Temples in Late Antique Egypt: Cultic Heritage between Ideology, Pragmatism, and Artistic Recycling

Abstract

The landscape of Egypt and the rest of the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity was marked by the continued presence of temples. Several papyrological documents, corroborated by archaeological evidence, attest to the abandonment of temples and their recovery by the state, which could rent or sell them to individuals for a wide variety of uses. Christianity, therefore, settled into a desolate cult landscape and was not necessarily imposed by force or through the destruction of temples as was too often suggested by the hagiographic sources. By placing the question of the fate of the temples in a perspective which is not specifically religious and by clarifying it from the angle of the heritage policy of the ancients, this article aims to illustrate the role of temples in the formation of the cultural identity of Late Antique Egypt, thus providing a framework also for contemporary literary and manuscript production.

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