On March, 20, I presented my research on festival mobility in Graeco-Roman Egypt at the Research Seminar of the Department of Classics at the University of Reading. My paper, chaired by Prof. Ian Rutherford, explored new evidence of religious travel to Abydos, contextualising it within papyrological and literary sources.
Among papyrus documents, I discussed a business letter from the Zenon archive, which reports that local workers were absent due to a religious festival at the Labyrinth. This site, located in Hawara in the Fayum, was actually a mortuary temple of Pharaoh Amenemhat III, similar to the Temple of Seti I in Abydos. It was visited already by Herodotus, who admired it even more than the Great Pyramids of Giza.
