Dakhleh Oasis and the Western Desert of Egypt under the Ptolemies: 17 (Dakhleh Oasis Project Monographs) - Tapa dura

This volume makes a significant contribution on the archaeology of the Dakhleh Oasis. More importantly, however, Gill's study provides a manual for others working in the wider region who will now be able to recognise and characterise their own Ptolemaic pottery, or who will be able to say with certainty that it is indeed absent. * Antiquity * The book's wealth of information about a rarely visited part of Egypt, and from a period of Egyptian history rarely studied, makes this volume a worthy addition to the libarary of any serious scholar of the end of the pharaonic period. * Ancient Egypt Magazine * "The book provides an enormously strong scientific impulse for changing the obsolete and evidently misleading opinion that the Roman era was a time of enormous agricultural expansion and population increase in the Western Desert... Thus, this comprehensive and lavishly illustrated publication cannot be ignored by any specialist of Ptolemaic ceramics, because it presents results of good research which is based on its author's excellent knowledge of material." * Ancient West & East * This is a very important book, full of necessary new information, ideas, and syntheses. It is the best kind of pottery study, because it makes of that mundane material historical testimony. * Journal of Hellenistic Pottery and Material Culture *

Through an analysis of recently discovered Ptolemaic pottery from Mut al-Kharab, as well as a re-examination of pottery collected by the Dakhleh Oasis Project during the survey of the oasis from 1978-1987, this book challenges the common perception that Dakhleh Oasis experienced a sudden increase in agricultural exploitation and a dramatic rise in population during the Roman Period. It argues that such changes had already begun to take place during the Ptolemaic Period, likely as the result of a deliberate strategy directed toward this region by the Ptolemies. This book focuses on the ceramic remains in order to determine the extent of Ptolemaic settlement in the oases and to offer new insights into the nature of this settlement. It presents a corpus of Ptolemaic pottery and a catalogue of Ptolemaic sites from Dakhleh Oasis. It also presents a survey of Ptolemaic evidence from the oases of Kharga, Farafra, Bahariya and Siwa. It thus represents the first major synthesis of Ptolemaic Period activity in the Egyptian Western Desert.