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1 In the periods from which we have Greek and Demotic texts, Amheida was called Trimithis, meaning “the storeroom in the north” in Egyptian; the name Amheida apparently represents the same root minus tri, “the storeroom”, at the beginning.
The ostraka presented in this volume come from excavations conducted at the site of Amheida, located in the northwestern part of the Dakhla Oasis in the western desert of Egypt. Dakhla was part of the Great Oasis of the Graeco-Roman period. Amheida is the largest surviving archaeological site in Dakhla today, although it was certainly smaller in antiquity than the historic capital of the oasis, Mothis (today’s Mut), the remains of which survive only in very fragmentary form.The excavations at Amheida have been carried out by an international team under the sponsorship of Columbia University; with the 2009 season, primary sponsorship passed to New York University, where it is based in the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. This team has worked in 2004–2007, the years from which the ostraka published in this volume come, under the regional permit of the Dakhleh Oasis Project, directed by A. J. Mills. The Columbia project has been directed by Roger S. Bagnall, with Eugene Ball as field director in 2004 and Paola Davoli as archaeological director since 2005. Olaf E. Kaper has served as the project’s associate director for Egyptology. Preliminary reports for each year appear on the project’s web site (www.amheida.org). Complete lists of those who have participated in the project during these years are given in these reports. We are grateful to all for their contributions to understanding ancient Trimithis and the support they have given both in the field and between seasons to our work. The present volume has benefited above all from many discussions with Paola Davoli about the contexts and stratigraphy of the house in Area 2.1 (House B1), and from conservation work and study of the coins by David M. Ratzan and William E. Metcalf. Infrared photography of the ostraka in 2009 by Rodney Ast helped improve readings in a number of texts.
We are also indebted to all of the institutions and individuals whose financial support has made the project possible. These also are listed on the web site, but we must record here that the bulk of the funding during 2004–2007 has come from Columbia University (the Academic Quality Fund, the office of the Vice President for Arts and Sciences, the Stanwood Cockey Lodge Fund of the Department of Classics, and the Columbia University Libraries) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through a Distinguished Achievement Award to Roger Bagnall. We record our thanks to all of those who helped make the launching of this project possible, including (then) Provost Jonathan R. Cole, (then) Vice President for Arts and Sciences David H. Cohen, and Vice President and University Librarian James G. Neal. In Egypt, we are particularly grateful to Zahi Hawass, (then) General Secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Magdy El-Ghandour, (then) chief of foreign missions, and Maher Bashendi Amin, the chief inspector for the Dakhla Oasis in the Pharaonic and Roman Inspectorate, for their constant support of our work. The essential logistical basis of our operations in the oasis is provided by Ashraf Barakat, assistant to the director, and Gaber Mahmoud Murad, manager of our excavation house. Without them, there would be no excavations.
Our project at Amheida was launched with as one of its explicit aims the discovery of new textual material in a fully recorded archaeological context. Anyone who has worked with papyri, ostraka, and inscriptions from excavations knows that context does not always illuminate texts nor the reverse. But equally, in many cases the relationship is deeply rewarding. Both situations occur with the ostraka presented here and will be discussed both in the introduction to this volume and in the forthcoming publication of the structures.
A somewhat wider context for our work, and one of the reasons for the selection of Amheida for a field project, is the Dakhleh Oasis Project, mentioned above; the excavations at Kellis (modern Ismant el-Kharab), directed for the past twenty years by Colin A. Hope, were a particular inspiration, and it was the opportunity to work on the Kellis Agricultural Account Book at his invitation that first brought Roger Bagnall to Dakhla in 1996. We are deeply indebted to Dr. Mills and Professor Hope for their help with our work in more ways than we can recount.
2 Raffaella Cribiore has contributed to establishing the versions of the various exercises. We are grateful to both. Professor Vittmann wishes to note that because he was unable to see the original ostraka, his transcriptions and comments are preliminary. He intends to provide a fuller publication of these texts at a later date after having the opportunity to work on the originals. The papyrologists involved in publishing the Kellis documentary and literary finds have also contributed much at every stage to our work. In the case of the present volume, above all we owe an enormous debt to Klaas Worp. He and we have shared unpublished material from both sites throughout our editorial labors, and his index of personal names from the oasis has been of great value at many points. He has also read a draft of the present volume, discussed many difficult points in the texts with us, and improved our readings. We thank also two anonymous referees for the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.
In the present volume, the Demotic texts have been prepared by Günter Vittmann, who also contributed onomastic suggestions.New York, November 2010