One of the best-preserved town sites from Roman Egypt, Karanis was excavated by the University of Michigan from 1924 to1935, and artifacts from Karanis form a large part of the Kelsey Museum's holdings. Karanis was an agricultural town in the region known as the Fayum--a rich farming area developed in the Ptolemaic period (332-30 BCE) and heavily settled in the Roman and Byzantine periods (30 BCE-641 CE). The unusually extensive and well-preserved remains of the town, taken with the thousands of documents on papyrus to survive from the site, form a thorough record of the lives of the inhabitants of Karanis. The artifacts from Karanis relating to music in the present exhibition provide unique insight into the nature of music and the lives of musicians in Roman Egypt.