Year: 1998
Type: article
Abstract: A LONG AGO as 1820 the Greek merchant Ioannis Athanasi 1 identified a site within the Pharaonic Egyptian antiquities complex of Luxor/Thebes/Deir el-Bahri/Medinet Habu, on the west bank of the Nile, as a Coptic Christian If chapel,ff2 which, on the basis of a Greek wall inscription, he mistakenly dated to the fourth century, to the patriarchate of his namesake Athanasius (328-373).In conjunction with the main official project to excavate an Eleventh-Dynasty Pharaonic tomb at the site, the entire Christian complex was explored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1912 and 1914.The excavators' findings are published in two splendidly produced volumes that contain a wealth of reportage on both the physical, material remains and the documentary and literary texts recovered.Thus the Epiphanius site is one of the very few in Egypt from Late Antiquity from which we have both texts and objects, together with their built space, in a documentable and datable context.3 It is worth investigating the interrelation of 1 See Warren R. Dawson, Who Was Who in Egyptology2 (London 1972) 13. 2Herbert E. Winlock, Walter E. Crum, Hugh G. Evelyn White, The Monastery of Epiphanius at Thebes I-II (New York 1926: hereafter Ep.)I 25; cf. Malcolm L. Peel, "
Author: Leslie S. B. MacCoull
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1506165943