Abstract
Early Egyptian monasticism traditionally drew heavily upon interpretations of textual evidence, both literary and documentary sources. ese sources typically provided abasis for the archetypes of monastic settlements and of the physical re-mains archaeologists might have expected to recover in the field. Just as Heinrich Schliemann used the
Iliad
as a travel guide for finding the cityof Troy, so scholars of monasticism used the
Apophthegmata Patrum and other hagiographical texts as guides to monastic life in Egypt.