Temple ranks in the Fayyum during the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods: documentary sources and archaeological data

According to administrative sources, during the Ptolemaic period the Egyptian temples were divided into three ranks: first-, second- and third- class (prota, deutera, elassona hiera). This classification of sacred buildings apparently left no trace in the papyri of the Roman period, when only the most important temples were called and classified by the epithet logima hiera. This paper aims to understand the rules according to which Egyptian sacred buildings were classified and how these first-, second- and third-class temples were planned and arranged. To this end, an integrated and comparative analysis of different kinds of sources was carried out: all the Graeco-Roman papyri and the inscriptions, which contain rank epithets, were examined and a number of archaeological data about the temples of the Fayyum region was investigated. Based on these sources, it is possible to put forward a number of hypotheses about: when the ranks of the sacred buildings were established, what the amount of land tenure for each class of temples was, and why this classification seems to have changed during the Roman period. Moreover, it is worth noting that three different types of sacred complexes were identified in the Fayyum, with three distinct architectural kinds of sacred buildings and three different organisations of the sacred space, each one associated with a specific temple rank. So, it is possible to outline the distinguishing features of each class of temples.