Category: Uncategorized

by Élodie Mazy

I started working at UvA in October on a postdoctoral research project focusing on the commemoration of the dead in late antique Egypt. That project is funded by the Van Moorsel en Rijnierse foundation, which aims at promoting research on Christianity in the Nile Valley from the Byzantine to the Mamluk period. Having completed a doctoral thesis on festivals in late antique Egypt, including of course Christian feasts, my interests fitted the scope of the fellowship perfectly, and I was eager to expand the kind of liturgical and socio-economic research I did in my thesis.

This project provides the first comprehensive study of the Christian commemoration of the dead in Egypt between the 4th and the 8th centuries. This observance encompassed a wide range of liturgical, social and economic arrangements for remembering deceased individuals, taking place over a long period of time after death and burial itself. It involved all strata of society, be they men or women, monks, clerics or lay people. The aim is to show how this widespread, but understudied phenomenon, impacted the lives of the late antique Christians in Egypt, both at an individual and societal level.

This topic has been scarcely addressed at all, mainly for two reasons: first, the accessibility of Egyptian evidence, which encompasses not only literary but also liturgical, papyrological and epigraphic sources, both in Greek and Coptic; second, the evasiveness of that type of celebration, whose existence can typically be inferred only from allusions to commemorative offerings or provisions made for that purpose. I will first compile a corpus of all the available written sources that mention or allude to the commemoration of the dead. These include, on the one hand, normative and liturgical texts: monastic rules (mainly those of Pachomius and Shenoute), sayings of the desert fathers, church canons, some saints’ lives and martyrdoms narratives; books of prayers, intercessions for the deceased. Documentary sources, on the other hand, comprise first and foremost papyri and ostraca: wills, private letters, expense accounts, lists of days or individuals to commemorate, acts of donation, loan agreements, petitions. Commemorative inscriptions and graffiti, though fewer in number, provide insights into the public dimension of the celebration, some of them bearing witness to the collective commemoration of groups of people.

My first step will be to obtain a full picture of the practice. Who are the deceased and who are responsible for their commemoration? When is the commemoration held? Where does the commemoration take place (home, tomb, church)? (4) What are the prerequisites for commemorating the dead and what is their value? Offerings seem to have been mandatory, either provided by the deceased by testament, or made on their heirs’ own volition. (5) What liturgical rites and social gatherings mark the commemoration (religious services, prayers, communal meal, the reading of the name)?

I will then explain why and how the commemoration of the dead constitutes a central feature of the private and collective lives of the Egyptian people. A socio-economic analysis will question in particular how gender and religious condition affect the care for the deceased and the economic impact of that kind of rite on the individuals and the individual communities. A good portion of the relevant sources relates to lay people and women, whereas ancient sources in this area overall mainly concern men and especially monks, which explains the monastic focus that has traditionally been a hallmark of studies on late antique Egypt (Schenke 2025). The project will offer a more nuanced and comprehensive view of Egyptian society, reflecting its diversity. This will be achieved by framing the commemoration of the dead within the wider social context and by including it within the description of daily life of, e.g., women (Wilfong 2002) and villagers (Ruffini 2018).

Finally, the project will explore the relation between commemoration and public festival. Commemorations are private in nature, since they are contingent on the death of an individual, but they are also public ceremonies attended by a larger local lay or monastic community. Some commemorations, held for those who had attained sainthood, developed into proper public feasts. Three Egyptian case studies show how this development persisted in a later period: the cults of Apollo and Phib at Bawit, Ieremias at Saqqara and Lots at Dayr Abu Hinnis display features of a true cult of saints, while also retaining some aspects of a commemoration (Papaconstantinou 2001; Delattre 2021). Based on the in-depth analysis of the private practices, I will be able to question the ways in which the more public festivals took over or partook in them.

Overall, the commemoration of the dead was a celebration that shaped the lives of individuals not only throughout their lives, but also multiple times a year, for it required them to make plans for their own commemoration or organising and attending that of deceased relatives and community members. And for that reason alone I couldn’t be happier to carry out this project in Amsterdam, where I will work in close relationship with the members of the Lived Time project.

References

Delattre, A. 2021. “Graffiti from Christian Egypt and the Cult of the Saints. A Case Study from Dayr Abu Hinnis”. In: B. Ward-Perkins and A.E. Felle (eds), Cultic Graffiti across the Mediterranean and Beyond. Turnhout, pp. 103–110.

Papaconstantinou, A. 2001. Le culte des saints en Égypte des Byzantins aux Abbassides. L’apport des inscriptions et des papyrus grecs et coptes. Paris.

Ruffini, G.R. 2018. Life in an Egyptian Village in Late Antiquity. Cambridge.

Schenke, G. 2025. “Coptic Papyrology (2016–2022): Primary Evidence of Egyptian Lives”. In: A. Delattre, E. Mazy, P. Pilette and N. Vanthieghem (eds.), Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress of Coptic Studies (Brussels, 11–16 July 2022). Paris, pp. 263-272.

Wilfong, T.G. 2002. Women of Jeme. Lives in a Coptic Town in Late Antique Egypt. Ann Arbor.

Although the database of the Lived Time project mainly includes documentary texts, literary texts that record dates and regular time-related events are included as well, since they may provide additional information on the experience of time, the timing of activities and how time is expressed. One such text is the Coptic Encomium on Bishop Pesynthios of Koptos, which is preserved completely in a manuscript dated 1005 CE at the British Library (edited by Sir Ernest Wallis Budge) and partly in a late seventh- or early eighth-century manuscript at the Coptic Museum (its edition is entrusted to me). Although the complete version is from a much later date than the period central to the Lived Time project, the fact that it contains the same anecdotes as the earlier version encouraged me to add some time-related details to the database. When processing the passage on the day on which Bishop Pesynthios passed away, I realized that the Julian date indicated in many recent studies is probably a year too late. If so, the bishop did not die in 632 but in 631.

According to the Encomium, the bishop died at sunset on “the thirteenth day of the month Epeiph of this fifth year”, that is, in a fifth indiction year (transl. Budge [1913]). Budge did not convert the date, but Walter Ewing Crum equated the fifth indiction year with the Julian years 631-632 (in 1914 and 1927). Gawdat Gabra Abdel Sayed was the first to propose an absolute date – July 7, 632 – in his dissertation Untersuchungen zu den Texten über Pesyntheus, Bischof von Koptos (569-632) (1984). This date features regularly in publications relating to the re-edition of the bishop’s correspondence (a Leiden-based project directed by Jacques van der Vliet and Florence Calament, in which I am involved as well), the edition of the Encomium (e.g. in my article of 2018) and the bishop’s functioning (my dissertation).

The appearance of an indiction year in an eleventh-century text version – copied at a time when the indiction system was no longer in use – implies that the time description is based on a centuries-old tradition and rightfully included in the Lived Time database. The conversion of the date to July 7, 632 was based on the implicit assumption that the indiction year started on Thoth 1, on the same day as the traditional Egyptian civil year, and that July was almost at the end of the indiction year. However, Roger Bagnall and Klaas Worp demonstrated that the start of the indiction year was subject to regional differences: in the Thebaid, it began on Pachon 1 or May 1 (also noted in this blog and an article by Sofie Remijsen and myself). Consequently, Epeiph came early in the indiction year and the recorded date actually converts to July 7, 631, which fell on a Sunday. This would certainly be true in the case of documentary texts. However, Bagnall and Worp have the impression that dates by indiction in literary texts are still linked to an era starting on Thoth 1. This hypothesis requires further study, but for the present, I accept the new date, based on the assumption that the recorded date goes back to an early version of the literary text that was composed in Western Thebes at a time when indiction years were increasingly used in documentary texts, that is, the late seventh or early eighth century.

Episcopal documents already confirm that Bishop Pesynthios was not a legendary saint but an actual historical person. Remarkably, not a documentary text or inscription but a literary source records a precise date of death, which enables scholars to better anchor him in a historical framework, less than a decade before the Arab conquest of Egypt.

I included the revised year of death in two recent articles (here and here) but have not yet fully discussed it in a scholarly publication, as it should ideally be included in the long-awaited edition of the Encomium.

Renate Dekker