Picturing the Roman Army in Third-Century Egypt. Roman Tombstones from the Military Necropolis at Nicopolis.

Following the defeat of Marc Antony and Cleopatra in 30 B.C., a Roman fortress was established southwest of the newly founded town of Nikopolisnear Alexandria in Egypt. Its necropolis was located close to the fortress and produced more than 140 tombstones, most of them associated with legio II Traiana fortis</>. Only a small minority has been discovered in situ</>; the major part has been sold on the antiquities market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As a result, the tombstones are now scattered among various museum collections (Alexandria, Port Said, Tanta, Cairo, Suez, London, Warsaw, Brussels, Marseille, Bologna, Stockholm, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Barcelona, Athens, Paris, Uppsala and Edinburgh). I have reconstructed this corpus by combining the method of museum archaeology with criteria such as language (primarilyLatin), material (primarily marble, presumably from Asia Minor), size (diminutive) and iconography. The tombstones, previously published in scattered studies with no particular attention to their dating or iconography, are now for the first time available to scholars in a single volume. 

Keywords:Epigraphy, Military tombstones, Roman Egypt, Roman army

Disciplines:Historical theory and methodology, History

Project type:PhD project