Publisher's Synopsis
The monastery of Bawit in Middle Egypt is one of the biggest and best-known Egyptian monasteries. Between 1901 and 1905, Jean Cledat led four archaeological campaigns on the site. The archaeologist found a large amount of papyri and ostraca (up to several hundreds). A corpus of ostraca was published in 1999 (MIFAO 111). The papyri, with a few exceptions, have remained unpublished. The present book offers the edition of a batch of papyri discovered by Cledat and now kept in the Louvre Museum. The 73 fragments contain Greek and Coptic texts, mainly administrative or private ones, including accounts and many letters. Most of the documents are small, but they help reconstructing the archives of Bawit and, more generally, give us information on the life in the monastery in the 7th and 8th centuries. A table is given in appendix, which lists all the published papyri and ostraca from Bawit (more than 700 documents).
