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Article
Deserted Villages: From the Ancient to the Medieval Fayyum
Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists
  • James G Keenan, Loyola University Chicago
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2003
Pages
119-139
Publisher Name
American Society of Papyrologists
Disciplines
Abstract

This article, originally delivered as a paper at the 117th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, is a development of twin papers given by Roger Bagnall and me at the xxe Congres International des Etudes Byzantines in Paris, 19-25 August 2001, as part of a "Table ronde" on villages in the Byzantine world. On that occasion, we were responsible for Egyptian villages, he for villages as evidenced (mainly) in the Greek papyri, I for the medieval period based on al-Nabulsi's description of Egypt's Fayyum Province, Ta 'rikh al-Fayyiim (c. 1245 A.D.). Thematically, we had agreed to explore such topics as the physical relationship between villages and their central cities, ranges in village sizes, hierarchies of settlements, in short, "geographies of power." As I reconsidered both papers in revising mine for publication, I came to see that in our experiment, despite Bagnall's good work, but perhaps because of the way we had defined our concerns, the Greek documents of the fourth to the eighth centuries and al-Nabulsi's thirteenth-century Arabic text rarely connected. And since ancient historians have traditionally treated the history of the late antique Fayyum as discontinuous, I was led to ask whether a continuous history of the FayyUm, from antiquity to the Middle Ages, was after all possible.

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Author Posting. © James Keenan, 2003. This article is posted here by permission of the American Society of Papyrologists for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 40, 2003.

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Citation Information
Keenan, JG. "Deserted villages: from the ancient to the medieval fayyum" in Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 40, 2003.