Here you can find an overview of all the project team’s blogposts.
XXII. Vans, donkeys and canals: on how my trip to Egypt helps my research
by Kevin Hoogeveen
I have been studying late-antique Egypt for a while now, with special attention for the Fayum lately – but I had never actually been to Egypt. From 8 to 16 February, I had the opportunity to participate in the Fayum Winter School, which was organised by the University of Warsaw and the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology. For a little more than a week, I visited various sites …
XXI. From the Roman Kalends to Carnival: Rowdy feasts as markers of time
by Elsa Lucassen
Dressing up, wearing masks, parading, dancing, celebrating through the night: these are all elements that quickly come to mind when thinking about carnival. Although the specific traditions vary per region, examples like the parades in Rio, Venetian masks or Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans show that carnival celebrations are easily recognizable as such.
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XX. A little more than forty years and it’s yours
by Kevin Hoogeveen
1985 is a long time ago. Forty years, to be exact. Or rather, the author of this blogpost, a twenty-seven-year-old Dutch PhD Candidate, thinks it is a long time ago. One could say forty years equal the working life of one generation. In the proceedings of a court case dated 10 May 339 CE from Egypt (SB XVI 12692 = P. Col. VII 175), we encounter a law from the emperor Constantine I according to which …
XIX. The Lived Time conference: a short retrospective
by Sofie Remijsen
How many hours did civil servants work a hundred years ago and did they experience stress? What did the introduction of a weekly day of rest mean for crowd control in the Roman bathhouses? How did sex workers in early modern Japan manage to charge by the hour? And how did merchants schedule their business ventures during the insecure period of the Black Death? These are just a few examples of the questions addressed during the international Lived Time conference held here at Amsterdam from 26 to 28 November 2024.
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XVIII. Lived Time at Dutch secondary schools
by Elsa Lucassen
What is the right time to arrive at a party? Arriving too early, even only a little, is kind of awkward, on time is fine, but it is definitely cooler to arrive ‘fashionably late’. Much later, however, is also not done. Luckily, most partygoers are able to navigate these unwritten social rules regarding time. These kind of mundane questions seem to us a modern luxury problem, but are they really something new? This is the topic of a lesson our team developed for secondary school children (ages 15-17).
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XVII. A day in the life of a Roman schoolboy
by Kevin Hoogeveen and Hugo Oostdijk
What was it like to be a Roman schoolchild? A few months ago, the project team designed an interactive tutorial about the life of Roman schoolboy and the ways of knowing time in the Roman world for school children aged 9-12. From June one, we (research assistant Kevin Hoogeveen and student assistant Hugo Oostdijk) have practiced and perfected the tutorial in primary schools in Bussum, Amstelveen and Rotterdam. In this blogpost, we share our experiences.
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XVI. Monastic routines at the Monastic Federation in Upper Egypt
by Renate Dekker
For those interested in the origin of monastic routines, Bentley Layton’s book The Canons of Our Fathers: Monastic Rules of Shenoute (Oxford, 2014) is highly recommended. It presents the first edition of a very early collection of monastic rules written in Coptic, 595 entries in total. These rules were not transmitted as a group, but abbot Shenoute of Atripe (ca. 347-465) and his successor Besa quoted them in their writings, and Layton carefully collected these quotes.
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XV. Imagining the future in late antique contracts
by Kevin Hoogeveen
The payment of rent in kind, the delivery of pre-paid wine, and the repayment of a loan in kind; all depend on the not always predictable outcome of a harvest – especially in premodern societies. Agricultural entrepreneurship was a risky business, as one was dependent on the vagaries of natures. Nature’s pace was relatively predictable – yet one could never know when impactful deviations from the common agricultural calendar, like a belated Nile flood, would occur.
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XIV. How did Christians in late antiquity “pray without ceasing?”
by Renate Dekker
Late antique Christians, and monks in particular, were supposed to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17). But what did this mean in daily life? How many prayers were considered appropriate and what tools did monks have to keep track of their prayer count?
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XIII. Customized festival calendars
by Elsa Lucassen
In every society there are communal feasts, when most people are free from work and schools are closed. Here in the Netherlands, there has been some discussion lately concerning the inclusiveness of these feast days. Why should feasts with a Christian origin, such as Pentecost or even Christmas, be nationwide holidays for everyone, including people without a connection to Christianity?
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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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