Giovanni R. Ruffini - Böcker

Among the few surviving archaeological sites from the medieval Christian kingdom of Nubia--located in present day Sudan--Qasr Ibrim is unique in a number of ways. It is the only site in Lower Nubia that remained above water after the completion of the Aswan high dam. In addition, thanks to the aridity of the climate in the area the site is marked by extraordinary preservation of organic material, especially textual material written on papyrus, leather, and paper. Particularly rich is the textual material from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE, written in Old Nubian, the region's indigenous language. As a result, Qasr Ibrim is probably the best documented ancient and medieval site in Africa outside of Egypt and North Africa.Medieval Nubia will be the first book to make available this remarkable material, much of which is still unpublished. The evidence discovered reveals a more complicated picture of this community than originally thought. Previously, scholars had thought medieval Nubia had existed in relative isolation from the rest of the world and had a primitive economy. Legal documents, accounts, and letters, however, reveal a complex, monetized economy with exchange rates connected to those of the wider world. Furthermore, they reveal public festive practices, in which lavish feasting and food gifts reinforced the social prestige of the participants. These documents show medieval Nubia to have been a society combining legal elements inherited from the Greco-Roman world with indigenous African social practices. In reconstructing the social and economic life of medieval Nubia based on the Old Nubian sources from the site, as well as other previously examined materials, Giovanni R. Ruffini will correct previous assumptions and produce a new picture of Nubia, one that connects it to the wider Mediterranean economy and society of its time.

This volume presents 455 inscribed pottery fragments, or ostraka,found during NYU's excavations at Amheida in the western desert of Egypt. Themajority date to the Late Roman period (3rd to 4th century AD), a time of rapidsocial change in Egypt and the ancient Mediterranean generally. Amheida was asmall administrative center, and the full publication of these brief textsilluminates the role of writing in the daily lives of its inhabitants. Thesubjects covered by the Amheida ostraka include the distribution of food, theadministration of wells, the commercial lives of inhabitants, their education,and other aspects of life neglected in literary sources. The authors provide afull introduction to the technical aspects of terminology and chronology, whilealso situating this important evidence in its historical, social and regionalcontext. Online edition available 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).

Most ancient history focuses on the urban elite. Papyrology explores the daily lives of the more typical men and women in antiquity. Aphrodito, a village in sixth-century AD Egypt, is antiquity's best source for micro-level social history. The archive of Dioskoros of Aphrodito introduces thousands of people living the normal business of their lives: loans, rent contracts, work agreements, marriage, divorce. In exceptional cases, the papyri show raw conflict: theft, plunder, murder. Throughout, Dioskoros struggles to keep his family in power in Aphrodito, and to keep Aphrodito independent from the local tax collectors. The emerging picture is a different vision of Roman late antiquity than what we see from the view of the urban elites. It is a world of free peasants building networks of trust largely beyond the reach of the state. Aphrodito's eighth-century AD papyri show that this world dies in the early years of Islamic rule.