Séance du séminaire Espaces, villes et sociétés
Intervention de Roger Bagnall (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University)
Répondant : Dan Dana (CNRS, HiSoMA)
- 8 décembre 2023 - de 15h à 18h - amphithéâtre de la MILC - 35 rue Raulin - Lyon 7e
- affiche (.pdf)

The oases of the Egyptian Western Desert have yielded meager harvests of Greek inscriptions on stone, even though a much larger number of graffiti and dipinti show that the epigraphic habit was not entirely lacking.
Even by the standard of the oases, Siwa has stood out for its epigraphic poverty: only a few graffiti of the fourth century BC, a statue base of Hadrian from Aghurmi now in the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria, a few sketchy fragments, mainly also from Aghurmi, and a badly damaged dedication of the later Ptolemaic period to several gods.

Recent archaeological work, led by Abdel Aziz el-Demery, the director of antiquities for the region, has begun to show that Siwa was not quite so epigraphically poor as it seemed. El-Demery, Magdy Aly, and I have published several Christian gravestones and a temple dedication inscription from the reign of Antoninus. Another such inscription has long been known (and wildly misrepresented) but not published; the three of us will publish it in a forthcoming volume from a conference in Alexandria held in May, 2023. It contains the dedication on behalf of Trajan of the temple of Isis at el-Maraqi. I shall contextualize it in the wider epigraphic milieu of the oases as well as of Siwa.