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The “brilliant and most splendid city” of Oxyrhynchus has been famed for more than a century as an unparalleled source for papyri, granting insights into everyday life in Roman Egypt. Yet, it has only been in the past two decades that scholars have paid attention to religion in this important city. This dissertation argues that amulets serve as the ideal lens for accessing everyday religion in Oxyrhynchus. Amulets exemplify religious usage, redeploying religious signs and idioms to address users’ concrete anxieties. Focused exclusively on Oxyrhynchus due to its unique combination of abundant amuletic evidence and extensive papyrological documentation enabling contextual reconstruction, this dissertation analyzes a corpus of late antique amulets. Chapter 1 establishes the dataset through a comprehensive inventory and critical discussion. These amulets evince the coexistence of scriptural quotations with non-Jewish/Christian mythology and imagery among the late ancient amulets, demonstrating Oxyrhynchites’ creative redeployment of diverse literary and symbolic tools.
The subsequent chapters use amulets to identify domains of everyday life, which prompted the’ ritual deployment of amulets. Chapter 2 examines amulets addressing pregnancy, birth, and childhood survival. Despite elite injunctions against amulet use from physicians and church authorities, the coexistence of medical/theological texts and amulets in the papyri, alongside evidence for midwives employing amulets, indicates that efficacy prevailed over orthodoxy for those ensuring safe childbirth. Chapter 3 analyzes amulets in elite social competition. Contrary to discourses associating amulets primarily with women and children, Oxyrhynchus evidence shows adult men, particularly athletes, used amulets for bodily safety and victory. This use intersected with local literary culture, which informed mythological understanding and amuletic power. Chapter 4 explores mortuary amulets, seeking beautiful burials and post-mortem survival. Specialists redeployed older Egyptian, Hellenistic, and Roman traditions alongside Christian elements within an enduring mortuary logic focused on protection and resurrection, reflecting syncretism as local practice. The volume of mortuary materials speaks to perceived post-mortem dangers and ritual deposition patterns.
Actors such as midwives, physicians, athletes, and mortuary practitioners tactically deployed ritual power, often defying elite injunctions. Oxyrhynchus’s physicians used both handbooks and amulets; elite men used amulets to ensure their status; mortuary specialists blended traditions to address persistent concerns. This research demonstrates that amulets were central to everyday religious life as practical responses to anxiety. Crucially, they reveal how much of Oxyrhynchus’s literary and scriptural detritus was directly deployed in amulets or informed their creation. This project contributes to our understanding of ancient religion by recontextualizing the papyri excavated from Oxyrhynchus as lived ritual tools, revealing widespread lay agency through tactical reuse, and advancing the study of everyday religion in antiquity by highlighting amulets as an exceptional form of evidence.