Towards a Prosopography of the Priests of Akhmim from the Late Period to the Roman Period

International audienceThis paper aims at presenting my current post-doctoral research project. In the last centuries of the pharaonic period in Egypt, Akhmim was a very important city and its 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 the 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. But 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 career, 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 you an overview of the results of this study and highlight the importance of prosopographical research for the field of Egyptology and the knowledge of the Egyptian society