Jenny Cromwell, Monks, Camels, and Wine (blog)

Monks, Camels, and Wine

Since 2009/10, I have been studying the corpus of texts written at the monastery of Apa Thomas at Wadi Sarga, a valley ca. 25 km south of modern Asyut in central Egypt. In 2013, I held a British Museum Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, in order to study and photograph the published and unpublished items from the site that bear writing on them, whether in ink or incised, and whether labels or longer documents. From the beginning of 2015, I began a Fellowship at the University of Copenhagen. The main focus of my research here is the monastery at Wadi Sarga, about its history and its day-to-day life, including its organisation, administration, economy, and relationship with near and distant communities. My work is based on the written record that survives from the site, but work on other material from the monastery is currently being studied (as part of a larger project at the British Museum) and provides vital context for the textual evidence.