Inschriften aus Schedia

Abstract

In this paper, 37 largely still unpublished inscriptions are presented from Schedia, the customs station of Alexandria situated at the head of an artificial canal that connected the Canopic branch of the Nile with the Mediterranean metropolis. Despite the strategic and economic importance of this harbour, little remains known about the settlement, so that the inscriptions, though fragmentary in part, provide a range of new information. They illustrate that Schedia must have already developed into a multiethnic urban centre during Ptolemaic times and gained still further significance in the Roman period. The surprisingly great number of monumental and imperial inscriptions, which are attested in such numbers at scarcely any other Egyptian site, is particularly remarkable.