A number of the new settlements that were founded in the Faiyum region during the reign of Ptolemy II continued to be quite prosperous in Roman times. Both illicit and legitimate excavations of these sites have yielded huge numbers of well-preserved papyri and ostraca with texts in Greek, Demotic, and Coptic.
Also from the Faiyum come the famous “Faiyum mummy portraits,” excavated by Flinders Petrie in a large Roman Period cemetery to the north of a Middle Kingdom pyramid (Amenemhat Ill’s) at Hawara (Plate 10.3). But other contemporaneous burials that were more traditionally Egyptian in decoration were also excavated in this cemetery. A Ptolemaic cemetery that Petrie excavated at the mainly pharaonic site of Medinet Gurob in the Faiyum yielded many Greek and Demotic texts, from private letters and wills to works of the Greek classics. The papyri were reused (and thus preserved) as the underlying material for the cartonnage mummy cases, otherwise usually made of plastered cloth.
After spectacular finds of papyri in 1899-1900 by Grenfell and Hunt, the site of Tebtunis (Tebtynis) on the southern edge of the Faiyum was excavated early in the 20th century by German and then Italian archaeologists. More recently a French-Italian team (the French Institute of Archaeology in Cairo and the University of Milan) has been excavating the site, and in an ancient dump they have uncovered ca. 6,000 texts, mostly in Greek and Demotic, on papyri and ostraca. There are also hieratic (Egyptian) papyri, and texts in Aramaic, the Near Eastern lingua franca, have revealed the existence of a Jewish community at Tebtunis in the 2nd century Bc. Founded in the Middle Kingdom, the town gained importance in the Greco-Roman Period when it was an administrative and economic center, with a cult temple of the crocodile god Soknebtunis. A major center of Egyptian culture in Greco-Roman times, the town has yielded the most important prov-enanced finds of late literary texts (in Demotic). The town continued to be occupied until the mid-13th century ad.
Finds from the recent Tebtunis excavations include many rolled papyri, still sealed with lumps of clay, that were addressed to the temple oracle - frequently asking the oracle to identify thieves. A demotic papyrus in the Cairo Museum that describes the Soknebtunis temple led the excavators to the discovery of a large processional way (dramas), 14 meters wide, along part of which about 100 sheep and goats were buried in small graves near the temple, as offerings in the 1st-2nd centuries ad. To the east of the temple, well-preserved houses dating from the 3rd century BC to the 2nd century ad have been excavated, including a 2nd-century BC baker’s house with the remains of four ovens and three granaries. To the west of the temple and within the foundations of a Roman "tower house” were the remains of public baths of the 3rd century BC with limestone tubs. In the late 2nd century BC new baths were built nearby that included bathtubs and smaller basins, with groups of rooms for men and women.
Italian archaeologists have also been working in the southwestern Faiyum region at Medinet Madi, the site of the Greco-Roman town of Narmouthis. The site was excavated early in the 20th century, with large-scale excavations conducted by the university of Milan, 1934-1939 and from 1966 onward; the later excavations have been directed by Edda Bresciani (University of Pisa). This was also the site of a Middle Kingdom temple, and the town continued to be used in Byzantine times (at least seven churches were built) and well after the Muslim conquest. Recently the Roman military camp (castrum) there was located using a satellite image, and excavations began in 2006. The 50-meter-square castrum had mud-brick walls almost 4 meters thick and a vaulted cistern cut deep into the bedrock that was connected to a sophisticated hydraulic system for supplying it with water.
Many Demotic and Greek texts have been found in Narmouthis, as well as later Coptic and Arabic ones. Ptolemaic temples there included one where crocodiles were kept in a special room. Cults of crocodile deities were quite prominent in the Faiyum, and many mummified crocodiles, from babies to adults, have been found in Greco-Roman cemeteries in the region.
In the northeastern Faiyum, the town of Karanis was founded by Ptolemy II. Although some parts of the town had been destroyed by sebbakh diggers, excavations from 1924 to 1935 by the University of Michigan/Kelsey Museum of Archaeology (first under the direction of J. L. Starkey, and later by E. E. Peterson), revealed strata of well-preserved mud-brick houses, some with paintings still on the plastered walls. Large Roman “tower houses” two to three stories high were sometimes preserved, often with vaulted underground storage rooms. Similar houses have been found at other Greco-Roman settlements in the Faiyum, including the one at Tebtunis. Largely unpublished finds by Cairo University excavations at Karanis (1966-1975) include Roman baths as well as houses.
The artifactual evidence from the American excavations at Karanis, along with the many excavated papyri and ostraca, provide much information about daily life of non-elites from the 3rd century Bc to the 6th century ad. Household artifacts, such as baskets, ovens, grinding stones, and storage jars, were found in situ inside the houses or in their courtyards. Many of the 27,000 coins came from hoards - attesting to economic insecurity. Excavated textiles were so well preserved that a study was done on 3,000 samples, providing a chronological sequence and information about weaving techniques, and locally produced textiles versus imported ones. Because of the Kelsey Museum’s documented excavations at Karanis, of well-preserved domestic contexts and associated texts, detailed socio-economic studies, such as have been done for the New Kingdom workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina (see 8.11), should yield interesting results for Karanis.
In 2005 the UCLA-RUG Fayum Project (of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Rijksuniversiteit, Groningen, the Netherlands) began a site-management project at Karanis. Since the earlier American excavations there did not backfill the excavation trenches, much erosion of structures has occurred since the 1930s, and the new project includes making a virtual reality model of the site as well as investigations directed at conservation of the remaining architecture. New excavations in areas where the University of Michigan project did not excavate have uncovered one of the largest known granaries as well as a domestic context in the central part of the site with archaeobotanical and zoological material.
The Greco-Roman towns in the Faiyum were basically organized around a temple and its processional way (dramas). Some of these towns show strict orthogonal planning from the earliest phase of Ptolemaic building, with grids of, north-south and east-west streets. Other towns in the Faiyum were less strictly organized along the dramas. According to Wolfgang Muller, the latter type consisted of towns with houses located along secondary streets which were parallel to or crossed the dramas, or more frequently, towns with houses organized more agglutinatively around the temple precinct,
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