An Oasis City by Roger S. Bagnall et al. (review)
- An Oasis City by Roger S. Bagnall et al.
My first thought on reading this book concerned the importance of production values. What could have been a dull excavation report about an obscure Egyptian oasis has been transformed into a riveting learning experience. Its subject, the town of Amheida in the Dakhla Oasis, lies some five hundred kilometers to the west of Luxor and the Nile valley. Thanks to the numerous color illustrations and diagrams, beginning with the book's cover (a replicate of one of the frescoes found on the site), the place comes alive for the reader. Useful and surprising illustrations are spaced throughout chapters describing the ecology, cityscape, economy, religious changes, and culture of this Greco-Roman site from about 100–400 CE. An intriguing chapter details local educational practices, including the white plastered walls of a schoolroom that served as surfaces on which to write lessons for students to recite or copy—a learning aid not unlike the whiteboard walls in today's "active learning" environment. Evidence for religious practices ranges from Egyptian cult temples to Christian churches, subtended with evidence for the hybridity of local practices.
An unexpected insight gained from this study depends upon camels. Introduced probably in the Saite period (c. 600), the camel's ability to traverse large swaths of desert without water opened up oasis locations like the Dakhla to economically viable, exportable agriculture that, in turn, allowed such places to grow and flourish in the Roman period, attract investors, and support local elites.
Susan Stephens is Hart Professor of the Humanities and professor of classics at Stanford University. The author of Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria and The Poets of Alexandria, she is coauthor (with Benjamin Acosta-Hughes) of Callimachus in Context: From Plato to Ovid and coeditor (with Jack Winkler) of Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments.
