Foreword
This is an online digital edition from ISAW Digital Monographs. The print edition of this work can be consulted at https://isaw.nyu.edu/publications/isaw-monographs/ain-el-gedida
As Nicola Aravecchia shows, the fieldwork at and publication of the site of ʿAin el-Gedida have brought to light a type of settlement that existed in large numbers in late antique Egypt, the rural hamlet dependent on and supporting a larger settlement. The ʿAin el-Gedida project took place as a subsidiary operation of the excavations at Amheida, at the time of the excavations sponsored by Columbia University, where I was then a faculty member. The work was supported by a Distinguished Achievement Award made to me by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and I take this opportunity to renew my thanks to the Foundation for this support. I am also grateful to the entire Amheida team for their moral and logistical support, particularly to my assistant Ashraf Barakat and to our house manager Gaber Murad. They solved problems at every stage and made this work possible.
The results of this excavation are being published as part of the Amheida series, even though they concern another site, both because this work was part of the Amheida project and, more importantly, because Amheida, Roman Trimithis, was made possible by a network of such rural settlements in its surroundings. Not only do the finds from ʿAin el-Gedida have many points of intersection with those at Amheida, but they help show how an urban settlement of the Roman period like Trimithis functioned in the oasis ecological and economic zone.