Abstract
Documentation from excavations at the Antinoopolis site testifies to the central role played by this city in education, at all levels : from learning Greek and Latin, through shorthand, to research work in mathematics and medicine.
This singularity of the city founded by Hadrian and promoted to capital of the Thebaid following Diocletian's reforms can be seen in the case of an exceptional batch of texts : a notebook made up of wax tablets preserved in the Louvre (inv. MND 552 LIKH), whose former owner was Aurelius Papnouthion. In short, Antinoopolis did not produce any great authors - except perhaps the geometer Sérénos - but it did give us a budding schoolboy, whose name alone indicates a whole program : Aurelius, he was acquiring the knowledge necessary for the life of a subject in the late Roman Empire ; Papnouthion, a theophoric name meaning " that of the god (or God) ", he was evolving in a world marked by the rise of Christianity. In this seminar session, we will look back at the identification and publication of this collection of documents, and analyze its content and form, placing it in the scholarly context of a late-Roman Egyptian city and the cultural changes that characterized it.
