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16 - The House of Serenos and Wall Painting in the Western Oases

from Part IV - An Oasis Culture?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2019

Roger S. Bagnall
Affiliation:
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York
Gaëlle Tallet
Affiliation:
Université de Limoges
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Summary

Excavations at Amheida between 2004 and 2006 revealed a large, late antique domicile, dubbed the “House of Serenos,” filled with an astonishing array of decorated plaster – a rare find in terms of quantity as well as the subject matter of the paintings in the house’s main reception room. Showcasing lively figural scenes drawn from Greco-Roman mythology in an era when one might expect instead Christian iconography, the visual program of this house reveals much about the sophisticated visual and literary culture at play in a city that could otherwise be considered a backwater given its distance from the major metropolitan centers of the Nile. This chapter surveys therefore the extraordinary corpus of late antique wall painting from Amheida’s House of Serenos alongside other examples of decorated plaster from the Great Oasis in order to interrogate the role played by artistic practice and visual culture in general in articulating the social, political, and religious dynamics of late antique Egypt.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Great Oasis of Egypt
The Kharga and Dakhla Oases in Antiquity
, pp. 281 - 296
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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