Katherine Blouin

This paper proposes a reevaluation of the role of the Menzaleh Lake area in Late Antique Egypt. I do so by weaving together available evidence on three 'urban' harbours attested by/in the Lake at the time in the work of John Cassian: Tinnīs, Panephysis, and Diolkos. Analysing Cassian's work alongside all other available evidence, I argue that the Lake acted as a socio-economic hub well before the Arab conquest, and that as such, it was already then an eastern complement to Alexandria's fluvio-maritime harbour network.
My reflection recognizes that harbours encompass more than material, constructed spaces and that, therefore, they are also liminal societal nexus. Not only are they where (non-)humans, goods, and the ideas they convey literally move between water and land, but they are also spaces of social, economic, cultural and also, as John Cassian's work eloquently shows, religious porosity and confluence.

Despite the increase in the amount of evidence at our disposal on ancient Alexandria and its hinterland, the way scholars have encapsulated the city's historical significance has not changed very much since the early-modern period: Alexandria, the remarkable foundation of a no less remarkable Macedonian king, whose civilizational pinnacle lastingly impacted literary memories, but left very few noticeable material traces; Alexandria, the cultural lighthouse of Hellenism - and by extension of 'Western' culture - perched at the edge of Africa; Alexandria, the often-personified, and feminized, success story, who on many occasions fell prey to civilian troubles and foreign conquerors. There is, undoubtedly, something very affective about this story. What makes it makes so enduring? What is it really about? And whose story is this?
This paper discusses the European historiographical tradition regarding the landscape and occupation of the site of Alexandria before, during, and shortly after the city's foundation.  What interests is not the early occupation of the Alexandrian region per se, but the foundation story as (re)told by European(ized) historiography  and more specifically, its relationship to landscape, people, and power. I argue that far from limiting themselves to travelers and antiquarians' writings, the ideological positioning and "phenomena of intertextuality"  that characterize (early) modern European descriptions of Alexandria have also profoundly, and racially, shaped the gaze of scholars whose work focuses on the city's early history. Through a chronological overview of scholarship produced since the early 18th century, I shall explore how the dominant narrative was built through an enduring aggregate of Eurocentric tropes and colonial occlusions, some of which date back to Antiquity. The fiction that emerges - that of a Greek foundation (quasi) ex nihilo - establishes Alexandria and its surroundings as Greek in essence, and thus not only next to, but also - racially and culturally - above the rest of Egypt's landscapes and native population. This story is rooted in colonial fantasies that testify to the imperial entanglements of Classical scholarship.

This paper examines the socio-environmental conditions under which wet and saline agricultural margins 2 located in the area of the Lake Menzaleh (NE Delta) were occupied and conceptualized by ascetic monks in the late fourth century CE. The most compelling sources on this important phenomenon are John Cassian's Institutes (Inst.) and Conferences of the Desert Fathers (Conf.). 3

"La terminologie agro-fiscale en vigueur aux époques hellénistique et romaine montre comment les contribuables autant que l’État étaient
conscients de l’instabilité des rives du Nil et de ses défluents, et soucieux de gérer les risques leur étant associés. Les papyrus grecs de cette époque font notamment état d’une catégorie de terres déplacées nommées « atterrissements » (προσγενήματα, prosgénêmata). À partir de l’analyse de l’ensemble des sources relatives à ce type de terre riveraine, la présente contribution s’interrogera sur leur signification du point de vue de la mise en valeur des espaces riverains
nilotiques ainsi que de la gestion de ces environnements à risque. Pour ce faire, nous nous intéresserons d’abord à la signification du terme prosgénêma dans la documentation grecque hellénistique et romaine, avant de nous attarder sur les questions cruciales du profil agraire, du statut agro-fiscal et de la gestion de ce type de terre."

To say that modern scholarship on ancient Egypt is Nilocentric might seem like knocking at an open door. However, to explore the underpinnings of that claim and question its elevation to lieu commun is another story, and this is the task this article proposes to undertake. As I hope to show in this paper, the recent and current geomorphological, archaeological and environmentally-informed historical work in and on the ancient Nile Delta’s “agriculturally margins” is gradually but surely reshaping the traditional, Nilocentric narrative, and leading to an epistemological shift that is transforming the way we conceptualize Egypt’s socio-environmental dynamics in the longue durée. As a case in point, I shall focus on the Mareotide, an area located at the north-western edge of the Nile Delta, whose most famous settlement is Alexandria.

What was the significance of the Nile Delta within the successive empires it belonged to from the Pharaonic to the modern period? Complementarily, how did imperialisms shape the region’s socio-environmental dynamics in the longue durée? These are the two, complementary questions the conference Imperial Landscapes: Empires, societies, and environments in the ancient to modern Nile Delta proposes to examine.

This 2-day conference will take place on March 23-24, 2017 in the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto and will feature talks by sixteen historians, archaeologists and philologists from North America, North Africa, and Europe.

The event is open to all.

Besides the fact that the Delta was a fertile, productive agricultural region where a great deal of Egypt’s grain came from, what exactly do we know about the specifics of agricultural production in the different areas of this ecologically complex region from antiquity onwards (types of food produced, relative importance of each activity/crop, regional and microecological peculiarities, relationships between domestic, communal, State, and other economic agents’ interests)? To answer this question, we need to submit the ‘breadbasket’ image to the test of locally based evidence. Starting from an analysis of administrative papyri related to the Roman Mendesian Nome, I will show what these documents tell us regarding local practices of agricultural diversification in that region in the 2nd c. ad. I will then turn my attention to a 4th c. cadastral register to reflect on the relationship between diversification and cash crop-oriented specialization.

Through an analysis of the main attributes of the Egyptian Agathos Daimon and of the Canopic/Agathos Daimon branch of the Nile, the author analyses the agathodaimonian onomastic corpus and shows how it is symptomatic of the long lasting popular echoes the promotion of the « Good Spirit » in the Roman imperial discourse had in Egypt.

À partir d’un examen de l’ensemble de la documentation papyrologique disponible, cet article s’intéresse à la gestion fiscale des bains collectifs dans l’Égypte hellénistique et romaine ainsi qu’aux motivations sous-jacentes à ces interventions économiques. Une attention particulière sera portée aux sources relatives au balaneutikon, qui sera envisagé dans le contexte des politiques ethno-fiscales introduites dans la province sous Auguste.

Starting from an examination of all the relevant papyrological data, this article focuses on the fiscal management of collective baths in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, as well as on the motivations behind these economic interventions. Particular attention will be dedicated to the evidence related to the balaneutikon, which will be examined in the context of the ethno-fiscal measures introduced in the province under Augustus.

Les sources archéologiques, littéraires et papyrologiques relatives au nome mendésien, une circonscription administrative sise dans le nord-est du delta du Nil, documentent l'importance des zones humides dans cette région tout au long de l'Antiquité, et notamment à l'époque ...

This volume gathers chapters by a wide, international, and intersectional range of scholars coming from a variety of backgrounds and sub-disciplinary perspectives, and from across the chronological and geographical scope of Classics. Between them they provide a summary of the state of current research into ancient Mediterranean history and into the history of the discipline informed by postcolonial thought, and point out a number of areas and priorities for future research and discussion. The individual chapters provide case-studies to illustrate both how postcolonial thought already has illuminated our understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world and its potential for the future. They also provide opportunities for reflection on the current state of the discipline. An introduction written by the editors will provide a survey of the development of postcolonial theory, its relationship to other bodies of theory and its connections to Classics. There will also be a concluding chapter which will offer shorter reflections from three scholars with different career and disciplinary perspectives on the themes of the volume and the directions of future research.

The Northern Land proposes a multidisciplinary set of contributions pertaining to varied aspects of Lower Egypt's long, complex, yet still underappreciated history. The chapters included in this volume were written by scholars who come from different disciplinary horizons (archaeology, Classics, Egyptology, ancient and modern history, art history, geography, reception studies) and, thus, engage with their respective corpora through a range of methodological and conceptual practices. The heterogeneous nature of the approaches, scopes, and façons de faire gathered here is the result of a deliberate choice; one that aims to open up new spaces for conversations and cross-fertilization across disciplinary boundaries, while also acknowledging the legitimacy, and richness, brought to the table by each particular discipline. Thus, the presence of case studies, broader historical overviews, as well as site-based and thematic analyses, all of which offer different vintage points onto the ancient realities and modern entailments of Lower Egypt, its landscapes, and (a)biotic actors. Rather than aiming for exhaustiveness or completeness, this book thus offers over a dozen "stories made of true events" about the history of Egypt's "Northern Land". Taken together, the chapters illuminate the historical significance and complex webs of the region's shifting landscapes and imperial histories over the course of over five millennia.

PHOENIX ing as an epithet in the superlative. Under Trajan providentia makes its first appearance on the imperial coinage and it also appears in an official inscription; under Commodus there is a similar situation with nobilitas (231–232). The high emphasis on pietas in the coinage of Antoninus Pius is reflected by the epithet piisimus used in two inscriptions (from Rome and Ostia) honouring his adopted son Marcus Caesar. Another example involves Macrinus and providentia (234), where the virtue is prominent on Macrinus' coinage and also appears as an epithet on three milestones (all from Noricum). Under Septimius Severus Noreña identifies both a direct correspondence between felicitas on the coinage (where it accounts for 20% of virtue types) and the appearance of the epithet fe-licissimus in inscriptions, and more general " conceptual " links between military themes in each medium. But the number of inscriptions that illustrate these links with the " canon " of virtues seen on the coinage is very small (one each for the examples of Trajan and Commodus, three for Macrinus). One wonders whether the opposite conclusion could be drawn from this (and from the lack of specific correspondence between numismatic and epigraphic virtues for other rulers): that as a rule there was no close connection between them. Other questions come to mind. Is it valid to argue that the commoner types would have a greater prominence than the rarer in the eye and mind of a user of coinage? Would rarer types perhaps be more striking than common ones (the great majority of which were single-figure types) to a person who paid attention to the designs on his money, simply by virtue of how they stood out from the crowd? Even the commonest of Noreña's core virtues, aequitas, would have been no more common in general circulation than one coin in any given eight; the three least common core virtues would appear on no more than one in twenty. Noreña (195–196) reconstructs a model for the circulation of Roman coinage that envisions coins passing from the imperial mint to the provinces where it is paid out to soldiers and administrators, then moves from these bodies to the civilian population. But other arrangements are possible, and archaeological evidence suggests that in some parts of the empire the typological makeup of coin circulating in military areas could be different from that in civilian ones. 1 This book is a refreshing alternative to the approach traditionally employed by numis-matists and historians when analysing coinage. Noreña brings the commonest types into the foreground and through a meticulous and detailed analysis shows that these images may well have had a much more important function (whether deliberately intended or not) than normally thought in spreading the virtues of the emperor and thereby helping to unify the Roman empire.