Christian books and libraries in Late Antique Egypt have been primarily studied through the manuscripts themselves. Documentary papyri and ostraca, on the other hand, often remain ignored. In this paper, I will examine the papyrological documents mentioning specific books, for they provide information about the content of books and the management of collections. I will first study the different types of documents mentioning books by their titles (inventories, catalogues, personal notes), and then the contents of the books.

This article was originally written for the Acts of the International Colloquium "Les ermitages d'Égypte au premier millénaire" (IFAO, Cairo, 24-26 January 2009), which, for various reasons, is still in press. For the current publication, Alain Delattre has added a study of inscriptions of the three sites studied. He presented the section on the inscriptions in Dayr Abu¯ Hinnis during the colloquium. The study consists of an initial survey of monastic habitation patterns on the East Bank of the Nile in Middle Egypt. Fieldwork was carried out from 2004 to 2008 in Dayr al-Dik, Dayr Abu¯ Hinnis and al-Shaykh Sa?i¯d in co-operation with the Dayr al-Barsha¯ Project of the KU Leuven - Catholic University of Leuven, directed by Prof. Dr. H.O. Willems.1 The original manuscript was finalized in December 2009. The text has been slightly modified to incorporate the Appendix. Publications which were in press at the time of writing have been added but, apart from the elimination of obvious mistakes, the text has not been updated. Follow-up research was carried out within the framework of the Dayr al-Barsha¯ Project2 during the author's EU funded Marie Curie Fellowship at KU Leuven "A View from Heaven: Exploring the potential of remote sensing techniques to study spatial patterns of monastic habitation on the East Bank of the Nile in Middle Egypt." (FP7-MC-IEF 254243, 2010-2013). Subsequent publications in press, targeting Dayr Abu¯ Hinnis and al-Shaykh Sa?i¯d in detail, and remarks can be found in the footnotes, enclosed in square brackets.