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The village Euhemeria, located in the Fayum region of Egypt, preserved a corpus of documents on papyri and ostraca from the first century of Roman rule. This thesis studies those documents as a group for the first time, and uses them to examine the question of how this small, rural settlement responded to the arrival of the Roman Empire. The question of how the Euhemerian documents made their way from Egypt to collections around the world is addressed, and the interrelations between the texts are explored. New groups of texts within the evidence, based around individuals and families, are identified and used to underpin an analysis of various aspects of life in Euhemeria. The documents are a particularly rich source of information about agriculture, the local economy, and social relations between the villagers. They also show the emergence of a prosperous new socio-economic group within the village, who seized the opportunities offered by the change of regime from Ptolemaic kingdom to Roman province. Overall, the thesis concludes that, while the village itself was typical of its time and place, the collection of documents that it left to posteriority is unique. A detailed examination of that evidence therefore provides a valuable complementary perspective to previous studies on early Roman Egypt.

This thesis will probe selected Arabic commentary material on the Hippocratic Aphorisms. The aim is, first, to shed light on the development of Arabic medical commentary; second, to draw attention to issues of continuity and change in medical ideas and debates; third, to shed light on wider debates about women and medicine in the medieval world. Due to limitations on space, the main focus is on the second point. The sample of Arabic commentary material investigated here relates to Aph. 5. 31, Aph. 5. 35 and Aph. 5. 48. The material is situated within the wider context of the Islamic scientific commentary genre. The Arabic material is taken from the preliminary online edition now available due to the culmination of the Project on the Hippocratic Aphorisms (2012-2017) led by Peter Pormann at the University of Manchester.

This thesis offers an analysis of the Arabic Commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms (9th-15th centuries AD) on three levels, (i) translation, (ii) individual styles and (iii) genre. It particularly examines meta-discursive features such as cohesion, subjectivity, hedges, the addressing of readership, and the formulation of truth statements. The analysis of these features reveals rhetorical conventions in the corpus that indicate a discursive unity of the genre of the medieval medical commentary. Yet, this study also shows considerable stylistic variation between the individual commentators which, besides its intrinsic value, is crucial for the identification of these authors’ texts. Moreover, this research examines how the rhetorical features of the later commentaries have developed after the fashion of Ḥunayn Ibn Isḥāq’s 9th-century translation of Galen’s 2nd-century Greek commentary. This study highlights significant differences between Ḥunayn’s rhetorical strategies and those in the later Arabic commentaries. Thus, this work demonstrates discontinuities between Greek and Arabic medical discourses, despite the huge influence of Ḥunayn’s translation. This thesis uses an innovative quantitative methodology combining both close reading and distant reading techniques to study Ḥunayn’s translation technique, and compare Ḥunayn’s style with that of the later commentators. Furthermore, this study advances the understanding of the ways of writing in scientific medieval Arabic. Finally, the separate studies in this thesis contribute knowledge regarding grammatical phenomena such as modals, conjunctions, and conditionals in Classical Arabic.

This thesis takes up the question of the part played by Syriac sources in the composition of early Arabic translations of the Hippocratic Aphorisms. In it, I compare the four major extant Syriac and Arabic translations of the Aphorisms with continual reference to the content of Syriac lexicons composed by the translator Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq and his students and successors. Through detailed treatments of both the definitions and translations of scores of individual Greek terms found in these sources, as well as through analysis of the translations of the Aphorisms, I weigh the relative importance of Greek and Syriac scholarship for Ḥunayn's translation praxis. In doing so, I specify the value of the Syriac lexicons for the study of Greek-to-Arabic translation while clarifying several outstanding issues in the broader history of Syriac and Arabic medicine.

This study investigates the term, and the poetry of, the Rearguard Poets (saqat al-shuʿaraʾ). It demonstrates through the investigation of both literary and non-literary texts of the Abbasid era that socio-political circumstances were major factors in forming the critical thinking of Abbasid critics as exemplified by al-Asmaʿi. The study argues that the grouping of the rearguard poets (without their consent) indicates that al-Asmaʿi and his fellow critics were interested in the poetry of this group not merely because they found in it the 'purity of the Arabic language' (fasaha) free from linguistic errors or because of the poets' eligibility to be included among the champion poets (fuhūl al-shuʿaraʾ); they were concerned with a much bigger issue: the mission to preserve Arab cultural identity, which those critics felt was being threatened by the changing atmosphere of Abbasid politics, as Chapter One shows. Reverting to the life of the desert and the Bedouin language to create a standard language (ʿArabiyya) marked an important stage in Arabic intellectual life which left its mark on generations of critics and the criteria they used in selecting and judging poetry, as Chapter Two shows. One of the most important features of Bedouin poetry is the predominance of unusual vocabulary (gharib), which served as both a linguistic treasury for philological critics and a foundation for creating a distinctive linguistic identity impregnable to foreigners, as Chapter Three demonstrates. In Chapter Four the norms and values of Bedouin society, which had the tribe at its centre, are analysed using examples of the poetry of the rearguard poets; these are identified with major themes occurring in the poets' panegyrical and satirical poetry. Turning to the inner-self and the persona of the poets themselves in Chapter Five, it becomes clear that although the critics relied on them to provide contemporary examples of Bedouin poetry, the poets for their part were preoccupied by their own interests and were trying to fight for their own causes: for their tribes, for their patrons and for their own concerns as a part of the wider society, which may or may not have intersected with the agendas and concerns of the critical and cultural authorities. Chapter Six examines the stylistic features of the poetry in question, and investigates the influence of Abbasid modern (muhdath) poetry and the refined (badiʿ) style. Examples of Ibn Harma's poetry in particular are thoroughly analysed due to his perceived position as a pioneer poet composing in the new style of the Abbasid era. The study has found that although the creation of the 'rearguard poets' group served the critical authorities' cultural and ideological interests rather than to show the linguistic and artistic value of their poetry, this does not imply that the representation of those poets as providers of good examples of Bedouin poetry in the Abbasid era is invalid. Moreover, the creation of this group was a reaction to the dominance of Persian culture in al-Asmaʿi's time. Furthermore, the poets' language, themes, motifs and imagery served to showcase the interests of early critics and their preferences in poetry despite the lack of compelling evidence that both parties collaborated to promote one unified and clearly stated purpose.