Onomastics and Classical Culture in Egypt’s Western Oases

Abstract A considerable number of male names known from classical Greece appear in the papyri of the Ptolemaic period but virtually disappear from use by the early Roman imperial period. Some of these reappear after several centuries of disuse, turning up in papyri and ostraca from the third and fourth centuries ad and even later. The oases of the western desert (Kharga, Dakhla, and Bahariya) supply a disproportionate share of the attestations of these names. This chapter argues that the names are not merely classical or even literary, but derive specifically from the educational curriculum of the propertied classes and are likely to reflect the aspirations of the class from which the members of the city councils were drawn in the period after the Severan grant of councils to the metropoleis. The names in question reflect not only the poetic curriculum of grammar schools but the rhetorical, historical, and philosophical texts, including anthologies, that played an important role in rhetorical training. Why this trend was so pronounced in the oases remains unclear; their isolation from the valley may have intensified the feeling of a need for such cultural marking of the managerial class.