The Fayum oasis is key to our knowledge of houses in Roman Egypt. The villages and necropolises there have long attracted investigators focusing – in a more or less scientific way – on written documents, especially papyri, and material remains. Recently renewed research, including surveys and excavations, has supplemented the earlier evidence with new archaeological and textual data of the Hellenistic and Roman occupation of the area. This chapter gives an overview of what is known of the housing of the Fayum during that time. By integrating archaeological housing evidence from Fayum sites with papyrological information, this chapter aims to demonstrate that only an approach taking into account both the material and textual sources can result in a comprehensive picture of the appearance, layout, value, inhabitants and occupation history of individual buildings (for example, change of ownership through sale or the division of a single house among various house owners) within the context of entire village quarters. Moreover, this interdisciplinary method allows an improved understanding of the house types that coexisted on the Fayum sites during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and situates the Fayum evidence in the context of housing in the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean.

This chapter brings together Greek documentary papyri from family archives in and around the town of Tebtynis in the Fayyum, with the archaeological record for housing across the region. In so doing, it presents a case for understanding the ownership, transactions and leasing of houses, or parts of houses, as a means to develop or preserve social status and standing in these towns and villages. The chapter explores transactions in the papyri between known individuals, against the context of the observed physical life cycle of houses and their associated outside space. It concludes that, for those individuals of specific social status (primarily gymnasial), both close and extended kinship ties were an important part of the considerations when financial transactions took place involving housing. Such activities were crucial to the operation of social positioning within the middle and upper echelons of these relatively small communities in the Fayyum. The extent to which these patterns may be said to be typical of similar elements of kinship and social structures across Roman Egypt is debatable, but the approach taken by this chapter provides a means of exploring these relationships further.