Relations and Identities in a Saharan Environment (late third-tenth century CE)

ongoing

From the late 3rd to the 10th c. CE, Egypt transitioned from a Roman province to an Arab Muslim state. Despite much work, the societal and political changes in Egypt’s Western Desert oases (the Roman westernmost districts along the Libyan Sahara) remain poorly understood. RISE aims to fill this gap. By challenging the view of the oases as merely peripheral to the Nile Valley, RISE focuses on overlooked historical actors: the nomads in the Western Desert and their interactions with the oasis settlers. The working hypothesis is that these relations lie at the basis of the region's historical evolution. Nomads were often invisible, but in this transitional era, nomad-settler interactions evolved persistently, leaving records that let us trace them from the perspective of oasis settlers and in literary portrayals. Based on bibliographical data, RISE’s analysis is conducted on 2 corpora (100 documentary texts and 126 literary passages, respectively), including Greek, Latin, Coptic, Arabic texts, complemented by archaeological evidence. Combining expertise in the history of literature, papyrology, archaeology, and digital humanities, RISE adopts a socio-anthropological approach to interpreting socio-cultural dynamics. RISE is the first systematic study of nomad-settler interactions in Egypt’s Saharan frontier, late 3rd-10th. This broadens the debate on the oases, exploring an overlooked period and on nomad-settler relations in Rome’s Desert Frontier, including Egypt’s Saharan one. An international workshop (part of RISE) will foster a comparative discussion on Rome’s desert frontiers from Africa to the Levant. This interdisciplinarity needs a host like the UP1 - ArScAn unit, where I will be integrated and trained in digital humanities, archaeology, and papyrology, developing a distinctive expertise in Late Antique desert frontiers from a comparative view. New career opportunities in France and abroad will open. Dissemination will use various channels to maximase impact.