Mar 16, 2026: Making the Desert a City: Recent Discoveries from Ancient Trimithis in the Dakhla Oasis of Egypt at Vollum College Center

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:15:00 -0700

The Dakhla oasis lies in a depression in the middle of one of the driest locations on Earth, some 400 miles due west of Luxor in Egypt’s Western Desert. Nevertheless it prospered: it was home to extensive cultivation and thriving settlements during the Roman period, including Amheida or ancient Trimithis. Tonight’s lecture incorporates recent work from the just-concluded 2026 excavation season at Trimithis into what we have learned over the last two decades about how Egyptians at the very edge of the Roman empire turned the western oases into a city, complete with traditional Egyptian temples (and later churches), painted villas, Roman baths, schools, and a sophisticated culture of feasting.

David Ratzan joined ISAW in 2014 as the Head of the ISAW Library. Before coming to ISAW he was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Greek and Roman Classics at Temple University and a lecturer in Contemporary Civilization in the Core Curriculum at Columbia University, where he also served as Curator of Papyri pro tempore in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. His publications include several edited volumes, including Missing Mothers: Maternal Absence in Antiquity (with Sabine Huebner; Peeters, 2021), and Law and Transaction Costs in the Ancient Economy (with Dennis Kehoe and Uri Yiftach-Firanko; University of Michigan Press, 2015). Starting with the 2023 field season, he is the Director of NYU's Amheida Excavations in Egypt, along with his colleague Nicola Aravecchia (Washington University), who is Archaeological Director.

Sponsored by the department of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and the Archaeological Institute of America. Free and open to the public.

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Mar 20, 2026: Greek Hymns to Egyptian Gods: Dialogue and Difference at Performing Arts Building

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:30:00 -0700

When Lucius, in the final book of the Metamorphoses, prays to an unknown lunar goddess and receives a reply from Isis, Apuleius has his characters, one human and one divine, address each another in Latin literary versions of well-known Greek texts: hymns and self-revelations of Isis. Apuleius was not simply adapting particular texts; he was also participating in a dialogical discourse attested in a range of Greek inscriptions and in the network of correspondences between them. Several of these texts adopt and adapt typical expressions and formal features from each other that were regarded as characteristics of a distinct genre of discourse. Drawing on examples from the Memphite self-revelation of Isis, the aretalogies from Maroneia and Andros, as well as the hymns of Isidorus from Medinet Madi, this talk explores the dialogical discourse of Greek hymnic texts belonging to Isis and her circle. While these texts have long been understood as domesticating representations of an exotic divinity intended to facilitate her assimilation into Hellenistic and Roman societies, examining them collectively and in their dialogical relations with one another shows that their discourse held a place for difference, figuring Isis as a stranger who was neither fully assimilated nor wholly other.

Ian Moyer (associate professor of history at the University of Michigan) explores the ancient history and modern historiography of cultural and intellectual encounters between ancient Greeks and Egyptians. His work ranges across history, classical studies, Egyptology, religion, and reception studies, and addresses questions of culture, identity, and agency in cross-cultural interactions. His first book, Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism (2011), explores the ancient history and modern historiography of cultural and intellectual encounters between ancient Greeks and Egyptians. He is co-editor, with Celia Schultz, of a special issue of Archiv für Religionsgeschichte on “The Religious Life of Things” (2016); a collection of essays entitled Classicisms in the Black Atlantic (2020) with Adam Lecznar and Heidi Morse; and a volume on Cultures of Resistance in the Hellenistic East with Paul Kosmin (2022). With Chris Faraone, Sophía Torallas Tovar and an international team of collaborators, he has produced a new edition of the hymns of Isidorus from Medinet Madi together with translations, commentary and interpretive essays (forthcoming). He is also currently writing a monograph entitled “At the Gates of the Temple,” in which he studies the gates and forecourts of temples as a form of public space in first millennium BCE Egypt.

Sponsored by the Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest and the department of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies. Free and open to the public.

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Calendar - Greek, Latin, & Ancient Mediterranean Studies

Mar 16, 2026: Making the Desert a City: Recent Discoveries from Ancient Trimithis in the Dakhla Oasis of Egypt at Vollum College Center

Mar 20, 2026: Greek Hymns to Egyptian Gods: Dialogue and Difference at Performing Arts Building