Soknopaiou Nesos (meris of Herakleides)
Documentation
According to Davoli the archaeological site of Soknopaiou Nesos measures 660 x 300 m, i.e. about 20 ha.
After a period of looting systematical excavations were undertaken in Soknopaiou Nesos by E. Peterson of the university of Michigan in 1931. They resulted in a detailed excavation report (Peterson 1935), which was a model for its time. In 2003, more than fifty years later excavations were resumed by the university of Lecce, for which see now:
- http://www.museopapirologico.eu/snp-progetto.htm
- http://www.museopapirologico.eu/Componenti%20web/SNP%20Project.htm
The project has resulted into a detailed topographical map of the site. The archaeological reports of the campaings of 2003-2007 are available online:
- http://www.museopapirologico.eu/snp-reports.htm
A general survey of the papyrus documentation about Soknopaiou Nesos is offered in Clarysse 2005. Soknopaiou Nesos is mentioned 1103 times in 836 texts. The spread is very similar to that of Tebtynis, but the peak for Soknopaiou Nesos is somewhat later, in the period AD 130-220 (666 texts or more than half in 90 years). The documentation is more tightly packed than in Tebtynis, with hardly any texts in the Ptolemaic period, where the priestly archive partly published in P.Amherst and by Bresciani in P.Oxf. Griffith, yielded only few toponymic references. As a result Soknopaiou Nesos is referred to only 25 times in Ptolemaic texts, vs. 112 references for Tebtynis. This is partly due to the fact that the Zenon archive, which accounts for over half of the Ptolemaic texts from the Fayum, has no connection with those temple villages. In fact we know that in Tebtynis an older temple was rebuilt by Ptolemy I and that the absence of papyri before 250 is merely due by accident of survival. For Greek literary texts from Soknopaiou Nesos, click here. Demotic literary material is surveyed by van Minnen 1998a and is now included in Trismegistos (click here).
Name
In Egyptian text the name of the village is TA-mAy-n-Sbk-nb-PAy, "the island of Sobek lord of Pay" (Pay meaning again "island"!), often followed by the epithet "the great god". This is rendered in Greek by Soknopaiou Nesos, in the earlier texts often preceded by the feminine article ἡ. Both in Demotic and in Greek this can be abbreviated to mAy or Νῆσος, which makes it sometimes difficult to decide if a proper name is meant or a general indication of a place. Dime, the modern name of the site, is perhaps an Arab rendering of old Egyptian TA-mAy.
Population
The number of inhabitants of Soknopaiou Nesos in the second half of the second cent. BC and in the early third cent. BC can be estimated from the number of male tax payers. According to the poll-tax register SB XVI 12816 there were 244 adult males in the village in September 178, but this number was reduced to 169 by August 179, perhaps due to the great plague. In AD 207/209 only 135 males were left (SB XIV 11715). If a multiplicatior of 3.1 is used, the total population would be:
Aug. 178 : 244 adult males => 756 inhabitants
Sept. 179 : 169 adult males => 523 inhabitants
207/209 : 135 adult males => 413 inhabitants
Most inhabitants of the village were priests. in SB XVI 12816 one hundred males are tax-exempt, no doubt because of their priestly status. The round number and the fact that the number does not change when the general population has diminished, show that these were numeri clausi, controled by the administration.
According to Messeri-Savorelli, however, the 169 adult males in Sept. 179 were all priests. This high figure is indeed confirmed by the speech of a lawyer, dated AD 186 or 187, where the number of priests in the village is given as 160 (PSI VIII 927). In this view the number of tax-exempt priests was limited to 100 and the other priests had to pay the poll-tax along with the rest of the population. On the basis of an early third century text (Stud. Pal. XXII 67 + 167), Messeri calculates that at the end of the second century AD the village still had between 1000 and 1100 inhabitants, priests and non-priests together. Van Minnen, p. 43, using the same sources, arrives at a slightly lower figure of about 900 inhabitants.
Bibliography
W. Clarysse