Life in an Egyptian Village in Late Antiquity : Aphrodito Before and After the Islamic Conquest

Explores the records from Aphrodito, a late Roman village, and provides a micro-history, giving more detail about daily life here than anywhere else in the Roman Empire. Challenges the conventional focus on late antique cultural elites. Creates instead a vision of Late Antiquity focused on free peasants and their villages.

Most ancient history focuses on the urban elite. Papyrology explores the daily lives of the more typical men and women in antiquity. Aphrodito, a village in sixth-century AD Egypt, is antiquity''s best source for micro-level social history. The archive of Dioskoros of Aphrodito introduces thousands of people living the normal business of their lives: loans, rent contracts, work agreements, marriage, divorce. In exceptional cases, the papyri show raw conflict: theft, plunder, murder. Throughout, Dioskoros struggles to keep his family in power in Aphrodito, and to keep Aphrodito independent from the local tax collectors. The emerging picture is a different vision of Roman late antiquity than what we see from the view of the urban elites. It is a world of free peasants building networks of trust largely beyond the reach of the state. Aphrodito''s eighth-century AD papyri show that this world dies in the early years of Islamic rule.