Egyptian Archaeology 41

No. 41 Autumn 2012

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EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY

T he B ulletin of T he E gypt E xploration S ociety

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EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY Bulletin of the Egypt Exploration Society www.ees.ac.uk

The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the aims or concerns of the Egypt Exploration Society Editor Patricia Spencer Editorial Advisers Peter Clayton George Hart David Jeffreys John J Johnston Mike Murphy Chris Naunton Alice Stevenson John Taylor Advertising Sales Rob Tamplin Egypt Exploration Society 3 Doughty Mews London WC1N 2PG Phone: +44 (0)20 7242 1880 Fax: +44 (0)20 7404 6118 E-mail: rob.tamplin@ees.ac.uk Distribution Phone: +44 (0)20 7242 2268 Fax: +44 (0)20 7404 6118 E-mail: orders@ees.ac.uk Website: www.ees.ac.uk

Published twice a year by The Egypt Exploration Society 3 Doughty Mews, London WC1N 2PG Registered Charity No.212384 A limited Company registered in England, No.25816 Original design by Jeremy Pemberton Set in Adobe InDesign CS2 by Patricia Spencer Printed by Commercial Colour Press Ltd Angard House, 185 Forest Road, Hainault, Essex IG6 3HU

Theban West Bank. View over the ancient landscape, with the temple of Amenhotep III and the Colossi of Memnon in the foreground, the temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu in the middle distance and the desert and cliffs beyond. Photograph © Egypt Exploration Society. See pp.21-24.

Number 41

Autumn 2012

Landscape archaeology Patricia Spencer EES Patrons

2

Threat to archaeological sites in Sudan Centenary Awards Reader’s letter

3

Gaballa Ali Gaballa John Ruffle EES news and events

4

A day at the races in Byzantine Oxyrhynchus Margaret Mountford

5

Egyptian landscapes and environmental archaeology David Jeffreys

8

Geophysical methods and landscape archaeology Tomasz Herbich

11

The mobile Nile Judith Bunbury

15

The ancient landscape around Lake Burullus Penny Wilson

18

Investigating the Theban West Bank floodplain Angus Graham

21

Nile navigation: ‘towing all day, punting for hours’ John P Cooper

25

Digging Diary Patricia Spencer

28

Significant composite statue fragments from Amarna Kristin Thompson

32

Akhenaten in Syria Alexander Ahrens and Peter Pfälzner

34

The Valley of the Kings: two burials in KV 64 Susanne Bickel and Elina Paulin-Grothe

36

Bookshelf

41

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© Egypt Exploration Society and the contributors. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission of the publishers.

ISSN 0962 2837

Cover illustration. Kristian Strutt undertaking a magnetometry survey in the fields in front of the Ramesseum for the EES Theban Harbours and Waterscapes Survey. Photograph © Egypt Exploration Society. See pp.21-24.

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Landscape archaeology The annual Nile inundation was also a major factor in determining the locations and viability of settlements.

Landscape archaeology has become a prime focus of EES fieldwork and research in recent years but as a concept it is perhaps harder to communicate than, for example, excavation to reveal one tomb or temple; hence this special issue in which several EES Field Directors David Jeffreys, Penny Wilson and Angus Graham - and invited specialists - Tomasz Herbich, Judith Bunbury and John Cooper - describe their own research and how it helps us to understand better the landscape in which the ancient Egyptian civilisation flourished. There was a major international conference on landscape archaeology in Berlin in June 2012, at which Judith, Angus and Joanne Rowland gave talks on their work. The papers are published online: http://tinyurl.com/c4xbqk8 Other articles shed light on aspects of the reign of Akhenaten, with an update from Kristin Thompson on her research into composite Amarna statuary and a report

by Alexander Ahrens and Peter Pfälzner on the discovery of a seal of Akhenaten in Syria. Susanne Bickel and Elina Paulin-Grothe summarise their recent excavation of a new tomb in the Valley of the Kings and, in this Olympic year, Margaret Mountford, an EES Trustee, contributes an article on her research into games programmes from the site of Oxyrhynchus.

PATRICIA SPENCER

For the first time since Egyptian Archaeology was launched in 1991, the Editorial Board decided that EA 41 would be a ‘special issue’ with commissioned articles on aspects of ‘landscape archaeology’ in Egypt, with, of course, a special emphasis on the work of the EES. Most excavators in Egypt have until fairly recently concentrated their efforts on one site at a time, sometimes moving every year or two - as Petrie did for most of his career - sometimes investing more in a site and working there for a number of years, or even decades. Now, however, rather than study one site in isolation, many excavators in Egypt wish to place their own site in its wider context, investigating its social, economic and administrative role within its region, looking at contacts with other neighbouring, and distant, towns and villages and studying the landscape in which the site originated and developed in antiquity. Such wide-ranging research has led archaeologists to collaborate with geologists and other specialists to help provide a better understanding of the climatic and geological changes which affected the Nile Valley, and its surrounding deserts, from remote antiquity up to the present day.

Since the civilisations of ancient Egypt and Sudan were so dependent on the river Nile, its meanderings and movements over time have had a major influence on settlement patterns in both the Nile Valley and the Delta.

EES Patrons The Egypt Exploration Society has always been blessed with dedicated and enthusiastic members who, particularly in recent years since we lost our annual government grant, have supported us very generously and ensured that our programme of fieldwork and research has been able not just to continue, but to grow and develop.

We now offer the opportunity for members to become Patrons of the Society and, in appreciation of their continued support of the EES, to receive enhanced benefits including subscriptions to the JEA, GRM or JEA via JSTOR, a pair of complimentary tickets to both the Society’s Summer and Winter Study Days, exclusive Patrons’ events, and up-to-the-minute personal communications from the Society’s Director, Chris Naunton, and from our Field Directors during their seasons in Egypt.

On 31 May 2012 we held our first Patrons’ Evening at Doughty

Paul Lynn, Chris Naunton and Angus Graham at the Patrons’ evening

Mews with talks on all the Society’s current projects in Egypt, the chance to view the new Archive storage (funded by members’ donations) and talk about the Society over a glass of wine with Field Directors, Trustees and Staff.

The annual Patron subscription rate is £500. If you think you might like to become a Patron of the EES and help to ensure the future sustainability of the Society, please contact Roo Mitcheson who will be able to answer any questions you may have: roo.mitcheson@ees.ac.uk or phone: +44(0)207 242 1880.

Current EES Patrons for whose most generous support the Society is very grateful are: C T H Beck, Andrew Cousins, Martin R Davies, Christopher Gorman-Evans, Richard A Grant, George Huxley, Paul Lynn, Anne and Fraser Mathews, Anandh Indran Owen, Lyn Stagg, John Wall and John Wyatt.

The Society’s Archive Assistant, Alice Williams (left), at the Patrons’ evening, describing the rehousing of glass negatives

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Threat to archaeological sites in Sudan Map showing the locations of the Kajbar, Shereiq, Atbara and Sitite dams

In response to many planned and current hydroelectric and irrigation projects on the river Nile and its tributaries, the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM) of Sudan launched on 1 February 2012 an appeal to the international scientific community to assist with rescue activities in areas affected by these projects.

Following on from this appeal, on 15 May 2012, the NCAM and the International Society for Nubian Studies hosted a meeting at the British Museum, London, to provide information concerning the threats posed by these new development programmes to Sudan’s cultural and archaeological heritage.

There is an imminent threat posed by the construction of dams at Kajbar, Shereiq (5th Cataract), Upper Atbara and Sitite to which the national and international archaeological community has been asked to respond

by Sudan’s NCAM. Future projects are planned at Dal, Mograt, Dagash and Sabaloqa (6th Cataract). Ancient sites which are threatened by their construction include Amara West, Sesebi, Soleb and Sai. Further information concerning the appeal and affected areas will be published on the International Society for Nubian Studies website: www.nubiansociety.org which

will be used to gather data when it becomes available. It relies on information that is provided by the Dams Implementation Unit, the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums, Sudan, and from archaeologists themselves.

Missions and specialists who wish to participate are asked to contact NCAM directly: PO Box 178, Khartoum, Sudan. Telephone and Fax: +249 183 786784. Email: teharga2008@yahoo.com.

Centenary Awards

Reader’s letter

The EES Centenary Awards were established with donations from EES members to our Centenary Appeal in 1982. Since then they have funded fieldwork and research by over 40 ‘early career’ researchers, many of whom now direct their own projects in Egypt.

Successful applicants are invited to write articles for our website (see: www.ees.ac.uk/news/index) and for EA on the work funded by their award: in EA 40 (pp.10-11) Kenneth Griffin reported on his study of the Book of the Dead in the tomb of Karakhamun at Thebes and EA 42 will include an article by Héléne Virenque on her study of the correspondence of Edouard Naville.

The 2011 EES Centenary Fund grants were awarded in March 2012 to Heba Abd el-Gawad to undertake a survey of the site of Ptolemais-Hermou in Middle Egypt and to Timothy Sandiford for the excavation of a Ptolemaic settlement site at Abydos. Reports on both projects will appear in future issues of EA. The 2012 Centenary Awards will be advertised towards the end of the year: www.ees.ac.uk/research/centenary-

I wanted to let you know how much I’m enjoying EA 40.

I’m especially delighted to see the beautifully illustrated article on the Rev Colin Campbell by Angela McDonald and Sally-Anne Coupar. As a young Egyptology enthusiast growing up among the used-book shops of New York City one of the books I discovered was Two Theban Princes Kha-em-Uast & Amen-Khepeshf Sons of Rameses III. Menna, A Land-Steward And Their Tombs, of which I remain very fond. Among the photos, there are some of Campbell’s reproductions. I am also pleasantly surprised to see a reference to his mentor E L Lushington; I encountered the work of that scholar very early when I was given an old anthology of Egyptian literature, edited

by Epiphanius Wilson AM, which contains a ‘Hymn to Ra-Harmachis’ translated by Lushington. Thank you, and thanks to colleagues McDonald and Coupar, for reawakening these fond memories and bringing the earlier days of Egyptian discovery to life.

Edmund S Meltzer Stevens Point, WI, USA

awards.html

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Gaballa Ali Gaballa I first met Gaballa in 1963 when he arrived in Liverpool to study for his PhD under H W Fairman. We very soon became good friends, discussing and arguing about all the subjects that interest students, often in my Granby Street flat, and together with Mohy Eddin Ibrahim and a Libyan friend, Awad Sadawiyya, I learned a great deal about life in general and modern Egypt in particular. After Liverpool Gaballa Ali Gaballa at his son’s wedding we went our different ways but we stayed in close contact as our families in 2004. Photograph: courtesy of Genefer Ashley grew and I would catch up with Gub and his wife Genny whenever I went to Egypt. My early visits were usually as a guest lecturer with a tour group and if there was a free day Gub would take me off to see some of the less frequented sites.

I particularly remember clambering down a dodgy stairway to the underground chambers of the Step Pyramid but there were several visits to the Fayum and the Delta.

Gub had taught many students who had gone on to jobs in the Antiquities Organisation (later renamed the Supreme Council for Antiquities) and they were always pleased to see their professor to whom they were devoted. He knew well the problems faced by students as he had been born to a poor peasant family in the Delta village of Kufur el-Raml and had had to spend much of his childhood helping with the farm chores. The poor diet and general poverty probably contributed to his later health problems, but as a quick learner

he won scholarships which took him first to secondary school and then to university. This was not an easy escape route; he had miserable lodgings and his mother supplemented his meagre funds by sending him food regularly. His problems did not stop there: his country accent and rough clothing made him a figure of fun for the sophisticated set that he found in the Philosophy class and he became so disillusioned that he decided to drop out. Fortunately he was persuaded to change courses instead and so turned to Egyptology. Here he flourished and found a caring and understanding teacher in Ahmed Fakhry who supported and encouraged him with his studies.

I tried several times to persuade Gub to write his memoirs, or at least to dictate something for the EES archive, but he was too ill to make the effort, or perhaps too modest. He rose to head the Egyptian Antiquities Organisation and received many honours, but he never let them go to his head: he knew that he had earned them through hard work and integrity and he was also proud of his country and of the education system which in his case worked amazingly well.

I often stayed with Gub and Genny on my way to and from Dakhla and at our last meeting, in the home of his daughter Sarah in Altrincham after yet another course of hospital treatment, he was still the same Gub, with that wicked twinkle and distinctive laugh. Going to Egypt will not be the same.

JOHN RUFFLE Gaballa Ali Gaballa was born on 10 February 1939. He was a former Head of the Egyptology Department, and Dean of the Faculty of Archaeology, at Cairo University, and served as Secretary General of the Egyptian Antiquities Organisation from 1997 to 2002. He died in Alexandria on 13 April 2012.

EES news and events Regular news updates are posted on our website, www.ees.ac.uk, which we would urge readers to consult regularly for up-to-the-minute information on all EES activities, including our current fieldwork and research. EES news can also be found on our Facebook page: http://tinyurl. com/eesfacebookpage and in the blogs noted below. If you would like to receive our regular e-newsletter, please e-mail: contact@ees.ac.uk The revised fourth edition of Who Was Who in Egyptology has just been published (see inside back cover) and a launch event was held at Doughty Mews on12 July 2012. The new edition, funded by donations from EES members, was edited by Morris Bierbrier (left), seen here with Jason Thompson (the biographer of Edward Lane, see also pp.43-44) who spoke at the event, and Chris Naunton

In March 2012, the EES Director, Chris Naunton, visited Egypt and held talks with officials of the Ministry of State for Antiquities and the British Ambassador. Chris also visited EES expeditions in the field (above with Jeffrey Spencer at Kom el-Daba). A full account of his trip, and of his earlier experiences filming for the BBC documentary on Flinders Petrie, can be found on Chris’s new blog: eesdirector.tumblr.com

At the Rijksmuseum in Leiden on 2 June 2012, Geoffrey Martin was presented with the first copy of The Tomb of Maya and Meryt I (see inside back cover) by Susan Royce (EES Treasurer) and Arnold Jan Stuart (Chairman of the Friends of Saqqara Foundation). The printing of the book was funded by generous donations from the Saqqara Friends and EES Members. For a description of the event see: eespublishers. tumblr.com. Photograph: Peter Jan Bomhof

The Society’s Cairo Representative, Faten Saleh, visited London in June 2012 to participate in meetings and discussions, visit major Egyptology collections and attend the EES Study-Day on 9 June. The Study Day Grand Designs: Amenhotep III and the landscape of Thebes was one of our most successful with over 200 people hearing talks from an international range of speakers.We took the opportunity of Faten’s visit to photograph the EES London and Cairo staff in Doughty Mews. Left to right: Roo Mitcheson, Faten Saleh, Joanna Kyffin, Patricia Spencer, Chris Naunton, Alice Williams and Rob Tamplin On 20 June 2012, the Society’s Oxyrhynchus Papyri featured at the British Academy in London, in a public event Training, Cheating, Winning, Praising. Athletes and Shows in Papyri from Roman Egypt, chaired by Dominic Rathbone.

William J Slater, Margaret Mountford and Christopher Carey talked about their research on topics related to the Olympic Games (see Margaret’s article on pp.5-7). A fuller description of the proceedings can be found at: eespublishers.tumblr.com

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A day at the races in Byzantine Oxyrhynchus In 2012, and particularly in London, much attention has been focused on the ancient Olympics.

Margaret Mountford reviews the evidence for the sports held at Oxyrhynchus and the events which were included in the programme there.

The Olympic Games, according to tradition, first took place in 776 BC at Olympia, near Elis in the north-west of the Peloponnese.

Our knowledge of those Games has been pieced together from a variety of sources including the epinician poetry of Pindar, the travel writings of Pausanias, inscriptions found both at the site and in the home towns of the victors, and documentary evidence on papyri. The only event in the early Olympics was the 200 metre foot-race, but chariot-racing was included from the early seventh The Delphi Charioteer century BC. This Greek-style (474 BC). Photograph © Peter Clayton chariot racing was very much a sport for the wealthy, who could afford to own horses and the slaves who drove the chariots. The Olympic programme eventually included combat sports (boxing, wrestling and the pankration) and other athletic events (longer foot-races and the pentathlon) but chariot-racing remained popular throughout the history of the Games.

At Delphi, Nemea and the Isthmus of Corinth, the other venues where ‘Crown Games’ (in which the prize was not money but a wreath) were held, the festivals included contests in the performing arts, but at Olympia music, dance and dramatic performances were not competitive events, being rather like our ‘cultural Olympiad’ today.

Among the papyri which I have been studying, and which will be published in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri 79, are three so-called ‘circus programmes’. These are lists of events which took place in the fifth or sixth centuries AD at Oxyrhynchus, the town about 100 miles south of Cairo where the Oxford scholars Grenfell and Hunt (funded by the EES) extracted thousands of papyri from ancient rubbish mounds. These are very different from an Olympic programme, but the events listed in them, a combination of races and other ‘acts’, have their origins in the Panhellenic festivals of classical and Hellenistic Greece, like the Olympic Games, as well as the chariot-races and gladiatorial and wild beast shows of imperial Rome.

Gladiatorial contests and the practice of throwing victims to the lions were prohibited by the end of the fifth century

AD and although wild beast hunts and shows continued these too were becoming rarer, due to a combination of pressure from the Christian church, increasing costs and the difficulty in obtaining wild animals.

By the sixth century Roman-style chariot-racing had replaced the earlier Greek style and had become the main competitive ‘sport’ for mass entertainment; horses and riders were organised in four teams or ‘Colours’ (the Blues and Greens were the predominant ones, but there were also Reds and Whites) which competed all over the Roman Empire. In Oxyrhynchus the Colours were first attested in AD 552 and the only Roman remains left standing above ground at the site, part of a column, marks the ‘place belonging to the Blues’. The programmes also include other entertainments such as mimes, acrobats and singers, continuing the tradition of musical displays and contests which took place alongside the track and field events in the ancient Games. Such entertainments were sometimes included to distract the crowd while the track was cleared and prepared between races, but in other cases may have formed a separate section of the programme after the racing had concluded. By the time of these programmes the gymnasium had ceased to play a major part in the education of the upper classes and athletics had also become a spectator sport, with professional athletes forming part of the bill. The performers (charioteers, horses and equipment, and the other entertainers) may have had to remain in the town where they were based.

A charioteer for the ‘Blues’ team (third century AD). Mosaic in the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome. Photograph © Peter Clayton

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One wonders whether, in a town like Oxyrhynchus, there would have been sufficient variety of entertainers to keep the people amused; perhaps the horses and riders remained in the same stables or racing yards but the other artists continued to travel around from one games to another, as they had centuries before.

Three circus programmes have been published so far; the only complete one is also from Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. XXXIV 2707). It lists six races, with items such as singing stilt-walkers, athletes and mimes (the most common and so, presumably, the most popular or the least expensive entertainment) in between. Other known types of entertainers included mimics, gymnasts, tightand slack-rope walkers and performers with hoops. All the programmes which are preserved intact start with an invocation to good fortune (a throw-back to pagan times when Tyche, the goddess of the fortune of the city, was invoked) and some form of display of victory or victories, probably statues or panels symbolising the Emperor. A procession of all the performers also regularly took place, possibly including imperial representatives and local dignitaries.

The entertainments were provided free for the crowds, but it is not entirely clear how they were funded by the time of these papyri; possibly there was no single source of finance. The emperor paid for entertainments in Constantinople and it would seem logical, if the same political purpose was to be achieved, that the imperial role

Charioteers (fifth century AD) depicted on a papyrus found by the EES in 1914 at Antinoe (Antinoopolis)

would have been performed by the governors, or others perceived to represent him, in the provinces.

The papyri do not show the venue for the events.

Oxyrhynchus had a hippodrome (or Roman circus), probably just outside the city to the north of the ancient site, and there was a theatre in the south-west quarter of the city, where shows which did not include chariotracing may have taken place. In Aphrodisias in Turkey, for example, where there was no hippodrome, there is evidence in the theatre for a range of entertainers, including mimes and a tight-rope walker.

What were these documents used for? Two of them (2707 and new papyrus 1) end with the words ‘Farewell’, added by a second writer, suggesting that they may have been copies of a public notice which was seen and approved by a second person, possibly passed from one municipal official to another. We cannot tell if any of the others had such a subscription; all may have had. All are written in large letters with wide spaces between the lines and, so far as one can see, wide margins which suggest that they may have been created to be handed round or pinned up; whatever the general level of literacy, there would have been enough people able to read to justify this. Alternatively they may have been used by the master of ceremonies or impresario in charge of ensuring that the various acts came on at their appointed times.

Key: 1. Hippodrome (?)

7. Colonnade photographed by Petrie 2. North-west gate (?)

8. Base of honorific column 3. West rampart 9. Wells and column (temple?)

4. Upper necropolis 10. Eastern gate 5. Graeco Roman necropolis 11. Corner of Doric peristyle (gymnasium?)

6. Theatre 12. New Kingdom necropolis (?)

Hypothetical reconstruction of of ancient Oxyrhynchus. From Oxyrhynchus: A City and its Texts (EES 2007)

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• For good fortune • Victory • [ ] • [ ] • Mime • [ ] • Gymnast • Mime • Vocalists • [ ] • (2nd hand) Farewell

PEETERS P U B L I S H E R S Ancient MeMphis, ‘Enduring is thE PErfEction’ L. EvanS (ed.)

This book brings together some of the latest findings regarding Egypt’s first capital. The twenty-two papers that comprise the volume were originally presented during a conference and examine the administrative functions of Memphis, its social structure, demography, art, material culture, religious institutions, and mortuary beliefs from the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period to the end of the New Kingdom.

Collectively, the papers provide a fascinating overview of one of the most important cities in dynastic history and reveal the potential of ancient Memphis for achieving a greater understanding of Egypt’s socio-political and cultural development.

New papyrus 1

• Mime • Race • Mime • ??????

• Race [or mime]

2012 – Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 214 – VIII-443 p. – ISBN 978-90-429-2546-5 – 90 EURO

FunctionAl Aspects oF egyptiAn cerAMics in their ArchAeologicAl context

New papyrus 2

B. BADER & M.F. OwNBy (eds) This volume presents the papers given at an international conference. The aim of this conference was to discuss Egyptian pottery in different archaeological contexts and the employment of ceramics for understanding these deposits. At the same time some archaeological contexts were utilised to gain insights into the function of pottery, in order to intergrate both approaches.

• Mime • Vocalists • Hoop artist • Mimics

2012 – Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 217 – XII-421 p. – ISBN 978-90-429-2581-6 – 90 EURO

New papyrus 3

The number of races held on a single day varied widely from time to time and from place to place, with 24 a day being normal in the capital during the Imperial Period.

There were only six races in P. Oxy. 2707, and three of the six known papyrus programmes do not appear to list any races at all, even though one of those definitely contains the opening elements (the invocation to good fortune, the display of victories and the procession) which were typical elements of ludi circenses, and the others may do so. It must have been cheaper to put on such a show rather than a full programme including racing, but the absence of racing may indicate that these three papyri are later than the others and from a time when the venues no longer had racing stables. They show that a day at the races had, by the Byzantine Period, actually become what we would call a day at the circus.

An Ancient egyptiAn literAry text in context: thE instruction of PtahhotEP F. HAgEN The book attempts to reconstruct the social context for Egyptian wisdom literature during the Middle and New Kingdoms (c. 2000-1000 BC), using The Instruction of Ptahhotep as a case-study.

By looking at the archaeology and material culture of manuscripts, intertextual references and editorial changes to the text over time, the book traces the life of a wisdom poem from the hands of its copyists to the minds of its readers, charting its use and reception over hundreds of years.

2012 – Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 218 – X-313 p. – ISBN 978-90-429-2600-4 – 84 EURO

q Margaret Mountford has recently been awarded a PhD at University College London for her research into documentary papyri from Oxyrhynchus, including circus programmes. She has been a Trustee of the Egypt Exploration Society since December 2010. Photographs, unless otherwise indicated, © The Egypt Exploration Society and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Imaging Project.

BonDgenotenlAAn 153, B-3000 leuVen, BelgiuM peeters@peeters-leuven.be www.peeters-leuven.be

95262_EgArch_advertentie_3.indd 1

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Egyptian landscapes and environmental archaeology The Egypt Exploration Society’s current research strategy is focusing on landscape archaeology.

David Jeffreys explains the reasons for this and the issues which need to be addressed. wandered and changed over time, not just in the Delta but also, within the confines of the desert cliffs, in the Nile Valley. Landscape/environmental archaeology can challenge and change the way we see the past and provoke questions about our own prejudices and presumptions.

In particular the archaeological evidence can provide a salutary reminder that the written record is not the only one - or even the most important.

There has been a surge of interest recently in the archaeology of the Egyptian landscape, both in the Nile Valley and Delta and in adjoining and peripheral regions (the deserts and oases either side, the Delta fringes, and the coasts of the Red and Mediterranean Seas). It is puzzling that it has taken so long for this interest to emerge: in the late 1890s and early 1900s Egypt’s ecology was being fundamentally transformed by the construction of the first Aswan dam and the canalisation of the country’s agricultural infrastructure, but this major event seems not to have sparked any particular enquiry into past practices. The unusual, if not unique, conditions of the Nile seem not to have struck anyone until lately. The idea had taken hold that ‘eternal Egypt’ essentially meant that things had always been the same - an extraordinarily lazy way of thinking.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as we are now beginning to understand. The Nile is a dynamic riverine

Landscape archaeology is perhaps best described as the study of past natural environments and the people who lived in them. At its best it is a slightly odd combination of hard science (geology, geography, geomatics and mapping systems) and more theoretical approaches derived from social anthropology such as social history and phenomenology - the way that the environment was and is experienced in the past and the present - and certainly includes the built environment; architecture and structural history. It may address ecological and climate variations and naturally lends itself to change on a range of different timescales. One important aspect when applied to Egypt is just how conscious the Egyptians were of these changes. With the deep chronological record the Egyptians maintained we might expect this but curiously it does not seem to appear so often except in certain aspects of their mythology.

The archaeology of landscapes and environmental conditions has exercised those of us interested in the way that humans have adapted to ecological change, the way that they have perceived their surroundings, and the awareness they have had over their own short- and longterm development. Environmental changes influenced, and sometimes controlled, settlement patterns in Egypt, as the annual inundation pushed the Delta out into the Mediterranean Sea and the channels of the river Nile

New SCA buildings over the Early Dynastic town at the foot of the Saqqara escarpment

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Sediment coring in Saqqara town (just in time!)

Coring in the fields west of Mit Rahina

system involving constant change and (to a fairly limited extent) sporadic management by the inhabitants. This has certainly been appreciated in the past by just a few experts in the field, for example H Kees’s Ancient Egypt: a cultural topography (1961) and K Butzer’s seminal Early hydraulic civilization in Egypt (1976), further back by the architects of the new ecology (surveyor H G Lyons, engineers W Willcocks and J I Craig) at the turn of the century and, further back still, the geologist-turned-archaeologist Joseph Hekekyan (one of my all-time heroes) who in the early 1850s was the first to imagine and describe in detail the social consequences of the Nile regime (see EA 37, pp.7-8). What is perhaps most telling is that Hekekyan’s pioneering and painstaking fieldwork, meticulous records and expert commentary were blithely, indeed wilfully, ignored by the European Egyptological establishment for over a century: Petrie, for instance, should have known (but apparently did not) what had been done at Memphis before he started, and could have saved himself a good deal of trouble, heartache and expense if he had only done his homework.

All that is now changing. As readers of EA will be well aware from reading articles and ‘Digging Diary’, many expeditions in Egypt are now studying their sites, not just in isolation, but as a part of a wider environment.

Modesty forbids me to suggest that the EES Memphis Survey has alone led to this sudden interest in landscape archaeology and environmental issues, but since we began

in 1981 conversations with colleagues and feedback on our published work have been very positive and encouraging.

To use a medical analogy, Memphis is in so many ways a suitable case for treatment as it shares environmental characteristics of both the Nile Valley and the Delta. This region was - and still is - the country’s most important hub (or heart-throb) combining riverine and cross-desert transport routes (veins and arteries), and the continual re-emergence (resuscitation) of the site as a dynastic and administrative centre is testament to its enduring function, appeal and exploitation. Its necropolis has the country’s most impressive built structures in the form of the pyramids and most extensive elite cemeteries of all dynastic periods, as well as the (mostly unexplored) largest settlement. Targeted ‘surgical’ excavation here has been successful, and our programme of sediment drilling (archaeological biopsies, as it were) has been core to our understanding of the buried stratigraphy of the city and its environs. Sadly, the main site of dynastic Memphis at Mit Rahina (see EA 40, pp.6-7) is increasingly looking like a forgotten and over-exposed corpse (where else in the world would a national capital of such historical and cultural importance be so neglected and badly maintained?

Should it not be in intensive care, even as an elderly patient?)

The history of the Society’s Survey of Memphis is simply described: we started as an EES Centenary Project in 1981 under Harry Smith’s direction and with Lisa Giddy and myself as field supervisors, with no particular preconceptions or agenda, or for that matter a very clear idea how long the project would last. Memphis was almost a blank slate: apart from Hekekyan, Petrie, Clarence Fisher and Rudolph Anthes for the University of Pennsylvania in the 1910s and 1950s, little connected or strategic exploration had ever been carried out there.

Since Mariette’s day the Egyptian authorities had exposed several sites, often in advance of local works (mostly canal and road construction) but with next to no publication of the findings, and Ahmed Badawi of Cairo University had excavated the important ‘Apis House’ and Late Period tombs near the town of Mit Rahina. But compared with

A modern Nile-side shipyard (did Perunefer look like this?)

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David KLOTZ

Caesar in the City of Amun: Egyptian Temple Construction and Theology in Roman Thebes YYWJJJ Q Y NN 1# *4#/ ǎ

Series: Monographies Reine Élisabeth, Vol. 15

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Pilot excavation east of the Saqqara escarpment

somewhere like Thebes, Memphis might as well have been undiscovered terrain. Thankfully, that left us a certain freedom to explore whatever seemed interesting without any prejudice or prior influence.

We are now at a stage where we can at least make some intelligent and informed guesses about the past Memphite environment. It became clear to us early on that the only way to understand Memphis properly (or any other ancient Egyptian site, for that matter) was to explore and appreciate its natural and human evolution: from perhaps a river island or even a riverine archipelago at the start, to its appearance as the mightiest conurbation anywhere in the ancient Near East. To begin with we were in a sense hampered by existing models of urban growth from other places such as Mesopotamia, in particular the presumption that any large communal living area would be highly nucleated or centralised; given the circumstances of the Nile regime that now seems unlikely. Instead we have proposed a string of settlement centres along the west side of the floodplain, attracting the building locations of the various pyramid and associated tomb sites, with an established core region near the earliest elite tombs between Saqqara on the west and Helwan on the east.

As the river migrated eastwards many of these sites were abandoned and a nucleus did emerge (see also pp.1517) at Mit Rahina - home to the iconic Ptah temple Hikuptah (origin of the name ‘Egypt’) and also the site of many other important functional sites and monuments - including, perhaps crucially, the port of Perunefer (see the recent discussions in EA 26, pp.13-17; 28, pp.36-37; 34, pp.15-17 and 35, pp.16-17).

This edition of Egyptian Archaeology highlights the environmental work that the Society’s projects are currently involved in from the Nile Delta to Upper Egypt.

We all hope that this special issue will bring the Society’s contribution to this important initiative to a wider public and we look forward to future developments and to future collaborations with colleagues who have also contributed to this and other issues of EA.

Hans SCHNEIDER

The Tomb of Iniuia in the New Kingdom Necropolis of Memphis at Saqqara Q Y NN 1# *4#/ ǎ

Series: Papers on Archaeology of the Leiden Museum of Antiquities, Vol. 8

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Arts et politique sous Sésostris Ier Littérature, sculpture et architecture dans leur contexte historique WJJJ Q JMM DPVMFVS Y NN 1# *4#/ ǎ

Série : Monumenta Aegyptiaca, vol. 13

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Exhibiting the Past Caspar Reuvens and the Museums of Antiquities in Europe, 1800-1840 Q C X BOE DPMPVS JMMT Y NN 1# *4#/ ǎ

Series: Papers on Archaeology of the Leiden Museum of Antiquities, Vol. 7

ɨ JT CPPL TIPXT IPX BOUJRVJUZ EVSJOH BOE KVTU BGUFS UIF /BQPMFPOJD FSB GPSNFE B TUBUFNFOU JO DIBOHJOH UIF XPSME BU UIF EBXO PG OBUJPOBMJTN All prices are subject to change and exclude taxes – where applicable – and shipping costs.

Order available books online at www.brepols.net

q David Jeffreys is Senior Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and Director of the EES Survey of Memphis. Photographs: © Egypt Exploration Society.

#FHJKOIPG t # 5VSOIPVU #FMHJVN 5FM t 'BY JOGP!CSFQPMT OFU t XXX CSFQPMT OFU

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Geophysical methods and landscape archaeology Archaeological geophysics has proved to be one of the most useful tools in landscape archaeology, mainly because of its potential for reconstructing diverse traces of man’s intervention in his surroundings, as Tomasz Herbich describes.

In Egyptian field archaeology the dominant geophysical method is the magnetic one - the others being the electrical resistivity and georadar methods. The success of the magnetic method in Egypt is due to the presence of magnetic iron oxides in Nile silt, which has been the primary building material in the Nile Valley from antiquity through to modern times.

Geophysics was used in the archaeology of the Nile Valley for the first time in the 1960s with the survey

by Albert Hesse during the exploration of the fortress at Mirgissa in Nubia. This early research was extremely time-consuming because of the need both to register measurements and to plot the results manually. Low apparatus resolution meant that the only features which could then be mapped were those which were characterised by resistivity or magnetic field intensity values significantly different from their surroundings. It was not until the 1980s that fully automatic measurements permitted values to be obtained in denser grids: for the magnetic method usually no fewer than 8 points per square metre and for the electrical resistivity method 2 measurements per square metre, covering large areas counted in tens of hectares. In addition, computers provided the means for the quick processing of large amounts of measurement data, using different kinds of filters to increase the legibility of the results and varied forms of visualisation including maps and 3D models.

Higher sensitivity instruments have also played a role.

Despite occupying a strong position in European archaeology, archaeological geophysics was seldom used in Egyptian archaeology until relatively recently, being confined mainly to sites with a strong contrast between archaeological features and their surroundings. In the case of the magnetic method, this meant the difference between features made of magnetic Nile silt and the nonmagnetic sandy environs. Research by Helmut Becker, Joerg Fassbinder and Edgar Pusch in Qantir (see EA 14, pp.13-15) in 1996, and continued in the first years of the twenty-first century, marked a turning point in geophysical prospection. These results demonstrated the potential of the magnetic method in reconstructing the ancient urban layout and its localisation in the contemporary Delta landscape, on the bank of the now extinct Pelusiac branch of the Nile, covering an area of more than 2km2. Their

The writer (foreground) and Dawid Święch scanning magnetically for the EES Delta Survey at Tell Yetwal wa Yuksur in 2009. Photograph © Egypt Exploration Society

map shows the town’s architecture, the street grid, the waterfront and the temple complexes. Clearly visible house plans allow assumptions to be made about the character of different districts. The research in Qantir demonstrated the falsehood of the belief (then commonly held) that the magnetic method would not be useful in the Nile Delta and could not replace traditional excavation methods as a means of identifying Nile-silt constructions in a matrix of the same material.

The success of the research at Qantir raised interest in the application of geophysics for archaeological projects in Egypt. In the sixteen years since the Qantir prospection archaeological geophysical surveys have been conducted on at least 100 sites (60 of these being by the author of this article). In most cases the objective was to answer the archaeologist’s query: ‘Where best should I dig?’.

Revealing structures concealed from surface view, but within the confines of an investigated site, gives archaeologists the opportunity to plan their excavations more effectively and efficiently. At a number of sites, however, the issue was not so much improvement of excavation technique as answering questions concerning the use of space within settlements, cemeteries or temple complexes, as well as the reconstruction of the landscape around a site in an effort to recreate and understand settlement processes.

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Tell el-Daba. Magnetic map of the area to the east of Ezzawin village. A reinforced waterfront may be reflected by a feature with homogeneous values of magnetic field intensity (indicated with red arrows).

A recess in the waterline (yellow arrows) suggests a harbour. The yellow dots are VES locations.

Box: apparent resistivity pseudo-section. The higher-resistivity structure between the arrows corresponds to the feature characterised by homogeneous magnetic field intensity values - the presumed waterfront made of material with gravel and sand added

The effectiveness of geophysics in reconstructing the layout of both settlements and their environs is best exemplified in Egyptian archaeology by the research of the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Tell el-Daba, presented in EA by Irene ForstnerMüller (EA 34, pp.10-13). Recently, the prospection has brought further interesting results in the south-western part of the site, around the village of Ezzawin. Verification by the vertical electrical sounding (VES) method of Josef Dorner’s geomorphological map (establishing the extent of areas with settlement potential in antiquity by reconstructing the course of the Nile and the related flood area) has demonstrated not only that this particular area was never flooded (which Dorner’s map had indicated), but also that, as indicated by the high resistivity of surface layers, it could have been settled.

Magnetic surveying revealed a village, the southern edge of which was based on the river bank, which appears to have been artificially reinforced. This theory is supported by geoelectric research as the embankment appears to have been made of material of much higher resistivity than that of the surrounding matrix. The heterogeneous magnetic picture in the neighbouring part of the riverbed could suggest its deepening. Analysis of the combined results of surveying by two separate

methods leads to the assumption that there had been a small harbour in this location and that, considering the deepening operation, it may have been operational not only during the Nile flood. A feature of identical shape (and of similarly high ground resistivity) was registered next to the settlement discovered in the magnetic survey of the eastern part of the site (beside the village of Mehesin). Identical structures can also be observed on magnetic maps of Qantir. This research shows how areas of active use of river resources by local inhabitants can be identified, contributing data essential for the reconstruction of overall town landscapes which could not be generated easily by traditional excavation methods.

A reconstruction of the water network was one of the main goals of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo (DAI) research at Philoteris in the western Fayum. The network of canals distributing water in the region had been reconstructed based on aerial and satellite photographs combined with ground surveying, but magnetic surveying provided a much broader and fuller picture. With regard to known channels, magnetic mapping permitted a determination of the exact width of particular canals, the presumed location of harbours and areas where canals had been altered or shifted. The mapping also revealed canals that could not be seen on the ground by any other means, as well as the system of interconnections. It also traced a canal that appears visually no different from the other canals, but, according to the magnetic results, was never finished or used.

A good example of a sacred landscape reconstructed by means of magnetic prospection is provided by the joint project of the Polish Center of Mediterranean Archaeology (PCMA) and the British Museum in Tell el-Balamun (EA 29, pp.16-19). This research led to the discovery of an unknown temple in front of the subsidiary temple built by Nectanebo I. The recording

Philoteris, Fayum. Map of the western part of the site.

The red arrows indicate canals identified by the magnetic survey alone and the green arrows are canals traced on the ground. The red dotted lines mark a canal traced on the ground but not present on the magnetic map owing to the absence in its bed of alluvial (silt) deposits, indicating that the canal was never used

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example. The image of particular tombs was sufficiently precise to date them, while the mapping not only visualized the distribution of tombs in the necropolis but also verified the plan of structures excavated in the early twentieth century such as the enclosure around the Tetisheri shrine (EA 24, pp.3-6). Finally, magnetic mapping also revealed two previously unknown funeral enclosures of rulers of the First-Second Dynasties.

Geophysical methods used on urban sites give an overall idea of the architecture and thus enhance our understanding of the function of particular quarters.

Another good example of such research by the magnetic and electrical resistivity methods, apart from Tell el-Daba and Qantir, is the project of the PCMA in Pelusium.

Magnetic mapping there has revealed the monumental

of stone building foundations, in front of Nectanebo’s temple, presented an entirely new view of the complex.

Magnetic mapping also provided new architectural details of the temple of Psamtik I, traced the extent of Ptolemaic development inside the enclosure and pinpointed areas of industrial activity and their relocation inside the enclosure over time. Mapping data combined with subsequent excavations by the British Museum gave a much fuller idea of the sacred temenos in successive periods.

The magnetic method is also useful in understanding the development of cemetery sites, which are an important element of the landscape on the fringe of the Nile Valley. The results of research by the Pennsylvania University/Institute of Fine Arts-New York University/ Yale University mission in Abydos provide a good

Tell el-Balamun. Magnetic map of the temple enclosure. Detail: schematic plan with the enclosure walls and main structures marked. The yellow area indicates the extent of the temple enclosure which was magnetically mapped. Background image © GoogleEarth 13

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Abydos, north cemetery Left: Detail of the magnetic map showing Middle Kingdom shaft tombs and chapels.

Anomalies corresponding to Late Period vaulted tombs are marked with yellow arrows Right: Detail of the magnetic map. The arrows point to newly-discovered funerary enclosures: red – the enclosure of Aha; green – the enclosure of an unidentified ruler

and public character of the area between the lagoon and the theatre and the more private nature of the area to the east of it, characterised by an irregular street network and architecture built partly in mud-brick. The electrical resistivity method turned out to be a useful tool in clarifying individual house plans, as well as for tracing the course of particular streets in areas where a concentration of red brick, the chief building material in Pelusium, had blurred the magnetic image because of the heavily magnetic properties of this material.

A number of other geophysical research projects, reported in EA, have helped to reconstruct settlement or funerary landscapes over large areas.

To name but three: the DAI research in Buto (EA 24, pp.14-17), the British Museum work at Kom Firin (EA 24, pp.38-39) and the Saqqara surveys of Ian Mathieson and his team (EA 21, pp.14-16, EA 34, pp.38-39). In all cases, the conclusions have been the same: so long as the geological conditions and the character of a site are conducive to the application of geophysical methods, a decision not to carry out geophysical prospection in advance of excavation limits the possibility of understanding properly the landscape of the site and its environs. The results of geophysical surveys provide a breadth of understanding of the ancient environment which is impossible to achieve by traditional excavation methods.

Pelusium Above: The magnetic map. The dotted yellow line marks the extent of the public quarter with monumental architecture and the red dotted line that of the private district. The solid-line box marks the area shown below Below: The resistivity map superimposed on a detail of the magnetic map.

The dark linear anomalies (at right angles) correspond to the foundations of red brick constructions. The arrows indicate streets

q Tomasz Herbich is a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Science and since 2011 has been Deputy Director of the Institute. From 1995 to 2000 he was Secretary General of the Polish Center of Archaeology, Cairo. Illustrations, unless otherwise indicated, © Tomasz Herbich. The writer is grateful to directors of the projects discussed in this article for permission to use the results.

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The mobile Nile Human life may seem short compared to geological or geographical processes but EES projects at Memphis and Karnak, and new researches into environmental change in the Delta, are finding significant effects on the Nile landscape within a few generations, as Judith Bunbury explains.

At the end of the last ice age, the sea-level rose quickly as the ice-caps melted but c.6,000 years ago this rise slowed so that river mouths, which had been inundated began to recover and, once again, grow deltas. By comparing the Nile Delta with the intensely mapped Rhine Delta (where approximately 180,000 boreholes have been drilled) Ben Pennington has created a model for the change of the Egyptian environment as the Delta re-grew. Broadly, at its wettest, a marshy landscape extended well inland, at least as far as the site of Memphis where the Nile Valley closes in. This habitat was nutrient The Nile Delta and its ‘head’ in the Memphis/Cairo region. Image © GoogleEarth rich and the notable presence groups of people were organised. Before the transition, of hippopotamus remains in the houses at Merimda Delta people had more or less equal opportunities in being Beni Salama probably reflects their proximity to this able to access the rich habitat and were equally connected food-rich, if hazardous, environment. Amongst the to their neighbours. After the transition, river travel from marshes were many anastomosing channels (those that one side of the Delta to the other required a trip through divide and reconnect) that made transport from one Memphis, which became the capital of Egypt, in part part of the Delta to any other part easy by boat. In this thanks to its privileged geographical position. environment, Yann Tristant has highlighted that early From sediment deposited in the ruins of Memphis, humans clustered around the fringes of Pleistocene sand Hekekyan (see also pp.8-10), working in the 1850s, mounds known as ‘turtle-backs’ or geziras. As the Nile hoped to calculate the date of the Biblical flood. His flood brought additional water to the marshlands, the scientific work, directed towards this theological enquiry, population and their domesticated animals retreated to revealed that the Nile floodplain was slowly rising at a rate the tops of the geziras - places where the dead could also of around 1m per millennium. Unknown to Hekekyan be safely buried. and many that followed him, however, the channel was With time, as the rate of sea-level rise decreased, the Nile also moving sideways, by meandering, more quickly began to behave differently, building up the floodplain than it was rising. Although the mean rate for floodplain so that the marshes began to disappear, starting from the rise is 1m per millennium, migration by meandering is south and moving northwards. While the habitat of the typically 2km per millennium, thousands of times the Delta-front with its marine and estuarine species still rate of vertical accumulation. The view that aggradation provided a varied diet, people inland needed to travel (increasing land levels by deposits) was more important further to gather food and may have come to rely more than migration persisted until the 1980s when David heavily on farming to supply their needs. As part of the Jeffreys, with his flagship EES project the Survey of same process, the number of channels in the Delta was Memphis (SoM), realized how much the Nile had really reduced and, instead of dividing and recombining, they moved. Subsequent SoM observations from more than began to branch from a point around Memphis that is a hundred boreholes have shown that not only has the generally referred to as the ‘Delta-head’. Ben Pennington Nile moved but a whole river has disappeared. argues that, in Egypt as well as in other deltas around Meandering is a common process in river valleys; as the the world, this led to a profound change in the way that 15

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A GoogleEarth© image (left) of part of the Nile Valley with (right) an interpretation of the field boundary lines that indicate the former movements of the river

current flows around a bend it erodes material from the outside, where the current is fastest, and then deposits it on the inside of the next bend to form a point bar or an island. Fortunately for Egyptologists, the field patterns of the Nile Valley are a palimpsest of former river channels and are easily visible on freely-available GoogleEarth images, such as that above The images can be augmented with borehole and geophysical data as well as more sophisticated satellite analyses like those carried out by Sarah Parcak. From field-boundary patterns we see meander bends move outwards and downstream, eventually cutting into the traces left by the former bends.

In this way, the movement of the Nile has destroyed much of the archaeological and historical record. Fortunately, however, the river seems unable to erode established settlements and both Memphis and Karnak have survived by trapping the river to one side of the Nile Valley.

Islands are favoured for building since the river moves round an island by abandoning the minor channel rather than by eroding the whole area. When an island forms, first a submerged sandy bar forms, anchoring the

plants that in turn baffle sediment so that slowly the bar emerges from the waters. Often the highest, sandy, part of the bar forms a horse shoe shape, preserving shallow muddy water in the middle where fish can spawn and fishermen may gather. The abundance of islands and their comparative safety may explain the focus of ancient Egyptian cosmogony on the emergence of the primordial island from the chaotic waters of Nun. Islands were an important part of the topography in both Memphis and Luxor.

In Luxor the work of the Karnak Land and Water Survey (KLaWS) has shown that the temples there were initially founded in the Middle Kingdom on an island in the Nile channel (see also pp.21-24). Working with Angus Graham and colleagues we have demonstrated that as the river migrated away with time, new land with prime development potential was continually created, allowing mighty structures including the First Pylon at Karnak to be added to the complex. The shifting of the temple’s primary axis from east-west to north-south and then back to east-west can now be considered as a result of the availability of new building land upon which successive kings, male and female (in the case of Hatshepsut), could impress the might of the great god Amun-Re upon the populace.

Back at Memphis, after decades of careful analysis, we are beginning to understand the complexities of a site that probably formed as the sea-level rose to its current height c.6,000 years ago but, being at a strategic position, at the head of the Delta, persisted through dramatic landscape change: the death of the deserts and the writhing of the Nile in its valley.

We now think that the archipelago of ancient Memphis was between two migrating branches of the Nile. During the annual flood habitation was restricted to high land on river banks and islands, Karnak. The First Pylon with the waterfront ramps excavated by Mansour Boreik but as the flood receded the fertilised 16

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The writer and Angus Graham studying an island in the Nile, standing on the sandy bar with the Nile to the left (behind the bushes) and the swampy core of the island to the right Photograph: Omar Farouk

Biahmu in the Fayum, with the base of one of the colossi on the edge of Amenemhat III’s lake. The king’s major irrigation works in the area may have diverted the western branch of the Nile at Memphis

fields between the communities bloomed, making it a garden city with two waterfronts; one to the east and another to the west.

The western river at Memphis flowed past most of the great Old Kingdom pyramids and may have carried royal processions to the harbours of Khentkawes excavated by Mark Lehner at Giza. This channel was probably the river that Sinuhe crossed in his flight from Egypt and which he called the Maaty. Somehow, towards the end of the Middle Kingdom, it disappeared. Where did this western river go? The last firm sighting seems to have been at Lisht, where Sarah Parcak and a BBC TV team sank an investigative borehole into the sediments of what they

identified as an ancient levée of the river. Five metres down, embedded in the muds of the old river bank, they found carnelian and amethyst, the types of precious stone that were favoured by the jewellers of the ancient capital, Itj-tawi, suggesting that the river still flowed in the early Middle Kingdom. Later pyramid builders focused their attention on Lahun at the entrance to the Fayum and by the New Kingdom there is little evidence for large settlements along the former western branch of the Nile north of Lahun.

Perhaps future EES projects will solve the puzzle of what happened to this river but for now the prime suspect in its disappearance is the late Middle Kingdom ruler Amenemhat III, who irrigated the Fayum to form a mighty lake and develop the agriculture of what would ultimately become the bread-basket of the Roman world.

We conjecture that his works diverted the western channel (known further south as the Bahr Yusuf) through the Hawara gap into the Fayum and paved the way for New Kingdom development in the area: the Gurob Harem Palace, with its great wealth and international trade relations. Since Memphis still had command of the channel that flanked it to the east, the supply of food and taxes from the developing Fayum may have been a fair exchange for the loss of the Maaty, especially at a time when climate change had reduced the Saharan area from a game-rich, grassy savannah to a howling desert.

At Memphis and Karnak the landscape setting of sites has changed both during and since their occupation. The palimpsest of the Nile Valley shows that we must assume that the river is moving unless we have evidence to the contrary. Fortunately, the tools are to hand so that sites all along the Nile can be placed in their landscape context. q Judith Bunbury is a Fellow of St Edmund’s College, Cambridge.

She is grateful to her students at the University of Cambridge: Ben Pennington and Laurence Pryer (Earth Sciences Department) and Pedro Goncalves (Archaeology Department) whose research has contributed to this article. She would also like to thank David Jeffreys and Angus Graham for their collaboration and inspiration. Photographs by the writer, unless otherwise indicated.

A view of the excavations at Memphis, showing a First Intermediate Period cemetery to the left, with stone blocks, and to the right Middle Kingdom remains that lie over 10m-deep deposits containing Old Kingdom pottery.

Since beach sand flanks the cemetery below the Middle Kingdom deposits, we interpret this as the core of the Old Kingdom island of Memphis 17

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The ancient landscape around Lake Burullus

The northernmost areas of Egypt are remote, swampy and watery. Penny Wilson, who has been investigating around Lake Burullus for the EES Delta Survey, describes this little-known environment and the ancient sites that once flourished there.

Travelling northwards in the Nile Delta, you have the sensation that the edge of the world is approaching and you will soon fall off it. The flat agricultural expanses of the floodplain give way to endless modern fish farms cut through swampy margins, and then to the reedbeds and shore of Lake Burullus. Using the prevailing northern winds, boats sailing across the lagoon can tack through the reed beds along hidden channels and around flat islands, towards the sand bars and dunes of the northernmost fringe of Egypt. Beyond are the clear blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. To the east of Lake Burullus the mighty Sebennytic branch of the Nile once flowed, now canalised and tamed by a series of drains, and along the southern edge of Burullus a series of distributaries and waterways once debouched into the lagoon, creating channelways through the swamps and reed beds.

Modern irrigation has brought the area under intensive farming, but in pharaonic times it was Map of Burullus and the surrounding areas, showing ancient sites (after the EES Delta most likely only occasionally visited by fishermen, Survey), the lagoon and sea areas (in blue) and modern fish-farms/ancient marshes (green).

Contour lines are in metres above sea level bird catchers and reed collectors. As the Delta 641. With reduced populations, the large towns and slowly moved northward, due to the yearly deposition cities could no longer maintain the drains and dykes to of silt, more land became available for exploitation. From the standards needed to survive in this hostile area. The the Roman Period onwards there was an enormous effort tells that once supported these thriving communities do to make the most of these northernmost areas, which, in exist, however, and number amongst Egypt’s unsung turn, created an agricultural land boom from the first to and undiscovered treasures. North of the ancient centre the tenth centuries AD. Towns and villages sprang up, of Buto, there are more than 100 sites, many of them inhabited by people eager to take advantage of the new dating to the Roman Period. Survey work by the Egypt land and encouraged by an empire hungry for grain.

Exploration Society aims to establish the nature of the The populations in the area declined, however, due to settlements in this extraordinary landscape. war, famine and plague, and the Arab invasion after AD

A house, boats and trees in Lake Burullus 18

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A sycomore tree sculpted by the wind at Tell Hara, near Baltim

House plans visible on the surface of Tell Nashawein

Once drained, there would have been rich agricultural lands for grain, vegetable and fruit production. The surpluses were collected at strategic points, perhaps monitored by guard posts along the waterways, and sent as tax to Rome and Constantinople during the Roman and Byzantine Empires. The agricultural towns in the area saw the change from pagan religious beliefs to Christianity and then to Islam in just four hundred years and the settlement mounds should reflect the political, economic and religious changes. The area around Lake Burullus provided rich resources and the very isolation of the area may have attracted monastic communities, amongst others, from the Late Antique Period onwards.

There are diverse types of site in this area, therefore, and they are a product of the landscape in which they were built.

Along the northernmost fringe of Burullus, for example, there is a series of sand dunes, up to 10m high, which have good views north to the sea and south to the lagoon.

Pottery on these sand dunes dates to the Medieval Period, but it is possible that the dunes may have moved and covered earlier watchposts, since fragments of Roman amphorae can be noted at places such as Mastarua. The modern seaside resort of Baltim has covered any ancient remains, but the sand dunes here have abundant medieval Islamic pottery, again attesting to activity in this area, which was the location of the port of Paralos, at the mouth of the Sebennytic branch, until the tenth century.

Large settlements south of Burullus may have been at the edge of the agricultural lands and adjacent to waterways in order to administer and manage the areas around them. Kom Khanziri (Pachnamounis) and Kom Khawalid (Phragonis) were important bishoprics and both sites survive as tells of up to 15m high, covering an area of 25 and 65 hectares respectively. Tell Nashawein is a site which comprises two mounds, most likely originally on either side of a waterway, and Tell Foqaa, to the west, may also have had a twin town, now no longer extant, in order to supervise goods being transported northwards.

Both sites are covered in fired brick, red-slip ware pottery, glass and metalwork, suggesting that they were equally affluent. In the area now used for fish farming, ancient mounds stand proud of the tanks excavated for young fish. Kom Khubeiza (13 hectares) and Kom el-Ahmar el-Ain (9 hectares) may be remnants of larger sites and they must always have been constantly wind-blown, flyridden and difficult to access if their modern condition is any indication.

More isolated than even these settlements are those inside Lake Burullus itself. Accessible now only by boat, the remaining ancient sites at the islands of Dakhlah, Kom el-Akhdar, Mehgara and Singar are surprisingly different in their appearance. Dakhla is a flat area of mud, almost at water level, with some traces of red brick walls, pottery and glass dating to the Late Antique Period (fourthseventh centuries), whereas Kom el-Akhdar has a small

Sandhill and grass-covered dunes at Mastarua 19

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Cows grazing on Kom el-Akhdar

Recording fired brick on the surface at Kom Retabi

mound not more than 2m high, which is now covered in green shrubs and yellow flowers in the spring. There is abundant pottery, glass and metal, also of the Late Antique Period, covering the site. Singar, which in local legend is said to have had its own king, has been inhabited in more recent times by fishermen whose small huts were cut down into the island and through archaeological strata, which would suggest that the island was at least partly inhabited during the Late Antique Period. The primary use of these islands today is for pasturing cattle, because the natural isolation and difficulty of reaching them means that potential thieves would have to be very determined and well prepared to be able to rustle the animals from these places.

By comparison, at the south-west corner of the lagoon is the site of Tell el-Ahmar or Tell Mutubis, which was investigated in spring 2012 as an EES Amelia Edwards Project, directly funded by EES members. Mutubis seems once to have been close to an inlet of the lagoon and with the Rosetta branch of the Nile not far to the west, the site must have commanded an important strategic position, monitoring traffic on the Rosetta branch, as well as having direct access to the lagoon and the northern seaboard. The site of Mutubis now consists of a 12m high mound, partly cut away, but which may have once covered an area of around 35 hectares. Its most thriving era also seems to have been in the Late Antique Period, as attested by the many red-slip ware sherds and abundant amphora fragments on the surface of the mound.

The pattern of settlement and development of this isolated and hostile environment during a little understood period from an archaeological point of view

Fish farms surrounding Kom Khubeiza

Surveying at Tell Mutubis

is only now becoming apparent as further survey work is carried out. Like work in the eastern lagoon system of Manzala at Tell Tinnis (see p.30), the EES survey is part of a detailed landscape investigation of the Delta, which aims to reconstruct the ancient environment in which so many people once successfully lived and worked. q Penny Wilson is Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University. She is grateful to Rebecca Bradshaw, the Kafr el-Sheikh office of the MSA, the Water Police of Lake Burullus at Shakhlouba and Baltim, CEAlex and the Austrian Institute in Cairo, and to those EES members whose donations funded the survey at Tell Mutubis as an Amelia Edwards Project. Photographs: ©Egypt Exploration Society

The mound of Tell Mutubis. The preserved mound rises behind the low-lying area which has been cut away to the level of the modern fields

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Investigating the Theban West Bank floodplain Following the curtailed first season in January-February 2011 (see EA 38, p.3), the EES Theban Harbours and Waterscapes Survey carried out its first full season between February and April 2012.

Angus Graham reports the results of this season’s work on the West Bank at Thebes.

The Theban Harbours and Waterscapes Survey (THaWS) aims, using geophysical and geoarchaeological techniques, to advance our understanding of past landscapes and waterscapes in the Theban region and to study how much the Egyptians were able to manipulate the floodplain for religious and practical ends.

Evidence for a dynamic river and floodplain in the Theban region over the last two centuries can clearly be seen in maps, photographic archives, paintings and satellite imagery, and has also been revealed for ancient times by our work at Karnak (see also p.16). A notable example of recent manipulation is a minor channel south of Luxor temple that was recorded by David Roberts in his 1838 painting and can also be seen in photographs (see below) taken before 1872. By the 1940s the 1:25,000 map shows this minor channel, the Khor el-Ammari, infilled at the downstream end - probably connected with the construction of the Winter Palace Hotel in 1886, immediately south of the channel.

We know that the Festival of the Valley in antiquity saw the images of Amun, Mut and Khonsu journey from Karnak to the West Bank to visit royal cult complexes and the West Bank necropolis in an act of reunion and reintegration between the living and the dead (see Ute Rummel’s forthcoming article in EA 42). Although there are several textual sources providing important evidence for the festival, and many scholars have made suggestions about its itinerary, to date there has been no investigation of the floodplain to locate possible canals or land routes that may have been used. Scenes depicted

on New Kingdom elite tomb walls on the West Bank show basins in front of temples and chapels (some with canals) and often with a tribune or reception platform.

Supporting evidence comes from a number of extant platforms associated with temples at, for example, Karnak, Medinet Habu and ElKab. Canals of Tuthmosis I and Tuthmosis III are listed on the so-called Red Chapel of Hatshepsut and are thought to have linked their respective royal cult temples with the Nile, but their existence has not yet been archaeologically proved.

During previous surveys in the Egyptian Nile Valley with Judith Bunbury and Kristian Strutt we found electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) to be a very effective tool for detecting sub-surface features and former channels at Karnak (EA 36, pp.25-28) and in the Edfu floodplain. ERT relies on the passing of an electrical current through the earth, and the measuring of the resistance to the current at intervals to build up a profile of the changing material below the surface of the ground, thus enabling the detection of localised anomalies and features. Our geophysical work is followed by hand augering to assess what the resistance readings corresponded to below the ground using the methods of recording and study developed at Karnak (EA 27, pp. 17-19). All our work is geo-referenced using a Total Station and the topographic data has been incorporated in the processing of the profiles. To complement this work we also make limited use of magnetometry to map potential near-surface archaeological features in a broader 2D area survey.

This photograph taken by Antonio Beato some time before 1872 shows the waterway, Khor el-Ammari, rejoining the Nile to the south of the Temple of Luxor. Photograph (the sky has been cropped): Image no.3456, reproduced with permission of the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford

An unsigned photograph taken facing south from the Temple of Luxor some time before 1872 shows the waterway, Khor el-Ammari, rejoining the Nile.

Photograph (the sky has been cropped): image no.3460, reproduced with permission of the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford 21

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ERT Profile 4 processed using Res 2D Inv software with the location of AS35 marked

Profile 7 showing low resistance material lying between high resistance anomalies at 16m and 28m along the profile

Profile 13 across the Second Court of the temple of Amenhotep III. A cut feature with an infill of higher resistance material lies between 8m and 32m along the profile

Profile 16 processed, with the locations of AS36-38

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Omar Farouk and Talat Handagha conducting a survey traverse with Sarah Jones and Kris Strutt. Photograph: Sarah Jones

ERT Profile 4 (P4) on the track south of the Ramesseum. Kris Strutt and Warda el-Najar recording raw resistivity data from the probes

The larger satellite image shows the location of the spoil mounds of Birket Habu on the West Bank, with our ERT and auger sites located across the entrance.

The inset image shows the locations of ERT profiles in the floodplain in front of the Royal Cult Complexes of Tuthmosis III (T), Amenhotep II (A) and Ramesses II (R) as well as the area of the Royal Cult Complex of Amenhotep III with the Colossi of Memnon (C). Auger site AS35 and magnetometry area 1 (M1) are also shown. Background images: ©GoogleEarth 23

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were found in this auger and most were small and well rolled (worn and rounded), and could not be dated with accuracy. Those that could be given a tighter date range based upon their fabric - and for some their extant surface treatment - fall within a Middle Kingdom to New Kingdom range on, or a little above, this ancient surface.

Evidence of calcisols were also found in AS37 and AS38 in the entrance to Birket Habu (3km southwards) at very similar heights to AS35. More work is needed to date and understand further this ancient surface as it has the potential to provide a benchmark level which will help us to understand better the major monuments within the Theban floodplain.

We carried out two ERT profiles (P7 and P8) across the axis of the temple of Amenhotep III c.180m in front of the Colossi of Memnon to see if a channel associated with their delivery could be identified. Initially we did not think that there was anything of great significance in P7 and P8. However, since we have re-displayed the processed data by changing the ohm range we can see that there is an anomaly in P7 (see p.22) between 16m and 28m along the profile that deserves further attention. We hope to auger in this area to ground-truth these results. In collaboration with Hourig Sourouzian and the ‘Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project’ team, we carried out ERT Profile 13 across the temple’s Second Court to test Rainer Stadelmann’s hypothesis that a canal may have transported the first pair of colossal statues to their position at the front of the temple. The profile (see p.22) indicates the presence of a large in-filled feature represented as high resistivity measurements from 8m to 32m in the profile, and running to a depth of 69m above sea level. This feature also appears in excavations carried out in front of the Third Pylon.

However, in this section of channel the cut lies wholly above the level of the floor found in the First Court and thus it must post-date the reign of Amenhotep III. We hope to clarify our understanding of this fascinating feature in the future.

This first full season was extremely productive and has provided some exciting and intriguing data about the ancient landscape at Thebes, and posed many new questions. We can only hope that our next season is as successful as this one.

The team sort all the ceramic and non-ceramic fragments using tweezers and then record them. Left to right: Aurélia Masson and Marie Millet (standing), Ben Pennington, Morag Hunter, Warda el-Najar, Youssef Ahmed, Abd el-Nasser, Abd el-Hardie, Yasser Abd el-Hamid and Omar Farouk

This season 14 ERT profiles were carried out. Eleven were on the West Bank (P4-P13 and P16), two at Karnak and one at Birket el-Hubeil/Birket Luxor on the East Bank. The resolutions of each profile varied, with probes set at 1m, 2m, 3m and 4m spacing according to the length of the profile, the required depth, time constraints and the questions that each profile aimed to answer. Lengths of ERT profiles ranged from 60m to over 800m going to depths of 6.5m to 19.5m on the West Bank and depths of 32m at Karnak.

One result this season showing all our techniques coming together was the relocation of a feature on Gardner Wilkinson’s 1830 map. High resistance readings in the area of the junction between profiles P4 and P5 suggested an interesting anomaly and the curvature in the dirt road at this point was distinctive. In the south-west corner of the magnetometry area (M1) (see cover image) a linear positive anomaly was recorded. These findings were checked with Alban-Brice Pimpaud, who has georectified Wilkinson’s map, showing that they match the location of a rectangular feature measuring c.120m by 65m described by Wilkinson along with other features as ‘Halfeh grass, showing the sites of ancient buildings’. The linear anomaly corresponds to the edge of the feature in P5 as well as to the north-east edge of Wilkinson’s feature.

Auger AS35 was then carried out to see what was producing the high resistance readings and shed some light on the history of the feature. We retrieved rounded sandstone fragments to more than 2m below the surface and angular to sub-rounded limestone fragments in smaller quantities to more than 3m below the surface.

What precisely Wilkinson’s feature represents is not yet entirely clear, but it is worthy of further attention.

AS35 also revealed an unexpected and exciting finding.

At 71.1m – 71.2m above sea level (4m below the modern surface) a calcisol was recorded. Calcisol is characterised by a layer of translocated calcium carbonate and forms in arid to semi-arid conditions. It points to a drying out event a little below an ancient surface. This is supported by the presence of ceramic fragments and charcoal at approximately 71.5m above sea-level where we would expect the surface to be. Very few ceramic fragments

q Angus Graham is Field Director of EES Theban Harbours and Waterscapes Survey and an Honorary Research Associate, Institute of Archaeology, UCL. The project is very much a team effort and he would like to thank all his colleagues for their expert contributions. At the MSA, we are grateful to Mohammed Ismail in Cairo and, in Luxor, to Mansour Boreik, Mohammed Abd el-Aziz, Ibrahim Suleiman and our Inspector Warda el-Najar. We are extremely grateful to Ray Johnson, Hourig Sourouzian, Rainer Stadelmann, Kent Weeks, Joel Paulson, Peter Lacovara, Ute Rummel and Alban-Brice Pimpaud for their support of our work. Our thanks, as always, go to Omar Farouk for his expertise and logistical organisation and to the EES Cairo Representative, Faten Saleh. We are also grateful to the farmers/ landowners who generously allowed us to work on or near their land.

Illustrations by the writer unless otherwise indicated © EES. 24

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Nile navigation:‘towing all day, punting for hours’ The Nile has been so transformed by modern hydro-engineering projects that it bears little resemblance to its pre-modern self. But a wealth of historical data reveals a more complex navigational landscape than present appearances suggest, according to John P Cooper.

The Egyptian Nile is today very much a tamed river. Since the 1830s, the Egyptians have built a series of barrages and dams, culminating in July 1970 with completion of the famous Aswan High Dam. The river network also comprises some 130,000km of artificial canals, which lock the Nile’s waters into a highly controlled system of hydroengineering. The effect of such a phenomenal programme of engineering has been to transform the Nile from a force of nature to a day-to-day resource-management exercise for technocrats. The resulting appearance of the river for us today is of a calm and hardly changing waterway that lulls us into a false sense of what it was to navigate on the Nile in the past.

The river was not always so. Before the nineteenth century, Egypt was subject to the full force of the annual Nile flood, and to a restriction of water supply when the Ethiopian highlands were in their dry season. In a typical year, the flow of water at the flood’s September peak would have been about 14 times that of the river’s April nadir. It was of course that very cycle that made possible the agricultural development of Egyptian society from the Neolithic era to modern times. But it also had enormous implications for the navigational landscape of Egypt.

Let us start with the low Nile. At Cairo, the river level was some 6.5m below that of the flood. The stream

Lake Nasser and the Aswan High Dam (circled) from space. The dam transformed the navigational landscape of Egypt (Image: NASA)

narrowed to half its width, and a traveller on the river could not see beyond the muddy banks that towered on either side. Irrigation ditches and canals were empty.

Major canals - such as those leading from the Nile to Alexandria and Suez - were also out of action. Indeed, even the main Nile and Delta branches were put beyond navigation for all but the smallest of craft, as lurking sand banks caused groundings and capsizes. The Danish traveller Frederik Norden travelled down the Nile valley in January/February 1738, as the flood receded. His

The volume of water discharged through Aswan in a typical year in the early twentieth century. Image: after H E Hurst

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is also a time when the prevailing northerly winds become both stronger and more frequent, helping navigators to overcome the stronger current wherever the two are in opposition. Where they weren’t, particularly around the Dendera bend, navigators had often to beat against both wind and current.

The Delta was a tougher proposition than the Nile Valley.

The warming land often generated land breezes that cancelled out Freeing a Nile cargo vessel from a sandbank. With the vessel anchored, the captain watches as his crew seek to the prevailing northwesterlies ‘bounce’ the vessel off the bank. Image: F L Norden blowing in off the Mediterranean laden cargo vessel struggled against grounding in several Sea, resulting in frequent calms that left Nile boats facing locations. Near Samannud, he writes, ‘we found ourselves so a strong current with no supporting wind. Even when perplexed by the banks of sand that we knew not what method the sea breezes broke through, Delta channels were not to take in order to get out of them. Two large barques loaded always oriented in a way that enabled navigators to take with sena had unloaded there already a week before, without advantage of them. being able to put off. We were afraid of finding ourselves under The combined result of all these factors was hard labour a necessity of doing the same’. for Nile navigators. Navigation on the Nile is sometimes Data from the early nineteenth century indicate that caricatured as easy, with boats portrayed as drifting a 100-tonne cargo vessel was unable to operate on the downstream on the current, and sailing upstream on the main Nile for five months of the year. The largest vessels wind: this may in part be because the hieroglyphic symbol in the Delta, carrying 60tonnes, were excluded for a for upstream is a boat in full sail, while downstream is similar period. That brought commerce to a halt. In the indicated by a boat with its sail furled. Millennia of Nile eleventh century AD, a trader in Cairo complained in navigators, had they ever been consulted, might have a letter preserved in the Cairo Geniza (at the Ben Ezra dissented from that view.

Synagogue in Cairo, housing a collection of Jewish Indeed a delve into historical accounts of Nile travel manuscripts) that, ‘The city is at a complete standstill. There yields a far richer understanding of what it was like to is no buying or selling, and no one is spending a single dirham. journey on the river. The founder of the EES, Amelia All the people’s eyes are turned towards the Nile. May God in Edwards, was herself a sympathetic observer of the crew his mercy raise its waters’. of her dhahabiyya, an oared and sailed vessel that was the The completion of the Nile flood – celebrated in choice of wealthy nineteenth-century western tourists. medieval times at the Roda Nilometer in Cairo, and in Travelling up the Nile valley in 1873, she noted that her earlier times at nilometers throughout Egypt – was not crew were ‘sometimes towing … on a rope all day long, like simply a matter of jubilation for farmers and tax collectors.

As the tenth century AD Persian geographer Ibn Hawqal reports: ‘Most navigation takes place with the rise of the Nile’. It was at this time that the main waterways became navigable again for cargo vessels. It was also when the main artificial canals re-opened. This was done systematically. Earth dams were thrown across the canal mouths ahead of the rise, and they were broken in a co-ordinated fashion, with the Cairo canal opened first. As the thirteenth-century Persian scholar al-Qazwini puts it: ‘… the people go out with great pomp to break open the canals, and the land of Egypt becomes a single sea’.

The effect of the flood was not only to open up the entire network to navigation: the current also picked up, tripling in speed. That gave extra assistance to the navigator heading downstream, and presented a bigger The Roda Nilometer in Cairo was the arbiter of the opening of the main navigational canals of Egypt, such as those leading from the Nile to obstacle for those heading upriver. Fortunately, the flood Alexandria and Suez. Photograph: J P Cooper season in the Nile valley, particularly in the earlier months, 26

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barge-horses; sometimes punting for hours, which is the hardest work of all …’.

Even though Edwards was on a tourist vessel, her experience seems to be typical of Nile journeys. The Southampton-born Richard Pococke travelled up the river on a more generic Nile cargo vessel a century earlier.

He noted not only that his crew regularly towed the vessel from the Nile bank, but that they continued to do so even during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Together with hard labour came danger. Grounding incidents were not only inconvenient; they were also dangerous. A sailing vessel hitting a sandbank could easily capsize, as the English barrister Eliot Warburton discovered in the nineteenth century, when his craft halfoverturned. When the Christian pilgrim Jean Coppin arrived in Egypt in 1638, he learned that a storm had just sunk 80 vessels on the Nile. In the nineteenth century, Florence Nightingale saw even a dhahabiyya overturned as the result of a storm whipped up by a southerly khamsin wind.

Particular locations caused particular problems. At the northern extremes of the river, the Nile’s Mediterranean mouths created their own risks: shifting river-mouth deposits of sediment made for narrow and shifting channels, from which the prevailing northwesterlies could easily blow a vessel - not least when waves from the sea met both the shallows and the outpouring river. ‘The waters of the river combat with the sea to find a passage’, says the eighteenth century traveller Claude Savant, ‘When the winds freshen, the waves then run mountain-high, and form whirlpools, which swallow up vessels’. At Egypt’s southern extreme, it was a navigational obstacle - the First Cataract - that marked the historical border of the country. These rapids could be crossed at high Nile, but only with the expertise of a local pilot.

Between these northern and southern extremes, the hazards were more generic than specific to a location. But

A dhahabiyya on the Nile near Cairo, by Fielder (1876)

this was not always the case. At the mountain of Gebel Abi Foda, near Asyut, the Nile presses against the river cliff. The current runs faster, and the mountain induces tricky cross winds. For medieval authors, it was the abode of witches. When Amelia Edwards passed the mountain, crosswinds drove her vessel into the muddy river bank, where it joined twelve others already trapped.

Maritime archaeologists have often resorted to experimental archaeology as a means of better understanding the navigational landscapes of the past. Observing the handling and behaviour of, say, a reconstructed Viking ship or a sewn-planked vessel can greatly boost our understanding of navigation in the northern Atlantic or western Indian Ocean. But the Egyptian Nile has been so radically transformed by human engineering over the past 150 years that no amount of reconstruction can replicate the navigational conditions encountered by Egyptians in the past. Fortunately, Egypt has exercised such a draw on visitors that a substantial corpus of travel literature exists, and from this we can start to build an understanding of Nile navigation across all periods. Of course, not everything was the same across time. Waterways came and went, and the climate has changed to some extent. But judicious use of travel, meteorological and hydrological data can nevertheless shed valuable light on what it was like to navigate the Nile in the past.

What these accounts reveal is that navigation before the building of the dams was highly seasonal, and that it required hard labour and a much more extensive expertise than has often been credited to it. This insight is important in its own right, because it helps us to understand the past lives of a great many ordinary Egyptians. But it also helps us to understand the making of the wider landscape.

Alexandria, for example, is a fine sea-port, but it is isolated from the Nile. Efforts to keep it connected it to the Nile via canal can only be understood if we appreciate why mariners didn’t simply sail in and out of the nearest Nile mouth, ignoring Alexandria altogether. It is in addressing issues such as these that the experiences and encounters of the Nile’s past travellers become so very valuable. q John P Cooper is a Lecturer in Arab Studies and Islamic Material Culture at the University of Exeter. His book on the navigational landscape of the medieval Nile is due for publication in 2013.

At low Nile, waterways narrowed and the banks loomed high above the boats. This view shows Petrie’s dhahabiyya in the Delta in 1883.

Photograph © EES Lucy Gura Archive 27

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Digging Diary 2011-12 Dahshur: Part of the lower causeway of the Bent Pyramid and the western harbour wall.

Photograph: DAI/Free University of Berlin

Summaries of some of the archaeological work undertaken in Egypt in Winter 2011-12 and Spring 2012 appear below with one report from Summer 2011. The sites are arranged geographically from north to south, ending with the oases.

Field Directors who would like reports on their work to appear in EA are asked to e-mail a short summary, with a website address if available, as soon as possible after the end of each season to: patricia.spencer@ees.ac.uk PATRICIA SPENCER Abbreviations: EDP Early Dynastic Period; OK Old Kingdom; FIP First Intermediate Period; MK Middle Kingdom; SIP Second Intermediate Period; NK New Kingdom; TIP Third Intermediate Period; LP Late Period; GR Graeco-Roman; ERT Electrical Resistivity Tomography; GPR Ground Penetrating Radar; DS EES Delta Survey.

Institutes and Research Centres: ARCE American Research Center in Egypt; AUC American University in Cairo; BM British Museum, London; CFEETK Franco-Egyptian Centre, Karnak; CNRS French National Research Centre; DAI German Institute, Cairo; MMA Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MSA Ministry of State for Antiquities, Egypt; OI Oriental Institute, University of Chicago; PCMA Polish Centre for Mediterranean Archaeology, Warsaw; SCA Supreme Council for Antiquities, Cairo: Swiss Inst Swiss Institute for Architectural Research and Archaeology, Cairo; USR CNRS research group.

SUMMER 2011 (May to September) Dahshur North: The season of the Waseda Univ mission, directed by Yoshimura Sakuji and led in the field by Ken Yazawa, mainly focused on the conservation, by Richard Jaeschke, of the brightly coloured anthropoid coffin of Sobekhat (see EA

37, pp.9-12). This had been found within his boxtype coffin, in a MK shaft tomb, together with the box coffin of Senetites. The lid and base of Sobekhat’s anthropoid coffin are covered with painted gesso on a background of linen fabric stretched over a wooden frame. Both lid and base had been considerably distorted and had to be secured and realigned.

WINTER 2011-12 (November to March) Lower Egypt Saqqara: The Leiden Museum/Leiden Univ expedition, directed by Maarten Raven and Christian Greco, resumed work in the NK necropolis. For security reasons, excavation was not permitted so the team concentrated on repairing damage inflicted in 2011 by plunderers in January and by heavy rain in April. The architecture and wall decoration of the tombs was largely undamaged but many modern wooden doors, protective screens and cupboards had to be repaired or replaced, and new locks fitted. Several modern roofs were renewed or adapted and new wire-mesh screens installed to keep out birds.

Some restoration was undertaken in the tomb

of Pay (the lid of Raia’s sarcophagus had been cracked by robbers), the chapel of Tatia (the last fragments were repositioned on the walls and stela) and the chapel of Khay I (the ancient gypsum coating of the reliefs was stabilised). All disturbed storerooms were checked and re-organised with 120 objects and 40 relief fragments found to be missing.

New digital registers were made of all finds of the past 12 years, including those now in the SCA magazines near the Imhotep Museum. www.saqqara.nl

Upper Egypt Dahshur: The DAI/Free Univ of Berlin expedition, directed by Stephan Seidlmayer and Nicole Alexanian, continued work at the lower causeway of the Bent Pyramid. The trench excavated in spring 2010 was enlarged, revealing the lower end and entrance of the causeway which proved to have a total length of 148m. It ends in a large U-shaped area which is probably a harbour basin. The entrance of the lower causeway and the middle part of the W harbour wall were unearthed.

The doorway of the lower causeway is only 1.40m wide and was originally closed by a wooden door.

The upper end of the lower causeway, excavated

by Ahmed Fakhry in 1951-55, was recleared revealing an ancient pedestrian underpass made of limestone blocks. Further limestone relief fragments from the lower temple of the Bent Pyramid were uncovered. A detailed architectural study of the lower temple was undertaken to create a 3D model. www.dainst.org/

Egypt Exploration Society Expeditions WINTER/SPRING Lake Burullus: The Delta Survey team, led

by Penny Wilson (Univ of Durham), visited 16 sites; on the coast, on islands in Lake Burullus, among the fish-farms S of the Lake and in the agricultural land (see further pp.18-20). Seven sites were mapped and condition-surveyed, and surface finds were recorded. Most date to the Late Antique Period (fourth to seventh centuries AD). Along the N coast, the sites have material dating to the medieval period and later. www.ees. ac.uk/deltasurvey/ds-home.html

Tell Mutubis (Kom el-Ahmar): Penny Wilson and her team investigated this site (DS 234) S of Rosetta on the E bank of the Nile as an EES Amelia Edwards Project (see also p.20), making a detailed topographic map. The tell covers an area of c.35 hectares and is c.12m high. Surface pottery was surveyed as well as that in areas cut into the sides of the mound. Most is of the Late Antique Period, with some fragments of the first to third centuries. Features such as mud-brick and red brick walls were recorded. A drill auger survey was conducted and an assessment made of the rich archaeobotanical remains.

Kom el-Daba: The Delta Survey expedition, funded by the British Academy and led by Jeffrey Spencer, continued investigation of this tell (DS 269) in Kafr es-Sheikh Governorate, excavating a large mud-brick structure in the N of the site.

The external wall faces were found on the N and E sides and cleared to show the building to have been 10m x 12m. The walls had been cut by deep pits but were continuous with a high mass

(www.ees.ac.uk)

of brick from the core of the building, still standing clear of the ground. The brickwork belongs to a foundation, which was an almost solid podium of brick with very thick outer walls and perhaps a few small internal compartments. It was probably a Ptolemaic town-house with several floors, and is only one of several such ruins at the site. Similar houses probably covered a wide area arranged on crossing streets. www.ees.ac.uk/deltasurvey/ds-home. html and http://deltasurvey.tumblr.com/ Quesna: The Minufiyeh Survey team, led by Joanne Rowland (Free Univ, Berlin) continued work in the GR cemetery. Trench 9 was extended, revealing 15 graves, including one multiple burial with remains of white and coloured plaster. Two double-vessel ceramic coffins were excavated, and the first burials found at the site surrounded by fired red bricks. Another burial has traces of wood, possibly remains of a coffin. In the falcon necropolis, the results of the 2009 GPR survey were confirmed with the discovery of an additional W-E series of mud-brick corridors, with intact roofing.

Rooms or niches run to the S of the corridors, and each seems to have been filled with a different offering type; some have bird mummies, others have ceramic jars with egg shells. A broken Horus stela was found and a mud-seal, probably from a ‘bird’ jar. The pottery is Ptolemaic. Sedimentary analysis of cores from Kom Usim (DS 45, see EA 39, p.4) began. http://minufiyeh.tumblr.com/ Tell Basta: The work of the EES/MSA/Univ of Göttingen expedition, led by Eva Lange, concentrated on further excavation of the

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Ptolemaic Period casemate-building in the entrance area of the Temple of Bastet; several well preserved floor levels came to light. In the entrance hall of the Temple, epigraphic documentation continued of the Osorkon I reliefs as well as documentation of all fragments of monumental statues of the temple. The area of the cemeteries N of the temple was surveyed and photographic recording started of the decorated elite tombs of the OK necropolis. The team also began a regular lecturing programme at the MSA Zagazig Inspectorate to contribute to the training of junior inspectors.http://tellbasta.tumblr.com/ Luxor: The Theban Harbours and Waterscapes Survey, led by Angus Graham, undertook its first full season (see pp.21-24). Ten ERT profiles were carried out in floodplain areas in front of the memorial temples stretching from Tuthmosis III in the N to Amenhotep III in the S and ranging from 96m to 720m in length and up to 19.5m in depth, to locate any canals that may have served these temples. ERT, magnetometry and hand-augering confirmed the presence of a large rectilinear feature in the floodplain marked on Gardner Wilkinson’s 1830 map, c.400m E of the Ramesseum. An ERT profile and augering in the entrance to Birket Habu and another profile through the possible ceremonial lake on the E bank began investigation of these two massive projects. Two long 32m-deep ERT profiles through the Amun-Re complex at Karnak continue developmental research there. http:// eestheban.tumblr.com/

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El-Sheikh Ibada (Antinoopolis): Fieldwork directed by Rosario Pintaudi (Istituto Papirologico ‘G. Vitelli’, Univ of Florence) concentrated on church D3 - mainly on further excavation of the unusual baptistry and adjoining buildings in the N cemetery. The baptismal chamber adjoins a small single-aisled, and probably once barrel-vaulted, chapel with a large E apse and an underground burial chamber. The chapel and the hall were both entered from additional rooms in the W. The font had not simply been abandoned in antiquity but had been filled with earth and debris and then carefully covered by a strong cement flooring spread over a strengthening substratum of fired bricks bound in lime-mortar. Baptism of the dead was strictly forbidden by the rules of the church and this baptistry in the N cemetery may have been rendered inaccessible by the church authorities to prevent the rules being flouted.

Amarna: The Amarna Project expedition, directed

by Barry Kemp, completed repairs to the animal houses on the N side of the North Palace, and a further season of excavation was undertaken at the South Tombs Cemetery where another decorated anthropoid coffin was discovered. The human bones were later studied by the Univ of Arkansas anthropology field school. www.amarnaproject.com Wadi Sikait (Mons Smaragdus): The Univ of Delaware/PCMA team, led by Steven Sidebotham and Iwona Zych, surveyed this Roman era beryl/ emerald mining region, c.120km NW of Berenike.

The project produced detailed architectural plans and elevations of two major settlements: Middle Sikait and North Sikait, and continued work at Nugrus. The project also initiated excavations at a fifth-third millennium BC cattle cemetery in Wadi Khashab where initial survey work had been conducted in 2010. http://tinyurl.com/7w5llrd Berenike: The Univ of Delaware/PCMA team, led by Steven Sidebotham and Iwona Zych, continued geomagnetic surveys and geological coring, and excavated trenches in several areas of the site: in the early Ptolemaic area at the W end, in the Ptolemaic and early Roman rubbish deposits, in the SW harbour (where some Ptolemaic and many early and late Roman remains were recorded) and at the so-called Serapis Temple. http://tinyurl.com/7w5llrd

Abydos: As part of the Univ of Pennsylvania/Yale Inst of Fine Arts/New York Univ expedition, a team led by Josef Wegner continued work at the mortuary complex of Senwosret III. With funding from the Antiquities Endowment Fund of ARCE, a permanent building was constructed encasing the tomb’s entrance area to permit completion of the excavation and facilitate the tomb’s future opening to visitors. At the mortuary enclosure of Senwosret III expanding previous excavations produced new evidence for the dating and form of the subsidiary mastabas. Previously unknown structures contemporaneous with the tomb construction were discovered and investigated. At the nearby town site of Wahsut, excavation of the mayoral residence (Building A), where documentation of the building proper is now complete, revealed significant well-preserved deposits of ceramics and seal impressions, including a dense deposit of wellpreserved administrative debris from Building A. http://www.penn.museum/abydos.html

Karnak: 1. Archaeological research and restoration programmes continued inside the precinct of Amun-Re under the auspices of the CFEETK (MSA/CNRS USR 3172) directed by Mansour Boreik and Christophe Thiers. Mansour Boreik continued excavation at the Roman bath which covers c.3000sq m, with many archaeological features, such as the bathing pools and heating rooms, very well preserved. At the Ptah Temple, excavation, led by Christophe Thiers and Pierre Zignani, of the SW area brought to light different

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Karnak. Part of a lintel of King Senakhtenre Ahmose of the Seventeenth Dynasty. Photograph: CFEETK occupation phases and a succession of mud-brick walls. A door jamb and part of a lintel from a gate of a granary dedicated to Amun-Re by the 17th Dyn king Senakhtenre Ahmose was found, shedding new light on the history of the SIPearly NK. Elizabeth Frood (Univ of Oxford) continued the study of hieroglyphic and hieratic graffiti. The restoration programme focused on the first Ptolemaic gate. The epigraphic survey of the barque-shrine of Philip Arrhidaeus is now mostly finished. The team led by Laurent Coulon (CNRS) continued the study of the chapel of Osiris Nebdjefa and undertook an epigraphic survey of the chapel of Osiris Ptah Nebankh, between the 10th Pylon and the Mut precinct. The chapel’s lintel was restored, and the mud-brick enclosure wall rebuilt. At the Treasury of Shabaka, Nadia Licitra (Univ Paris Sorbonne) found parts of wooden ceiling decoration made of coloured glass paste, and a stela of Ramesses III describing the construction of a mud-brick enclosure wall. www. cfeetk.cnrs.fr/

2. The OI team, directed by W Raymond Johnson, in co-operation with ARCE as part of its USAID-funded Luxor East Bank Groundwater Lowering Response Project, continued recording re-used blocks in the floors and foundations of the Khonsu Temple under the supervision of Brett McClain and Jen Kimpton. In room II is a large block with a name-frieze of Ramesses II, usurped from an 18th Dyn kheker-frieze. Krisztián Vértes and Keli Alberts documented blocks and fragments in the barque shrine, in rooms III, IV, V, and VII, and on the outside wall of room X. http://oi.uchicago. edu/research/projects/epi/

Luxor Temple: Conservation and monitoring by the OI, led by W Raymond Johnson, and supported by the World Monuments Fund, continued in the temple blockyard, supervised

by Hiroko Kariya. Along the E outer wall of the Colonnade Hall 101 buried blocks were conditionsurveyed and photographed, and then reburied in clean sand. Yarko Kobylecky photographed 135 blocks of Ptolemy I after they were moved to a mastaba platform for study. Jay Heidel continued documentation, study and collation of blocks from a dismantled sixth century AD basilica ‘The Church of St Thecla’ in front of the Luxor pylons, focusing on Arch 1 of the sanctuary. This and a second arch will be studied for possible reconstruction along with the other blocks from the church sanctuary.

the entrance to MIDAN.05 was found, and the remains of a mud-brick structure with a sloping surface ending with steps roughly aligned towards the main door of the tomb. Excavation of the N part of the transverse hall of the tomb revealed the remains of a painted ‘banqueting’ scene on the E wall, showing the tomb owner and his wife seated in front of a table of offerings, with guests and musicians. http://tinyurl.com/6t6wepe.

2. The Spanish National Research Council mission working at Dra Abu el-Naga, directed

by José M Galán, continued restoration inside the tomb-chapel of Djehuty (TT 11). The funerary shaft at the innermost chamber of the tomb-chapel of Hery (TT 12) was excavated. It descends 7.5m, and ends in two burial chambers. One was filled in the Ptolemaic Period with animal mummies, probably mainly ibises and falcons. Two large demotic graffiti (probably mid second century BC) were uncovered in an annex gallery. NE of Hery’s monument the owner of a mid-18th Dyn tomb chapel was identified by 50 funerary cones (Davies and Macadam no.334) and four stamped corner bricks lying on the floor at its entrance as ‘The Overseer of Weavers, Ay’.

3. At Qurna, Margaret De Jong and Susan Osgood of the OI team, directed by W Raymond Johnson, continued epigraphic documentation of the inscribed N wall and one column of the sunken court of the tomb of Nefersekheru (TT 107).

Yarko Kobylecky photographed a group of small, inscribed wall fragments for later incorporation with the reliefs which depict Amenhotep III’s Steward of the Jubilee Palace at Malqata, the noble Nefersekheru. They were carved in bad limestone whose condition has been made worse by flooding. http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/epi/

4. The Centro di Egittologia Francesco Ballerini, Como team, led by Angelo Sesana, concluded their work at the ‘Temple of Millions of Years’ of Amenhotep II. Three TIP burial shafts were completely investigated; they contained ushabtis, pottery sherds, coffin fragments and human skeletal remains. In one shaft the poor remains of two boxes were found, containing two sets of limestone canopic jars. On four of them the name of the owner, Bakenptah, was written in black ink.

On the E side of the temple a niche cut into the conglomerate was discovered. Within were two, probably SIP, mud-coffins with the remains of two individuals still in perfect anatomical connection.

Restoration continued of the mud-brick boundary wall, the remains of the second pylon and two mud-brick chapels inside the columned courtyard.

The aim is to protect the remains of the ancient structures from degradation and to prepare the area for possible visitors. www.cefb.it 5. The work at the Funerary Complex of Harwa (TT 37) and Akhimenru (TT 404) of the Missione Archeologica Italiana a Luxor, directed

by Francesco Tiradritti, concentrated on study of the large amount of material found in recent years in the Tomb of Harwa, with no excavation.

Particular attention was paid to over 500 fragments of papyri recovered in 2009-10. They are mostly funerary in nature, written in hieratic and cursive

http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/epi/

Western Thebes: 1. The Univ of Pisa team, directed by Marilina Betrò, continued the clearance of the forecourt of MIDAN.05 at Dra Abu el-Naga. In front of the main entrance of the tomb, three decorated and uninscribed offering tables were found, surrounded by remains of what was probably an ancient funeral ritual or festival; thick layers of garlands and vegetal remains with dark layers of burnt organic material and several jar stoppers. During the clearance of the W side of the courtyard, the mouth of a shaft, excavated into the bedrock of the forecourt S of

29

Dra Abu el-Naga. Three offering tables found during the excavation of tomb MIDAN.05. Photograph: Gianluca Miniaci © Missione dell’Università di Pisa

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from the gate’s original quarry at Gebel el-Silsila. http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/epi/

Kom el-Hettan. The northern colossus after having been re-erected. Photograph: The Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Conservation Project hieroglyphic; a few are demotic administrative texts. Data from excavation of the courtyard was re-examined and analysis revealed that the tomb had been used for the disposal of corpses of plague victims in the third century AD. To that date also belong the kiln and remains of a huge bonfire (discovered in the courtyard in 2009) and the large areas of quicklime located inside the first pillared hall in 1997-98. A palaeographical study of the texts of the first pillared hall began, as did anthropological analysis of mummies discovered in recent seasons. Some of them, tentatively dated to the early centuries of our era, appear to belong to individuals of non-Egyptian origin. www.harwa.it 6. The Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Conservation Project at Kom el-Hettan, directed by Hourig Sourouzian, continued the geological and archaeo-seismological survey around, and annual cleaning of, the Memnon Colossi. At the second pylon, the lower part of the N colossal quartzite statue of Amenhotep III was re-erected at its original place. At the third pylon, clearance around the large alabaster blocks was pursued and the upper part of the N alabaster colossus in alabaster was revealed. In the peristyle court, the N stela in quartzite was fully raised: its current height is 8.66m, width 3.23m and depth 1.66m. Seismological investigation in the central zone of the peristyle court revealed the place of a collapse due to an earthquake. Conservation of the standing quartzite statues, as well as study and consolidation of sandstone architectural remains, continued. In the S portico two modern pedestals were installed on cement foundations to support the feet of two red granite royal statues which will be raised in forthcoming seasons.

7. The OI epigraphic team at Medinet Habu, led by W Raymond Johnson and supervised by Brett McClain, continued work at the small Amun temple of Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III in the barque sanctuary ambulatory (interior and exterior) and façade. Tina Di Cerbo and Richard Jasnow continued documentation of LP graffiti in the Ptolemaic additions to the small Amun temple and on the rooftop and upper walls of Ramesses III’s mortuary temple. The conservation team, supervised by Lotfi Hassan, continued work in the new blockyard built along the S Ramesses III enclosure wall, prepared an open-air museum and restoring and test-joining five sections of a 5½mtall palm column from the formal palace on the S side of Ramesses III’s temple. Inventorying and documentation of miscellaneous architectural and sculpture fragments was supervised by Julia Schmied assisted by Christian Greco. Frank Helmholz and the OI workmen successfully dismantled the last courses of the sandstone Domitian gate, constructed a new foundation and began shaping replacement blocks from newly quarried sandstone

8. The Joint Expedition to Malqata completed its third season of survey and clearance under the direction of Diana Craig Patch (MMA) and Peter Lacovara (Michael C Carlos Museum, Emory Univ, Atlanta). The site of this palace-city of Amenhotep III extends some 7km along the edge of the low desert beginning just S of Medinet Habu and ending at the cleared causeway in the desert SW of Kom el-Abd. Malqata includes the following buildings and areas: Kom el-Abd, Kom el-Samak, the W mounds of the Birket Habu, the S Village, the Middle Palace, the Palace of the King, the West Villas, the N Village, the Audience Pavilion, and the Amun Temple. A Ptolemaic temple, Deir el-Shalwit, is also located on the site.

The work at Malqata is a long-term project to increase understanding of the city and to plan the long term preservation of the various buildings, as well as to complete and publish the excavations conducted by the MMA between 1910 and 1920. http://imalqata.wordpress.com/

brewery installations located nearby. A survey for rock art by Fred Hardtke (Macquarie Univ) discovered 25 new sites including depictions of an elephant, ibexes, hartebeest, Barbary sheep and hieroglyphic inscriptions. At the ‘Fort’ of Khasekhemwy essential maintenance of the new masonry concentrated at the NE corner. A large area of decaying and cracking brick in the centre of the exterior W wall was also reinforced and repaired. www.hierakonpolis-online.org Kom Ombo-Aswan region: The Aswan-Kom Ombo Archaeological Project, directed by Maria Carmela Gatto and Antonio Curci, started a rescue operation of Prehistoric sites in Wadi Kubbaniya and Sheikh Mohammed (on the W bank at Aswan) and continued the rescue operation of the Predynastic sites in Nag el-Qarmila (Kubbaniya).

Geological drillings were continued on the Aswan W bank, together with a survey in the same area and at Khor Abu Subeira. Digital and artistic documentation of the rock art in West Bank Aswan was undertaken and lithic material in the Kom Ombo storeroom was analysed. www. akapegypt.org (under construction).

Aswan: The work of the joint team of the Swiss Inst and the MSA Aswan, headed by Cornelius von Pilgrim and Mohamed el-Bialy, and directed in the field by Wolfgang Müller, continued. The mission carried on excavation in the PtolemaicRoman domestic quarter in Area 2 and studied the building history of the town fortification in the same area. www.swissinst.ch Kharga Oasis: The North Kharga Oasis Survey, directed by Salima Ikram (AUC), continued to survey the hitherto unexplored areas in the N and NW part of the Kharga depression, recording ceramic finds from earlier seasons, restoring a Roman-era pigeon tower at Ain Dabashiya, and carrying out a site management programme at Ain el-Lebekha. In addition to discovering 11 new sites along the Darb Ain Amur with petroglyphs from as early as 5,000 BC as well as ceramic finds from the Dynastic and Roman periods, the team worked on a newly-noted stone church and settlement associated with alum mining. www.

Elkab: The BM expedition, directed by Vivian Davies, focused on the tombs of Senwosret (early 12th Dyn) and Ahmose-Pennekhbet (probably reign of Amenhotep III). In Senwosret, cleaning continued of the E wall. A large scene, much damaged, showing the tomb-owner hunting with bow and arrow and dogs was recorded. In AhmosePennekhbet, good progress was made in cleaning and recording the decoration on the façade and within the tomb-chapel. A photographic record was made of decorated fragments, some from other monuments at Elkab, found lying among the debris on the floor. At the rear of the chapel, a large hole in the ceiling of the niche leads to the funerary complex of the neighbouring tomb of Pahery. Investigation began of the relationship of the two tombs and of their relative dating.

Hagr Edfu: The BM expedition, directed

by Vivian Davies and Elisabeth O’Connell, continued a programme of conservation through documentation funded by an Antiquities Endowment Fund grant (USAID/ARCE). The project completed 1) the first topographical map northkhargaoasissurvey.com of the archaeological site, 2) a surface survey of pottery, 3) architectural plans of representative SPRING (March to June) architecture and 4) epigraphic documentation of Lower Egypt hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic, Greek and Coptic Tell Tinnis: A team led by Alison Gascoigne inscriptions and dipinti together with related motifs.

(Univ of Southampton) and John Cooper (Univ of The approach to a rock-cut tomb surmounted by an Exeter) undertook a topographic, magnetometry apparent mud-brick pyramid base was investigated and sedimentological survey of this tell in Lake to clarify aspects of its construction, and a rockManzala. The surveys clarified details of the cut tomb (reused for habitation in Late Antiquity) urban topography, including the street layout, and was fully recorded. In the Elkab magazine, Coptic identified a new gate in the city enclosure wall. The ostraca excavated at Hagr Edfu in the 1980s by augering provided contextualising information on an Egyptian mission were collated; the number site formation processes and rates of subsidence. of ostraca attributable to the site doubled when a Kafr el-Sheikh Governorate: The DAI second group, identified in 2011, proved (by joins) Regional Survey around Buto (Tell el-Farain), led to be related to the known corpus

by Robert Schiestl, focussed its work on an area Hierakonpolis: The BM expedition, directed by c.1km NE of the tell of Buto (see EA 40 pp.18Renée Friedman, conducted excavations on the 20). Today this area is entirely covered by fields E side of HK6, the elite Predynastic cemetery, and no archaeological remains are visible on the where the tomb of a leopard was uncovered in surface. Early Survey of Egypt maps, however, 2011. Ten more tombs were discovered and included burials of baboons, sheep, an aurochs, crocodile, ostrich and dog, as well as several humans, one of whom was a dwarf. At HK11C, excavations directed

by Masahiro Baba (Waseda Univ) revealed more of a Predynastic structure made of hand-formed mud-bricks. Outside the structure, more than 1,000 intentionally shaped pieces of sandstone were discovered arranged in 23 discrete piles. The purpose of these pieces remains unknown. At HK24B, excavation directed by Izumi Takamiya (Kinki Univ) investigated one of a series of granary structures in an attempt Aswan: Overview of the excavation in Area 2. Photograph to determine its date and association to the © Swiss Institute Cairo/N Gail 30

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show five small tells, which have since vanished.

In addition, on an aerial photograph from 1955 outlines of a large angular structure are visible.

Magnetometric investigations were conducted to gain more information on this structure and it was possible to verify parts of the N edge and the NW corner of the structure in the ground. In order to understand better the structure’s date and function, a small scale archaeological investigation is planned for the next season. http://www.dainst.org/ en/node/24238?ft=all

Buto: 1. The DAI team, directed by Ulrich Hartung, continued work N of the village of Sekhmawy and excavated further structures of the very beginning of the 1st Dyn. Several rooms of similar size (c.2m x 6m) are arranged side by side and accessible from corridors. So far, there are no round silos and fire places which are typical features of the subsequent occupation phase (early 1st Dyn). A rather large percentage of marl clay vessels (mainly cylindrical and wine jars) contrast with the almost exclusively locally produced pottery assemblage of the later occupation phases.

2. Supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Univ of Poitiers team, led by Pascale Ballet, continued excavation of the Ptolemaic/ Roman bath house in the NE part of Buto, constructed as a Greek-type tholos-bath and later changed into a Roman-type bath house with hypocaust system (see EA 40 p.16). The general survey of the site was continued with detailed surface sampling to investigate the development and interconnections of urban and industrial quarters from the early Ptolemaic Period until the late Byzantine Period.

Tell Farkha (Gazala): The mission of the Jagiellonian Univ, Kraków, the Poznan Archaeological Museum and the PCMA, directed

by Marek Chłodnicki and Krzysztof M. Ciałowicz, carried out fieldwork on the W Kom within the trench opened in 2006-09. Excavation of layers between the oldest phases of the administrativecultic centre (Naqada IIIB) and the top layers of the burned Naqadan residence revealed only a few, very badly preserved, remains of small rectangular rooms. Sherds included a few fragments of imported Palestinian pottery. On the central Kom a Naqada IIIB building with mud-brick walls, 1.5m-1.7m thick, was found, below the EDP settlement excavated in 2011. A new trench to verify geophysical survey results was opened on the NW slope of the kom and a round building, destroyed at the beginning of the 3rd Dyn, was found. Its interior diameter is 7m and its wall is 2m thick. On the E Kom work concentrated on the cemetery and settlement layers around mastaba grave no.10. To the N of it is a group of rooms bordered on the N by a 2m thick wall. A similar wall was found S of the mastaba. The test trench opened in 2011 on the E border of the kom was enlarged to reveal part of a huge room with two entrances built on the gezira sand. www.farkha.org Tell el-Murra: The Polish Archeological Expedition to the North-Eastern Nile Delta,

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(Jagiellonian Univ, Kraków) led by Mariusz Jucha conducted work mostly in the SW of the site.

Trench S3, where two graves of the second half of the 1st Dyn had been found, was enlarged and five more graves, often cut into each other, were explored, ranging in date from the early 1st Dyn to the end of the EDP. The graves mainly contain pottery vessels – among them shouldered jars with half-bows around the shoulder and cylindrical jars with decoration beneath the rim, as well as plain examples, beer jars and bowls. There are also several stone vessels – cylindrical jars, squat jars and bowls. The walls of several other mud-brick structures were also uncovered, with associated Naqada III material. www.murra.pl Tell el-Daba (Avaris): The work of the Austrian Archaeological Inst, Cairo, directed by Irene Forstner-Müller, continued in area R/III, the administrative centre of the 15th Dyn town. In the excavated area the structures are separated by two large main streets. Within the structures different uses of space are discernable, and the W part appears to have had a more official aspect than the E part, which appears more domestic in nature. The individual buildings are relatively well-preserved, up to a height of 1m, and in one case a staircase of mud-brick was discovered leading down from the street into one of the buildings. The plan of this area shows a systematic organisation during the SIP - the streets were used for the whole period the area was settled. Besides pottery, the major finds were sealing impressions (Egyptian, Levantine and Syrian), including another with the name of King Khyan and one of the 16th Dyn. An unusual find was a faience vessel in the shape of a hippopotamus. The season also included studies of Ptolemaic remains, the Minoan frescoes, human and animal bones, and plant remains.

Heliopolis (Matariya): A joint project of the SCA and the University of Leipzig, directed by Aimen Ashmawy and Dietrich Raue, continued excavation of a sanctuary in the area called Suq elKhamis within the temple enclosure. Additional evidence for the reuse of Amarna Period blocks was gathered as well as new fragments of statues of Senwosret I that were re-erected in the W part of the temenos of this temple of Ramesses II.

Upper Egypt Qarara: After two years’ interruption, the Univ of Tübingen team, led by Béatrice Huber, investigated an area in the S of the Coptic site, far away from the main settlement. Some walls were revealed by excavation but it was not possible to define their exact function. No domestic installation has been discovered. The settlement had been abandoned and the constructions later collapsed. The area was then used as a cemetery by the Coptic population, so that the tombs lie here over the settlement and not beneath it, as is the case in other parts of the site. Archaeological material and textiles date the cemetery from the mid fourth to the fifth centuries. Both the settlement and cemetery were seriously looted in 2011 and the team had to clear and record a 20m by 20m area in the N part of the settlement after it had been dug down to the bedrock by sebbakhin.

The stratigraphy and the inner structures of the houses, built directly over the Coptic cemetery, are inevitably disturbed but several periods of occupation can be observed. http://tinyurl.com/7vgdcuh Sharuna (Kom el-Ahmar): The Univ of Tübingen team, led by Béatrice Huber, continued the work begun in 2010 in the NW side of the rock necropolis (directed

by Luis Gonzálves), completing research in the OK tomb M8b, where the inner chamber was excavated. Around M8b three completely robbed OK tombs Heliopolis: The excavation of the temple sanctuary in Suq elwith shafts and funerary chambers were Khamis. Photograph courtesy of Dietrich Raue 31

Sharuna: The wrapped head of a Coptic Period mummy with a garland made of palm leaves. Photograph: Lourdes Moret cleared. Beside them, a 5m deep Ptolemaic shaft (L8a) has at the bottom two child burials with pottery still in situ. In the filling of the shaft were a Ptolemaic pottery assemblage and two offering tables. The area in front of the tombs was used as a cemetery by the Copts and six rock-cut graves have been discovered to date. The bodies are undisturbed and are wrapped in typical Coptic fashion and dressed in tunics with elaborate tapestry decoration. http://tinyurl.com/7vgdcuh Deir el-Barsha: The Leuven Univ team, led by Harco Willems, continued work at the N of the site, in the 3rd Dyn rock circle tomb area. Similar cemeteries have been located in Deir el-Barsha S and Deir Abu Hinnis, and in other parts of Middle Egypt where they appear to be the characteristic burial type in the 3rd Dyn. Work continued in the late OK cemetery in the S of the site, and in the MK nomarchs’ necropolis where the last unexcavated shaft in the tomb of the nomarch Ahanakht I was opened. Although the burial had been rifled at least twice, dozens of ritual objects made of pottery, copper, faience, and calcite alabaster were found still in position. There were also badly damaged remains of the coffin, inscribed with Coffin Texts, of a man called Djehutinakht who may have been Ahanakht’s father, and hence the last FIP nomarch of the Hare nome. Geophysical research defined the limits of the cemeteries. In the process, an extensive new area was found, with streets of (probably early MK) tombs. Study of the pottery from el-Sheikh Sayed/Wadi Zabayda proved that the remains of houses discovered in 2010 all date between the mid-18th Dyn and the Amarna Period. Mapping and photography of the Amarna Period quarries continued. www.dayralbarsha.org Tuna el-Gebel: The Inst of Egyptology, Ludwig Maximilian Univ Munich/Faculty of Archaeology, Cairo Univ expedition, led by Dieter Kessler and Mélanie C Flossmann-Schütze excavated a tower house complex along the processional way between the ancient settlement of Kom elLoli and the temple of Osiris-Baboon, above the animal galleries. A central rectangular tower house with undulating walls c.150 BC to AD 150 is built above the remains of an earlier tower house (time of Ptolemy II). In front were bakery installations with ovens and a mill. Remains of painted wall plaster indicate the existence of an unexcavated cult place for Osiris-Baboon. www.aegyptologie. unimuenchen.de/forschung/projekte/tuna/index.html

Amarna: The team, led by Barry Kemp, began a new project to re-clear and return to view the Great Aten Temple. Work concentrated on the area around the N brick pylon, including the stone building called the ‘Altar’ by Pendlebury (now known as the Platform Building), and the area of the Stela towards the rear of the temple enclosure.

The foundations of the stone building were recleared, a fresh plan was made, and the outlines of the main features were marked at ground level in fresh stones (to be completed next season). The foundations for the emplacement of the quartzite stela had been preceded by an earlier phase of construction with mud bricks and large wooden posts. Quantities of incense were found in some of the post holes. www.amarnaproject.com Thanks to Nicole Alexanian, Béatrice Huber, Gianluca Miniaci, Dietrich Raue, Hourig Sourouzian, Christophe Thiers and Cornelius von Pilgrim for photographs.

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Significant composite statue fragments from Amarna Recent discoveries and identifications have contributed to our knowledge of the distinctive composite statuary of Akhenaten’s reign. Kristin Thompson describes two significant unpublished pieces of composite statues which deserve to be more widely known.

Most pieces of Amarna composite statuary representing heads, limbs and torsos are made of quartzite; some have surviving tenons which would have been inserted into mortises in garments and bases, secured with gypsum.

Specialists have long assumed that the garments of Amarna composite statues were made from a contrasting material, and it is most likely that this would have been a light-coloured limestone, though the possibility has to be entertained that the garments consisted of some other substance such as wood or gypsum.

Numerous limestone fragments from Amarna representing garments exist in museums and magazines, but until recently no surviving portions of mortises on such pieces had been identified. In 2010 a right shoulder in fine white limestone (UC108), on display in the Petrie Museum at University College London, was found to contain the remains of a mortise. The sleeve was discovered by Petrie in his 1891-92 season of excavation at Amarna but with no specific provenance recorded.

Beautifully carved with narrow pleats and the edge of what was probably a broad collar of beads, the shoulder is roughly life-size (height 8cm, width 9.6cm, depth UC108. This sleeve, made from fine white limestone, came from a dress that was part of a composite statue

6cm; the widest pleat is 1cm). The front of the shoulder contains a pair of vertical cartouches with the late name of the Aten (total width 2.5cm) and the grooves retain traces of blue frit. The presence of the late name is not surprising, since composite statuary seems to have been introduced toward the end of Akhenaten’s reign.

The mortise has a rounded profile and perhaps about a fifth of the original opening survives. Its surface has been shaped to a slightly rough texture by pecking with a small, pointed stone tool. Given that the sleeve has been broken off at the bottom, there is no way to determine how deep the mortise was.

The second fragment is a segment of a stomach (Amarna registration number S-5995), almost certainly from a statue of Akhenaten. The material is brownish-purple quartzite and it is roughly life-size; height 19.3cm, width 16.3cm, depth 18.5cm; finished surface of stomach, 17cm x 9cm. It was discovered in 1989 during the excavation of the Kom el-Nana temple, now almost certainly identified as the Sunshade of Ra of Nefertiti (see EA 33, pp.5-7).

The find-spot was in grid square AB21, roughly the centre

UC108. The scooped-out area on the underside of the sleeve is part of a mortise that originally would have had the tenon of an arm, probably made of quartzite, fastened into it 32

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S-5995. A front view of Akhenaten’s stomach, from a composite statue that stood in the Kom el-Nana temple

The stomach’s right profile, showing the massive tenon that would have rested inside a kilt, probably, like the sleeve, made of light-coloured limestone

of the collection of rooms on the Central Platform, to the east of the hall with two rows of columns (see EA 1, pp.20-21 for a photograph and reconstruction drawing).

The stomach was the only piece of statuary found in the Central Platform, while fragments of several statues of Nefertiti, Akhenaten, and the princesses were found in the North and South Shrines; these included a few pieces from composite statues. The area around the shrines also yielded a surface find, a purple-quartzite foot with a deposit of gypsum on its tenon (see EA 36, pp.38-39).

The stomach fragment is notable both as the largest known piece of a composite statue and as the only known portion of a torso from such a statue. It consists of a smooth vertical segment of Akhenaten’s stomach, including a very deep horizontal navel. The edges are all broken away. Beneath it is a large tenon, designed to be set down into a mortise in one or more pieces

forming a kilt. Presumably below the kilt there would have been legs and feet of the same quartzite; tenons on the undersides of the feet would have fitted into a base made of a different stone.

The stomach surface represents a relatively small portion of the piece. The tenon is deep and square, as the profile and bottom views show. Apart from some large chips off the lower right edge, it is well preserved. As the right profile view shows, the tenon is not just a thin column extending down from the middle of the stomach. Rather, it extends far to the rear, and it seems probable that the flat back of the tenon continued up along the back of the torso.This flat rear surface suggests that Amarna composite statues were not finished at the back. There would have had to be some means of supporting the statue, given the lack of a back pillar. The most likely explanation is that the statues were slightly flattened at the back and attached along the torso and garment to depressions in a back panel extending up from the base. This panel would have needed to reach only up to shoulder level.

These recent discoveries have expanded the corpus of known composite pieces and revealed how they were assembled. Limestone was used for garments which had mortises firmly fixed with gypsum plaster into tenons on the body-pieces. Royal crowns were probably made of faience, while the princesses had granodiorite sidelocks of youth. Frit or paste added to the body cartouches and broad necklaces completed the colourful and realistic effect created by these innovative statues. q Kristin Thompson is a member of the Amarna Project at Tell elAmarna, registering stone statuary and relief fragments. The front and profile photographs of the stomach are by Barry Kemp, the others by the author. UC108 © The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL. Thanks to Stephen Quirke and the staff of the Petrie Museum for their help in the examination of this piece.

S-5995. A view of the tenon’s base, showing its square shape 33

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Akhenaten in Syria A clay sealing with impressions of the throne name of Akhenaten was recently found in the Bronze Age royal palace at Qatna in Syria. Alexander Ahrens and Peter Pfälzner report on this discovery.

The Bronze Age royal palace of the rulers of Qatna in Syria has been excavated by an international team of archaeologists, bringing to light a large number of new finds, among them two undisturbed Bronze Age tombs and Aegean-style wall paintings. Room DK, in which the sealing of Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten was found, is part of the north-western wing of the palace - a structural unit added to the Middle Bronze Age IIA main building, probably still in use during the entire Middle Bronze Age II, and erected on a lower terrace of the surrounding ground. The densely-packed refuse contained thousands of pottery sherds and hundreds of fragmented pottery vessels, more than ten thousand animal bones, and an extraordinarily high number of 808 clay sealings, among which were many with scarab impressions. In addition, there were several bronze arrowheads, a cylinder seal and five administrative cuneiform tablets.

This assemblage of objects typically reflects activities of administration and consumption within the royal palace and might have been connected to a kitchen and magazine area, where food and other goods were stored, processed and consumed. Within this context, the sealings and tablets indicate the administration of the goods, the pottery vessels testify to the processing, distribution and consumption of food, and the animal bones represent slaughtering and consumption remains.

Thus, this assemblage offers an instructive insight into the regular economic and service activities of this area of the palace.

This accumulation of refuse was deposited in what is the lower ground level of Room DK, and must have

Map of the northern Levant showing the location of Qatna and other sites

been discarded into the room from a higher elevation, probably from the main floor level (i.e. the upper ground level) of the palace, which has not been preserved. The deposit is attributed to the pre-destruction phase of the royal palace and dated to the Late Bronze Age IIA Period, i.e. the Amarna Period in Egypt. The sealing with the impression of the scarab of Akhenaten can be closely connected to the administrative and economic activities of the royal palace of Qatna during the fourteenth century BC, as it comes from a functionally and stratigraphically very well defined context within the palace.

This strengthens the historical importance and relevance of the object.

The clay sealing has five impressions of one single seal that was used to cover evenly the entire surface of the sealing.

The actual scarab-seal that was used for the impression carried the throne name Neferkheperure Waenre of Akhenaten in hieroglyphs. The throne name of the king is also the name commonly featured in the corpus of the Amarna letters, there rendered as Naphururija, Namhurija and other variations in the cuneiform texts, all without the epithet Waenre. Numerous Room DK in the north-western wing of the royal palace of Qatna 34

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The clay sealing with scarab impressions featuring the throne name of Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten

parallels for clay sealings with impressions featuring the throne name of Akhenaten, as well as scarab seals and faience bezel rings displaying this specific arrangement of hieroglyphs, are attested in Egypt, notably at Tell elAmarna, but the clay sealing from Room DK is the first archaeological attestation of Akhenaten at Qatna. It is also of prime importance as only a very few objects naming Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten have been found in the entire Levant so far. These consist of three fragmentary stone vessels made of calcite/alabaster from the royal palace at Ras Shamra/Ugarit and one gold scarab naming Queen Nefertiti from the Late Bronze Age shipwreck at Uluburun in southern Turkey.

The sealing found at Qatna was surely discarded soon after the object’s arrival at the site, like the other sealings with scarab impressions found in this room. Apart from the evidence of Egypto-Levantine contacts provided in the corpus of the Amarna letters, these sealings from the royal palace are the only archaeological evidence known thus far of a shipment of Egyptian goods to the northern Levant, and Qatna, during Akhenaten’s reign: it seems highly unlikely that a seal naming Akhenaten would still have been is use after the king’s death. The clay sealing probably sealed a small container or vessel, as the use of similarly-sized sealings generally seems to have been restricted to smaller objects, on the basis of the sealings found at Tell el-Amarna. The many other scarab impressions found in the refuse deposit of the same room suggest that a large group of Egyptian objects had been dispatched to Qatna.

Two of the five Amarna letters from Qatna (EA 52–56, but perhaps also including EA 57?), written by king Akizzi, are explicitly addressed to Amenhotep IV/ Akhenaten (EA 53 and 55). Although it is unclear when exactly these letters were written during his reign, it can be surmised on the basis of their internal political

Detail of one of the scarab impressions

information that they were written after the move to Akhetaten (Tell el-Amarna), i.e. most probably after year 6 of his reign. In these letters, Akizzi frequently asks for help from the pharaoh and for various objects to be sent to him. His pleas may well have been answered, since this clay sealing vividly attests to an exchange of goods taking place between Egypt and the court of Qatna that was hitherto unknown in the archaeological record. q Alexander Ahrens is an Egyptologist and Near Eastern Archaeologist currently working at the Damascus Branch of the Orient Department of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). Peter Pfälzner is the director of the German archaeological mission of the joint SyrianGerman excavation project at Tell Mishrife/Qatna and Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. The authors would like to thank Heike Dohmann-Pfälzner for her help in preparing this article and the Direction Générale des Antiquités et des Musées de la Syrie (Homs and Damascus) for help and support. All illustrations: © Qatna excavation project of the University of Tübingen. Photographs: Peter Pfälzner and Christian Seitz. Drawing: Khaled Hammed elHammud. Map courtesy of the DAI Damascus (Th Urban/A Ahrens).

For a detailed study of the clay sealing, see: Alexander Ahrens, Heike Dohmann-Pfälzner and Peter Pfälzner Zeitschrift für Orient-Archäologie 5 (2012). www.qatna.de 35

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The Valley of the Kings: two burials in KV 64 The University of Basel Kings’ Valley Project is exploring the non-royal tombs in the side valley leading to the cliff tomb of Tuthmosis III. A new shaft tomb with two consecutive burials was investigated early this year. Susanne Bickel and Elina Paulin-Grothe report on the find.

The side valley leading to the tomb of Tuthmosis III (far right) with the non-royal tombs currently under study

The branch off the Valley of the Kings which leads to the sepulchre of Tuthmosis III is home to several undecorated tombs, and until recently no date or owner could be assigned to them. In 2001 a team from the University of Basel was able to identify KV 32 as the tomb of queen Tiaa, the wife of Amenhotep II and mother of Tuthmosis IV. Since 2009, the University of Basel Kings’ Valley Project has been investigating this part of the necropolis to document the architecture and the remains of burials. So far, only some of the burial structures in the area have been explored. Three tombs

(KV 32, 33, 37) are accessible by flights of stairs; all the others are shaft tombs of various size and shape. Pottery and some inscribed small finds indicate that all the tombs date to the period between the reigns of Tuthmosis III and Amenhotep III. The fragmentary state of preservation of the surviving funerary equipment has meant that it has not yet been possible to identify the tomb owners with any degree of certainty, though the material testifies to the very high social status of the individuals buried here.

Several tombs were used for multiple burials. KV 31 is composed of a central room with two side chambers and contained the remains of five adults as well as numerous large jars and other types of pottery. Although the tomb has not been penetrated and damaged by rainwater and humidity, only small fragments of wooden furniture, and no coffins, were found.

Nothing was previously known about KV 40, which turned out to be one of the largest tombs in the area. It consists of a deep shaft leading into a corridor and a central room with three spacious side chambers. This tomb contains the extremely scattered remains of several dozen burials dating both to the Eighteenth Dynasty and to the Third Intermediate Period. A heavy fire has blackened all the contents and the walls of the tomb.

As a measure of site management and in order to safeguard the tombs and visitors walking through the area, protective structures are being built over and around

The shaft of KV 40 (right) with the new stone-cut feature as first found, leading to the discovery of KV 64

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Plan of the Twenty-Second Dynasty re-use of KV 64 showing the blocking at the bottom of the shaft and the burial of Nehemes-Bastet

The shaft of KV 64 as found, with the intact blocking of the last burial

The upper part of the coffin of Nehemes-Bastet after restoration

View into the burial chamber with the coffin and stela of Nehemes-Bastet

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all the shaft openings. While preparing the immediate surroundings of KV 40 for the construction of the protective wall, a man-made feature was discovered in January 2011 only 1.5m from the northern shaft edge of KV 40. This feature was investigated in January and February 2012 and led to the discovery of an unknown tomb, which received the number KV 64. It belongs to the type of rather small shaft tombs with one single chamber. Despite its modest size it offers an insight into the long and multifaceted history of the Kings’ Valley.

The shaft of the tomb contained its original fill and above the edge of the passage leading to the chamber large blocking stones were found, showing that the tomb had not been entered since the last burial took place.

The shaft of KV 64 measures c.1.20m by 0.95m and has a depth of 3.50m. The chamber is c.4.10m from north to south, 2.35m wide, and has an average height of 2m. In the northern part of the room, a black wooden coffin with yellow inscriptions along its side lay upon a thick layer of limestone debris. Restoration revealed the decoration of its lid with several funerary scenes painted in yellow on a black coating.

A painted wooden stela stood against the wall at the coffin’s feet, slightly turned towards the body. The two objects identify the owner as the Songstress of Amun Nehemes-Bastet, daughter of a priest of Karnak called Nakhtef-Mut, and support a date in the Twenty-Second Dynasty. Inside the coffin, the carefully wrapped mummy

Profile of the debris that covered the remains of the original burial

lay without any further adornment. This is one of the very few discoveries of an intact ‘upper middle class’ burial of the period. The stela is one of the finest examples of its kind. Nehemes-Bastet is figured in a thin white dress in front of an offering table and a seated falcon-headed god, addressing a prayer to several deities. Her name is also written on the back of the wooden tablet.

Remains of a second blocking of the passage with stones and plaster, as well as Eighteenth Dynasty pottery at the bottom of the shaft, indicated the presence of an earlier

The mummy of Nehemes-Bastet within her coffin 38

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The stela of Nehemes-Bastet

burial beneath the layer of debris which covered the floor to a height of 0.70m-1.20m. The state of preservation of this original Eighteenth Dynasty burial illustrates the interventions that took place before the tomb was filled with debris and reused for Nehemes-Bastet. The earlier burial was found in an extremely fragmentary and thoroughly looted condition; many objects were missing, the coffin had been stolen for re-use with only an inlay eye left behind, and parts of the canopic equipment, pottery

and possibly pieces of furniture had been removed. The mummy lay next to the northern wall, unwrapped and torn apart. However, the objects that were left behind give some indication as to the original owner of this tomb. Two human-shaped heads of canopic jars are reminiscent of examples from the time of Tuthmosis IV - Amenhotep III. A fragmentary wooden tag probably names a royal daughter, and splinters of furniture carry the name of Amenhotep III. Similar fragments of furniture 39

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The unwrapped and broken remains of the original burial in KV 64

The human-headed lid of an Eighteenth Dynasty canopic jar

plausible explanation. The presence of numerous ancient wasps’ nests on the ceiling and walls of KV 64 indicates that this Eighteenth Dynasty tomb may have stood open for some time before it was chosen, in the Twenty-Second Dynasty, as the resting place for Nehemes-Bastet.

were found in several places in the vicinity. If these small elements belong to this burial – and were not brought in accidentally with the debris filling – they would identify the original owner of KV 64 as a princess of the reign of Amenhotep III. The rifling of the original burial is most probably related to the systematic campaign which took place during the Twenty-First Dynasty, aimed at appropriating all the valuables in the Kings’ Valley, and transferring the royal, and some non-royal, mummies into different caches. The lack of respect shown to the Eighteenth Dynasty mummy of KV 64, as well as to those in KV 31, still requires a

q Susanne Bickel is Director of the University of Basel Kings’ Valley Project and Elina Paulin-Grothe directs the work in the field. They acknowledge gratefully the help of the members of the MSA in Egypt and the generous support of sponsors of the project. Photographs © University of Basel Kings’ Valley Project. The stela of Nehemes-Bastet is published in full in MDAIK 67, 2011. http://aegyptologie.unibas.ch/ forschung/projekte/university-of-basel-kings-valley-project/

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John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: from the first farmers to the Great Pyramid. Allen Lane, 2012 (ISBN 978 1 846 14377 9). Price: £25.00. John Romer is best known for his work in the Valley of the Kings in the late 1970s and from his various popular works on this and other ancient topics - including his provocative Rape of Tutankhamun (1993), in which he roundly criticised various approaches taken to fieldwork in Egypt. In his Preface to this book - intended to be the first of two volumes covering the five millennia of Egyptian Predynastic and Dynastic history - as well as in lectures given to promote it, the author implies a similarly iconoclastic approach to the writing of Egyptian history as presently practised. In doing so, he holds up Alan Gardiner’s Egypt of the Pharaohs as the kind of prevalent ‘old fashioned’ work he is reacting against - yet this was published more than 60 years ago, when its author was over 80, and, although still usable with care, no professional Egyptologist would now endorse it as an example of contemporary historiography.

One thing Romer rails against is Gardiner’s failure to go back beyond the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period - but one needs to note not only that Gardiner was explicitly writing a history based on written sources but also that there is a very real issue about whether one can actually write ‘history’ (as defined by the Pocket Oxford Dictionary as a ‘continuous methodological record of important or public events’) prior to the advent of writing.

We can certainly provide an account of successive material cultures within an outline chronology, and perhaps infer some events from material remains, but this reviewer remains uncomfortable in calling this ‘history’.

Indeed, there are significant issues around the validity of calling large chunks of what we think we know about ancient Egyptian events ‘history’ - but that is for another occasion!

Romer’s book begins during the fifth millennium, with the Fayum Neolithic cultures and a more general discussion of climatic and ecological matters, including the annual Nile inundation. In this and later chapters, the author aims to ‘personalise’ his descriptions of the material culture, particularly as regards aesthetic issues - unsurprisingly, given his own background as an artist.

He then moves successively through the general issues of the ‘Neolithic revolution’ to the Merimda/Omari, Badarian, Naqada and Maadi-Buto cultures, interposed with discussions of various specific topics. Here and there the book’s ‘radical’ agenda is underlined by such statements as ‘[c]onventional histories of Naqadan culture are by definition bogus’.

However, from the remarks that follow, it is clear that the author is not referring to modern work on the period but that from decades ago, recognised by all professionals as obsolescent at best, and thus, by definition, no longer ‘conventional’: Romer does himself no favours by setting up such Aunt Sallies that implicitly denigrate modern mainstream

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researchers as blind followers of ‘tradition’.

Such researchers’ work is then highlighted by an account of the ongoing research at Hierakonpolis, including the implications of the discovery of the burials of victims of mace-blows.

We then move into the interface between the Predynastic and Early Dynastic Periods.

In this, and elsewhere, key discoveries are introduced before their discussion, although this is done in a rather uneven way with, for reasons that are not made clear, far more detail given on the excavation and excavators in certain cases but not in others. However, the key issues surrounding this era are covered, including its foreign links, leading on into the First Dynasty proper. Here, almost as much space seems devoted to describing nineteenth century excavations as to the interpretation of their, and later, finds, before moving on to an excursus on Manetho. We then have a chapter nominally on the Second Dynasty, although much of this is taken up by an account of the early history of Aswan, without any real engagement with what might actually have happened during that obscure dynasty.

On the other hand, a kind of ‘before and after’ is provided by a chapter contrasting the Saqqara tombs of Merka (First Dynasty) and Hesyre (Third Dynasty). This is indeed a worthwhile comparison (though hindered by the lack of any reference to the intervening Second Dynasty tombs) given the evolution of private tombs between the reigns of Qaa and Djoser, but the author never seems to get a full grip on the architectural issues involved, instead devoting considerable space to a description of Mariette’s career and the mode of Quibell’s rediscovery of Hesyre’s tomb - both interesting topics, but surely only footnotes to the writing of history.

A similar monument-centric approach is taken to the reign of Djoser, with extensive descriptions of the Step Pyramid complex - but nothing on how it might relate to the

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preceding royal tombs of the Early Dynastic Period or how Djoser himself linked back into the Second Dynasty. In view of this interest in monumental architecture, it is surprising that Romer then jumps from brief discussions of Sekhemkhet and Khaba to Seneferu with no mention of one of the most remarkable, but least known, Old Kingdom pyramids: the Brick Pyramid at Abu Rowash - a monument intended to be as big as the Second Pyramid at Giza. Although lacking any inscribed evidence for its builder, its internal design makes it impossible to place it other than at the end of the Third Dynasty, most probably as the tomb of Huni (in spite of Romer’s claims, there is no evidence to associate Huni with anything at Dahshur).

The account of Seneferu’s reign is dominated by descriptions of tombs of the time, both of courtiers and of the king himself, with a useful account of the trials and tribulations that led to Seneferu possessing no fewer than three fullsize pyramids. It is shortly afterwards, with the accession of Khufu - whose pyramid was the subject of Romer’s previous book - that the narrative comes to a close, with an account of the excavation of the tomb of Hetepheres.

The main body of the book is followed by a chronological table, with a useful note on the realities of Egyptian chronology, and a bibliography. This, as the author expressly states, is intended as a short general reading guide, rather than a full citation of sources.

Nevertheless, this is usefully arranged by chapter, with a short note as to the utility of the source in question, making it a useful tool for the uninitiated. The book is illustrated largely with line drawings - of varying quality and provenance - plus a number of monochrome and colour plates; unfortunately, some of the latter are biliously off-true.

Notwithstanding the aforementioned comments, Romer’s book provides a useful overview of what is known of Egypt in the fifth through to the mid-third millennia, informally told, with some nice turns of phrase - the reviewer wishes he could get away with calling a chapter on cylinder-seals ‘Rolling Along’. Accordingly, it is a pity that it should be burdened with its claims of particular novelty and pot-shots at alleged archaic ‘conventionalism’ or ‘tradition’ that has not existed in professional Egyptology for a long time. It is, therefore, to be hoped that the promised second volume will play it straight and rely on its own inherent qualities rather than ‘dissing the [alleged] opposition’!

AIDAN DODSON

Andrew Robinson, Cracking The Egyptian Code. The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion. Thames & Hudson, 2012.

(ISBN 978 0 5000 5171 9). Price: £19.95.

A full-length biography of Champollion as one of the pioneers in the decipherment of hieroglyphs has been sorely lacking in English.

Mention of Champollion and decipherment in English publications is restricted in its focus and does not flesh out the man. This

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is where Robinson fills the gap using the earlier German and French biographies Hartleben (2 vols in German 1906, abridged in French 1984) and Lacouture (in French, 1988) – and his own research. It is quite incredible that none of Champollion’s own publications (except for his Egyptian Diaries, 2009) have appeared in English, not even his seminal Lettre à M. Dacier, and Robinson’s knowledge and own translations from these are of inestimable value for understanding Champollion. There is no denying that from an early age he was as a man possessed in his application to ‘cracking the code’ of hieroglyphs. His dedication, however, led to the treatment of, and attitudes to, other scholars which leave much to be desired - he seems to have been a very unpleasant person - and his revolutionary ideals got him exiled from his native Grenoble in 1816-17. It was only the continued support, financial and moral, of his elder brother, ChampollionFigeac (he changed his name to differentiate them) that made Champollion le jeune’s Egyptian studies possible.

Almost all of the first half of the book is devoted to Champollion’s early life. Robinson takes issue on several points with the early biographers, especially Hartleben (24 citations in the index), often correcting statements of fact, but credit should be given for Hartleben’s pioneering work. Giovanni Belzoni is, literally, a towering figure of the period, and is cited, in passing, 12 times in the Index. Unfortunately, on pp.10-11, where more information about him is given, it is all totally wrong. Belzoni found Seti I’s tomb in 1817 (on 16 October), not 1818; Seti’s sarcophagus did not form the ‘pièce de résistance’ of Belzoni’s exhibition as is implied in the text, although it is admitted that it arrived after the inauguration of the exhibition; Sarah Belzoni did not sell Seti’s sarcophagus to Sir John Soane for £2,000, it was Bingham Richards acting for Henry Salt who did – and Sarah got not a penny of the money.

Despite his somewhat unacceptable character, Champollion’s star was rising, especially after he found support from the Duc de Blacas, an

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influential courtier and collector, who became his second mentor after his elder brother. It was thanks to Blacas that Champollion was introduced to the French king, and undertook his study tour of Egyptian antiquities in Italy and his voyage to Egypt to record inscriptions and to test his decipherment.

What Champollion would never recognise was his debt to Thomas Young who, in his 1819 paper, had changed Champollion’s ideas on to the right track for the decipherment.

Young was a physicist whose name resounds in other sciences, notably for his work on optics, and had he not been diverted he would have certainly arrived at the decipherment of hieroglyphs before Champollion. Young was a polymath who shared his many discoveries and insights in science as well as those on the Rosetta Stone (of which, unlike Champollion, he published a translation). Silvestre de Sacy, Champollion’s teacher (and there was animosity between them) had himself made discoveries from the Rosetta Stone, and had warned Young in a letter about Champollion’s habit of gathering and using (unacknowledged) other people’s research, likening him to a jay or magpie. Even after Young’s early death in 1829, Champollion refused to acknowledge his ‘road to Damascus’ moment arising from Young’s 1819 paper, even later making false accusations against his rival. Robinson well charts the story using his own translations from the original sources (all duly referenced) to make this an absorbing study of a man who, whilst acknowledged as a genius, became one often by standing on the (unacknowledged) shoulders of others. In Chapter 16, ‘The Hieroglyphs after Champollion’, Robinson notes that Champollion had few supporters and had twice been rejected as a candidate for the Academy of Inscriptions, only achieving membership in 1830. After his death in March 1832, it was left to later scholars to refine and correct much in his several publications. On de Sacy’s recommendation, Champollion’s papers were bought by the French government for 50,000 francs, while his impoverished widow and daughter were granted a pension of 3,000 francs.

Robinson’s biography is a most welcome and long-overdue study in English of an enigmatic and still controversial genius. This splendidly produced and absorbing book should be in every Egyptologist’s library.

PETER A CLAYTON Richard H Wilkinson (editor), Tausret: forgotten queen and pharaoh of Egypt.

Oxford University Press, 2012 (ISBN 978 0 19 974011 6). Price: £22.50. Over the past few years there has been a tendency towards ‘package’ histories, with different aspects of a period dealt with by different authors.

Egyptological examples have included works on Tuthmosis III, Amenhotep III, Ramesses III – and now this work on the late Nineteenth Dynasty queen and female king, Tawosret (the transcription of her name is essentially a matter of taste, like Senusret/Senwosret).

While in theory helpful where areas of deep specialism are involved, such books generally suffer from a lack of a unifying ‘voice’, and also risk incoherence (and reader-confusion) 42

when the views of one contributor differ from another over some ‘fact’ or other. There is also less scope for last-minute updating – most contributions to the present volume do not address relevant studies published some two years ago.

That said, one cannot but welcome a booklength treatment of a lady who has long lurked in the shadows and whose status was once so obscure that, as Richard Wilkinson notes in his introduction, she featured in a paper (in JEA 44) with the memorable (and creditably to the point!) title ‘Only One King Siptah and Twosre not his Wife’. However, much about her remains obscure, and one of the more general issues with the present volume is that – presumably in the interests of readability and accessibility to non-specialists – some ongoing issues are skated over in favour of a ‘neat’ reconstruction.

The book begins with a chapter by Joyce Tyldesley on the general topic of female pharaohs. It gives a useful overview of the subject, except where it wholly ducks the question of Neferneferuaten: while the author rightly points out that is not 100 per cent certain that Neferneferuaten was identical with Nefertiti (although in this reviewer’s opinion it is extremely likely), it is now absolutely certain that Neferneferuaten was a woman and thus should have been discussed in this chapter, particularly as her status seems to have differed somewhat from that of most other female kings.

Gae Callender’s chapter on the life and reign of Tawosret forms a key part of the book and is, unfortunately, a case where the full extent of some of the issues surrounding the author’s preferred reconstruction are minimised in the text and not even raised in the endnotes. For example, Seti II’s alleged youth is a key issue in her assessment of the origins of Amenmeses – yet without noting both the significant concerns about the identification of the mummy (morphologically completely unlike those of Ramesses II and Merenptah) and the validity of age-determination in pre-twentieth century human remains (on the basis of the

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often gross mis-match between ‘skeletal ages’ and recorded ages of well-identified individuals of the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries in the crypt of Spitalfields Church in London). Also, King Ramesses-Siptah is confidently stated to be identical with Prince Ramesses-Siptah, son of the apparently Canaanite Queen Shoteraya, with fundamental consequences for explaining King Siptah’s exclusion from listings of kings.

This is, however, by no means certain, with much to be said for the prince being a son of Ramesses II and nothing to do with the later king of the name. King Siptah’s deformed foot is, as usual, attributed to poliomyelitis, without considering that such a deformity is much more commonly a result of cerebral palsy caused by birth trauma. On the other hand, Dr Callendar provides an excellent overview of the themes and most key monuments relevant to the construction of the career of Tawosret and the other key figures of the period.

Some of Tawosret’s major monuments are then discussed in a chapter by Catherine Roehrig that, while fine as a stand-alone piece, illustrates some of the problems of a ‘package’ history book. First, it includes an introductory section that effectively repeats the thrust of the two preceding chapters and, second, it overlaps significantly with both Dr Callender’s chapter and the succeeding one in its coverage of a number of monuments and objects. One cannot help but wonder whether tighter editorial briefing or liaison between the contributors could not have been managed to produce more of a unified account, rather than what is in fact a selection of stand-alone essays.

Hartwig Altenmüller’s chapter summarises what is known of Tawosret’s tomb, KV14 in the Valley of the Kings. This includes a detailed discussion of the complex history of both the construction and decoration of the tomb, successively as that of a queen, a regent, a female king, and finally the usurped restingplace of a king (Sethnakhte).

The final chapter provides us with Richard Wilkinson’s summary of work to date on Tawosret’s memorial temple at Western Thebes. Long regarded, since Petrie’s work in 1896 (which has since proved to have been perfunctory in the extreme), as never having progressed beyond mere foundations, it has now been shown to have moved significantly towards completion. One wonders, however, given that the foundation blocks are dated to Tawosret’s 8th (and probably final) year and that no temple of Sethnakhte is known, whether much of the construction might actually have been carried out during Sethnakhte’s reign (as Dr Wilkinson appears at one point to hint). While no definite trace of his name survives, that of Tawosret is known only from foundation deposits, and any trace of this putative Sethnakhte phase would have been lost in the utter destruction of the walls and ceilings of the temple.

Although this book has its flaws, it is nevertheless gratifying to see an individual such as Tawosret meriting a book-length treatment.

Reign-specific studies are something that continue to be needed in Egyptian history and this is a useful addition to a still-scarce, albeit growing, corpus.

AIDAN DODSON

ARCHAEOLOGY

Jeffrey Abt, American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute. University of Chicago Press, 2011 (ISBN 978 0 2260 0110 4). Price $45. American Egyptologist is an appropriate title for a book about the individual who was at the very foundation of American Egyptology and who did more than any other person to construct its edifice. According to Who Was Who in Egyptology, James H. Breasted was ‘the real founder of Egyptology in the New World’. Breasted’s only American peer, and to some extent his rival, was George A Reisner; and Reisner, though the pre-eminent American archaeologist of his generation, never exerted the powerful influence across the entire field of Egyptology that Breasted wielded. One cannot understand the development of Egyptology in the United States, and indeed in the world, without understanding Breasted.

Breasted’s life also makes for a very good American success story. From fairly modest beginnings he rose from drugstore clerk to one of the most famous scholars in the United States, a true celebrity, one whose reputation sometimes loomed larger than life. It is a staple of Egyptological legend how William Rainey Harper, the new president of the University of Chicago, grasped the young man by his lapels and said, ‘Breasted, if you will go to Germany and get the best possible scientific equipment, no matter if it takes you five years, I will give you the professorship of Egyptian in the new University of Chicago!’ As Jeffrey Abt points out, Harper was actually a bit more restrained than that, but the end result of Abt’s meticulous scholarship and lucid presentation - even while exposing some of the myths and exploring the flaws as well as the virtues of a complex, driven man - is to enhance rather than diminish Breasted’s stature.

Breasted did indeed go to Berlin, where he studied under the great Adolf Erman and became lifelong friends with such future Egyptological luminaries as Kurt Sethe.

Besides the superb training he received in Germany, and the éclat of a prestigious degree, Breasted’s years at Berlin provided the confidence that he could hold his own 43

with the best in the world. Following his graduation, a wedding trip to Egypt became another defining moment by stimulating his incipient inclination for epigraphy.

He devoted every available moment to inscriptions. One night in the hypostyle hall at Karnak, he wrote, ‘I copied by moonlight.

The silver light streamed down through the broken roof of the vast colonnaded hall, splashing with bright patches the dusky outlines of the enormous columns . . .’ Even in those enchanting moments, however, he noticed that some of the transcriptions he had previously used were inaccurate, and he was appalled to see how much was being destroyed. As Abt observes, this ‘impressed on him the value of accurately recording such sources before they were permanently lost to vandalism or natural erosion’.

When he assumed his professorial duties at the University of Chicago, Breasted pondered the possibilities the inscriptions offered as texts for historical work. After his experiences in Germany, one would have reasonably expected him to devote his career to philology, to the study of the ancient language, and to become a sort of American Kurt Sethe. Instead, Breasted took a highly original turn and became a foremost historian of ancient Egypt. His masterpiece in that regard was A History of Egypt from Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest, first published in 1905 and often reprinted. Though designed to appeal to a wide readership, Breasted’s History of Egypt maintained the highest scholarly standards. Finding that available secondary works were filled with errors, he resolved to take ‘nothing second hand from any middleman’ and to ‘write a history based on the original monuments’. He also intended to write ‘a readable narrative of good literary form’. The result was a great success. It continued to be read seriously for decades and can still be perused with pleasure and benefit.

As an exercise in general pharaonic history, it remains unequalled.

Not that Breasted neglected philology. His Ancient Records of Egypt, published in five volumes in 1906-07, has been accurately assessed as representing ‘the pinnacle of Egyptological achievement and the highest standard of philological research’. More than a century after its publication, Ancient Records is still consulted. Nor did Breasted’s philological skills decline over time, as was demonstrated in 1930 with publication of The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, a masterly treatment of a document dating from c.1600 BC, but almost certainly based on a text from the Old Kingdom, perhaps a thousand years earlier. It was an exceedingly formidable undertaking that kept Breasted busy for a decade, culminating in an achievement that, according to Abt, ‘reflects not only the breadth of his knowledge in ancient Egyptian language and history but his awareness of the study’s potential meaning for a world of scholarship outside Egyptology as well’.

An incomplete bibliography of Breasted’s publications runs to nearly 100 entries, many of which had great impact that was not limited to specialist scholars.

Breasted was a relentless academic

EGYPTIAN

entrepreneur. Whenever a new discovery or fresh opportunity arose, he promptly exploited it to appeal for additional funding, usually with success. At any given time Breasted might have a dozen or more endeavours under way, such as the Coffin Texts project (‘the most formidable task I have ever undertaken’), begun with Alan H Gardiner and eventually handed on to Adriaan de Buck. He could also be helpful to others by finding financial support for their work. But eventually he came to be envied, and to a considerable degree resented, for what some of his contemporaries considered a monopolisation of resources that became ever scarcer with the onset of the Great Depression. His defiant response to such adversity was invariably to advance increasingly grandiose proposals. It was perhaps a mercy that Breasted died before receiving the letter from his major patron, John D Rockefeller, Jr, that informed him in no uncertain terms that he had to curtail the scope of his enterprises.

But while some of Breasted’s initiatives were unrealistic, many more were enduring. On the institutional level, his crowning achievement was the creation in 1919 of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, one of the premier centres for the study of not only ancient Egypt but also the entire ancient Near East. In 1924 he established the Epigraphic Survey of the University of Chicago, popularly known as Chicago House, in pursuit of his longstanding ambition ‘to copy all the inscriptions of Egypt and publish them’. That was a bit too ambitious, to say the least, but the Epigraphic Survey continues to this day, recording increasingly endangered messages from the distant past.

Breasted would present a daunting challenge to any biographer, but Jeffrey Abt brings a number of pertinent skills into play with good results. Drawing on his established track record as an institutional historian, Abt is able to make sense of Breasted’s incomparable and almost incredibly complex academic entrepreneurship. One example is the analysis of Breasted’s ‘Unbuilt Museum’ in Cairo.

With a generous commitment of support from Rockefeller, Breasted intended it to be ‘the finest modern monument in Egypt’ and ‘a temple of the unfolding life of man’.

In the event, however, the project proved unacceptable to the Egyptian government.

Until fairly recently the conventional wisdom, as expressed by Breasted’s student John A Wilson, was that ‘a brilliant opportunity was sacrificed to bickering and petty politics’.

Abt has now demonstrated that ‘the great Egyptian museum Breasted proposed could not be realized without the Egyptians ceding control over their antiquities’, that ‘to the Egyptian leadership, the project raised the specter of a highly visible capitulation of Egyptian sovereignty, a political liability they could ill afford in a time of nationalist turmoil’.

Abt’s expertise as an artist and art historian is also effectively applied. Again to provide just one example, his explanation of the ‘Chicago House method’ of epigraphic copying, a complex subject that does not readily lend itself to description, is a model of clarity.

The personal touches about Breasted are

ARCHAEOLOGY

present, tastefully told and in just the right depth to delineate a real human being and to suggest how his personal life conditioned his professional life. One learns that his first and longest marriage was often a trial, depriving him of the solace and additional creative space he might have sought at home, away from his ambitious agenda at work. That was because Frances Hart Breasted never fully recovered her emotional equilibrium after a drunken obstetrician fatally bungled the delivery of their first child. Also, while Breasted was certainly a loyal friend, inspiring teacher, and able administrator, it becomes clear that he was not always the easiest person to work with. Breasted’s stature was such that there has been a tendency to assume that any person or organisation that differed from him was necessarily in the wrong. Stripping away some of the gilding allows an even brighter personality and more authentic character to shine through.

The history of Egyptology is an active, rapidly growing field. American Egyptologist is a major contribution to it.

JASON THOMPSON

Jack Green, Emily Teeter and John A Larson (eds), Picturing the Past. Imaging and Imagining the Ancient Middle East. Chicago Oriental Institute Museum Publications 34.

2012 (ISBN 978 1 885923 89 9). Price $29.95.

This volume is the latest in a valuable series of exhibition catalogues with extended essays, published by the Chicago University Oriental Institute and made available both in print form and online as downloadable (free) PDFs: http:// oi.uchicago.edu/research/pubs/catalog/oimp/

The exhibition with the same title as the catalogue was on display in Chicago from 7 February to 2 September 2012 and aimed, as Jack Green says in his Introduction (p.13) to ‘explore an important but often overlooked set of themes in the archaeology of the Middle East, its history and potential future directions’. The catalogue element of the volume includes photographs and descriptions of the 37 exhibits, ranging from Breasted’s original notebooks written during his visits to Egypt and European museums at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries to a CT 44

image of a ‘token ball’ from Iran (c.3,3503,100 BC) enabling the contents of the sealed package to be scanned and identified without having to break the object open. Most of the other exhibits are two- or three-dimensional images of ancient monuments and artefacts - photographs, paintings, epigraphic copies and models - together with some of the tools used to create them, such as photographic equipment.

Inevitably, most of the accompanying essays focus on the work and recording techniques of the Oriental Institute with a full, and well-illustrated, description by W Raymond Johnson of the ‘Chicago Method’ of the Epigraphic Survey. There is also a fascinating glimpse inside the photographic archive of the Oriental Institute, by John A Larson. Other essays relating to Egypt are by Emily Teeter who summarises the foundation of the Institute by Breasted, Ann Macy Roth who describes the Chicago Saqqara expedition of the 1930s, and Jean-Claude Golvin who explains the techniques behind his architectural reconstructions of ancient sites. EES epigraphic work is featured in Nigel Strudwick’s beautifully illustrated essay on the paintings of Nina de Garis Davies, Amice Calverley and Myrtle Broome. William H Peck reviews the history of plaster casts which once featured so prominently in museum displays, then fell from favour, but now may have their own academic value as they often preserve details which are lost on the weathered, damaged or destroyed originals.

One of the plaster casts in the exhibition catalogue is of the famous head of Nefertiti, made from an exact stone copy sculpted in Berlin in the 1920s since the original is too fragile for casts to be made from it.

The Oriental Institute has also been active extensively elsewhere in the Near East and its work at Persepolis features prominently in several essays, especially that of Dennis O’Connor on the paintings of John Lindon Smith. The value of aerial and satellite photography is assessed by Scott Branting, Elise MacArthur and Susan Penacho, leading up to discussions of the latest imaging techniques by Joshua Harker, who describes the 3D digital facial reconstruction of Meresamun, and Donald H Saunders who concludes the essays with a brief description of ‘virtual heritage’.

Jack Green in the Introduction says that images ‘... help communicate information and ideas that may be difficult to describe in words, they can also evoke atmosphere and emotion, and inspire wonder and fascination in the past’. The images presented in this catalogue and the essays are certainly evocative but they also raise many questions as to the extent to which our perceptions of antiquity might be influenced by images initially created to aid interpretation.

PATRICIA SPENCER In EA 39 (p.34) we published a review by Eva Lange of Egyptian Antiquities from Kufur Nigm and Bubastis and are very grateful to Raymond Betz who has sent the following link where this hard-to-find publication can be purchased from the Humboldt University in Berlin: www. project-min.de/publications_en.html

The Egypt Exploration Society Who Was Who in Egyptology Edited by Morris L Bierbrier First published in 1951, edited by Warren R Dawson, Who Was Who in Egyptology is a standard reference work for anyone interested in the history of Egyptology. From the earliest travellers to scholars and excavators of more recent times, the book contains biographical details of the lives and careers of those who have shaped the discipline, with photographs of many of its subjects. The second edition, edited by Eric Uphill, was published in 1969 and the third, edited by Morris Bierbrier, in 1995. This fourth edition, again edited by Dr Bierbrier, contains many new and revised entries and a wider range of photographs than in previous editions.

ISBN: 978 0 85698 207 1. 2012.

Price: £35. EES Members: £25.

The Tomb of Maya and Meryt I. The Reliefs, Inscriptions, and Commentary Geoffrey Thorndike Martin with contributions by Jacobus van Dijk and Kenneth J Frazer Maya was one of the most important officials of state under Tutankhamun. The holder of many titles in the administration, the chief of which was Overseer of the Treasury, he was also responsible for the security of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Maya and his wife Meryt erected a magnificent tomb at Saqqara, the necropolis of the capital city, Memphis. Wrecked in antiquity by tomb robbers, much remained nevertheless to be recorded by the EES-Leiden mission, which located the tomb in 1986. The present volume provides a full record of the architecture, scenes, and texts in the superstructure, as well as the unique painted substructure reliefs of the monument, detailed indexes, and an overview of the life of the tomb-owners.

EES Excavation Memoir 99. ISBN: 978 0 85698 206 4. 2012.

Price: £80. EES Members and Friends of Saqqara Foundation (to 31 December 2012): £40

Egyptian Archaeology binders and index Binders for Egyptian Archaeology, can be purchased at the EES online shop: www.ees-shop.com or ordered from the EES London Office (address below). Each binder costs £10 and holds ten issues of the magazine.

An index to EAs 31-40 has been prepared by Lyn Stagg and can be downloaded from the EES website: www.ees.ac.uk/publications/egyptian-archaeology.html If you would prefer to receive a printed copy of the Index to EAs 31-40 (no charge), please contact Rob Tamplin (details below) EES publications and merchandise can be purchased from: The Egypt Exploration Society 3 Doughty Mews, London WC1N 2PG, United Kingdom.

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7242 2266. Fax: +44 (0)20 7404 6118.

E-mail: rob.tamplin@ees.ac.uk On-line shop: www.ees-shop.com

EA 41 Inside Back Cover.indd 1

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Jochem Kahl

Geoffrey Thorndike Martin

Kenneth A. Kitchen, Paul J.N. Lawrence

Ancient Asyut

Umm el-Qaab VII

The First Synthesis after 300 Years of Research

Private Stelae of the Early Dynastic Period from the Royal Cemetery at Abydos

Treaty, Law and Covenant in the Ancient Near East

The Asyut Project 1 Reprint of the 1st edition, 2012. X, 188 pages, 112 fig., 1 map, 16 plates, pb ISBN 978-3-447-06424-8 € 48,− (D) / £ 38,−

Due to a poor history of research and the deprival of many of its monuments, Asyut had been forgotten for a long time. The ancient site, its town, its temples, and its necropolis had not been the focus of any archaeological interest since the 1920s.

In the 1980s and 1990s some attempts to start scientific work in Asyut failed. Only in 2003 a new field-project began: The Asyut Project, a joint mission of the Universities of Münster (2003 and 2004), Mainz (2004 up to present) and Sohag (2003 up to present). Fieldwork and studies of former research work enabled the author to reconstruct for the first time the history of the ancient necropolis, and thereby of the ancient town and its different fortunes as a city of culture, as a border town, and as a wounded city.

Archäologische Veröffentlichungen 123 2011. V, 312 pages, 1.332 fig., 90 plates with 335 fig., clothbound ISBN 978-3-447-06256-5 € 128,− (D) / £ 100,−

The objects published in this catalogue by Geoffrey T. Martin are stelae (gravestones), over 350 in number, most of which commemorate administrators, priests, attendants, artisans, and others who formed part of the entourage of Egypt’s earliest kings, interred in the ancestral royal cemetery at Abydos in southern Egypt at the beginning of the fourth millennium BC. A surprising number are inscribed for women, who do not for the most part have titles, though it cannot automatically be assumed that they were members of the royal harem. Most of the stelae were excavated more than a century ago, but have never received definitive publication.

Jochem Kahl, Mahmoud El-Khadragy, Ursula Verhoeven, Andrea Kilian (Eds.)

Seven Seasons at Asyut First Results of the EgyptianGerman Cooperation in Archaeological Fieldwork Proceedings of an International Conference at the University of Sohag, 10 th–11th of October, 2009 The Asyut Project 2

HARRASSOWITZ Verlag

All books are also available at amazon.co.uk, www.harrassowitz-verlag.de EA 41 Outside Back cover.indd 1

2012. LXXIV, 1641 pages, numerous tables, 7 maps, numerous diagrams, hc ISBN 978-3-447-06726-3 Ca. € 298,− (D) / £ 235,−

This work presents a far-reaching social profile of life in the Ancient Near East, based on its wealth of lawcollections, treaties and covenants through three millennia. Volume 1 sets out a uniquely comprehensive corpus of over 100 such documents in 10 languages, mostly displayed in facing-page transliterations and English translations with individual bibliographies. Volume 2 provides essential philological and background commentary to the texts, fully indexes their subjectmatter, and concludes with a revolutionary and innovative series of full-colour diagrams of every text, vividly highlighting variations through the centuries. Finally, Volume 3 outlines the flowing interplay of political history, changing social norms and varying documentary formats throughout the whole period.

Katja Weiß The Asyut Project 1

Harrassowitz Verlag

Jochem Kahl

Ancient Assiut The First Synthesis of 300 Years of Research

2012. XII, 186 pages, 98 ill., 4 tables, 38 plates, hc ISBN 978-3-447-06529-0 € 38,– (D) / £ 30,−

Volume 2 in the series The Asyut Project presents the contributions of an international conference held at Sohag University after the first seven seasons of Egyptian-German cooperation in archaeological fieldwork in the necropolis of Asyut, Middle Egypt. The volume is edited by scholars of the three Egyptological institutions involved in the project, the Universities of Berlin (Freie Universität), Sohag and Mainz.

The first article gives an overview of the present state of knowledge (2011) of the historical background of Asyut, the different functions of the western mountain (Gebel Asyut al-gharbi), and its architectural structures from Egyptian Old Kingdom to Late Antiquity and partially Islamic Period. It is followed by a study on the succession of the First Intermediate Period/Middle Kingdom local ruling elite (the so-called nomarchs) which reconstructs the eventful history of these eras.

Special contributions are devoted to wooden models and offering plates as grave goods, hieratic visitors’ graffiti, methods of epigraphy, reconstruction of tomb architecture, and Islamic pottery. In addition, analyses of the anthropological and botanical finds are presented. All articles are written in English and provided with an Arabic abstract.

Part 1: The Texts Part 2: Text, Notes and Chromograms Part 3: Overall Historical Survey

Ägyptische Tier- und Götterbronzen aus Unterägypten Untersuchungen zu Typus, Ikonographie und Funktion sowie der Bedeutung innerhalb der Kulturkontakte zu Griechenland Ägypten und Altes Testament 81 2012. XXXVI, 1171 Seiten, 2 Teile, 7 Abb., 79 Tafeln mit zahlreichen Abb., 145 Tabellen, 1 Karte, gb ISBN 978-3-447-06719-5 € 198,− (D) / £ 155,−

Monika Dolińska, Horst Beinlich (Hg./Eds.)

8. Ägyptologische Tempeltagung: Interconnections between Temples Warschau, 22.–25. September 2008 Königtum, Staat und Gesellschaft früher Hochkulturen 3,3

Rolf Gundlach, Kate Spence (Eds.)

Palace and Temple Architecture – Decoration – Ritual 5. Symposium zur Ägyptischen Königsideologie/ 5th Symposium on Egyptian Royal Ideology Cambridge, July, 16th–17th, 2007

2010. X, 237 Seiten, 140 Abb., 1 Tabelle, 1 CD-ROM, br ISBN 978-3-447-06238-1 € 68,– (D) / £ 53,−

Hans-Ulrich Onasch

Ägyptische und assyrische Alabastergefäße aus Assur

Königtum, Staat und Gesellschaft früher Hochkulturen 4,2

Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 128

2011. VIII, 210 pages, 77 fig., 2 tables, pb ISBN 978-3-447-06515-3 € 58,– (D) / £ 45,50

2010. X, 244 Seiten, 163 Abb., 34 Tafeln, gb ISBN 978-3-447-06108-7 € 68,− (D) / £ 53,−

The 5th symposium was hosted by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge in cooperation with the Institute for Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Mainz. The general theme of the congress was determined by archaeological aspects of Egyptian Royal Residences. Palace and Temple: Architecture – Decoration – Ritual put two primary elements of royal residences into focus. Lectures and discussions were dedicated to the interior of the residences, namely to decoration and worship.

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