Archeologists Unearth Clues About Life in the Roman Empire, and Early Christianity, in Egypt’s Dakhla Oasis

If you trekked 200 miles into the Western Desert of Egypt from Luxor, home to the famed Karnak Temple, you'd hardly be surprised to see some of the most beautiful and desolate desert terrain imaginable. Nothing, though, would prepare you for reaching the edge of the Dakhla-Abu Minqar plateau, where the earth drops away in ravines cut into the limestone, and winds move crescent-shaped dunes slowly and inexorably south. Extending east to west, in the shadow of the steep escarpment to the north, is a patchy ribbon of green.

Here, in the Dakhla Oasis, an international team led by NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) is uncovering the remains of the once-flourishing ancient city of Trimithis.

Difficult to reach for the first generations of archeologists who famously explored the pharaohs' monumental tombs west of the Nile, this oasis in Egypt's inhospitable western desert is yielding today some of the most important discoveries in Egyptian archaeology. Dakhla's remote location has in fact helped to preserve some of the best remaining indications of everyday life during the Roman Empire. While the inhabitants of Trimithis (today's Amheida) may have lived at the very edge of empire, NYU's excavation project has shown that they were nevertheless deeply connected to the imperial center and its culture.

This connection has been most recently and dramatically demonstrated by the discovery of one of the earliest known Christian churches in Egypt, the archaeology of which is the subject of the seventh and latest monograph on the excavations at Amheida, published by ISAW and NYU Press. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the church is that it held the oldest funerary crypts ever excavated in Egypt, with the skeletal remains of women and children-and that is a surprising find given the generally patriarchal nature of Roman society in the Fourth Century CE.

View through church crypts. Photo credit: The NYU Amheida Excavations.

Active excavation resumed in 2023 after a seven-year pause that had stemmed in part from the COVID-19 pandemic. The site has yielded not only important information about antiquity, but also discoveries with some interesting parallels to our modern era. From a variety of sources, it's known that the settlement at Trimithis reached back to the New Kingdom (1550-1069 BCE), but the majority of its extensive visible remains hail from 250-450 CE, a period when Egypt was a province of the Roman Empire.

"Everyday life in Fourth-century Trimithis was of course very different from ours in 21st-century New York," explains David M. Ratzan, project director and head of ISAW's library. While we may often study other cultures and periods in order to appreciate the wide variety of human experience, "sometimes it's the things that we seem to have in common that can be the most striking."

The excavations, for example, have uncovered evidence that the citizens of Trimithis managed complex agricultural enterprises for export to the Nile Valley. The form of agriculture practiced in the oasis, which required digging and maintaining wells, was capital-intensive, so it required investment from elites from the Valley. But the distances created the conditions for the rise of a local managerial class for these absentee landowners. From Dakhla has emerged the account book of one such manager, preserved in a wooden codex (i.e., wooden tablets stitched together in a book format, as opposed to a papyrus role). And some of these managers even took what we might call business classes, as can be seen from the sole surviving manuscript from the equivalent of an ancient business school textbook; dating from roughly the same era, it was published in 2020 by ISAW and NYU Press.

Of course, this ancient economy depended on an extensive network, if not a system, of transportation connecting Dakhla and the Valley. Through roads plied by camels, Trimithis received a flow of hardwoods, metals, and craft and luxury objects in exchange for olive oil, dates, figs and jujubes. The crops flourished in oasis conditions but were comparatively difficult to grow in the Valley (and valuable enough to be worth the cost of transport).

The excavators also have found some of the fruitful results of agricultural exploitation and trade for the local elites. Perhaps the most impressive testimony to the profits to be made in Daklha and the cultural pretentions of these provincial men of property are the extensive remnants of a striking villa. With its dome-covered reception room, the villa may well have belonged to a businessman-official Ratzan likens to the "mayor" of late antique Trimithis. It later incorporated a classroom, including the equivalent of a "whiteboard" with a teacher's model Greek verses still legible by archeologists.

Closeup of poetic verse on ancient classroom "whiteboard." Photo credit: The NYU Amheida Excavations.

In the fall semester, Ratzan teaches an undergraduate class in ancient history and archeology, on top of his librarian duties. Then, in January, he decamps from ISAW on Manhattan's E. 84th Street to direct the NYU Amheida Excavations in the Dakhla Oasis.

Most of us are not lucky enough to work in a desert oasis! Tell us about your first impression nearly 20 years go.

The first time I traveled there, it was before the development of the new roads. My colleagues and I made the bumpy marathon 8- to10-hour drive from Cairo in a cramped minivan with blown-out shock absorbers. Descending from the plateau, I entered a world hidden in a geological depression, which is the Oasis, and was immediately confronted by a patchwork landscape of green fields and orange groves standing next to vast sand dunes and traditional mud brick pigeon towers. Nowadays, you can still see donkeys hauling berseem, a frosty clover used for fodder. But the farmers harvest their crops with weed wackers; and ancient Roman ruins bake in the sun next to ever-expanding fields of solar panels.

I was, in 2006, a graduate student at Columbia. Nearly 20 years later, it's still incredibly exciting to be part of a team recovering the history of a place that was little more than a name before the 1990s, known only from a handful of papyrus documents and one late-antique register. Our project was instrumental in identifying this site as the location of Trimithis.

My very first impression when I first saw the site itself was, "Whoa-this place is huge! What is a city of this size doing all the way out here?"

Trimithis lies near the western edge of the Dakhla Oasis, and the only thing more surprising than its remote location is its sheer size: the official archaeological site extends more than 40 hectares-the equivalent of 75 football fields-and clearly stretches even farther, continuing beneath the encroaching modern village of Amheida and its fields.

View of the baths of Amheida, showing the pillared hall and round pool. Photo credit: The NYU Amheida Excavations, in P. Davoli, The House of Serenos, Part II - Amheida VI.

What questions does the excavation of the Trimithis ruins seek to answer?

Well, a central question is a version of what I asked myself all those years ago: what could explain a settlement of this size all the way out here? Who lived here? How did its ancient inhabitants not just survive but thrive in the middle of one of the driest places on Earth? And why, by all indications, did Trimithis and dozens of other sites in Dakhla and Kharga (the oasis to the east, closer to the Nile Valley) contract dramatically in the late Fourth or Fifth century? These are some of the questions the NYU project is attempting to answer.

Given the remote location and the desert climate, excavating the site is logistically complex but, as you certainly see it, highly worthwhile.

It is indeed a complicated undertaking. In an average year, our team might include 10 to 15 international colleagues and graduate students from several universities in the US and Europe, another 5 to 10 professional colleagues from Egypt, and up to two dozen local workmen, many of whom have been with the project for years and are now quite skilled in archeological field work. We're truly grateful for the support we receive from ISAW, Washington University in St. Louis, and our many private donors, who make it possible for us not only to travel to and work in Dakhla, but also to bring and train students, the next generation of archaeologists, papyrologists, and historians.

Team members working on fragments of collapsed painted ceiling in Room 1 of church. Photo credit: The NYU Amheida Excavations, in N. Aravecchia, Early Christianity at Amheida (Egypt's Dakhla Oasis), A Fourth-Century Church - Amheida VII, ISAW/NYU Press, 2024, Fig. 6.3.

But is it worth going all the way out to Amheida? Yes! Think of it this way: We tend to see Egyptian civilization as almost morbidly obsessed with death: mummies, the Great Pyramids, the tombs of the Valley of the Kings, the Book of the Dead. Without denying the intense eschatological interests of the ancient Egyptians, it is also worth pointing out that the remains of their mortuary culture survived far better than the traces of their daily lives. The Nile Valley is not particularly large, and between the annual flooding, the planting and replanting, and centuries of dense population in that narrow valley, most ancient sites are either still inhabited or have been effectively destroyed. Most tombs, on the other hand, were built in the desert high ground to the west of the Valley, the land that Nile floods did not reach and that could not be cultivated. This not only served practical and symbolic reasons in antiquity-the dead were buried in the land under the setting sun-but also ensured that the cities of the dead endured for modern archaeologists to study in far greater numbers than the cities of the living.

And therein lies the attraction of excavating in the oases: the floods never reached these lands, nor were the oases ever populated so densely or so continuously as the Valley. It is therefore one of the few places in Egypt where one can excavate entire ancient cities, ancient roads and routes, and even ancient fields. Indeed, in Amheida one has nearly an entire ancient "city of the living" to explore.

What has been revealed so far?

So far, we have focused on what appears to be the late antique core of the site, having explored the city's main temple of Thoth (Trimithis's tutelary deity); two domestic sites, one of which is an elite villa with an impressive decorative program of painted walls; a Roman bath; and one of the earliest funerary churches in Egypt to have been excavated systematically.

The Temple of Thoth stood on one of the highest points of the settlement and would have dominated the town's skyline for much of its history. Today, though, the temple is almost entirely unbuilt, with just a few sections of its precinct wall still standing. The temple site itself is a maze of robber pits, and many of the temple's blocks have been incorporated into the buildings of the nearby medieval and early modern town of El Qasr. The only advantage of this state of affairs is that one can reconstruct several phases of the temple, something impossible to do for the more or less intact temples, like the impressive Temple of Horus at Edfu in the Valley. This project is, like NYU itself, global: the lead on the temple excavation was taken by Prof. Paola Davoli of the University of Salento in Italy, who supervised the archaeological excavation, and the Egyptologist Olaf Kaper of Leiden University, who has painstakingly reconstructed six phases of the temple, from Seti II (ca. 1203-1197 BCE) to the reign of the Emperor Domitian (81-96 CE).

While the inhabitants of Trimithis may have adhered to their traditional religion, the Roman baths are one of the clearest signs of the local elite's embrace of Roman culture, not least since they had to build them in the middle of a desert!

To me, that is so interesting: structural clues to everyday life in a civilization vastly different from our own. But have you found any similarities to life as it is lived now?

Everyday life in fourth-century Trimithis was of course very different from ours in 21st-century New York. But sometimes it's the things that we seem to have in common that can be the most striking. We uncovered, for instance, an ancient classroom-one of the few ever discovered archaeologically, since there were few dedicated learning spaces in antiquity. On the wall of this classroom, which was later repurposed into a storage space, are the remains of a "whiteboard" (they used the white gypsum plastered wall as a writing surface, writing in red paint),with model poetry written on it for children learning how to compose learned verses in a stylized form of classical Greek. The poetry isn't great: it is inspirational couplets exhorting the likely teen-aged students to study hard ("But may god grant my wishes that you all learn the Muses' honeyed works, with all the Graces and with Hermes son of Maia reaching the full summit of rhetorical knowledge. … Work hard for me, toils make men manly …", etc.). The teacher composed, or more likely copied, these verses as models with the rubric "for my students" above them. How many times have I done this myself over the last two decades, standing at a chalkboard, teaching Greek and Latin? The gulf of time separating me and that anonymous late antique teacher collapsed as my then-teacher and now late- colleague Professor Rafaella Cribiore (NYU Classics) and I transcribed the verses that no other teacher or student had read in more than 1,600 years.

But that classroom was in fact part of an even more spectacular find: an elite townhouse next to the baths, now known as the "Villa of Serenos," named after what appears to be its last formal inhabitant, a man of evident wealth and influence. The villa was originally a 15-by-15-meter, square construction. Over time, it grew to incorporate several rooms to the north and enclosed the street to its east. Many of the main rooms were decorated with impressively painted plaster.

Villa of Serenos, painted plaster, Building 1, Room 14, southeast corner. Credit: NYU Excavations at Amheida.

The pièce de résistance of this prominent man's villa, though, is the main reception room, which appears to have been covered by a dome (seemingly not a common architectural element in private houses) decorated with an elaborate design of geometric patterns and featuring an oculus or a circular skylight in the center of the dome. And along the upper register of the walls are a series of figural scenes. One of the most arresting of these is a narrative scene from the Homeric epic cycle, showing a procession of gods, each with his name painted above.

The northernmost figure is not an Olympian, but what must be a personification of Trimithis itself as a draped and nimbate woman sitting on a throne and sporting a scepter and a mural crown, representing the walls of a city. This is a typical representation of cities and nations in the Roman world, which we often see represented in other media, such as coins; but just in case the symbolism was lost on one of the guests, the Greek work for "city" (polis) is helpfully painted above her smiling visage. We know that Trimithis was classed officially as a city by the early Fourth century, and so it seems natural to see this as an expression of local pride by the owner of the house. But how do we know that this owner is "Serenos"-and why should he have been so invested in the political standing of his hometown?

That sounds like a question for an archeologist.

And the excavations at Serenos's large and elaborate villa are striking.

It must have been a suitably impressive residence for a man like Serenos in the Fourth century, when the walls were complete and the paintings newly executed. Sadly, because the entire structure is made of mudbrick, it cannot be kept open for tourists to visit. Even so, we take seriously our responsibility to communicate what we learn with the general public, not only back here in the States or in Europe through our publications, but also with the local community and tourists who make it to Amheida. So, with the cooperation of the local antiquities office, the NYU team backfilled the site to protect it, and then with financial support from the American Research Center in Egypt, we built a 1:1 replica of the site, using largely traditional materials and techniques (in itself a learning opportunity in applied archaeology). We also have a new video shot inside the house, which I can show in some of my classes. It really gives one a sense of lived experience of the villa.

What has the excavation of the church-the subject of the latest monograph on the project, detailing this particular find-revealed?

We can date the church to the Mid-Fourth century largely on the basis of coins and some dated texts found in certain foundation layers. While there certainly were churches before Constantine, who ended the imperial persecutions (he ruled from 306 to 337 CE), we have relatively little sense of what they looked like. In any case, churches in this style, based on the Roman basilica, a type of public building dedicated to administration and law, date back only to a generation or two before the church at Trimithis, since only then did Christians feel sufficiently confident to build proudly public spaces of worship.

Hypothetical reconstruction of the interior of the church at Trimithis at night. Credit: C. ullendorff, in N. Aravecchia, Early Christianity at Amheida (Egypt's Dakhla Oasis), A Fourth-Century Church (Amheida VII), ISAW/NYU Press, 2024, Fig. 6. 13.

More surprising was the discovery of 17 people buried in the church. Twelve individuals were buried in the crypts below the eastern end of the church, under what would have been the altar and pastophoria, or service rooms. It was hard to know what to expect with respect to who might be buried here, since so few churches from this period survive, and even fewer have been fully excavated. It is safe to say, however, that almost nobody would have guessed that of the 12 people buried in the crypts, at least seven would be female, with eight of the 17 being children or adolescents, including infants. Indeed, the true count for females might even be higher, since it is impossible to determine a person's sex from skeletal remains below a certain age. While there is good evidence that women were important in early Christianity, it was still surprising to find such a concentration of women and children buried in this church, since Roman Egypt was a patriarchal society.

The church at Amheida, looking northeast. The steps up to the altar can be seen toward the back, plastered in white. Credit: NYU Excavations at Amheida.

Plan of the church at Amheida, showing excavation phases and tombs. Credit: NYU Excavations at Amheida.

Although we have completed the excavation of the church, many questions remain. Are we looking at burials of related individuals, perhaps one or more families; or some sort of cross-section of the Christian community in Trimithis? Were these people related to clergy or prominent patrons who helped build and maintain the church? Are crypts like this typical of churches of this period, or idiosyncratic to the oases? At present we are not able to perform DNA testing, which might answer some of these questions. But for the others, we will need to await the excavation of other churches. In fact, there's good reason to believe that this was not the only church in Trimithis. For now, though, this is an exciting discovery and one that we expect will make a significant impact on the discussion of the history of early Christianity. And we still have one volume to publish on the church that we are working on now: the small finds and the forensic anthropology of the skeletons.

Bronze vessel found associated with a child's coffin in Tomb 9 in Room 2, the northern crypt in the church at Amheida. Credit: NYU Excavations at Amheida.

This project seems to have its own rather extensive history, and it's still unfolding.

Well, it is now in its third decade. It began in 2001 under the direction of Roger Bagnall, who in 2008 moved it to NYU. The field director then was Paola Davoli of the University of Salento. The temple, the baths, and the Villa of Serenos were all excavated before 2016, when the Egyptian authorities closed the Western Desert to foreign tourists and researchers. I became project director in 2022, toward the end of our extended hiatus, and I have been working with my colleague and the project's field director, Dr. Nicola Aravecchia of Washington University in St. Louis, to get the excavations going again. We had our first full field season in early 2023. With archaeology, if you open an area, you're obligated to finish excavating it if you can; and so our plan is to finish work at an area that had been under active excavation before the 2016 interruption (another elite residence, north of Serenos's Villa) and to expand to a new part of the site, which may preserve an earlier phase of Trimithis.

While we have our questions and established lines of research, part of what makes archaeology so exciting and vital is precisely that we have no idea what we are going to find. We have excavated perhaps 10-to-12% of Trimithis. Who knows what else it will tell us in the future? The other truth is that we are in a race against time: every year we lose a bit of the site to encroaching development and looting. I take great pride in working at a university that invests in recovering the complex, sometimes unsettling, but always interesting multicultural history of the human experience.

"We are in a race against time," says Ratzan. Photo Credit: The NYU Amheida Excavations.