Alan K. Bowman

Bio: Alan K. Bowman is an academic researcher from University of Oxford. The author has contributed to research in topics: Empire & Roman Empire. The author has an hindex of 36, co-authored 76 publications receiving 3069 citations. Previous affiliations of Alan K. Bowman include University of Manchester.

Cities and Administration in Roman Egypt

Abstract: These two inscriptions come from the precinct of the temple of Hathor at Denderah (Tentyra), capital of the Tentyrite nome, just north of Thebes in Upper Egypt. The impressive remains of the complex are mostly late Ptolemaic and Roman (re)constructions, but they look Pharaonic and suggest social and cultural continuity across the centuries. The inscriptions, however, illustrate the radical changes in communal organization and administration which the Romans introduced. These changes form the subject of this paper. The first inscription dates to 12 B.C., but is almost entirely in the pre-Roman tradition. It is a trilingual dedication with the primary version in demotic (i.e. Egyptian). Augustus is god, implicitly Pharaoh, and lacks his Roman titles. The strategos (governor of the nome) Ptolemaios gives himself obsolete court titles and a string of local priesthoods. Ptolemaios came from a family which had hereditarily held local priesthoods (and probably continued to hold them after him), and his father Panas had preceded him as strategos of the Tentyrite nome, retaining office through the Roman annexation. On this occasion Ptolemaios' dedication was personal, but other dedications show him acting, like his father, as the head of local cult associations. Ptolemaios is last attested as strategos in 5 B.C. Five years later, our second inscription, which dates to 23 September A.D. I, reveals a very different situation. The dedication was made on Augustus' birthday, and was finely inscribed in Greek only. The strategos Tryphon, whose name suggests an Alexandrian sent up to the Tentyrite nome, figures only as an element of the official dating clause standard throughout Roman Egypt; he is just a cog in the Roman administrative machine. The dedication was made corporately by the local community, structured, as we will see, on the new Roman model.

Literacy and Power in the Ancient World

Abstract: 1. Literacy and power in the ancient world Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf 2. The Persepolis Tablets: speech, seal and script D. M. Lewis 3. Literacy and the city-state in archaic and classical Greece Rosalind Thomas 4. Literacy and language in Egypt in the Late and Persian Periods John Ray 5. Literacy and power in Ptolemaic Egypt Dorothy J. Thompson 6. Power and the spread of writing in the West Greg Woolf 7. Texts, scribes and power in Roman Judaea M. D. Goodman 8. The Roman imperial army: letters and literacy on the northern frontier Alan K. Bowman 9. Literacy and power in early Christianity Robin Lane Fox 10. Greek and Syriac in Late Antique Syria S. P. Brock 11. Later Roman bureaucracy: going through the files C. M. Kelly 12. Literacy and power in the migration period Peter Heather 13. Texts as weapons: polemic in the Byzantine dark ages Averil Cameron.

The Vindolanda writing-tablets (Tabulae Vindolandenses II)

Abstract: The Vindolanda writing-tablets cast a unique light upon the role of the occupying Roman forces who organized the frontier region between England and Scotland, just before Hadrian's Wall was built. This substantial work of palaeography includes editions, with translation and commentary, of all the tablets which contain significant amounts of text; and also brief descriptions of those which cannot be read, or contain very little writing, and brief re-editions of all the texts published earlier in Bowman and Thomas. The introduction to this work analyzes recent evidence provided by the tablets, revealing Roman life and literacy on the frontier, and examines the nature and importance of these remarkable documents.

Agriculture in Egypt from Pharaonic to modern times

Abstract: Agriculture in Egypt from Pharaonic to Modern Times The Village Economy in Pharaonic Egypt Land Tenure in the New Kingdom: the Role of Women Smallholders and the Military Land Tenure Regime in Ptolemaic Upper Egypt Irrigation and Drainage in the Early Ptolemaic Fayyum New and Old in the Ptolemaic Fayyum Agricultural Tenancy and Village Society in Roman Egypt The Village of Theadelphia in the Fayyum: Land and Population in the Second Century Agrarian History and the Labour Organisation of Byzantine Large Estates Agriculture among the Christian Population of Early Islamic Egypt: Practice and Theory Land Tenure in Egypt in the First Six Centuries of Islamic Rule (7th-12th Centuries C. E.) International Trade and the Medieval Egyptian Countryside Fayyum Agriculture at the End of the Ayyubid Era: Nabulsi's Survey A Tale of Two Villages: Family, Property and Economic Activity in Rural Egypt in the 1840s An Industrial Revolution in Agriculture? Some Observations on the Evolution of Rural Egypt in the Nineteenth Century A Long Look at nearly Two Centuries of Long Staple Cotton Irrigation in Contemporary Egypt State, Landlord, Parliament and Peasant: the Story of the 1992 Tenancy Law in Egypt

The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History

Abstract: (2000). The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 139-139.

The Cambridge economic history of the Greco-Roman world

Abstract: In this, the first comprehensive one-volume survey of the economies of classical antiquity, twenty-eight chapters summarise the current state of scholarship in their specialised fields and sketch new directions for research. The approach taken is both thematic, with chapters on the underlying determinants of economic performance, and chronological, with coverage of the whole of the Greek and Roman worlds extending from the Aegean Bronze Age to Late Antiquity. The contributors move beyond the substantivist-formalist debates that dominated twentieth-century scholarship and display a new interest in economic growth in antiquity. New methods for measuring economic development are explored, often combining textual and archaeological data that have previously been treated separately. Fully accessible to non-specialist, the volume represents a major advance in our understanding of the economic expansion that made the civilisation of the classical Mediterranean world possible.

Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul. By G. Woolf. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge1998/2000. Pp. xv + 296, figs 20. Price: £40.00 (bound); £15.95 (paper). ISBN 0 521 414456 (bound); 0 521 789826 (paper).

Abstract: 1. On Romanization 2. Roman power and the Gauls 3. The civilising ethos 4. Mapping cultural change 5. Urbanising the Gauls 6. The culture of the countryside 7. Consuming Rome 8. Keeping faith? 9. Being Roman in Gaul.

Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations

Abstract: In this ground-breaking work, Norman Yoffee shatters the prevailing myths underpinning our understanding of the evolution of early civilisations. He counters the emphasis in traditional scholarship on the rule of 'godly' and despotic male leaders and challenges the conventional view that early states were uniformly constituted bureaucratic and regional entities. Instead, by illuminating the role of slaves and soldiers, priests and priestesses, peasants and prostitutes, merchants and craftsmen, Yoffee depicts an evolutionary process centred on the concerns of everyday life. Drawing on evidence from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica, the author explores the variety of trajectories followed by ancient states, from birth to collapse, and explores the social processes that shape any account of the human past. This book offers a bold new interpretation of social evolutionary theory, and as such it is essential reading for any student or scholar with an interest in the emergence of complex society.