Les Inscriptions coptes et grecques du temple d'Hathor a Deir al-Medina.

• Author: Depuydt, Leo
• Position: Book review

Les Inscriptions coptes et grecques du temple d'Hathor a Deir al-Medina. By CHANTAL HEURTEL. Bibliotheque d'etudes coptes, vol. 16. Cairo: INSTITUT FRANCAIS D'ARCHEOLOGIE ORIENTALE, 2004. Pp. 206, illus. (paper).

Near the ruins of the desert village at Deir el-Medina across the Nile from Luxor and Karnak, where the workers who decorated the rock-tombs of the Pharaohs of the New Kingdom (ca. 1500-1000 B.C.E.) once lived, a small temple dedicated to the goddess Hathor was built in Ptolemaic and Roman times. E. Baraize and B. Bruyere restored and excavated it in the first half of the twentieth century. The temple is fairly well preserved. Its walls bear graffiti written in hieroglyphic, demotic, Greek, and Coptic. The task of publishing these graffiti was entrusted to the late P. du Bourguet, whose distinguished efforts did not come to fruition. L. Gabolde and L. Menassa have meanwhile completed du Bourguet's work on the hieroglyphic and demotic inscriptions. The result appeared in 2002 as vol. 121 of the IFAO's Memoires publies par les Membres. Chantal Heurtel now finishes what Bourguet began for the Greek and Coptic texts inscribed on the temple's walls and on the entrance gate of its enclosure wall. Heurtel credits several earlier students of the texts (including R. Lepsius, who published thirty-one of the Coptic inscriptions in his Denkmaler, at III.ii: 117 and VI: 102-3) for valuable contributions. But this book is clearly hers.

Like so many structures dating to Pharaonic times, the temple was reused in Late Antiquity for Christian ends. The mere name Deir el-Medina, "Monastery of the Town," as designation of a Pharaonic site signifies how Christianity supplanted the native Egyptian religion from the third and fourth century C.E. onward. The author notes (p. 2) that the IFAO's preferred spelling has changed from Deir el-Medineh to Deir al-Medina. But while making the second component more Classical, then why not also the first, namely as Dair or Dayr?

The Greek and Coptic graffiti are Christian in inspiration. Their authors presumably included both locals and pilgrims. The graffiti reveal that the temple was transformed into a sanctuary (topos in Greco-Coptic) dedicated to a certain martyr named Isidore (probably by the sixth century C.E.), the author suspects by the Theophilus mentioned in inscriptions nos. 3 and 22. None of the graffiti contains year dates, which would have been counted by the Era of Diocletian, that is, from 284/85...