Manichaean Identity in Antique Egypt

The site of Kellis, an Egyptian village in the Dakhleh Oasis, has provided rich textual evidence for studying the life of a small, fourth-century Manichaean community. These extant documentary texts comprise around 208 papyri texts; 90 in Greek and 116 in Coptic. It is this record that forms the basis for studying a group of ordinary people who practiced a Manichaean lifestyle in late antique Egypt. The approach of this study focuses on the lived reality of everyday Egyptians practicing Manichaeism. Brand states that the study’s ‘theoretical framework is characterized by what I will call Everyday Groupness, a critical scholarly approach to everyday life undergirded by current debates in religious studies and sociology’ (p. 24). This represents part of a larger scholarly turn from focusing on religious systems, intellectual history, and the construction of grand narratives, which are seen as privileging elite voices. In its place, this cache of letters from Kellis permits access to the lived realities of practicing adherents to the Manichaean belief system. Thus, by focusing on the intersection of daily life and religious commitment, it is possible to glean the degree to which such faith commitments did or did not shape everyday practices. The first two chapters, after the introduction, utilise the papyrological evidence first to assemble details about the lives of Makarios, Pamour, and their families. Here, according to Brand, one is able to detect a mix of Manichaean phrases and vocabulary alongside other examples of a wider sociolect, particularly that drawn from fourth-century Christians. The picture that Brand presents is that of a community of Manichaean believers who ‘were at home in the oasis’ and who ‘lived and worked within existing social patterns without always redefining relationships and interactions within a Manichaean framework’ (p. 86). Moreover, despite the geographical remoteness of the Dakhleh Oasis, Brand draws attention to the wider social connections and notes how inhabitants of the oasis were connected to and embedded within larger social and patronage structures (p. 123). The remaining chapters discuss, ‘five key themes of Manichaean life: self-designation, gift giving, communal gathering, and book writing’ (p. 28). This provides fertile material both for understanding the life of this Manichaean community itself, as well as facilitating further comparative studies with other fourth-century religious groups. Having probed the literary evidence in detail, Brand characterizes the practices of the Manichaean community at the Dakhleh Oasis as reflecting an unruly pattern of religion. By this he means that ‘[t]he practices of Manichaean individuals and families never entirely correspond with the prescriptive reality of theological and cosmological system builders found in texts’ (p. 291). In this way, Brand demonstrates how individuals in one particular location negotiated the relationship between abstract theological commitments and their own daily lived reality. As such, one is transported into a fascinating world of the daily lives of one fourth-century Manichaean community.