الفهرس 
Introduction
The inhabitants of the Eastern desertOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Over the past thirty 30 years, excavations in Egypt’s Eastern desert, which was home to important mining sites and the hub for long-distance trade between Rome and the Near and Far East, have turned up thousands of potsherds inscribed with Greek and much fewer with Latin. Most of these texts are private and official letters and they tend to date to the first three centuries of the current era. Studying this large corpus of material, which has not been studied in a synthetic manner before, reveals multiple aspects of life in Roman Egypt: for example, we see how letters were exchanged, who handled and delivered them, whence and to where they were delivered, what obstacles could prevent their delivery, and who communicated with whom, namely, the networks that were formed through epistolary communication. The Eastern desert brought people of different cultures together, who came to this hardly habitable area generally for reasons of work and commercial interest. It was important to the Romans because of its mines of precious metals and stones, and for its access to the Red Sea trade route, which connected the Mediterranean to South Arabia, Southern Africa, and India. People stationed in the Eastern desert needed to communicate, and communication required infrastructure. The present work has thus been conducted with particular focus on the circumstances that surrounded the process of the circulation of letters and goods in the Eastern desert. Overall, this study attempts to reveal how epistolary communication was the underpinning of Roman commercial and military operations in a critical part of the Roman empire. The data for this work is derived from around 931 published (and forthcoming) letters from the Eastern desert, information about which was gathered in a Filemaker database. The letters date from the 1st to the 3rd century CE.The first chapter explores the communities of inhabitants in the Eastern desert who corresponded with each other. Besides that, it provides a survey of the Eastern desert letters and elucidates their common features and the materials used for writing. It also sheds light on the routes and stations between which the correspondence traveled. Moreover, it discusses the reasons for writing these letters. Studying them reveals that the inhabitants of the Eastern desert relied on letter writing to serve a wide range of life necessities. To get most things one had to write requesting them. This explains why a large number of letters are concerned with exchanging goods and various commodities. On the official side, individuals mainly used letter writing in order to manage complex logistics and to control work progress in the mines and quarries.The second chapter deals briefly with the ancient postal service, generally. Then, it turns to the official postal system in the Eastern desert and the types of couriers that were employed by it. The study discusses each type of messenger (e.g., cavalryman, monomachos, etc.) who conveyed letters, sometimes with accompanying goods, trying to show in which capacity they operated, whether officially or unofficially. The third chapter focuses on the individual carriers, whose number appears to have been the largest in the Eastern desert, particularly in the case of the transfer of the unofficial correspondence. The chapter also deals with some aspects pertaining to these carriers, such as their social networks, and extends to discuss other means of delivery (e.g., boats, the caravan, the probole, etc) which are not much attested with regard to letter exchange, so far, but rather with regard to goods transfer. The fourth chapter deals with aspects pertaining to the process of circulation of both letters and goods, either in official or unofficial correspondence, such as the organization of the circulation of official correspondence and goods, the obstacles and dangers that hampered the activity and movement of the carriers, privacy and the authentication of letters, and verbal messages and the herald. The fifth chapter looks at the writers of the Eastern desert letters and discusses various examples of these throughout the first three centuries CE. Studying the hands exposes the agents involved in writing the letters. Here we meet people of different origins (Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Thracians etc.) who held various positions. They were high officials, soldiers, civilians, workers and also women. Many of these women were from the circle of the trader Philokles, the most prolific letter writer of the Eastern desert, which reflects the vital connection between commerce and literacy. As a trader, Philokles relied heavily on letters to conduct his business, even though he was hardly literate. Had he lived in the Nile, he may well have never written. Chapter five also considers the largely silent apparatus of official scribes (and interpreters) who were likely responsible for some of the clerical work at the Eastern desert sites, but who are known mainly through brief references in dedicatory inscriptions (e.g., from Berenike) and the occasional ostraca (from Mons Claudianus and Krokodilo). Moreover, the chapter tries to prove the existence of a central “postal” office in three main stations: Mons Claudianus in the northern part of the desert, Krokodilo on the road to Myos Hormos, and, most likely, Dios on the road to Berenike.