Blog

Here you can find an overview of all the project team’s blogposts.

XII. The origin of the leap year

by Kevin Hoogeveen and Sofie Remijsen

Every four years, the month of February counts 29 instead of 28 days. Yesterday, this happened again. In this way, our calendar keeps up with the astronomic speed with which the earth runs its course around the sun. Adding this day to February was a measure implemented by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE.

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XI. When do we get to see bears and panthers fighting?
by Konstanze Schiemann

Roman animal hunts, so called venationes, were rare occasions. Seeing wild animals in the arena as they attacked each other or were confronted by human fighters was an exciting sight that spectators did not often get to experience. Outside of Rome and Constantinople, these spectacles were organized in the context of the imperial cult.

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X. Coptic expressions for the days of the week
by Renate Dekker

In Sahidic, the main variant of Coptic in late antiquity and the early Islamic period, there are three incomplete sets of names for days of the week (Table 1). Words for Sunday, Friday and Saturday were adopted from the Greek version of the Bible, whereas the days from Monday to Friday were numbered and written in full in Coptic. In the 1940s and early 1950s, the Austrian Coptologist Walter C. Till gradually identified a third set of names that refers to “fasts” and “intervals”, but until recently, scholars still struggled to interpret these.

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IX. The legacy of an ancient Roman festival
by Elsa Lucassen

A great feast, celebrated with family and friends, tables loaded with delicious food and sweet things, plenty of wine, houses decorated with boughs, the habit of giving each other gifts, sometimes singing songs together- of course I’m talking about the feast of … New Year!

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VIII. Glocal dating: the reception of Justinianic reform in dating formulas
by Kevin Hoogeveen

In 537 CE, emperor Justinian ordered all officials charged with drawing up documents and all notaries of the Eastern provinces to have their dating formulas comply to a format that named him and his successors first. Egyptian scribes were used to a different system. Did the scribes pay heed to this imperial instruction? In this blogpost, we look at the speed of the implementation of this Justinianic instruction in the provinces.

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VII. Sunday rest and discourses of difference
by Sofie Remijsen

The rhythm of our modern lives is set by the alternation of weekdays and weekend. This alternation between work and rest goes back to the early Jewish and Christian introductions of the Sabbath and the Sunday respectively as a weekly day of rest. This one day apart sets the pace of peoples’ lives. Jewish communities were – by far – the first to live according to a seven-day pace, but it was with the Christian day of rest that this lifestyle spread far and wide.

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VI. How monks at a hermitage in Kellia established the time for eating
by Renate Dekker

In Late Antiquity, Kellia (“the Cells”) was an internationally renowned monastic community located ca. 60 km southeast of Alexandria, on the edge of the Western Desert. According to monastic tradition, it was founded by the fourth-century hermit Amun of Nitria. Following the advice of Antony the Great, “the father of Christian monasticism” (d. 356), he chose a location twelve miles from Nitria, so that hermits from this community could first eat at the ninth hour (ca. 3PM) and visit the brethren in Kellia before sunset, and vice versa.

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V. Another Busy Day at the Office
by Elsa Lucassen

The rhythm of our lives is largely structured by obligations for work or studies. Many of us keep track of work activities and appointments in a calendar, creating an overview of what we still have to do, while at the same time recording what we have done for future reference.

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IV. The Era of Oxyrhynchus: A Political Statement?
by Kevin Hoogeveen

Dating formulas abound in Roman Egypt. One could, for example, name the acting consuls to identify the year, or count the regnal year of the reigning emperor(s). Eras, that is a continuous count of years from a significant moment, were late-comers in Egypt. The common era, which counts the years since the birth of Christ, was an invention of the sixth century, and took several centuries to spread. In the fourth century CE, however, another, remarkable era appears in Egyptian documents from the city Oxyrhynchus. Where does this dating formula come from?

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III. How the Lived Time Database Contributes to the Study of the Workweek of Scribes in Eight-Century Egypt
by Renate Dekker

In the first months of my postdoc project, I have been entering information on dated Coptic texts in the Lived Time database, including deeds, tax receipts, letters and inscriptions. Sofie had already imported sources available at the papyrological platform Trismegistos.org, and I expanded the corpus with texts from less easily accessible publications or recent editions.

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II. Being Late at a Party
by Sofie Remijsen

After a wonderful night of dancing at the royal ball, Cinderella – in the exquisite dress given to her by her fairy godmother – looks at the clock and notices to her great dismay that it is already almost 12 o’clock. Afraid of being too late and being unmasked as an intruder to the high society assembled for the occasion, she panics, starts running and loses her slipper.

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I. Food for the Soul (and more) in Early Islamic Palestine
by Eugenio Garosi

The Muslim expansion of the 7th century turned the Ancient World upside down. Less than 30 years after the death of their Prophet, Muslims from Arabia ruled over much of what had been the Eastern Roman and Sassanian empires. But what did this mean for the average person of the day? How did the rule of the new masters affect their habits and prospects (if at all)?

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