Professors Fournet and Hickey are interested in the culture and society of an ancient town called Panopolis (modern Akhmim, about a 500km drive south of Cairo). In Late Antiquity (c. 300‒700 CE), Panopolis was a “city of letters” second only to Alexandria, and many of the works produced by its authors have been preserved. The documentation illuminating the socio-economic structures that nurtured these individuals, in contrast, is rather poor. Fournet and Hickey’s FBF project seeks to remedy this imbalance through the careful study of an extraordinary set of wooden writing tablets recently rediscovered at the British Library.
UC PI:
Todd Hickey
Department of Classics, UC Berkeley
French PI:
Jean-Luc Fournet
Culture Ecrite de l'Antiquité Tardive et Papyrologie Byzantine, Collège de France
