Saints in the Caesareum: Commemorative Toponymy at Hermopolis
Most of the evidence discussed up to this point has spoken only indirectly to the central question of how the Christian inhabitants of late antique Hermopolis thought about the pagan monuments that still marked the topography of their city.
However, a handful of Hermopolite sources suggest that, in some cases, the transformation of sacred landscapes might be commemorated in the very toponyms applied to those landscapes. The most important of these documents, PLond.Copt. 1100, is an account (XOPOC) which appears to record payments of, or liability for, the diagraphon tax on the part of a group of Hermopolite churches.48 The document, acquired in el-Ashmunein by the Rev. Chauncey Murch and now in the collection of the British Library, is written on paper and consists of five lines of Coptic on the recto and one line on the verso; according to the editor, Walter Crum, the verso bears an Arabic text that pre-dates the Coptic. Crum did not assign a date to the Coptic text, but Stefan Timm has suggested placing the document's composition in the ninth century; such a late date would be in accordance with the use of paper, first attested in Egypt at the very end of the eighth century, and the presence of an Arabic text on the verso.49 The document is of interest to the present discussion because several of the churches named in the account are further qualified by toponyms giving their specific location; in five cases, these can be identified as pagan temples or civic monuments that had evidently been adapted for Christian use. Thus, we find the churches of Saint Theodore at the Agora (npAP(lOC) O©OA(^p©) ©TAPOp/, line 4), Michael at the Agora (MlX(AHA) ©TAPOp/, line 4), Saint Theodore at the Caesareum (n?AP(lOC) -e-©OA(O>p©) ©TK©CAp/, line 5), Michael at the Temple (MlX(AHA) ©n©pn©, line 7), and the Virgin at the Praetorium (TnApO(©NOC) ©n©np©TO>p, line 8).50P.Lond.Copt.
1100 raises several significant questions, not least of which is the provenance of the document, which lacks a secure archaeological context. Crum noted that the churches were ‘presumably in Hermopolis or its neighbourhood', and a number of internal criteria suggest that the churches listed in the text did indeed stand within the city limits.51 Hermopolis is not explicitly named in the document, which refers only to ‘the city' (TnOAlC), but the sheer quantity of religious institutions ascribed to ‘the city' points to a fairly dense urban settlement. Similarly, references to the agora, the Caesareum and the Praetorium also suggest an urban and heavily Hellenized (or Romanized) context for the document. The identification of the churches as Hermopolite is also substantiated by external witnesses; a church of ‘Saint Theodore in the Caesareum' (^APlO(C) -e-©OAO>p© MnKAlCApiN, lines 1-2) is attested in the Hermopolite P.Ryl.Copt. 238, an inventory of that institution's movable property,52 and the church of Saint Theodore at the Agora may also be referred to in P.Sorb. II 69, a seventh-century Hermopolite fiscal record.53 Several of the churches listed in P.Lond.Copt. 1100 can be correlated with Hermopolite churches described by Abu Salih in the early thirteenth century, and, as Crum noted, the reference to the church of ‘the Virgin at the Sycamore-Tree' (‘TnApo(©NOC) ©n©^OY©') draws on a long-standing Hermopolite legend concerning the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt.54If it can be assumed that the churches named in P.Lond.Copt. 1100 were indeed located in the city of Hermopolis itself, the question then arises of whether is it possible to identify these establishments in the archaeological record. Unfortunately, despite the extensive archaeological exploration of Greco-Roman remains in the city centre, it is not possible to make any secure identifications at the present time. A reference to the agora in the Repair Papyrus (SB X 10299) suggests that the city's marketplace was located near a temple to Hadrian, itself on or near Antinoo Street, and the German excavators of the city centre originally believed they had uncovered the agora on the south-east corner of the intersection of Antinoo Street and the Dromos of Hermes.55 However, this site was subsequently identified as a Ptolemaic temple complex, largely demolished and rebuilt as a Christian basilica in the mid-fifth century ad.56 More recently, Bailey has proposed a location ‘in the West City Quarter, within the south-west quadrant formed by the crossing of Antinoe Street and the main north-south road, the Dromos of Hermes’, but this remains speculative.57 The existence of a Caesareum in Hermopolis is attested from at least the early second century ad on the basis of P.Brem.
38, a petition concerning liturgical obligations, including sacrifices in that establishment (line 18). Schmitz placed the Caesareum in the district of East Citadel on the basis of P.Bad. IV 89.27-28 (ad 222-35), but the precise location of the temple within that sector of the city has yet to be identified.58 Nor can the Praetorium be located with respect to the known archaeological evidence. Perhaps the most elusive of the toponyms that appears in P.Lond. Copt. 1100 is the reference to the church ‘of Michael at the Temple'. The Coptic word ‘temple' (‘ρπβ') is generic and could be used equally to designate temples to Egyptian or Greco-Roman deities, so the phrase ‘at the temple' offers no a priori indication of the deity to which that establishment was dedicated.59 Günter Lanczkowski has argued that in Egyptian Christianity, the figure of the archangel Michael took on several attributes proper to the god Thoth; however, he stops short of identifying the church of St Michael at the Temple with the ruins of either the Ramesside or the Late Period temple of Thoth at Hermopolis, and the identity of the temple rededicated in the name of the archangel remains unknown.60Failing any positive identification of the churches mentioned in P.Lond. Copt. 1100 with the known archaeological remains of late antique Hermopolis, we are left with only the place names themselves, and it remains to be seen why the scribe of our document was so explicit in his identification of the Hermopolite monuments that had been appropriated to the cults of Michael, Theodore and the Virgin. The practice of commemorative or ideologically- motivated toponymy was certainly not unknown in Greco-Roman and late antique Egypt, as shown, for example, by the shifting nomenclature of the city variously known as Crocodilopolis/Ptolemais Euergetis/Arsinoe. However, it is somewhat unusual to find such explicit references to the Christian reuse of temples and other public buildings contained in the very toponyms applied to those monuments.
The names of churches built in or around Pharaonic temples do not normally make reference to the underlying pagan landscape; so, for example, the church constructed in the second court of the Ramesside temple of Medinet Habu is referred to in the Theban documents as the ‘Holy Church of Jeme’ (‘ΤΘΚΚλΗΟΙ\ ΘΤθγ\\Β ΝΧΗΜΘ’),61 and the Christian chapel constructed within the Isis temple at Philae is the ‘House’ (‘οίκος’) or ‘Topos' (‘τόπος’) of Saint Stephen.62 With this in mind, the unusual specificity of the references in P.Lond.Copt. 1100 begs a further explanation. It is possible that these toponymic references were simply intended to differentiate the churches in question from others in the city which shared the same titular saint; the list mentions three churches dedicated to St Theodore, three honouring the Archangel Michael, and five churches of the Virgin Mary, and if all of these churches were indeed located within the city limits, a means of distinguishing them from one another would have been necessary. However, the reference to ‘Saint Theodore in the Caesareum’ in P.Ryl.Copt. 138 - an internal administrative document, in which such a geographic reference would seem to be unnecessary - suggests that the phrase ‘at/in the Caesareum’ is, in fact, an integral part of the church’s name. In fact, I would argue that what we see in the case of these Hermopolite churches ‘at the Caesareum’, ‘at the temple’ and ‘at the Praetorium’ is a deliberate evocation of the underlying (pagan) monumental landscape, intended to serve as a reminder of the physical act of temple-conversion.Recent research in the history of early Christianity has rightly problema- tized the concept of ‘temple-conversion’, challenging the notion of a rapid and linear progression from pagan temple to Christian church.63 Indeed, in many cases where temple sites were reused by Christian communities, it appears that the phase of Christian activity did not follow hard upon the end of pagan cult practice, but came after decades or even centuries of desuetude or secular reuse.64 The pattern at Hermopolis, however, was somewhat different.
Two clear examples of temple-conversion are attested in the archaeological record at Hermopolis: the great basilica, constructed in the city centre on the site of an early Ptolemaic temple complex,65 and the so-called ‘South Church', built in the forecourt of a temple of Ramesses II that had been restored under Nero.66 Both churches date to the mid-fourth century ad, and, in both cases, the construction of the church appears to have closely followed the abandonment and/or demolition of the original temple site. At the South Church, the presence of early fifth-century fill at the level of the temple pavement suggests that the Ramesside temple whose forecourt the church occupied had remained in use until shortly before the church's construction.67 In the case of the basilica, the excellent state of preservation of the Hellenistic spolia employed in the construction of the foundations indicates that not only had the Ptolemaic complex remained in good repair up to the fifth century, but also that elements of the complex were deliberately demolished to make way for the church's construction.68 Moreover, in the construction of the basilica, the fifth-century architects seem to have deliberately reused elements of the earlier Ptolemaic complex in such a way as to provide a clear visual statement of the newfound Christian domination of that space.69 Laszlo Tbrbk has recently suggested that... the closing of the pagan sanctuaries, the donation of the building site, and the erection of the episcopal complex seem to have represented a concerted action of the imperial government, the town council, and the bishop to transform the civic and symbolic centre of the city by replacing the ancient pagan cult institution(s) of great prestige by an episcopal cathedral.70
Although the churches named in PLond.Copt. 1100 cannot be securely associated with this fifth-century Christian initiative,71 I would argue that they participated in the same overall effort to Christianize the Hermopolite landscape through the conversion of major public monuments, and that toponyms like ‘Saint Theodore at the Caesareum' and ‘Michael at the Temple' served as a deliberate commemoration of this historical act of templeconversion, functioning at the linguistic, rather than the architectural, level.