This article deals with different modes of monastic economic agency: the mobilisation of internal means and forces of production to supply its inhabitants with staple food, and the activation of spiritual capital to supply inhabitants and visitors with spiritual goods, such as the forgiveness of sins. These practices are exemplified by recent findings of an ongoing project at Deir Anba Hadra. After an overview of the monastery and its role in the first cataract region, two sections deal with the two kinds of economy attested here. One section focuses on archaeological evidence for food production, such as mills and ovens, in the workshop area of the monastery. The role of food production intra muros for mere subsistence versus a local market is discussed here. Another section is dedicated to secondary inscriptions left on the walls of the monastery by inhabitants and visitors and their potential role in the monastic economy.

Monastic communities needed wine for individual consumption, as well as for liturgical purposes and payments in kind. Next to grain, wine was the most common commodity transported from different villages to monasteries, as we learn from invoices from Bawit, Wadi Sarga, and Edfu. It is therefore widely assumed that monasteries, especially the more affluent ones, owned vineyards. Following a brief overview of the purposes wine served in monasteries, this chapter presents and reassesses the evidence for monastic vineyard ownership and considers other options available to monks seeking to procure wine for their needs.

In the late 1970s, the American artist, Stanley Roseman, undertook a project entitled The Monastic Life, during which he visited sixty monasteries located throughout Europe. He participated in their daily life and ‘made drawings of monks and nuns at prayer, work, and study. He drew them at the communal worship in church and in meditation in the quietude of their cells.’1 Roseman’s 1979 chalk on paper drawing of Benedictine monks at the Abbaye de Solesmes in France depicts two men with shaven heads who are dressed in long hooded robes. They are bent forward with their faces anchored towards the ground. Their eyes are closed, and their hands are carefully placed on their thighs. The men stand alone: they are the focus of the artist’s composition; they exist in isolation from their background; they are still, serene, frozen in perpetual worship and detached from their contemporary world. This is the essence of monastic life – the ideal – but it is not the full story.

Egypt has an abundance of well-preserved monastic settlements. The mudbrick structures provide ample evidence for examining domestic spaces associated with the daily household activities of food preparation through the acts of cooking, frying, and baking. While monastic literature presents a portrait of food scarcity in monastic communities, the archaeological evidence of kitchens and cooking spaces creates a more dynamic story of how monks interacted with ingredients, prepared meals, and considered the economy of space in designing areas for food preparation. The monastic movement required new habitations and ones in new locations to be set apart from the traditional and biological households. The importance of consumption habits within the family setting played a role in reinforcing one’s identity in a monastery or in a non-monastic family. The numerous examples of preserved monastic kitchens offer substantial evidence for a robust analysis that combines the theoretical models of household archaeology and spatial configuration to consider how monastic builders addressed the specific needs for food production within a homosocial community. The advent of new monastic settlements in late antique Egypt provides a unique opportunity to observe the evolution of cooking within an archaeological context.

The St Michael Collection (dating from 823 to 914) from the Fayum Oasis is the earliest extant group of painted Coptic manuscripts and is impressive because it has remained together as a cohesive whole. The manuscripts reveal aspects of monastic book production ranging from acquisition of materials to the practices of scribes and painters, as well as aspects of book culture, from the dedication of books to sharing them across a regional network of monasteries. The study of this unique collection allows the cost of these manuscripts to be estimated, using inferences about the materials, time, and effort required to produce them. The results of this analysis enhance our understanding of the relationships among patrons, books, monasteries, and scribes in the ninth and tenth centuries in the Fayum Oasis. Ultimately, this chapter argues that, within the context of the Egyptian monastic economy, the production of these books was not expensive. Yet, the cost of books in the medieval period was still perceived to be high.

This chapter examines the economic pattern of the monastery built around the Memorial of Moses on Mount Nebo in the Roman province of Arabia (modern Jordan). After a topographical introduction of the site’s landscape and its physical environment, the agricultural production strategies of the monastic complex are taken into consideration. On one hand, particular attention is paid to the production facilities found in the monastery, such as wine presses and ovens for the preparation of bread, and on the other hand to the traces of agricultural tillage, the management of water resources, and religious and lay patronage. The analysis of seeds and palaeobotanical remains found in the latest archaeological excavations allow us to reflect on the possible diet of the monks and, consequently, on the crops grown in the monastic fields of the Nebo region.

German excavations carried out between 1980 and 1995 in Tall Bi’a (Raqqa, Syria) uncovered the remains of a unique Syrian orthodox monastery on the top of the central hill above the Bronze Age city of Tuttul. The building complex is unique in that, although it is of inexpensive mudbrick, three of the rooms are decorated with carefully executed mosaic floors with figural decoration. Two of these mosaics have Syriac inscriptions that date the construction of the building (509 AD) and the renovation of parts of it (595 AD). The complex can be identified as the monastery of Mar Zakkai. This chapter focuses on the economic life of the monastery and describes it as a household unit. The starting point is the well-preserved refectory, the large kitchen, and the storerooms. The refectory is equipped with circular benches, unique in Syria, parallels of which are known only from Egypt.

The early seventh-century papyrus from the St Sergius Monastery at Nessana in Roman Third Palestine (Negev desert, Israel) illustrates how early byzantine monastic stewards categorized and handled lay donations. Called an ‘Account of Church Offerings’, P.Ness. III 79 preserves registers that formally separate gifts called ‘blessings’ (eulogiai) from ‘offerings’ (prosphorai). Though unique in the papyrus record, such categorical distinctions are also implied by contemporary hagiography; P.Ness III 79 confirms that monks formally recognized a categorical difference between these two types of gifts, as implied by hagiography. Moreover, hagiography indicates that blessings were considered gifts that did not oblige their recipients to give anything in return, while offerings expected recipients to provide some sort of service. Marks placed next to entries of offerings in P.Ness III 79 suggest that concern for obligation guided monastic stewardship practices. Such monastic practices and concerns may be illuminated by distinctions drawn between restricted and unrestricted gifts by modern non-profits.

This chapter explores aspects of the transformation of the spatial and built environment of monasteries in the Southern Levant, with a focus on Arabia and Palaestina. Literary sources and archaeological excavations provide tangible evidence of the development of monasteries into productive units in the context of a larger rural economy. The success of the management model and its integration into the social and economic fabric are testified by the growing number of minor monastic structures equipped with wine and olive oil production units, cisterns, and terraced fields. The rise of monasticism reflects the importance of the Church in daily life, the agency and jurisdiction of local bishops – as evidenced by the mosaic inscriptions – and mutual contacts with adjacent villages. Papyri and other written sources combine to produce a picture of a well-structured economy aimed at intensive production, especially in the sixth and seventh centuries, even in the wake of critical conditions such as pandemics, climatic downturns, and political changes.

This chapter targets the local horizon of sanctuaries whose scope and spheres of influence transcended the local. Variously labelled as ‘regional’ or ‘Panhellenic’ sanctuaries, Funke’s contribution challenges the implicit dichotomy between these descriptors and the local. He begins with the observation that religious conduct in the polis was always subject to diverse spatial dynamics, articulated, for instance, in the different reach of urban and liminal cult sites. A similar spatial and functional diversification is pitched for Panhellenic sites. Rather than being elusive or purely notional, Panhellenic perspectives manifested themselves in the evocation of Greek gods and in cult practices that were considered genuinely Hellenic in nature. As shared points of reference, Panhellenic commodities were not only commonly accepted by the Greeks but, in fact, were substantiated through hardwired regulations that assured availability to all.

Rethinking the local horizon of Greek religion is a challenging but necessary endeavour. After two decades of fascination with Mediterranean connectivity and entangled worlds, it is worthwhile to remember that a significant part of the population in Antiquity, as well as in later periods up to the twentieth century, moved and functioned in a vital space that hardly exceeded a radius of 25 km from their home.1 This observation provides an image of a ‘small world’ that is quite different from the one recently explored by Irad Malkin. The attention paid to the local dimension is by no means a historiographical narrowing: works on globalisation and its early manifestations in Antiquity convincingly ascertained that the global–local binomial, with various variations and intermediate scales, was structurally inescapable. In other words, questioning the local dimension of Greek religion in no way means isolating idiosyncratic cultic realities and studying specific identities in restricted contexts. On the contrary, as all the contributions in this book show, it is a matter of articulating several levels of social reality, in which the local dimension fuels interactions, comparisons, differentiations, collaborations, representations, within individual and collective dynamics. In ancient Mediterranean contexts, distant in time and space, with variable unknowns and incomplete evidence, it is necessary and salutary to avoid optimistic generalisation and to carefully analyse each single situation as a social laboratory prone to elaborate creative social devices. Religion is a space of communication between people and superhuman entities, open to change and uncertainty. The local scale is, at the same time, the most evident, rich, and intricate layer for an archaeology of religious practices.

Jan Bremmer’s contribution returns to the thorny issue of divine identities. Bremmer offers a case-study that shows the interplay between local and universal forces that characterises most recent works on localism, religious and otherwise. His study of the presence of the goddess Hera on the Greek island of Samos during the Archaic and Classical periods integrates myth, ritual, and cult, and brings them together in a comprehensive account of the same divine persona. The chapter confirms that one and the same divine presence might combine both local and universal elements. Visible throughout is a distinct tendency to localise elements of the divine persona by attributing Hera with particular local connections. Through an erudite study of the larger contexts in which the worship of Hera took place on Samos, Bremmer teases out some of the forces at work in this localising process: among them are the move to integrate aspects of the local landscape or environment into the cultic practice.