Egyptian Archaeology 45

The Fourth Cataract and Beyond

The Workman’s Progress

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference for Nubian Studies

Studies in the Village of deir el-Medina and other documents from Western thebes in Honour of Rob demarĂŠe

EdItEd by JulIE R. ANdERSoN ANd dEREk A. WElSby the 12th International Conference for Nubian Studies was held at the british Museum, london, from 1st-6th August 2010. the conference, held every four years, is the only international gathering of archaeologists and scholars from associated disciplines which considers all aspects of Sudan and southern Egypt’s ancient and more recent past. the main sessions, and main papers published herein, were devoted to a consideration of the Merowe dam Archaeological Salvage Project, its aftermath and impact. over de previous decade this has been the major focus of archaeological activity on the Middle Nile. the dam is now complete and the reservoir is full drawing a line under the fieldwork component of the project. It was felt timely, therefore, in the interim to obtain an overview of what was found during the many years of intensive work and the first main paper speaker in each session sought to do just that. they were followed by reports on sites, categories of objects and more thematic papers arranged broadly by period. these highlight that, while the focus of archaeological activity still remains in the Nile Valley where there is the densest concentration of sites and also where there remains the most concentrated threat to their survival, much work is being undertaken away from the river and in some cases outside its catchment area. the role of the deserts is increasingly being appreciated while the role of the savannah and areas even further south has yet to be given the prominence that it probably deserves. t #SJUJTI .VTFVN 1VCMJDBUJPOT PO &HZQU BOE 4VEBO t 997*** Q t &630 *4#/

No. 45   Autumn 2014

EdItEd by bEN J.J. HARINg, olAf E. kAPER ANd RENÊ VAN WAlSEM this book contains twenty-two papers col&HZQUPMPHJTDIF 6JUHBWFO t 997*** lected in honour of Robert J. demarÊe by his friends and colleagues. because of his experThe Workman’s Progress tise in the area of Western thebes and ostraca of the village of deir el-Medina in particular, the contributors have sought to address these topics in particular. Central theme of the festschrift is the community of workmen of deir el-Medina, which is investigated from many different angles. the papers discuss the documentary texts from the village, either written in graffiti, on papyri or on ostraca, but also aspects of the work in the Valley of the kings, the workmen’s use of oil, birthing beds, coffins, stelae as well as their religious beliefs and behaviour. the volume thus sheds new light on the workmen’s community, as well as on the area of Western thebes in more general terms. this volume is a token of gratitude from the leiden university department of Egyptology for Rob’s much appreciated contribution to its teaching programme, as well as a tribute by colleagues worldwide who have worked with him, also in fieldwork projects in Egypt.

Studies in the Village of Deir el-Medina and Other Documents from Western Thebes in Honour of Rob DemarĂŠe

B.J.J. Haring, O.E. Kaper and R. van Walsem (eds.)

Price ÂŁ5.95

EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY

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

Peeters – Leuven Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten – Leiden 2014

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La VallĂŠe des Rois ItinĂŠraire du visiteur SylVIE CAuVIllE & MoHAMMEd IbRAHIM AlI

Acts of the Tenth International Congress of Demotic Studies

les Pyramides, prodigieux monuments dÊfiant le temps et l’espace des hauteurs, tÊmoignent /$ 9$//K( '(6 52,6 devant l’univers de l’existence immuable du vieux pays; le pharaon, protÊgÊ par la pierre souveraine, gagne l’infini du ciel et repose parmi les astres. les tombes de la VallÊe des Rois sont en quelque sorte des pyramides inversÊes que le souverain parcourt et oÚ il sÊjourne, seul spectateur initiÊ de ces images mystÊrieuses – grandioses ou terrifiantes – qui jalonnent l’espace souterrain. les hypogÊes royaux, conservatoire de la quintessence thÊologique et astronomique Êgyptienne, transmettent leur message en une dÊbauche de couleurs qui, plus encore que les hiÊroglyphes finement ciselÊs ou les silhouettes artistement esquissÊes, donnent accès à l’ineffable. le pharaon quitte le sÊjour des vivants pour un lieu oÚ règne en maÎtre le disque rouge du Soleil de la nuit, nimbÊ d’une lumière d’or qui anime dieux et gÊnies. l’espace de quelques heures, il n’est plus l’astre de la vie terrestre; il plonge dans le monde minÊral des morts et ressurgit dans celui, vÊgÊtal, des vivants. Il est conduit vers l’ÊternitÊ dans l’intÊgritÊ de son corps; il perpÊtue alors non seulement son nom et sa dynastie, mais aussi la marche du monde. le pharaon a pÊnÊtrÊ le grand Mystère, celui de la Première fois, lors duquel l’astre ignÊ et le limon fÊcondateur fusionnent et engendrent la divinitÊ: dans l’AutreMonde, en un cycle quotidiennement rÊpÊtÊ, Rê incandescent ranime osiris lÊthargique et osiris redressÊ exhausse des profondeurs l’autre face de l’Âme double, Rê de feu.

Sylvie Cauville | Mohammed Ibrahim Ali

ITINÉRAIRE DU VISITEUR

-FVWFO "VHVTU &%*5&% #: ."3, %&1"68 "/% :"//& #3069 the Acts of the tenth International Congress of demotic Studies held in leuven illustrate theOLA disciplinary diversity of the field. Apart from new editions of documents (receipts, contracts, letters, oracle questions,...) and presentations of new literary texts (including even those referring to raining frogs), this volume also contains contributions such as a new proposal to standardize transliterations, a discussion of the classification of magical texts, or a survey of the history of demotic in leuven. the volume will be of interest to egyptologists, papyrologists, and ancient historians. t 0SJFOUBMJB -PWBOJFOTJB "OBMFDUB 9*7 Q t &630 t *4#/

O R I E N TA L I A L O VA N I E N S I A A N A L E C TA Acts of the Tenth International Congress of Demotic Studies Leuven, 26-30 August 2008 edited by MARK DEPAUW and YANNE BROUX

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Publishers and booksellers http://www.peeters-leuven.be #POEHFOPUFOMBBO # -FVWFO peeters@peeters-leuven.be EA 45 Covers.indd 1

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The Egypt Exploration Society Since its founding in 1882 the Egypt Exploration Society’s mission has been to explore ancient Egyptian sites and monuments, to create a lasting record of the remains, to generate enthusiasm for, and increase knowledge and understanding of, Egypt’s past and to raise awareness of the importance of protecting its heritage. Today the Society supports archaeological research projects throughout Egypt. We rely almost entirely on the support of our members and the wider public to fund our work and run an extensive programme of educational events in Egypt, the UK and beyond to convey the results to our audience.

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7KLV LV WKH Ă€QDO SXEOLFDWLRQ RI WKH ((6 'XUKDP 6&$ H[FDYDWLRQV FDUULHG RXW LQ 2007 in the ‘Great Pit’ at Sa el-Hagar, ancient Sais. It contains a full discussion of the layers dating to the Neolithic and Buto-Maadi Periods, with specialist reports on WKH FKLSSHG DQG JURXQG VWRQH WRROV VPDOO Ă€QGV SRWWHU\ DQLPDO ERQHV DQG Ă RUD $V WKH RQO\ 1HROLWKLF VLWH VR IDU H[FDYDWHG RQ WKH 1LOH Ă RRGSODLQ LQ (J\SW WKH VLWH KDV LPSRUWDQW LPSOLFDWLRQV IRU XQGHUVWDQGLQJ WKH 1HROLWKLF WUDQVLWLRQ LQ WKH 'HOWD DQG WKH development of Predynastic settlements in the north of Egypt.

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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 Jan Geisbusch David Jeffreys John J Johnston Mike Murphy Chris Naunton Alice Stevenson John Taylor Advertising Sales Jan Geisbusch Egypt Exploration Society 3 Doughty Mews London WC1N 2PG Phone: +44 (0)20 7242 1880 Fax: +44 (0)20 7404 6118 E-mail: advertising@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-shop.co.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 byPage Bros (Norwich) Ltd, Mile Cross Lane, Norwich, NR6 6SA. http://www.pagebros.co.uk/

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

ISSN 0962 2837

Kharga Oasis: The North Kharga Oasis Darb Ain Amur Survey is studying the climate, environment and archaeological remains of this desert basin which was once teeming with life but today is part of the arid Sahara. See further pp.9-12. Photograph © North Kharga Oasis Darb Ain Amur Survey.

Number 45

Autumn 2014

Some editorial musings Patricia Spencer

2

Access all areas - the EES Archive online Carl Graves and María Rodríguez Rubín

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EES Patrons

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A New Kingdom temple in the Delta Jeffrey and Patricia Spencer

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Kharga Oasis: a Saharan patchwork of lakes Judith Bunbury and Salima Ikram

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El-Hibeh: a plundered site Carol Redmount

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Disaster at Nuri Kathryn Howley

18

KV40: a burial place for the royal entourage Susanne Bickel and Elina Paulin-Grothe

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Kom el-Dahab interpreted Gregory Marouard

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Digging Diary 2013-14 Patricia Spencer

28

Avaris, its harbours and the Perunefer problem Irene Forstner-Müller

32

Living above Luxor temple Sylvie Weens

36

Digital epigraphy of the temple of Debod Lucía E Díaz-Iglesias Llanos and Daniel M Méndez Rodríguez

39

Bookshelf

42

Cover illustration. The Valley of the Kings. Cartonnage fragments of a face from a Twenty-Second Dynasty coffin, found in KV40. See further pp.21-24. Restoration by Erico Peintner. Photograph: Matjaz Kacicnik © University of Basel Kings’ Valley Project.

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Some editorial musings

Since this is my last editorial I hope you will not mind if I indulge myself and muse a little on the history and evolution of Egyptian Archaeology.

By the 1980s there was a growing feeling at the EES that there was a need in the subject for a regular publication which presented the results of fieldwork and research in a more accessible way than was possible in the more weighty Egyptological journals, such as our own JEA. The first tentative steps were taken in 1987 with the production of a Newsletter which included an article by Barry Kemp on the Amarna dig-house, brief summaries of recent EES fieldwork and a list of publications. Although uncredited (clearly I did not have editorial control!) there is also a short account that I wrote about the removal of heavy antiquities from Bubastis a century earlier in 1887 - the outcome of my first real foray into the extensive archives at the Society. Six issues of the Newsletter, compiled and edited by David Jeffreys and Ian Shaw, appeared over the next two years and the final issue in October 1989 announced that it would be replaced from 1991 by Egyptian Archaeology ‘a 32-page magazine with a colour cover and colour illustrations within the text’. All six issues of the Newsletter can be downloaded from the EES website: www.ees.ac.uk/news/EESNewsletters.html I remember much discussion as to what the name of the new magazine should be (Petrie Papers was one of the suggestions - quickly voted down) but the eventual title chosen has proved to be ideal, both describing succinctly the content and also referencing the magazine’s older sibling, the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. The first issue of EA, edited by Mike Murphy, was published in 1991 and the content focused on EES fieldwork with one ‘guest’ article by Alain Zivie on his excavation at Saqqara.

Initially published annually, the growing popularity of the magazine led to a decision in 1994 to produce two issues each year, in Spring and Autumn. EA 5 (Autumn 1995) was the first to be edited by John Taylor and in 1996 (with EA 9) I became the Editor. A major change was made in 1999 when EA became full-colour and the number of pages was increased to 44. The change to full-colour made the magazine much more attractive and informative (especially for photographs of excavation details) and was also a real editorial blessing as it was no longer necessary to work out which pages would be greyscale and which colour - a very tedious and often unsatisfactory process.

Both Mike and John, after they ceased to be Editors, continued as valued members of the EA Editorial Board and I would like here to thank profusely all those who have served on the Board, past and present, and generously given of their editorial and Egyptological skills and experience. Readers may not appreciate how much the high production values of EA owe to the other editors who proof-read all the content and whose eagle-eyes

A meeting of the EA Editorial Board in 2011. Left to right round the table from the front; John Taylor, John J Johnston, George Hart (who left the Board in 2014), Mike Murphy, Peter Clayton, Alice Stevenson, Chris Naunton, Patricia Spencer and David Jeffreys. Jan Geisbusch joined in 2014

often pick up on grammatical infelicities or inaccurate academic points which I myself have missed. Although EA is not ‘peer-reviewed’ as such, the potential content of each issue is discussed and reviewed at the Board’s twice-yearly meetings, and in between times by e-mail, ensuring that any articles included meet the highest academic standards. Very special thanks are due to Lisa Giddy who edited what is perhaps EA’s most popular feature ‘Digging Diary’ from the first issue until 2003.

Lisa devised the format and oversaw its expansion into what has become an invaluable research tool.

The other vital group I would like to thank is, of course, all our colleagues (who must number in the hundreds by now) who have contributed articles, reviews and ‘Digging Diary’ entries. Without their constant, and I hope continuing, support, there would be no Egyptian Archaeology and our subject would be the worse for it.

Since its first issue in 1991 EA has evolved to play a vital role in Egyptological publishing, bridging the gap between fully-referenced and very academic journals and the more ‘popular’ output of other media where it can sometimes be hard to separate fact from fiction. Increasingly EA articles are being referenced in other publications and we always have a waiting-list of colleagues eager to have their research published in the magazine.

Editing EA is a lot of work but it is something which has given me a great deal of satisfaction and pleasure, and I can’t deny that I shall miss it. My successor as Editor will be the EES Publications Manager, Jan Geisbusch (jan.geisbusch@ees.ac.uk) and I hope that he will find editing EA to be as rewarding as have I. There is, however, one big disadvantage of being Editor in that by the time an issue is published, the content is so very, very familiar that it is impossible to appreciate it properly so I am very much looking forward to receiving my member’s copies in the post and, with a big mug of coffee and a chocolate biscuit, sitting down and enjoying reading each new issue of Egyptian Archaeology.

PATRICIA SPENCER

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Access all areas - the EES Archive online The Society’s Lucy Gura Archive contains records from more than 130 years of exploration in Egypt and is one of the largest Egyptological archives in the world. Carl Graves and María Rodríguez Rubín describe the current project to rehouse the Archive and make it more accessible.

The EES Archive includes information on the many sites investigated by the Society since its inception in 1882, including Amarna, Abydos and Deir el-Bahri.

In addition to excavation records, it also contains material related to the associated Field Directors. One such individual was Ricardo A Caminos, a renowned Egyptologist and epigrapher who, together with Harry James and other colleagues, conducted work on behalf of the EES at the site of Gebel el-Silsila as part of the Archaeological Survey, between 1955 and 1982.

At this isolated site roughly ninety Two photographs of the home of Ricardo Caminos before the Society purchased the house after his death in miles south of Luxor Caminos 1992. It was later dedicated as the Ricardo A Caminos Memorial Library, where much of the Lucy Gura Archive is now stored and preserved worked intensively to record and Mews, where he continued his research until his death copy the scenes and texts preserved at the site, including in 1992, when the Society purchased the property. His stelae, niches, rock-drawings and quarry marks. The home has since become the Society’s Ricardo A Caminos results of these expeditions were presented in Gebel esMemorial Library, which is open Monday to Friday for Silsilah, I: The Shrines, published by the EES in 1963. members and visiting researchers.

Three volumes were contemplated, but unfortunately In May 2014, the Society decided that more space only the first volume, and a preliminary report of the was needed to house the ever increasing amount of work in JEA 41 (1955), 51-55, appeared, leaving large material in the Lucy Gura Archive – especially after the amounts of research material unpublished. recent arrival of records of the Society’s excavations in On his eventual retirement from Brown University in the Saqqara Sacred Animal Necropolis and of Caminos’ 1980, Caminos moved next door to the EES at 4 Doughty

Left: the bedroom of Ricardo Caminos at 4 Doughty Mews, now, together with the adjoining bathroom, converted (right) into the new archival research facility

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Carl shelving the Gebel el-Silsila material, with a framed photograph of Caminos recording scenes in the New Kingdom temple of Buhen

contribution to his current archaeological work at the site. Archive materials often contain information which is is no longer preserved and can only be explored through consultation of these precious records. The site of Gebel el-Silsila is particularly relevant in this respect due to continued erosion and defacement of monuments since the analysis of Caminos and James. By providing a new dedicated research facility to promote access to, and engagement with, our Archive, the Society hopes to increase awareness of the materials preserved and encourage further investigation.

After cataloguing the material, the next step will be to make it as widely available as possible and from November 2014 we will be working on the database of the Lucy Gura Archive to make it searchable online. This will be a significant step in facilitating worldwide accessibility and understanding of the materials preserved in the Archive.

The Society’s online collections have only just begun, and what lies ahead is an intensive task of digitising and analyzing documents to complete the process in the coming years. We will also continue to encourage access and engagement through the use of social media, such as our Facebook page and our Twitter account, and to increase physical engagement and interaction with the Lucy Gura Archive through a new season of free Access Archive Afternoons.

Should you have any questions about the Society’s Archive or wish to book a viewing then please visit our website: www.ees.ac.uk/archive/LGarchive.html, or email: archive@ees.ac.uk. If you would like to support further work in the EES Lucy Gura Archive, please see the leaflet about the 2014-15 Amelia Edwards Projects Awards for details of this year’s fundraising projects.

The writers in the new archival research facility of the EES Lucy Gura Archive, checking recently received field records

Gebel el-Silsila survey that had been on extended loan for the purposes of publication. It seemed apt that this material should be stored in the former home of Caminos in a newly refurbished archival research facility which had previously been his bedroom and bathroom. This refurbishment project was reported in the Society’s Newsletter (issue 11, ‘Bed, Bath and Beyond…’) and progress can be seen in the accompanying photographs.

When the archive material, including tracings, rubbings, and field notebooks, arrived they were catalogued and rehoused in their new location where they are now available for consultation by appointment. The Gebel el-Silsila records have recently become the subject of study by Moamen Saad Mohammed, an MSA Inspector at Luxor, who was awarded an EES scholarship in September 2014 ( www. e e s . a c . u k / news/index/268. html ). Moamen’s

research on these archival materials will make a valuable Moamen Saad Mohammed analysing epigraphic rolls from Gebel el-Silsila, of scenes traced by Caminos on behalf of the EES

q Carl Graves is the EES Education and Public Engagement Manager and María Rodríguez Rubín is the Leonardo Da Vinci Intern for the Society’s archive during 2014. The authors would like to thank Hazel Gray for checking an initial version of this article and the Society for allowing them to work with this fantastic resource. Photographs © The Egypt Exploration Society.

EES Patrons Current EES Patrons, for whose most generous support the Society is very grateful, are: C T H Beck, Barbara Begelsbacher, Eric Bohm, Raymond Bowker, Andrew Cousins, Martin R Davies, Christopher Gorman-Evans, Richard A Grant, Annie Haward, Michael Jesudason, Paul Lynn, Anne and Fraser Mathews, Anandh Indran Owen, Lyn Stagg, John Wall and John Wyatt. If you would like to become an EES Patron, please contact Carl Graves: carl.graves@ees.ac.uk.

EGYPTIAN

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A New Kingdom temple in the Delta In spring 2014 the EES Delta Survey, in collaboration with a team from the Egyptian Ministry of State for Antiquities, began to investigate the little-known site of Tell Buweib in the north-east Nile Delta. Jeffrey and Patricia Spencer summarise the results of the EES fieldwork.

The mound at Tell Buweib viewed from the south. The highest part has built up around and over the New Kingdom temple

was noteworthy in being an example of a substantial casemate-platform foundation, of a type already known at other Delta sites, most notably Tell Dafana, Naukratis and Tell el-Balamun. Since the original dimensions of the ancient mound have already suffered reduction which has left the back of the temple vulnerable, an investigation at the site was planned to record the buildings.

After the conclusion of Delta Survey work in the governorate of Kafr el-Sheikh in March 2012, we had to return some equipment to storage at the site of our previous work at Tell el-Balamun, and decided to make a visit to Tell Buweib from there, driving via Shirbin and Dikirnis. The mound lies in the fields well away from any village and consists of a high central part surrounded by extensive flat areas to the north and south. The visible buildings, including the temple, are all on the elevated part, which seemed curious since, as Petrie first noted, the temple areas of Delta mounds are usually low because they were not overbuilt by successive housing. The evidence of the satellite imagery was soon confirmed by observation of the outlines of the temple and casemate walls on the surface, which was remarkably undisturbed by pitting. Some surface pottery noted was of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, but there was no sign of the Ptolemaic or Roman occupation which is so common on Delta mounds. Having started this flying visit in good weather, we had just set off for Mansura when a huge thunderstorm rolled in and the drive was completed in torrential rain - so often a feature of fieldwork in the Delta.

Our initial intention had been to start work at

The investigation of Tell Buweib, a Delta mound c.45km east of the city of Mansura, was prompted by an examination of satellite imagery of the site as part of the continuing EES Delta Survey (www.deltasurvey.ees.ac.uk).

We thought it would be useful to create a file in which all the sites in this project would be identified on the satellite images provided by GoogleEarth, and marked with individual placemarks. When Tell Buweib was reached during this long task, it stood out because of the clarity of the buildings visible on the image, in particular a central temple c.100m in length. Around this monument were the outlines of numerous other buildings, one of which

Satellite image showing the temple and the casemate foundation. Š Google Earth™ mapping service

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Defining the walls of the temple sanctuary at the highest point of the mound

To establish their exact positions the surface dust was removed and the faces of the walls traced along their lengths. We had expected that the ‘walls’ visible on the satellite image and surface would turn out to be foundation-trenches, as is often the case on Delta sites, but to our surprise they proved to be substantial remains of mud-brick walls, preserved above the ancient floor level.

The side walls and front corners of the temple were soon delineated, and then the central gate in the south-eastern wall was excavated. This wall, forming the pylon-like frontage of the building, was a massive 10m thick, while the side walls were each 4.5m in thickness. The gate had brick jambs added to the main wall to narrow the actual doorway to 3.05m. For the most part, the walls were cleared just sufficiently to reveal their edges, but two tests were dug down to the original floor level in the passage of the gate. This was marked by a layer of broken limestone c.1.1m below the level of the front of the jamb. Since much of the temple is preserved higher than the gate, there is a great height of brickwork still remaining above this original floor level, although it is all totally embedded in the mound.

The satellite image had suggested that the rear part of the

Tell Buweib in the spring of 2013 but that proved not to be possible owing to political and security issues, although we did make another visit to the site in March of that year, accompanied by Elsayed El-Talhawy of the MSA, who had excavated an outlying portion of the site some years before. In March 2014 we began a season of work in collaboration with an MSA team under his direction.

The first aim was to recover the complete plan of the temple, a task that proceeded quite rapidly as the walls were preserved to surface level and, as noted above, their general alignment could be seen before any excavation.

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The entrance to the temple in the south-east wall, looking to the north-west

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temple might have been destroyed because of a steep drop in the level of the mound, but in fact we found the rear wall of the structure still present, except for the exterior of the north corner, which had been eroded down below its foundation. The rear west corner has survived – just – with the remains of the foundation courses reduced to a brick and a half. The drop in level proved to be useful in that it enabled us to reach the foundation level of the whole building, pretty much at the base of the high mound in the surrounding flat zone. Here it was possible to see the layers over which the temple wall had been built, which consisted of settlement debris with pottery of the late New Kingdom. Since the fill above the temple, although it consists mainly of compacted empty layers of mud, contains some pottery sherds from the end of the Third Intermediate Period and early Late Period, the temple appears to sit in a stratigraphic sequence between about 1300 BC and 700 BC, so a construction date in the Ramesside Period seems most likely.

After exploring the outer perimeter of the temple, we investigated the interior. The only internal walls we were able to locate were those surrounding a sanctuary area of c.24m x 13.5m, with a central entrance at the front, on the axis of the temple. This entrance was 2m wide through a front wall 2.9m thick, while the side walls were each 4.5m in thickness. Each side wall was connected to the rear wall of the temple at the north-west. This area of the building is located at the highest part of the ancient mound so the walls of the sanctuary are actually preserved to a height of over five metres above the level of the temple floor at the gate, which is itself 3.4m above the foundation level of the building. None of the walls are visible above the present ground surface, however, because the whole temple has been buried in a combination of wind-blown dust and material from the erosion of its own walls, with some later fill dumped above.

To the south of the temple lay the casemate foundation

Settlement remains below the position of the north corner (eroded away) of the temple

seen on the satellite image. This building was cleaned of dust and all the interior chambers were delineated, but only a couple were investigated to any depth. Some contained Late Period sherds, mostly in the upper part of the fill, with empty mud below. Two corners of one chamber were rounded, perhaps indicating that it had been vaulted over, while another chamber had been roofed with wooden planks. This might suggest that they were intended for storage, but a deep clearance in the chamber with the wooden covering revealed only the usual empty fill of accumulated dust, with few sherds. If anything had ever been stored here, it had been completely cleared out when the building fell out of use. The whole platform was 33.5m square and the outer walls averaged 4.20m in thickness on all sides.

While the side walls were slightly concave in plan, the front and rear sides were straight. All the external corners of the building were investigated, and even those at the south and west, which lay in the low ground off the edge of the mound, are still preserved. Excavation at

Remains of the wooden roofing of casemate chamber no.13

One of the rounded corners of casemate chamber no.3

The central part of the Saite casemate foundation

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date, cannot have been dependent on that temple and the location of the Saite/Late Period temple at the site has yet to be identified.

The discovery of a previously unknown New Kingdom temple at Tell Buweib is significant, especially as its mudbrick walls are preserved to a height of five metres above the ancient floor level. The reason for the abandonment of the temple in, probably, the early Third Intermediate Period is as yet unknown but could be related to the growing importance of the nearby site of Tanis. To excavate the Tell Buweib temple completely would be a massive, and expensive, task and our test trenches gave no indication that any of the original contents - stone elements, stelae, statues - might have been preserved. It would be interesting to know the ancient name of the site, and that of the god to whom the temple was dedicated, and probably the best hope of finding out this information will be if inscribed stonework from the temple has been reused elsewhere at the site.

New Kingdom settlement levels cut by the south-west wall (to the right of the photograph) of the casemate foundation

the south corner and along the south-west side showed that the building had been constructed in a foundationtrench cut into older settlement deposits, probably from the late New Kingdom. The foundation level of the brickwork below the south corner lies 4.10 metres below the highest preserved part of the platform. The pottery found in and around the building was generally of the Late Period, although towards the early part of that era.

Since the mud-brick temple described above was already out of use by the end of the Third Intermediate Period, the casemate building, which is almost certainly Saite in

q Jeffrey Spencer is Director of the EES Delta Survey and former Deputy Keeper of the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum. Patricia Spencer is Editor of Egyptian Archaeology and the former Director of the EES. The fieldwork at Tell Buweib was funded by a grant from the British Academy and was carried out in collaboration with an MSA team led by Elsayed El-Talhawy.

Photographs, unless otherwise indicated: ©Egypt Exploration Society.

The expedition blog can be read at: http://deltasurvey.tumblr.com/

The Egypt Exploration Society New Publication David O’Connor, The Old Kingdom Town at Buhen The excavation by the Egypt Exploration Society of the Old Kingdom E E S

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Town at Buhen in Sudan was directed by Bryan Emery between

account of the excavations and publishes the results of the two short Front cover; David O’Connor supervising fieldwork during the excavation of the Old Kingdom Town at Buhen.

Photographs ©The Egypt Exploration Society.

but significant seasons of work at Buhen’s unique Old Kingdom Town.

The excavation by the Egypt Exploration Society of the Old Kingdom Town at Buhen in Sudan was directed by Professor W B Emery between 1962 and 1964. David O’Connor, who was a site supervisor during both seasons, has reconstructed, from the original field records, this account of the excavations and publishes the results of the two short but significant seasons at Buhen’s unique Old Kingdom Town.

The Old Kingdom Town at Buhen

The principal team members who worked on the Old Kingdom Town excavations were Tony Mills (standing left), Bryan Emery (standing in centre) and David O’Connor (kneeling second right). They are seen here on Christmas Day 1960 at Buhen with (left to right) Molly Emery, Ricardo Caminos, Harry Smith and Robert Deane.

both seasons, has reconstructed, from the original field records, this

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The Old Kingdom Town at Buhen

The Old Kingdom Town at Buhen

1962 and 1964. David O’Connor, who was a site supervisor during

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David O’Connor is the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Ancient David O’Connor

David O’Connor has had extensive archaeological experience in both Egypt and Sudan, including participation in EES fieldwork at Buhen and Qasr Ibrim.

He has been Director of the continuing excavations at Abydos (University of Pennsylvania-Yale-Institute of Fine Arts/New York University) since 1964 and from 1964 to 1995 was a Professor of ancient Egyptian history and archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania and Curator-in-Charge of the Egyptian collection of the University’s Penn Museum. Professor O’Connor is currently the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.

Egyptian Art at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.

EES Excavation Memoir 106. 2014. ISBN: 978 0 85698 215 6 ::H

Price: £70.00. EES Members: £59.50

:B &%+

David O’Connor E G Y P T

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EES publications 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: maria.idowu@ees.ac.uk.

On-line shop: www.ees-shop.com. US Distributor: https://isdistribution.com/

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Kharga Oasis: a Saharan patchwork of lakes Today the Sahara forms one of the world’s largest deserts, with the exception of a few oases, and is a significant barrier to human and animal migration. Judith Bunbury and Salima Ikram reveal how during the Holocene the climate and environment were quite different.

Although the area around Fish Rock in Kharga Oasis is barren today, it is a rich source of lithic finds and rock art, including depictions of fish and a crocodile

The North Kharga Oasis Darb Ain Amur Survey (NKODAAS) has been recording hitherto unknown sites in the north-western part of the Kharga basin since 2004 and has found that in the past large lakes and damp patches periodically fostered settlement of the area. Access to high-resolution satellite photography and topographic data has transformed research in remote areas since many of the sites we are investigating can now be seen from space, and additional sites can be identified for potential exploration. Combined with digital elevation models, these images are a powerful tool for modelling past landscapes, including lakes and aquifers.

Many researchers, including Nick Drake, Fred Wendorf, Romuald Schild and Simon Armitage, have studied the playas (dried-up lakes) of the Sahara and established that the surrounding areas were episodically inhabited as water levels rose and fell; Kharga is no exception. Our work shows that historically four main sources of water supplied Kharga: overflow from the Nile which formed lakes in the Kharga basin; artesian water as today; direct rainfall; and springs fed by local aquifers which could sustain lakes for longer than in the deep Sahara. Analysis of sediments from the depression shows how the lakes waxed and waned over time. As recently as the Neolithic and in Dynastic times lakes persisted here and at its greatest extent the Khargan lake that formed the basin measured up to

3,000km2 and supported a diverse flora and fauna.

Changes in rainfall are driven by global climate cycles.

At the end of the last glaciation, around 10,000 years ago, global temperatures first rose to levels above those we experience now, causing increased local rainfall in north Africa and an intensified monsoon in the Ethiopian Highlands, augmenting the Blue Nile. As lakes formed, human exploitation of the areas re-intensified. Then, as global Holocene temperatures dropped, water became sparse and lake levels fell. Communities moved into the fertile lakebeds, concentrated around the remaining

Logging Holocene lake sediment in which each band represents one episode of lake filling. Mud cracks at the top of many layers show that lake expansion was followed by drying and contraction

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covered earlier cultural deposits in sediments, supporting the second hypothesis. Additionally, ice core results suggest that there were six glacial cycles during the Pleistocene, each one perhaps associated with separate episodes of lake formation, showing that the landscape of these areas is continuously changing. By plotting sediments as well as the location of rock art and prehistoric camps, a picture emerges of oscillating lake levels and, ultimately, an increasing reliance upon pastoralism and agriculture, as nutritional resources became concentrated on fertile lake muds that were exposed as the water disappeared.

Patches of redder mud in the Kharga basin, possibly Reconstruction of the Holocene lake at its greatest extent of around 3,000km2 augmented by the Nile through sources of water, including springs and wells. Within this the Toshka route, suggest that a quick drying bio-diverse pattern there were many expansions and contractions of lake, as attested by abundant worm casts, formed as water lakes. With the fine detail now available from ice-cores spilled out of the Nile above the First Cataract and into the drivers of Holocene landscape change at Kharga can the Kharga depression in about the sixth millennium be assessed and it is possible to explore the impact on BC. Rock art, found at higher altitudes in the basin, earlier human inhabitants. We can also consider how suggests a diverse fauna: crocodile, hippopotamus, giraffe, global climate change since the industrial revolution may be affecting the Sahara again.

In her survey of Kharga Gertrude Caton-Thompson noted evidence for a rich Palaeolithic culture around the upper fringes of the basin but no similar deposits were retrieved from its interior. There are two possible explanations: the depression may have been a huge uninhabitable lake or this material might have been covered by sediment from a subsequent lake.

Recent work by Vance Hayes on the route of the Toshka canal, which links Lake Nasser and the Western Desert, shows that during the Holocene Map of the NKODAAS survey area showing reconstructed lake areas in shades of blue, the outcrop of the Surface this was a river that Water Sandstone (SWS) aquifer in red and the main desert tracks as dashed red lines 10

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Images at Aa Rock showing tethered giraffes and their handler

gazelle, oryx and fish. Excavations at Dakhla Oasis have yielded archaeozoological and archaeobotanical remains supporting this picture, as has the work of Michel Wüttman and Béatrix Midant-Reynes in the south of Kharga.

However, this paradise came to an end when global temperatures started to fall around 5,000 BC and the lakes, draining into the sandstone bedrock and desiccated by the sun, started to shrink, leaving a Neolithic high-tide mark of artefacts. We know from the results of Gaelle Tallet’s team working at el-Deir that standing water persisted

Split Rock: copying rock art which has been left isolated and high above the modern ground level by erosion

A reconstruction of the environment of Fish Rock in the Late Midauwara Period of the Holocene, with contemporary images taken from rock art in the Oasis

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Lake Ephemera formed after rain in 2013 (person on far shore for scale)

The temple at the surviving spring of Ain Amur where gazelle still roam

until the Roman Period in some parts of the oasis since skeletons from the site showed traces of bilharzia, while the description of Herodotus (c.450 BC) of a place seven days journey from Thebes as the ‘Isles of the Blessed’ might easily be a description of the watery Khargan area of that time, with settlements and temples on small rises within the residual lake.

Despite the lowered lake level, the flat-lying fertile sediment that the lake left behind was easily irrigated with artesian water provided by springs along the major geological faults of the depression or extracted from wells.

This bounty was not lost on the inhabitants of the region from the Middle Kingdom through to the Roman era, who used these ideal conditions to cultivate the famous wine-producing grapes of Kharga, among other crops.

However, during this long stretch when the lakes and pools continued shrinking, salinity increased. Gypsum crystals growing in the upper layers of sediment are further evidence of a deterioration of the water quality. It is notable that the catfish and fresh water mussel that were reported by Françoise Briois and Béatrix Midant-Reynes are amongst the most tolerant of brackish conditions.

Wetter interludes continued to raise water levels, and rainy spells in the New Kingdom led to the reestablishment of pools in the earlier lake beds. These were regularly exploited, as attested by rock inscriptions and amphorae found in what is now deep desert. Again in the Roman Period rains re-filled the upper aquifer and modest communities sprang up, accessing this stored water through wells and manawir and qanats (subterranean water-harvesting tunnels, a technology possibly imported by the Persians, see Michel Wüttman’s article, EA 22, pp.36-37). Examples of the many Roman sites include Qasr el-Lebekha, Umm el-Dabadib, el-Deir and Qasr elSumayra. Subsequently the lake dried into ever smaller, and more widely dispersed pools until there were only a few springs remaining, with gazelle and ostrich still taking refuge there in the 1950s. Pumps brought in during the early twentieth century allowed the extraction of everdeeper water and renewal of the oasis.

Of course in our own times of global temperature increase, rain is returning to the depression, creating modest ephemeral lakes and re-filling the upper sandstone aquifer. Gazelle, until recently restricted to pockets like the spring at Ain Amur, have started to roam further afield, grazing on plants that spring up in the playa basins as a direct result of this rainfall.

While modern deep boreholes and high pressure irrigation sprinklers are spreading agriculture into the desert, might global temperature rise achieve the same end through increased rainfall re-greening the Sahara within our lifetimes?

Roman fort at Umm el-Dabadib, an agricultural and mining settlement that relied on water qanat (rock-cut underground galleries) and springs

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q Judith Bunbury is a geo-archaeologist at Cambridge University.Salima Ikram is Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo and the Director of NKOS’s Darb Ain Amur Survey. They would like to thank the Ministry of State for Antiquities, the Inspectors and Inspectorate of Kharga, the American Research Center in Egypt, National Geographic Society, the American University in Cairo, the Boyer Family, M Fisher, N Pirrazzoli, Far Horizons, and the Friends of Kharga Oasis.

All illustrations are by members of the NKODAAS.

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El-Hibeh: a plundered site Since the 2011 revolution in Egypt there has been a well-documented lack of security in the country which has had serious implications for many archaeological sites. Carol Redmount describes the impact on the important Third Intermediate Period town at El-Hibeh. increased accessibility Three hours south and occasional, but of Cairo by car, in usually very minor, an isolated and poor looting. Although far rural area of northern from pristine when Middle Egypt, lies we began our work, the very picturesque the El-Hibeh tell archaeological site of was, unusually for an El-Hibeh (pronounced Egyptian town site, Heybah). Bounded to substantially intact and the west by the Nile arguably one of the and a narrow strip best-preserved town of fertile cultivation, mounds anywhere and to the east by The Twenty-Second Dynasty limestone temple after clearing in 2003. Behind the temple is in Egypt. It offered desert and a modern part of the well-preserved mud-brick temenos wall an unparalleled highway, El-Hibeh opportunity to investigate the character, layout and (ancient Teudjoi/Ankyronpolis) comprises the remains of development of a provincial town. The words of a once impressive walled town of the Third Intermediate Ahmed Kamal, the pioneering Egyptian scholar who first Period, with its associated cemeteries. Impinging on the excavated the site, still largely held true: ‘... one can affirm site to its north and south are expanding modern villages with certainty that being situated in a region little cultivated, and their accompanying agricultural activities. Together, these ruins have escaped the sebakh hunters, and, by consequence, the town mound (tell) and the desert cemeteries cover an have preserved in great part all the [town] ruins, so that one area of approximately two square kilometres. could, if one wished to undertake excavations there, recover a In 2001 our team, a multi-national, multi-disciplinary great part of the interior plan’. group from the University of California, Berkeley, began Since most previous fieldwork at El-Hibeh (see work at El-Hibeh in association with the then Supreme inset box below) was either unpublished or published Council of Antiquities (SCA; now the Ministry of State for to a standard unsuitable for the demands of modern Antiquities, or MSA). At that time, like virtually all sites research, our fieldwork focused initially on the basics: in Egypt, El-Hibeh was endangered by a combination of site reconnaissance, assessment and monitoring, and the factors, including a rising water table, population growth generation of baseline data through mapping, survey, accompanied by settlement and agricultural expansion,

Papyri from El-Hibeh and early excavations Giza, hired local villagers at El-Hibeh to plunder burials, procuring quantities of scarabs, amulets, ushabtis, statuettes, and faience and alabaster vases for the market. Ironically, Ptolemaic mummies with papyrus cartonnage were thrown away as worthless.

The quantity and quality of papyrological and archaeological material sold on the open market in the 1880s and 1890s and identified as coming from El-Hibeh inspired prominent early scholars of diverse nationalities to investigate the site. Between the end of the nineteenth century and World War I, Daressy, Kamal, Grenfell and Hunt, Junker and Ranke all worked at El-Hibeh. Daressy and Ranke explored the temple while Kamal and Junker investigated the town.

Grenfell and Hunt excavated massive quantities of predominantly Ptolemaic papyri preserved in mummy cartonnage. However, after World War I interest in the site declined as attention focused on more spectacular and earlier material and only two further expeditions to the site would take place in the twentieth century: an Italian group under Breccia searched unsuccessfully for papyri in the 1930s and an American expedition, directed by Wenke, undertook a single field season in 1980.

Scholarly interest in El-Hibeh was aroused in the 1880s, when notable finds attributed to the site began to appear on the antiquities market. Numerous important papyri said to come from El-Hibeh were sold over the next approximately twenty years, including three hieratic texts found together in a jar - The Report of Wenamun (our only copy of this masterpiece of Egyptian literature), A Tale of Woe, and the best extant copy of The Onomasticon of Amenemope.

Other papyri from the site are the Harpenese Letters (Twenty-First Dynasty hieratic administrative and priestly correspondence) and the nine Rylands Papyri of the Twenty-Sixth and Twenty-Seventh Dynasties. These large demotic papyrus rolls were also found inside a pot, and describe the fortunes of a local priestly family serving the temple of Teudjoi, the dynastic name of El-Hibeh. The most famous, the Petition of Petiese (P. Rylands IX), is 15ft long and full of information - whether historical or literary or both is still debated - about Teudjoi and its temple. Today papyri ascribed to El-Hibeh can be found in museums worldwide.

During the 1890s cemeteries at the site were heavily plundered, and from 1895-96 ‘Sheikh Hassan’, a prominent antiquities dealer from

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History and importance of the site The ancient Egyptian name of El-Hibeh was Teudjoi and in the Graeco-Roman Period it was known as Ankyronpolis. The town was founded on an irregular limestone outcrop at or near the edge of the Nile at the very beginning of the Libyan Third Intermediate Period (c.1070 BC). Once viewed as a historically irrelevant period of decline and cultural disintegration brought about by the decay of Bronze Age Egyptian power and glory, the Third Intermediate Period is now recognized as a multifaceted and protean time of changing societal paradigms for kingship and religion, temples and government, economics and social structure, art and mortuary practices. Unfortunately, our knowledge of the era is limited by the textual and archaeological sources that have survived. Few settlement sites in Egypt preserve Third Intermediate Period stratigraphy as extensively as El-Hibeh so the site is - or at least was - uniquely positioned to provide critical insights into Third Intermediate Period archaeology as well as providing information on Egyptian urbanism more generally.

Teudjoi/Ankyronpolis was enveloped by a substantial town wall partly constructed of mud-bricks bearing the stamped names of either Pinudjem I (lower courses) or Menkheperre (higher courses), successive High Priests of Amun at Thebes in the Twenty-First Dynasty, and it is usually assumed that El-Hibeh marked the northern border of Theban authority at this time. Kilns scattered along the western edge of the site attest to industrial activity while an imposing height adjacent to the north gate has been identified as a fort but could also have been a large residence. A second desert gate is probably located somewhere along the eastern town wall. The most notable structure preserved at El-Hibeh is the small limestone

Part of a stamped brick of the High Priest of Amun, Menkheperre, originally from the town wall, reused in kiln structure

Satellite view of El-Hibeh in 2004, with the site’s key locations marked. © Google Earth™ mapping service temple (see photograph on previous page), nestled in a hollow at the southern end of the tell, which functioned into Roman times.

Inscriptions in the temple tell us that it was dedicated to ‘Amun Great of Roaring(s)/Bleating(s), Lord of the Crag’ - an idiosyncratic local form of the god Amun - as well as to more traditional Theban gods. This distinctive form of Amun occurs elsewhere only twice: once in the Chronicle of the High Priest/Prince Osorkon at Karnak, and once in the Rylands Papyri. The Karnak inscription identifies ‘The Crag of Amun, Great of Roaring’ as the Residence of Osorkon, eldest son of Takeloth II (c.850-825 BC). In the Saite/Persian Period Rylands Papyri (see inset box on p.13), ‘Amun of the Crag’ and ‘Amun-Re, Great of Bleatings, Lord of the Great Crag’ are identified with, respectively, the town and temple of Teudjoi. Temple inscriptions also tell us that ElHibeh’s Amun temple was founded by the Libyan king Sheshonq I (c.945-924 BC), the first king of the Twenty-Second Dynasty, and completed by his son and successor Osorkon I. Ceramic, mortuary and textual evidence also indicate that the town was founded in the Third Intermediate Period and it was occupied at least until the Coptic era.

A relief block from the temple showing Sheshonq I, found reused in the floor of a later structure. A looting hole is now visible at the approximate location of the block

Fragments of papyrus found in situ in Third Intermediate Period layers during the 2009 field season

short period of lawlessness in which police were pulled from the streets, followed by a more protracted time of compromised security. The results have been disastrous for the country’s cultural heritage. Museums and site storehouses have been looted, and many archaeological sites were plundered mercilessly. El-Hibeh, in an isolated region without tourist attractions, was particularly badly affected. In February 2011 I was told that the site was ‘very bad’ but it was only later that I fully appreciated what that meant and the extent to which El-Hibeh had been looted.

Between June 2011 and January 2012, I was sent a series of photographs documenting severe damage to El-Hibeh. Pockmarked with looting pits, areas of the site resembled Swiss cheese. Broken body parts and torn mummy wrappings from violated graves were seemingly scattered everywhere. Previously unknown and clearly

and test and salvage excavations. Our longer term goals included tracing the development of the town and its hinterland through time and space; advancing Third Intermediate Period archaeology by excavating stratified deposits; correlating textual and epigraphic materials from and about the site to its archaeology; and, ultimately, in cooperation with the Egyptian authorities, establishing an open-air museum at the site to aid the local economy.

To date we have identified various functional areas and established that the town was founded in the Third Intermediate Period, reaching its greatest extent and importance during that era, after which there was a marked shrinkage in urban size.

With the rest of the world, our team watched as the Egyptian people carried out a revolution against the Mubarak regime in late January and February 2011.

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the continuing disaster at ElHibeh, we helped to launch a media campaign to raise awareness about the looting of the site. El-Hibeh’s plight was featured on Egyptian television and its looting debated in the Egyptian parliament; overnight it became, as one official put it, a ‘huge scandal’. The Wafd Party newspaper sent a reporter to the site and published two feature articles on the pillaging.

Employing social media, we established a ‘Save El Hibeh Egypt’ Facebook group that today has over 2000 members ( http://tinyurl.com/m5w9of7 ).

Assisted by Amir Bibawy, a professional EgyptianAmerican journalist with an Satellite view of the site in 2012, with new looting holes clearly visible - compare this with the image from 2004 international reputation, we shown opposite. © Google Earth™ mapping service drafted a formal press release.

In August 2012, El-Hibeh was featured on a segment of significant structures were now exposed. It appeared that NBC television’s Rock Center with Brian Williams. most of the damage had been inflicted in the short period The Egyptian media exposure apparently led to three of lawlessness marking the beginning of the revolution. increasingly broad and progressively senior official Comparison of the different sets of photographs, however, inspection tours by the MSA, initially of El-Hibeh, then also indicated that at least some plundering had continued.

The ongoing looting, I was told, was the work of an individual from a nearby village who dug at night and whom the police were unable to catch.

Our winter/spring 2012 fieldwork had been planned as a study season. Given the pillaging, we updated our MSA application to include assessment, mapping, and, if possible, mitigation of the looting. Having obtained the requisite permissions, we travelled to Cairo in February, signed our contract as usual with the MSA, and prepared for our field season. The day before we were to begin work, however, our security clearance was revoked: the local police considered it too dangerous for us to work at El-Hibeh. Apparently an armed ‘mafia-like’ gang, led by a ‘master criminal’ from one of the nearby villages, was aggressively looting the archaeological remains and threatening to shoot MSA inspectors.

Stunned, we debated how to proceed. We set ourselves two goals: to get the looting stopped and the site protected (our top priority), and to salvage our study season. After about a month we received permission to move our study materials from El-Hibeh to the MSA storehouse at Ehnasya el-Medina where, despite a three hour daily commute, we were able to do a solid month’s work. We are most grateful to the MSA for rescuing our field season from total loss but, unfortunately, we were completely unsuccessful in our first goal. Consequently, A deep looting hole exposing a limestone architectural element (a jamb?) of after Egyptian media reached out to us, and in despair over a previously unknown structure, looking north-west

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El-Hibeh, particularly relating to the Third Intermediate Period, is incalculable.

Now, two years later, El-Hibeh remains unprotected, apart from the unarmed site guards who were unable to prevent earlier depredations, and site destruction, plundering and heritage loss generally in Egypt remain serious problems. Nevertheless, there are signs of hope.

For El-Hibeh, the ‘master-criminal’ who organised the industrial-scale looting is dead, killed in an unrelated shootout with police. The pace and extent of looting at the site seems to have fallen off significantly, and it may yet prove possible to salvage some archaeological data.

More broadly, the MSA is enjoying notable success in recovering stolen museum objects, repatriating pilfered items that surface abroad, and preventing looted materials from leaving the country in the first place. In April 2014, the Egyptian government, acknowledging that its cultural heritage is in serious jeopardy, formally requested a bilateral agreement with the United States under the Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act. If recommended by the Cultural Property Advisory Committee and the State Department, and approved by President Obama, as seems likely, this agreement would restrict imports into the USA of endangered heritage

View from ‘fort’ of the area inside the north gate, now pockmarked with looting holes

of El-Hibeh and Middle Egypt more generally. To our delight, we were invited to accompany the first two inspection tours to El-Hibeh, and were permitted and encouraged by MSA officials to go wherever we wished and document the devastation. The third and final site visit of our 2012 field season occurred in April when we returned our study materials to the El-Hibeh storehouse; we were then permitted to explore the area one last time.

Together with our MSA colleagues we reburied as many desecrated body parts as possible.

Unhappily, the three site visits confirmed our worst fears. The site - town mound and cemetery alike - had been thoroughly violated. The tell in particular had been, and still was being, massively and systematically plundered. Every single one of our excavation areas, without exception, had been ransacked: it was as if the looters knew where we had worked - discarded remains and freshly dug holes appeared between our visits. As the looters worked through the site, the excavated contents from new holes were used to backfill others, disguising the extent of the damage and making it more difficult to assess. Some of the numerous looting holes were enormous, measuring many metres wide and many metres deep and there were tunnels burrowing deep into the ground scattered throughout the site. Significant structures had been exposed, now stripped of their contents and the stratigraphic connections that gave them and their associated finds context and meaning. El-Hibeh was at the mercy of predators: despoiled and dismembered, the ancient town and cemetery were being violently reduced to a wretched, disarticulated archaeological carcass that was still being picked clean. Sadly, given the date and character of the site, it is likely that the monetary worth of any looted finds was not great; the high price paid was rather in the enormous damage the looting inflicted on the site. The true value of material from El-Hibeh lay not in the objects themselves, but rather in their association with the now-devastated stratigraphy that would have given them context and meaning. The loss of knowledge, of irreplaceable archaeological data from

Excavated area, possibly a shrine, adjoining the rear enclosure wall of the Twenty-Second Dynasty temple, during excavation (above) and after looting (below)

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The torso, legs and mummy wrappings of a burial exposed by looters in the northern cemetery

(prehistoric to Ottoman Period) materials from Egypt. Meanwhile, a new grassroots movement that employs social media and organises local groups is now establishing itself in Egypt. Its goals include protecting heritage sites and preventing their destruction, documenting damage where it does occur, and in general raising awareness of the uniqueness and importance of Egypt’s cultural heritage. A host of Facebook sites promoting cultural heritage preservation have sprung up and Monica Hanna, a young Egyptian scholar, has emerged as a local champion and prime mover for this grassroots movement. She founded the ‘Egypt’s Heritage Task Force’ page on Facebook (http://tinyurl.com/ mz8yylb) and has over 30,000 followers on Twitter.

As Egypt moves forward with elections and a new government, we and the rest of the world are hopeful that the MSA and the new grassroots organisations can work together as powerful colleagues to end the heritage destruction in Egypt.

The façade of a tomb in the northern cemetery, with its uraeus frieze exposed by looters q Carol Redmount is Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology in the Near Eastern Studies Department, University of California, Berkeley, and Curator of Egyptian Archaeology at the University’s Phoebe A Hearst Museum of Anthropology. She would like to thank: Mohammed Ibrahim (former Minister for Antiquities), Nadia Ashour (Director, Beni Suef Inspectorate) and Atef Helmy (Manager, MSA magazine at Ehnasya el-Medina) for permission and facilities to undertake the 2012 season; MSA Inspector, Rabee Akl, and the staff of the American Research Center in Egypt Cairo office, especially Amira Khattab. Illustrations © the El-Hibeh Project unless otherwise indicated.

Journal of Egyptian History Founding Editor: Thomas Schneider Editors-in-Chief: J.G. Manning and Juan Carlos Moreno García Managing Editor: J.J. Shirley Editorial Board: Christian Cannuyer, Leo Depuydt, Aidan Dodson,

• 2015: Volume 8, in 2 issues • ISSN 1874-1657 / E-ISSN 1874-1665 • Institutional Subscription rates Electronic only: EUR 144.- / US$ 198.Print only: EUR 158.- / US$ 218.Electronic & print: EUR 173.- / US$ 238.• Individual Subscription rates Print or Electronic only: EUR 53.- / US$ 73.-

Andrea Gnirs-Loprieno, Karl Jansen-Winkeln, Ludwig Morenz and Toby Wilkinson brill.com/jeh

From July 1st, the Journal of Egyptian History will have 2 new Editors-in Chief!

J.G. Manning and Juan Carlos Moreno García will take over from Ransacked area of the Copticwho cemetery outside north from gate ofits thebeginning. site Thomas Schneider, edited thethe journal

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Disaster at Nuri In 1916 Reisner excavated the Napatan royal cemetery at Nuri in Sudan. Right at the start of the season there was a tragic accident which Kathryn Howley uncovered while carrying out research funded in part by an EES Centenary Award.

The archaeologist George Andrew Reisner (18671942) is considered by many to be one of the fathers of scientific archaeology, but he might also be regarded as the father of pyramid excavation. Although best known for his association with the Giza necropolis, Reisner also excavated at all the major pyramid fields in Nubia. In 1916 he started work in the royal cemetery of Nuri at the fourth cataract of the Nile, hoping to find the tombs of the ‘Black Pharaohs’ Piankhy, Taharqo and Aspelta.

His excavations, a joint mission of Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, were on a scale that would be unthinkable today, regularly hiring upwards of 250 workmen. Fortunately Reisner’s field diaries have survived, opening a window into the extravagant world of archaeological life at the beginning of the twentieth century. These fascinating and hugely valuable sources are held, still in their original handwritten form, in the Department of Art of the Ancient World at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reisner religiously kept a record of daily happenings on site, and the diaries are indispensable for the archaeological information they contain. However, they also record details of life in the camp, thus providing a more human perspective on this important archaeological project. This is never more true than at the end of November 1916, when disaster was to overshadow the day-to-day operation of the work.

At the start of the season, in the autumn of 1916, Reisner sent ahead his trusted Egyptian foreman Said Ahmed to Nuri to begin clearance work, with Reisner himself to follow later. Under Reis Said’s command, work began on 26 October 1916 and proceeded smoothly as he recruited local workmen, donkeys and camels, and laid railroad tracks to aid in sand clearance.

Merawi Camp, 6 December 1916.

Photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Reisner began his long journey south from Giza with his family on 23 November. While there was no archaeology to write about, it seems that bureaucracy plagued archaeologists as much then as it can now, and there were plenty of administrative headaches to fill the diary entries of the long days on train and steamer. Reisner was dismayed to find 20 kilograms of sugar confiscated from the excavation’s rations at the border crossing at Wadi Halfa, as he lacked the appropriate Egyptian sugar export permit. The family finally reached their base at Merawi Camp, some distance from Nuri, on the evening of 27 November; Reisner spent the next morning involved with the administration of ‘unpacking boxes and getting camp settled’, and greeting the British army officers who governed the area.

While Reisner busied himself at Merawi, Reis Said, who records the day in his own diary, was conducting business in the nearby town of Kareima. He had left instructions for the excavation of the staircases entering pyramids I, V

Workmen at the Nuri pyramid field, 19 December 1916. Photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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and IX, continuing exactly the same work that had been going on the previous day. The clearance was routine, and as the end of the work day at noon approached, no major finds had been made. Having completed his business in Kareima, Said boarded the ferry to cross the Nile back to Nuri. Suddenly another Egyptian appeared on the opposite bank of the river shouting terrible news; the stairway of pyramid V had collapsed on to the workmen excavating it.

Said and the men with him ‘seized the oars of the ferry’ and rushed the boat to the bank. The news was not good.

At 11:55am, just five minutes before work was due to end, a piece of rock had fallen at the very base of the staircase, trapping numerous men. Five were killed: two Egyptian foremen and three local Sudanese workmen.

Said mourned that ‘Allah took them in [their] tracks’ and solemnly recorded their names.

The erasure at the beginning of the paragraph and the overwriting in the last two lines are features not seen elsewhere in Reisner’s handwriting and seem to indicate his state of mind

launch still moored at Merawi, he was forced to go on foot, and did not arrive until after 3pm. Reisner was devastated to hear of the disaster, and his distress can be seen clearly in his handwriting, which deteriorates as soon as he reports the arrival of the news.

Reisner immediately notified the Governor, Colonel Jackson, and asked for a doctor to be sent. By the time Dr Sarkis arrived and the pair could leave for Nuri in the launch it was 4.30pm. Luck was not with the expedition that day. Strong currents delayed the journey to the site, and there were no donkeys to meet them on the bank at Nuri. Reisner and Sarkis were forced to hurry on foot across the desert to reach the pyramids, and by the time the doctor was able to tend the injured it was 7pm. The Egyptian foremen had already obtained shrouds and buried their two dead, while the bodies of the Sudanese deceased had been taken away by their families. One of the injured Egyptians had a broken leg and was taken in the boat to the hospital, while the other men caught in the fall were, thankfully, not seriously hurt. Reisner praises the efforts of the Egyptian foremen in minimizing the fatalities; while the terrified locals ‘simply went mad, rushing about, throwing dust on their heads’, the more experienced Egyptians immediately started the rescue work to dig out the buried, working themselves ‘like Trojans’.

Among the misfortune emerges one lucky escape. It had taken the rescuers 45 minutes to extricate all the men trapped under the sand and rubble of the collapse, four of whom died during this time. However, among those with the bad luck to be on the staircase at 11:55 was one young boy carrying his basket. As the walls collapsed above him, his basket overturned on to his head, creating an air pocket. Miraculously, this was able to sustain him until he could be dug out. Reisner wonderingly reports seeing him the day after the accident, ‘carrying his basket … as if nothing had happened’, apparently none the worse for his misadventure.

The death of his workmen gave Reisner much cause for soul searching. He returned to Nuri the next day to investigate the cause of the accident and compile an official report. Further inspection revealed that there had been two vertical cracks in the wall. While they were visible to the excavators, there was nothing unusual in

Egyptians: Gibran Awed, Moharrib Ahmed Locals: Shafia Mohammed of Barkal, Mohammed Salib Habeebullah of Dueim, Mohammed Abd-el-Gabbar of Nuri When the rock began to crack, twelve men were working on the stairway. As they heard the collapse begin, eight tried to flee up the stairs: an understandable but fateful response. Gibran Awed was crushed by the falling rock, while the rest were buried under sand and gravel. Four of these men were suffocated before they could be dug out while four who did not rush up the staircase and remained pressed against its back wall were able to escape almost unhurt.

As soon as he heard the news, Said sent a runner to Merawi Camp to inform Reisner; with the expedition’s

The scene of the accident, 2 December 1916. Photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 19

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Pyramid V after the accident, 2 December 1916.

Photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

their presence, and Reisner points out that his team had excavated more than 30 similar stairways in Sudan with no previous problems. Unfortunately, the outward appearance of the cracks masked invisible weaknesses in the unstable red sandstone below.

Reisner concluded that ‘the unsoundness of the wall was due to two invisible defects in the rock, both of them extremely unusual, and, together, forming a combination which might well be compared to the chance stroke of a flash of lightning … the conclusion to which I have come is that the danger is not one which could have been foreseen’.

Reisner’s diagram of where the collapse occurred in pyramid V, with the visible and invisible lines of weakness in the rock marked

Despite the lack of blame to be assigned for the accident, Reisner was determined that such a dreadful tragedy should not happen again. He made arrangements for all the injured men’s hospital expenses and wages to be paid while they were incapacitated, and ensured that the families of those killed were well provided for. He also implemented extra safety precautions on the excavation, which are repeatedly noted in future diary entries. After 28 November, excavation was suspended if there was the slightest suspicion of weakness in the rock, and a system of reinforcing tomb walls with dom-palm logs was instituted, despite the difficulties of obtaining large pieces of wood.

The events experienced by the Harvard-MFA expedition on 28 November 1916 would have taxed even the most resilient spirits, and Reisner returned to camp that evening in a far worse mood than when he had arrived just 24 hours earlier. He closes his diary entry with a typical understatement: ‘Altogether a bad day’.

Reisner’s diary for 28 November 1916. ‘Bad’ is overwritten as he searches for the right word to express himself q Kathryn Howley is a PhD candidate in the Egyptology Department of Brown University. She is very grateful to the Art of the Ancient World Department of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, who allowed her access to this material and were extremely generous with their time and assistance. The larger project of which this archival research forms part has been made possible through the generosity of Brown University Graduate School, Brown Egyptology Department, and the EES Centenary Fund. Illustrations courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Pyramid V staircase after the accident, 2 December 1916.

Photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 20

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KV 40: a burial place for the royal entourage The University of Basel Kings’ Valley Project is investigating minor tombs in the royal necropolis and has now identified KV 40 as the burial place of members of the Eighteenth Dynasty royal family.

Susanne Bickel and Elina Paulin-Grothe report on the find.

Tomb KV 40 is situated on the east flank of the side valley leading to the tomb of Tuthmosis III and was given its number by Victor Loret who worked in this area in 1898-99. Loret did not, however, explore the tomb, perhaps because he saw, or was told about, its devastated condition. The University of Basel Kings’ Valley Project started clearing its shaft in January 2011 and the construction of a protective structure over its opening led to the discovery of KV 64 immediately north of KV 40 (see further EA 41, pp.36-40).

KV 40 is a large undecorated tomb and its ground plan is comparable to that of KV 30 on the opposite side of the wadi. The shaft of KV 40 opens into a corridor which leads to The area around KV 40 and KV 64 in 2009 prior to investigation a large central room with one side chamber allow a preliminary reconstruction of the tomb’s eventful to the north and two to the south. While the corridor history and the identification of its original occupants. was filled with sand to half its height and yielded only KV 40 had clearly been used for multiple burials and a few objects, the floors of the four inner rooms were from the countless mummy parts found it seems that a covered with carbonised fragments of wood, cartonnage, total of some 50 individuals were interred here, including textiles and pottery as well as parts of mummies. The several infants. The name of Tuthmosis IV is given on a documentation of this impressive find and its systematic small faience vessel, while a pot lid and several clay seal clearance were carried out during recent field seasons and impressions bear the name of Amenhotep III. Fragments of black wooden coffins and striped cartonnage masks as well as a large number of broken jars also date to this period, while fragments of painted cartonnage mummy containers and of polychrome wooden coffins indicate that the tomb was reused for additional burials in the Twenty-Second Dynasty (see cover photograph), like its neighbour KV 64. Similarly, during the TwentyFirst Dynasty the tomb was entered and, although this was not ‘tomb-robbing’ in its narrowest sense, many of its valuables were removed for re-use elsewhere.The devastated state in which all the remains were found can be attributed to looting that presumably took place in the late nineteenth century. After ransacking whatever they did not carry away, the robbers threw their torches towards the middle of each room, causing fires which burned hot enough to blacken the walls and ceilings but which were quenched by the refilling of the shaft, sparing Preliminary ground plan of KV 40 (Tanja Alsheimer) the fragmentary remains from complete destruction.

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KV 40, Room E as found. Photograph: Matjaz Kacicnik

The pottery from KV 40, ready for reassembling

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KV 40, Room D as found. Photograph: Matjaz Kacicnik

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Inscribed sherd mentioning the ‘royal daughter, Neferunebu, from the house of the royal children’

The clearing of KV 40 was completed in our most recent season but the restoration and study of the hundreds of fragments of burial equipment will take several more years. Among the impressive quantity of pottery sherds, some 100 short hieratic inscriptions in black or yellow paint have been preserved. A preliminary investigation of these dipinti has revealed unexpected insights into the identities of over thirty of the individuals who were buried in this tomb. The jars, which are currently being reassembled, can be associated with linen natron bags and other refuse of embalming. As KV 40 was used for numerous burials, it must have been crucial to personalise these containers to ascertain their attribution to a specific individual, so the jar inscriptions consist mainly of names.

A large majority refer to females, twelve of whom had the title of ‘king’s daughter’. Some of these princesses are further specified as belonging to ‘the house of the royal children’, a designation which presumably refers to the institution that guaranteed their income during lifetime and perhaps also covered their funeral expenses. Another group of female names is characterised by a hieroglyphic sign that indicates a foreign origin. These women may be tentatively associated with the king’s diplomatic marriages and the large entourages that must have accompanied the brides to Egypt. A further group of women is preserved only through their names being inscribed on the jars without any other indication. Four different royal sons are attested on jars while two more are named on a canopic vessel and on wooden tags.

Based on this evidence, we can conclude that KV 40 was used as a burial place for members of the large family of Amenhotep III:

Part of a jar with the name of Tatjuia

his siblings, women and offspring. None of the individuals buried here seems to be known from other sources and it is possible that they were not among the most prestigious members of the royal family, but rather belonged more generally to the women’s quarters of the court.

The handwriting, which is different for every name attested, and variations in the jar shapes indicate that the tomb was used over an appreciable time span. Two jar inscriptions mentioning a date in year 25 might indicate that funerary activity took place here for much of the reign of Amenhotep III. Anthropological and medico-radiographical research planned for coming seasons should tell us more about the individuals buried in KV 40. Several elaborately mummified infants are among the badly looted human remains and their sophisticated treatment is perhaps indicative of their royal status. It is hoped that DNA analyses will, in the future, help to establish genetic profiles and family relationships.

The significance of KV 40 lies in its preservation of what appears to be a coherent social group within the royal court. Women - some of royal descent and others perhaps from abroad - seem to have lived and brought up their children together and were buried together in one tomb.

So far, only a few individuals have been identified among the owners of minor burials in the Valley of the Kings.

The recent find in KV 40 now adds over thirty people from the king’s immediate personal entourage. The Valley was clearly conceived as a family necropolis, and tombs like KV 40 might even have inspired Ramesses II when he created KV 5 as a monumental burial place for his numerous offspring. 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. Annual reports: http://

Sherd with part of the name of a foreign woman

aegyptologie.unibas.ch/forschung/projekte/university-of-basel-kings-valleyproject/ and www.ubkvp.ch.

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Kom el-Dahab interpreted The lakes along Egypt’s northern coast contain a number of ancient sites which were once on dry land but are now islands. Gregory Marouard has been studying satellite images of Kom el-Dahab.

With an approach similar to François Leclere’s 2007 article on the large temple complex at Tell Dafana (EA 30, pp.14-17), by using only satellite images from 2011 it has been possible to re-evaluate the archaeological potential of a small site located in the south-western part of Lake Menzaleh in Daqahliya governorate. Kom el-Dahab is one of the most northerly ancient sites in Egypt, situated 12km south of the coastal city of Damietta.

Already inventoried many years ago by the Antiquities Service (their site No.050105) and listed by the EES survey (No.321), the site has so far been neither explored nor excavated and remains a terra incognita in the eastern Delta. Georges Foucart mentioned the site in the 1890s (RT 20 (1898), p.167; ASAE 2 (1901), p.64) but he never actually visited it.

Kom el-Dahab lies on a small island covering about forty hectares. Around 1926 (its first appearance on a map) it was still located 4km from the nearest (western) shoreline of the lake. As shown below by the comparison of Corona satellite photographs (1969) and the more recent images (2011), since the construction of the Aswan High Dam Lake Menzaleh has been gradually drying up and Kom el-Dahab is now located less than 2km from the shore.

Surrounded by water and a thick barrier of reeds, the site can be reached only by boat.

The maximum extent of the site is c.800m (south-east to north-west). At the north end, a triangular extension is

Map of Lower Egypt showing the location of Kom el-Dahab

separated from the main island by a flooded area c.120m long and 80m wide. Except for evidence of recent pillaging, the site seems to be largely intact but the surface has been badly affected by both rainwater and a probable increase in the lake level, which has apparently caused a very even levelling of the archaeological remains.

The most densely urbanised part of the site covers an area of approximately 16 hectares, from c.350m north-south to c. 450m east-west. The eastern half of the plan shows a regular and strictly orthogonal form inspired by the Hippodamian rectangular grid from the Hellenistic era - a rare example for the eastern Delta. The urban grid was not orientated according to the cardinal points but along the lengthwise direction of the site, in order to make best use of the higher parts. In the lower, western, part of the site, the grid becomes less regular with some streets progressively moving away from each other. The later occupants had apparently settled the space in a less dense and more loose manner, without observing the original grid layout.

At the centre of the urban area a wide street dominates the plan and extends without interruption over 470m. It leads at its eastern end to a large building which measures more than 42m in length and 29m in width. Its plan is very symmetrical and shows two rows of peripheral rooms arranged each side of an empty central space 9m wide. This large building 2 Kom el-Dahab on satellite images from 1969 (Corona) and 2011 (Digital Globe) showing covers an area of about 1200m and must have dominated the urban landscape. It is probably a how Lake Menzaleh has been reduced in extent over the past 50 years 25

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The main buildings visible at Kom el-Dahab (preliminary reconstruction by the author)

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large palace or temple. If the latter, it shows none of the architectural features of an Egyptian-style temple, but has a more Classical form.

To the north, and outside the urban settlement, is a small lower-lying area in which the most significant element is a theatre, which is clearly visible on the satellite images. It measures 58m to 60m in length and had a maximum width of 44m. The orchestra must have had an original diameter of 12m. The semicircular cavea, with a diameter of 58m, is divided into two distinct seating areas, which are visible on account of a major concentration of vegetation here. The frons scaenae, rectangular in plan, measures c.58m long and 14m wide. It includes an axial opening that led to the proscaenium from the large open area behind the Ancient lake levels in the north-east Delta (preliminary reconstruction by the author) scene. This theatre is one of the few identified so far in Egypt - other comparable theatres of similar date The presence of such a site clearly illustrates that in and shape being at Pelusium (Tell el-Farama and Tell Roman times Lake Menzaleh was still easily navigable el-Kanais), Antinoopolis and Oxyrhynchus. The plan and accessible from the Mediterranean Sea. The colony at is clearly modelled on the imperial pattern and in the Kom el-Dahab, with its position in the southernmost part tradition of the Antonine Period (second century AD). of the lake, would have overseen and expedited the entry This remarkable structure indicates the importance of of ships to the central Delta region, as well as functioning the urban site of Kom el-Dahab and also underlines the as a stopping place for the unloading of goods. The probable strong Romanisation of the local population and northern part of the site would have had good access to its close contact with the Mediterranean world. the sea, particularly for vessels going to/from the Levant In the northern extension of the site, the satellite images and Cyprus, while the southern part was connected to reveal other unusual installations, which have been the inland network of waterways, which the larger seapartially damaged by illegal digging. There is a building going ships could not navigate. Kom el-Dahab must have with two sets of five or six long parallel rooms, which functioned as an emporion (trading place) with a strategic are reminiscent of the layout of large storage magazines, location and a similar function to those of larger sites such or a kind of dockyard. Directly to the south is another as Pelusium or Heraklion, respectively situated on the unusual construction - a massive building with a square Pelusiac and Canopic branches of the Nile. plan at least 10m to 11m along each side with an octagonal The settlement at Kom el-Dahab was abandoned in feature 6m wide in its centre. On the southern side the early centuries AD and numerous factors could have a rectangular addition can be seen which might have contributed to this. The deep crisis caused by the revolt of functioned as an entrance area to this building. Obviously the boukoloi (outlawed herdsmen) that affected the norththe purpose of this later structure cannot be determined east Delta in the second half of the second century AD without a field survey, but its position at the northern may have had an impact on security in the area, or the site end of Kom el-Dahab, in an area that was at this time could have been affected by the devastating hydrological probably widely open onto the lagoon of Lake Menzaleh, and seismic phenomena in the region at the end of the and the strong similarities and dimensions close to those of fourth century AD, reported in his Conference VII, 26 by the ‘funerary replica’ of a lighthouse at Taposiris Magna, the monk John Cassian. cannot be ignored.

This preliminary investigation shows how much The precise extent of the western end of the ancient information can be learned about ancient isolated Lake Menzaleh and the nature of its landscape are both sites by studying high-definition satellite images, but still relatively uncertain, and in contrast with areas further archaeological research on the ground will be necessary east (Tell Tinnis and Pelusium) it has not been extensively to find out more. An extensive approach with a investigated in order to clarify the changes at the mouth of magnetometric survey would augment the good results the Damietta branch whose current configuration seems that have already been obtained simply from space. to have evolved quite late (after the fifth-sixth centuries q Gregory Marouard is a Research Associate in Egyptian Archaeology AD?). Located far outside the current regime of Nile at The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. He is Cowaters, it is possible that the site at Kom el-Dahab was Director of the Tell Edfu Project and, since 2010, has been Director of the Edfu Pyramid Project. He has also worked at many other sites originally located at the mouth of a secondary branch that in Egypt, including Buto, Dendara and Wadi el-Jarf. He wishes to was connected at that point to the ancient course of the thank the Camel Lab at the Oriental Institute for providing maps and Damietta branch, which corresponds to the Bucolic (or satellite images and Katherine Bloin (University of Toronto) for her Phatmetic) branch, mentioned in ancient texts. constructive advice.

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Digging Diary 2013-14 Summaries of some of the archaeological work undertaken in Egypt in Winter 2013-14 and Spring 2014 appear below. 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: jan.geisbusch@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 Resistance Tomography.

Institutes and Research Centres: ARCE American Research Center in Egypt; AUC American University, Cairo; BA British Academy; BM British Museum; CFEETK Franco-Egyptian Centre, Karnak; CNRS French National Research Centre; DAI German Institute, Cairo; FNRS National Fund for Scientific Research, Brussels; IFAO French Institute, Cairo; MSA Ministry of State for Antiquities, Egypt; NVIC NetherlandsFlemish Institute, Cairo; OI Oriental Institute, University of Chicago; PCMA Polish Centre for Mediterranean Archaeology, Warsaw; Swiss Inst Swiss Institute for Architectural Research and Archaeology, Cairo; USR CNRS research group.

WINTER 2013-14 (November to March) Lower Egypt Matariya/Heliopolis: The joint excavation of the MSA and the Egyptian Museum Georg Steindorff, Univ of Leipzig, directed by Aiman Ashmawy and Dietrich Raue, continued excavations in the temple area. The geophysical and geomorphological survey proved that the

Matariya. Area 210 in the temple precinct, showing the so-called ‘Fort bank’ and the obelisk of Senwosret I (at left behind the hedge).

Photograph: Egyptian Museum, University of Leipzig

remains of a limestone temple wall are preserved in situ. Investigations focused on the mud-brick wall named the ‘Fort bank of the Hyksos’ by Petrie. Documentation of the S enclosure wall of the precinct was continued. A number of stone fragments dating to the Amarna Period were discovered in the area N of the ‘Suq el-Khamis’ shopping mall project.

is covered by a 3m deep debris layer, left by papyrus hunters, who destroyed most of the Roman buildings in the 1920s. This debris yielded some rare terracottas and c.100 Greek texts on papyri and pottery sherds.

Underneath, a large granary constructed during the second century BC was found and partly excavated.

The building might have belonged to the estate of Nechtpharaus, general of Ptolemy X, known from a demotic stele discovered nearby in 2010. www.ifao.

Upper Egypt Tebtunis (Umm-el-Breigat, Fayum): In 2013, because of the situation in the country, the joint IFAO/Milan Univ mission, directed by Claudio Gallazzi, worked for only three weeks. The area of the 2012 excavations in the dwelling area NW of the Soknebtynis temple was enlarged. The sector

egnet.net/archeologie/tebtynis

Athribis: The Univ of Tübingen/MSA project, led by Christian Leitz and Abdel Hakim Karar and directed in the field by Marcus Müller, continued work in the Repit temple of Ptolemy XII. Several rooms were excavated, all containing new reliefs and inscriptions. As expected, based on the parallel at

Egypt Exploration Society Expeditions WINTER/SPRING Tell Mutubis: The EES/Univ of Durham team, led by Penny Wilson and working with the Univ of Mansoura and the MSA, undertook magnetometer and resistivity surveys with the aim of creating a 3D image of the main mound. An intensive pottery sampling survey was undertaken across the whole of the site adding to data collected in 2012 and resulting in a substantial corpus of material for the 2nd-7th centuries AD. Although the geophysical survey is not yet complete, the expedition can now begin to develop a cultural heritage plan for the site and surrounding area, as part of the associated BA International Partnership and Mobility Award. The survey is funded by an EES Amelia Edwards Projects Award and the team is very grateful to all those whose donations made the work possible. http://tellmutubis.tumblr.net Tell Buweib: The EES Delta Survey, funded by a BA grant, and directed by Jeffrey Spencer working in collaboration with the MSA, began investigation of buildings observed on satellite photography of the site (see further pp.5-8).

A mud-brick temple, 100m x 53m, with an entrance at the SE, was delineated and planned.

Towards the rear of the temple is a sanctuary of 13m x 25m, within the highest part of the mound and showing that the temple’s walls are preserved to a height of over 5m above the level of the ancient floor at the gate. None of the walls stand above the present ground surface,

(www.ees.ac.uk)

however, because the building has been buried in dust and mud. Ceramic evidence shows that the temple was no longer operational by the end of the TIP. Also studied was a 33.5m square mudbrick casemate foundation platform (probably 26th Dyn) S of the temple. http://deltasurvey.tumblr.com/ Tell Basta: The spring season of the EES/Univ of Wurzberg expedition, directed by Eva Lange, continued excavation of the dromos leading to the temple of Bastet. The extent and direction of a sand foundation, probably of a previously unknown LP temple building in this area, was further followed although the end was not reached. The building chronology of the Late Dyn and Ptolemaic houses at the temple entrance was further investigated, revealing that the dromos had been reduced and overwhelmed by dense building in the Ptolemaic Period. Epigraphic work and on-site documentation in the elite OK cemeteries with partly decorated 6th Dyn tombs continued. Excavation and documentation of the MK Palace, directed in cooperation with Manfred Bietak, discovered earlier phases of the OK and MK, as well as domestic courtyards and pit trees.

In addition OK tombs, underlying the early MK palatial phase, were revealed.

Imbaba: The EES/Freie Univ, Berlin Imbaba Governorate Prehistoric Survey, led by Joanne Rowland, focused on the recording and analysis of lithic finds collected during the systematic survey in spring 2013 on the SE side of the Wadi

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Gamal terraces which lie to the SW of Merimde Beni Salama, as well as study of some ceramic finds from the site itself. The analysis revealed many Middle Palaeolithic stone tools and associated debitage, including Levallois cores, flakes and points. There was also a small number of tools of possible Lower Palaeolithic date, and Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic tools, albeit in much smaller quantities. MSA work E of Merimde revealed an unexpectedly dense cluster of Epipalaeolithic stone tools, giving way to increasing amounts of Neolithic finds (ceramics and stone tools/debitage) moving closer towards the Merimde antiquities area. http://imbaba.tumblr.com/ Luxor: The EES Theban Harbours and Waterscapes Survey, led by Angus Graham, focused on hand augering and percussion coring on the W bank. The work was surveyed using a differential Leica Viva GNSS system. Work continued at Kom el-Hetan in collaboration with Hourig Sourouzian and her team, carrying out three augers in front of the Colossi of Memnon along an ERT profile undertaken in 2013 (see JEA 99 (2013), p.43, fig.5). These results, in conjunction with work in front of the third pylon and at the rear of the temple, suggest that the temple was founded on a sand-body, but further testing is needed. A transect of six augers was carried out E of the Ramesseum to investigate if a former Nile channel lay in this area. Further results will emerge as our findings are studied.

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in the walls and flooring of Ramesses III’s Khonsu Temple. Supervised by Jen Kimpton, in coordination with the ARCE floor restoration team, the primary focus was the inscribed, reused material in the flooring of the Hypostyle Hall - ten blocks from an unknown monument of Amenhotep III. In room 11 above the doorway because the plaster was particularly fragile, two reused blocks of Horemheb, plastered over and inscribed by Ramesses III, were photographed by Yarko Kobylecky, allowing Dra Abu el-Naga. The rishi-coffin of Neb, found south-west of the courtyard of TT 11.

Keli Alberts to draw on Photograph: © José Latova and ‘Proyecto Djehuty’ photographic enlargements documentation of the inscribed façade of TT the details of both the 18th Dyn and 20th Dyn 107, the tomb of Amenhotep III’s Malqata decoration. http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/epi/ Palace steward Nefersekheru. Susan Osgood also Luxor: For the OI expedition, directed by W pencilled the limestone fragments from the façade, Raymond Johnson, James Heidel continued to photographed by Yarko Kobylecky. The only refine the new data management program for the surviving inscribed pillar was collated by Brett blockyard, and continued the facsimile epigraphic McClain. http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/epi/ documentation of the Bentresh block inscription 3. The Mission Archeologica Italiana a Luxor material using a Cintiq Wacom Companion drawing expedition, directed by Francesco Tiradritti, tablet. Brett McClain collated Heidel’s drawings of continued work in The Funerary Complex two monumental red granite ‘doorjamb’ slabs that of Harwa (TT 37) and Akhimenru (TT had been reused in the Thecla Church as sanctuary 404), concentrating on improving textual pilasters but which still retain the names and titles knowledge of the decoration in the Cenotaph of Tuthmosis III. Krisztián Vertés continued the of Harwa. Identification of the inscriptions in facsimile pencilling of the Tetrarchic Roman the passages between rooms was completed, as frescos in the Imperial Cult Chamber, S wall, E was comprehension of the sequence of texts and side, for digital inking. Hiroko Kariya conducted images that constitute the ‘Path of Harwa’. This her annual condition survey, maintenance, and describes (S walls) the destiny of a human being treatment of the blockyard material, and prepared from life to eternal rebirth in the Netherworld a presentation and publication of the work so far. and N walls) from the afterlife to resurrection on Conor Power conducted his annual condition earth as a transmuted entity. Mariam Ayad (AUC) study of the temple and found it to be stable improved the reconstruction of the ‘Opening of and dry; the result of the successful dewatering the Mouth’ ritual inscribed on the walls of the 2nd programme at Luxor and Karnak temples. This pillared hall, attaining a better understanding of season’s work was supported in part by a grant the sequence of the texts, for publication of a new from USAID Egypt. Shortly after the end of edition of the ritual based on Harwa’s version. the season two small Coptic ‘lion’ architectural www.harwa.it elements, which had been bolted to the display 4. At Medinet Habu the epigraphic team of the platform, were stolen from the blockyard open-air OI, directed by W Raymond Johnson and under museum. http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/epi/ the supervision of Brett McClain, continued Western Thebes: documentation in the small Amun temple of 1. At Dra Abu el-Naga North, the Spanish Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III on the final drawings National Research Council mission, directed by for Medinet Habu X and XI. New digital pencilling José M Galàn, continued excavation in the 17th/ and inking techniques were refined by Krisztián 18th Dyn cemetery SW of the open courtyard of Vértes, in consultation with Brett McLain and the tomb-chapel of Djehuty (TT 11), including the epigraphic team, in preparation for the online the investigation of three shafts. One contained an publication of Digital Epigraphy, due out in 2014. untouched re-burial of a rishi-coffin in very good Jen Kimpton continued her survey and cataloguing condition. It belonged to a certain Neb, with no of blocks and fragments of the destroyed W High titles mentioned. The mummy of a male in his mid Gate as part of a comprehensive conservation to late forties was found resting inside, wrapped and restoration programme for the entire S and and with the shroud tied up W sectors of the Medinet Habu complex. This around the toes. In TT 11 also includes the House of Butehamun and the the cleaning, consolidation Ramesses III mortuary temple administrative area. and restoration of the Lotfi Hassan continued the new conservation walls continued, revealing training programme for six local Egyptian more demotic graffiti of conservation students, condition-surveying, the mid-second century documenting and consolidating inscribed sandstone BC. In the tomb-chapel of blocks from the dismantled Domitian Gate prior Hery (TT 12), study of the to their reassembly. Masons Frank Helmholz hundreds of bird mummies and Johannes Weninger prepared new sandstone deposited in the burial blocks to replace the lowest courses of the gate chamber, also in the second that had been destroyed by groundwater salt. Tina century BC, is in progress Di Cerbo and Richard Jasnow continued digital - more than twenty species documentation of LP and medieval graffiti in the have been identified. www.

N Ptolemaic annex of the small Amun temple, a excavacionegipto.com small uninscribed Ptolemaic gate on the S, plus the 2. At Qurna the OI first court roof area of the Ramesses III mortuary team (Susan Osgood temple. The documentation, conservation, and and Margaret de Jong) restoration work is funded by a grant from USAID Qurna. Brett McClain collating the texts on a pillar in TT 107. Photograph courtesy of the directed by W Raymond Egypt. http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/epi/ Epigraphic Survey, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago Johnson, completed the

Dendera, a small stairway gives access to the wabet, half of which was excavated. In the E ambulatory five more columns were revealed by excavation.

Their decoration dates to the Julian-Claudian dynasty and depicts protector gods of Chemmis.

A massive layer of smashed limestone pieces demonstrates the temple’s deliberate destruction.

All rooms contained numerous finds of daily life from the Medieval Period when the temple was used for domestic purposes and as an animal shelter.

Two crypts were surveyed and excavated, revealing complex blocking systems at the entrances to some chambers. Epigraphic work focused on collating texts in various rooms and the recording of newly discovered texts. Consolidation and restoration of blocks and small finds was undertaken, with an emphasis on polychrome reliefs. More than 100 loose blocks were moved out of the temple.

Karnak: 1. The CFEETK (MSA/CNRS USR 3172) programmes of archaeological research and conservation in the Amun-Re precinct continued throughout the winter and spring, directed by Abdel Hakim Karar and Christophe Thiers. At the Ptah temple, the conservation and restoration programme focused on the Osirid colossus of Tuthmosis IV and on the stela of Horemheb.

Excavations uncovered a Ptolemaic settlement built against the S enclosure wall of the temple.

The epigraphic and conservation programme of the Akhmenu and the N storerooms of Tuthmosis III continued, in cooperation with Christian Leitz (Univ of Tübingen). Sébastien Biston-Moulin and Elizabeth Frood (Univ of Oxford) continued study of the 8th pylon and, under the supervision of Pauline Calassou (LabEx Archimede), the epigraphic survey of the E side of the pylon and the E wall between the 7th and 8th pylons was undertaken. Chiara Salvador (Univ of Oxford) studied graffiti in this area and a complete high resolution orthophotographic survey was made for the N side of the pylon. Luc Gabolde and JeanFrançois Carlotti (CNRS) continued study of the blocks of Amenhotep I. Gabriella Dembitz (Univ of Budapest) started studying the inscriptions on the plinths of the N row of sphinxes in the Great Court. The Marriage Stela of Ramesses II was checked by Dominique Lefèvre (Univ of Geneva).

Romain David (LabEx Archimede), Catherine Defernez (CNRS), Zulema Barahona (Univ of Barcelona), Stéphanie Boulet (FRS-FNRS) and Sylvie Marchand (IFAO) studied ceramics from the Ptah temple area and the chapel of Osiris Neb Djefau. The excavation and restoration work of this chapel continued under the supervision of Laurent Coulon (CNRS). The Karnak online project www.cfeetk.cnrs.fr/karnak/ continued under the supervision of Sébastien Biston-Moulin.

2. The OI team, led by W Raymond Johnson, continued documentation of the reused blocks

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Elkab: The BM Expedition, under the direction of Vivian Davies, continued the programme of planning and recording in the main necropolis.

In the tomb of Ahmose-Pennekhbet, debris was cleared away to reveal a section of the ancient floor.

The original chisel-marks are present, together with remnants of thin white plaster. Within the debris further fragments were found of relief decoration from the doorway. To the S, planning took place of the tomb of Tientis, which has an external stela but no internal decoration. The neighbouring tomb was also accessed and found, unexpectedly, to contain the remnants of four seated figures (two male and two female) on its rear wall, and the remnants of painted decoration on its E and N walls. In the tomb of Senwosret, copying was undertaken of a large finely painted scene on the W wall depicting seated figures of the tomb-owner and his wife. Also copied was a scene on a loose block detached from the E wall, showing part of a hunting scene featuring a lion, a hare and several other quadrupeds. Elsewhere, a much-faded inscription, painted on the lintel of a half-buried (probably late OK) tomb, was copied.

Hagr Edfu: The BM team, led by Vivian Davies, undertook a brief study season to check drawings, especially in tomb 3, which has complex secondary decoration, including hieratic visitor-inscriptions.

Documentation continued of Coptic ostraca from the site, now stored in the magazine at Elkab.

Hierakonpolis: The BM excavations, directed

by Renée Friedman, continued at HK6, the elite predynastic cemetery, resulting in the discovery of two further tombs (Nos.72-73); both can be dated to the Naqada IIAB period, and were surrounded by wooden superstructures. Tomb 72 was nearly intact and contained a complete ivory statuette (32cm high), ten ivory combs, two hard-stone palettes, two grinding stones and numerous flint items. Several clay statuettes were found in conjunction with tomb 73. Evidence of 1st Dyn restoration of the structure around tomb 72 indicates the respect paid to deceased ancestors buried in the HK6 cemetery. At HK11C, excavation by Masahiro Baba (Waseda Univ) within a predynastic mud-brick structure, revealed several cooking hearths and animal bones, especially of large fish. These finds indicate that the structure was associated with food production on an industrial scale. At HK27C, the cemetery of the Nubian C-Group, areas only partly excavated in previous seasons were cleared to improve the map for the final publication. This work resulted in the discovery of four new tombs, one containing the naturally mummified body of a woman wearing a leather skirt. www.hierakonpolis-online.org Berenike: The expedition of the Univ of Delaware and the PCMA, led by Steven Sidebotham and Iwona Zych, concentrated on an early Roman-era animal cemetery (cats, dogs, monkeys and a baboon), the early Roman rubbish dump and the SW harbour where parts of a Roman-era ship frame made of cedar wood and a ring intaglio depicting a man on horseback, among other objects, were found. Portions of the early Ptolemaic city wall were also documented.

A continuing geophysical project for mapping the entire site with the magnetic method was completed this season. Excavations at the Bronze Age cattle cemetery in Wadi Khashab continued, as did brief surveys of Ptolemaic and Roman sites in the Eastern Desert.

Kom Ombo to Aswan: The Aswan-Kom Ombo Archaeological Project (Yale Univ and Univ of Bologna), directed by Maria C Gatto, undertook a survey in the Wadi Kubbaniya and a section of the desert E of Kom Ombo. Particular attention was given to the investigation of stone structures, some of which had already been plundered. Excavations revealed that some were devoid of any human remains, while others were graves. Two of the

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Amheida. Stela of the reign of Seti II. Photograph courtesy of the New York University Amheida Excavation

latter, recently looted, could be dated to the 5th millennium BC thanks to the very fine shale-andsand tempering and the rippled decoration of the pottery recovered. Similar pottery assemblages are characteristic of the Final Neolithic at Nabta Playa in the W Desert. A Terminal Palaeolithic campsite in Wadi Kubbaniya was excavated. It has wellpreserved postholes, hearths and pits and is thus a unique find so far in this area.

Aswan (Syene): The joint Swiss Inst/MSA Aswan team, headed by Cornelius von Pilgrim and directed in the field by Wolfgang Müller, concentrated on further excavations in a Ptolemaic animal cemetery and houses of the Persian Period in the SE corner of the fortified town (Area 2). A salvage excavation was carried out in the vicinity of the modern suq and revealed tombs of the Late Roman Period (Area 82). www.swissinst.ch Amheida (Dakhla Oasis): The New York Univ expedition, directed by Roger S Bagnall, with Paola Davoli as Field Director, continued work in two areas: Area 4.1 (the temple of Thoth) and Area 2.2 in Building 6. In total 121 blocks and fragments with relief decoration were found in the temple area, and two relief blocks were found reused in building B6. Olaf Kaper, in charge of studying the blocks, arranged chronologically c.1,400 blocks in the course of this season. Most of those found in 2014 are from the temple of Amasis, while only two blocks are Roman, and a few are of the Persian Period and NK. The reliefs included the names of three kings who are not previously known to have built at the temple: Seti II, Ramesses IX and Pedubast III. Two temple stelae were found: one (Ptolemaic or early Roman Period) was reused in B6 and represents Seth with wings and a spear.

The second stela is dated to the reign of Seti II and is carved with four offering scenes to the gods Thoth, Horus and Seshat. Building 6, which has a wide pillared hall and has been under excavation since 2010, turned out to be the last phase of a Roman public bath which had existed in this area in the third century AD. It is composed of two parts: the dry area built in mudbrick and the bath proper in baked brick, with two caldaria provided with a hypocaust, two heated pools, and a latrine. www.amheida.org and (database)

directed by Harry Tzalas. To the area of the original concession granted by the MSA, which extended for c.10km from the Silsileh Promontory (ancient Cape Lochias) to Sidi Bishr, another 3.5km of coast have been added, reaching the peninsula of Montazah (ancient Lesser Taposiris). Greek and Egyptian divers surveyed the sea bed from the ElHassan and El-Nassar reefs to the Chatby littoral, discovering three small, complete, Islamic Period stone anchors which were raised for conservation.

Roman pottery sherds were also found. In an area possibly attributable to the Martyrium of St Mark c.200m from the Chatby Casino, three early Christian architectural elements (a slab and two columnellae), all made of a white stone, were found. The survey carried out jointly with the Department of Underwater Antiquities of Alexandria and the Mariolopoulos-Kanaghinis Foundation for Environmental Sciences focused on researching into sea-level changes of the E Alexandrian littoral. Because of the rise in sealevel of the Mediterranean and the subsidence of Alexandria’s littoral, large coastal areas with ancient remains (architectural elements, structures, extended necropoleis and quarries) are today submerged, and the team members hope, during the October season, to investigate the natural phenomena that led to this change in sea levels.

Buto: 1. The DAI team, directed by Ulrich Hartung, continued the investigation of EDP building remains belonging to three occupation phases from the beginning of the 1st until the middle of the 2nd Dyn. In some places underlying late predynastic (Naqada IIIB) structures were reached.

Further predynastic remains were expected to be situated below the foundation of a large Saite building which cuts through all the EDP layers. However, the removal of this impressive brickwork with a depth of more than 3m had to be abandoned after groundwater showed up before the lower edge of the foundation was reached.

2. The work of the University of Poitiers team, supported by the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, IFAO and the Centre of Alexandrian Studies and led by Pascale Ballet, focuses on the site’s late history. Fieldwalking survey continued on the S settlement mound and different phases of Ptolemaic and Roman occupation were identified. In the NE, excavations were carried out in the area of a Ptolemaic/ Roman bath-house and in the SW part of the N kom where Late Roman settlement remains had been identified previously. Of special interest is the large number of imported amphorae from these layers which underlines Buto’s close relations with the Mediterranean world during this time.

Kom el-Gir. The DAI ‘Regional Survey around Buto’ team, led by Robert Schiestl, undertook a brief study season to complete the analysis and drawing of finds, mainly pottery sherds, from past seasons. Thilo Rehren and Daniela Rosenow analysed Roman and Late Roman glass sherds from

www.amheida.com

SPRING 2014 (March to June) Lower Egypt Alexandria. The Hellenic Institute of Ancient and Mediaeval Alexandrian Studies, Athens, continued its underwater archaeological campaign,

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Deir el-Surian. Detail of the cherubim in the painting of St Macarius the Great (see p.31). Photograph: © Leiden University/NVIC

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Period. The second building of 18th Dyn levels (most notably dating to the is a rounded structure on the Amarna Period). Although intact stratigraphy was NE slope of the kom, built found, this mostly belongs to rough floor levels during the second half of the with hardly any architecture. However, in higher 1st Dyn. Close to the rounded areas, the edges of industrial zones were found building was discovered a - for copper smelting, and production areas for unique large ceramic stamp glass, faience and stone vases. The variety of finds, with hieroglyphs. On the as well as the associated pottery, suggest that this E kom, to the E of the large industrial site was run by the state and may have mastaba, remains of mud-brick been associated with the nearby site of Amarna. construction were discovered www.dayralbarsha.com - their purpose is as yet Western Thebes: At Dra Abu el-Naga the unknown. Five graves were DAI expedition, directed by Ute Rummel, found dated to the second half continued work in K93.12, the tomb-temple of of the 1st Dyn and beginning the High Priest of Amun, Amenhotep, revealing of the 2nd Dyn. The richest the remains of a mud-brick gateway which served grave discovered this year had as the entrance to the processional causeway. A two chambers and the deceased mud-brick structure was also discovered which, Dra Abu el-Naga. Restoration work on a mud-brick pylon in K93.12, the tomb-temple of was equipped with 42 pottery based on the large number of late Ramesside the High Priest of Amun, Amenhotep. Photograph © DAI Cairo vessels (mainly beer-jars), 26 ritual vessels (eg. wavy-necked bottles or incense stone vessels, and carnelian beads. www.farkha.org burners) could have been a chapel beside the the site by pXRF (portable X-ray fluorescence).

Tell el-Daba (Avaris): The work of the Austrian causeway. Excavation in the first court showed www.dainst.org/en/node/24238?ft=all Archaeological Institute, Cairo Branch, directed that it had once featured a row of columns, Naukratis (Kom Geif): The BM team, led by

by Irene Forstner-Müller, continued in area showing that both forecourts were equipped with Ross Thomas, undertook a magnetometry survey R/IV, where the main harbour of Avaris was peristyles. The survey and detailed study of the in many areas of this important harbour town, assumed to be located (see further pp.32-35). architecture of K93.11/K93.12 was continued, which is now known to have covered at least Fieldwork in 2013 had revealed that the area was as well as the conservation, documentation 60 hectares. Numerous tower houses, courtyard occupied in the Ramesside Period as well as in and recovery of a group of 19 badly preserved houses, and warehouses were identified, as well as the 15th Dyn when a row of huge tombs was wooden coffins of the late 21st/early 22nd Dyns buildings and other structures in the sanctuary of aligned with an earlier, massive sand brick wall. which had been discovered in the inner court of Amun Re and at the Hellenion. ERT provided Work this season demonstrated that the area was K93.12 during earlier seasons. Consolidation and a section 860m long and 15m deep through the continuously settled from the middle of the 13th restoration of the mud-brick structures, begun in site and its ancient river channel, and geological Dyn until the late SIP. In the earliest period the 2012, was continued. The restoration is funded by investigations recorded further details of the wide edge of a water channel or canal was identified, the Cultural Heritage Preservation Programme of and deep Canopic branch of the Nile W of the with a deliberately-made mud bank, and showing the German Federal Foreign Office. www.dainst.de settlement and recovered fragments of worked at least one episode of recutting. At least 50% of Wadi el-Hudi: A new Princeton Univ wood from the sacred harbour area, close to a the pottery from this phase is imports (storage jars), archaeological survey, led by Kate Liszka, is substantial limestone quay. Excavation in the area suggesting that there is a storage and redistribution re-examining archaeological sites, initially of the Greek Hellenion revealed the temenos point somewhere nearby. Later this area was used documented by Ahmed Fakhry in 1952, that relate wall and c.4,000 artefacts, especially 6th century for storage facilities, and several silos of different to amethyst mining in the MK. In a short season BC pottery from Egypt, Greece, Cyprus and the sizes were found, some of them with mud-brick at this site in the desert SE of Aswan, the team Levant. Fieldwork was sponsored by the Honor floors inside. Cylinder sealings were found, mostly explored Fakhry’s Sites 5, 6, and 9. Sketch plans Frost Foundation and the Institute of Classical from Syria, with one possibly from Mesopotamia. were completed of Sites 5 and 9; two remarkably Studies, London.

Egyptian stamp sealings were also recovered, some well preserved settlements/fortresses made of Deir el-Surian (Wadi Natrun): The main task bearing titles and names of Egyptian officials. a rare example of dry-stone architecture. GPS of the Leiden Univ/NVIC fieldwork, directed Previous investigation of the 15th Dyn tombs had coordinates of almost 100 inscriptions at Sites 5

by Cristobal Calaforra, was the retouching of the shown that most were heavily plundered, with and 6, first published by Fakhry, were recorded large Epiphany scene in the N semi-dome of the dislocated burials. Further burials were excavated, and previously unknown inscriptions discovered. church. This was achieved for the most part, with including one intact grave. Within the tomb types An intensive examination of the ceramic corpus just a small number of places being left open for three main categories (already known from other at these sites was also initiated, demonstrating that possible retouching in the next season. A number areas in Tell el-Daba) could be identified: tombs the same pottery forms occur at Sites 5 and 9, and of paintings and texts, previously unknown, were with mud-brick architecture, pit burials and infant that both fortresses date from the early to mid MK. uncovered on the S and E walls of the nave, burials in storage jars.

In future seasons the team hopes to examine more including an unusual composition of three wallclosely the remarkably well preserved patterns of paintings and an obituary text, in which the death Upper Egypt deposited artefacts and pottery and to learn more in AD 888 of Abbot Mar Maqari from Tikrit is Deir el-Barsha: The Univ of Leuven team, led about the organisation of spaces in the forts. commemorated. The text refers to two of the three

by Harco Willems, excavated in the tomb of accompanying paintings: the three Old Testament Ahanakht I, leading to the discovery of numerous patriarchs in paradise (already uncovered in an Thanks to Roger Bagnall, José Galàn, Karel Innemée, fragments of the funerary equipment of that earlier season) and St Macarius the Great. A third Ray Johnson, Kate Liszka, Dietrich Raue and Ute nomarch, including his coffins. On the S hill painting represents two saints on horseback, Rummel for providing photographs. excavations continued depicted in an unusual frontal aspect. www.facebook. close to where a 6th com/DeirAlSurianConservationProject Dyn foundation deposit Tell Ibrahim Awad: The Allard Pierson Museum had been found last Mission, under the direction of Willem van year. A text on the Haarlem, conducted a final and successful study pottery now suggests season to document all remaining finds, and in the deposit shares anticipation of further field work. features of a foundation Tell el-Farkha (Ghazala): The mission of the deposit and of a cache Inst of Archaeology, Jagiellonian Univ, Kraków, of embalming material. the Poznan Archaeological Museum and the In this same area, a well PCMA, led by Marek Chłodnicki and Krzysztof modelled plaster face M Ciałowicz, continued excavation in the W kom that must once have in the layers between the oldest phases (EDP) of been attached to a late the administrative-cultic centre and the top layers OK mummy was found. of the burned Naqadan residence (the E part of www.dayralbarsha.com which was excavated in 2003-04). The remains Sheikh Said: Fieldwork of a brewery were found. On the central kom resumed by the Univ of research concentrated on two large buildings Leuven team, directed discovered in 2012. One is rectangular with very

by Harco Willems, Wadi el-Hudi. Inscription from Site 5 dating to year 1 of Montuhotep Nebtawyre, erected by the thick walls and a row of rooms located on the with the excavation Steward Intef (WH2). Photograph: Robert Kraemer E side of a wide courtyard of the Naqada IIIA1

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Avaris, its harbours and the Perunefer problem Ancient Avaris is well known as the capital city of the Hyksos and the location of the later city of Piramesse, but was it also the site of the Eighteenth Dynasty harbour of Perunefer?

Irene Forstner-MĂźller adds new evidence from the latest Austrian excavations.

The ancient city of Avaris (modern Tell el-Daba and its surrounding area) was, like all important historic towns in Egypt, situated on a major branch of the Nile - in this case the Pelusiac branch. This was the easternmost branch in antiquity, forming the eastern limit of the fertile Delta during the second millennium BC. By this time Avaris was not only the capital of the Hyksos rulers of Egypt but also one of the largest and most important cities in Egypt and the ancient Near East. It covered an area of c.260 hectares and had an estimated population of between 29,000 and 34,500. Its strategic position on the route out of Egypt to the east served as a link and a gateway between the Nile valley proper, the Mediterranean and the neighbouring countries of the Near East.

From the late Twelfth Dynasty onwards Avaris had been an important harbour town for both Nile and seagoing shipping and thus for international trade, and in the Ramesside Period the harbour of the capital Piramesse was at Avaris, which then formed the southern part of the town. The discovery of an Eighteenth Dynasty palace

Tomasz Herbich carrying out the vertical electrical sounding survey

decorated with Minoan frescoes led to the hypothesis that Avaris might also be identified as the port of Perunefer, attested in texts and representations. For this discussion see: Bietak, EA 26, pp.13-17; Jeffreys, EA 28, pp.36-37; and Bietak, EA 34, pp.15-17.

Recent research at Tell el-Daba by the Cairo Branch of the Austrian Archaeological Institute has focused on the possible locations of ancient harbours and mooring places. This is based on more than 800 auger drillings, an extensive geomagnetic survey (Forstner-MĂźller, EA 34, pp.1013) and, most recently, a VES (vertical electrical sounding) survey (Herbich, EA 41, p.12) undertaken to gain a better knowledge of the fluvial system and Nile branches.

In 2013 a large research project was launched at the site of the supposed main harbour of Avaris, its location suggested by OSL (optically stimulated luminesence) and archaeological evidence obtained from boreholes. It lies in an area which is still visible in the modern landscape as a large, seasonallyinundated depression north-west of the excavation house and close to a modern Islamic cemetery, and

Excavations in progress in area R-IV 32

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a large basin (natural or artificial) is visible here in the geomagnetic image. It was situated in the middle of the ancient town and was connected to the Pelusiac Nile branch by one, or possibly two, feeder canals.

Archaeological excavations in this assumed main harbour area began in spring 2013. Almost in the middle of the central harbour basin, a 2m-square trench (area A-VI) was excavated down to 4.5m below ground level until the underlying sandy gezira was reached, in order to investigate the sediments within the basin. A massive layer, 2m thick, of very rich dark clay with organic matter and archaeological material in the upper part indicates a quiet environment typical of harbour deposits.

The main focus of archaeological research, however, was on the edge of the basin, where the aim was to try to investigate how the harbour was organised, in which periods it was in use and if any harbour installations might

be present. Across the northern edge of the basin a trench of 10m x 4m was dug (area R-IV) which reached from the settlement structures to the supposed northern edge of the basin, as visible on the geomagnetic image. However, it soon became evident that the clear line seen there was not the harbour edge.

Both natural causes (soil accretion) and human activity gradually extended the settled area of the town into the harbour basin. As a result the area of the basin became smaller over time. This same phenomenon can be observed in modern Egypt, especially in the river channels of the Nile Delta. To reach the actual edge of the harbour basin, at least during its last phase of use, it was necessary to enlarge the trench to the south by 30m.

Two main phases could be discerned as a result of the first season of work. During Phase 1, from the Thirteenth Dynasty until the end of the Second Intermediate Period,

Reconstruction of the urban landscape of Avaris with the excavation areas R-IV and A-VI marked in red 33

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Plan of the excavation in the harbour, area R-IV, overlaid on the geophysical scan, showing the two phases

The large wall, made of sandy bricks, dating from the Second Intermediate Period

bricks and persisted as a landmark until at least the end of the Second Intermediate Period.

Along this wall, to its south, ran a street with many layers of fine fill. South of the street two large mud-brick chamber tombs from the first half of the Fifteenth Dynasty were found. They consist of subterranean rectangular chambers made of dark grey mud-bricks, covered by single and double mud-brick vaults of the same material.

The tombs were accessible from the street. The larger of the two fully excavated tombs was entered through a rectangular burial shaft, and the smaller through the enlarged grave pit in front of the entrance. Both entrances had been closed with mud-brick walls.

These tombs had been thoroughly plundered, and almost all the offerings had been removed, though skeletal remains were found scattered in the vicinity. Ramesside pottery fragments found in the robbers’ pits would suggest that these tombs were looted (at least in part) during that period.

In Phase 2, after the end of the Fifteenth Dynasty, this town quarter was abandoned and while other parts of the town, such as Ezbet Helmy, were settled in the earlier New Kingdom there is no settlement activity of that date here. This area was resettled only when Avaris became the southern part of Piramesse and the location of its harbour.

Massive buildings of dark mud-bricks were then erected here; the remains were excavated in 2013.

These archaeological results fit very well with the historical tradition of the development of the site. Avaris is well known as having been both an important trade centre in the late Middle Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period, and the harbour of the city of Piramesse in the Ramesside Period. However, there is no archaeological evidence in the harbour area from the earlier New Kingdom, when Perunefer, the naval base of the Eighteenth Dynasty, appears in the written sources.

the excavated area was used intensively as both a domestic and funerary area, some structures having attached tombs and associated burials. At this time a massive wall - at least 500m long and c.2m wide - ran along the northern edge of the basin. This may be a quay wall and it is visible in the geomagnetic image. It is built from yellow sandy

A tomb of the late Second Intermediate Period. L347, situation 4 34

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These surprising results lead us to the continuing debate as to whether Perunefer was in Memphis or at Tell el-Daba in the Delta. A major reason put forward for identifying Tell el-Daba with Perunefer is that a harbour for large seagoing vessels needs access for shipping throughout the year. Since the seasonal flooding in Egypt allows navigation in Upper Egypt only during the months of the inundation, it has been proposed that a harbour which functioned all year round must have been located in the Delta rather than to the south at Memphis. But is this a valid argument? Is the concept of a permanently active harbour relevant here, or is it perhaps a modern concept imposed on ancient Egypt? Is it not more likely that major trade and military expeditions were undertaken only under ideal climate conditions, at times of the high flood, as is known in the nineteenth century AD before the regulation of the Nile (see Cooper, EA 41, p.26), and at times when the wind conditions in the Mediterranean were favourable to navigation?

If so, it is possible that Perunefer could have been situated south of the Nile Delta, and associated with Memphis, the Eighteenth Dynasty royal residence. This would seem to be a more logical choice for Perunefer, the naval base and starting point for the famous military campaigns of the earlier New Kingdom. It is hoped that future research on the harbour area at Tell el-Daba will be able to shed more light on this controversial subject.

Massive buildings of the Ramesside Period q Irene Forstner-Müller is Director of the Cairo Branch of the Austrian Archaeological Institute and Director of the Institute’s fieldwork at Tell el-Daba. The Harbour Project is in cooperation with Tomasz Herbich (Institute for Archaeology, University of Warsaw and Polish Academy of Sciences), Jean-Philippe Goiran (University of Lyon 2, UMR 5133 Archéorient and CNRS) and Laurent Schmitt (University of Strasburg). The project is funded by the Austrian Archaeological Institute and the Austrian Science Fund (P-25804-G19). Illustrations © Austrian Archaeological Institute.

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Histories of Egyptology are increasingly of interest: to Egyptologists, archaeologists, historians, and others. Yet, particularly as Egypt undergoes a contested process of political redefinition, how do we write these histories, and what (or who) are they for? This volume addresses a variety of important themes, the historical involvement of Egyptology with the political sphere, the manner in which the discipline stakes out its professional territory, the ways in which practitioners represent Egyptological knowledge, and the relationship of this knowledge to the public sphere. Histories of Egyptology provides the basis to understand how Egyptologists constructed their discipline. Yet the volume also demonstrates how they construct ancient Egypt, and how that construction interacts with much wider concerns: of society, and of the making of the modern world.

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Living above Luxor temple Throughout the nineteenth century, before it was cleared of centuries of accumulated debris, Luxor temple was home to some flamboyant and picturesque characters, as Sylvie Weens describes.

Perched on top of the ancient walls and columns of the temple at Luxor, two imposing houses dominated the nearby village for much of the nineteenth century. One belonged to the famous consular agent for initially the USA and later Britain, Russia and Belgium, Mustapha Agha Ayat, while the other, known as the Maison de France, was the official residence of the French consular agent. For many visitors to Luxor they were not only This photograph (the sky has been cropped) by Antonio Beato was taken from the roof of his own house and can their favourite stopping places - be dated to the 1850s, when Mustapha Agha was consular agent of the USA. The entrance to Mustapha’s house is between the columns of the Horemheb colonnade - note the flagpole in front of the house. The nearby court of where mail could be collected, and where lavish dinner parties Amenhotep III was used for storing wheat and was also the favourite abode of noisy camels which used to keep Lucie Duff Gordon awake at night. Photograph: DU1991.18 © Denison Museum, Denison University, Granville, Ohio were thrown - but they were with oriental food, musicians and dancing girls, stood also used unofficially to store many illicitly acquired mummies, stelae and baskets full of papyri, all acquired antiquities. It was well known that most of the consular illegally. While the small objects were often offered as agents took advantage of the immunity conferred by gifts to visitors, the more valuable and substantial finds their respectable positions to deal openly in the lucrative were sold to wealthy collectors as well as to museums. antiquities trade.

One visitor recalled that his host was asking $1,000 for a Among these unscrupulous dealers, the case of Mustapha statue that stood conspicuously in the centre of the main Agha Ayat is famous and well documented: he was a room. Mustapha’s association with the infamous Abd generous host to British travellers and his name appears el-Rassoul brothers in 1871, following the discovery of in numerous travel accounts. Mustapha, a rich landowner, the Deir el-Bahri cache and the subsequent trial, brought had built his family house in the middle of Horemheb’s him disgrace as well as the loss of his role of consular colonnade in the early 1850s. He was one of the wealthiest agent for Belgium. and most influential personalities of Luxor, and regularly When French engineers arrived in Luxor in 1831 to helped the governor to deal with the village disputes. remove one of the two obelisks that stood in front of the In the sitting-room, where he often entertained guests

Another of Beato’s photographs (with the sky cropped), taken in the 1860s, of the entrance to Mustapha’s house, which now has three flagpoles since he has become consular agent for Britain, Russia and Belgium. Mustapha had also acquired several neighbours.

Photograph: © Griffith Institute, University of Oxford

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A rare photograph of Mustapha Agha Ayat and his children in front of Horemheb’s colonnade, not far from his house.

Photograph: © British Library Board

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The balcony of the Maison de France in 1859. Its occupant at the time was a French antiquities dealer, V Galli Maunier, who had obtained permission from the French consul in Cairo to stay in the house. In 1860 Maunier discovered the Twenty-First Dynasty‘Banishment Stela’ and kept it in the house until it was shipped to the Louvre Museum in 1883.

Photograph: © The J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

The southern sanctuary, on top of which the Maison de France was built.

Photograph: Sylvie Weens

was an American missionary who spent three months in Luxor in order to establish a school (which later became the American Mission, located on the Karnak road).

Another American, Edwin Smith, also benefited from Mustapha Agha’s hospitality. At one time, he was renting a small house near Mustapha’s, which belonged to the consul, and where he sold both real and fake antiquities, often sharing the profits with his famous neighbour. In the 1870s, John Taylor Johnston visited Luxor with his family on board a dahabiyah, commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum in New York to purchase fine antiquities to display in the soon to be opened Egyptian gallery. Both Smith and Mustapha promised to bring him exceptional objects, including royal mummies, which probably

temple, they were given permission by Mohammed Ali to build some rooms on top of the southern sanctuary.

The house came to be known as the Maison de France, and provided shelter for many passing distinguished visitors including Gustave Flaubert and Maxime Du Camp. Lucie Duff Gordon spent many happy years there and developed close links with her neighbour, Mustapha Agha, who offered her endless advice and assistance.

Mustapha clearly enjoyed the company of the foreigners he befriended through his duties and occasionally leased a room to some of them. One of its most curious occupants

Granite bust of an early Eighteenth Dynasty official. Photograph: © Museum of Fine Arts and Archaeology, Besançon (Jean-Louis Dousson)

Louvre E7822. The diorite ‘Banishment Stela’.

Discovered by Maunier in 1860 at Karnak.

Photograph: © Louvre Museum (Georges Poncet)

Right: Louvre E7826. Twenty-Fifth Dynasty granite statue of Isis suckling Horus.

The lower part was discovered in 1855 by John B Greene at Medinet Habu. The upper part entered the collections of the Guimet Museum in 1897 and was given in 1906 to the Louvre where the two parts were reunited. Photograph: © Louvre Museum (Georges Poncet) 37

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Right: Louvre E7825. Diorite statue of Seti I. Photograph © Louvre Museum (Christian Décamps)

Louvre E7823. Part of a monumental diorite offering table of Tuthmosis III. Photograph: © Louvre Museum (Georges Poncet) Left: Louvre E7827. Diorite statue of Hapuseneb, Priest of Amun. Reign of Tuthmosis II/Hatshepsut. Photograph: © Louvre Museum (Georges Poncet)

shipped to France and entered the Louvre Museum where many (including those illustrated here) are now on display in the Egyptian galleries.

Mustapha’s house was the last one to be demolished, in 1886, and this deeply affected the ageing consular agent.

His health deteriorated and he passed away a year later. His funeral drew large crowds, some of whom travelled from 50 miles away to pay their last respects to the well-known figure. His son, Sayed, was appointed Governor of Luxor and often took important visitors around the ancient sites. One visitor recalled that Mustapha’s son had once organized a lunch party for them at the Ramesseum and entertained them with a lottery with Egyptian antiquities as the prizes. From his burial place, overlooking the Nile, Mustapha Agha Ayat could therefore rest in peace: the family’s reputation remained intact!

originated in the Deir el-Bahri cache. On the day that the purchasing contract was due to be signed, Johnston cancelled the deal when he found the two men swearing and fighting on the quay, outside the boat, obviously disagreeing on the amount of their commission.

Countless objects that are today exhibited in museums around the world can boast of having spent some time on top of Luxor temple before being shipped to less exotic locations. One such case is a mummy which Mustapha Agha sold in the 1860s to a Canadian private collector. It was exhibited for many years in the Niagara Falls Museum before being purchased in 1999 by the Michael Carlos Museum in Atlanta. The mummy, believed to be that of Ramesses I, was returned to Egypt in 2003 and is now in the Luxor Museum, not far from the temple where it was once propped against a wall inside Mustapha’s house.

When Lucie Duff Gordon died in 1867, the Maison de France was in a very sorry state and badly in need of repair but continued to be used as the residence of French consular agents. It was also the abode of some rather dubious characters, such as a French merchant and antiquity dealer who used to keep pigs in the sanctuary below, but the golden days of living on top of the famous temple were drawing to an end. In 1881, Gaston Maspero, the new Director of the Service des Antiquités, decided to clear the temple to make it more accessible to the growing number of visitors and found himself confronted with strong resistance from locals who refused to vacate their houses. After extended negotiations, the houses were finally destroyed, together with the legendary Maison de France. The house, however, was found still to contain several fine antiquities, all of Theban provenance, discovered or acquired illegally by some of its various occupants, and Maspero was asked to arrange for their removal to France since the house and all its contents were official French property. In 1883 the antiquities were

Correction I am grateful to Mario Villani for identifying correctly members of the Italian royal family in images published on page 27 of EA 44. The photograph on the left, which can be dated to the early 1930s, shows Maria, daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III and, probably, Maria José of Belgium, wife of the king’s son, Prince Umberto. The photograph on the right shows Prince Umberto with Howard Carter. He reigned as Umberto II for only one month in 1946 after the abdication of his father. q Sylvie Weens was Assistant Secretary of the Egypt Exploration Society from 1989 to 1997. She now lives in Cairo and is currently researching the historical and urban development of Luxor in the nineteenth century. She wishes to thank: The Louvre Museum, Paris; The Museum of Fine Arts and Archaeology, Besançon; The British Library, London; The Griffith Institute, University of Oxford; The J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the Denison Museum, Denison University, Granville, Ohio, for permission to reproduce their copyright images.

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Digital epigraphy of the temple of Debod A Spanish team is currently applying the latest digital recording techniques to a study of the scenes and inscriptions of the Nubian temple from Debod, now in Madrid, as Lucía E Díaz-Iglesias Llanos and Daniel M Méndez Rodríguez describe. of the uprising of the Theban area against Alexandria at the end of the third century AD; the iconographic programme highlights the importance of a new local theological creation (Amun as divine father of the king of Meroe) and the central role played by the nearby temple of Isis in Philae in the cultic network of small chapels in the area; and the religious background of the decoration, with its balance of representations of Nubian and Egyptian deities, exemplifies the political and religious developments in the Dodekaschoinos.

Our project ‘tA-Hwt, Digital Techniques applied to the Inscriptions and Reliefs of the Temple of Debod’, directed

by Miguel Á Molinero Polo of the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, has a multi-disciplinary team composed of Egyptologists, graphic designers, computer technicians and architects. The project’s research focuses on the recording, study, and publication of the inscriptions and scenes of Debod’s temple, which will allow us to create a digital reconstruction of the building in the future. The aim is to render an accurate copy of its scenes and texts by means of digital epigraphic techniques and to analyze the rules that underlie the decorative programme. The project was started because of the slow erosion of the

The Lower Nubian temple of Debod was constructed c.20km south of the original island of Philae, but the building of the Aswan High Dam led to the dismantling and removal of the monument in the early 1970s. It was presented to Spain by the Egyptian government in appreciation of Spanish participation in the UNESCO ‘Campaign to save the monuments of Nubia’ and now stands in the Parque del Oeste in Madrid.

The core of the temple is a small decorated shrine erected by the Meroitic king Adikhalamani in honour of Amun of Debod in the place where a chapel built by Seti II originally stood. Ptolemy VI enclosed the shrine within a typical Ptolemaic temple structure, turning it into a rectangular building with access to a terrace and with a screen-walled, columned façade. It was then dedicated additionally to Isis of Philae. Finally, Augustus and Tiberius added a vestibule and a landing place. The decorative scheme of the temple thus covers the Meroitic, Ptolemaic and Roman Periods.

The inscriptions and reliefs of the temple are important for several reasons: they are among the few sources for the reign of Adikhalamani and testify to the appropriation of Lower Nubia by Meroitic kings in the political context

The temple of Debod in its current location in the Parque del Oeste, Madrid 39

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A detail of decoration photographed from different lighting angles.

Photographs: Miguel Á Molinero Polo and Alfonso Martín Flores

perception created by varying shadows and highlights.

The software chosen for the graphic representation is a program of vector-based drawing (using Adobe Adikhalamani offers incense and pours a libation to Osiris and Isis.

Illustrator) which allows information to be added and Photograph: José Latova. © Museo de los Orígenes recorded in several layers.

Contemporary data is compared with historical sources decorated walls of the monument, which were initially to document all the stages and vicissitudes of the building: damaged by the periodic inundation of the temple (for drawings, photographs and descriptions of its scenes made around ten months every year) after the enlargement of by travellers, architects, artists and antiquities collectors of the First Aswan Dam in 1907 and further exacerbated the nineteenth century. Among these the most detailed by environmental concerns at its present location (a stem from the work of Franz Christian Gau, Alessandro situation for which solutions are being sought). We were Ricci (the draughtsman used by William John Bankes) and also prompted by the lack of a scientific publication David Roberts, together with the results of the expeditions integrating the temple’s scenes and inscriptions, which of Jean-François Champollion and Richard Lepsius. Of hinders any overall understanding of the nature of its outstanding importance is the monograph of the German decoration. Finally, the project allows us to extend to Egyptologist Günther Roeder, Debod bis Bab Kalabsche the temple itself, which is built of sandstone ashlars, (two volumes, Cairo, 1911) in which photographs of now highly eroded, an adaptation of the digital drawing scenes are accompanied by exhaustive descriptions that method which was applied to the temple’s graffiti at an enable us to document aspects of the temple which have earlier stage of this project. been lost due to the periodic immersion of the building In recent decades digital drawing has become a in water. This is especially so for elements that were not fundamental tool for the accurate reproduction of surfaces carved but only painted, such as the feathered dresses of in the fields of archaeology and epigraphy. It combines goddesses, and armbands. This information from historic the use of digital or digitised photographs with computer sources will be used in future virtual reconstructions of programs of vector drawing. As regards the photographs, the sanctuary, giving us the possibility of recreating the the ideal is to have several pictures of a given scene, shot scenes’ original colours. Similarly, we have been seeking from the same camera position but with light projected parallels for stylistic features and specific elements in from different angles, in order to avoid problems of the typology of crowns, dresses, offering tables and gestures studied

by Eleni Vassilika and based on the Temple of Philae, and in the SERAT database (System zur Erfassung von Ritualszenen in altägyptischen Tempeln: http://www.serat.aegyptologie. uni-wuerzburg.de/cgi-bin/serat).

Our main criterion in the design of a methodology for epigraphic reproduction is that the drawings should include the maximum amount of information possible from the scenes without hindering understanding of the original decorative scheme. To avoid confusion we use different Floor plan of the building showing position of former and current decorated surfaces 40

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Process of digital drawing of the reliefs using Adobe Illustrator ®

thicknesses of lines and patterns to identify the contours of figures (and to show their physical details such as muscles and bone structures), frames of scenes and inscriptions, architectural elements and surfaces lost by erosion or by the use of cement in old restorations. Thanks to the historical documentation described above, reconstructions of areas which are now eroded can be suggested in the drawings. The working protocol usually followed in digital epigraphy consists of taking a series of photographs, lit from different angles, of a scene, reducing the distortion of the lens by means of programs for correcting images, assembling the photographs to create a template, ‘screen’ drawing over this template, collating the drawings in front of the original surfaces and then making any necessary corrections.

The project has started to yield interesting results for the temple of Debod. The combination of present-day photographs with historical documentation is especially fruitful in the case of the most eroded scenes, where the outline of certain figures can today hardly be discerned.

The drawings also highlight deficiencies in the old restorations (executed by Alexandre Barsanti under the

Collation of a drawing with the original scene

Augustus presents three bound animals as offerings to Isis. Drawing: Daniel M Méndez Rodríguez

direction of Gaston Maspero) when vast quantities of cement were used, covering some of the reliefs. They also testify to the intentional destruction of certain parts of the figures, probably the result of interventions by Christians in the building. Although not recorded in written sources, the Christian presence can be detected through graffiti and dipinti of crosses and by the damnatio inflicted on the faces and nude body parts of the deities depicted. q Lucía E Díaz-Iglesias Llanos is a Research Fellow at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and Daniel M Méndez Rodríguez is Research Assistant at the University of La Laguna on Tenerife. The project ‘tA-Hwt, Digital techniques applied to the inscriptions and reliefs of the Temple of Debod’, (Pro ID 20100235) is funded by the Agencia Canaria de Investigación, Innovación y Sociedad de la Información and by FEDER. The project is a joint collaboration between the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, and the Museo de los Orígenes, Madrid, which is responsible for the temple of Debod.

Comparative views of part of a scene as shown by Roeder (left), in a recent photograph by José Latova (centre) and in the digital drawing by Lucía E Díaz-Iglesias Llanos (right). The use of Roeder’s photographs helps with the recovery of lost elements and reconstruction, as shown in the drawing 41

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Bookshelf

William H Peck, The Material World of Ancient Egypt. Cambridge University Press, 2013 (ISBN 978 0 521 71379 5). Price: £18.99. This book represents a slightly different take on the ‘daily life’ of the ancient Egyptians from that which is usually produced, in being explicit in focusing on the material culture from which we derive our clues as to how the ancient Egyptians lived. It is thus a fitting fruit of the pen (or more probably of the word-processor) of a distinguished retired museum curator.

Clearly intended for a wide readership, it begins with a potted history of Egypt down to the Roman Period, and then continues with a short history of Egyptology, with a focus on the recovery and study of ‘daily life’. Dr Peck most usefully points out that the oft-reviled Belzoni’s ‘understanding of what he found far exceeded that of most of his contemporaries’; on the other hand, it is a pity that his account rather fizzles out after Petrie: some more recent protagonists could have benefitted from specific mention.

The main body of the book starts with dress and personal adornment. Chapters then follow on: housing and furniture; food and drink; hygiene and medicine; containers of clay and stone; tools and weapons; basketry, rope and matting; faience and glass; transportation; sports and games; music and dance; and finally weapons and armour. In all cases a mix of evidence from tomb-representation on one hand, and actual domestic material on the other, is cited, each chapter finishing with a brief bibliography of the topic.

The chapter on hygiene and medicine ends with a section on life expectancy that cites an age ‘limit’ of around thirty to thirty-five years, and then contrasts this with an alternative average, implicitly suggested, of twenty-five years for the Roman Period. A ‘limit’ (an odd

term, presumably meaning ‘life-expectancy’?) suggests that few people lived above the given age; an average is a very different thing, skewed by high infant mortality, and should not thus be directly compared. In either case, the reviewer remains sceptical about the very low life-expectancy given as a ‘fact’ in most Egyptological works. First, even the poorest and most disadvantaged countries, with minimal access to modern medicines, manage at the present time a life-expectancy of around 50; second, the mismatch between the bone-ages of the royal mummies and known reign-lengths, plus similar bone-age/ known actual age mismatches in much more recent remains from Spitalfields in London, suggests that the aging criteria generally used on ancient human remains may still require some calibration.

The book ends with a short conclusion and a bibliography, all together providing a most useful summary of the topic of daily life and its artistic and archaeological manifestations that will be of considerable value to students and Egyptophiles requiring a primer before a potential plunge into more scholarly works such as the monumental Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, edited by Nicholson and Shaw (Cambridge, 2000). The Material World of Ancient Egypt also provides a useful starting point for those outside the subject requiring an up-to-date and reliable source, and the book is to be recommended to this full range of potential readers.

AIDAN DODSON Thomas Schneider, Ancient Egypt Investigated.

101 Important Questions and Intriguing Answers. I B Tauris, 2013 (ISBN 978 1 78076 230 2). Price: £18.99. This book is an English translation of Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen. Das Alte Ägypten, published in 2010 by the Professor of Egyptology and Near Eastern Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. (The title of the North American edition is Ancient Egypt in 101 Important Questions and Answers.)

Readers may well ask themselves if these really are the most important 101 questions about ancient Egypt - indeed, this was the first question in the German edition, but it has been omitted from the translation.

Other differences include the understandable substitution of ‘Why did Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley write about Cheops and Ramesses?’ for ‘What did Goethe have against Isis and Osiris?’ (my translation here and below) and (less understandably) ‘Do we know how the ancient Egyptian economy functioned?’ for ‘How did the Egyptian state come into being?’ Two additions in the English version are ‘What do we know about ancient Egyptian music?’ and ‘Did the ancient Egyptians practice [sic] sports and play games?’

The final question in the German original ‘What are the 101 most important publications

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on ancient Egypt?’ - is answered in the English appendix: ‘101 Reading suggestions for the Study of Ancient Egypt’. These actually total only 100, since the second, revised edition of Barry Kemp’s Ancient Egypt – Anatomy of a Civilization is listed twice (nos. 28 and 80), with two different dates of publication – 2005 and 2006. Non-English speaking Egyptologists figure in the text, but only books in English are listed (which reminded me that a respected English publisher once urged me to cite English-language books and articles, even if they were out of date, in preference to titles in French and German).

This means that the study about Maat (the answer to Question 39: ‘What was ancient Egypt’s most important religious concept?’)

by Jan Assmann (who is the most frequently cited Egyptologist) is not listed since to date it has been translated into French but not English. Other curious omissions are Manfred Bietak’s Avaris, the Capital of the Hyksos: Recent Excavations at Tell ed-Dab’a (London, 1996) (excluded despite the fact that the Austrian work at Tell el-Daba under Bietak is the answer to Question 56: ‘What is the most important excavation of the last half century?’) and T G H James’s Tutankhamun – the Eternal Splendour of the Boy Pharaoh (London, 2000) – a Tauris publication with more to offer than Hawass’s King Tutankhamun: The Treasures of the Tomb (No.93 in the list).

Schneider does not shy away from contentious topical issues such as Afrocentrism (Question 4), Egyptologists and the Third Reich (Question 9), terrorism and globalisation (Question 10), and the repatriation of objects to Egypt (Question 66). In general, answers have been unavoidably compromised (and telescoped) by the limited space allowed for

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each, and I noted a marked emphasis on later periods of Egyptian history, at the expense of the Old Kingdom.

There are some examples of downright incorrect or misleading information such as the demonstrably false statement that ‘wreaths of flowers were lying on the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun when it was discovered’ (p.144). The answer to No.86 (‘Why did elite Egyptians not wear beards?’) that the only facial hair ‘allowed was the moustache’ ignores the countless examples of officials and dignitaries depicted with fashionable chin beards.

Some of Schneider’s opinions and interpretations astonished me. One of them is the twist he gives to the idea, currently in vogue, that a plague played an important role in the history of the later Eighteenth Dynasty: he suggests that the Amarna episode could have resulted when, to overcome the ravages of this plague, ‘the elite of the state might have decided, as a last resort, to give Akhenaten a free hand in introducing a new religion’. And in the answer to Question 87: ‘Are Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep the first attested gay couple?’ Schneider presents the idea that these men were Siamese twins as if it were worthy of serious consideration.

The answer to this question also points up one shortcoming of the book: nowhere is it mentioned when these men lived. The names of Kings Unas and Niuserre are cited in the answer, but in the ‘timeline’ provided for

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readers’ chronological orientation on pp. x-xi, only dates for Dynasties are given without any king’s names. This is a definite disservice to the general reader, since dates or references to Dynasty are not consistently cited when pharaohs’ names occur in the text.

The few monochrome illustrations have been chosen at random and the captions for some of them are garbled or simply wrong.

For example, Nun (the primaeval ocean in an Egyptian creation myth) is called ‘the god of the skies’ in the caption to Fig.3 and in Fig.14 ‘two royal women of the time of King Amenophis [sic – elsewhere consistently Amenhotep] III’ are said to be ‘each wearing [!] a sistrum’.

Schneider dedicates this book to the memory of David Lorton who prepared the translation.

It’s indeed a pity that Lorton did not live to see it through the press, since the final printed text (described, p. xiv, as his translation ‘somewhat adjusted and [with] some articles substituted’) is not up to his standard.

MARIANNE EATON-KRAUSS John Baines, High Culture and Experience in Ancient Egypt. Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2013 (ISBN 978 1 84553 300 7). Price: £60. This book is comprised of five studies suggesting the existence of an elite experience in ancient Egypt. Social sharing of experiences is a relatively new field of research that is not only investigated in the field of psychology but also in that of sociology and it is certainly

important to distinguish between social groups before Egyptologists can seriously dig new trenches. The raising of awareness for this promising new field of research is certainly to be welcomed warmly, especially since it is suggested by a scholar who in the past did not suffer the discipline’s focus on Hochkulturen gladly.

John Baines belongs to a group of mostly British Egyptologists who have spearheaded,

PAPERS ON ARCHAEOLOGY FROM THE LEIDEN MUSEUM OF ANTIQUITIES

The Tomb of Meryneith at Saqqara Saqqara

By Maarten J. Raven & René van Walsem 352 p., 925 b/w ills., 164 col. ills., 220 x 280 mm, 2014, PALMA 10, ISBN 978-2-503-54876-0, € 94 / $137.00

NEW

This funerary monument of a high Memphite official was discovered by a joint expedition of the Leiden Museum of Antiquities and Leiden University in 2001. The importance of the tomb of Meryneith lies in the fact that for the first time it allows us to witness various stages in the rise and fall of the Amarna heresy from a Memphite point of view. The present report includes a full description of all wall scenes, as well as chapters on the career of the tomb-owner, on the double statue of Meryneith and his wife found in one of the west chapels, and on the objects, pottery, and skeletal material found in the course of the excavations.

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By Hans D. Schneider

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THE MEMPHITE TOMB OF HOREMHEB COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF TUTANKHAMUN, V: THE FORECOURT AND THE AREA SOUTH OF THE TOMB WITH SOME NOTES ON THE TOMB OF TIA

By Maarten Raven et al.

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EGYPTIAN

since the late 1970s, the call to research the non-elite in ancient Egyptian society, thus proclaiming a new agenda in the wake of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s semiotic approach to cultural achievements.

Although most scholars today feel uneasy about the term ‘high culture’, Baines’s approach to social class distinction helps him to identify the primary evidence necessary to focus on the experience of at least the highest class of the ancient Egyptian social pyramid. It is needless to say that their experiences never matched those of Egyptians lower down the social pyramid.

In the Introduction this carefully produced book sets out the methodological approach and the obvious challenges in a context where those expressing experience were limited by rules set up to define what was appropriate for being displayed (decorum). But as this book deals with sociology rather than the consumption of aesthetics, its author also convincingly shows that the leisured classes were striving for enjoyment, celebration and appreciation of the finer things in life.

The first chapter argues that the elite manipulated the landscape to achieve exactly these aims both in cities and rural areas where they played a dominant role. Baines includes travelling and commuting as ‘integral to elite identities’. Unfortunately, the difference between elite travel and that of ordinary people commuting to work places, such as to Elephantine during the Old Kingdom, are not spelled out. Often, it seems, the absence of evidence is taken as evidence for absence and one would like to argue that, for example, travelling was an integral part of any social group’s identity; it is merely the quality of travel that differed when towns and villages became inundated due to the ever-changing course of the Nile and some became homeless while others, having built on higher ground, could choose to remain.

Landscape obviously changed considerably under the influence of humans, and cultural landscapes are the result of human activities.

According to Baines, the garden epitomises this approach (the word ‘culture’ after all derives from Latin cultura) and he mainly uses evidence from tombs to support his point of the ‘celebration of ordered abundance’. We know little about villas in the countryside but one would suspect that even well-off city dwellers had their gardens or allotments elsewhere, as in towns like Elephantine gardens have not been identified to any great extent. But Baines rightly points out that his interest is not in gardens that are maintained to help families to make ends meet but in those that celebrated excellence, although these have not been excavated. His passage about the hunting party during the reign of Amenhotep II makes clear that untamed nature was also included in this overarching concept.

In the last chapter experience is fully discussed and the importance of the display of personal achievement and self-presentation, or in other words presence as an expression of power, convincingly flagged up. It becomes

ARCHAEOLOGY

clear throughout the book that, according to Baines, the elite’s expression of experience (or self-reference?) has to do with the display of pleasure and supremacy more than anything else. However, it would also have been interesting to learn what the elite’s religious experience looked like, in an attempt hopefully to understand better the religious practice of non-elite classes as well. But then, again, it is still almost impossible to draw the lines between the many different levels of ancient Egyptian society.

MARTIN BOMMAS

Kathleen L Sheppard, The Life of Margaret Alice Murray. A Woman’s Work in Archaeology.

Lexington Books, 2013 (ISBN 978 0 73917 417 3). Price: US$85. A biography of Margaret Murray (1863-1963) has been long overdue, doubtless because this Egyptologist left no diaries and barely anything else by way of a personal archive. It is therefore fitting that Kathleen (Kate) Sheppard published this comprehensive volume in 2013, exactly fifty years after Murray’s death, as a direct outcome of her 2010 doctoral dissertation from the History of Science Department at the University of Oklahoma.

By centralising Murray as a professional scientist, rather than, as has been the case in the past, solely in the light of the career of her mentor, Flinders Petrie, Sheppard firmly situates her subject’s lasting legacy: as a classroom educator at University College London. At the same time, Sheppard skilfully positions Murray’s controversial work as a folklorist and writer of two books on witchcraft, and as an accepted authority on Mediterranean archaeology.

Murray’s life as a passionate feminist is appropriately nuanced, not as a militant suffragette but rather as a woman academic who, in the early 1920s, attempted to desegregate the sexes within their respective common rooms at UCL. In her My First Hundred Years, written some forty years

44

later, Murray recalled that, on entering ‘the lion’s den’ of the male common room, she ‘encountered looks of shocked horror, changing to fury, from the die-hard antifeminists present’. Having recently dined at the Travellers Club in London, with its male bastion lounges and library, not to mention membership regulations, I am even more appreciative of Murray’s pioneering feminist activism nearly a century ago.

Sheppard, who now holds the post of Assistant Professor of History at Missouri University of Science and Technology, writes with lucidity and purpose; she has that rare gift of being able to engage her reader throughout the 267 densely packed pages of what was clearly once her doctoral thesis. Unfortunately the dearth of illustrative material in this biography, is, I believe, a serious drawback.

There are only four (badly reproduced) black and white figures, of which only two depict (the younger) Murray. Moreover, the image within the text of Murray at fifty from the Petrie Museum’s archives simply replicates the front cover (colour) illustration. The engaging pictures of Murray aged ninetyseven on the steps of UCL’s portico, or those taken at the College at her hundredth birthday party - illustrated in my The First Hundred Years (1993) and Growing up and Getting old in Ancient Egypt (2007) - might perhaps have appealed more to the reader than the witch’s broom of figure 7.1.

This leads me to my second criticism of the biography in that Sheppard’s final ‘Retirement’ chapter, which covers the last twenty-eight years of Murray’s life, tends to read as an add-on, rather than as a thorough assessment of the remarkable output of an older woman who was indeed, as she had hoped, ‘working to the last’.

This biography is a meticulously researched work, which it has been very well worth waiting for, by a writer who has an intrepid capacity for ferreting about in archives and in graveyards: while a student on the MA course in Egyptian Archaeology at UCL in 2002, Kate Sheppard wrote a very original essay in which she analysed the Biblical texts on Egyptianising monuments in Kensal Green cemetery in London.

The story of the author’s relationship with Margaret Murray is by no means over, for just this June she revealed on her blog (http://doctorkate.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/foundletters/) that she had recently located two personal letters from Murray to James Henry Breasted. Sheppard says: ‘Oh, what a sight for sore eyes to see her careful, clear, familiar, handwritten letters’. One letter indeed fills a gap in that Murray makes the (so far) only known mention of the death of her mother (now known to have been in December 1913). Since there are so few untapped archival resources for the life of Margaret Murray, the discovery of just two more letters is significant and it is to be hoped that Sheppard’s continuing researches may reveal more about one of the most important figures in the early years of our subject.

ROSALIND JANSSEN

The Egypt Exploration Society Since its founding in 1882 the Egypt Exploration Society’s mission has been to explore ancient Egyptian sites and monuments, to create a lasting record of the remains, to generate enthusiasm for, and increase knowledge and understanding of, Egypt’s past and to raise awareness of the importance of protecting its heritage. Today the Society supports archaeological research projects throughout Egypt. We rely almost entirely on the support of our members and the wider public to fund our work and run an extensive programme of educational events in Egypt, the UK and beyond to convey the results to our audience.

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The Egypt Exploration Society Centenary Issue: JEA 100 The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology LV FHOHEUDWLQJ LWV ÀUVW RQH KXQGUHG \HDUV as one of the leading scholarly publications within the discipline of Egyptology.

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EA 45 Covers.indd 2

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The Fourth Cataract and Beyond

The Workman’s Progress

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference for Nubian Studies

Studies in the Village of deir el-Medina and other documents from Western thebes in Honour of Rob demarĂŠe

EdItEd by JulIE R. ANdERSoN ANd dEREk A. WElSby the 12th International Conference for Nubian Studies was held at the british Museum, london, from 1st-6th August 2010. the conference, held every four years, is the only international gathering of archaeologists and scholars from associated disciplines which considers all aspects of Sudan and southern Egypt’s ancient and more recent past. the main sessions, and main papers published herein, were devoted to a consideration of the Merowe dam Archaeological Salvage Project, its aftermath and impact. over de previous decade this has been the major focus of archaeological activity on the Middle Nile. the dam is now complete and the reservoir is full drawing a line under the fieldwork component of the project. It was felt timely, therefore, in the interim to obtain an overview of what was found during the many years of intensive work and the first main paper speaker in each session sought to do just that. they were followed by reports on sites, categories of objects and more thematic papers arranged broadly by period. these highlight that, while the focus of archaeological activity still remains in the Nile Valley where there is the densest concentration of sites and also where there remains the most concentrated threat to their survival, much work is being undertaken away from the river and in some cases outside its catchment area. the role of the deserts is increasingly being appreciated while the role of the savannah and areas even further south has yet to be given the prominence that it probably deserves. t #SJUJTI .VTFVN 1VCMJDBUJPOT PO &HZQU BOE 4VEBO t 997*** Q t &630 *4#/

No. 45   Autumn 2014

EdItEd by bEN J.J. HARINg, olAf E. kAPER ANd RENÊ VAN WAlSEM this book contains twenty-two papers col&HZQUPMPHJTDIF 6JUHBWFO t 997*** lected in honour of Robert J. demarÊe by his friends and colleagues. because of his experThe Workman’s Progress tise in the area of Western thebes and ostraca of the village of deir el-Medina in particular, the contributors have sought to address these topics in particular. Central theme of the festschrift is the community of workmen of deir el-Medina, which is investigated from many different angles. the papers discuss the documentary texts from the village, either written in graffiti, on papyri or on ostraca, but also aspects of the work in the Valley of the kings, the workmen’s use of oil, birthing beds, coffins, stelae as well as their religious beliefs and behaviour. the volume thus sheds new light on the workmen’s community, as well as on the area of Western thebes in more general terms. this volume is a token of gratitude from the leiden university department of Egyptology for Rob’s much appreciated contribution to its teaching programme, as well as a tribute by colleagues worldwide who have worked with him, also in fieldwork projects in Egypt.

Studies in the Village of Deir el-Medina and Other Documents from Western Thebes in Honour of Rob DemarĂŠe

B.J.J. Haring, O.E. Kaper and R. van Walsem (eds.)

Price ÂŁ5.95

EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY

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

Peeters – Leuven Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten – Leiden 2014

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La VallĂŠe des Rois ItinĂŠraire du visiteur SylVIE CAuVIllE & MoHAMMEd IbRAHIM AlI

Acts of the Tenth International Congress of Demotic Studies

les Pyramides, prodigieux monuments dÊfiant le temps et l’espace des hauteurs, tÊmoignent /$ 9$//K( '(6 52,6 devant l’univers de l’existence immuable du vieux pays; le pharaon, protÊgÊ par la pierre souveraine, gagne l’infini du ciel et repose parmi les astres. les tombes de la VallÊe des Rois sont en quelque sorte des pyramides inversÊes que le souverain parcourt et oÚ il sÊjourne, seul spectateur initiÊ de ces images mystÊrieuses – grandioses ou terrifiantes – qui jalonnent l’espace souterrain. les hypogÊes royaux, conservatoire de la quintessence thÊologique et astronomique Êgyptienne, transmettent leur message en une dÊbauche de couleurs qui, plus encore que les hiÊroglyphes finement ciselÊs ou les silhouettes artistement esquissÊes, donnent accès à l’ineffable. le pharaon quitte le sÊjour des vivants pour un lieu oÚ règne en maÎtre le disque rouge du Soleil de la nuit, nimbÊ d’une lumière d’or qui anime dieux et gÊnies. l’espace de quelques heures, il n’est plus l’astre de la vie terrestre; il plonge dans le monde minÊral des morts et ressurgit dans celui, vÊgÊtal, des vivants. Il est conduit vers l’ÊternitÊ dans l’intÊgritÊ de son corps; il perpÊtue alors non seulement son nom et sa dynastie, mais aussi la marche du monde. le pharaon a pÊnÊtrÊ le grand Mystère, celui de la Première fois, lors duquel l’astre ignÊ et le limon fÊcondateur fusionnent et engendrent la divinitÊ: dans l’AutreMonde, en un cycle quotidiennement rÊpÊtÊ, Rê incandescent ranime osiris lÊthargique et osiris redressÊ exhausse des profondeurs l’autre face de l’Âme double, Rê de feu.

Sylvie Cauville | Mohammed Ibrahim Ali

ITINÉRAIRE DU VISITEUR

-FVWFO "VHVTU &%*5&% #: ."3, %&1"68 "/% :"//& #3069 the Acts of the tenth International Congress of demotic Studies held in leuven illustrate theOLA disciplinary diversity of the field. Apart from new editions of documents (receipts, contracts, letters, oracle questions,...) and presentations of new literary texts (including even those referring to raining frogs), this volume also contains contributions such as a new proposal to standardize transliterations, a discussion of the classification of magical texts, or a survey of the history of demotic in leuven. the volume will be of interest to egyptologists, papyrologists, and ancient historians. t 0SJFOUBMJB -PWBOJFOTJB "OBMFDUB 9*7 Q t &630 t *4#/

O R I E N TA L I A L O VA N I E N S I A A N A L E C TA Acts of the Tenth International Congress of Demotic Studies Leuven, 26-30 August 2008 edited by

MARK DEPAUW and YANNE BROUX

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