by Alexander Free
Between 115 and 117 A.D. the areas of Cyrenaica, Egypt, Cyprus and Mesopotamia were gripped by a wave of revolts against the Roman rulers by the Jewish population living there.
In the year 116 A.D., this conflict was carried into the Egyptian backlands and as a result reached the city of Hermopolis. We are informed about these events through the Archive of Apollonions. We learn that the rioters not only fought a battle with the villagers in which they (the villagers) were crushed (P. Brem. 1). It seems that the opposing parties also fought a battle for Hermopolis, as a result of which the city itself was affected. After the conflict, Apollonios who was a strategist in Apollonopolites Heptakomias, submitted a request for sixty days´ leave to the Praefectus Aegypti in order to attend to his matters in Hermopolis and to take care of the Hermopolites as well as have some repair work carried out (P. Giss. I 41 and e.g. P. Brem. 15). In general, the post-war period appears to have been used for a gradual remodeling of the public space. Archaeological findings of this time can be found mainly in the remodeling of the so-called Antinoitic Street.
Bibliography:
- D. Bailey, Excavations at el-Ashmunein IV. Hermopolis Magna. Buildings of the Roman Period (London 1991)
- W. Müller, Urbanism in Graeco-Roman Egypt, in: M. Bietak – E. Czerny – I. Forstner-Müller (eds), Cities and Urbanism in Ancient Egypt. Papers from a Workshop in November 2006 at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Untersuchungen der Zweigstelle Kairo des Österreichischen Archäologischen Institutes 35 (Wien 2010) 217–256
- M. Pucci Ben Zeev, Diaspora Judaism in Turmoil, 116/117 CE. Ancient Sources and Modern Insights, Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion 6 (Leuven 2005)
- P. Reinhard, „Eine Seuche, die die Welt bedroht?“. Bemerkungen zu Judentopoi in ausgewählten literarischen und papyrologischen Quellen, in: M. Zerjadtke (ed.), Der ethnographische Topos in der Alten Geschichte. Annäherungen an ein omnipräsentes Phänomen, Hamburger Studien zu Gesellschaften und Kulturen der Vormoderne 10 (Stuttgart 2020) 91–109
- J. Schwartz, En marge du dossier d’Apollonios le stratège, CdE 37 Fasc. 74, 1962, 348–358