Abstract
The changing sacred landscape of Late Antiquity has long been seen in terms of a monolithic development ‘from temple to church’. Recent scholarship, however, has discarded this picture in favour of a more complex view, in which freestanding churches (and monasteries) were increasingly built from the fourth century onwards, while at the same time various, mostly practical, ways were found of dealing with the sacred built environment of the past. The Late Antique papyri from Oxyrhynchus contain dozens of references to churches and monasteries, and, occasionally, also temples. The city thus affords an excellent opportunity to study the changing sacred landscape of this period in a local context. In previous scholarship, several lists have been compiled to collect the attestations of churches. The last comprehensive collection of the material dates back two decades, however, while the one list of monasteries is heavily outdated. Moreover, a list of temples in the Late Antique papyri has never been put together. This article, then, presents, in the appendix, a brand-new Checklist of temples, churches and monasteries of Late Antique Oxyrhynchus. It serves as the basis for the detailed analysis of the data that precedes it, which shows that these data are in perfect agreement with the now prevalent general view among Late Antique scholars of how the sacred landscape changed over time. For comparison with the findings from the papyri, we will also briefly discuss the results of recent excavations at the site.
The research for this article was conducted in the context of the first author’s Insight Grant project ‘“I Wish to Offer a Sacrifice to God Today”: Religious Violence in Late Antique Egypt’, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He invited the second author to collaborate with him on a study of the changing sacred landscape of Oxyrhynchus following the publication of a revised version of her dissertation on the martyr cult in Late Antique Egypt, which includes a chapter on Oxyrhynchus (cited below at n. 98). The first version of the Checklist was compiled by the second author, after which the first author systematically went through it. The latter then wrote down the analytical part, while the second author created the graphs (Figs 1–3), double-checked the attestations, discussed various issues with the first author and commented on the analytical part. We would like to thank Nikolaos Gonis and Leah Mascia for some bibliographical advice, and Eva Subías Pascual for sharing, and permission to reproduce, Fig. 4. We are also grateful to Peter van Minnen for discussing several issues that arose from the material with us (in one case leading to a new reading in a papyrus, see n. 165 below, where he is also separately thanked for this contribution) and providing detailed comments on a first draft of the article.
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