Qasr el-Zayan: An Egyptian temple in the frontiers of the Hellenistic and Roman Empires

Conférence du Prof. Nikolaos Lazaridis (University of Sacramento)

Qasr el-Zayan was an important Ptolemaic and Roman temple that lay 21 km south of the town of El-Kharga, in Egypt’s western desert. With its abundant water resources, the ancient settlement adjacent to the temple constituted a reputed agricultural hub and an attractive stopover for travelers on the routes from El-Kharga to Dush in the south or to Esna, in the Nile Valley. The site is currently included in the list of priorities set by Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), because its unprotected archaeological remains have been under threat by encroaching farming and construction, and because no archaeological work has been carried out there since 2010. Zayan Archaeology, an international team consisting of archaeologists, Egyptologists, ceramicists, and epigraphers, has recently received SCA’s permission to survey and excavate Qasr el-Zayan’s site and its environs. Zayan Archaeology, in collaboration with the SCA, will concentrate on excavating the site’s settlement and cemetery, and on conducting a thorough epigraphic survey at the temple. The primary goals of Zayan Archaeology’s upcoming missions are to determine the dates of Qasr el-Zayan’s premodern habitation and usage, to study its complex historical relationship with other sites in the region, such as the temple at Qasr el-Ghueita, 5 kilometers north of the site, and to reconstruct its function and role as part of the region’s developments under the Ptolemaic and Roman regimes. Zayan Archaeology, also, aims to engage with the local community from the nearby villages of Zayan, ‘Aref, and Khartoum, promoting the site’s heritage value and inviting the community to contribute to the team’s efforts to protect the site and to improve its current state of preservation.

Nikolaos Lazaridis is the Professor of Ancient Mediterranean History at California State University Sacramento, where since 2009, he has been teaching courses on ancient Egypt, Greece, and Near East. In 2007, he published his doctoral dissertation on ancient Egyptian and Greek wisdom literature, and since then, he has authored numerous articles on comparative ancient literature, Egyptian and Greek epigraphy, and Egyptian storytelling. Since 2007, he has been conducting fieldwork in Egypt's western desert, as the chief epigrapher of the North Kharga Oasis-Darb Ain Amur Survey team, and in 2023, he became the director of Zayan Archaeology, an international project on the site of Qasr el-Zayan in Kharga Oasis. He is currently preparing the monograph The art of ancient Egyptian storytelling and the publication of ancient rock graffiti from Kharga Oasis.