This document is part of the online version of the book An Oasis City by Roger S. Bagnall, Nicola Aravecchia, Raffaella Cribiore, Paola Davoli, Olaf E. Kaper and Susanna McFadden, which is available at http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/oasis-city/. It is published as part of the NYU Library's Ancient World Digital Library and in partnership with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW). Further information about ISAW's publication program is available on the ISAW website. Please note that while the base URI of this publication is stable, the specific content available online will be updated to include more links to supplementary material and related digital resources.
Trimithis in the Culture of the Eastern Roman Empire
7.1. Literary culture and education in the Dakhla Oasis
Raffaella Cribiore
The texts on ostraka found in the oasis include school exercises together with other categories of writing, such as labels, accounts, and short letters. These diverse texts have one thing in common: their brevity, which allowed them to be contained in their entirety on the small surface available. Ostraka were ideal for use in primary education to display, as here, alphabets and lists written in coarse hands;1 they could circulate in class with minimal risk of damage. Papyrus, however, is so far missing at Amheida because of the humidity, so at first it looked as if our knowledge of the lives and activities of pepaideumenoi—cultivated persons—would remain severely limited. Was the Dakhla Oasis so far from the Nile valley as to prevent its inhabitants from making contact with higher-level education, or had we simply not yet been able to find any trace of it? That the latter was the case, as finds at Kellis would encourage us to think, became evident with the excavation of the house of Serenos and the discovery of the school annexed to it.↩#p309
The house itself illustrated how people came into contact with culture, displaying, for instance, mythological learning both in painted plaster (see §7.2) and in writing. As we look at the evidence, it is important to bear in mind the general goals of education here. Was it simply transmitting knowledge and specific skills, or was it communicating a specific attitude and point of view? Were fathers in the oasis striving to procure teachers from afar because they believed that knowledge would provide their sons with a practical guide for navigating the outside world? Or did they mainly want their children to improve their chances of achieving material success by possessing some coveted tokens of culture that would allow them to compete with others in the oasis and with the people in the valley?↩#p310
In 2006 we started what turned out to be a two-year-long excavation of a building next to the house of Serenos. When it became evident that it housed a fourth-century school containing several rooms, the whole expedition was thrilled, and for many reasons. The mere uncovering of a school building would have been an important event. Most teachers in antiquity did not use premises exclusively devoted to teaching, so that identifying such spaces is almost impossible. They taught in private rooms that belonged either to them or to the patrons who offered them hospitality, or they made use of such locations as temples and abandoned tombs.2 Being able to identify premises where teaching and learning occurred is thus highly unusual.↩#p311
The literary sources often mention the advantages of studying and learning, but rarely describe the students' accommodation. The Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana, which were schoolbooks supposedly composed around the fourth century— whether in the east or the west is not known—contain vignettes of the routine of going to school in the morning.3 They mention a staircase leading to a school building and a large room with benches serving the needs of pupils of different educational levels. We have known that specifically purposed schools like this one existed, but identifying them, even where we know they did, has generally proven impossible. In fourth-century Antioch, the sophist Libanius ran a famous school of rhetoric. At the start of his career he made use of various private rooms; later, on becoming the official sophist of the city, he was given access to a large room in the city hall.4 Earthquakes, unfortunately, have effaced any trace of this school. Auditoria for the teaching of law existed in Berytus (modern Beirut), according to a work referred to as Expositio totius mundi et gentium. Those lecture halls have not survived, and it is uncertain whether they existed as separate structures or were situated in buildings devoted to other purposes.5↩#p312
Figure 119. Classrooms at Kom el-Dikka, Alexandria.
The school found in Amheida can be compared in certain respects with the auditoria found in Kom el-Dikka, Alexandria.6 These halls were more numerous, possessed benches for students and sometimes seats for teachers (thronoi) (Fig. 119). What has been called "the university of Alexandria" occupied a vast space and included an amphitheater for delivering orations. It is thought to have offered a whole course in higher education, along with grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, and even medicine. No writing was left on the walls of these teaching halls, and no papyrus referring unquestionably to them has been preserved from the site,7 so we can extrapolate the activities of students and teachers only from the literary sources. From Zacharias, bishop of Mytilene, we learn that later in the fifth century the grammarian Horapollon and the sophists and philosophers who taught liberal studies in the city received students in their homes on certain days of the week and at the school on others. In the Life of Severus, he says that on Fridays Horapollon and the philosophers taught in school, but the other professors taught at home.8↩#p313
Figure 120. A wall showing a poetic dipinto in a schoolroom (Room 15) at Amheida.
The Amheida and Kom el-Dikka schools are also similar in so far as they were located in premises exclusively used for teaching, both came to light through archaeological excavations, and both are still partially extant. The Amheida school, naturally on a less grand scale, could offer only grammar (and perhaps some rhetoric), and to a limited number of students. Yet this school is unique because it presents poetic texts extraordinarily vividly and accurately. The writing in red ink that covers the walls of Room 15 displays poetry previously unknown (Fig. 120); and we can try to reconstruct what appear to be several days of school activities frozen in time, giving us a window onto ancient education in progress. School exercises such as these, found all over Graeco-Roman Egypt and written on several materials (mainly papyri, ostraka, and wooden tablets),9 all seem to have the same quality of immediacy, but they have usually been separated from their context and thus exist in a vacuum.↩#p314
Figure 121. Benches in Room 15.
The house of Serenos was built around 330–340, and the school structure (B5) next door belongs to the same period. The building functioned for a short time as a school, until some years later Serenos extended his house to the north by incorporating it and transforming its space into storage rooms. The school consists, as now identifiable, of three rooms, 15, 19, and 23, but it may be that there were originally more. Low benches were built along the walls of each room. In Room 15 they stood in front of the large dipinto that filled the wall with the elegiac distichs inscribed there (Fig. 121).10 Sitting on the benches, students could study and memorize the text, or they could stand on them to write on the plastered wall. In Room 19 the benches were higher and, judging from the remains of letters on the walls, the students here too probably stood on them to reach the writing surface.↩#p315
The close proximity of house and school gives rise to an obvious question. Did Serenos' sons attend the school? Together with their mother and father, they appear in a painted panel in the dining room (Room 1). They are sitting formally, at a banquet, dressed in the Greek style, and they have the solemn, elegant look of the young men sometimes portrayed in Egyptian mummy portraits. It is likely, though impossible to prove, that these two youths will have taken advantage of the proximity of the school to their home. Here they will have attempted to construct for themselves an image of perfect Greekness.↩#p316
Figure 122. Room 15, view from above.
Because its doorway is remarkably large, Room 15 appears to have served an important function in the school. Perhaps it was the school's main focus, housing students of the highest level. The west wall was plastered and inscribed, but now only isolated letters remain. The east wall was also plastered and, judging from the presence of a few letters that can be seen underneath the dipinto, had contained a previous text (Fig. 122). In effect, the walls functioned as whiteboards that could be erased and written on again: this is the only instance found in Egypt of walls used in this way in an educational setting. (Actual whitened boards, covered in gesso, were in use in Egypt from Pharaonic times and well known in the Roman period.) Not that this is very different from the way other materials functioned. For instance, students who wanted to reuse a papyrus usually inscribed their new text on the back of it and only very rarely sponged off the old one. (Dots on top of some letters to be corrected, indicating deletion, do not appear on school exercises but only in scholarly texts.) Generally, when students needed to rub letters out they applied the eternal wet finger.↩#p317
What we find at Amheida calls to mind the erasing of an old text and the writing of a new one on a wax tablet. The text on a tablet could be obliterated just by smoothing out the wax with the back of the stylus, then writing anew. Wooden tablets were covered with a whitish coating that permitted the writer to wash off any unwanted text. The surface was then reusable, again employing pen and ink. Such tablets are the closest models for the use of walls as writing surfaces. On papyrus and other materials, writers mainly used a black ink made of carbon and gum arabic; later, brown ink was popular. Red ink was used infrequently and mostly for headings, but here it makes the text stand out on the white background.↩#p318
Figure 123. Detail of the dipinto with lectional signs.
The text of the dipinto in Room 15 consists of five columns of elegiac couplets plus some sporadic hexameters. In all there appear to be at least eight epigrams, dedicated by a teacher to his students. The palaeographic style is competent and recalls that of some contemporary literary papyri and inscriptions. The first two columns are reasonably well preserved, but the surface of the rest is badly abraded or erased, and so full of holes that only isolated words and letters are discernible. Though it is conceivable that the condition of the wall was not ideal at the time of inscribing, most of the damage must have occurred when Serenos annexed this room and converted it into a storage magazine. A rare feature of the text worth pointing out is the presence of frequent lectional signs, such as breathings, accents, and apostrophes (Fig. 123). These signs, extremely rare in early papyri, anticipate what has been called the "grammar of legibility" of medieval texts. The dipinto was thus a didactic model for the students to assimilate.↩#p319
A continuous translation is possible only for the first two columns—for the rest, observations on individual words have to suffice.↩#p320
[Col. 1] ". . . here [I withdraw] near the sources of the sacred leaves. But may god grant my wishes that [you all] learn the Muses' honeyed works, with all the Graces and with Hermes son of Maia reaching the full summit of rhetorical knowledge. Be bold, my boys: the great god will grant you to have a beautiful crown of manifold virtue."
[Col. 2] ". . . yearning after your mother . . . To my students: My talented boys, from the spring of the Pierian waters drink till you are sated [or till the end]. To the same: Work hard for me, toils make men manly . . ."
The first, mutilated, line of column 1 probably does not allude to anywhere in Egypt but defines an ideal place, a locus amoenus. Various deities then appear, to populate this mythological landscape. A man who seems to be a teacher addresses the young men under his tutelage. He wants them to be able to ascend the hill of education and, with the help of the Graces and of Hermes, reach its summit. In the rest of the dipinto he exhorts them to follow the example of Herakles, immersing themselves in their toil. The image of education as a steep hill that students have to climb occurs in many educational contexts. In the Professor of Rhetoric by the satirist Lucian, for instance, the students reach the top of the hill of learning by various paths, more or less arduous; and rhetoric, represented as a lady that they wish to "marry", is waiting for them there. The young men of Trimithis must have been been familiar with the Muses, the Graces, Hermes, Herakles, and other classical deities, encountering them in the poetic texts studied at the secondary level of education with a grammarian. By calling these young men paides—boys, or sons—and addressing them in an educational setting, this man identifies himself as a teacher and alludes to mutual feelings of affection that distinguish the teacher–student relationship. In the fourth century the teacher-father and student-son model became popular, as the orations of the rhetors Himerius (an Athenian sophist) and Libanius and the philosopher Themistius show. In column 2, the students are clearly identified with the word scholastikoi, "pupils."↩#p321
In the first epigram, the mention of "god" and "the great god" is intriguing but ambiguous. Did the verses allude to a mythological god or to the Christian God? Both are possible. The language of these epigrams is heavily poetic and epic, but many expressions from Homer and Apollonius Rhodius later passed into Christian poetry and prose. Hermes Trismegistos, or Thoth, was not only the god of rhetoric but also the main deity of Trimithis, and the epithet megas (great) is attested for him, so that the identification appears at first possible. And yet Christian epigrammatists often applied the same epithet to the Christian God. In the first epigram, moreover, Hermes is mentioned among the deities who escort the students up the hill, so he cannot be identified with the "god" that the teacher invokes at the beginning, and it seems very likely that the "god" is the Christian God. The coexistence of mythological gods and God poses no difficulty, because in the fourth century Christians claimed for themselves the right to use a classicizing language and literature; this contest for the classical heritage lies behind the emperor Julian's edict against Christian teachers and the counterreaction of Gregory of Nazianzus, among others.↩#p322
Figure 124. Homeric passage on a wall in Room 19.
The plastered walls of Room 19 (Fig. 124) were inscribed with several texts, no doubt many more than the two that are preserved. These two texts, on the west wall, are clearly visible and written side by side. The one on the left contains three lines (4.221–3) from the Odyssey that were extensively quoted and commented upon in antiquity, followed by a brief comment. They are written in minute and fluent characters, the kind used in documents, which are very different from those usually employed to transcribe literary works. Book 4 of the Odyssey contains many references to Egypt, and passages from it are often found in the papyri. The lines refer to Telemachus' visit to Sparta where Helen mixed for her weary guests "[a drug] that takes away grief and anger, and brings forgetfulness of every ill. Whoever should drink this down when it is mixed in the bowl would not let fall a tear down his cheek, in the course of that day at least. Imitate."↩#p323
Ancient writers attempted to identify the healing drug in question, and some, like Plutarch, thought that it consisted of words and alluded specifically to the tale of Odysseus' adventures that followed. Interestingly, Himerius in Oration 16 linked the drug with an educational context. The Homeric words together with Himerius' own had the power to quell the students' anger. It is not easy to identify with certainty the reason why a teacher should have written the lines in such a tiny hand, adding the request to "imitate". Since the passage contains several rare words, it is conceivable that he chose it so as to give the students practice in glossing.↩#p324
Figure 125. A passage about an ignorant king from Room 19.
To the right of and above the Homeric text are lines in larger characters that are unfortunately quite abraded (Fig. 125). This hand is different from the previous one and may vaguely resemble a book hand, if not a very proficient one. Or perhaps the writer was a student. The loss of a large central part of the wall's plaster prevents us from fully understanding the text. The main content, however, can be partly reconstructed from Plutarch's Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata (174E–F) and from his De Alexandri Magni fortuna aut virtute (334B), where the story is more developed. Plutarch recounts: "Anteas king of the Scythians, who had captured the flute player Ismenias, ordered him to play the flute over the wine. While everyone else marveled and applauded, he swore that hearing his horse neigh was more pleasant: for so long he had kept his ears away from the Muses. His soul was in the stables and was more accustomed to hear not even horses but asses."↩#p325
Plutarch appended a moral ending to this anecdote, saying that kings in their ignorance could not hear the Muses; they promoted neither the arts nor music and generally oppressed artists.↩#p326
There is no doubt that these very mutilated lines refer to the tale reported by Plutarch: his text, too, deals with a military expedition and a banquet where people drink wine while listening to a flute player; and toward the end the name of King Anteas appears. But the lines on the wall are not a quotation from Plutarch. Several versions of the story of Anteas may have been circulating, but it is also conceivable that those words might be a reworking by a student asked to paraphrase the story. Material of this kind was used in teaching at all levels. One of the first progymnasmata—preliminary rhetorical exercises—consisted of commenting on anecdotes that might or might not contain an ethical statement. This exercise, especially when not developed at length, belonged to the province of the grammarian, who would have been the students' first teacher of Homer and the other poets, as well as grammar.↩#p327
Thus the texts written in Room 19 could have originated in a grammarian's class. Grammarians were formidable personages who resided in cities and towns. They commanded respect, enjoyed a high social status, and were wealthy. In Alexandria, Palladas, who taught the most privileged children, complained that they tried to avoid paying their tuition fees and cursed his profession.11 As a rule, though, grammarians held well respected positions. But do we have to assume that an individual designated as grammatikos was active in this school? Strictly speaking, no. Other teachers, called didaskaloi or kathegetai, who travelled through the country offering their services, could deliver the same traditional teaching, as the papyri show.12↩#p328
The verses written in Room 15 present another quandary. They refer to rhetorical training, but it is impossible to verify at which level. Are they alluding to rhetoric proper—that is, the teaching of declamations and orations—or to a mere smattering of that discipline? Centuries before, the Roman Quintilian had complained that a proper division of the various disciplines was no longer observed, in either Roman or Greek schools.13 Thus while the rhetors occupied themselves only with declamations and orations, grammarians, not content with teaching just grammar and the poets, encroached upon rhetoric. Students, therefore, remained with a grammarian for a long time, so that Quintilian commented bitterly that boys passed on to the rhetor when they already knew how to declaim. This is the scenario likely to have been presented by the Trimithis school, where a secondary-level teacher would have taught the poets while expounding a bit on rhetoric. It is true that students continued to read poetry in rhetorical schools, but the heavy use of lectional signs in the dipinto to teach proper reading and writing, together with the impeccable verses, point to a grammarian's class that was offering young men an education befitting the oasite cultural elite.↩#p329
The high quality of the mythological paintings in the house of Serenos described in the next section testifies to the cultural level of his household. It also provides a window onto the cultivated tastes of the visitors who came to ask for Serenos' assistance and to enjoy the entertainment he provided. In this respect, another room, number 13, offers a further surprise. This one was painted in purple with a decoration of palm trees and garlands. It originally possessed panels depicting figures of which only their mythological names, such as Dionysos, Polydeukes, and Hephaistos, remain. Originally there had been more writing, but it was destroyed when the room was converted for other uses, or when the walls deteriorated. One wonders about the function of a room like this, next to the vestibule of the main entrance to the house. Was it a room for rest at night or for repose after a banquet? Did people use it for reading literature, for entertaining cultivated guests, or for business meetings? Scholars have shown, in fact, that they used such rooms (Latin, cubicula) for several purposes besides resting. Pliny the Younger, for example, used his bedroom to receive friends and recite poetry.14 Although Rome was far from the oasis, some of its inhabitants would have valued social and cultural relations with the metropolis.↩#p330
Figure 126. A line from Euripides on a wall in House B1, Room 13.
A line written in chalk on the north wall of Room 13 is a welcome indication that people in the house read, remembered, and quoted from literature (Fig. 126). The line in question comes from Euripides' tragedy Hypsipyle, which was little known before papyri revealed some essential fragments. In one Oxyrhynchus papyrus (>P.Oxy. 6.852) the second column of fragment 60 is missing its right side, and various scholars have speculated on what the missing part of line 86 might have said. This is the verse that someone scribbled on the wall. Thus one of the most ephemeral of writing implements has left a lasting mark that is significant for several reasons. First, the line vindicates the opinion of the great scholar D. L. Page, against that of others. Second, this line—"Adrastus will come to Thebes"—that was written so casually, raises some questions. The papyri show that Hypsipyle was not very popular in Egypt, and was absent from the school curriculum. Who was this individual, then, who nonchalantly quoted a little-known tragedy? Was he a scholar familiar with the whole work, or did he know only this verse? Could he be identified with the teacher who worked at the school? Or had the line become a proverb? We are not familiar with a proverb like this, but if one did exist, its presence on the wall would have a different cultural significance.↩#p331
In conclusion, our findings in Amheida abundantly demonstrate that the culture of the oasites matched that of the most cultivated locations in the Nile valley, and that it mattered to fathers that their sons be exposed to a refined education, or paideia. Financial and other material reasons were only one aspect: paideia was highly esteemed, had a value per se. Even without papyri or letters that could give us more details, the house itself and the school have a voice. It would seem that the students of Trimithis were no different from those two other boys, Hephaistion and Horigenes, who in the same century wrote from Alexandria a finely honed letter to their father, thanking him for the upbringing he had given them. They used refined expressions and an abundance of accents, breathings and other sophistications that their grammarian teacher would have been proud of.15 The sons of Serenos might well have done the same.↩#p332
7.2 Amheida's wall paintings
Susanna McFadden
Figure 127. Traces of painted plaster in an unexcavated room at Amheida.
Wall painting is rarely preserved in great quantity in the territory that was once part of the Roman Empire, despite its ubiquity in ancient times. The exception, of course, is the great body of evidence from the Bay of Naples preserved for us by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. Apart from this accident of nature, in most of the preserved examples outside funerary contexts it is only the floor levels of Graeco-Roman spaces that survive. Consequently, our understanding of the complexities of domestic decoration in the ancient world is woefully incomplete. For this reason, the wall paintings of Amheida are a scholarly windfall, in that they offer us a rare glimpse into the visual culture of the late Roman Empire. The town's mural remains are unique not only for their quantity, but also because the subject matter of much of the plaster thus far recovered is unprecedented in both Egypt and the wider empire. While I shall focus here on the lively mythological and geometric decorations from the house of Serenos, it is worth noting that as of a survey in 2015, traces of painted plaster have been detected in approximately 33 other rooms scattered across the site—and these represent only what is visible from the surface (Fig. 127). There is still a wealth of evidence awaiting discovery beneath the sands.↩#p333
Figure 128. The house of Serenos, Room 1, north wall and northeast corner.Figure 129. Geometric design from Room 11.Figure 130. Geometric design from Room 14.
Although the wall paintings in Serenos' house (B1) were discovered in 1979, the domicile and its decorations were only fully excavated between 2004 and 2007. Four of the twelve rooms in the house contain painted plaster, which, from the accompanying archaeological and documentary data discussed elsewhere in this book, can be firmly attributed to the mid-fourth century. Room 1, where the figural images are concentrated, likely served as the main reception space and hence received the most comprehensive elaboration, consisting of both figural vignettes and dynamic geometric "wallpaper" patterns (Fig. 128). The decorative schemes of the painted plaster found in three other, subsidiary, rooms (11, 13 and 14) comprise colorful geometric designs, some of which bear a strong resemblance to motifs found in the nearby town of Kellis (Fig. 129, Fig. 130).16↩#p334
Figure 131. West wall of Room 1 and doorway into Room 14, illustrating thickness of painted plaster attached to mud-brick masonry.
Perhaps half of Room 1's plaster is still attached in situ, but the collapse of the mud-brick domed ceiling sometime after the house was abandoned in antiquity caused much damage to the rest. Complicating the plaster's state of preservation is the fact that it was not of high quality to begin with. Unlike with true fresco (buon fresco), a technique that normally involves the application of several layers of plaster, including the vital arricio layer that acts as an anchor between the walls and the layer that holds the pigment, the intonaco, the paintings in the house of Serenos are executed over only a very thin substratum of straw-tempered mud plaster attached to the mud-brick walls (Fig. 131).↩#p335
While true fresco is rare in Egypt, distillations of the technique are well known, and the thinness of the plaster in B1 is in marked contrast to the thicker, more stable decorative surfaces found, for example, in the houses at Kellis, which are of an earlier date.17 This raises the question of whether the lower quality of the plaster reflects the skill of the artists, the availability of materials in the fourth century, the state of the patron's economic solvency, or some combination of these. One might expect to find the best materials in B1, a home that presumably belonged to an important city official; but whether B1's plaster represents the best that was available at the time, or simply parsimony on the part of the patron, may in the future be determined via comparison with other painted houses at Amheida. Interestingly, plaster fragments akin to true fresco, as well as others of varying degrees of quality between true fresco and the plaster from B1, have been detected on site during recent surveys. These may predate the fourth century, as at Kellis, but only further excavation will tell us for sure.↩#p336
Figure 132. Replica of the house of Serenos, showing geometric registers.Figure 133. The dome in the replica of the house of Serenos.Figure 134. The replica house, figural motifs.
In addition to the in situ paintings, many fragments of painted plaster, both large and small, were recovered from the fill of B1 in 2004, but unfortunately it has been difficult to reconstruct the original position on the walls of these pieces. Approximately 135 trays of small pieces, seventy-five large fragments still attached to mud bricks, and four large blocks of plaster attached to pieces of brick masonry are currently in storage and being studied (see Fig. 131). The house has now been buried once again so as to best preserve the in situ paintings, but in 2009 a full-scale replica of the house was constructed on the edge of the modern archaeological site. Painted facsimiles of the paintings from Rooms 11 and 13 were added to the replica during the 2010 field season, the geometric registers (bands) were completed in 2012, the dome in 2013 and the figural motifs in 2014 (Fig. 132, Fig. 133, Fig. 134).18↩#p337
The explosions of color and pattern that today's visitor encounters upon entering the reception room of the replica house provide him or her with an authentic recreation of the original experience—it is what can only be described as a scene to overwhelm the senses. Every surface of the walls and ceiling was painted, so that at first glance the sheer variety of scenes would appear to belie the impression of programmatic unity. A band of decoration reaching from just above floor to eye level, and displaying a variety of geometric designs reminiscent of mosaic and textile patterns found throughout the Roman Empire, circles the room.19 Above this register, the compositional format varies: the east and west walls are decorated with two filmstrip-like bands of figural decoration, while on the north and (we presume) the south walls, the figural vignettes are set in half-lunettes. Triangular pendentives at each corner of the room containing haloed putti holding aloft garlands, as well as the psychedelically patterned dome, complete the room's decorative zones.↩#p338
Figure 135. Detail of geometric designs from Room 1's northeast corner.Figure 136. The north wall of Room 1 in 1979, showing Odysseus and Eurykleia (photo Peter Sheldrick).Figure 137. The east wall, depicting the adultery of Aphrodite and Ares.
By far the majority of the painted surfaces display geometric motifs that are somewhat unusual compared with other contemporary wall designs, both local and international (Fig. 135). But the figural decorations are even more surprising for the era, given the preponderance of themes drawn from Graeco-Roman mythology. Preserved in situ in the original house are visual interpretations of narrative scenes well known in Graeco-Roman literature—such as, on the north wall, that of Perseus (carrying the head of Medusa) rescuing Andromeda from a sea monster. Many ancient authors tell this story, in both Greek and Latin.20 Also pictured on this wall is a scene showing the dramatic moment when Odysseus' old nurse Eurykleia recognizes him upon his return from the Trojan War, related in Book 19 of Homer's Odyssey (Fig. 136). We find the visual version of another dramatic moment, this one from Book 8 of the Odyssey, on the east wall, where a procession of Olympian deities witnesses the adultery of Aphrodite and Ares (Fig. 137). Semi-preserved scenes still attached to the east wall depicting figures to the right of the adultery scene in Phrygian caps (which in Greco-Roman art identifies them as non-Greek/Roman and from Anatolia—perhaps Trojans), and above the adultery seated upon thrones, suggest further narrative complexities to the room's figural program.↩#p339
Figure 138. A reconstructed vignette from Room 1, east wall, showing Zeus as a bull and Europa.Figure 139. A fragment from the west wall of Room 1 depicting (left) the haunches of several rearing horses, and (right) a woman brandishing a sword at an enthroned figure.
Myriad additional vignettes rooted in classical literature are also hinted at in the painted fragments recovered from Room 1. Reconstructed from the east wall, for example, are scenes of a satyr chasing a nymph, Zeus in the guise of an eagle embracing Ganymede, Zeus (as a bull) with Europa, and perhaps Daphne in the process of being transformed into a tree (Fig. 138). Several large pieces of painted plaster that once decorated the west wall have also been recovered, still on their mud-brick backing, showing narrative scenes as yet unidentified. These include a cuirassed soldier and a female figure riding a chariot, and an enthroned male being threatened by a woman with a sword (Fig. 139). In these cases, while we cannot decipher the specific mythological tales being told, we can at least say that the images reference generic tropes in Graeco-Roman art and literature, such as "Triumph" and perhaps "Revenge", suggesting many layers of encoded meaning, aimed at multiple audiences. What meaning a viewer was able to grasp would depend perhaps on their background and level of education. In general, it is rare in Roman art for visual narratives to reflect an exact textual equivalent, so we may not be able to identify these scenes precisely; nor, for the images to function as intended in antiquity, is that really necessary.↩#p340
Figure 140. Room 1, east wall, detail of Polis.Figure 141. Room 1, west wall, banquet scene.
Adding to the complexity of Room 1's figural program are scenes that are more temporal in theme, to do with civic and social identity. The figure of Polis, seated next to a schematic architectural element on the far left of the east wall's lower figural register, is likely a reference to Trimithis' status as polis, which we know was achieved at the latest by 304 (Fig. 140).21 By extension, this personification also alludes to the house owner's privileged status within the city's administration. Serenos may in fact be pictured cattycorner to the depiction of Polis, on the far left of the west wall's lower figural register, where he and his family appear to be enjoying one of the ancient world's most important social rituals, the banquet, or convivium (Fig. 141).22 This scene is especially interesting because it is self-referential, illustrating an occasion that may well have taken place within the painted walls of Room 1. As such, it suggests a self-consciousness on Serenos' part and a desire to promote himself as a member of an elite society, and one steeped in Graeco-Roman paideia, or education, as exemplified also by the mythological subject matter of the paintings.↩#p341
Figure 142. A large plaster fragment in situ portraying Orpheus taming the animals.
Last but not least, another detached piece of masonry, one with plaster from the west wall depicting Orpheus taming the animals, defies easy characterization (Fig. 142). By the fourth century CE, this subject was widely found across the empire and executed in a variety of media, including mosaic and painting, as well as contexts—domestic, funerary, pagan and Christian. Depending on who is viewing this image, the meaning shifts: in the Christian catacombs of Rome, for example, Orpheus calming the beasts with his music became an allegory for Christ bringing harmony to the world.23 By contrast, in a domestic setting such as Serenos' house, the scene could simply be another representation of age-old Graeco-Roman literary and artistic tropes. Supporting this notion is the fact that among the plaster fragments from the west wall, a second figure in a Phrygian cap and holding a lyre was also found near Orpheus, as well as a female figure of comparable size, suggesting that the iconic image of Orpheus and the animals might have been part of a more complex narrative scene, not typical of a Christian context. However, in late antique Trimithis, Orpheus might, in fact, have embodied both meanings. We know that there were Christians in the oasis, and indeed in Serenos' immediate circle, by the time these paintings were executed, so a polysemic motif such as the one depicted here could have been aimed at multiple audiences, both pagan and Christian.↩#p342
Collectively, the paintings from B1 are representative of a longstanding Roman tradition of communicating issues of identity and status in the domestic arena via carefully considered image programs, particularly those decorating the most important room of the house, the one in which business and ceremonial events took place.24 In late antiquity, which saw the preservation of Graeco-Roman education among the empire's elites—in spite of, in lieu of, or perhaps even alongside the new social strictures driven by Christianity—figural narratives in particular, referencing Graeco-Roman mythology, link the house's owner with wider cultural developments.↩#p343
But despite this continuity with empire-wide elite practices, the style and iconography of the paintings from the house of Serenos, and the decorative system employed in Room 1, are eclectic, not really conforming to known contemporary, or indeed earlier, domestic formulae, in either Egypt or the wider empire.25 The composition of Room 1's walls and ceiling can be characterized as generally asymmetrical, especially given the inconsistent size and shape of the figural vignettes distributed around the perimeter in two, perhaps three, registers. By comparison, late Roman painted domestic spaces from around the Mediterranean are much more conservative, favoring instead linear decorative systems that divide wall surfaces into flattened, geometric sectors or illustrate large expanses of imitation marble paneling or opus sectile designs, fictive pilasters or even simplified architectural settings framing floating figures both large and small. For example, substantial bodies of late Roman wall paintings dating from the second to fourth centuries CE survive from both the western and eastern parts of the empire (such as Rome and Ostia in Italy, and Zeugma and Ephesos in Turkey), but these bear little resemblance in format or iconography to the program of decoration in the House of Serenos.26↩#p344
Figure 143. The tomb of Petosiris at El-Muzawwaqa.
Interestingly, the filmstrip-like format of the figural registers in Room 1 does bear some resemblance to Egyptian-style mortuary decorative schemes, in which narrative vignettes related to funerary texts are arrayed in bands around the inside of a tomb. This format is employed at the necropolis of El-Muzawwaqa near Trimithis, in the tomb of Petosiris, for example (Fig. 143).27 While the date of this tomb (probably late first or early second century CE), its painting's narrative content, and the function of the space, are not directly comparable to the paintings from the house of Serenos, the similarities in composition might indicate some Egyptian influence in the house's decorations, whose style and iconography are otherwise entirely Graeco-Roman. A winged reclining nude figure on the northwest wall, just below the scene of Perseus and Andromeda, may represent Harpokrates, making him the only figure in the decorations identified thus far that can be characterized as "Egyptian."↩#p345
The tomb of Petosiris is also well known because some of its painted figures are drawn according to classical conventions for depicting the human form, which at first sight might invite further comparison with the decorations from Serenos' house. However, in the tomb of Petosiris, the classically styled figures are juxtaposed with images rendered according to ancient Egyptian rules for depicting the human body. More specifically, a Graeco-Roman visual vocabulary is used for static vignettes depicting the deceased, which can be read as an expression of social identity. By contrast, Egyptian stylistic conventions employed in the tomb govern the figural scenes depicting Egyptian religious activities.28 This mingling of visual vocabularies illustrates the complex cultural milieu of Roman Egypt, and is a decorative device found in painted tombs throughout the country.29 Such formal variation is not, however, to be found in the house of Serenos.↩#p346
Figure 144. Archival photograph of Karanis Excavations, House B50, Heron on left, Isis nursing Harpocrates, KM 5.2159. Photo courtesy Kelsey Museum, University of Michigan.
Indeed, the figures from this house are rendered according to artistic conventions that aim to depict bodies naturalistically. While the artist has not been altogether successful in this—the technique is idiosyncratic, concerned more with the vigorous, expressive application of the paint than with producing symmetrical and proportional figures—the style of the figures is nonetheless clearly derived from Graeco-Roman traditions rather than Egyptian. For instance, the pigments are layered and modeled to create the illusion of corporeality and three-dimensional space. Furthermore, the figures have lively facial expressions and gestures, and their poses convey dynamic movement rather than controlled action or static majesty, like the stylized paintings of Isis, Harpokrates and Heron found in a house at Karanis in the Fayyum, one of the few other surviving examples of fourth-century figural painting from a domestic setting in Egypt (Fig. 144).30 Unlike the paintings from Amheida, however, these Karanis deities were not narrative scenes but placed in a niche so as to serve as devotional images. Their style and distinctive function thus make direct comparison with the paintings from Serenos' house difficult, despite their similar date and context.31↩#p347
Iconographical antecedents and comparisons for the house of Serenos, both in Egypt and internationally, are also difficult to pinpoint. Locally, some of the geometric motifs, especially the intersecting-circles design to be seen in the secondary Rooms 11 and 14, resemble paintings from several rooms in House B/3/1 in Kellis. This may suggest that instead of importing artisans from more cosmopolitan urban centers, the oasis had its own workshop of painters trained especially in tessellating patterns. It should be noted, however, that the Kellis paintings are dated two centuries earlier, to the second century CE, so more evidence is needed before we can firmly identify an "oasis style."↩#p348
Many of the other geometric patterns uncovered at Trimithis and Kellis are commonly found, in Late Antiquity as well as throughout the Roman period, and not just limited to the local. One comes across similar patterns especially in mosaics, as well as textiles all over the empire after the second century, but not, curiously enough, in domestic murals.32 More often than not, the geometric and architectonic motifs painted on Roman-era walls in Egypt33 and elsewhere in the empire mimic the natural veining of expensive marbles or imaginary architectural elements, rather than the intricate designs of tesserae or textiles.↩#p349
In this respect, the murals of Amheida seem to be in the vanguard. From the fourth century onwards in Egypt, textile and mosaic patterns become more popular in wall painting, especially in Christian contexts. We find, for instance, an echo of Room 1's dome pattern of overlapping "feathers" in a fifth-century tomb chapel in the necropolis at Bagawat.34 Overall, the overwhelming variety of pattern and color on display in the house of Serenos prefigures the "jeweled style" of the early Byzantine era, exemplified by the newly cleaned sixth-century paintings of the Red Monastery Church in Sohag.35↩#p350
As for the figural scenes in the wider context of late Roman art, just as with the geometric designs there are at present no contemporary domestic parallels. Extant painted walls of the late third or the fourth century in other parts of the empire do not exhibit Amheida's abundance of Graeco-Roman mythological iconography. In Egypt especially, scenes of this kind, executed in paint, are rare.36 A few plaster fragments depicting classical figures identified as Odysseus and perhaps Penelope, supposedly excavated from a house in Alexandria, seem to come closest in terms of date.37 An earlier painted tomb depicting the myths of Electra and Oedipus, from Hermopolis Magna, presents us with another interesting parallel,38 though one must be wary of drawing too many conclusions about domestic decoration from funerary contexts because the functions of the spaces are not comparable.↩#p351
In the corpus of wall paintings from the late Roman Empire, it is more usual to see figures such as muses and personifications represented in non-narrative scenes, and rarely are the literary associations as overt as at Trimithis.39 Furthermore, the kind of narrative variety that we see in the paintings of the house of Serenos is unprecedented in any medium. In Late Antiquity, Graeco-Roman mythological themes survive in abundance in mosaics across the Mediterranean, but mosaic narrative scenes are usually isolated visually, within the center of a floor for example, and are rarely collated into as complex a thematic constellation as the one that is emerging at Amheida.40↩#p352
Characters and motifs derived from Graeco-Roman myth also continue to be pictured in the Egyptian textile corpus after the fourth century, and many extant examples, like Amheida's paintings, can be described as classical in style.41 For the most part, however, mythological-themed textiles, like mosaics, from the fourth through the seventh centuries allude to classical myth only generally, without the textual specificity or the narrative complexity that we detect in the house of Serenos. One notable exception is an extraordinary painted linen tapestry from the early fifth century which is decorated with three bands of continuous narrative and which might have once adorned a tomb or a Christian cult space.42 In this case, the literary source is the Old Testament, but the filmstrip-like action as well as the classically rendered figures recall Room 1's figural registers.↩#p353
In summary, the visual culture of late Roman Egypt is difficult to characterize in general, because of the dearth of surviving evidence and also because of the province's complex population mix. Beginning with the conquest of Egypt by Alexander and the succeeding Macedonian monarchy of the Ptolemies, with its non-indigenous ruling class entrenched in Alexandria—an opulent city constructed de novo in the style of other Hellenistic Mediterranean capitals—two very different modes of visual representation became equally powerful, the Egyptian and the classical. And from the fourth century onwards we have to add to this mix the iconographic vocabulary of Christianity. Throughout the Graeco-Roman period and into late antiquity, artists and patrons alike found many opportunities to employ these styles and their iconographies—and one can speculate, from the choices they made, about their status, identity, beliefs and aspirations. Artists would sometimes use the different styles side by side in the same work, sometimes combine them to create new genres.↩#p354
Where does Trimithis fit into all this? In the context of late antique visual culture, the paintings from Amheida can be described as both unusual and typical, and their discovery complicates quite wonderfully the already tricky task of categorizing the arts of Graeco-Roman Egypt vis-à-vis those of the rest of the empire.↩#p355
7.3. The evidence of Greek names
Roger S. Bagnall
The presence of classical culture in the Dakhla Oasis was not limited to the house of Serenos or even to Trimithis, but widespread. And it manifests itself not only in the school, in literary quotations, and in art, but also in a phenomenon barely detectable in the face of the mass of Egyptian theophoric names (§4.3). Indeed, this is something that might easily escape attention, but in reading documents I have repeatedly been brought up short by a totally unexpected name in the midst of the banal. Now Greek names are not in themselves uncommon in the papyri and inscriptions from Egypt; and Kysis, ʿAin Waqfa, Kellis, and Trimithis, which make up most of our documentary material from the oases, are no different from most places in the Nile valley or the Fayyum in this respect.↩#p356
The phenomenon in question here is limited to masculine names, a point to which we shall return. Guy Wagner alluded to it briefly in his great work on the oases, mentioning the presence of a number of "classical" Greek names. In this group, however, he combined names that are commonplace in Roman Egypt, like Polydeukes, Leonides, Agathos Daimon (not very classical, that—it is a transparent calque of the name of the Egyptian god Shai), Timotheos, Agathon, and Eros, with a number that are unique or rare there. It is this latter group that interests us and prompts some broader reflections on Greek culture in the oases and more generally in Egypt.↩#p357
First, there is a small Homeric cluster. Since Achilleus is common in the papyri, the few examples in the Kellis ostraka are not very consequential. More striking is his father Peleus, a name that appears in a graffito in the Gebel Teir, the range north of Kharga where stone was cut for local use; of this name there is not a single example elsewhere in the papyri. Odysseus is lacking so far (it is extremely rare in the papyri), but the names of both his father Laertes and his son Telemachos appear in ostraka from Kysis (modern Douch). Telemachos is known from a couple of Ptolemaic papyri, and then two people in an Oxyrhynchos papyrus of the mid-third century CE; Laertes otherwise appears in first-century Philadelphia in the Fayyum, but nowhere else. Aeneas, extremely rare in the Roman period, figures in the Kellis ostraka. Eumelos—perhaps alluding to the son of Admetos and Alkestis—turns up in the form of a signature in one ostrakon from our excavations at Trimithis, but this name is not as rare as the others, even though the evidence is heavily Ptolemaic. We may also include here Alektor, again from a Douch ostrakon, who, as the son of Pelops, might seem a relatively obscure allusion. Although cocks are occasionally mentioned in papyrus accounts, the name ("Rooster") has not shown up before in the papyri. Alas, a Tisamenos that Wagner claims to find in one of the papyri of the nekrotaphoi of Kysis is a ghost, invented by the philologist Wilhelm Crönert in a faulty emendation. But Hylas, Herakles' companion on the Argo, a name otherwise unknown in papyri and inscriptions, appears in a Kellis ostrakon.↩#p358
With the archaic period, things pick up. The sage Kleoboulos is represented by a curator civitatis of that name in a Kellis papyrus, by an oasis councillor in a couple of papyri from the 370s, and in a host of ostraka from Douch and ʿAin Waqfa. There is only a single other attestation of the name in the papyri—and that, fossilized in a toponym, so probably referring to a settler of the Hellenistic period. Empedocles, a name found in the papyri only in two Ptolemaic texts, is probably preserved in a graffito from Gebel Teir. (It is, to be sure, an emendation (by Jean Bingen), but the editor's text had read "Themistokles," who would be welcome too.) Peisistratos is found at Kellis, ʿAin Waqfa, and Kysis, in a profusion that contrasts with only a handful of Roman instances elsewhere.↩#p359
There seems to be some special affection for Spartan names: Pausanias is common, but it is not at all rare in the papyri generally. Agis occurs in one Kellis text, and Agesilaos in an Amheida ostrakon. Agis is otherwise missing from the papyri, and Agesilaos found only in Ptolemaic texts. It is worth noting that the Agis of Kellis is the son of a man named Oueib, the Egyptian word for "priest." There is nothing Greek about the cultural identity of the father, certainly. Classical Athenian history, by contrast to Spartan, has little distinctive to offer, once the ghostly Themistokles is expunged; we do find Perikles, however, which is not common in the papyri, but hardly such a rarity as Agis and Agesilaos.↩#p360
Perhaps most telling is the extraordinary popularity of the name Isocrates at Douch and ʿAin Waqfa (although it is unknown at Kellis so far). This name is not at all common in Roman Egypt—a few examples from the first century, then a blank except for an instance in the Marmarica, on the Mediterranean coast, in the late second century. We must presumably associate with the popularity of Isocrates the occurrence of Nikokles, who was an estate manager at Trimithis in the fourth century and signs a number of receipts; Nikokles of Cyprus was the subject of two of Isocrates' orations. The name appears only in Ptolemaic papyri, otherwise. Demosthenes is also well attested, but at Kellis. Perhaps there was a rivalry between the oases, with Isocrates beloved in Kharga and Demosthenes in Dakhla; but more likely this is just a matter of chance. The great orator's name is not rare in the papyri, but the instances are mainly Ptolemaic, from the Great Oasis, or from the fourth century on.↩#p361
Theophrastus (known only from Ptolemaic papyri) and Polybius (rare) help to round out the scene on the literary front, and Rhoimetalkas on the historical side—although it is hard in this last case not to suspect a Thracian settler's name from an earlier period—early Ptolemaic, one would imagine, somehow transmitted to fourth-century Trimithis without ever having been found in Egypt at some earlier point, except in one graffito from the Valley of the Kings.↩#p362
More such names turn up almost every year. What are we to make of this? First, there are two axes of analysis to keep in mind. One is chronological: most of these names, although not quite all, appear elsewhere, principally in the papyri of the Ptolemaic period, when Greeks coming from all over the Hellenic world were settling in Egypt: soldiers from Alexander the Great's army, Cyrenaeans who entered Ptolemaic service, mercenaries from all over the Aegean and the Greek mainland, economic immigrants from many regions. The ranks of Hellenized Egyptians, with their heavy use of theophoric or dynastic names, were not yet so extensive. Over time, it is my general impression, the Greek onomastic repertory in Egypt becomes impoverished; the most popular names occupy a larger share of the total—the power law takes over, in mathematical terms. To a large degree this probably results from the vast popularity of Greek names that could be seen as calques of Egyptian theophoric names (Kronion for Pakoibis, for instance: "son of Kronos" equated to "the man belonging to Geb") or as sound-alikes for them (for instance, Sokrates for Sobek- names in the Fayyum, deriving from the local crocodile god).↩#p363
No doubt the loss of a sense of connection with the immigrants' homelands played a part as well, with those names that had a locally distinctive flavor disappearing in favor of more familiar ones. This process has apparently never been studied, but it would be worth the trouble to do so. It is part of the formation of a Graeco-Egyptian identity shared by the descendants of immigrants and by those of the Egyptians who had taken positions in the royal system of Ptolemaic Egypt. The last vestiges of the old names can be seen in the first century CE. By the second century, the Graeco-Egyptian synthesis is complete.↩#p364
But then some of the old names came back. This happens only after the mid-third century, and during the Tetrarchy and the fourth century we find more of the old Greek names than appear in the second-century papyri and those of the early third. Still, only part of the repertory returns. It is not as if the ancestral names had been found in papers in the attic and revived for a newer generation, as if an American today were to find an ancestor of 1794 named Elnathan and stick that name on his unsuspecting infant. The source must be elsewhere.↩#p365
The second axis is geographical. Because we have no more than a trivial number of documents from the first 250 years of Roman rule in the oases, there is little to go on there. We do not know what was going on in Kharga and Dakhla in the period from Augustus to the Gordians in the mid-third century. But when the revival of classical onomastics comes, it is far more marked in the Great Oasis than anywhere else. The percentage of attestations of many of these names that belong to the oasite documentation is far out of proportion to the weight of this documentation in the total volume of Egyptian papyri and ostraka. Many of the names appear in texts from both Kharga and Dakhla. We have no documents to speak of from Siwa, alas, and not much from Bahariya, although recent Czech excavations have found ostraka, not yet published. Since our textual evidence from the oases is still very limited in geographical and chronological extent, the non-occurrence of any given name in Dakhla or in Kharga may be a fluke.↩#p366
There is a third axis, that of gender. We know that the repertory of women's names in the papyri tends to be dominated, even more than the men's is, by the Egyptian element, and that in the same family we will find more of the men with Greek names than of the women, no matter how high their social standing. The situation with the oasis texts, where none of the names mentioned are women's, may be nothing more than another instantiation of the same rule. We have yet to discover whether there is more to it than that.↩#p367
The strongly local character of the attachment to names drawn from the Greek educational curriculum points to one of the recurrent themes of this book, the tension between the general and the particular. In many ways, what we find in the Great Oasis in the Roman period can be paralleled anywhere in Egypt that we find similar textual and material evidence. But distinctive traits are also very noticeable. We have commented on the reasons inherent in the physical geography that financial capital necessarily played a more important role in the oasis than in the Nile valley, and the likelihood that disparities in wealth between the asset-owning part of society and those who worked for them as cultivators or transporters were more pronounced than elsewhere. Perhaps the attachment to Greek paideia is connected to this stratification. The strong presence of domestic wall-painting may also be a witness of upper-class assertion of identity. Survey work in 2015 showed that the house of Serenos was far from alone at Trimithis in being decorated with Roman painting.↩#p368
The geographical remoteness of the Dakhla Oasis can easily tempt one to think of it as peripheral. That does not seem to us a useful concept. If anything, our work at Amheida leads us to think that a center-periphery model is a poor description of the later Roman world. The centrality of capital investment and concentration of wealth, with the accompanying upper-class devotion to classical culture, may more plausibly be seen as a foretaste of what we see in the sixth-century Egypt of Dioskoros of Aphrodito. These characteristics are not absent from the cities of the valley in the fourth century, but they may be present in more concentrated form in the oasis. It would be interesting to see if the urbanism of those valley cities develops in ways parallel to what we see at Amheida, or if the physical form of fourth-century Trimithis is the product of the climate rather than culture. That is an important item on the agenda for further research.↩#p369
That agenda is crowded. All of us, and other members of our team as well, have hopes and goals for continued work at Amheida for many years to come. The site is vast, and new surprises greet us each year. We have yet to locate Ptolemaic Trimithis (if it was called that already in the Hellenistic period), or to excavate residential quarters from the first centuries of Roman rule, or to investigate the sprawling cemeteries around the city, or to open the deep trenches on the temple hill that could find an Old Kingdom level. Although the town has been mapped, that is not yet true of the necropolis, and new quarters of the town, previously unseen, can emerge from under the moving sand dunes at any moment. Non-invasive methods have contributed much to our understanding of the site, but magnetometry has been of less help than at most sites because the mud bricks blend into the background fill. We need to keep excavating. The intensification of the surrounding agriculture worries us, but rushing excavation does not seem a solution; applying the stratigraphic method yields far more information than we could get in any other way. The exhilaration of integrating texts and contexts depends entirely on precise stratigraphy.↩#p370
Realizing our goals depends, of course, on the ability to sustain fieldwork and protect the site. Although Egypt has so far been more fortunate than most of its neighbors, we are more acutely aware than ever that the safeguarding of ancient sites depends on the stability and efficacy of national governments. Our beautiful and calm oasis has been an optimal place to work during the past decade, and we hope that it will remain so, allowing these first glimpses of an oasis city to be enriched by many more to come.↩#p371
Chapter 7 Notes
1 Cf. Bagnall and Ruffini 2012: 198–9. Instruction at this level might also address female students. Secondary education at the hands of the grammarian and the rhetor, however, served only males. For this reason, in what follows the pronouns are all masculine.↩#footnote-7.1
23 For an example of Orpheus in the Roman catacombs see Deckers 1987: 348–50. On Orpheus in late antique art see Murray 1981: 37–63, and Jensen 2000: 41–2.↩#footnote-7.23
25 For a survey of extant wall painting in Roman Egypt, see Whitehouse 2010: 1022–8.↩#footnote-7.25
26 On late antique wall paintings generally, see Dorigo 1971 and Joyce 1991. Site-specific studies include Zeugma: Barbet 2005; Ephesos: Zimmermann and Ladstätter 2010; Rome: Mielsch 1978; Brenk 1995. See Zimmerman 2014 for the most recent discoveries and discussions related to wall painting in the late Roman Empire.↩#footnote-7.26
27 Thanks to Paola Davoli for this suggestion. For the painted tombs of El-Muzawwaqa see Osing 1982 and Whitehouse 1998.↩#footnote-7.27
29 For a general study of the funerary arts, see Riggs 2005. On the painted tombs of Alexandria, see Venit 2002.↩#footnote-7.29
30 It is worth noting, however, that the date of these images from Room E of House B50 is far from certain, and largely based on stylistic comparison with contemporary Christian images. Boak and Peterson 1931: 34, pl. 25, fig. 49; Kelsey Museum Archives (University of Michigan) 5.2159. It has also been suggested that the figure on horseback is not Heron but one of the Dioscuri: Rondot 2013: 60. Rondot further discusses additional paintings of deities from house C65 at Karanis as well as from other domestic contexts in the Fayum such as Theadelphia, which may be closer in style to Amheida's figural imagery, but these too are not securely dateable, Rondot 2013: 59-65.↩#footnote-7.30
31 Slightly earlier (second- or third-century) painted deities (such as Sarapis, Helios and Harpokrates) decorate a niche in House H10 at Marina el-Alamein and are closer in style to Amheida's paintings; see Kiss 2006. Like the Karanis images, though, these too are iconic and devotional in function and so not directly parallel to Amheida's narrative scenes.↩#footnote-7.31
32 Compare for example the decorations of a late antique house from Antandros in the Troad where the mosaics resemble room 1's painted "carpet" motifs while the house's wall paintings are decidedly dissimilar, Polat 2014, figs. 2 and 6. One exception to this is the patterns employed in the late-second-century mural paintings from the house underneath the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome; Mols and Moormann 2010: figs. 13 and 14.↩#footnote-7.32
33 Early Roman examples include Kom el-Dikka: Majcherek 2002: 41–3, fig. 8; Fayyum: Bresciani 1976: 25–8, pl. A; Kellis: Hope and Whitehouse 2006: 319–20, col. pls. 1 and 2.↩#footnote-7.33
34 Chapel 25: Fakhry 1951: 79–88, pls. VI and VII, XXVIIa. For Bagawat in general, see Cipriano 2008, and for the figural images in the "Chapel of the Exodus," Davis 2001: 150–72.↩#footnote-7.34
35 On the "jeweled-style" see Roberts 1989. For the Red Monastery, see Bolman 2006; Bolman forthcoming.↩#footnote-7.35
38 Gabra and Drioton 1954: 10–11, pls. 14–16. For an overview of the site, Lembke 2010.↩#footnote-7.38
39 For example, paintings illustrating Penelope and Deidamia from Zeugma: Barbet 2005, and Perseus and Andromeda from Rome: Mielsch 1976.↩#footnote-7.39
40 Examples surveyed in Ling 1998 and Dunbabin 1999. For post-fourth-century instances of mythological subject matter in mosaics, see Bowersock 2006.↩#footnote-7.40
41 Such as the famous fourth-century Dionysiac tapestry now in Riggisberg: see Flury-Lemberg, Willers, and Gruber 1987.↩#footnote-7.41
42 Kötzsche, Flury-Lemberg and Schiessl 2004, although note that ongoing investigations into this textile are beginning to suggest a much earlier date.↩#footnote-7.42
