This book is a major new contribution to the study of households and everyday life in antiquity. Because the arid Egyptian environment affords extraordinary preservation, Egypt is in many ways an ideal place to study this subject. Making full use of this rich evidence, Boozer's work helps to humanise our perception of the ancient world, foregrounding the emotions, sensations, and experiences of people's daily lives. Rich in vivid, descriptive detail, this volume also makes an important argument: the home was a locus of historical change and agency, a site where ordinary people shaped history rather than merely getting swept up in its current. Domestic life was profoundly entangled with other spheres, contrary to ‘the artificial distinctions that scholars have drawn between the domestic, religious, craft, and mortuary spheres, to name only a few’ (232).
The book is largely organised around the human life cycle, with chapters devoted to different periods from conception to death (and beyond: a chapter on death and the afterlife rightly affirms the extent to which the dead remained part of their households). Each chapter begins with a short vignette featuring two fictional characters, Pamoun and Tabes, at different points in their biographies. However, the life-cycle theme does not wholly determine the structure of the book, and some chapters focus on activities and contexts rather than life stages (e.g. a chapter on the practices involved in dwelling and homemaking; another on the care and maintenance of the body).
One of the most powerful aspects of this volume is the attention and respect that B. pays to ancient people's subjective experiences. Emotion, attachment and sensation emerge not as epiphenomena, but as drivers of history. Here B. makes excellent use of the extraordinary textual, visual and material record from Roman Egypt, presenting readers with numerous extended quotations from papyrological sources and abundant illustrations of domestic and other artifacts. Although the subtitle places particular emphasis on archaeology (B.'s area of specialisation), the book is thoroughly interdisciplinary. Some of the most moving passages are extended quotations and discussions of papyri, from private letters to legal texts. We read a letter from a child to his father, in which the young boy complains about his father's refusal to take him to Alexandria (78); a man writing to his absent wife to lament that he misses her so much that he hasn't been able to bathe since his last bath with her (137); a sister consoling her brother for the loss of his wife (223); and much more. Even legal documents may be deeply moving to modern readers through the specificity with which they describe their signatories via identifying physical traits, such as age, skin colour and scars. Although we will never ourselves meet ‘Taorsenouphis, about forty-five years old with a scar on her left calf, and Tephorsais, about thirty-five years old with a scar on her left hand’ (129), this brief description in a loan contract drives home the fact that these sisters were real individuals, with real lives and experiences, and the (literal) scars to show for them.
B.'s emphasis on subjective and embodied experience builds on recent developments in sensory archaeology and the archaeology of affect and emotion. Her attention to the sources also produces new historical insights. For example, she argues against the notion that people must have cared less for their children because child mortality was high (e.g 214–15, 231). To the contrary, B. finds compelling evidence for strong parent–child bonds. More generally, she makes a case for the depth and importance of emotional ties between the members of Romano-Egyptian households. She argues that we should imagine those ties extending to the physical house itself, which would have held ‘emotional significance to its dwellers’ as the site of ‘their most poignant memories of life and death’ (231). Other arguments include an emphasis on continuity rather than (just) division between polytheistic and Christian practices within the domestic sphere (231–2) and a presentation of social identity as flexible and constantly under construction (e.g. 221).
For this reviewer, opportunities for quibbling are few. In order to acknowledge the complexities of ethnic identity in Roman Egypt, B. draws a distinction between ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic affinity’ (22), but this opposition raises questions that could have benefitted from deeper analysis. The discussion of the biological versus social background of sex and gender (45–6) might have been nuanced by some more explicit questioning of whether there is ever such a thing as a pre-social or pre-cultural human body. It might also have been interesting to engage with the sparse, but intriguing, evidence for some individuals who might be described as gender-transgressive or non-binary (e.g. M. DePauw, ZÄS 130 (2003), 49–59).
Both professionals and students will benefit from this book, whose style is accessible and enjoyable to read. It would make an excellent textbook for a course on everyday life in Roman Egypt, and individual chapters could be assigned for a course on cross-cultural household archaeology; the chapter on ‘settings and communities’ includes some overview of general background on Roman Egypt, which would be helpful for students unfamiliar with this particular region or historical period.
This is an important book which deserves to be widely read and cited. B. has succeeded admirably in writing ‘an account of Roman Egypt with the people put back in’ (230). Staring out from mummy portraits and speaking to each other (and to us) in their letters, contracts and petitions, the real people of Roman Egypt make their presence vividly felt throughout this book. As a history written from below rather than above (230–1), B.'s carefully researched work reminds readers of the humanity we share with those who came before us.
