Deserted Villages: From the Ancient to the Medieval Fayyum

This article, originally delivered as a paper at the 117th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, is a development of twin papers given by Roger Bagnall and me at the xxe Congres International des Etudes Byzantines in Paris, 19-25 August 2001, as part of a "Table ronde" on villages in the Byzantine world. On that occasion, we were responsible for Egyptian villages, he for villages as evidenced (mainly) in the Greek papyri, I for the medieval period based on al-Nabulsi's description of Egypt's Fayyum Province, Ta 'rikh al-Fayyiim (c. 1245 A.D.). Thematically, we had agreed to explore such topics as the physical relationship between villages and their central cities, ranges in village sizes, hierarchies of settlements, in short, "geographies of power." As I reconsidered both papers in revising mine for publication, I came to see that in our experiment, despite Bagnall's good work, but perhaps because of the way we had defined our concerns, the Greek documents of the fourth to the eighth centuries and al-Nabulsi's thirteenth-century Arabic text rarely connected. And since ancient historians have traditionally treated the history of the late antique Fayyum as discontinuous, I was led to ask whether a continuous history of the FayyUm, from antiquity to the Middle Ages, was after all possible.