Various types of monasteries appear in the papyrological documentation, from small, local shrines only mentioned once to influential institutions that are still active today. Based on the unrivalled evidence from Aphrodito, the best documented village of Late Antiquity, this chapter defines in detail the role that monasteries played as landowners in the rural economy. It also traces how their situations evolved over the two centuries around the Islamic conquest, highlighting a multiplicity of scenarios that invites us to nuance our views of their economic power.

The chapter discusses a papyrus letter in the Basel papyrus collection that is our earliest autograph of a self-proclaimed Christian. The earliest evidence of Christians in the Egyptian countryside points to a well-traveled and well-read local landed elite. The Basel letter shows that Christians at that time were not hindered from taking public offices in their hometowns. In fact, they were called upon to do so, along with their pagan fellow citizens of means; their financial situation was decisive, not their faith. The Basel letter further illuminates the early spread of Christianity beyond urban centres and the strong links between urban and rural areas operating in a symbiotic relationship. It helps us elucidate the lives of early Christians in the Egyptian countryside during the first half of the third century, a period for which literary evidence is lacking.

The Foreword by Professor Jason BeDuhn (Professor of Religious Studies, Northern Arizona University) offers an overview of this book’s critical historiography of the life of Mani, based in part on scepticism regarding the previously known sources, and in part on newly available sources. In introducing this book’s approach, BeDuhn follows various depictions of Mani the 'Apostle of Jesus Christ', the 'Doctor from Babylon', the 'Illuminator' and the 'Great Interpreter' within both the Manichaean tradition and in polemical accounts.

This chapter introduces the life of Mani as mediated through the history of Manichaean Studies. It follows the field’s genesis in the confessional polemics of the Reformation to the twentieth century where repeated new and unexpected manuscript discoveries have allowed for an advancement of the field through textual studies and philology. Texts that survive in a wide variety of languages, ranging from Latin and Greek through Coptic, Arabic, various Middle Iranian languages including Parthian and Sogdian, even Uighur and Chinese. This chapter reconsiders the many variations of the life of Mani as depicted in Manichaean, apocryphal, pseudepigraphical and polemical texts in the light of these new discoveries and the scholarship that preceded it.

Chapter I provides a theoretical reflection on the methodological approach of the study and debates the special status of Egypt among the many provinces of the Roman Empire.