Urban Biographies of the Roman and Late Antique Worlds

Antinoopolis and Heracleopolis in Egypt, c. 100- c. 650 CE.

The Urban Biographies Project aims to integrate textual and material data and develop new digital tools to bring back into life the sights and smells of two cities from ancient Egypt in the Roman and late antique periods. By ancient historical standards, the evidence for both cities is voluminous: with more than one thousand texts for Antinoopolis, one of the currently most prolific sites for Greco-Roman and Byzantine Egypt, and about two hundred and fifty for Heracleopolis, whose archaeological evidence is also significant. The project team will analyze the parameters for urban development in Roman/late antique Egypt and write “urban biographies” of two important sites, in which all the available evidence will be brought to bear on broader questions of political, economic, cultural, and religious change.

In addition to book monographs, peer-reviewed articles and edited volumes, the tools for the integration, analysis, and visualization of the data pertaining to people (digital urban prosopography) and places (a GIS platform for the contextualization and interpretation of archaeological data) will make the results of the project easily searchable and widely accessible, which will be also presented at a series of workshops and international conferences.

Find more information on the project website of the University of Basel.

The project works with the Geovistory Toolbox to create, curate and publish its research data.