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Karanis (), located in what is now Kom Aushim, was an agricultural town in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt located in the northeast corner of the Faiyum Oasis. It was roughly 60 hectares in size and its peak population is estimated to be 4000 people, although it could have been as much as three times greater.
Karanis was one of a number of towns in the Arsinoites nome established in the third century BC by Ptolemy II Philadelphus. The town largely stagnated in the late Ptolemaic period, until in the first century BC it expanded north when Augustus, having conquered Egypt and also recognizing the Faiyum's agricultural potential, sent workers to clean up the canals and restore the dikes that had fallen into decline, restoring productivity to the area. Karanis was continuously occupied up until about the time of the seventh-century Sasanian conquest of Egypt, when it was gradually abandoned due to unclear causes.
In the late second century, and again in the second quarter of the third, there were notable recessions that mirrored difficulties experienced by the Empire at large. Some houses had been left to collapse by the end of the third century, and the latest papyrus samples recovered date to the early fifth century. As Karanis' dry conditions are ideal for the preservation of papyri, this was the main focus of early excavators, and led them to infer that the town was on the verge of abandonment by this time. However, recent radiocarbon dating of organic specimens such as stockpiled seeds indicates that the town remained consistently inhabited at least through the sixth century.
The first real excavation was in 1895 by Englishmen Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt, though they felt the area had been too plundered to produce anything of much value. At this time, archaeology as a pursuit of knowledge was almost unheard of, and papyri and other artifacts were often treated as items to collect. Also during this time (i.e., the late 19th and early 20th centuries), excavators were almost solely interested in artifacts dating to the older dynasties. Graeco-Roman sites such as Karanis continued to be plundered for sebbakh until Francis W. Kelsey, a professor of Latin language and literature at the University of Michigan, observed this devastation and received grants to search for an excavation site in 1924. Starting excavations of Karanis in 1925, his goal was to "increase exact knowledge rather than the amassing of collections", with a focus on common people. The papyri collected are now part of the University of Michigan Papyrus Collection. More recent excavations have been done by the Cairo University, the French Institute, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the URU Fayum Project (a collaboration of UCLA, the University of Groningen (RUG) in the Netherlands, and the University of Auckland)
The Kom Aushim Museum was built on the site in 1974, and displays some of the archaeological artifacts unearthed from Karanis and the surrounding Fayoum region.
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