Dr. Rosalba Feo

A Hellenistic Case Study of Strong Asymmetrical Dependency (SAD): Ptolemaic Egypt and Kush

This project examines Ptolemaic Egypt’s relationship with Kush as a historically specific form of Strong Asymmetrical Dependency (SAD): a condition in which sustained military, logistical, and epistemic intervention generated profound asymmetries without formal annexation or permanent colonial administration. Focusing on the Nubian campaigns of the 3rd century BCE, it argues that their significance lay not only in military expansion but also in the systematic production and circulation of ethnographic knowledge about Kush and the wider Ethiopian and Red Sea regions. These campaigns functioned as epistemic laboratories in which Ptolemaic agents recorded landscapes, populations, flora, and fauna, reshaping earlier traditions into a more systematic and marginalising discourse that contributed to the legitimation and reproduction of imperial authority.

The project combines literary evidence with papyri, ostraca, and material sources to develop a microhistorical approach to dependency "from below." It reconstructs how individuals labelled as "Ethiopians" navigated work, trade, settlement, legal categories, and social networks in Ptolemaic Egypt, even as a marginalising ethnographic literature was being continuously produced and elaborated around them. Bringing these two bodies of evidence into dialogue reveals situational and negotiated forms of dependency that challenge rigid free/unfree binaries.

from November 2026
Junior Postdoctoral Fellowship (Heinz Heinen Fellowship at the Bonn Center for Dependency & Slavery Studies)

1.11.2023–31.10.2026
ERC Junior Research Fellow in Papyrology (ERC-CoG APATHES), University of Turin

1.02.2023–31.10.2023
Junior Research Fellow, CISPE (International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri), Naples

2023
PhD (D.Phil.) in Ancient History, Joint PhD Programme (Universities of Padua, Verona,Venice). Dissertation: The Papyrus Fragments of Philochorus of Athens: Edition and Commentary. Supervisors: L. Prandi, H. Essler

2018
MPhil in Philology, Literature and Classical Tradition, University of Bologna

2016
BA in Humanities, University of Bologna