How Do You Study a Disappearing Town?
Around the year 300 CE, a village official issues a receipt to two men, Souchidas and Melas. These two men had assumed responsibility for a substantial tract of agricultural land after its owner fled town, and the receipt was issued by the village official for paying the appropriate amount of wheat for rent. This document was discovered 1,600 years later in the early 20th-century. It wasn’t until last year, however, that it was translated and published by two professors from American universities. Where does this document come from, and why did it take scholars so long to figure out what it said?
This receipt, along with thousands of other documents and artifacts, was discovered in a northern Egyptian farming village called Karanis (modern Kom Aushim), established by the Greeks in the mid-third century BCE and, a couple hundred years later, part of the Roman Empire. No one is entirely sure when or why people left Karanis, but it was definitely abandoned by the 8th century CE, where it sat on the fringes of the desert, covered by sand and debris, until it was excavated almost 2,000 years later by a team of University of Michigan archaeologists. Although these excavations took place in the 1920s and 30s, scholars both at the University of Michigan and around the world continue to study the findings of the Karanis excavations and, as the example of the receipt shows, there is still plenty to discover about this site. What is it that makes Karanis so special and why, almost one hundred years later, are we still bothering to study it?
To understand this, you need to understand a bit about the history of archaeology and the excavations that took place at Karanis. Archaeology as a field really got its start in a practice known as antiquarianism, or the collecting of historical objects as curiosities. This practice dates as far back as the Romans, who collected and displayed works of ancient Greek art and sculpture as symbols of a lost period.
Throughout most of history, people have been interested in acquiring ancient objects without paying much attention to where they came from, often purchasing them from dealers who knew even less than they did. Even when archaeology got its start as a discipline in the 1800s, it was still more like a treasure hunt than what we view today as a modern excavation — people were interested in valuable objects and big palaces and temples, not broken bits of pottery and the smaller villages where common people lived.
Flash forward to 1920: it’s just after the end of World War I, and University of Michigan Latin Professor Francis Kelsey travels to Egypt to purchase papyrus documents (a plant material used as paper in the ancient world) for his students to study. Around this time period, there had been more scientific excavations taking place in Egypt following the ideas of Sir Flinders Petrie, a British archaeologist and the father of modern Egyptology. He thought that every type of object, no matter how small, could be of value and that archaeologists should try to collect some of everything so that it could be studied in the future.
This ideology, miles ahead of the antiquarianism practices of the past, was unfortunately only being applied to Dynastic Egypt, the time when the pharaohs ruled, which was considered by many to be the great and important period of Egyptian history. Later periods, particularly the period when Egypt was ruled by the Greeks and Romans, were considered lesser and not as worthy of extensive study. There were people in early-20th century Egypt doing work at Graeco-Roman sites, but they were mainly digging through ruins to find papyrus documents.
When Kelsey reached Egypt, he visited some of these Graeco-Roman sites and saw that they were quickly being destroyed, partially by people hunting for papyri but primarily by people digging for fertilizer (decaying organic material like papyrus makes excellent fertilizer). Kelsey was told that there was no real work being done to document and study the archaeology of this period, and thus he decided that what was desperately needed was work to fill the gap in the knowledge of this important period of Egyptian history.
In 1924, Kelsey organized the first archaeological expedition at Karanis. The central part of the town (the downtown, if you will) had already been destroyed by fertilizer diggers, but initial surveys showed that substantial residential areas still remained to be uncovered. The excavations conducted by the University of Michigan team were remarkably thorough for the time, and really demonstrated the application of Petrie’s ideas at a site from the Graeco-Roman period. The team collected some of everything they found, from pottery and texts to food stuffs and shells. They surveyed the entire area before digging anything up, drew detailed maps and plans of the site, and identified five distinct layers of occupation. Each house was explored room by room, with artifacts removed, numbered, and recorded based on where they were found. The team photographer, George R. Swain, captured hundreds of images of houses, groups of artifacts, and locals working at the site, as well as silent films showing the excavations in progress. They even hired flyers from the British Royal Air Force to take aerial photographs.
Although remarkably thorough, the University of Michigan work at Karanis was still salvage archaeology — a last ditch attempt to excavate and study a site that was rapidly being destroyed for fertilizer. The team used a small railroad line running near the site to clear debris from the structures, and in exchange the company in charge of this line had a permit to remove 200 cubic meters of fertilizer every day. In order to meet this quota, the archaeologists were excavating massive areas of the site very quickly, and therefore in some cases the work wasn’t quite as detailed or as complete as it could have been.
Francis Kelsey unfortunately passed away in 1927, only a couple years after excavations had begun, but his vision and his ideas for the study of Karanis were continued under the direction of Enoch Peterson until 1935. The results of the Karanis work were split with the Egyptian government, and the University of Michigan got to bring back over 44,000 objects and even more papyrus documents when they returned to Ann Arbor. Some initial reports about the excavations were published — the partial results of the first few seasons of work, a study of the site’s two temples, isolated studies of textiles, glass, and papyri — but the publication of the findings at Karanis was slowed down by the sheer amount of material uncovered and the onset of World War II in 1939.
Peterson’s main manuscript about the excavations wasn’t finished until 1973 and was never published because it’s extreme length would’ve made it too expensive to print (although it did form the basis for Elinor Hussleman’s much shorter 1979 book about Karanis). In the 1970s a bit more work was done on the site by Cairo University and the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, but this really only focused on the bathhouse. The University of Michigan moved on and conducted many other archaeological field projects throughout the years and Karanis, both the site itself and the thousands of objects it supplied to the Kelsey Museum, sat there relatively understudied.
Flash forward again to 2005, when a joint project known as the URU Fayum Project begins as a collaboration between the University of California in Los Angeles, the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands, and the University of Auckland in New Zealand. The goal of this project was to look at the Fayum Depression (where Karanis is located) in its entirety, and specifically their work at Karanis focused on surveying the remains left standing, performing some limited excavation work, and converting the original dig house into a visitor center and site museum. Quickly they found that the previously-excavated areas of Karanis (the work of both the University of Michigan and the Egyptian-French team) had been abandoned with no plans in place for preserving the site.
The structures at Karanis, made of dried mud-bricks that had been exposed to the elements for almost one hundred years, were completely worn away by wind and water erosion. The only thing remaining of the multi-story, well-preserved mud-brick structures excavated and photographed by the original team was the stone foundations, if anything was left at all (and in many cases it was not). The erosion of the natural features in this area was so severe that it was hard for the URU Fayum Project to even match up the location of the original structures with the appearance of the modern landscape before them. The team did perform some excavation work during their time at Karanis, the results of which are awaiting publication, but basically a majority of the site had already been excavated and eroded by the time the URU Fayum Project team showed up. Most of the physical remains of Karanis were, effectively, gone without a trace.
If you want to study these areas of the town now, you need to go back through the records, reports, and artifacts stored in the Kelsey Museum here in Ann Arbor. Yes, the artifacts were split with the Egyptian government at the time of excavations so the Ann Arbor collection isn’t complete, but what we do have is all the excavators original reports — the diaries, the notes, the letters, the unpublished Peterson manuscript –, all the original lists of objects and where they were found, hundreds of photographs, maps, plans, drawings, and even silent film footage, and that’s not even counting the masses of artifacts and papyrus documents. With all of this material, it’s possible to ‘re-excavate’ the site of Karanis, to retrace the excavators steps, to figure out which order they uncovered things in, and to look at this site house-by-house at a level of depth the original team didn’t have time for and with technology and methods that didn’t even exist in the early 20th century.
This is the type of work that I do and that I’m writing my thesis on, but I am by no means the only one working with this material in this way. The receipt I mentioned at the beginning of this post comes from a book in which W. Graham Claytor and Arthur Verhoogt try to archaeologically reconstruct one of the granaries at Karanis and all the papyrus documents found within it. In a 1994 article in the journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Peter Van Minnen uses this same sort of approach to reconstruct the occupants of a smaller home at Karanis. In 2014, Terry Wilfong, now director of the Kelsey Museum, published a book entitled Karanis Revealed, which accompanied an exhibition at the Kelsey of the same name. The last section of this book highlights all the types of research being done on materials from Karanis, from using computer software to map locations of artifacts throughout the village to using a combination of old work and new survey to examine the canal system around the site. New and exciting work continues to be done on this material constantly, and for good reason: we have tons of it, and a vast majority of it still hasn’t been completely studied.
Yet the question still remains: Karanis is an old dig. It was quite forward-thinking for the time, but it was excavated almost one hundred years ago and has its fair share of problems. The structures aren’t even there anymore, and in order to get a complete picture of the site you have to dig through a lot of material and work with multiple University of Michigan departments. So why do scholars still bother? Why not just take what we’ve learned from Karanis and apply it to a new site?
There are many reasons I could give you as to why studying Karanis is still worthwhile. The Fayum Depression was and still is an important agricultural producer, and by better understanding Karanis we can learn more about this region. Like Francis Kelsey said all the way back on his trip to Egypt in 1920, historically there has been a major knowledge gap when it comes to Graeco-Roman Egypt, especially compared to what we know about the Pharaonic era. Karanis gives us one of our most complete looks into a town from this period of history with artifacts and texts that can be traced back to their original archaeological find spots, information which is exceedingly important to scholars. A vast majority of the artifacts at Karanis are related to daily life, so this site also gives us one of our best looks at the archaeology of everyday people and rural life. This is the kind of evidence that doesn’t survive at a lot of other sites, and Karanis is so exciting precisely because it allows us to give a voice to the common people — the peasants and farmers and small-town merchants who are often ignored by the greater historical narrative.
In learning more about Karanis we could also learn more about the greater Roman Empire. Historically in the literature surrounding this period there has been a tendency to write Egypt off as the ‘weird’ province that’s nothing like the rest of the Empire. Lately, however, scholars have been arguing that this isn’t the case: Egypt only seems different from our evidence about the rest of the Empire because its climate is so dry and organic materials, like papyrus documents, preserve so much better here than in other parts of the world. In studying Karanis we have the opportunity to learn more about the Roman Empire as a whole, especially its production of food and how small agricultural villages in places like Egypt helped feed this massive empire.
Karanis may not be representative of all other Graeco-Roman villages in Egypt. It’s probably not even representative of all other Graeco-Roman villages in the Fayum Depression, but archaeology never has all the pieces of the puzzle. We can’t reconstruct the whole of Graeco-Roman Egypt, or even the whole of the Roman Empire, but in better understanding this one piece of the puzzle we can at least see part of the picture. The point of all this is that revisiting the materials from an almost one hundred year old excavation isn’t just some fun pet project for bored archaeologists, historians, or museum professionals. It’s an attempt to fill in a piece of the puzzle of history, a history with which we all interact each and every day of our lives. It is only through understanding our past and where we came from that we can truly understand ourselves and where we are now.
