Religious Violence in Late Antique Egypt Reconsidered: The Cases of Alexandria, Panopolis and Philae
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The period of Late Antiquity has long been perceived, and is still often perceived, through the lens of (Christian) literary works, which tell dramatic stories of violence against temples, statues and even ‘pagans’, and may give the impression that this was a period of widespread religious violence. Egypt, where such stories abound, has often been seen as a particularly good illustration of the pervasive nature of religious violence in the Late Antique world. This article takes a different view. By adopting a theoretical framework on religious violence from Religious Studies and including all the other sources available from Egypt—papyri, inscriptions and archaeological remains—it argues that events were often dramatized for ideological reasons and that, when seen against a general background of religious transformation, religious violence occurred only occasionally in specific local or regional circumstances. This point will be demonstrated by discussing three iconic events that have often been adduced as symptomatic of widespread violence in Late Antique Egypt: the destruction of the Serapeum at Alexandria in 391/392, the anti-‘pagan’ crusade of Abbot Shenoute in the region of Panopolis around 400, and the closure of the Isis temple at Philae in 535–537.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".