Karanis, a town in Egypt's Fayum region founded around 250 BC, housed a
farming community with a diverse population and a complex material
culture that lasted for hundreds of years. Ultimately abandoned and
partly covered by the encroaching desert, Karanis eventually proved to
be an extraordinarily rich archaeological site, yielding tens of
thousands of artifacts and texts on papyrus that provide a wealth of
information about daily life in the Roman-period Egyptian town. This
volume tells of the history and culture of Karanis, and also provides a
useful introduction to the University of Michigan's excavations between
1924 and 1935 and to the artifacts, archival records and photographs of
the excavation that now form one of the major components of the
collection of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.