Dime in the Fayyum - a temple between tradition and multiculturality in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Martin Andreas Stadler
• Subject Area: Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Term: from 2008 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 107273930

The project aims at a better understanding of cult, theology, history and chronology of the temple at Dimê. This is achieved in two complexes: (1) the edition of documentary texts and their historical analysis by considering the already published sources; (2) the editio princeps of the Daily Ritual in the Dime-temple and its contextualization with regards to the history of Egyptian religion and to a broader Egyptian framework. The thematically interdependent complexes of the project will provide significant information which will be relevant to the interpretation and dating of the architectural features of the Soknopaios-sanctuary. By this the position of an Egyptian temple as spiritual and economic centre as well as the conditions of Egyptian identity during periods of foreign rule will be studied from different directions. Thus the project conducts basic research by editing almost unpublished textual sources, which will be made available for Egyptology, Ancient History, and Greek Papyrology.Because of the overwhelming wealth of material in opposition to the limited budget for personnel a concentration on particularly salient sources has turned out to be necessary. This also implies that the texts must be presented with just a preliminary and sketchy analysis. On the one hand, the newly excavated ostraca and then a specific group of papyri (letters, contracts, so-called sh'at-contracts and receipts) of the chiefly up to now still unpublished papyri from the Griffith Institute, Oxford, which have been known for 40 years, but of which just the minor part has been made available to the scholarly community. The Griffith-papyri, nowadays in Oxford, come from Dime and date to the Ptolemaic period. Through them insights into the lesser known development of the villages and its temple during Hellenism shall be gained, and on this basis the site's history during the Roman period might be better understood. The texts paint a vivid picture of the priestly everyday-life in Dime, the duties and problems of the Soknopaios-priests, how they corresponded with the institutions of the Ptolemaic state, with their colleagues in other regions or persons whose profession is not identifiable anymore. On the other hand, the focus will exclusively lie on the Daily Ritual. In its present form it is both highly difficult to decipher and most crucial for our view on the liturgical agenda in Egyptian temples in general. The daily ritual for Soknopaios is of utmost interest not just to demotic studies, but also to Egyptology in general, because here we have the last manuscripts for this kind of ceremonies, questions of redaction, composition and traditions of the corpus of ancient Egyptian ritual texts are illuminated, by this Dime's connection to other centres of the conceptualization is highlighted and, finally, because the corpus of spells is enlarged.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants