BYZANTIUM

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
COLLECTIONS AND EXPEDITIONS

Introduction

This exhibition celebrates the University of Michigan's long involvement in the recovery of the material culture of Byzantium, by highlighting the University's collections of artifacts and the University's participation in the expeditions undertaken to document and retrieve those artifacts.

Collections feature highlights of three major University of Michigan collections:

  • The Papyrology Room
  • The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
  • the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology
    • .

    The other side of the gallery highlights University of Michigan Expeditions.

    Although not featured in this installation, the University of Michigan Museum of Art includes early Christian and Byzantine objects within its permanent display of Medieval art. Many of these objects are on long-term loan from other institutions. The scholarly contributions of Byzantinists from the University of Michigan and other institutions provide the basis for this exhibition. In recognition of these contributions a bibliography of books and brochures about various aspects of these collections and expeditions has been included. It is our hope that this exhibition publicize past efforts and generate new research projects.

    Thelma K. Thomas
    Associate Curator of Collections
    1994

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    BYZANTIUM

    In the early fourth century, the emperor Constantine established a new capital for the Roman empire. This capital was situated on the site of a Greek colony called Byzantium.

    Thus, Constantine laid the foundations for the Byzantine -- or East Roman -- empire which, at its greatest extent in the sixth century, stretched from southern Spain in the West to the borders of Sassanian Iran in the East. This spectacularly diverse combination of ethnic groups, languages, cults, and creeds was bound together by a Greco-Roman economic, political and cultural matrix.

    MAP:Byzantine world

    Constantine's legalization of Christianity was crucial for the subsequent development of the Byzantine empire. Gradually, over the following centuries, the Christian religion became the offical religion of the Empire -- and of medieval western Europe as well -- while pagan cults diminished both in importance and in the number of their adherents.

    By the end of the sixth century the Empire was embattled on all sides. Thereafter, its territorial holdings diminished as it lost control of the West to Northern European invaders and parts of the East to Persian, and then to Arab Islamic rule. By the time of its final collapse in the middle of the fifteenth century, the empire was no larger than its capital city, Constantinople.

    COLLECTIONS

    The collection of artifacts and works of art for the University of Michigan began at the end of the 19th century. The Byzantine collections were acquired mostly during the early decades of this century during a time of intense scholarly interest in the emergence of Christianity. The individuals who shaped University of Michigan Byzantine collections sought the evidence for early Christianity in texts. Prof. Francis W. Kelsey of the Department of Latin Language and Literature played a key role. His acquisitions by purchase and, after 1924, also by excavation helped to shape the three major Byzantine collections which are housed in the Papyrology Room, the Rare Book Room and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. Prof. Kelsey and other scholars, primarily classicists also sought artifactual evidence for daily life, the economy and the administration of the Empire during the period of transition from the Roman to the Byzantine empires. Consequently, University of Michigan collections are strongest for the early Byzantine period.

    Collectors, as individuals and as insitutions, attempt to conserve evidence of cultural developments. Thus, the activity of collecting is more than the hunt for rare and precious items, and more than their discovery and subsequent maintenance. Collecting is also a process that can involve the selection of facts, the elision of the unknown or disturbing, and the shaping of a particular version of history.

    Collections represent the past by displaying and explaining specific, tangible remains. Museum-goers (including specialized historians) imagine generalities of the settings that produced these works: who made it? in what type of setting? what happened when it was no longer needed?. Our curiosity does not diminish merely because relatively few of such basic questions find answers. Despite the efforts of collectors, curators of collections, and other scholars whose work explores material survivors of the past, the past remains irevocably distant, in need of preservation, further research and fresh imaginations.

    			   The Papyrology Room
    The Papyrology Room is devoted to the collection, documentation and study of texts written on papyrus, a "paper" product manufactured in Egypt from the locally cultivated papyrus plant.

    The Papyrology Room houses one of the largest collections of inscribed papyri in the world. Approximately 10,000 texts are stored in the Papyrology Room. Nearly all have Egyptian provenances. Together they span a period of two millenia, dating from ca. 1000 BC to AD 1000. A number of different languages are represented: various phases of the ancient Egyptian language (hieroglyphs, demotic, and Coptic), including Greek, and more rarely, Latin. These texts, written on single sheets or long rolls or papyrus, are usually categorized as literary or documentary. Documentary papyri may be legal texts, tax receipts, letters, etc. Thus, papyrology, the study of documentary and literary papyri, contributes to a wide variety of areas of specialized research, including ancient and medieval languages and literature, science, magic, law, economics and religion.

    The core of the collections which date to the Hellenistic, Roman and early Byzantine periods, from ca. 300 BC to AD 650 , were formed during the 1920s and 1930s from divisions following University of Michigan excavations. Karanis, in the Egyptian region of the Faiyum contributed the largest group of papyri (approximately 1,000 items) to the collection. Papyri with known archaeological contexts, such as those from Karanis, offer a glimpse of the cultural diversity of Egypt during these periods. Fourth-century libraries, for example, could contain copies of both classical dramas and contemporary early Byzantine poetry, and fourth-century archives could contain texts in Coptic and Greek, or archives of census records going back several generations.

    In the early years of papyrology, around the turn of the century, when the greatest number of papyri were discovered, archaeological data was not considered to be as important as the text itself and so the provenance of most texts is simply listed as the site of origin. Yet, the ancient traditions of maintaining meticulous and precise textual records, which continued throughout the early Byzantine period, offer a wealth of information about the original location of a papyrus text. Documents with transactions of legal proceedings, for example, are often so detailed that the procedures, the architectural setting and, indeed, the very atmosphere of a trial can be reconstructed (P.Mich. 6922).

    Of critical importance for understanding the dynamics of religious development in Egypt during the late Roman and early Byzantine periods are texts describing a wide range of religious activity. Numerous magical texts show that magic remained an important aspect of religious practice in Egypt throughout the Roman and Byzantine periods (P.Mich. 193). The emergence and rapid diffusion of various forms of Christianity in Egypt are attested to by the copying of Christian scripture (P.Mich.6238), "heretical" texts, the extraordinarily rich tradition of letter-writing, and documentary texts such as the third-century libellus displayed here (P.Mich. 263). The libellus is a certificate of sacrifice to the pagan gods of the Roman state -- the sacrifice was a means of identifying all Christians who would refuse to participate in the pagan ritual. The refusers could then be tried for their disloyalty to the state and sentenced to punishments including, imprisonment, torture and death.

    Papyrology has contributed to interdisciplinary research projects due to the wide range of research projects incorporating the various subjects contained in its texts. Increasingly, papyrology has come to formulate interdisciplinary studies which assess the papyri as physical objects -- as artifacts. Now, attempts are being made to reconstruct the archaeological contexts from incomplete excavation records, and exact findspots of papyri are being recorded in current excavations. A new expeditionary project for the Papyrology Room, in association with the Department of Classical Studies, is devoted to the conservation and decipherment of an enormous cache of papyrus rolls found in a scriptorium attached to a church in Petra, in Jordan.

    Art historians have traced significant formal developments in the manufacture and decoration of ancient books during the early Byzantine period. Perhaps most significant was the adoption of the parchment codex (the square book form we still use today). Literary or documentary texts -- especially those with scientific and magical content -- could be illustrated with diagrams, sketches, or more elaborate illuminations: the format of text illustrations changed in correspondance with the change from roll to codex.

    New computer technology aids continued papyrological research as images are digitized and stored for study as well as for display on the World Wide Web.

    			Rare Books
    The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections holds extensive and unusually diverse collections of ancient through modern written and printed materials. These holdings are in the Social Sciences, Science and Technology, and Humanities Collections. Within the majority of the Humanities Collections are ancient, medieval and renaissance manuscripts. While most of the ancient manuscripts are in the Papyrology Room, the approximately 250 medieval and renaissance manuscripts are located in the Rare Book Room. The majority of the Byzantine manuscripts were purchased in the early decades of this century; several of these (e.g., Ms. 172) were acquired by F.W. Kelsey who also shaped the Kelsey Museum's collections.

    The Byzantine manuscripts in the Rare Book Room are chiefly codices (books) written on parchment (vellum describes parchment of the highest quality), or more rarely paper, and bound between leather covered boards. The majority of the Rare Book Room's Byzantine manuscripts are written in Greek (Ms. 7), but there are also examples in Russian as well as in Coptic, Syriac and Armenian (Ms. 156), the languages of Eastern Orthodox traditions of Christianity. Medieval Christian texts written in other languages, notably Arabic and Ge'ez (ancient Ethiopic) show the continued diffusion of Byzantine manuscript traditions: scripture and scriptural commentary were translated for use in other Orthodox devotional and liturgical traditions; so too were Byzantine practices of manuscript illumination.

    				Kelsey Museum
    The Byzantine collections of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology are most extensive for the early period, that transitional moment when paganism and Christianity coexisted. The majority of the Museum's collections are from Egypt. Coins, above all, and works in stone, wood, bone, ivory, mosaic, glass, textiles and pottery were acquired principally through excavations in the 1920s and 30s, although there have been several generous donations and some purchases.

    Objects of daily life reflect both local manufacture and international trade. These same mundane artifacts provide testimony to the wide range of religious experience as well. Magical amulets, for example, were used in both pagan and Christian practices (KM 26020 and 261190). The Kelsey Museum possesses several hundred such amulets, as well as a series of casts of amulets in other collections. The dispersal of pottery from Egypt throughout Western Europe and the Near East is, in part, attested to by small inexpensive terracotta flasks (KM 8829) from the renowned pilgrimage site of St. Menas. On these flasks the saint is shown standing with his arms outstretched in prayer, beween two crosses and the two camels that carried his body to his final resting place. Pilgrims from across Europe and Asia Minor travelled to the holy shrine of St. Menas in the pilgrimage city of Menapolis, to worship at the saint's tomb, and to carry away with them in such flasks as these the healing oil or water that had been in contact with the tomb. These were dispensed and sold to pilgrims as the tangible and enduring blessings of their pilgrimages.

    Carvings in bone, ivory and wood, principally of local Egyptian manufacture, were generally used in the home, as decorations for furnishings and utensils. Depending upon their intended use and the owner's religious sentiments, their imagery was drawn from the older, but still viable repertory of pagan themes or from the emerging repertory of Christian themes (KM 62.1.57; 62.1.14).

    Textiles, an important Egyptian production since pharaonic times, constitute the greatest portion of the Kelsey Museum collections, numbering approximately 10,000 items. Most of these are fragments of garments and household furnishings woven of wool, linen and, more rarely, cotton and silk; they range in date from the Pharoanic, Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine periods to the later periods of Arab-Islamic rule of Egypt. The Byzantine collection includes examples of plain- and tapestry-woven, and embroidered textiles which draw upon a wide variety of styles. The decorations of these textiles are equally varied, presenting abstract and geometric patterns, as well as figural, vegetal, and animal motifs. Religious content is not always evident although certain examples represent mythological scenes, while others may be identified as Christian by sacred symbols and scenes, angels, saints and other holy personnages.

    Coins comprise the chief part of the Kelsey Museum's Byzantine holdings and constitute half of the total number of items in all the Museum's collections. Most came into the Museum from its excavations; some were acquired through the donations of coin collectors; very few were purchased.

    During antiquity and the middle ages, coinage provided the principle, the only relatively permanent currency for exchange. Imperfections in the coins (e.g. curvature and off-center compositions) reflect that the coinage was struck by hand. Byzantine coinage was strictly controlled by the government, produced at mints under imperial control. Mint marks (used from the later third c. CE) are letters and symbols which tell where the coins were made. Mint marks are particularly helpful in that many coins are often found far from their place of origin. Coinage served another more propagandistic purpose as well. The images and inscriptions impressed on a coin communicated imperial messages throughout the empire. Imperial portraits, following a Roman tradition set by Julius Caesar, are the most common type of coin image. These are usually bust-length and include the emperor's name and titles. The other side of the coin may present personifications of abstract concepts (Peace, Good Fortune, Wisdom, Victory) with which the emperor identified his reign, or his conquests, and members of the imperial family. Religious imagery was another staple of coin imagery. Mythological scenes, and attributes of the gods are common during the late Roman period. Increasing in frequence from the early fourth century, following Constantine's legalization of Christianity, was the sign of the cross.

    The Byzantines struck coins in gold, electrum (an alloy of silver and gold, silver and silver alloys, and bronze . Denominations were based on size and metal content. Gold coins were the most precious, yet silver is less often preserved than gold. Bronze coins were most common, but these corrode easily and survive in poor condition.

    Constantine reformed the Roman coinage system, in response to inflation (reflected in the debasement of metals used in coinage), introducing the solidus (called nomisma in later Byzantine times; known in the medieval western world as the "bezant") and its fractional denominations. Change could be made by cutting a coin into smaller pieces when smaller denominations were not available.

    EXPEDITIONS

    Map of University of Michigan Expedition Sites
    The first University of Michigan expeditions were buying trips, as F.W. Kelsey scoured the markets of Europe and the Near East for artifacts that would further his interests in the ancient mediterranean and serve the University's research and teaching needs. University of Michigan excavations began in 1924 at Karanis, in Egypt and Antioch of Pisidia, in Turkey and, the next year, 1925, explorations began at Carthage, in Tunisia. Although exploration at all three sites ultimately brought early Byzantine material to light, the interest of the excavators was focused on the earlier periods of occupation. The extraordinary quantities of late Roman and early Byzantine material found in subsequent seasons at Karanis and Carthage led the excavators to expand their interests to include the later periods. This led, ultimately, to an important series of campaigns in North Africa, Egypt and Syria. In a short campaign of 1935, excavators discovered early Byzantine jewelry and coinage at the Roman site of Terenouthis, in Egypt.

    By far the most important of these projects for Byzantine studies was the joint Princeton-University of Michigan expedition to the early Byzantine fortified monastery on Mount Sinai which was undertaken in the late 1950s to early 1960s. Current salvage operations nearby may offer an unexpected historical precedent for the construction of this fortress; the 1994 discovery of an earlier roman fort near the Suez Canal suggests a longstanding interest in the security of this remote region of the Empire.

    In the mid 1960s, monumental early Byzantine structures were found at the seaport site of Apollonia in Libya. In the early 1970s, a joint project with Dumbarton Oaks (the Harvard Center for Byzantine Studies) surveyed and excavated the late Roman-Byzantine-Islamic site at Dibsi-Faraj in Syria. The late 1970s saw a renewed interest in Carthage, resulting in the publication of several major late Roman and early Byzantine Carthaginian monuments, an international campaign to preserve the site, and continued exploration of the site. Current work at Lepti Minus in Tunisia continues to uncover early Byzantine monuments. University of Michigan personnel have installed some of these at a new archaeological museum in the modern town of Lepti. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a project combining excavation at the Upper Egyptian site of Coptos -- an important Hellenistic and Roman entrepot -- and survey of the roads leading from Coptos to the Red Sea found evidence of later Roman and Byzantine occupations. These artifacts, principally textiles, pottery and glass, are now stored with the Egyptian Antiquities Organization; their testimony to continued use of Red Sea trade networks merits further study.

    			Karanis
    The town of Karanis is one of the most significant and informative sites for the characterization of late Roman and early Byzantine Egypt. This is due, in large part, to the combination of different categories of evidence -- textual and artifactual -- recovered here. For this site, it is not necessary to interpret the archaeological record in isolation from any written record, nor to read texts in isolation from their physical context. Texts and artifacts offer fascinatingly detailed glimpses of economic systems, religious developments and social relations.

    Karanis forms the foundation of the Kelsey Museum's collections. The 44,000 artifacts from Karanis (not counting the papyri in the Papyrology Room) comprise approximately fifty percent of the Museum's holdings.

    Karanis first came to the attention of Prof. Kelsey due to the explorations of two of the first papyrologists, B.P Grenfell and A.S. Hunt at the end of the ninteenth century. Its unique combination of well-preserved papyri, artifacts and architectural remains compelled him to undertake over a decade of excavation. The Karanis expedition was recorded on films, in still photography, and with unusually full attention to stratigraphy. Preliminary publications of the site drew upon this wealth of information to select portions of the topography and of categories of objects (architecture, textiles, glass, papyri, etc.) Several generations later a renewed interest in the Kelsey Museum collections spawned additional publications and exhibitions. Current research on the site, conducted by scholars from numerous institutions in the United States, Europe and Egypt has prompted the organization of these projects under the aegis of the Kelsey Museum's Karanis Planning Study which seeks to identify areas of interest and potential contributing scholars for a more comprehensive series of publications.

    MAP of Karanis

    The town of Karanis endured over a period of about 800 years, flourishing in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Only a small portion, perhaps of tenth of the town's surface area, has been excavated. That portion is in a "downtown" area which contains two large pagan temples, numerous large granaries, a public bath, and several residential quarters.

    Site of Karanis

    The town of Karanis adjoins the rich, cultivable land of Egypt's Faiyum lake region. The business of agriculture was conducted at Karanis. Granaries appear to have stored, sold, and dispensed the produce of surrounding small farms, villages and estates of the Faiyum. The granaries and their contents, in conjunction with associated habitations and documentary papyri written in Greek (many are in the collection of the Papyrology Room) provide evidence of the extensive economic system of Faiyum.

    Karanis may have remained a polytheist (pagan) town even during the early Byzantine centuries. There is a great deal of evidence for continued non-Christian religious activity, much of it combining the various aspects of the town's culturally mixed population. One example of this multifaceted syncretism (mixture of religious traditions) is the identification of the Egyptian goddess Isis with the Greek goddess Aphrodite. There is a mixture of architectural and artistic traditions as well.

    No monumental Christian remains have been found as yet although continued exploration of the site may alter this conclusion. The edges of town, the traditional location for necropoleis (cities for the dead), will be of particular interest to historians of early Christian remains for this is where much of the evidence for earliest Christianity is found. Further explorations may yield evidence for how the population might have shifted from Karanis' center to its fringes over the long life-span of the town.

    Architectural remains at Karanis still stand several meters in height, preserving nearly complete shells of buildings and, in several extraordinary instance, their contents.

    Pottery at Karanis preserves evidence of importation, from North African centers and local centers of pottery production.

    Agricultural implements, and tools for the production of textiles were found in great numbers at Karanis. These are plain, sturdy implements. Unlike most museum collections of Byzantine Egyptian textiles, which were purchased for their decorations, these are without much ornament, They are, in fact, garbage, the detritus of a culture that recycled everything. They were found in rubbish heaps. The purposes of some of the re-used bits of fabric are unknown.

    Whereas donated collections of coins contain fine individual specimens (usually without provenance), the bulk of the coins from Karanis were found in hoards which span the dates of the occupation of the site. The latest coins dating to the fourth century, provide one of our most telling testimonies to the breadth of international trade and the strength of Karanis as an agricultural center during the late Roman and early Byzantine periods.

    			Mount Sinai
    The monastery of Saint Catherine is located at the foot of Mount Sinai, which is described in the Old Testament book of Exodus, as the holy place to which Moses ascended to receive the tablets of the law, where he was blessed with the vision of the burning bush.

    The phenomenon of the holy place, or locus sanctus, is evidence of the radical perceptual shift that transformed the Roman empire into the Byzantine empire. The religious terrain of the Roman empire was an inclusive patchwork of many different religious cultures. As seen through polytheistic Roman eyes, the landscape contained places associated with myths of pagan gods -- whether those gods were Greco-Egyptian, Syrian, Italic, etc. This Roman terrain included monotheistic views: Jews saw the landscape through the lens of their own history and sacred texts; as the empire took on a Christian identity, so too did its landscape, adopting the sacred template given in the Old and New Testaments.

    In a search of a new, wholly Christian way of life, men and women sought out loca sancta where they could devote themselves to the attainment of heaven on earth, where they could attend to the holy sites and partake of the remaining spiritual "charge" lingering at the site.

    Soon, pilgrims began to visit these loca sancta to see a tangible record of the history recorded in the scriptures and to visit the holy men and women at the sites. The earliest extensive record of a pilgrimage to Mount Sinai, the diary of the nun Egeria, which dates to the end of the fourth century AD, is also the first documentary evidence that travelling to and settling in the Sinai remained a dangerous proposition. Justinian had the fortified monastery and the church constructed at this most sparsely inhabited desert region to offer protection against bandits and other marauders who threatened the pilgrims and the settled monks.

    Justinian's structure was part of a larger empire-wide building program meant to strengthen the Empire's borders and to christianize its terrain by covering it with churches. Justinian's church enclosed the site of the burning bush. Justinian's fortress monastery at Sinai is an indication that the conversion of the topography of the Roman and Byzantine empires was more deeply imprinted upon the terrain than the abandonment of some towns and the founding of other settlements: for example, whereas the settlements at Karanis and Sinai overlap chronologically, the processes of their Christianization are dramatically different, as are their interrelationships with the wider world. In contrast to the role of Karanis as a distribution center in a varied agricultural economy, the monastic settlement at Sinai functioned successfully without economic ties to the surrounding region, and precisely because it lacked the secular framework of life in the cities and towns.

    Justinian's fortified monastery has been inhabited continuously since its construction in the mid-sixth century. The Greek Orthodox monks who live there have maintained traditional devotional practices including the the worship of holy images, icons. The monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai houses one of the largest collections of icons in the world -- the only collection of icons that spans early to post-Byzantine icon production -- as well as a large and important collection of Byzantine manuscripts and inscribed materials.

    Between 1956 and 1965, the University of Michigan, along with Princeton University and the University of Alexandria, undertook a joint expedition to the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai. The joint Michigan-Princeton expedition to Sinai continues to have profound ramifications for Byzantine studies thanks to its publications of the architecture, icons, and inscriptions of the monastery. Prof. George Forsyth, then the director of the Kelsey Museum, surveyed and interpreted the architecture of the church and monastery. Prof. Ihor Sevcenko, then of Columbia University recorded and interpreted the inscriptions. Prof. Kurt Weitzmann of Princeton University studied the icons. Fred Anderegg of the Kelsey Museum managed to present a complete and technically accomplished dossier despite occasionally dangerous scaffolding and a lack of running water.

    BYZANTINE STUDIES CONFERENCE

    The inspirational occasion for these two exhibitions is the XXth Annual Byzantine Studies Conference which, this year (October 20-23, 1994), is hosted by the University of Michigan for the second time. The Byzantine Studies Conference is an annual forum for the presentation and discussion of papers embodying current research on all aspects of Byzantine history and culture. Two items from University of Michigan collections will be discussed in papers given at the conference: the smaller of two fragments of an early papyrus roll is displayed below (the larger is over 9 feet long -- P.Mich 6901) with a later Byzantine codex (Ms. 50).

    Traditionally, University of Michigan collections are the subject of research its regular faculty, staff and students as well as scholars from outside the University. The collections are also used for teaching within the undergraduate and graduate curricula, as well as across the boundaries of the University, deliberately including school, religious and other community groups among its consituents.