Domestic Textile Production in Dakhla Oasis in the Fourth Century AD

Ancient Kellis, modern Ismant el-Kharab is located in Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert. The main occupation of the village was from the early to late Roman period (late 1st century to the beginning of the 5th century AD). Excavated as part of the Dakhleh Oasis Project, the site has revealed textual and archaeological evidence from which a detailed picture of life can be painted. To date, the main publications of the village’s finds have focussed on the textual remains, of literary and documentary texts in Coptic, Greek, and Syriac.1 A comparable publication of the archaeological evidence from the site is still pending, but the context of the surviving evidence is clear. Many of the documents were found in House 3, left there after the abandonment of the village around the turn of the 5th century, and reflect the concerns of several generations of its residents. One reason for the abundance of textual sources is the volume of written communication between individuals in Kellis and others in the Nile Valley, mostly members of the community who had travelled there for a variety of reasons. This Oasis–Valley duality is fundamental to understanding many of the documents, as well as the realities of life for Kellites. The distinction is made clear through reference to the Oasis (ⲟⲩⲁϩⲉ) and the Valley (“Egypt”, ⲕⲏⲙⲉ) and the importance of location will be raised at several points in the following discussion. The Manichaean nature of the community, for which the texts are the primary evidence, has received the greatest amount of scholarly attention to date. Yet, there is vast potential for the examination of a range of topics, especially in conjunction with the surviving material remains. Examination of the domestic textile industry in Kellis holds particular promise. Possible routes of research include: the use of raw material, equipment (including matching the physical with the textual evidence), production techniques, organisation of work, gendered divisions in labour, the economic value and impact of textiles, local and national networks, and the religious use and role of textiles. Given the restricted scope of the current study, my intention is to provide a snapshot into the world of Kellis textiles and to demonstrate the potential for a complete study of textiles at the village. In order to do so, I look at three different areas: • The lexical study of textiles, both in Greek and Coptic. Concerning the latter, the Kellis material makes an important contribution in two respects: it significantly expands the chronologic and geographic range of our Coptic evidence, being among our earliest corpora of Coptic documents and located far from the Nile Valley. • The procurement of raw materials. Wool is used as a case study to highlight the range of evidence available and the different areas of life in the Oasis upon which light is shed. • The economy of textiles and textile production

The nation’s health care bill

During the past 50 years, spending on health care services—by households, private businesses, and state and federal governments—increased dramatically and now approaches one out of every five dollars spent in the United States. The benefits of health care spending have not been distributed equally across the population, with less going to a growing number of uninsured people. Moreover, the United States does not realize proportional value for its spending on health care. It spends more per capita than any of six other industrialized countries but ranks below them on measures of health care quality, efficiency, and equity. Unable to sustain rising contributions to health insurance, employers are shifting more of the cost to workers, thereby increasing the number who cannot afford coverage. Federal, state, and local governments have taken on some of these costs by subsidizing the health services of elderly, disabled, and poor people. Health spending, once a small fraction of the federal budget, now exceeds spending on defense or Social Security. State and local governments now devote more of their own taxes to health care than to elementary and secondary education, despite the federal government’s paying for the majority of Medicaid spending. The data in this chartbook indicate that the financial burden of health care spending presents a disproportionate burden on uninsured and sick people, small businesses, and low-wage workers. In addition to the magnitude and maldistribution of health spending, society’s “opportunity costs” are high: Private businesses, households, and state and federal governments could have made other highly productive purchases had health spending not exceeded economy-wide growth. For the government, health care spending decreases the money available for other investments, such as education, infrastructure, and debt reduction. As health costs increase and the population ages, the historical reallocation of US productive capacity to health care is unsustainable. With pressing needs elsewhere, the country must make the health system more efficient, equitable, and affordable. Passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) by Congress in 2010 was a comprehensive step to contain health care costs, particularly for families, while extending health care coverage to millions of uninsured people. The potential benefits of the ACA include better access to health professionals and prescription drugs, decreased medical debt and fewer subsequent bankruptcy filings, and lower labor costs for small businesses. Constrained health care spending will allow businesses and government to make more cost-effective investments elsewhere without raising prices or burdening taxpayers. With this chartbook as a baseline, users can monitor changes that result from the ACA and take future steps to enhance the cost-effectiveness of the US health care system.Publishe

“Forgive Me, Because I Could Not Find Papyrus”: The Use and Distribution of Ostraca in Late Antique Western Thebes

The series Material Text Cultures is the publication organ of the Collaborative Research Center 933 of the same name at Heidelberg University, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)

Scribal networks, taxation and the role of coptic in Marwanid Egypt

After the Arab conquest of 639–42 CE Egypt became part of the burgeoning Islamic empire. Over the course of the seventh and eighth centuries a series of measures was introduced by the new rulers. They established a dīwān in Egypt’s new capital, Fusṭāṭ, a postal service, a system of corvées targeted toward equipping the navy and providing labor for major construction projects, and a new religious poll tax payable by all adult non-Muslim men. This period is characterized by increasing Arabization (the use of Arabic) and Islamization (the appointment of Muslim officials throughout the country, replacing local officials).1 The wealth of the surviving textual sources from Egypt – in Arabic (the language of the new rulers), Greek (the administrative and legal language of the previous regime, as well as that of a considerable number of the population), and Coptic (the indigenous language) – is unrivaled and allows us to examine language use in the country after the conquest in a way that is not possible for other provinces in the empire

New Texts from Early Islamic Egypt: A Bilingual Taxation Archive

In the Papyrology Collection of the University of Michigan is a group of tax receipts for the poll tax, here the διάγραφον, belonging to the same man, Cosma son of Prow and his brother Johannes, who appears in a couple of the receipts

A Framework for Evaluating Learning Progressions on Features Related to Their Intended Uses

In recent years, learning progressions (LPs) have captured the interest of educators and policy makers. There have been numerous efforts to develop LPs aligned to college and career readiness standards, to unpack these standards, and to provide more clarity on the pathways students follow to reach them. There is great variation, however, in the structure, content, and features of LPs, and these have implications for the LP’s most appropriate use. The purpose of this research was to devise a framework to understand and evaluate key features of an LP, including its structure, content, usability, and validity evidence. We maintain that educators and other stakeholders should understand these key features so they can evaluate whether an LP is appropriate for an intended use