ARCE-NT: Architects of Empire: The So-called Eponymous Commanders of Early Ptolemaic Egypt by Dr. Joe Morgan

Lecture Information:

The eponymous commanders of the Ptolemaic army have caused much debate among historians of Ptolemaic society and administration. These figures appear in the formal legal designations of the individuals enrolled in their respective military units, but because of the brevity of these attestations, they are difficult to associate with figures appearing in more direct roles in the documentary corpus of the period. This talk will provide a brief introduction to the hypotheses that have been proposed for the role of these individuals in the Ptolemaic military, administration, and society, and make the case for their active role in Ptolemaic statecraft during the Third Century BCE on the basis of papyrological and epigraphical evidence.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Joe Morgan is a historian of the Hellenistic Mediterranean with a particular focus on the social, economic, and environmental history of the Ptolemaic Kingdom. His work explores the development and evolution of institutions that informed individual decision-making during this turbulent period. His investigations address questions concerning the impacts of migration, monarchy, law and enforcement mechanisms, the relationship between local and regional markets, and socio-economic responses to environmental shocks.

Dr. Morgan contributes to the growing body of textual evidence available to historians through the publication of text-editions of papyri. He has published papyri dating from the Ptolemaic Period to the Byzantine Period housed in the collections of UC Berkeley and Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently preparing articles on early Ptolemaic cartonnage held by Yale University and the University of Toronto. He is particularly interested in addressing the problem of undocumented provenance through “museum archaeology”, the tracing of a papyrological assemblage’s transmission and dispersal through the global antiquities market to collections in Europe and the United States.

Dr. Morgan is an Assistant Professor of Classics and Letters, University of Oklahoma. He holds a Ph.D. in Ancient History from Yale University, an M.A. in Classics from Washington University in St. Louis, and a B.A. in Classics from Washington and Lee University. Prior to taking up his post at the University of Oklahoma, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Classics at Florida State University.