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This summer the 31^st Papyrological Conference was held in Cologne from the 28^th of July until the 2^nd of August. As this conference is organized only once every three years, this was the only occurrence within the time limits of the Lived Time project, so the team was well represented by Sofie Remijsen, Kevin Hoogeveen, Elsa Lucassen and former colleague Eugenio Garosi. We all presented papers on our current research and Sofie Remijsen introduced the project in a more general manner with a separate talk as well.

In ‘Weekly rhythms of late-antique life’ Sofie Remijsen considered when weekly rhythms started to make an appearance in the papyrological sources, using the precisely dated papyri from the project’s database to make graphs that illustrated this development. One feature she explored in particular was the role of the Sabbath in fourth and fifth century CE.

Elsa Lucassen’s spoke on festive gifts, such as heortika and kalandika in her paper ‘Follow the gifts: blurring lines between festivals from the perspective of gifts’. These formalized gifts appear to stem from an Egyptian tradition, reinforced by Roman customs of giving and continued under the guise of Christianity.

In ‘The rural history of Byzantine Egypt (284-642 CE) from below’ Kevin Hoogeveen introduced his own PhD project, on how mobility might be a way to study how the rural population of Egypt co-shaped the societal developments.

We were eager to see how other scholars are examining aspects of temporality. Eward Tang, for example, combined the team’s interests in temporal pattern and mobility in his paper ‘The shape of moving letters: seasonal mobility and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri’. Petra Sijpesteijn (‘Counting and dating in Arabic papyri’) discussed where exactly we can locate the innovative character of the new Muslim calendar and era. Ágnes Mihálykó’s talk on ‘Feasting after the Eucharist: Agape meals in Late Antique Egypt’ demonstrated how traditional customs influenced these early Christian gatherings, aligning well with Elsa Lucassen’s research into the continuity of traditional practices in new Christian guises. In ‘Food, gifts and festivals: New edition of P. Ross. Georg. II 41’ Elena Chepel likewise brought up many topics essential to Elsa’s research.

Many international colleagues presented editions of unpublished texts, several of which turned out to be of interest for the project. Maria-Jesus Albarran Martinez (‘The materiality of the Bawit papyri: Format of delivery orders’), for example, showed unpublished Coptic ostraca that mentioned a bonus of some sort given at Easter.  Susan Fogarty (‘Contract for the services of a wet-nurse’) presented an unpublished contract of a wet nurse that includes a heortika-like stipulation for the Amesysia festival. We look forward to further developments and publications! After five intense days of listening to interesting papers, meeting fellow researchers of the papyri and history of Roman and late-antique Egypt, discussing questions, making plans for future projects, sightseeing in Cologne and enjoying many nice meals, we were thoroughly inspired and more than ready to start our actual summer vacation.

View the full programme here.

In the fourth SUMMER SPECIAL of the podcast series Oudheid (“Antiquity”), Elsa Lucassen tells us about her PhD research on the changing festival calendar in Late Antique Egypt (published online on July 23, 2025).

Elsa examines the feasts that were celebrated and discusses the question whether a common festival calendar existed for everyone or whether there were multiple.

The podcast is available here.

[EN follows Dutch]

Begin juni was projectleider Sofie Remijsen te gast bij de podcast Oudheid van Timo Epping. In twee afleveringen sprak zij over tijd in de Oudheid. De aflevering van 4 juni over kalenders, de week en het ritme van het leven is hier te beluisteren. De aflevering van 8 juni over de uitvinding van het uur is hier te beluisteren.

Early June, principal investigator Sofie Remijsen spoke about time in Antiquity on Timo Epping’s Dutch podcast on Antiquity. The episodes of 4 and 8 June are found by following the links in the above.

From Tuesday 26 November to Thursday 28 November 2024, we will host an international conference in Amsterdam. The conference Lived Time: Routines, Temporal Norms and Identities from Antiquity to the Modern World will feature presentations by 20 international scholars, including On Barak, Matthew Champion, Ignace Glorieux, Uta Heil, James Ker and Brigitte Steger.

Program

On 17 May 2024 a conference on Urban times will take place at Bonn University, with contributions on temporality and routines in Greek and Roman cities. The program is as follows:

9.00 – 9.15: Introduction

9.15 – 10: Tabea Meurer (Mainz), Scheduling (In-)Equality. A Re-Exploration of Athenian Chronopolitics

10.00 – 10.45: Roland Färber (Düsseldorf/München), Topographie der Zeit –Chronographie des Raums. Das Beispiel der hellenistischen Polis

10.45 – 11.00 Coffee break

11.00 – 11.45: Franziska Lang (Darmstadt), Domestic times – Phos4Dtool and the affordance of daylight

11.45 – 12.30: Laura Nissin (Helsinki), In the Light of Darkness — Illuminating the Use of Space in Roman Houses

12.30 – 13.30 Lunch break

13.30 – 14.15: Adrian Hielscher (Kiel), Material Manifestations of Social Time.
Sundials in Roman Cities

14.15 – 15.00 Eva Winter (Jena), Timelines and shapes of time: Regarding possible interactions of temporal aspects in ancient cities

15.00 – 15.15 Coffee break

15.15 – 16.00 Sofie Remijsen (Amsterdam), Away from urban time: How early monastic routines developed in dialogue with the worldly rhythms of the city

16.00 Concluding remarks and discussion

Guests are warmly invited. If you would like to participate in the workshop, we would be grateful for a short email to sfeuser[at]uni-bonn.de and/or S.M.J.Remijsen[at]uva.nl.

On 19 September, ancient historians, Copticists and researchers of ancient religion came together for the first project-organized seminar of the academic year. Mattias Brand (University of Zürich), in his lecture titled “Lived Religion, Multiple Identities, and Monocausality in the Historical Study of Religion\s”, argued for a situational approach to ancient religion and introduced the concept of ‘group styles’ is a helpful concept in thinking about religious practices without the pitfalls of thinking in groups as stable, easily distinguishable social entities united by a shared doctrine. Brand also broke a lance for historically contextualized comparative research in the study of religion

June 13th, Dr. Élodie Mazy (UCL) shed her light on the festival calendar in Egypt from the fifth until the eight century AD in her talk titled “Ἔργα καὶ ἑορταί: works and feasts in Late Antique Egypt”. Not only did she show how she has used Greek and Coptic papyri and ostraca to reconstruct the festival calendar, but she also expanded on the socio-economic circumstances of the celebration of these feasts. Easter, for example, was a moment to open the books and account for expenses of the past year, next to a religiously motivated feast that was preceded by fasting. Dr. Mazy’s research touched upon several topics under investigation by the project team and her talk was followed by an interesting exchange of ideas. Elsa Lucassen afterwards showed how, during the first year of the project, she has been investigating the impact of the changing festival calendar in Egypt on social cohesion in Late Antiquity. She used the Calends, Roman New Year, as case study to look at the role of festivals in changing times.

The workshop of 7 February 2023 centered around time practices in the early Islamic world. Dr. Johannes Thomann (University of Zürich) shared interesting examples of what research into weeks and weekdays in the early Islamic world could yield. This seems to be unscathed territory. He showed how literary and documentary sources, both in Egypt and Al-Andalus, are suitable for this kind of new research. Afterwards, Dr. Eugenio Garosi, a member of the project team, shared his thoughts on dating formulas and scribal practices in the early Islamic imperial administration. As the dating formula is one of the few elements of official documents that allow for a scribe’s individual expression, one asks oneself what the differences in (the use of) dating formulas between chancelleries and document types mean and express.”

The Allard Pierson Museum has its own collection of papyri. The project’s team is helping the museum staff to identify which hidden treasures still lie unpublished in the museum’s depot. Monday 5 December was the first day of this collaboration at which Sofie Remijsen, Elsa Lucassen, and Kevin Hoogeveen took a look at some Greek papyri. A nice coincidence: the last papyrus in the box –  an order to pay a wine seller, already published as P. Amst. 53 – turned out to be written on the 5^th of December as well (Choiak 9 in the year 110/79 of the Oxyrhynchite era, or 443 CE).”

On Tuesday 29 November Cathrien Hoijinck (Radboud University) presented her dissertation project about the Córdoba Calendar in the project seminar. The 10^th century Córdoba Calendar contains various Coptic elements and Hoijinck suspects that next to a Damascene and Bagdadi prototype there might have been an Egyptian source, perhaps the calendar that was used for the thirteenth-century Long Calendar. In her project, she raises interesting questions about the use of calendars for showcasing erudition and for expressing community boundaries, and for the study of calendars as a potential but problematic source for religious practices.