LAUSR

The Egyptian village of Aphrodito is well known to papyrologists and historians of Late Antiquity because of the thousand papyri found there at the beginning of the 20th c. These papyri form two distinct groups. The first group found contained the more recent pieces: a trilingual archive from the beginning of the 8th c. CE in which the village administrator Basil figures centrally. All the other texts, found subsequently, are from the 6th c. and early 7th c. This latter group, called the Dioskoros archive, is better known and more extensively studied, and is at the heart of the reviewed book. With around 700 Greek and Coptic papyri, it is the largest archive coming from a single village, making Aphrodito the best-documented village of antiquity. Although many specialized studies are available from scholars like J. Keenan and J.-L. Fournet, the only attempt to synthetize this massive documentation was done by L. MacCoull in 1988. Revisions of this work as well as an update, taking into consideration the newly published texts and studies from the last 30 years, were greatly needed. The task, however, was not an easy one, since the documentation is massive and not easy to access: the texts often have several gaps, most of the editions predate the adoption of modern standards, and the bibliography is, as expected, both extensive and sparse. That is what makes the present book extremely valuable, since the author undertook to account both for all the main aspects of these texts and for the state-of-the-art analyses of the scholarly community.