Karanis was founded in the mid-third century BCE as part of Ptolemy II’s attempts to reclaim agricultural land in the Fayum region and became prosperous during the later Ptolemaic and Roman periods. It was most likely populated into the 6th or 7th centuries CE and then disappeared underneath the sands until the 19th century. From 1924 to 1935 it was excavated by the University of Michigan, which uncovered a large part of the town and recovered thousands of artefacts. (Wilfong 2014, 1-2) Due to the large volume of materials recovered and documented, Karanis is an excellent resource to learn about the activities of an agricultural town during the Greco-Roman period in Egypt.
This exhibit will look at one house in Karanis and the materials discovered within to try to reconstruct the appearance and the practice of domestic religion in a town during the Greco-Roman period.