Towards a prosopography of the priests of Akhmim from the Late Period to the Roman Period

International audienceThis paper presents my post-doctoral research project, which deals with the prosopography of the priests of Akhmim from the Late Period to the Roman Period. In the last centuries of the Pharaonic Period in Egypt, Akhmim was a particularly important city and the temple of Min, Horus, and Isis was one of the largest sacred areas of the country. Unfortunately, the history of this sanctuary and its priests is not very well known, mostly because of the fact that many objects belonging to the priests that were found during excavations at the end of the 19th century are now dispersed throughout the world. As a part of my doctoral thesis, I endeavoured to gather many of these objects in order to study the temples, divinities, and priestly titles of the city. However, the funerary material of the priests also allows for a reconstruction of the families and a prosopographical study of the priests through an analysis of their careers, the inheritance of their titles from father to son and mother to daughter, their matrimonial strategies, and so on. In this paper I will give an overview of the results of this study and highlight the importance of prosopographical research for the field of Egyptology and knowledge of Egyptian society