Roger S. Bagnall

"More than three hundred letters written in Greek and Egyptian by women in Egypt in the millennium from Alexander the Great to the Arab conquest survive on papyrus and pottery. These letters were written by women from various walks of life and shed light on critical social aspects of life in Egypt after the pharaohs. Roger S. Bagnall and Raffaella Cribiore collect the best preserved of these letters in translation and set them in their paleographic, linguistic, social, and economic contexts. As a result, Women's Letters from Ancient Egypt, 300 B.C.-A.D. 800, provides a sense that these women's habits, interests, and means of expression were a product more of their social and economic standing than of specifically gender-related concerns or behavior."--Jacket.

The traditional demographic regime of ancient Greece and Rome is almost entirely unknown; but our best chance for understanding its characteristics is provided by the three hundred census returns that survive on papyri from Roman Egypt. These returns, which date from the first three centuries AD, list the members of ordinary households living in the Nile valley: not only family members, but lodgers and slaves. The demography of Roman Egypt has a complete and accurate catalogue of all demographically relevant information contained in the returns. On the basis of this catalogue, the authors use modern demographic methods and models in order to reconstruct the patterns of mortality, marriage, fertility, and migration that are likely to have prevailed in Roman Egypt. They recreate a more or less typical Mediterranean population as it survived and prospered nearly two millennia ago, at the dawn of the Christian era. The material presented in this book will be invaluable to scholars in a wide variety of disciplines: ancient historians - especially those working on social and family history - historical demographers, papyrologists, and social historians generally.

The thousand years from Alexander to the Arab conquest in A.D. 641 are rich in archaeological interest and well documented by 50,000 papyri in Greek, Egyptian, Latin and other languages. But travelers and others interested in the remains of this period are ill-served by most guides to Egypt, which concentrate on the pharaonic buildings. This book redresses the balance, with clear and concise descriptions related to documents and historical background that enable us to appreciate the cities, temples, tombs, villages, churches and monasteries of the Hellenistic, Roman and Late Antique periods. Written by a dozen leading specialists and reflecting the latest discoveries and research, it provides an expert visitor's guide to the principal sites, many off the well-worn tourist paths. It also offers a picture of Egyptian society at differing economic and social levels. With a historical introduction, room-by-room tours of museums, specially commissioned plans of sites and buildings and over 100 other color and black-and-white illustrations, this book is a practical on-the-spot companion and armchair guide, bringing to life the splendors and curiosities of a little-known civilization.