foundation · 330 · Scetis
He was an Egyptian, a camel-driver carrying natron out of the desert before he lived in it, and he went out to Scetis at about thirty. What grew there was not a monastery in the Pachomian sense but a colony of separate cells within reach of a common church, which is the shape most Egyptian and later Palestinian monasticism took. Sozomen calls him the most celebrated of the ascetics of Scetis and reports that he was ordained late and unwillingly. The stories attached to him are the ones that give the desert tradition its tone — the stolen goods carried away by the thief while he helped load them, the refusal to condemn, the answer that a monk should be dead to the world before he dies in it. Almost none of it can be dated. The year here is a placing inside his known lifetime, and the curation note says so.
To get further out than Nitria — into the salt flats, a day and a night from anywhere, where nothing grows.
Scetis: four monastic settlements that outlasted the empire, and the desert most of the Sayings of the Fathers were remembered in.