Search results for ""Author E.R. O'Connell""

Throughout their long histories, Egypt’s monuments have been adapted, reused and reimagined. At Abydos, the tombs of the first kings became a locus of the national cult of Osiris, which continued with permutations into the Roman period. In Late Antiquity, the oracle of Bes drew an international audience before it was probably closed under the emperor Constantius II c. AD 359. By the end of the 6th century, Bes was remembered as a demon, who was vanquished by the famous monk Apa Moses of Abydos. Until now, the region’s history has been told largely from the literary sources. Recent fieldwork at Abydos offers deeper and more nuanced understanding of the region. This volume brings together the evidence from six major fieldwork projects and the British Museum collection in order to present the archaeology of Abydos in the First Millennium AD, when traditional ritual practices were largely replaced by Christianity and, later, Islam was introduced. Each paper details the adaptation of earlier architecture, artefacts, or both, including wall paintings, pottery, inscriptions, papyri and ostraca, and other objects of daily life.

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Across Eurasia and North Africa in the First Millennium AD, empires rose and fell, each adopting a universalizing faith which distinguished it broadly from its neighbours. In Egypt, our sources are particularly rich, owing to the land’s arid climate and the unparalleled survival not only of stone, ceramic and metalwork, but also of organic material such as textiles, wood and manuscripts found on papyrus, parchment and paper. This volume brings together over a dozen of the world’s leading specialists to explore the dialectical interplay between empire and religious identity through a series of case studies from Egypt. Evidence from Egypt suggests that it was precisely in the context of empire that ‘religious identity’ emerged as a distinctive marker. Using the unrivalled abundance and variety of surviving material culture, this volume explores the formation, renegotiation and reconstitution of religious identities from the Roman period forward. Whereas Egypt’s ‘pharaonic’ millennia (c. 3000-30 BC) have been studied as a coherent whole, later eras are often studied as fragments. Egypt and Empire offers a different approach by covering together periods that are usually treated separately in different academic disciplines.

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This volume contains the proceedings of the twenty-first annual British Museum Egyptology Colloquium, which was the first in the series dedicated to post-pharaonic Egypt. The volume investigates continuity and change in the archaeological record in the First Millennium AD, focusing on the transitions to and from Late Antiquity (AD 250-800), when Egypt's population became Christian and, later, Islam was introduced. The fourteen contributors, representing the overlapping disciplines of Egyptology, Archaeology and Art History with specialisations in the pharaonic, Roman and Late Antique periods, present the results of new archaeological research at a range of sites currently under investigation. Seeking to identify trends and compare results, the volume is organised according to four major themes: 1) settlements, 2) cemeteries, 3) settling rock-cut tombs and quarries and 4) temple-church-mosque. Many of the contributions address adaptive reuse of earlier architecture, the recycling of earlier monuments as building material (i.e. spolia), or both. Traditionally neglected by modern scholars in favour of other periods in Egypt's long history, the study of First Millennium AD archaeology offers increasingly better opportunities to evaluate both Egypt's distinctiveness and its role within the wider Mediterranean region.

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