TY - BOOK ID - 33198324 TI - Life in an Egyptian Village in Late Antiquity : Aphrodito Before and After the Islamic Conquest PY - 2018 SN - 9781107105607 9781316226377 9781107513464 1316226379 1107105609 1108653669 1108695604 9781108653664 9781108695602 PB - Cambridge, England : Cambridge University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Aphrodito (Extinct city) KW - Egypt KW - History. KW - History KW - Aphroditopolis (Ancient city) KW - Aphroditopolis (Sūhāj, Egypt : Extinct city) KW - Antiquities KW - E-books KW - 30 B.C.-1250 A.D. KW - Egypt. KW - Atfih. KW - Country life KW - Rural conditions. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:33198324 AB - Most ancient history focuses on the urban elite. Papyrology explores the daily lives of the more typical men and women in antiquity. Aphrodito, a village in sixth-century AD Egypt, is antiquity's best source for micro-level social history. The archive of Dioskoros of Aphrodito introduces thousands of people living the normal business of their lives: loans, rent contracts, work agreements, marriage, divorce. In exceptional cases, the papyri show raw conflict: theft, plunder, murder. Throughout, Dioskoros struggles to keep his family in power in Aphrodito, and to keep Aphrodito independent from the local tax collectors. The emerging picture is a different vision of Roman late antiquity than what we see from the view of the urban elites. It is a world of free peasants building networks of trust largely beyond the reach of the state. Aphrodito's eighth-century AD papyri show that this world dies in the early years of Islamic rule. ER -