The topic of violence in Late Antiquity is a heavily debated subject and many scholars have focused on this issue, as evidenced by the many studies published within the last ten years. The perception of Late Antiquity as a period of widespread religious violence is mainly influenced by Christian literary sources, who document accounts of violence against temples, statuary, and people alike. Egypt, in particular, has often been used as an example to demonstrate the destructive nature of religious violence that existed in the ancient world. However, the concept of religious violence is a complicated and nuanced topic. In Egypt, the many accounts by the Christian sources were written with specific intentions and the events documented in the texts were often exaggerated. The objective of this thesis is to provide a study of statue destruction by Christians between the fourth to seventh centuries CE in Egypt, and determine whether these destructions were acts of religious violence or were carried out for another reason in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of violence in Late Antiquity. By juxtaposing accounts from literary sources and archaeological evidence, the study seeks to determine whether the literary sources are accurate in their documentation of widespread statue destruction, or whether the violent discourse present in the literary sources is the result of Christian polemical purposes.

MAREK DOSPĚL Bīr Shawīsh, Small Oasis: Ostraka and Other Inscribed Material ABSTRACT The present dissertation is primarily a publication of a group of primary sources. These sources come from the recent archaeological exploration by Charles University in Prague of the site of Bīr Shawīsh in the Baḥrīya Oasis ("Small Oasis" in Classical Antiquity) in Egypt's Western Desert and consist of inscribed material written in Hellenistic Greek or koinē. Their majority belongs in the family of documentary texts, while a smaller group consists of informal inscriptions. Both texts and inscriptions are written or incised on fired potter's clay supports and can be dated to around 400 CE. The core of this dissertation consists of an annotated edition of these texts and inscriptions (Chapter 3), immediately followed by a synthetic and interpretative Chapter 4 in which the cardinal issues inherent to the published material are treated in detail. An important part of the edition are the analytical indices and appendices. Chapter 1 serves as a general introduction to the work; Chapter 2 presents the historical and archaeological context of the edited inscribed material. The dissertation ends with Reference Bibliography and Plates of individual text-bearing artifacts. This work is the first comprehensive treatment of a group of...