A detailed archaeological study of life in Egypt’s Eastern desert during the Roman period by a leading scholar

Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert is a two-volume set collecting Helene Cuvigny’s most important articles on Egypt’s Eastern desert during the Roman period. The excavations that she has directed have uncovered a wealth of material, including tens of thousands of texts written on pottery fragments (ostraca). Some of these are administrative texts, but many more are correspondence, both official and private, written by and to the people (mostly but not all men) who lived and worked in these remote and harsh environments, supported by an elaborate network of defense, administration and supply that tied the entire region together. The contents of Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert have all been published earlier in peer-reviewed venues, but almost entirely in French. All of the contributions have been translated by the editor and brought up to date with respect to bibliography and in some cases significantly rewritten by the author, in order to take account of the enormous amount of new material discovered in the intervening time and subsequent publications. A full index makes this body of work far more accessible than it was before. This book brings together thirty years of detailed study of this material, conjuring in vivid detail the lived experience of those who inhabited these forts–often through their own expressive language–and the realia of desert geography, military life, sex, religion, quarry operations, and imperial administration in the Roman world.