Krokodilo Praesidium (El-Muwayh)
About
Krokodilo stood on the Koptos-Myos Hormos road at El-Muwayh, one of ten fortified stations spaced along the route that carried Red Sea trade goods inland to the Nile. Soldiers built the fort under Vespasian as part of a security program that put a defended well within a day's march of the next, letting caravans cross the desert without running dry. More than 150 ostraca recovered from its rubbish dumps recorded the daily military correspondence passing between the fort's small garrison and its neighboring posts. Its intramural cisterns, still visible in the ruins, let the garrison store water through the driest stretches of the year.
What happened here
Five hundred men, sometimes a thousand, recruited from a province rather than from citizens, and often stationed a long way from where they were raised. Cavalry units get a bigger fort and far more stabling; the smell tells you which kind you are in before the plan does. The layout copies a legionary fortress at a quarter of the size — headquarters, commander's house, granaries, barracks, a bath house usually built outside the walls because of the fire risk. Duties are patrolling, escorting, customs, and policing rather than pitched battle. After twenty-five years a man is discharged with citizenship for himself and his children, recorded on a bronze diploma he keeps for life. A village grows outside the gate within a decade.
In ancient writing
- O.Krok. 1–151, military ostraca: correspondence and a daily duty journal praesidium archive, ed. H. Cuvigny 2005
Greek and Latin ostraca excavated at the fort include an official day-by-day journal of its routine covering 8 February–28 March 109 CE, naming Krokodilo directly as the writing post.
Sources
Nearby
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