11
Three Monks and a House
The Archaeology of Monastic Houses in Byzantine Egypt
Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom
Apa Zacharias, Apa Philotheus, and Apa Mena were granted a house in Jeme in 734 CE by a woman named Anna (P.KRU 106).1 The house was found within the bustling town of Jeme, located within the walls of Medinet Habu, the old mortuary complex for Ramesses III.2 The house and its contents were to become the legal property of the monastic community of Apa Paul, located in the hills of Dra’ Abu el-Naga.3
Late antique Thebes, where the three monks lived, reflects an integrated Christian landscape with monastic and nonmonastic families living in complex households. Each owned property either as an individual or as part of a community, relied on builders and masons to make repairs, and used legal bequeaths to ensure houses moved into the appropriate hands. Yet this portrait of monastic houses seems at odds with the description of monasticism found in the earliest histories and hagiographies, in which Egyptian monks were cast as individuals severed from their homes, familial ties, and all forms of ownership. What interest could three monks have in acquiring property in a nonmonastic town? Were their interests purely financial for the benefit of their monastery, or something else? How did this house and its contents compare with the archaeological record of earlier monastic housing found elsewhere in Roman and Byzantine Egypt?
Defining Monastic Households: Methods and Theories
To begin, we need to consider what it means to study the history of monastic living in terms of concepts shaped by shelter, home, and community. In the earliest sources on monastic living, the cell or room is the physical focal point for monastic spiritual living. In the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, monks struggled with ownership and community. A young monk was told to stay in his cell, for this would be the path to becoming a monk. But he wanted to repair the door and roof, for they were old. He was not satisfied with the conditions of his living quarters. His desire for a new door and roof reflected his spiritual immaturity.4 On the one hand, the monk was encouraged to separate himself from the world by living in a cell alone, and on the other hand, he was admonished for his desire to improve his dwelling despite the cell’s ability to “teach you everything.”5 Others, such as Abba Bessarion, who did not have a desire for a place to live or a house and lived more like an animal content in the natural world, did not have much difficulty leaving his previous life behind and sought the sand of the desert and the caves of the cliffs as his natural home.6
If we rely on the earliest presentation of monastic living, we might be left with the impression that monks only sought shelter because their bodies required it. Monastic literature is littered with stories of senior monks counseling younger colleagues to abandon the settled world: “He who flees from folk is like a bunch of ripe grapes, but he who is among folk is like an unripe grape.”7 The world, which often involved obligations of biological family and associated economic activities, impeded spiritual growth, withering a monk’s spiritual state. The practical solution was physical separation that ostensibly limited, if not severed, familial and financial bonds.
Since monks moved into underutilized or abandoned landscapes to build their communities, they relied on their skills to build their spaces. John of Lycopolis was trained in carpentry and building and went to Mount Lycos to build his residence, which had a room for prayer, one for working and eating, and a third for the “needs of the flesh.”8 The spaces are not described in great detail, and in fact there was a general reticence about their built environments. Seeking pleasure in a building was discouraged: “If you have a cell with only just enough space for your head, do not under any circumstances build another one to have plenty of room in it.”9 Physical comfort paved a path toward temptations, which led to a lack of commitment to God. Such stories create one narrative of space and place, but that narrative does not reflect the complex story of how monks created a sense of place by building new monastic houses.
For example, there are far more occurrences of monks directing each other to see the anthropogenic landscape as a tool for successful ascetic living. “Unless an athlete spar with many, he cannot learn the skill of winning… . So, too, the monk; unless he be trained with brothers … he cannot live alone nor can he withstand his bad thoughts.”10 Staying physically within the cell was the real challenge, for it was in this new space, dedicated exclusively to a life for God, that monks experienced separation from the world and desired to flee back to the land of entanglements.
Therefore, it is not surprising when we find monks encouraging, or even admonishing, each other to remain within their dwellings or cells. For remaining within the cell was necessary in order to enhance spiritual progress.11 Paul of Tamma, writing in the fourth century, equated the monastic dwelling with the embodiment of holiness in which the monk may internalize the fact of dwelling. His treatise On the Cell encourages monks to value the built environment: “Be wise and remain in your dwelling, which is your delight, and your cell will remain with you in your heart as you seek its blessing, and the labor of your cell will go with you to God.”12 The wise monk knows that his room, his cell, is the one place all monks share as the secure arena for spiritual work: “You shall be a wise man in your cell, building up your soul as you sit in your cell … while your soul and your thoughts watch God in astonishment, gazing at him all the days of your life.”13 The cell was a space that cultivated a spiritual mindset: “The person who learns the sweetness of the cell does not dishonor his neighbor in avoiding him.”14 These statements elucidate the importance of the house of monks as a performative space imbued with meaning that signals its difference or otherness from the houses found in their old communities.
Thomas Barrie explains the distinction between house and home as follows: the house is architectural or “material and instrumental” to one’s physical and bodily existence, whereas the home is a “placeless idea, cultural construct, and historical object.”15 The intersection of instrumentality and cultural construct aids us in thinking about how we might reread monastic literature as it presents the monastic household. Viewing the monastic cell and the larger monastic community from an emic perspective allows for the “multiple realities” and “differing perceptions of reality” that are exhibited in monastic literature for a broader late antique Christian community.16 Monastic authors fused the functionality or materiality of a dwelling to the concept of a “placeless” place, in which a monk internalized the architecture in a way that transcended the material world. We read of the complex and sometimes conflicting perceptions of what the monastic house is, what is used for, and whether a monk should treat it as a home.
Archaeological evidence of monastic settlements and individual houses or dwellings provides a unique collection of “big artifacts” for crafting a more nuanced history of the monastic house within a postprocessual view of buildings as unique expressions of the communities that built them. I find the concept of emic archaeology to be particularly useful in that it requires archaeologists to draw on literary and documentary sources as the “community’s ideas,” thus engendering a more culturally specific understanding of the built environment.17 While I am limited in my ability to discuss monastic structures with the builders of the late antique monasteries, I read monastic letters and histories just as I “read” archaeological material to build a thicker interpretation of things as reflections of a community.18 Tracing the historical path of monks without houses to the bequest of a house in an eighth century town is a fascinating story that will weave together the threads of monastic mythmaking, the brick and stone remains of monastic settlements, and faint whispers of monastic building activities found in documentary sources. In order to better understand how the three strands twist together, it is necessary to consider how the theoretical insights of household archaeology, together with a focus on “things,” enhance our understanding of the various pieces of evidence.19 The following analysis is not focused specifically on the features of monastic houses or their rooms—an attempt which would be more characteristic of the first decade of household archaeology20—but rather on exploring the monastic houses themselves as “big artifacts,” as they inform us about the lived experience of individual monks and the relationship of houses to monastic inhabitants.21
There is a tension in the field of archaeology between archeologists working on materials as “a means to reach something else,”22 such as to reconstruct the experience of monks or other individuals living in their houses, and those who focus on the “material non-human other,” a perspective which ascribes agency to monastic houses as things worthy of study in their own right.23 Put another way, archaeologists such as Ian Hodder, Bjørnar Olsen, and Timothy Webmoor outline the importance for the field to turn away from an anthropocentric view of materials24 and to “turn to things” in which one “explore[s] how the objectness of things contributes to the ways things assemble us” and not vice versa.25 Certainly, late antique Christian authors regarded monastic housing as a thing that could organize monks and create an order to living that was not possible in other environments. The call to take “things” seriously is not just a phenomenological or semantic exercise; the objective is an engaging path forward to reevaluate how we understand the relationship between materials and humans with the aim to treat them equally or at least symmetrically.26 This means that we can also consider how even language found both in documentary and literary sources brings us closer to an emic archaeology of the monastic house by granting more value to the voices that describe homes, building, and living in a monastic community.
For example, late antique monastic communities referred to their houses with the Coptic term, ma nshōpe, which means “the place of dwelling,” or more commonly “the dwelling place.”27 The monastic term replaces the usual secular terms for house found in our sources such as Greek oikos or Coptic ēi. It is also important to note that I do not use monastery or cell unless that is found in the original document. I also avoid hermitage, as this term is applied loosely to anything that is not clearly an enclosed monastery. Hermitage also does not reflect the reality of the appellations selected by monastic authors. The shift in nomenclature is significant, as the monastic dwelling place or the monastic house were, until recently, described in numerous ways by historians and archaeologists without much explanation. The choice to impart later medieval monastic terms onto the East, often from Western monasticism, obscured the identification of the living space as the space in which monks dwelt. Considering that household archaeology and the theoretical treatment of dwelling are at the heart of this discussion, it is even more appropriate to use dwelling place as the name given to the monastic houses found in the archaeological record.
Monastic Settlements and Houses
Kellia, or The Cells, is the most recognized site of early Egyptian monasticism. Located in the Delta, the monastic site is well known in late antique and medieval monastic literature, both in the East and the West, as one of the homes for the Desert Fathers, whose lives and spiritual accomplishments are recounted in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. The popularity of the Sayings and the writings of residents from Kellia, in particular, formed the foundation for subsequent monastic communities in the East and the West.28 Famous monastic authors, such as John Cassian and Evagrius, who lived at Kellia, presented the site as a nexus of spiritual and ascetic achievements without much attention to the physical world they inhabited.29 In fact, it is difficult to recover the emic perspective of the monastic dwellings from their writings, which focus more on a monk’s interior, spiritual work rather than one’s interactions with the built environments more broadly. The landscape was essentially a canvas and did not merit much discussion or description. Recent scholarship draws our attention to how the writers crafted Egyptian monasticism for Christian readers who resided outside of Egypt and therefore presented a somewhat artificial portrait of monasticism that was not based on the reality of the lived experience.30
The disconnect between the realia of monastic life at Kellia and the words of monastic authors was evident with the first archaeological seasons of work at the site in the 1960s.31 While the texts may present a story of a desert dotted with monks living with one or two others in modest homes, the identification of more than 1,500 monastic complexes, sometimes with sixty to eighty rooms, significantly undermines the mythologized and solitary landscape that might emerge from the words of Evagrius. In many ways, the spatial layout of the residences, with kitchens, latrines, courtyards, and reception areas, is similar to that of a Romano-Egyptian house or villa. Both the secular villa and the monastic residence provided comfortable living quarters and domestic areas for food preparation and storage, in addition to spaces for meeting or entertaining guests.
Documentary evidence from the rooms and complexes at Kellia in the form of dipinti serves as the main body of evidence of those who lived and moved within the houses at the site. The majority of the inscriptions were written in Boharic Coptic and in Greek, with a few in Arabic.32 The painted inscriptions include references to a monk’s name, his title, and occasionally his place of origin or his skill. In a complex identified as QR 306, monks used the walls to petition prayers and intercession by those who could read the walls.33 This practice indicates an awareness that the spaces in which words were painted or inscribed could be part of performative, paraliturgical actions that were part of daily life.34 In one dipinto, we read of a curse on anyone who removed items from the monastic dwelling, for such actions would result in total separation from God.35 Other dipinti directly address readers with the expectation that Christian readers, presumably members of the community, would participate in actions that further created bonds between those living in other buildings.36 The fact that no monastic archive survives from Kellia also impedes our ability to construct a nuanced narrative of how the monastic household interacted with each other or their physical residence. In contrast, the extensive Coptic corpus produced by Shenoute of Atripe (c. 347–465 CE), a prolific abbot of the White Monastery Federation in southern Egypt, and his successor Besa (r. 466–late 5th c. CE) describes the intersection between space, place, and the monk’s spiritual being.37 At Kellia we must rely on the documentary evidence of prayers painted or inscribed on walls to build a sense of place and dwelling.38
To illustrate the great diversity of monastic settlements and the status of Kellia as just one of many communities, I will examine four different sites that represent various forms of monastic building and house construction, thereby indicating the individuality of monastic households in Egypt. My selection of these sites serves as a counterbalance to the general perception that monasticism can be divided only into two categories: solitary dwellings, following the model of Antony, or communal monasteries, following the household model of Pachomius. For scholars of monasticism, this binary has been shown to be false, largely crafted by later authors and not based on experiences with actual monastic communities. Indeed, the monastic communities that I discuss exhibit monastic site designs and the construction of a household that could vary greatly, and these variations may allow us to infer that specific sites were known for their version of ascetic practice. Unlike later Western monastic communities, such as the Cistercians or Augustinians, where each monastery followed a similar spatial plan, Egyptian monastic sites did not follow a predictable, architectural plan.39
The four sites, moving from north to south, include the Monastery of Apa Jeremias at Saqqara, the Mountain of Cells at Jabal Nalqun, the Monastery of Apa Thomas at Wadi Sarga, and the semisubterranean dwellings at Esna in Upper Egypt. The four communities represent the diversity of the anthropogenic landscape of monasticism in terms of the spatial configuration of the community. In addition, each site differs from the others, with unique architectural design elements. The execution and placement of houses for construction of a monastic community and landscape permit us to examine the structures not only as windows onto monastic life, but also as reflections of how houses and their very components of brick, stone, and plaster responded to the natural environment and assembled monks.40 The mutability of the built environment itself, as a thing made of smaller things from the surrounding area, such as stones, mud bricks, plaster, wood, and reeds, is an essential element for reconstructing how monastic communities were built anew or remodeled from abandoned spaces.
The four sites also serve as examples of communities of practice, which can be read in two ways—the practice of monasticism and the practice of building. Monastic letters and even the highly structured monastic rules and hagiographies point to the ways in which monks “negotiate with one another.”41 The houses create the locus in which “important relations and interactions are not just between people but also between people and the places they inhabit and the material culture they deploy.”42 The role of monks as makers in a fluctuating community of senior and junior members may inform how we read phases of buildings and even phases of expansion and construction as monastic sites.43
The first monastic site that I consider is the Monastery of Apa Thomas at Wadi Sarga, excavated in 1913 and 1914 in Middle Egypt (figure 11.1). The site includes a complex domestic settlement with a variety of houses with several rooms of at least one story. Previously known only through the 1922 publication of the ostraka from Wadi Sarga, the extensive evidence of the Monastery of Apa Thomas is being published for the first time by the British Museum.44 The site was occupied in the late fifth or early sixth century, and the monks at Apa Thomas lived in apartments built along a steep hillside with seven terraces until the eighth century.45 The settlement is located 11.5 kilometers inland from the Nile, and a monk could have reached the monastery on foot just under three hours or by animal in one and half hours. The presence of a large stable and numerous references to camel and donkey herders suggest transportation to and from the monastery was frequent and relatively easy, should one come by the Nile.
One cluster of domestic housing is known as the North Houses, with thirty-three individual rooms divided along seven terraces cut into the bedrock of the wadi (figure 11.2). One way to approach the household nature of the domestic quarter of the monastic site is to ascertain which rooms were part of a house or if the entire structure on its seven terraces was considered a single house. The extensive documentary sources recovered from the various middens at Wadi Sarga do not discuss the built environment at Apa Thomas in ways that allow us to ascribe particular ownership of one space to any one monk, although the sources do allow for a prosopography of those living at the site and serving in leadership positions.46 Therefore, the houses as things themselves become the subject of analysis. Much as with houses from Neolithic and Protoliterate sites, we must consider the material remains as our sole guide in examining the boundaries of the households as defined by the architecture and the environment.
Figure 11.1.Mud-brick buildings of the Monastery of Apa Thomas at Wadi Sarga. View east shows agricultural fields and the Nile beyond. (AES. Ar. 719. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.)
The nature of the wadi required builders to cut into the hill face and use stone boulders to create a stable foundation for the various rooms. Mud bricks were used to build the walls of the rooms, which were later plastered and painted, sometimes with images of saints, animals, and even dipinti.47 In many cases, the builders took advantage of the limestone cliff to carve a bench along the north end of the building so that the room was equipped with a natural bench for sitting and sleeping. The remaining components of the room were then built around the geofeature. The adaptation and incorporation of the natural environment into the very fabric of the rooms demonstrate the notion that physical space had agency—space, itself, could organize individuals into specific activities for sleeping or daily crafts. Similarly, the location of small ovens and stoves in only four of the seven terraces suggests that activities, such as cooking and baking, took place in private kitchen spaces rather than communal kitchens shared by the entire monastic community.48
Figure 11.2.Excavation and clearing at the North Houses of the Monastery of Apa Thomas at Wadi Sarga. The photo illustrates the use of plaster, mortar, thin limestone chips, and mud brick in the design of the various rooms. (AES Ar. 719. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.)
By reading the Apa Thomas ostraka and buildings together, we can see that monks identified with their houses, their belongings, and felt the need to keep order in a space in which houses were built against each other. In one letter (O.Sarga 169), Apa Enoch asks his son, Apa Mena, to bring wine to Apa Peter, who will then deliver the jugs to the dwelling place (ma nshōpe) of Apa Macarius in the community.49 The letters are not just instructions, but also signs of permissions needed within the community to allow access to go into and out of houses to retrieve or deliver items. Such actions illustrate how moving through houses, or dwelling places, required testaments of communication. In another letter (O.Sarga 100), Patermoute tells another monk to “go into the dwelling place (ma nshōpe)” and into the church to retrieve rope and fishing nets in exchange for twelve loaves of bread.50 One monk received a letter (O.Sarga 101) stating, “As soon as you shall receive this potsherd, go to the dwelling place (ma nshōpe)” and take a balance, a ball of netting, and a length of rope to Papa Pihew, who had told Apa Apollo he wished for these things.51
Where did these things—nets, rope, a balance, bread, and wine—rest within the various dwellings in the North Houses? The monastic houses held such items on the various built-in shelves and on bone or horn hooks embedded into the very fabric of the walls. We can observe the presence of thresholds, door jambs, and the remains of framing for wooden doors to determine whether some rooms were closed and locked while others were not. We can even place objects within rooms, but can we place people within the rooms? If we return to the spatial and environmental setting of the houses as expressed in the letters from Apa Thomas, we may observe who is asked to travel between houses and who is not. The instructions reflect the social status of particular monks and bring us closer to consider a social archaeology of the site, which demonstrates that Papa Pihew, Apa Phoebmmon, Apa Macarius, and Apa Petermoute do not travel, but Apa Mena and Apa Peter must. The letters and the physical remains of monastic houses offer us clues as to how monks interacted at the Monastery of Apa Thomas. By focusing on the houses, and their contents, as material, nonhuman others, we can begin to look past the individual monks and consider what the materials of Wadi Sarga may have required of the builders seeking to create a new community for monastic habitation.
When we compare Apa Thomas to the near contemporaneous monastic sites in Upper Egypt of Esna and ‘Adaima, we have less material to work with, as the latter sites do not have extensive written sources to give voice to the material remains. While Wadi Sarga is roughly a one-hectare site, Esna covers an area of 1,150 hectares with two clusters of buildings. Known for their unusual architecture as geotectures, meaning they are architectural features comprised of the natural environment—in this case, the desert floor, Esna and ‘Adaima housed monks physically below ground. Esna is the better known of the two sites, as information about it was published by the French Institute in an extensive, four-volume publication.52 But both sites are similar in design and in execution. ‘Adaima shares the same features, spatial design, and contemporary ceramic remains and was likely occupied at the same time as Esna.53 Monastic builders carved their dwellings so that the houses were hidden, literally, in the desert.54 Was this decision made intentionally to align with monastic myths of asceticism and separation from the world? Or could the reason relate more to the natural environment, whose cooling properties would have created a more appropriate living space that was cool in the summer and warm in the winter? What can the houses at Esna tell us?
As semisubterranean dwellings, the kitchen and other rooms at Esna and ‘Adaima are accessed by a staircase which leads from ground level to a courtyard cut into the natural shale. Each residence contains a kitchen.55 The nine buildings reflect uniform planning, with a clear design with a ground-level staircase, which leads down to a subsurface, open-air courtyard. Three or four additional rooms extend from the courtyard, creating interior spaces for the residents. At least two of the doorways led to very different kinds of rooms: a private kitchen and a room with a central east niche with walls painted and inscribed with prayers and images of saints. Excavators interpreted the additional rooms as either storage areas or sleeping quarters, based on the fact that the rooms were undecorated and lacking windows. In three cases, houses numbered 4, 7, and 9 had two decorated rooms with a central niche and accompanying annexes. The designs are consistent in layout, reflecting a conscious choice to employ architectural features, such as the semisubterranean plan that includes a descending staircase to an open-air courtyard; a large prayer room with painted niches; smaller, secondary rooms; and a kitchen with ovens and stoves.
The identity of the community is unknown, although we do have the names of male monks such as Apa Mena, Phib, Victor, Touan, John, Philox, Abraham, and Paphnoute. At Esna, as a male, homosocial community, there is much that we can discern from the houses themselves about the nature of the monastic life of its residents. They had private kitchens, cisterns, and extensive storage rooms, complete with large amphorae. They painted prayers of intercession on the walls of central rooms and provided Christian genealogies of saints. The multiroomed residences are quite elaborate, if not luxurious, for only two individuals, if we assume one person slept in each of the windowless rooms. They also took most of their belongings with them when they left this community. The residences at Esna bear no sign of conflagration, but only the natural erosion that would be expected for any building left unprotected for centuries in the desert. The sparse documentary sources from the site consist entirely of dipinti. The epigraphic and ceramic evidence suggests that occupation of the site was short-lived, from the early sixth century until the middle of the seventh century.
The layout of each house and the individual features of windows, alignment of air shafts, placement of kitchens and sand barriers, and niches reflect how the natural environment and the raw materials of the houses acted on the builders of this monastic community.56 The execution of the construction and replicated layout reveals a conscious response to build a kitchen underground and to provide a reliable source of water in the middle of the desert plain (figure 11.3). Each room’s placement around an open courtyard also demonstrates an attunement to the movement of air, light, and even people in and out of the spaces. But, in comparison to other monastic settlements from the sixth century, the choices of arrangements are a departure from more normative forms of monastic habitation and construction.
The community’s monastic identity is most evident in the architectural plan and the way that the structures became a part of the desertscape (figure 11.4). As semisubterranean buildings, the structures are submerged in the landscape, revealing a keen awareness of environmental factors for building in the desert. Windowsills were designed to provide the most effective indirect light to rooms accessed from the open-air courtyard throughout the day. Ventilation shafts were positioned in corners of walls to facilitate the movement of fresh air into rooms not directly accessed from the courtyard, making the most of the natural winds across the desert. Even though all the doorways were equipped with socket doors to be closed as needed, half a meter-high revetment walls were built outside the doors, in the courtyard, to alleviate the constant need to move sand away from entrances. The marking of doorways with painted crosses, Christian dipinti, images of saints and monks (in a few cases), and painted architectural accents provided the physical markers of a living religious practice within a domestic setting.
The only epigraphic evidence that specifically references the houses is found in house number 4. The dipinto is written on the east wall of the north oratory. Here the author wrote a prayer, which was fairly illegible, but he included the phrase for “dwelling place” (ma nshōpe).57 The same phrase is used to describe the terraced, monastic housing at the Monastery of Apa Thomas. Is the “dwelling place” a common name for smaller monastic residences? Does it appear at larger monastic sites? And does its usage persist after the seventh century?
Figure 11.3.A kitchen in a semisubterranean house at the monastic site of ‘Adaima. (Courtesy of IFAO. Photo by J.-Fr. Gout in 1974.)
Figure 11.4. Plan of dwelling number 5 at Esna. (After S. Sauneron and J. Jacquet, Les ermitage chrétiens du desert d’Esna I. [Cairo : IFAO, 1972], plate XII.)
Perhaps one of the best-known monastic sites from late antique Egypt is the Monastery of Apa Jeremias, located south of the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara. It was excavated from 1906–10 and the findings of this excavation were published immediately. Several pieces from this massive monastic settlement found their way into museum collections around the world and came to be considered hallmarks of what a Coptic monastery looked like. Subsequent analysis of the earlier excavated remains by Peter Grossmann places the development of the community around a large basilica church in the mid-sixth century.58 After three centuries of expansion, the site was abandoned by the ninth century and never occupied again, although nonmonastic, Christian villages did continue into the ninth century.59
The archaeological excavation of the Monastery of Apa Jeremias provided the first opportunity to examine spatial relationships across a complex monastic settlement plan. The plan shows streets, footpaths, alleys, and seemingly planned spatial divisions of domestic quarters, which were separated from the more communal areas of church, infirmary, and refectory (figure 11.5). Like Apa Thomas, the Monastery of Apa Jeremias housed numerous letters, graffiti, and dipinti, which can augment the rich material remains recovered from the site. One of the significant challenges to analyzing the household nature of the material from Apa Jeremias is the fact that the archaeologist, James Quibell, failed to document any phases in his plans or discussions of various buildings. His plan of the site, enhanced later by Grossmann, therefore reflects all the excavated areas of the settlement without any differentiation between additions, modifications, or restructuring that might alter our perception of how monks occupied the various houses. The plan is not a plan of the monastery at any given phase, but is rather a plan that reflects all the spaces that Quibell excavated, and thus does not necessarily help us understand how dwellers experienced monastic houses in late antiquity.
One of the claims of the material turn is that modern archaeologists did and do constrain our understanding of the past by what they value, select, draw, catalogue, and ascribe meaning to. There is not necessarily a way around this problem, but I would argue that in the case of Apa Jeremias, we see the monastic site of Apa Jeremias through the eyes of Quibell. He was quick to call each room a chapel and to divide houses into single roomed spaces that severed the spatial relationships the rooms once had to each other. Therefore, our sense of a monastic house was immediately shaped by Quibell’s inferences. Because he was prejudiced by monastic myths of separation and privacy, he envisioned the spaces to be chapels, not sites of daily activities. He also neglected to discuss any rooms that were devoid of wall paintings or containing significant finds that would interest him or potential collectors or museums. In fact, he dismissed large swaths of the site as of little interest because of their domestic nature.60 Therefore, while we can ascribe particular meaning to various spaces as monastic houses in the large communal settlement at the Monastery of Jeremias, we must recognize that our current understanding of the houses is largely shaped by, and also limited by, Quibell’s reading of the evidence and not the full extent of the preserved remains of the houses.
Figure 11.5.Plan of the Monastery of Apa Jeremias showing all the spaces excavated by James Quibell. The map does not reflect any phasing of rooms or areas of the settlement. (Plan by Peter Grossmann.)
The last site is a contemporary of Apa Jeremias but located in the southeast edge of the Fayum at the site of Dayr al-Naqlun. It is a monastic settlement comprised of three distinct residential areas, including a cluster of eighty monastic residences in the hills of Jabal Naqlun, a multiperiod site on the desert plateau with medieval Christian buildings, and a smaller, monastic community located by a canal. The Mountain of the Cells, as it was called in documentary sources, was first occupied as early as the fifth century, with its last residents living in the ninth century.61 In the documentary papyri from the dwellings, each complex was called a monastery, monastērion, and not a dwelling place, ma nshōpe. It was only later, in the eighth and ninth centuries, that the monks adopted Coptic and then shifted to use the “dwelling place” to refer to their homes.
Figure 11.6. Monastic dwelling at Naqlun made of mud bricks, natural shale caves, and plaster. (Photo by author.)
The Polish excavations, led by Włodzimierz Godlewski, have explored residences with a central courtyard, enclosed by a wall, which gave access to a footpath along the cliffs (figure 11.6). Six of the residences have been fully excavated.62 The residence of Phibamo, which was occupied in the late fifth century and was abandoned during the sixth century, is the largest of the residences in the cliffs, with eighteen rooms divided into six clusters connected by two courtyards.63 Only two monks apparently lived here, with the apartments creating two separate homes connected by an open courtyard.64
Like the dwelling at Esna, each of the homes in the hills of Naqlun included a private kitchen complete with a least a stove and, less frequently, a bread oven. The monks living in these cliffs had homes that provided physical distance from the more communal and mixed community of nonmonastic and monastic persons at the main church. However, as at Esna, the houses here were carved from the shale cliffs, sealed with walls of plaster and mud bricks mixed with numerous straw inclusions. The various rooms were less refined in comparison to what is found at Apa Thomas and Apa Jeremias. Few dipinti and only the simplest wall paintings of crosses grace the walls of these homes. What are we to make of the Naqlun homes, the residents, and the nature of monastic houses in the Fayum? As found elsewhere, the locally available materials play a significant role in the shape of the homes. The coarse shale did not make the same quality of mud bricks seen elsewhere in the Nile Valley or the Delta. This fact resulted in plastered walls that were cruder and rougher than those found elsewhere. The raw materials played a significant role in the shape of the houses at Naqlun, and decisions about the quality of the walls or the paintings adorning the surfaces may have nothing to do with the actual builders or the monastic preferences of the residents. We know from the excavated letters that visitors went to the monasteries in the hills, and all referred to the settlement as the Mountain of the Cells, rather than the Mountain of the Monasteries. In looking at the houses at Naqlun, we can observe similar patterns of house designs, with kitchens, courtyards, communal spaces for guests, prayer, and labor along with the undecorated rooms.
Read together, the four monastic sites reflect the diversity of monastic houses in late antique Egypt and encourage us to see how houses, made of bricks, stones, plaster, and unique features, helped create their own configurations. Stella Souvatzi reminds us that “households are in a constant state of transitions and it is in the continually shifting relationships within and between households that wider societal changes can be best understood.”65
Things and Monastic Houses
Household archaeology offers engaging paths of inquiry for examining hitherto unsuspected nuances and multiple facets of monastic construction. While it is tempting to consider all monastic material culture as steeped in religious meaning and therefore sacred, this myopic view of the evidence erases the very nature of monastic living, which was structured around new, but fictive, kinship groups that were based in very earthly associations. Indeed, monastic bodies were often troubled by implications of sexual impropriety.66 Thus physical spaces with locking doors or private rooms or even structured seating arrangements at meals could be places to transgress forbidden boundaries. Monks who violated such boundaries were accused of pursuing “friendship” with another, which was understood as a euphemism for same-sex desire.67 The physical space of one’s place at the monastic table or the privacy of one’s own dwelling place, as defined by the locking door, could engender questions about one’s celibacy and purity. A monk’s door could hide or protect his ascetic purity inside. Or it could protect the transmission of one’s desires from watchful eyes.
Doors, tables, and dwelling places are elements of architecture. As objects, they are, as Cynthia Baker states, discursive things that require analysis. They are not merely transparent or objective facts that only require description. Baker persuasively articulates how “material objects … participate in the organization and contestation of meaning in a society.”68 The active intervention of monastic houses particularly takes effect in creating order between a father, or senior monk, his sons or his protégées, and even his servants. The need to create social order is mirrored in the need to create spatial order. By building new settlements, monks organized spaces to fulfill the practical needs of daily living alongside the needs for a new society in which place making was a dynamic activity in the sixth century and later.
Just as domestic settlements were long ignored by Egyptologists until now, the study of monastic settlements is demonstrating how important settlement archaeology is for building a more nuanced portrait of the ancient world. For example, we learn from monastic literature that the Delta was home to numerous monasteries, but very few have been found. Penelope Wilson acknowledges the limited physical remains of monastic settlements in the Delta. She outlines the practical, environmental factors that account for the dearth of archaeological material, including the challenges of floodplain archaeology, the reclamation of farmlands, and the lack of regulation to protect archaeological sites.69 However, even with an incomplete picture of monastic houses, we still can use the existing evidence to draw important conclusions about monastic dwellings.
The act of dwelling was essential to making a space a house. This concept is at the heart of Martin Heidegger’s belief that thresholds are boundaries that dissolve the lines that separate inner and outer spheres of living and make the home a space for emotions.70 By stepping into the dwelling place, monks were making a house a home, and thereby transforming rooms into different kinds of spaces that are engendered with expectations for how space may foster spiritual growth and intimacy with the divine. German philosopher Otto Friedrich Bollnow considered dwelling as a “means to have a fixed place in space, to belong to this place and be rooted in it.”71 For Sarah Schlanger, the continuous dwelling is the idea of a community’s “persistent places,” and for Wendy Ashmore, the buildings and settlements evolve to become “life histories of place(s).”72 Monastic houses, just like their secular counterparts, became persistent places with unique life histories.
Both the Pachomian and Shenoutean monastic communities were divided into houses as a way to manage the various communities. The houses included cells, or individual rooms, and in these more intimate spaces a monk was not allowed to hide secret food or to possess prohibited items such as woolen tunics, mantles, “soft sheepskin with unshorn wool,” coins, pillows, or “various other conveniences.”73 For Shenoute, it was important to inspect the monastic houses once a month to ensure that all members of the community abided by the structures of the community: “The father superior shall enter all the houses [ēi] of the congregation [synagōgē] and inspect all the cells or rooms [ri] that are within them and all alcoves and all vessels that are holding their portion that they have put there, so that he may know whether they have an excess beyond the ordnance that is laid down, or whether someone has committed impiety by taking anything into his cell against the edifying rule that is laid down.”74 Shenoute’s surveillance, by way of regular inspections, reveals that despite the community’s goals for semi-independent, ascetic living, it was necessary to provide a mechanism for more structure within the houses. The house inspections reinforced the ideals of ascetic living and the importance of communal identity.75 Without such inspections, it appears that conformity to particular habits would break down, especially when one was in the privacy of one’s own room. Therefore, it was necessary to cross the boundary of the locked door and see inside the monk’s dwelling place.
The idea that the monk’s dwelling place, or home, was also the home of God is explicit in monastic literature. In late antique Thebes, for example, Jacob, the superior of the topos of Apa Phoibammon, names his heir as Victor (P.KRU 65) and describes the “the holy topos and all its dwelling places, namely its caves which are set for us up in the same mountain by those who came before us, by our fathers according to God, through documents drawn up for use, our fathers to be commemorated for all time.”76 The dwelling places were part of a larger, spiritual topography of the holy, or sacred, topos. To ensure a house’s holiness required that a dwelling space be pure as well as its owners—the monks. The only way to guarantee this quality was to monitor the spiritual health of the monks who resided within the community. The monk was equated with the space in which he lived and practiced his asceticism. For it was within the monk’s dwelling place that God might reside and the space itself was also imbued with the spiritual health of the resident.
Initially, the very sense of rootedness to a specific place seemed antithetical to the monastic movement, at least as it appears in the writings of its most ardent, late antique admirers.77 One of the prominent themes in early monastic literature is a disdain for community and interaction with others outside of the immediate monastic community. Modern historians accepted this account until the discovery of monastic sites, with complex settlements and in close proximity to nonmonastic communities, caused a reconsideration of the late antique sources.78 In fact, the lax enforcement of building codes during the late Roman and early Byzantine Periods provided an opportunity for new communities to repurpose, adapt, restore, and build in spaces not currently owned by either landowners or the church.79 Monks adopted underutilized landscapes for building their homes. The new settlements were often visible from the Nile and accessible by foot.
If we dig deeper into the literary sources intended to serve as guides for monastic communities, we do see the importance of houses as places for monastic living. In fact, buildings, houses, and even God’s house appear as major characters in monastic teachings. The houses serve as illustrations of the importance of places for spiritual development in that personal attachment fostered a sense of a persistent place. For example, Abba Isaiah of Sketis, writing in the late fifth to early sixth century, recognized that monks moved between different locations and modified buildings to make them their own. But he warned that an affection for a place could be dangerous: “If you go and live in a place where you are given a cell (or room) and you spend money to construct something in the cell (or room), then, if you leave it and another brother takes it over, do not remove him should you later wish to return.”80 Similarly, monks were told not to take anything useful from the space, so that those who became new residents could benefit from what was inside.81 Being a guest in someone else’s house required the warning not to “destroy, tear down, nor construct anything” without first seeking the blessing and permission of the monastic owner.82
Monastic houses are by their very nature new houses for a new household based on new spiritual kinship groups. While monks regarded themselves on the best of days as members of a heavenly household, the reality of monastic life is that they built homes, personalized those spaces, and held both legal and emotional attachments to their residences. Amos Rapoport described that for some group-specific institutions, “environments, even apparently humble dwellings, are more than material objects or structures: they are institutions, basic cultural phenomena”83 and their “social networks, whether intensive or extensive, are usually centered on the dwelling.”84 Monastic houses are spaces, in Rapoport’s reading of architecture, that provide cues “which trigger appropriate behavior” of those who reside within the houses.85 We might return now to Shenoute and Pachomius as two leaders who knew that the dwelling was an important locus for creating community identity within the house and that if difficulties were to arise, they might come from what was happening within the private rooms of the monks. By bringing together archaeological, documentary, and historical evidence, we can observe how important monastic places were in reinforcing monastic identity and communities. This insight reflects the value of household archaeology in rereading monastic evidence with an eye toward finding the relationship between the built environment and the monk, not simply accepting the patristic tradition that monks shunned attachments to the material world.
To return to the opening questions, I propose the following answers. First, what interest could three monks have in acquiring property in a nonmonastic town? By the eighth century, monastics were well integrated into the economic and social affairs of nonmonastic communities to such a degree that even portions of buildings would be welcomed endowments. Second, were monks interested in property purely for the financial benefit for their monasteries? The material remains of monastic communities and their correspondence make clear that individual needs and desires played an essential role in the owning of big things, such as dwelling places or secular homes, and in small things, such as curtains, books, and bedding. Third, how did the later eighth-century house compare with earlier monastic housing? The earliest monastic houses are not attested in the archaeological record, but the earliest monastic manuals and guides do point to houses and rooms with personal things and suggest the practice of remodeling to suit individual monks’ needs. By the sixth century, we can see a wide variety of monastic settlements as well as great diversity in their design, both of which suggest that monks could be selective about what type of monastic housing they adopted. It is perhaps this great variation and the ownership that monks had over their houses within a monastery that led to even greater participation in home ownership in spaces outside of the monastic community.
Notes
1MacCoull 2009, 166–73.
2Hölscher 1954; Wilfong 2002b, 1–22.
3Eichner 2016, 159–70; Eichner and Polz 2022.
4N.17. Trans. Wortley 2013, 16–17.
5Moses 6. Trans. Wortley 2014, 195.
6Bessarion 12. Trans. Wortley 2014, 80–81.
7Moses 7. Trans. Wortley 2014, 195.
8Palladius, Lausiac History, 35.1. Trans. Wortley 2015, 81.
9N. 592.7. Trans. Wortley 2013, 405.
10N. 624. Trans. Wortley 2013, 507.
11Brooks Hedstrom 2009.
12Paul of Tamma, On the Cell 1. Trans. Vivian and Pearson 1998.
13Paul of Tamma, On the Cell 77. Trans. Vivian and Pearson 1998.
14Theodore of Pherme 14. Trans. Wortley 2014, 120.
15Barrie 2017, xxvii.
16Fetterman 1998, 20–22.
17For an application of an emic archaeological reading of Mayan material, see Sharer and Traxler 2006, 66–67; Ewen 2003, 69.
18Emic archaeology was questioned in the mid-twentieth century by archaeologists, who embraced processual archaeology for its unbiased and scientific approach to archaeological material. In contrast, postprocessual archaeologists see benefits to emic archaeology, which seeks the uniqueness of each community, and its material remains through reading historical sources to build a richer understanding of the human past. For explorations of emic readings of the premodern, material world, see Baker 2013 and Elsner and Meyer 2014.
19The archaeology of things will be discussed in greater detail, but the first major proponent of a focus on things is Brown 2001.
20See Deetz 1982; Wilk and Rathje 1982; and compare the historical discussion of household archaeology in Barrett, introduction, this volume.
21I follow the shift in household archaeology espoused in recent years to move away from the descriptive approach toward one that draws more on anthropological and sociological interpretations of the built environment. See Ashmore 2002; Robin 2003; Nash 2009.
22Introna 2014.
23Latour 2005.
24For the discussion see Webmoor and Witmore 2008; Olsen 2010; Nativ 2014.
25Hodder 2012, 14.
26Webmoor 2007.
27Brooks Hedstrom 2017b, 125–26.
28Brunert 1994; Leyser 2006; Rapp 2006; Saak 2006.
29For a detailed discussion of monastic communities and an overview of the archaeological evidence, see Wipszycka 2009; Brooks Hedstrom 2019.
30Goehring 1999; Rapp 2006; Krawiec 2012.
31Kasser et al. 1967; Kasser et al. 1972; Nenein and Wuttmann 2000; Grossmann 2002, 262–66, 491–99.
32Vycichl 1994; Fournet 1997; Borel 2013.
33van der Vliet 2017a.
34Davis 2013; van der Vliet 2017b.
35No. 23 in Room 2 of QR 306. On the role of the supernatural within the house, see further Frankfurter, chapter 10, this volume.
36Bridel 1984.
37Leipoldt 1913; Kuhn 1956; Layton 2014.
38Schroeder 2004; Brooks Hedstrom 2009, 759–60.
39Horn 1973; Kinder 2004.
40Kemp 2000; Barnard et al. 2016.
41Wenger 1998, 73.
42Hendon 2009, 60.
43Asylums, orphanages, workhouses, labor camps, reform establishments, leprosaria, and even monasteries are all institutions that were specifically designed to serve a select population. Recent work in confinement archaeology may provide new avenues for examining the design and function of monastic settlements as spaces intended to protect and control the body of a monk. See Casella 2011; Kay 2013.
44I wish to thank Elisabeth O’Connell for access to the Wadi Sarga material on behalf of the Trustees for the British Museum.
45Brooks Hedstrom 2017b, 33–36, 245–52.
46Dekker 2013.
47Brooks Hedstrom 2017b, 248.
48Brooks Hedstrom 2017a.
49O.Sarga 169. Trans. Crum and Bell, 1922, 139.
50O.Sarga 100. Trans. Crum and Bell, 1922, 93–94.
51O.Sarga 101. Trans. Crum and Bell, 1922, 94–95.
52Sauneron and Jacquet 1972.
53Sauneron 1974.
54Brooks Hedstrom 2017b, 50–53, 263–65.
55Sauneron and Jacquet, vol. 1, 1972, 18–24 and Pl. VIII.
56Compare Davoli (chapter 1, this volume) for an analogous perspective on the environment’s effects on dwelling construction.
57Sauneron and Jacquet, vol. 1, 1972, 100. No. 49.
58Grossmann and Severin 1982.
59Brooks Hedstrom 2017b, 28–31, 225–37.
60Quibell referred to the “poverty” of some rooms and poor workmanship in construction. Quibell 1912, 18, 28.
61Brooks Hedstrom 2017b, 269–70.
62Hermitages 1, 2, 25, 44 and 89; Godlewski 2008.
63Godlewski 1998; 2000; 2008; Leclant and Minault-Gout 1999, 369.
64Godlewski and Parandowska 1997.
65Souvatzi 2012, 15.
66McQuire 2010, 5–6.
67Wilfong 2002a; Schroeder 2009; Krueger 2011.
68Baker 2002, 25.
69Wilson (2014, 43) describes it this way: “Towns must have seemed to be islands floating high above the inundation at one moment and above fields of yellow grain or blue flax at another… . Even islands in the lagoons and swamps were occupied, maximizing the resource potential of the north of Egypt to an extent that not even the pharaohs had achieved.”
70Heidegger 1993.
71Bollnow 2011, 124.
72Schlanger 1992, 92; Ashmore 2002, 1177–78.
73Pachomian Rule 78 & 80–81. Trans. Veilleux 1981, 159.
74See Shenoute, Canons, vol. 9, MONB.XS 336, in Leipoldt, 1913, 58; Trans. Layton, 2014, 167.
75Jezierski 2006.
76O’Connell 2007, 268; Schiller 1926, 26–32.
77The writings of monastic authors John Cassian, Palladius, and historians, such as Socrates and Sozomen, reflect the mythmaking narrative of early monastics as wonder-working saints living with very little food or comfort. See Goehring 2003.
78A similar observation of the disconnect between material remains and ancient texts is outlined in Goldberg 1999.
79Brooks Hedstrom 2017b, 104–9.
80Abba Isaiah, Discourse 4. Trans. Chryssavgis, 2002, 59.
81Abba Isaiah, Discourse 4. Trans. Chryssavgis, 2002, 59.
82Abba Isaiah, Discourse 5. Trans. Chryssavgis, 2002, 74.
83Rapoport 1980, 159.
84Rapoport 2005, 116.
85Rapoport 1982, 60.
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