One of the most cosmopolitan outposts of the Roman Empire during the 1st to 4th centuries A.D. was Egypt's Faiyum region, about 60 miles south of Cairo on the Nile. A fertile farming and business community, it was settled by many retired Roman legionnaires, along with emigrant Greeks, Jews and native Egyptians. It became, according to Egyptologist William Peck, 34, a "prosperous, highly civilized region with a well-developed bureaucratic system of local government, and an elaborate social structure, fairly comparable to Detroit." By a fluke of custom and climate, the residents of...
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