The Thebaid in Times of Crisis

Know about the book -

The Thebaid in Times of Crisis is written by Ralph Birk and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 3111608050 (ISBN 10) and 9783111608051 (ISBN 13).

This collective volume explores societal crises in Hellenistic Egypt, focussing regionally on the Thebaid, from small-scale insurgencies to full-fledged secession. As a result of an international conference held at the Freie Universität Berlin (May 2-4, 2019), the presented case studies ask how actors – and modern scholars – of Ptolemaic Egypt shape and frame times of crisis and what traces remain thereof in the record. As decisive moments in time, crises reveal fundamental features of societies and structure the flow of events into historically meaningful, yet potentially teleological, trajectories. In Ptolemaic historiography, from Polybius till today, the Great Theban Revolt (206–186 BCE) served as such a turning point, demarcating rise and decline. By confronting the historiographic record with independent – and yet partially unexploited – sources, such as temple epigraphy, Demotic (literary) texts, archaeological, numismatic and private documentation, the reunited studies aim at diversifying the perspectives on and in societal conflicts in Ptolemaic Egypt, in order to gain a fuller and more nuanced picture of how various actors, kings, queens, officials, and priests coped with times of crisis.