The session will consist of two papers – by Prof. AnneMarie Luijendijk and Senior Lecturer Louise Blanke – followed by a shared discussion and questions round on the seminar specific theme ‘ancient waste – trash or treasures?’The topics of the talks are:
‘Trash and Treasure: Con-textualizing Trash at Oxyrhynchus’ (AnneMarie Luijendijk)
The ancient city of Oxyrhynchus in middle Egypt is famous for the treasure trove of the roughly half a million papyrus fragments excavated from the city’s trash heaps under the supervision of two British scholars, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt. My paper delves deeper into the trash aspects of the papyrological finds at Oxyrhynchus and other Egyptian cities and towns (Antinoopolis, Karanis). In order to understand how texts and other objects ended up on garbage, my paper discusses ancient approaches to discarding. I also situate these practices in a longer trajectory of trash in Egypt, from “people [who] sift dirt in the rubbish-heaps” to the so-called “garbage people,” or Zabbaleen of modern-day Cairo.
‘Down the Drain: What Trash Reveals about Bathing Culture in Late Antique Jerash’ (Louise Blanke)
Between 2002 and 2010, the University of Copenhagen’s Islamic Jerash Project excavated a series of buildings in Jerash’s urban centre dating from the late Roman period into the early Islamic period (c. 300–900). Among these buildings was a bathhouse which, in addition to a series of heated and unheated rooms, comprised two main drains that served to divert wastewater from the bathhouse’s basins and from its adjacent latrine into Jerash’s main sewage system. The excavation of these drains uncovered a rich assemblage of finds, some of which were flushed out with the bathwater, while others—mainly those found in the latrine drain—were deliberately deposited as rubbish. These finds allow us to examine the social practices that took place within the late antique bathhouse and establish that although the building changed radically through time, the activities conducted within it largely remained the same.
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