Egyptian Archaeology 57

EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY ISSUE 57 • AUTUMN 2020 • £5.95

Chasing shadows: graffiti in the Eighth Pylon at Karnak Page 4

The discovery of a Roman catacomb at North Saqqara Page 10

Behold the falcon gods: finds from Kom el-Hettan Page 46

We have a special permit from the Ministry of Antiquities for an exploration of rarely visited South Saqqara

SAQQARA SPECIAL WITH COLIN READER

At North Saqqara we have arranged private entry to the Second Dynasty tomb of Ninetjer

DEPARTING 9 OCT 2021 th

A one week tour based in Cairo and staying at our Giza hotel. Focussing on the development of Saqqara, this exciting new tour is accompanied throughout by popular Egyptologist and Engineering Geologist, Colin Reader.

We plan four trips to North Saqqara including entry to the Step Pyramid. We also have a special permit to enter the vast Second Dynasty tomb of Ninetjer.

There will be plenty of time for an in-depth look at the landscape and the various phases of development of the site. A chance to enter some of the mastabas that you have never had time for on past visits, including the subterranean galleries of the Serapeum.

At South Saqqara we walk the site and view the latest work of the French Archaeological Mission. We will visit Mastabat Faroun and the Pepy Pyramid before we head to Abu Sir to view the pyramids of Sahure and Niuserre.

Of course, being in Cairo we cannot leave out a visit to the Giza Plateau for the Great Pyramid, where Colin will explain his theories on the site, including the geological evidence leading to his dating of the great Sphinx and its enclosure.

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The Fourth British Egyptology Congress (BEC 4) was held in September 2018 at the University of Manchester, allowing scholars from around the world to present their latest and ongoing research to their peers. Eighty-two papers were presented, including four keynote speeches, covering the full spectrum of Egyptology, archaeology, museology, and the history of travel along the Nile.

The 13 papers included in this volume are representative of the wide variety of research discussed during BEC 4, reflecting ongoing studies of their authors. It is hoped that providing a publication platform through these Proceedings will stimulate further dialogue and investigation.

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EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY No. 57 Autumn 2020 www.ees.ac.uk

Editor Jan Geisbusch Editorial Advisers Omniya Abdel Barr Heba Abd El-Gawad Anna Garnett Loretta Kilroe Roberta Mazza Ahmed Nakshara Campbell Price Advertising sales Phone: +44 (0)20 7242 1880 E-mail: jan.geisbusch@ees.ac.uk Distribution Phone: +44 (0)20 7242 1880 E-mail: contact@ees.ac.uk Website: www.ees.ac.uk Published twice a year by the Egypt Exploration Society 3 Doughty Mews London WC1N 2PG United Kingdom Registered Charity, No. 212384 A Limited Company registered in England, No. 25816 Design by Nim Design Ltd Set in InDesign CC 2019 by Jan Geisbusch Printed by Intercity Communications Ltd, 49 Mowlem Street, London E2 9HE © The Egypt Exploration Society and the contributors. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission of the publishers.

The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the aims or concerns of the Egypt Exploration Society.

ISSN 0962 2837

Read EA back issues online at www.issuu.com/theees

Editorial Autumn has brought a rich and varied crop of material, with a slant towards more theoretically informed articles. In particular, the subject of writing comes up in several of them.

The article by Elizabeth Frood and her colleagues makes the case for an engagement with writing as a material practice, showing how temple graffiti at Karnak stand in a relationship to cult practices and the transformation of space. Discussing a group of Theban tombs, Lucía Díaz-Iglesias Llanos raises a similar point: beyond their manifest content, texts are also important for their contexts, bearing traces of specific historical, social and cultural practices.

A common form of writing are letters: Campbell Price rereads a letter by William Matthew Flinders Petrie for a new perspective on his aims and methods – but also to examine Orientalist narratives and racial stereotyping. An often overlooked perspective – the emic point of view of Egyptians – is also brought to the fore in Mohamed Abu el-Yazid and Ayman Damarany’s report on a rich yet still barely processed collection of records at Abydos on the antiquities administration of the past 100 years.

The short piece by Gianluca Miniaci and his colleagues connects some of the issues raised: through the micro-analysis of artefacts, a newly launched research project aims to recover the traces of otherwise invisible non-elite actors involved material production and circulation.

We return to Petrie in Sylvain Dhennin’s contribution, who takes a second look at his work, revisiting one of his excavation sites to learn more about work and living conditions at a late-19th-century dig house.

But classical archaeological work, of course, features in EA 57 too: Nozomu Kawai reports on the discovery of a Roman catacomb at North Saqqara, the first of its kind. And last but by no means least, Hourig Sourouzian updates us on the ongoing conservation work at the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III at Kom el-Hettan – and develops an intriguing iconographic hypothesis.

Jan Geisbusch Above: Colossi of the Second Pylon at Kom el-Hettan; see pp. 46–51 (Photo: Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project). Cover: Photographs are being taken at TT 87; see pp. 40–45 (Photo: NKS Project / José Galán).

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Photo: The Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project

Contents 4 Chasing shadows: graffiti in the Eighth Pylon at Karnak Elizabeth Frood, Chiara Salvador and Ellen Jones

10 The discovery of a Roman catacomb at North Saqqara Nozomu Kawai

16 Re-evaluating Petrie at Hawara Campbell Price

20 Excavations in Petrie’s camp in Dendera Sylvain Dhennin

25 EES Impact Report 2019–20 31 Digging Diary 2020 34 Egyptian voices: the Abydos Temple Paper Archive Mohamed Abu el-Yazid and Ayman Damarany

38 Object biographies and human practice: launching PROCESS Gianluca Miniaci, Camilla Saler and Vanessa Forte

40 Scribes at work: documenting Theban Tombs 61, 82 and 87 Lucía Díaz-Iglesias Llanos

46 Behold the falcon gods: new finds from Kom el-Hettan Hourig Sourouzian

Aerial view of the Temple of Millions of Years of Amenhotep III. See article pp. 46–51.

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Chasing shadows: graffiti in the Eighth Pylon at Karnak

Photo: A. Chéné / CNRS-CFEETK

Constructed during the co-regency of Hatshepsut and Tuthmose III, the Eighth Pylon at Karnak bears some of the most distinctive clusters of New Kingdom graffiti known from the Amun temple complex.

Elizabeth Frood, Chiara Salvador, and Ellen Jones report on recent discoveries of inked and painted hieratic graffiti in the staircase of the pylon, which help us understand this as a cultic and scribal space.

The Karnak Graffiti Project For almost ten years, the Karnak Graffiti Project (KGP), led by Elizabeth Frood, now together with Chiara Salvador, has been recording and analysing pictorial, hieratic, and hieroglyphic graffiti in the precinct of Amun at Karnak. It developed out of the major project of Claude Traunecker in the 1970s to systematically survey and record inscriptions and images that are not part of the primary decorative programme.

His archive is now held at the University of

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Oxford and is foundational to this phase of analysis. The KGP focuses on two main areas: the temple of P tah and the souther n processional axis, including the Eighth Pylon.

Graffiti left by temple staff in these places form case studies for assessing implications of graffiti practices across the complex. Those on and in the Eighth Pylon are crucial for examining circulation pathways, spheres of influence of staff members, and relationships of informal writing to cult and the transformation of space.

CHASING SHADOWS: GRAFFITI IN THE EIGHTH PYLON AT KARNAK

The epigraphic work at the Eighth Pylon was initiated in 2013 as a joint project between Sébastien Biston-Moulin and Elizabeth, under the auspices of the Centre Franco-Égyptien d’Étude des Temples de Karnak (CFEETK) and in cooperation with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The recording of the primary decoration was undertaken by the epigraphic and photographic team of the CFEETK. The graffiti were surveyed in 2013 by Elizabeth, Chiara, and Julia Troche. Our

south, now called Luxor temple. The Eighth Pylon was part of the stage for the annual festival of Opet, during which the power of the king was renewed. It was also probably a crucial area of display for officials and high-ranking temple staff through the dedication of statues, stelae, and, more occasionally, stela-like graffiti.

The Eighth Pylon is an ex traordinar y monument, the diversity of its graffiti being just one unique feature. It was one of the pr imar y component s of Hat shepsu t’s

recording work stopped from 2015–18 due to Elizabeth’s illness and rehabilitation, but began again with a season in 2018, during which Ellen Jones tested new photographic strategies and further discoveries were made. These included traces of black ink and yellow painted graffiti, which are the focus of our discussion here.

legitimation programme, incorporating several major texts of an overtly political character.

The analysis of this material, and of the erasures and re-car ving of the pylon in the later Eighteenth Dynasty, is being undertaken by Sébastien Biston-Moulin.

In the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties (c. 1292–1075 BCE), numerous kings had their images and texts added to the pylon and, during this time, the east massif seems to have become a focal point for display centred on the high priest of Amun and his staff. The east massif overlooks the sacred lake and the administrative heart of the complex; staff moving from this area into the temple to perform their daily duties would pass through side doors near the pylon. A door in the massif itself opens onto a staircase leading to something like a ‘watch-post’ at its top. In the late Nineteenth Dynasty, the high priest Roma(-Roy) commissioned the

The Eighth Pylon and its context The Eighth Pylon was built as the southern entrance to the Amun precinct during the co-regency of Hatshepsut and Tuthmose III (c. 1479–1457 BCE) and is now one of the four pylons, with their open-air cour ts, that monumentalise the southern processional axis.

The huge investment of resources in this area of Karnak in the early Eighteenth Dynasty is linked to its ceremonial role in connection with the temple of Mut, about 350 m to the south, and that of Amun of Opet, some 2 km further

The Eighth Pylon and sacred lake from the south.

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Photo: C. Salvador / KGP; CNRS-CFEETK

Scribbling on and in the pylon in the New Kingdom Almost all of the lower courses of the pylon bear graffiti of some sort or another, but there are patterns in distribution. In the New Kingdom, graffiti clustered on the east and west sides. As is typical for surviving graffiti in the Amun complex, they are carved, and no traces of paint or ink remain.

On the pylon’s west side is a small gateway, a secondary access to the processional way, and probably an entrance from the exterior of the precinct until the reign of Horemheb. It bears clusters of New Kingdom graffiti on its thickness and east jamb. These include a depiction of Ahmose-Nefertari and Amenhotep I, a large frontal, baboon-shaped god, divine barques, rams’ heads, baboons, and the only ear known to us from the graffiti corpus in Karnak. Unlike the graffiti of the east massif, these are anonymous and ‘unsigned’, but both groups relate to the activities of temple staff. Perhaps these images protected or ritualised their movements through this gate in some way.

The exterior of the east massif facing the sacred lake bears largely pictorial graffiti. Inside the staircase proper, graffiti are more formal and elaborate, including four stela-like scenes of staff worshipping deities, some of which were discussed by Traunecker in 1979 (image opposite page, bottom right). These were carved at the bottom and the top of the staircase. Amenemope, one of the individuals who had an inscription carved right at the top, bears titles placing him among the staff of the Nineteenth Dynasty high priest Roma (image opposite page, bottom left). It is tempting to think it was carved around the same time as Roma’s monumental inscription on the exterior.

A fur ther significant group of textual and pictorial graffiti were incised on the exterior

Photo: E. Frood / KGP; CNRS-CFEETK

carving of a long inscription to one side of this door, directly addressing these people: ‘O wabpriests, scribes of the domain of Amun … bakers, brewers, chief confectioners …’ (image opposite page, top). At least 50 years later, the high priest Ramessesnakht had two scenes of himself offering to the Theban triad carved high above Roma’s text. Ramessesnakht’s scenes were inscribed over earlier graffiti, including an offering scene, so it seems that the high priests were appropriating and formalising an already established ‘graffiti space’.

Top: the east massif of the Eighth Pylon and the side door to the courtyard.

Above: Ellen Jones examining the black dipinto on the north wall of the staircase.

Image: Ph. Soubias / CNRS-CFEETK

CHASING SHADOWS: GRAFFITI IN THE EIGHTH PYLON AT KARNAK

Orthophotograph of the door into the east massif, with the inscription of the high priest Roma to its right.

Below left: stela-like graffito at the top of the stair ‘which the elder of the portal of the domain of Amun, senior chamberlain of the high priest of Amun (Roma-)Roy, justified, Amenemope, justified, made.’

Photos: J. Maucor, Q. Dufor / CNRS-CFEETK

wall at the top of the stair, an area now difficult to access for recording. These too are quite formal and probably New Kingdom in date.

Smaller graffiti, mostly pictorial, cluster in and around the stela-like inscriptions. In 2013, Elizabeth and Julia systematically surveyed the block surfaces to ensure that these were all recorded. At head height on the north wall, roughly in the middle of the staircase, Elizabeth noticed a line of hieratic in black ink. Further up the stairs, near the light-well in the north wall, she saw faint, yellowish traces of what seemed to be large hieratic signs. Ink and

painted graffiti, or ‘dipinti’, rarely survive in Karnak, largely because of the exposure of the sandstone to the elements, so these were exciting discoveries. New photographic work undertaken by Ellen Jones in 2018 not only facilitated analysis, but revealed even more.

Above right: orthophotograph of the stela-like graffito of the ‘one in charge of confectionery’ Nebuneb.

Deciphering shades of black and yellow Documenting the graffiti in the staircase presented a number of logistical challenges. It is dark and narrow, and the uneven steps make setting up tripods tricky. Photographing the larger graffiti was difficult for even the widest EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY ISSUE NO 57 AUTUMN 2020

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Photo: E. Jones / facsimile drawing: C. Salvador / KGP; CNRS-CFEETK

Above left: DStretched orthophotograph and facsimile of the black dipinto on the north wall of the staircase.

Above centre: orthophotograph of the yellow dipinto on the north wall of the staircase, before and after DStretch enhancement.

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angle lens. The camera tripod was too short to be feasible, so photographs were taken by hand, which meant quite a balancing act. Here, photogrammetry offered an effective solution.

Photogrammetry involves taking a series of photographs of an object or surface, and using software, such as Agisoft Photoscan, to create a 3D model from them. This can produce an or thorectif ied image, removing camera distortions and presenting the inscription in its true position on the block surface. The creation of these models, and the use of DStretch to enhance colours, has enabled preliminary readings and facsimile drawings.

The black dipinto is a single line, 14.5 cm in length. The signs themselves are small, averaging 1.5 cm high, and are written in neat literary hieratic, perhaps of the Third Intermediate Period (c. 1075–715 BCE). Unusually, the text is partially underlined, with spaces forming three separate groups. It could read: ‘May Re, the perfect one, be established …’ ‘Perfect one’ is a well-attested epithet of Amun in one of his more accessible forms as a goose. The first group, smn, is also a word for goose, potentially creating a wordplay evoking Amun. Context strengthens this possibility since geese were bred in aviaries near the sacred lake, and graffiti depicting geese were incised on the east exterior wall of the pylon’s court. The dipinto then could be an anonymous invocation to ‘(goose-)Amun-Re, the perfect one, Amun, the perfect one (a thousand times?).’

The faded yellow dipinto by the light-well was even more difficult to record and analyse.

While testing different enhancements with the DStretch plugin (www.dstretch.com), Ellen

realised that this graffito was not alone. Her photograph had captured an area of the staircase ceiling where very similar text traces had been hiding in plain sight. More photographs revealed a two-line inscription, and a careful search elicited three more yellow scribbles, either a scribe practising particular sign forms or scrawling abstract shapes.

The use of yellow for dipinti is otherwise unknown to us; black, red, and occasionally blue, are the conventional colours. The signs are unusually large – those on the north wall are some 10–12 cm high – making them look a bit like modern spray-painted tags. On the wall, one complete line runs for about 73 cm. It identifies its author Pahor(ta)hatnakht(?) as an artist, a ‘scribe of forms (draughtsman) of Amun’.

The line immediately below is unfinished, comprising just ‘scribe’. On the ceiling, the name in the first line is difficult to decipher and the second one is lost. Both bear the same artist title. All of the formal scenes in the staircase include signatures of their artists, so perhaps these people were colleagues, working or resting together in the staircase and claiming it for themselves. These texts would have originally been very visible, lit by a faint glow from the light-well, the yellow paint extending the effect of that light onto the ceiling. This is a powerful, bright assertion of presence in this meaningful but as yet poorly understood space.

Why here?

The tops of pylons probably served as watchposts for controlling daily access. Occasionally, they were exclusive observation points for witnessing the processions that came through

CHASING SHADOWS: GRAFFITI IN THE EIGHTH PYLON AT KARNAK

DStretched orthophotograph of the yellow dipinto on the ceiling of the staircase.

Photos: E. Jones / KGP; CNRS-CFEETK

Photo: C. Salvador / KGP; CNRS-CFEETK

the main gates, which they directly overlook.

In Karnak, the Eighth Pylon staircase is the only surviving one known to us to bear graffiti. This points to the salience of this pylon for the temple community throughout the New Kingdom, which some high priests contributed to. The investment of some of their staff in elaborate scenes speaks to the prestige that accrued by displaying here. Although ink and paint are faster, more fleeting engagements, the writers of the yellow dipinti show off a comparable privilege. With their vivid dipinti, they sought to be part of the special group of artists that signed their work in this space. A while later, the little black dipinto may have

caught the eye of someone bustling up the stairs, encouraging them to utter Amun’s name, thus benefitting its anonymous author.

Egyptian temples, especially large-scale state complexes like Karnak, project an image as ‘monumental playgrounds’ for kings and, at particular times, high priests, who, one after the other, left their mark: commissioning new structures, dedicating inscriptions, expanding parts of the temple or redecorating it. Graffiti allow us to zoom in from this superhuman scale to the micro-level of the ‘ordinary’ people who worked in temples and administered them.

Their graffiti allow us to follow in their footsteps and know a little of who they might have been.

Below left: the top of the staircase in the east massif of the Eighth Pylon.

• Elizabeth Frood is Associate Professor of Egyptology at Oxford University. Chiara Salvador is a postdoctoral researcher for the Projet d’Index Global des Inscriptions des Temples de Karnak (LabEx Archimède, Université Paul Valér y Montpellier 3, CNRS, USR 3172, UMR 5140).

Ellen Jones is reading for her doctorate in Egyptology at Oxford University. KGP is a project of the CFEETK (Ministry of State for Tourism and Antiquities-Centre National de la Recherche Scientif ique USR 3172). We thank Claude Traunecker for initiating the work; Sébastien Biston-Moulin as our project partner; Mohamed Abdel Aziz and Mohamed Yahyah, Directors of Antiquities of Luxor and Upper Egypt; Mustafa el-Saghir, Director-General of the Temples of Karnak; Abd al-Satar Badri, Adel Irfan Ali and Ahmed el-Taher, Co-directors of the CFEETK; Luc Gabolde and Christophe Thiers, current and former Directors of the USR 3172-CFEETK; Rais Mahmoud Farouk, his team, and everyone in Karnak for their help and support. Chloé Ragazzoli and Julia Troche made vital contributions.

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The discovery of a Roman catacomb at North Saqqara In 2015, the Japanese-Egyptian Mission to North Saqqara was granted permission to conduct an archaeological survey in the area. Its main goal is the exploration of the New Kingdom cemeteries, which until recently have never been fully investigated. Field director Nozomu Kawai reports on the seasons since autumn 2017, and in particular on the discovery of a Roman catacomb last year.

Image: GoogleEarth

Memphis, a key administrative centre of the New Kingdom (c. 1550–c. 1077 BCE) about 18 km south of modern Cairo, was inhabited by a large number of people, yet information on their burial places has remained somewhat sketchy. What we do know is that the major New Kingdom cemeteries are located in the area south of the causeway of the Unas P yr amid, the rock escar pment of the Bubasteion, and the northern parts of the necropolis of Teti. Recently, some New Kingdom rock-cut tombs were identified at

Photos: North Saqqara Project / Kanazawa University

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THE DISCOVERY OF A ROMAN CATACOMB AT NORTH SAQQARA

presence of New Kingdom tombs in the vicinity.

At the end of the season, we discovered a portion of the limestone rock cliff, which seems to have been exposed in ancient times, suggesting the presence of rock-cut tombs nearby.

During our fourth season of work, February to March 2019, we extended the excavation area approximately 20 m to the north, where we hit upon a wall made of limestone blocks and some additional mud bricks, built on the limestone bedrock. Af ter removing the accumulations of fine natural sand to the east of the bedrock surface, we discovered three simple burials and a dense concentration of pottery sherds from the early Roman Period, around 100 CE (image bottom centre right).

Mixed with the sherds were several terracotta figurines of the same period, among them a well-preserved representation of Isis-Aphrodite (image bottom right). It is thoroughly painted and dates to the 1st to 2nd century CE. Adjacent to the bedrock surface, we opened a trench approximately 3 m wide in order to search for fur ther archaeological remains related to the limestone wall mentioned above.

Among the f inds were piles of irregular limestone blocks, which continue from the area near the bottom of the wall at the northern edge of our excavation area. It seems likely that the wall was constructed in order to prevent the collapse of accumulated winddriven sand. A layer of so-called tafl chips had

Opposite page: satellite image of the surveyed area at North Saqqara.

Bottom centre: trench sounding in Area C (see the satellite image).

Bottom left: two of the three simple pit burials to the east of the cliff, dating to the Roman Period.

Bottom: terracotta figure of Isis-Aphrodite.

All photos: Japanese-Egyptian Mission to North Saqqara

the bottom of the rock escarpment near Abusir Village (see EA 48), and already in 2008 the Japanese Mission had discovered the tomb of Isisnofret on the summit of a rocky outcrop in north-west Saqqara (see EA 36).

However, the presence of New Kingdom objects from Saqqara in museums all over the world indicates that there might be further locations for New Kingdom tombs at Saqqara.

Geoffrey T. Martin suggested that a number of rock-cut tombs still await excavation at the eastern escarpment of the North Saqqara plateau. Beatrix Gessler-Löhr also pointed out that the private tombs of the Eighteenth Dynasty before the Amarna Period should be found somewhere in the North Saqqara plateau.

In our third season, from August to September 2017, our survey focused especially on the area of the eastern escarpment of the North Saqqara plateau. Accordingly, we drew detailed maps in the four sections where we conducted geophysical prospections (image opposite page) and later opened a trench measuring 5 x 30 meters along an east-west axis (image bottom centre).

Under the top layer, we uncovered 21 simple burials dating to the Ptolemaic or Roman Periods. The lower strata contained thick layers of mud-brick debris originating from the top of the North Saqqara plateau. Here, we found several pottery sherds and other artefacts dating to the Eighteenth Dynasty, pointing at the

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Right and below right: general view of the site, showing the vaulted structure covering the stairs down to the catacomb as well as the limestone walls running atop the rock cliff and alongside the stairs.

accumulated on the south side, showing as a steeply sloping deposit, stopped by a (second) retaining limestone wall at the southern end of the frontal part of the bedrock surface.

Another, third and parallel, limestone wall was found to the north. The walls appear well executed, with mortar infill and a flat surface.

Notably, the aforementioned piles of irregular limestone wall were found on top of the fine limestone wall to the nor th. The distance between the two walls is about 3.5 m. Both appear to run directly perpendicular to the limestone wall in the upper layer. Between these walls, we uncovered a por tion of a

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vaulted mud-brick ceiling, part of a passage that seemed to continue inside the bedrock (images above and opposite page) Our excavations resumed with the fifth season in August 2019. Its main objective was to reveal the vaulted mud-brick structure partially identified at the end of the previous season. This required the removal of large amounts of debris dumped by previous missions, especially those of Walter B. Emery during his work on the Early Dynastic mastaba tombs in 1950s, which took more than a week.

In the upper layers of debris, we revealed a thick mud-brick wall, at a right angle to the

THE DISCOVERY OF A ROMAN CATACOMB AT NORTH SAQQARA

Photos: North Saqqara Project / Kanazawa University

northern limestone wall and running north on the same level. It may belong to a different structure yet to be uncovered.

Continuing our exploration of the parts to the east of the rock cliff, where the fourth season had revealed the dense concentration of Roman pottery sherds described above, we came across an oval mud-brick structure.

Around this, yet more Roman-era pottery sherds and terracotta figurines were found.

We also exposed the continuation of both the nor ther n and souther n walls r unning perpendicular to the rock cliff, as well as the vaulted structure that had come to light in spring. The oval structure appears to have been built on top of its entrance, possibly functioning as something like a hut and utilising the entrance of the vault after it was abandoned.

During the course of excavations, we found 25 simple burials, most of them badly weathered and skeletonised (bottom image).

At least two of them had been mummified and wrapped with linen bandages and were found in a better state of preservation. Most of the burials seem to date to the Roman Period, though there are Coptic burials too.

While some were found close to each other, it is not clear whether they were buried together or separately. Notably, it appears that many were laid out near the entrance to the vaulted structure, implying some kind of relationship.

As we cleared the inside of the vaulted structure, we realised that it covers a staircase made of limestone and mud brick descending into the rock cliff (images top and centre left).

It measures approximately 9 m in length and 1 m in width. Its construction technique seems to have changed from the middle of the stairs to the east, where larger bricks were used.

Limestone blocks were used for the side walls, especially in the eastern part. Some ancient restorations were discernible at the middle section, which shows structural weaknesses.

There were several mud-brick walls in different Top: elevation of the vaulted structure covering the staircase to the catacomb.

Centre: the vaulted structure covering the staircase to the catacomb.

Bottom: simple burials found in the area outside the entrance to the vaulted structure.

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places inside the structure, possibly functioning as sealing walls at different periods.

At the end of the staircase is an entrance gate to the rock-cut chamber, measuring 1.64 cm in height (as revealed so far) and 91 cm in width (image A). It is made of fine limestone from Tura and consists of a cornice and torus above the lintel. Since the vault is narrower than the entrance gate, it is likely to be a later addition.

Above the entrance gate, we found a stela placed in a rock-hewn niche. It shows, from left to right, Sokar, Toth and Anubis under a winged sun-disk and a Greek inscription, ‘Menelaos, son of Philamon, ser vant and reverent’, on the cut surface at its bottom (image C). Presumably, original text has been removed here and this new text written in its place. In front of the stela we found four terracotta figurines of Isis-Aphrodite, two Roman ramps and small pottery vessels also dating to the Roman Period (image D).

Another Isis-Aphrodite was found in the sand in front of the entrance gate. The figurines were possibly left here in antiquity by tomb robbers.

On the sides of the staircase two guardian lions made of limestone face each other (image B), protecting the entrance gate. Several pottery vessels were recovered from the staircase and the sand accumulations above it.

Also found here was a pile of mud bricks that may once have sealed the door during the last usage phase of the rock-cut chamber.

The chamber is approximately 15 m deep and 2.5 m wide. Three side rooms and two empty niches are hewn into the right wall. The entrance of one of these side rooms was plastered and painted. The side rooms contain wooden coffins and human remains, including some mummified bodies. Another two side rooms were hewn into the south wall, also holding human remains, and four niches containing stelae. A shaft at the end of the chamber will require further investigation in a future season.

Numerous burial remains were found on the surface of the heap of sand near the entrance and the floor of the chamber, including mummified bodies and skeletons still inside coffins as well as scattered skeletal remains.

Several different types of Roman pottery vessels accompany them. Par ticularly eyecatching were a large terracotta statue, standing 57.5 cm tall, of Isis-Aphrodite with a small

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A

D Harpocrates, which we found near the painted entrance to one of the side rooms (image E); and the stela of a lady named Demetria. It shows her inside a stylised Graeco-Roman temple, holding a bunch of grapes and with a dog by her side (image F). The Greek inscription reads ‘Demetria, daughter of Menelaos, granddaughter of Ammonia, worthy, farewell.’

It was discovered inside a coffin, having fallen from a carved niche above. It appears that the chamber served as a catacomb, dating to the Roman Period around 100 CE. Its interior and contents will be the focus of future seasons.

So far, we have only entered it for a brief survey and to assess its current state.

This Roman catacomb is the first of its kind in the Saqqara necropolis. It is our hope that more information will be discovered in future seasons to shed further light on burial customs and funerary religious beliefs during the Roman Period in Egypt.

Photos: North Saqqara Project / Kanazawa University

THE DISCOVERY OF A ROMAN CATACOMB AT NORTH SAQQARA

B E

• Nozomu Kawai is Professor of Egyptology at Kanazawa University, Japan, and Director of the Japanese- Eg yptian Mission to Nor th Saqqara. The author would like to thank the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities for granting permission to work at the site. He would also like to thank the Saqqara Inspectorate, especially Sabri Farag, Dr Mohammd Yousef, Ahmad Zikri, Ismail Mostafa, and Marwa Mahmoud Akhmad (Egyptian members of the team). Thanks are due to Prof Jiro Kondo, Prof Salima Ikram, Prof Hiroyuki Kashiwagi, Kazumitsu Takahashi, Yuka Yoneyama, Nonoka Ishizaki, Dr Hisao Baba, Dr Ka zuhiro Sak aue, Hiroko Kar iya , and Mutsumi Okabe for their works at the site. The project is funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and Kanazawa University’s special research grant, ‘ChozenProject’.

C

F

A: the entrance to the catacomb, sealed with mud bricks and limestone blocks.

B: the recumbent guardian lions found in situ in front of the entrance.

C: the stela of Menelaos.

D: terracotta figurines of Isis-Aphrodite found in front of the stela of Menelaos.

E: Isis-Aphrodite accompanied by a small Harpocrates.

F: the stela of Demetria.

EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY ISSUE NO 57 AUTUMN 2020

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Re-evaluating Petrie at Hawara William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) directed three seasons of excavations at the site of Hawara, on the southern edge of the Faiyum region, between 1888 and 1911. A re-examination of the objects excavated, selected and distributed from these campaigns, and their associated archival imprint, offers a new perspective on the aims and methods employed, writes Campbell Price.

Petrie’s own prior interest in the site of Hawara is somewhat obscured in his own published accounts. In an exchange in spring 1887 between Petrie and Amelia Edwards, the enterprising author describes a wealthy potential sponsor, Jesse Haworth (a Manchester cotton industrialist), as ‘just the man that might be got to excavate the Labyrinth’, a quasilegendary structure described in Classical accounts of Egypt and inspired by remains of a Middle Kingdom pyramid temple complex t h a t o n ce d o m i n a t e d t h e s i t e . T h e correspondence between Petrie and Edwards betrays a complex cotton-spun web of British I m p e r ia l co n n e c t io ns , co n ce r ns a n d convenience – a story that it is increasingly important to unpick and attempt to explain to audiences in Egypt and the UK. Petrie appears to have first met Haworth in Manchester at a gathering of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, an organisation that – along with additional support from the prominent eugenicist Francis Galton of University College London – funded a research trip to allow Petrie to collect data for his 1887 volume Racial Photographs from the Egyptian Monuments. Haworth went on to be one of Petrie’s main private backers, resulting in many signif icant Egyptology acquisitions for Manchester Museum.

Once at Hawara in early 1888, and after ‘attacking’ the pyramid to confirm the identity of the owner as Amenemhat III (c. 1831–1786 BCE), Petrie was disappointed by the lack of further Middle Kingdom remains – with even the main structure of the ‘Labyrinth’ remaining

16

elusive. Instead, his archaeological attention was monopolised by funerary material of the Late and Graeco-Roman Periods, notably in the form of mummies richly decorated with gold-leaf and/or painted wooden panel ‘portraits’.

The presence of Egyptian workers that enabled such labour on so large a scale is fleeting in printed accounts. Petrie does record the names of some individual workers in his notebooks – for example men named Khalifa and Ali Hamad as making significant finds in the 1910–11 season – but otherwise local Egyptians appear as an impediment to the practice of safe and dispassionate archaeology.

Petrie noted the advantages of staying at some distance from local villages, with their attendant ‘loafers’ who were best to be avoided. A sketch in one of his letters to Amelia Edwards, dated 9 April 1888 and now in the EES archives (image right), illustrates Petrie’s tented ‘camp’ with an adjoining area labelled the ‘skullery’, where human remains – especially interesting skulls derived from portrait mummies – were kept. Elsewhere Petrie described the area as ‘a deadhouse for my mummy friends’, claiming ‘the amount of mummification on my premises is embarrassing.’

Although Petrie fought against the implication that subscriptions to his work from donors were ‘mere purchase money’, he clearly had an eye on the potential value of finds to his supporters. He complained of ‘a plague of gilt mummies’, ‘wretched things with gilt faces and painted head pieces.’ By March 1888, however, Petrie was resigned to salvaging them:

RE-EVALUATING PETRIE AT HAWARA

Photo: Egypt Exploration Society

Letter from W. M. F. Petrie to Amelia Edwards, 9 April 1888, today in the EES Archives (COR.017.c.090).

EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY ISSUE NO 57 AUTUMN 2020

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Photo: Manchester Museum, University of Manchester

Gilded mummy of a small child from Hawara, 1st–2nd century CE. (Manchester Museum acc. no. 2109).

‘I suppose I must bring them all away, as they will be worth something in England, in spite of their hideously late style. I am not sure but what their gilt gaudiness may be very attractive to British Philistines.’ (Image above.) Petrie was clearly aware of the considerable interest that existed amongst some British subscribers in B iblical connec tions with Eg yptian archaeology. Jesse Haworth was, for example, a prominent member of the Non-conformist Protestant community in Manchester, a group that held considerable political influence in late Victorian Britain.

The discovery of the painted panels on Roman Period mummies was statistically uncommon – Petrie claimed only around 2 percent of mummies had such decoration – but these strikingly lifelike ‘portraits’ had a major impact on Western aesthetic tastes. While he ‘heaved over’ hundreds of undecorated mummies, Petrie reasoned it to be ‘a great point anthropologically to have skulls of persons whose living appearance as to colour and feature is preserved to us by the portraits.’

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Such attempts at racial profiling assumed the paintings to be mimetic representations of the mummified people they masked; this is a farfrom-established ‘fact’, with numerous dissenters, including the present writer, favouring the interpretation of such ‘portraits’ as standardised, idealised and most likely posthumous. Yet Petrie’s appraisals of the ‘truth’ of the paintings went hand-in-hand with a generally pejorative view of the artistic quality of material from Hawara as a whole. For Petrie, ‘all these gaudy and ignorantly painted cartonnages were probably made by Greeks and not by Egyptians’. He regretted the lack of ‘pure’ Egyptian art.

In his 1911 eugenicist tract Revolutions of Civilization, written at the close of his third and f inal Hawara season, Petrie fur ther laments: ‘Greek and Roman ar t was too incongruous to be a prop to Egyptian design, and the old style passed away forever’. Given the entire book is about the avoidance of ‘racial mixing’, Petrie’s opinions about GraecoRoman funerary material take on a particular sense of colonial anxiety. In Revolutions, Petrie concludes: ‘Yet if the view becomes readily grasped, that the source of every civilisation has lain in race mixture, it may be that eugenics will, in some future civilisation, carefully segregate fine races, and prohibit continual mixture, until they have a distinct type, which will start a new civilisation when transplanted.

The future progress of man may depend as much on isolation to establish a type, as of fusion of types when established.’

Petrie’s ambivalence towards Graeco-Roman art gives an insight into his broader thinking: on one hand, he believed admixture and strife brought about progress, yet was appalled by the ‘gaudiness’ of the apparent disjunction produced by the mixing of different styles. The wider context here is British colonial control of Egypt, an infrastructure that allowed and actively enabled Petrie’s work – despite his (often still accepted) claims to scientif ic impartiality in the face of ungrateful Egyptian and British government administration.

Imperial anxieties have already been shown to be at the root of several fictional Gothic horror narratives; it is perhaps unsurprising that in Sax Rohmer’s wildly orientalising Fu Manchu-books a key British bulwark against the Oriental threat represented by the title character is named ‘Dr. Petrie.’ Flinders Petrie’s

work at Hawara, as elsewhere, benefitted both directly and indirectly from British imperial control of Egypt. Although not explicitly acknowledged, Britain (and other European powers) emulated ancient Roman power over Egypt. The country was personified as a powerful but defenceless crocodile with the Latin words AEGYPTO CAPTA (‘Egypt Captured’) on coinage of Augustus, while in Punch cartoons of 1882, the same ‘other’-ing imagery was deployed.

This form of political control perhaps explains some of Petrie’s ambivalence to the GraecoRoman funerary material that his workers uncovered at Hawara. It makes the point with par ticular emphasis that the unear thing, selection and interpretation of material does not happen in isolation, nor in an intellectual vacuum. Petrie was conflicted in seeing Greek, Roman and Egyptian concepts coexisting in surprising ways; he chose to identify different types of material with certain ethnicities. In reality, neither ethnicity nor ‘race’ are innate biological features as Petrie supposed, but are socially constructed – and contested.

The complexity of the situation is illustrated by scenes of enemies of the deceased shown bound under the sandals of both gilded-mask and painted ‘portrait mummies’ of the GraecoRoman Period (image right). The individuals on whose mummies these scenes appear could have identified as Egyptian, Greek or Roman in differing and unknowable ways. Although borrowed from standard xenophobic imagery of the pharaoh, the motif of the bound captive is a magical and apotropaic motif of triumph appropriate to funerar y sphere – not a statement of the personal prejudices of an individual, nor evidence of assumed inequality in the past.

While it is easy to lampoon Petrie’s comments about the ‘gaudiness’ of GraecoRoman Period mummy decorations, his initial interpretation of the Hawara finds has cast a long shadow in Egyptology and elsewhere.

Such subjective pronouncements should highlight broader assumptions based on assessments of ancient Eg yptian ‘ar t’; pharaonic self-presentations continue to be favoured and accepted at face value, making anything else (later or contemporary) that does not quite fit seem foreign and ‘other’, thus compounding and perpetuating ancient biases. In the most extreme cases, highly

Photo: Manchester Museum, University of Manchester

RE-EVALUATING PETRIE AT HAWARA

stylised ancient battle scenes are cited as justification for explicitly racist attitudes.

Re-examining the work of Petrie is not simply a matter of critiquing one man’s opinions in an attempt to lighten our own moral conscience; it should be cause to actively reflect on our own systems of knowledge construction and transmission, and a challenge to use objects to tell more complicated stories.

Decorated footcase of the mummy of a lady named Isaious from Hawara, 2nd century CE (Manchester Museum acc. no. 11630).

• Campbell Price is Curator of Egypt and Sudan

at Manchester Museum, University of Manchester.

His book Golden Mummies of Egypt. Interpreting Identities from the Graeco-Roman Period accompanies Manchester Museum’s international travelling exhibition based on Petrie material from Hawara. It is on show at Buffalo Museum of Science until January 2021, moving to the North Carolina Museum of Art from February 2021.

EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY ISSUE NO 57 AUTUMN 2020

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Excavations in Petrie’s camp in Dendera Archaeology and excavations go hand in hand. The object of knowledge that both pursue are the material remains of past societies. But the practice of excavation can also become a subject of exploration itself.

Sylvain Dhennin takes a look at Petrie’s camp at Dendera.

All photos: S. Dhennin – CNRS/HiSoMA UMR 5189

W. M. F. Petrie carried out a single excavation campaign at Dendera, in 1897–98, for the Egypt Exploration Fund. During this campaign, he focused par ticularly on the human necropolis and the animal catacombs, both located in the southern part of the site. The published volume of his excavations (Dendereh, EEF [EES] Excavation Memoir 17) provides little insight to the context in which this campaign was organised. It details the composition of the team, which included his wife Hilda Petrie and several of his students, among them Arthur C. Mace and Norman de Garis Davies, but he gives no indication of the practical organisation and management of the campaign.

Petrie’s autobiography, published in 1931, states that work at Dendera began on 20

20

December 1897, with the cleaning of the animal catacombs ‘to gain room for our men’. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that he set up camp close to this spot. The resumption of archaeological work on the catacombs by a CNRS - HiSoMA team of the French archaeological mission of Dendera (IFAO, led

by Pierre Zignani) was occasion to excavate this camp and an oppor tunity to explore Petrie’s working conditions in Dendera at the end of the 19th century.

Discovery and identification of the camp A first visit to the south-western area of Dendera in 2018 revealed a set of three walls, of undetermined function, but whose antiquity was not obvious. During a search of the Philadelphia archives, Yann Tristant (Macquarie

EXCAVATIONS IN PETRIE’S CAMP IN DENDERA

University) identified this building, based on its characteristic shape, as the base camp of Petrie’s excavations. It appears on the site map drawn by Petrie, unlike the published ver sion. The map kept in Philadelphia combines Petrie’s excavations for the EEF and C. E. Rosher’s excavations for the American Exploration Society for the same period 1897–98. The Temple of Hathor and the human cemetery are detailed, as well as the animal necropolis and the camp, although no details of the catacombs are given. There is also a drawing of the general view of the site from the catacombs, showing the cemetery, the temple, and the gate of the eastern sanctuary up to the River Nile.

The building sits on the trail of a wadi running approximately north to south. The identification on Petrie’s map and the outcrop of the structure made us open a limited excavation trench within the grounds of the structure. Facing east, it probably provided a direct view of the animal necropolis and the human cemetery beyond, before the piles of rubble came to obstruct the sight lines. It was also set up to face away from the strong winds. It has suffered much damage and is preserved only to a height of some tens of centimetres – not greatly surprising as most of it would have been constructed from perishable materials such as wood or tent fabrics.

The architecture of the camp The preserved part of the structure mainly consists of three low, linked walls, built in a similar way: they are about 30 cm wide and

rather irregular, composed of large f lint pebbles (up to 20–25 cm long), abundant in the local soil, and fired bricks reused from the ancient structures of the site. Pebbles and bricks are coarsely bonded with mud.

The first wall follows an approximate eastwest orientation and forms the southern end of the building. It is 3.90 m long and reaches a maximum height of 40 cm. The second wall, the back of the building and perpendicular to the first, is 24.40 m long, running roughly north to south and preserved to a maximum height of 60 cm. The third wall, to the north, is parallel to the first one, but 70 cm shorter. However, it is preserved along its entire length, the ‘missing’ par t being the building’s entrance door. Petrie’s map shows a row of 9 huts immediately to the east of the masonry structure. According to his drawings, these huts were rectangular and of various sizes. A large tent (about 4 by 4 m) accompanied the huts, at the same orientation.

The three walls were the only solidly built elements of the structure and hence the sole surviving part. Of the row of huts, only a few negative traces remain. The stratigraphy consists only of an abandonment layer of soft black soil, present across the entire surface of the inner structure. It covers an indurated cir culation level of compac ted sand , corresponding to the surface of the natural soil (composed of a mixture of sand and large flints). The only traces of occupation were detected in the nor th-west corner of the building, where remains of a fireplace are preserved. The floor around this fireplace

Left to right: 1. General view of the camp, before excavations.

2. General view of the catacombs.

3. The main corridor of the catacombs, used as barracks for the Egyptian workers.

EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY ISSUE NO 57 AUTUMN 2020

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and towards the outside of the structure is slightly raised and blackened by the ash discharge.

All photos: S. Dhennin – CNRS/HiSoMA UMR 5189

Top: detailed view of Petrie’s camp.

22

Centre: the camp fireplace.

Bottom: view of the camp during the excavations.

Plan of the camp: S. Dhennin/J. Le Bomin - CNRS/HiSoMA UMR 5189

Small finds from inside the camp Despite the few archaeological layers preserved, the material discovered in the abandonment layer was abundant and varied.

It is composed of objects used by Petrie’s team during his mission and of fragmentary ancient material left on site after excavation.

The fragments of modern material discovered reflect the everyday objects used by the team: we found several corks of various sizes. Two of them bear the oval stamps of the French mineral water brand Badoit, a third one a rectangular stamp of four lines: ‘(1) [...]GREE[...]

(2) O.V.[M] (3) D HIGHLAND [...](4) [G?] LAS[G?]’, probably indicating Scotch ‘old vatted malt’ whisky, the fourth one a stamp showing only the number ‘163’.

Two lead sheets that belonged to bottles were also discovered. One is decorated with alternating black and cream-coloured stripes, the other bears an oval stamp with the name ‘[...]Southwell (?) [regi]stered Trade Mark’, but the reading is difficult and uncertain.

Metal objects have also been found, nails of several modules, fragments of rectangular strips with several holes, can keys, a fragment of aluminium foil and a multi-function knife

EXCAVATIONS IN PETRIE’S CAMP IN DENDERA

Limestone fragment bearing the title ‘smr wʿtj ’ (‘sole companion’).

All photos: S. Dhennin – CNRS/HiSoMA UMR 5189

Limestone fragment depicting a cow.

Above: fragment of a jar with a Greek inscription of the month of Pakhons.

Left: plan of the camp.

with a corkscrew, bottle opener, small and large blade (image on the following page).

Several bullet casings and a lead bullet have also been discovered as well as a 2-piaster coin dated 1293 AH (1875 CE).

Five glass bottles were found under the arch of the door in Gallery 6 of the animal catacombs: three light green glass bottles of Badoit water, two of which can be identified by the remains of their labels. These labels appear from 1874 onwards and were meant to prevent counterfeiting, but also to create a brand identity. The labels discovered in Dendera bear remnants of the brand slogan, ‘Table water without rival’, and an advertising tex t ex tolling the qualities of the water, helping to restore stomach functions, along with a list of the international prizes and competitions won by Badoit water, at the 1878 World Exhibition or in Frankfurt in 1881 – a common feature in advertising strategies of the period (image on the following page).

Two more bottles complete this set: a glass bottle of a darker green and different shape; and a transparent glass bottle, closed with a cork and still bearing some traces of the label (two letters only).

Another group of objects found inside Petrie’s camp derives from discarded fragments discovered during his own excavations. They seem to come mainly from the human necropolis and the animal catacombs in the camp’s vicinity.

A group of about 40 limestone fragments with decorations or inscriptions belongs to different monuments of the human necropolis.

Their style places them at the end of the First Intermediate Period or the beginning of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2050 BCE). These are fragments of offering tables and stelae bearing only a few traces of decoration or text, such as the title ‘smr wʿtj ’ (‘sole companion’), various hieroglyphs or animal figures (images left).

Also notewor thy are two fragments of ceramics originally from the animal catacombs, which seem to have been brought back to the camp because they bore a date inscribed in Greek (month of Pakhons) (image left). There were also Two ostraca – one demotic, one Coptic. The rest of the material consisted of beads, small fragments of car tonnage and ceramics from various periods.

In summary, Petrie’s camp at Dendera has left relatively sparse traces. Nevertheless, the EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY ISSUE NO 57 AUTUMN 2020

23

excavation of the premises gives us a first picture of the living conditions on the site. The construction is crude, as is the material discovered. The camp having probably been cleared before (or at the latest, just after) the end of the excavations, most of the objects were removed, the construction materials for the huts were probably collected and given away. Initial obser vations in the animal catacombs show that – similar to the camp – only a few traces of the barracks of Petrie’s excavation team remain, except for a few objects abandoned nearby.

Bottle of Badoit water with fragments of the label.

• Sylvain Dhennin is based in Lyon at the CNRS (HiSoMA lab, Maison de l’Orient). I am grateful to Joachim Le Bomin (archaeologist) and Stéphanie Porcier (archeozoologist) for their work in the field. I also thank Pierre Zignani, director of the mission, the IFAO and the inspectorate of Qena for their kind support.

Multi-function pocket knife with corkscrew.

All photos: S. Dhennin – CNRS/HiSoMA UMR 5189

Find exclusive EES merchandise at www.society6.com

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IMPACT REPORT 2019-20 We envisage a world where the cultural heritage of Egypt is preserved for posterity.

It is our mission to support and promote Egyptian cultural heritage.

Today, the Society supports Egyptological research projects around the world. We rely almost entirely on donations from members and the wider public to fund this work and run an extensive educational programme of publications and training, as well as events to convey the results to interested audiences.

Greetings, Friends Thank you all for your tireless support during 2019-20. Without your dedicated participation in our global community passionate about supporting and promoting Egyptian cultural heritage we would not have achieved so much.

Over the year, the Board adopted new strategic aims focusing on becoming a financially sustainable organisations, maintaining support for high-impact research projects, expanding our provision for the next generation of scholars, and continuing to build strong and meaningful relationships with you, our international supporters. This brief overview reports just some of the things we have achieved with your help over the last year.

Thank you to all our members and supporters during 2019-20. Without your generous contributions, we could not have achieved all that follows in this annual Impact Report! The Society is particularly grateful to the following individuals for their support in the reporting period: Patron Circle Barbara L Begelsbacher Susan Biddle Raymond Bowker Mechthild Burton Timothy Paul Cove Philip Feakin Michael Jesudason Faye Kalloniatis Paul Lynn Anne and Fraser Mathews Margaret Mountford Mark Ponman Lyn Stagg John Wall John Wyatt Amelia Edward Circle Martin Davies Anandh Owen 25

IMPACT REPORT 2019-20

Research The Society has a long history of supporting research projects but due to a strategic review of the Society’s research programme Fieldwork & Research Grants were not made available in 201920. This has, however, provided an opportunity to complete previous obligations for funding to 16 different research projects across Egypt, Sudan, and in collections around the world during 2019-20.

Support was provided for scholars at all points in their careers, from student skill development through to established academics. This included the continuation of our Centenary Awards, which are specifically offered to early-career researchers.

This year, we were pleased to present Awards to Jun Wong and Marta Arranz Cárcamo for their field projects which will take place in 2021.

A highlight of our research programme has been the ongoing relationship between the Society and Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. During his visit to open the new ‘Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh’ exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in October 2019, we were honoured to be visited in London by HE Dr Khaled el-Anany to discuss future plans for our work in Egypt and the development of mutually beneficial projects.

Dr Stephanie Boonstra shows HE Dr Khaled el-Anany, Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, the Society’s collections at our London Office.

2 16

Centenary Awards granted

Research projects completed

Publications Disseminating information about work supported by the Society’s members and donors is a critical part of archaeological research. We continue to communicate our activities in a range of printed and, increasingly, online media.

The fifth edition of Who Was Who in Egyptology edited by Morris Bierbrier has proven popular since its printing late in 2019. The Proceedings of the Fourth British Egyptology Congress provide an additional a platform for sharing current research.

The JEA was brought up to date and subscribers should now have received all of the volumes owed to them. Behind the scenes, staff have also been busy implementing a new submissions portal and will soon advertise some open access opportunities with our partners at SAGE Publishing.

BEC 4: Proceedings of the Fourth British Egyptology Congress and Who Was Who In Egyptology appeared in 2019-20.

Collections The Society’s collections remain an important repository for scholars all over the world.

Continuing efforts to make material available online has seen a marked increase in their accessibility and efforts now focus on proactively engaging audiences with these virtual materials, while not forgetting the important task of preserving the originals for future generations.

The successful Archive Appeal in 2018 allowed the Society to rehouse over 5000 fragile glassplate negatives from some of its early excavations at Abydos, Armant, Meir, Balabish, and Tell elAmarna.

As well as rehousing glass-plate negatives, Alix and contract conservator Vicky West were able to offer further skills training for our colleagues at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology and at the Palestine Exploration Fund.

Though library use remains low, the Society was able to accept a large donation from the library of the late Geoffrey Vincent Walker (donated by his son Keith Walker), which is current being processed. Many of these books are accounts of Victorian and earlier travellers to Egypt and will lead to the creation of a distinct Special Collection within the Society’s library holdings.

A team of volunteers worked under the guidance of Archive Assistant intern Alix Robinson and completed the rehousing of the glass-plate negatives from the EES archives in summer 2019.

5,000+

8

Glass-plate negatives rehoused

Student volunteers trained in conservation techniques

In June 2019, the Society reported on the alleged theft of papyri from its collection housed at the Sackler Library, University of Oxford. The Society has since issued further statements on its website regarding the alleged thefts and its ongoing efforts to identify missing papyri in international collections and will continue to update members where appropriate.

Following the 2019 survey of the EES cartonnage collection by conservator Dr Susi Pancaldo and volunteers, a partnership was created between the Society and University College London’s MSc Conservation department as a multi-year cartonnage conservation project. We look forward to seeing what results come of this project over the next year.

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IMPACT REPORT 2019-20

Education and training We are committed to supporting the next generation of scholars by providing them with the tools and skills necessary to do their work. We have provided educational opportunities in the UK and Egypt and are grateful for the help of experts in the running of these Schools and Workshops.

Our commitment to support Egyptian scholars continued in September 2019 by offering two training sessions (in Cairo and Luxor) both covering getting published in the JEA, and an introduction to archive management. Shortly after the training, the JEA received its first submission from Egypt using its new online submission platform. Following the popularity of these workshops, a one-day training workshop in January 2020 at the British Council focused on the challenges of Egyptological archiving and its relationship to archaeology.

One-day training workshop at the British Council: the 13 attendees came from the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, as well as museums, research institutes, and universities across Egypt.

Outreach and engagement Promoting Egypt’s unique cultural heritage by communicating the results of our activities to interested audiences is crucial for our ongoing mission. With a team of Local Ambassadors and other representatives, we have succeeded in running events across the UK and Egypt this year, reaching new audiences, and engaging communities with Egypt’s history and heritage.

The highlight of our annual programme, in April 2019, was the sixth biennial Delta Survey Workshop held in collaboration with the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities at Mansoura University. Over 200 people attended the sixth Delta Survey Workshop to hear 25 presentations from researchers, all active in the Delta region.

Want to know more?

The full version of the Society’s Annual Report and Accounts can be viewed online at www.ees. ac.uk.

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Since its founding in 2015, 60 students have now attended the Egyptian Archaeology Skills School in the UK. In 2019, another ten students attended the School from across the UK, Leiden, and even Harvard.

2 10 200

Training sessions for Egyptian scholars

Skills School attendees

Attendees at the Delta Survey Workshop

Heritage at Risk Grant Appeal

COVID-19 has decimated tourism in Egypt. Millions of Egyptian people depend on tourism for survival.

At times like this, heritage is dangerously at risk. Projects on the ground need your help now. A little money can go a long way toward protecting heritage and supporting those working with it. Please donate to our grant programme now:

A contribution of just £50 could provide essential recording equipment

£100 could facilitate a community gathering to discuss people’s local heritage and its preservation

A kind donation of £150 could pay the fees of an inspector for a whole month A generous gift of £1000 could fund an entire project and create a lasting record for future generations All funds raised in this appeal will be held in the Society’s restricted Research Fund, which is dedicated to supporting projects in Egypt, Sudan, and worldwide collections and will provide further grants for research in the future.

For further details and to donate to the Appeal, visit www.ees.ac.uk or email fundraising@ees.ac.uk.

You can also support us by sending a cheque with the form below to: The Egypt Exploration Society, 3 Doughty Mews, London WC1N 2PG, United Kingdom.

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Digging Diary 2020 Summaries of archaeological work undertaken in Egypt since autumn 2019. Sites are arranged geographically from north to south. Field directors who would like reports of their work to appear in EA are asked to e-mail a short summary, with a website address if available, to the editor: jan.geisbusch@ees.ac.uk | Jan Geisbusch LOWER EGYPT Ghazala (Tell el-Farkha): Western Tell el-Farkha

Sharuna

Antinoupolis Tell el-Amarna

Athribis

Karnak / Dra Abu el-Naga

kom: Most important here were excavations in the brewery (object no. 296), discovered a few years ago and partially explored during earlier campaigns. During the 2019 season, we reached the two oldest phases of the brewery (Naqada IIIA). Central kom: Excavations concentrated on two trenches. In the N trench, work continued on the area excavated in previous seasons.

Four layers were connected with the Protodynastic settlement (Naqada IIIA1). In the S trench, we explored the S part of the rectangular building interpreted as a central warehouse (Naqada IIIA). The N part had already been excavated in previous seasons.

Unfortunately, the building appears to have been destroyed in ancient times. As no walls of it are visible in the S profile of the trench, it is certain that the building does not continue in this direction. Eastern kom: We reached the layers connected to Tell el-Farkha phase 4 and end of phase 3 (second half of Naqada IIIA, first half of Naqada IIIB). Most interesting is a structure of rectangular rooms around an open space, probably a courtyard. Beneath, the outlines of earlier walls are visible. They are very poorly preserved, with bricks made from almost pure mud. These walls are connected to the first S Egyptian occupation of Tell el-Farkha. Research in the NW corner of the oldest Egyptian mastaba yielded very interesting results. The main objective of the investigation was the reconstruction of the building methods of these edifices.

The excavations were carried out already in autumn 2019 by Marek Chłodnicki and Krzysztof M. Ciałowicz (IAJU, PCMA). www. farkha.org

Tell el-Farkha: remains of the brewery at the Western kom. Photo: IAJU / PCMA. EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY ISSUE NO 57 AUTUMN 2020

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UPPER EGYPT Sharuna (El-Kom el-Ahmar): In

2018, during the excavation of a drainage ditch, a significant number of blocks were discovered. After a preliminary excavation by an SCA team, a joint archaeological project was created between the Univ of Tübingen, the SCA and the Museu Egipci de Barcelona in order to determine the extension of the site and carry out a recording of the archaeological remains.

The excavation of the site (2019–20), directed by Luis Gonzálvez (Museu Egipci de Barcelona), has unearthed the remains of a Christian church dated to 5th–6th centuries.

For the foundations and other parts of the building, blocks were reused from a temple dating to the reign of Ptolemy I. The original layout of the temple remains unknown and constitutes one of the questions to be solved by future research. During the season of Mar/Apr 2020 under field director Béatrice Huber recording in situ, cleaning, restoration, and storage of the blocks were undertaken.

Individual drawings were done, employing sophisticated techniques that allow to create 3D models. This data will contribute to a hypothetical reconstruction of the temple that once stood at Sharuna (Kom el-Ahmar). www.ianes.uni-tuebingen.de/forschung/ aegyptology/projekte/index/html

Antinoupolis (El-Sheikh Abadah): In Oct/Nov 2019 and Feb/Mar 2020, the joint Egyptian-Italian mission of the MoTA and Univ of Florence (Istituto Papirologico ‘G. Vitelli’) under Rosario Pintaudi continued excavation in two areas at the site. The MoTA team under Fathy Awad Reyad, Hamada Kellawy and Zakhary Fawzy Zakhary worked in the area of the big water well and the small chapel near the Italian dig house: new trenches revealed important parts of the temple complex built by Hadrian and dedicated to Antinous-Osiris.

A new area of excavation, under Giuseppe Alvar Minaya, has been opened in the NW sector of the site: excavations unearthed a building complex consisting of two small square structures made of brick and an adjacent floor made of limestone slabs. Two column bases were found on its NE side.

The function of the complex is open to interpretation, but it was certainly linked to the supply of water, given the presence of an articulated system of pipes for the collection and run-off of water below the paved floor.

There may have existed a public colonnaded space. Despite modern pillage, excavations have revealed a homogeneous stratigraphy, with layers pertaining to the last period of occupation and the abandonment of the area (5th–7th centuries CE). The ‘Archaeological Map of Antinoupolis’ Project, begun in 2009

by Marcello Spanu (Univ of Roma Tre), has finished as far as recording is concerned.

During the final season, checks on the features of the plotted buildings were carried

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Antinoupolis: the area in the north-western sector of the site. Photo: G. A. Minaya.

out. Diletta Minutoli continued the study and the restoration of papyrus fragments found during the excavation and catalogued the seals on the amphora stoppers. Flora Silvano (Univ of Pisa) undertook the drawing and study of glass objects from the new excavation, while Cristina Guidotti (Museo Archeologico Nazionale – Florence) studied the pottery. Pascale Ballet (Univ of Paris Nanterre) continued the study of clay figurines from the site. Emanuela Borgia and Mara Elefante (both Univ of Rome Sapienza) reviewed the findings from the excavations

by Sergio Donadoni (1965–68, 1978) in the urban area (Ramesses II temple area) and in the S Necropolis of Antinoupolis.

Somaya Abdel Khalek (National Museum of Egyptian Civilization) studied textiles from the tombs. In the last season, four previously discovered mummies were studied by Aya Salem (MoTA).

Tell el-Amarna: The season was divided

into two, the division being the end of March.

The first period saw further examination of the Great Aten Temple, with excavation areas at the front and along the S and N sides of the Long Temple and the ground in and beside the ‘Butcher’s Yard’ in front of the Sanctuary. Well-preserved mud-brick offering-tables, remains of actual offerings and several hundred fragments of carved quartzite were amongst the material found.

A further length of the N wall foundation trench of the Long Temple was cleaned. This allowed almost 100 m of stone foundations for a future marking-out of the wall itself to be laid. The second period was devoted to recording finds from the temple stored in the site magazines. In August 2020, 36 new Visitor Information Panels were installed as a result of a collaborative initiative between the Univ of Cambridge and the MoTA. Funding was provided largely via a British Council Institutional Links grant (PIs Kate Spence / Yasmin El-Shazly). www.amarnaproject.com

Athribis: In its 18th season (Oct 2019–Mar

2020), the Athribis Project (Univ of Tübingen, MoTA), led by Christian Leitz and directed in the field by Marcus Müller, finished its work in the Repit temple of Ptolemy XII and continued the excavation of a large trench outside the temple next to the monastery.

This excavation revealed nearly 4,000 ostraca, raising the total number of Athribis ostraca to 12,000. The excavation of the temple was finished by removing two door blockings in the main axis and a sondage in the pronaos.

The latter showed the limestone foundations of two columns and a nearly 2-m-high mudbrick pillar of unknown function next to these foundations. In order to open the area for visitors, the limestone floors and some

Tell el-Amarna: Hamada Kellawy with a newly installed panel at work in the 1920s that were kindly provided by the EES. Photo

DIGGING DIARY 2020

walls were restored. Destroyed walls were reconstructed to a height of one course (45 cm) so that the complete layout of the temple is now visible. Moreover, a wooden bridge for visitors was built in the main axis of the temple to present the medieval re-use of these rooms. Finally, information boards along the visitors’ walkway were installed. www.uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/ philosophische-fakultaet/fachbereiche/ altertums-und-kunstwissenschaften/ianes/ forschung/aegyptologie/projekte/athribisprojekt-dfg/

Karnak: The archaeological and epigraphic

studies of the CFEETK continued under the supervision of A. Erfan and L. Gabolde between Sep 2019 and Jun 2020 The restoration and conservation programme of the S magazines of the Akhmenu goes on, conducted by A. Oboussier, with the support of the Kheops Fund for Archaeology.

Thanks to the same sponsoring, the restoration of the quartzite statue of Amun of Tutankhamun was undertaken under the stewardship of A. Garric, L. Antoine and M. Abd er-Radi. The missing parts of the bust and left leg are being replaced by copies in indurated sandstone shaped after original statues of the same reign. The background of the statue has been enhanced by the rebuilding of a portion of the Annals of Thutmose III that collapsed between 1864 and 1867, and the right part of the granite lintel of the gate – which had been reused as millstone in the village of Dendera – was recovered and will be installed next season.

In the ‘Cachette courtyard’, A. Garric and his team have implemented the rebuilding of the W wall, replacing two courses. In the Osirian

t the northern dig house. The panel displays archive photos of o: Amarna Project.

Karnak: excavations in the Middle Kingdom courtyard and site management of the zone. Photo: E. Saubestre (CFEETK no. 202438 CNRS-CFEETK).

sector, the IFAO team led by L. Coulon and C. Giorgi continued epigraphic study and archaeological researches. The gate of the chapel of Osiris neb-neheh has been dismantled for restoration and will be rebuilt next year. Excavations of the sandstone platform of the primeval temple in the Middle Kingdom courtyard have been undertaken in order to explore its foundations and to create a presentation of the area to the public. The Karnak documentation programme, the online archive and lexical database were continued. http://www.cfeetk.cnrs.fr/

Dra Abu el-Naga: The Spanish mission under José M. Galán (CSIC), working at Dra Abu el-Naga North, continued the excavation S of the tomb-chapel of Djehuty (TT 11). Near a 17th Dyn mud-brick chapel discovered last season, a wooden anthropomorphic coffin was found on the ground. Inside, the mummy of a 15–16 year old woman was resting on her right side. She was wearing two gold earrings in the left ear, and one finger ring on each hand. Four necklaces were left on her chest, one of them including semi-precious stones and beads made of translucent blue glass or blue-glazed quartz (to be analysed). At the other side of the mud-brick chapel, a model coffin made of mud was found, containing a wooden figurine in the shape of a human mummy wrapped

in four linen bandages, and identified by a hieratic inscription on its front as ‘the Osiris, Djehuty’. In the same area of excavation, inside a robbed 17th Dyn funerary shaft, a wrist guard and a loincloth were found inside a bag, all three made of leather. www. excavacionegipto.com

Dra Abu el-Naga: necklace from the burial of a young woman. Photo: CSIC.

Abbreviations: Technical terms: PD Predynastic; 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; PP Ptolemaic Period; GR GraecoRoman; ER Early Roman; LR Late Roman Institutes and Research Centres: CFEETK Franco-Egyptian Centre, Karnak; CNRS (USR) French National Research Centre (Research Groups); CSIC Spanish National Research Council; IAJU Institute of Archaeology Jagiellonian University, Cracow; IFAO French Archaeological Institute, Cairo; MoTA Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, Egypt; PCMA Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, Cairo

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Egyptian voices: the Abydos Temple Paper Archive Eight years ago, Mohamed Abu el-Yazid and Ayman Damarany came across an abandoned store of archival documents in a sealed room in the Temple of Sety I at Abydos. This chance discovery has since grown into the Abydos Temple Paper Archive Project (ATPA). It allows a glimpse of the local context of research at the site, foregrounding the Egyptian contribution to the archaeology of Abydos, while also yielding traces of the eccentric figure of Omm Sety.

Above: the slaughterhouse of the Temple of Sety I (‘Butchers’ Hall’) and the reopened archive room at its southern end.

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Recovering the Egyptian viewpoint The story of the Abydos Temple Paper Archive (ATPA) project began in 2012, when the southern rooms of the slaughterhouse of the Temple of Sety I at Abydos were reopened for study and photography.

This occurred in the course of research for the MA dissertion of Mohamed Abu el-Yazid, one of the present authors. Upon entering the southernmost room, we were surprised to discover that it was filled to a height of more than 1 m with accumulated papers, ceramics and stone fragments strewn across the floor.

Sifting through the jumble, Ayman Damarany – the other author present – quickly realised the impor tance of the find: the star tling discovery included thousands of archival documents belonging to the Sohag Inspectorate and the Egyptian Antiquities Service more generally, consisting of incoming and outgoing correspondence, reports, and survey maps, found in various formats such as ledgers, folders, files, loose papers, cahiers, squeezes, photos, maps, drawings, and sketches. The documents are in Arabic, English, and French, and were written mainly by inspectors and other employees of the antiquities authorities.

Others were written by scholars, visitors, art dealers, members of local communities, and others. Many documents date as far back as the late 19th century, with the oldest record going back nearly 150 years.

EGYPTIAN VOICES: THE ABYDOS TEMPLE PAPER ARCHIVE

The find represents a treasure trove of information that can shed light on the littleknown histories of Egyptian contributions to cultural heritage management during the formative years of Egyptology, a perspective that so far has been sorely missing from the discipline. The ATPA with its archaeological, social, and political accounts greatly enhances our knowledge not only of the modern history of one of the most important sites in Egypt.

It is also suggestive of practices and activities at other archaeological sites at this time. More importantly, for the first time the early history of Egyptology can be examined from the viewpoint of the Egyptians who worked at and managed the ancient sites over much of the discipline’s modern history, rather than through the Western-centric lens of European and American scholars.

Since the beginning the archival project in 2017, we still have not completed more than

transportation, rest houses, guards, complaints, employee investigations, antiquities dealers, local community, tourism, and important visitors (e.g. the Sultan of Egypt in December 1920).

Because of Egyptology’s Western-centric focus – a result of colonisation that still applies today – the roles of Egyptian inspectors and scholars have widely been ignored. However, the ATPA highlights numerous notable Egyptian figures, such as AbdulHakim Abd el-Ghany, Abdullah el-Sayed, Ahmed Fakhry, Ahmed Tayeb (inspector of Abydos in the early 1880s), Aziz Morkos Mansour, Tewfik Boulos, Bulbul Abdel Meguid (better known as Omm Sety), Fahmy Mohamed Ali, Ghazouli Edouard, Hassan Houssny, Ibrahim Gerges, Labib Habachi, Metias Faam, Mohamed Anwar Shoukry, Mohamed Saleh, Moharram Kamal, Osiris Ghabrial, Rashid Mohamed Nowair, Sadek Mohamed, and Abdel Hamid Zayed.

Moreover, guardians of the temple are also attested, for example Ahmed Abu Bakr and Ali Suefi, the famous reis who worked with Flinders Petrie.

Unsurprisingly, the documents also mention the names of well-known Western scholars, among them Carlo Anti, Guy Brunton, Amice Calverley, Georges Daressy, Norman de Garis Davies, Étienne Drioton, Campbell Edgar, Reginald Engelbach, Henri Frankfort, Alan Gardiner, Henri Gauthier, Battiscombe George Gunn, Pierre Lacau, Gustave Lefebvre, Georges Legrain, Gaston Maspero, Édouard Naville, T. Eric A form signed by Omm Sety (here named Bulbul) on 21 October 1961.

Name: Bulbul Abdel Meguid Job: draftswoman and restorer in the Department of Engineering at Abydos.

Salary: 6.50 p. per day.

Ministry of Culture and Guidance Authority: Antiquities Section: engineering.

Egyptian ID no.: 9742, issued on 14 January 1959.

Address: El-Araba ElMadfuna

10 percent of the records, indicating the sheer volume of information. Though we have been able to piece together many interesting stories, many more are surely waiting to be revealed.

The documents relate to a very long list of topics and of ongoing activities: the archaeological sites of Abydos (e.g. the temples of Sety I and Ramesses II, the Osireion, Kom es-Sultan), financial reporting, excavations, site management and monitoring of changes, stone quarries, tasks for the inspectors, inspection programmes and reports, the activities of sabakhin, illegal digging, site security, object rescue, foreign missions,

Peet, William Matthew Flinders Petrie, James Quibell, George Reisner, and Gerald Wainwright.

Several documents highlight the influence of Egyptian stakeholders in antiquities management, even at a time when the relevant authorities were still led by French and British officials. The documents show how Egyptian scholars and excavators, contrary to what is widely known, actively engaged with their heritage and wielded influence over foreign scholars. For example, a letter dated 3 May 1922, signed

by Joseph Messawir, on behalf of the Director General, concerns informing Reginald Engelbach, Head Inspector of the Antiquities of Upper Egypt, to take over the work of Gerald Wainwright, Head Inspector of the Antiquities of Middle Egypt during his annual leave for three and a half months.

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Right: a health office form documenting some of Omm Sety’s medical problems.

Far right: an application for sick leave because of a hand injury, written

by Omm Sety.

Omm Sety in the archive Omm Sety – real name Dorothy Louise Eady (1904–1981) – was an exceptional non-Egyptian f igure who of ten appears in the ATPA documents, as on 1 January 1952, when she became the first woman ever to work for the Egyptian Department of Antiquities. One might say that she dedicated not only her life to her research, the villages, and the Antiquities Authority at Abydos, but also her afterlife – to the point that she has become a veritable legend at Abydos.

Having worked in Egypt since the 1930s, she first visited Abydos in 1952. Since 1951, she belonged to the staff of Ahmed Fakhry, at the time Director of Pyramid Researches, though on 3 March 1956, at her own insistence, was transferred to Abydos by the Egyptian Antiquities Service. In the first two years, she joined the excavations directed by Chief Inspector Edouard Ghazouli in the area known as the Palace and Magazines of the Sety Temple. She sketched the plans of the temple and drawings of the wall reliefs, and helped with conservation and restoration work, while also assisting preparations for Ghazouli’s publication (who expressly thanked her for her contributions).

As well as being an experienced draftswoman, on 1 January 1958 she joined the Abydos engineering department, which was under the supervision of the inspectorate, using the Hall of Barks as a makeshift office for her work.

Turning 60, in 1964, Omm Sety was faced with

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mandatory retirement, though the Antiquities Department decided to make an exception and allowed her to carry on her work at Abydos for a further five years, until she retired in 1969.

Even after that time, until her death in April 1981, she continued as a part-time consultant for the Antiquities Department, guiding tourists around the Temple of Sety and explaining the symbolism of the painted wall scenes.

Omm Sety won unparalleled respect and regard in the Antiquities Department and in the community of Abydos. In life, Omm Sety faced frequent problems, such as financial difficulties, the impact of political instability, and bad health, which worried her from the early 1960s.

Nearly 40 years after her death, the Abydos Archive provides more detailed insights into her life and shows that there is more to be said about her daily work , her role in documenting and protecting the finds, the temple and other archaeological sites, and her relations, not always unproblematic, with scholars and inspectors. Within the archive, a file with Omm Sety’s handwritten letters includes archaeological reports from 1968: in August of that year she expresses concern over unusual flooding in the Osireion (opposite page, top left). A series of letters from her to inspectors and government officials accuses Abdel Hamid Zayed of plagiarising her work (opposite page, top right). Fortunately, her employee f ile is still mostly preser ved, containing more than 400 documents and

EGYPTIAN VOICES: THE ABYDOS TEMPLE PAPER ARCHIVE

Far left: a work report

by Omm Sety for August 1968.

Left: a letter by Omm Sety accusing Abdel Hamid Zayed of plagiarising her work.

photos that were generously shared with us

by Gamal Abdullah, the son of a ghafir (guard) who worked closely with her during the time with the Antiquities’ Authority. It contains not only documents of a bureaucratic nature, such

as her holiday and sick leave, but also drawings and scholarly writings. Together with the documents from the archive, we can piece together the impressive life history of this remarkable woman.

• Ayman Damarany is the photographer for the

Abydos Temple Paper Archive Project (ATPA)

American Research Centre in Egypt (ARCE) and a Senior Inspector at Abydos. He trained at the ARCE Field Schools in Luxor and Giza and has extensive excavation experience as a field director.

Mohammed Abu el-Yazid is a Senior Inspector and archaeologist for the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (Sohag office).

This project continues with the dedicated hard work and passion of our esteems team members: Mohamed Abdel-Badie, Carol Redmount, Ayman Damarany, Mohamed Abu el-Yazid, Jessica Kaiser, Nora Shalaby, Hazem Salah, Zainab Hashish, Ahmed Abdel-Kader, Yasser Abdelrazik, Fiona Baker, Wael Ibrahim, Ahmed Tarek, Abdel Ghafour Motawe, Elizabeth Minor, Rachel Regelein, Kea Johnston, and Amany Amer Abdel Hameed. We are grateful to his excellency, Dr Khalid El-Enany, Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, Dr Mostafa Waziri, Secretary-General of Antiquities, Dr Mahmoud Afifi, Dr Ayman Ashmawy, past and current Head of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector, Dr Mohamed Ismail, and Dr Nashwa Gaber, past and current Head of the Permanent Committee.

We are also grateful to Dr Hany Abou el-Azim, first leader of the project, and in Sohag we are indebted to Gamal Abdulnasser, Dr Fredrika Sayed Rasem, and Sayed Abdulaziz. Lastly, special thanks to Ashraf Okasha, Head of Abydos, for his kind support, and to Haj Ahmed Abdutabl, chief guard of the temple of Abydos.

The ATPA is an international mission under the supervision of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and in collaboration with the University of California Berkeley. Its work is carried out by a mainly Egyptian team, the majority of whom are local to the Sohag area.

The project was funded by ARCE / AEF in 2017 and more recently by the EES to preserve, catalogue, digitise, transcribe and translate the documents; to build a custom made database for the archive; to establish a safe and convenient storage system; and disseminate this unique archive. To date, we have conducted three field seasons, resulting in a digitised and conserved corpus of over 7,000 documents and maps, a custom-built database, an exhibition in the newly inaugurated Sohag Museum, and several conference presentations, public talks, and publications. By making the contents of this archive available to the public, the project aims to restore a voice to previously under-represented stakeholders involved in the heritage management of important ancient sites.

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Object biographies and human practice: launching PROCESS A new project – Pharaonic Rescission: Objects as Crucibles of Ancient Egyptian Societies (PROCESS) – led by Gianluca Miniaci at the University of Pisa, aims to write a social history of ancient Egypt, focusing on the productive level of society in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. The team, complemented by Camilla Saler and Vanessa Forte, is implementing a methodology to profile the identity of ancient workers through archaeometric analyses and the study of traces left by manufacture and use.

Photo: The Trustees of the British Museum

A heart scarab of the Seventeenth-Dynasty pharaoh Sobekemsaf (BM EA 7876). The magnification makes tool marks visible on its back.

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The project ‘PROCESS – Pharaonic Rescission: Objects as Crucibles of Ancient Egyptian Societies’ was conceived to shed new light on the social history of Egypt in the Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period (c. 2050–1550 BCE), especially on the lower strata of society, the working class, of which we have less direct information.

Egyptian history has usually been reconstructed in a ‘top-down’ fashion, with more attention given to the ruling classes, especially the pharaohs and their entourage. Indeed, sources are usually tied to the elites as they had the means to leave behind the kind of self-

representation that is easier to decipher for us, e.g. text and images. The working population, the real e ngine of t he s y s te m , therefore, tends to appear as an undifferentiated mass of

people, indistinct or invisible in the historical reconstruction. Written sources, still our baseline for the reconstruction of Egyptian history, reflect mostly ‘one view of the world’, providing information about the ideas and events of the hegemonic classes, the ones with privileged access to resources and whose decisions and actions denoted cultural predominance over a wider layer of society. In addition, most written sources originated from within the institutional administration, which, given its bureaucratic nature, produced much more abundant records concerning the people in charge of ‘social control’.

Recent years have seen the growth of literature centred on the study of material artefacts – the ‘material turn’ – and their potential to encapsulate traces of social relations. The life h i s t o r y (o r ‘o b j e c t biogr aphy’) of ancient artefacts mainly runs along three axes: a) the various stages of an artefact’s production, that is: along the whole chaîne opératoire of its creators that transforms raw material into a consumable object; b) the circulation of the finished product, i.e. its owner(s) and its use life, including its social, temporal and spatial movements until the final act of deposition or

OBJECT BIOGRAPHIES AND HUMAN PRACTICE: LAUNCHING PROCESS

discarding; c) its rediscovery in modern times, typically involving a change in meanings and values of the object.

Until now, archaeology and related studies have mainly focused on isolating the artefact and determining its ultimate owner(s). This approach primarily aimed at descriptions of the people who owned and eventually deposited the object. The result is a narrow social history, reflecting those who were able to afford social visibility. Yet objects encapsulate traces of more than a single human life, prompting us to consider all participants in an object’s biography, be they contemporary or later (i.e. synchronic or diachronic) and across the varying social distances in the object’s operational chain. Beginning with the acquisition of its raw materials (and even before), the object becomes a vehicle of its producers’ stories and their social relations: from the stone quarrier, the goldsmith, the potter, the illustrator (who may all have contributed in some form or other) to the merchant who sold the finished product to the object’s users or consumers. All participants in the production of an object have in some way left their imprint on it, which can be discovered, read and used to reconstruct a broader story.

To achieve this objective, PROCESS will add archaeometric methods to the archaeological perspective, trying to detect the often invisible traces left by the producers of an objects.

The scientific approach used by PROCESS combines non-destructive archaeometric applications and trace analyses to detail characteristics of ancient craft productions.

Archaeometrics employ portable XRF (X-ray fluorescence) and SEM-EDX (scanning electron microscopy / energy dispersive X-ray) analysers to detect the main features of an object’s composition. This allows to show variations in, and provenance of, raw materials used by workers. These data will provide a solid basis for the analysis of the production technologies involved as well as later wear and tear: one may think here of specific techniques of shaping, sequences of gestures, or alterations caused by intensive and prolonged use. Por table microscopes, stereomicroscopes and SEM will allow to observe object surfaces at diverse ranges of magnification, detailed enough to distinguishing technological traces from use wear. Through the scope of PROCESS it will become possible to reconstruct the actual

sequence of manufacturing processes, toolkits used, techniques and dex terity of the producers. The artefact will be analysed in its broad lifecycle in order to detect all the visible traces of human activity.

Through this combined approach of archaeometric analyses and trace investigations, PROCESS aims to gather richer information about the productive class of ancient Egypt than is currently available and to fill a gap in social history. We hope to bring to light the stories of those men and women who so far have most often remained in the shadow of history.

Gianluca Miniaci carrying out an XRF analysis with his students at the Petrie Museum, London.

Photo: Gianluca Miniaci / PROCESS

• Gianluca Miniaci is Associate Professor of Egyptology at the University of Pisa, Honorary Researcher at the Institute of Archaeology in London and Chercheur Associé at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. He is codirecting excavations at the site of Zawyet Sultan and editor-in-chief of the international series: Ancient Egypt in Context, Kitab – Egyptology in Focus, and Middle Kingdom Studies. Camilla Saler is a PhD student in Egyptology at the University of Pisa. Her research interests focus on the relations between Egypt and the North Levant in the Middle Bronze Age (2000–1500 BCE).

Vanessa Forte is a post-doctoral research assistant at the University of Pisa and Honorary Researcher at Sapienza University of Rome. She specialises in technology and the use of ancient objects, applying a combination of archaeometric and trace analyses for investigating social aspects of production. PROCESS is financed by the Italian Ministry of Instruction, Universities and Research (MIUR) under the scheme PRIN-2017.

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Scribes at work: documenting Theban Tombs 61, 82 and 87 Philological research has been at the heart of Egyptology since the emergence of the discipline as a modern academic subject. In her article, Lucía Díaz-Iglesias Llanos lays out what more recent approaches, such as the ‘Material’ or ‘New Philology’, can tell us about a text beyond its manifest content. To do so, the New Kingdom Scribes Project looks at a number of Theban tombs and the processes through which their textual and decorative programmes were produced.

In 2019, the New Kingdom Scribes (NKS) Project was established to accomplish the full documentation and epigraphic analysis as well as the conservation assessment of three burial chambers belonging to members of the ancient Egyptian elite and sub-elite. Cut into the upper terraces of the Sheikh Abd el-Qurna area of the Theban necropolis during the first half of the Eighteenth Dynasty, they rate among the best-preser ved underground chambers decorated with extensive textual programmes, of which there are fewer than ten examples.

These spaces were linked to the tomb-chapels of three well-known officials from the reigns of Hatshepsut (1507–1458 BCE) and Thutmose III (1479–1425 BCE): the vizier Weseramun (TT 61), his steward Amenemhat (TT 82), and the overseer of the granaries of Upper and Lower Egypt Nakhtmin (TT 87) (image right).

Before describing these chambers, I will explain the aims and the conceptual basis of the NKS Project, before concluding with a summary of the tasks undertaken during the first two seasons of fieldwork in 2019 and 2020. Its main objective is to deepen our knowledge of aspects of Egyptian culture that were not recorded in ancient sources, but which are at the centre of current debates and questions within historical disciplines in general, and Egyptology in particular. Among these open questions are: How were funerary texts and images transmitted? What intellectual and

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material procedures underlie the manufacture of inscribed objects or three-dimensional spaces? What were the education and working conditions of the scribes in charge of copying texts in tombs like? How can we distinguish individual scribal hands? What role did those who commissioned private monuments play in the selection of the decorative programmes deployed in their tombs?

To approach these research questions, which lie at the heart of many investigations into cultures that existed before the invention of print, new perspectives and tools are available for philologists and historians. Since the late 1980s, trends that were mainly developed in the field of Mediaeval Studies (the so-called ‘New’ or ‘Material’ Philology) have led to a noticeable change in the ways that texts from manuscr ipt cultures are analysed and interpreted. These trends suggest shifting the focus from the texts themselves towards material artefacts as a whole, and call attention to the processes through which they were pr oduced, used, and r eceived. Mor e importance is also given to the historical, social, and cultural contexts in which these processes took place, and to the human actors that were involved in them.

In the case of the NKS Project, these actors are the patrons of the large early New Kingdom Theban tombs and the scribes who participated in their decoration. The ‘material

SCRIBES AT WORK: DOCUMENTING THEBAN TOMBS 61, 82 AND 87

turn’ in the study of texts has also been fostered by rapid developments in digital information and communication technologies, and by archaeometrical techniques through which written and decorated surfaces can now be documented and analysed with an unprecedented degree of detail.

Studies of written and scribal culture in Egyptology have traditionally concentrated on

belonging to Djehuty, the owner of TT 11 – s h a r e s o m e co m m o n g e o g r a p h i c a l , chronological, technological, and social features.

They were all built in the Theban necropolis around 1470–1450 BCE, making them roughly contemporary, and their texts were written in cursive hieroglyphs on top of a creamy-white layer of stucco by scribes using rush pens.

Moreover, their owners stood at the highest

Photo: NKS Project / Lucía Díaz-Iglesias

View of part of the hill of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, with the location of the shaft belonging to TT 87 highlighted. In the background, the Ramesseum.

papyri and, to a lesser extent, on ostraca, but the NKS Project employs an as-yet underutilised source: the subterranean funerary chambers that belonged to members of the Theban court who lived during the first half of the 15th century BCE. The walls of these spaces were completely covered with formulae belonging to different funerary and cosmographic corpora (Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, the Book of Going Forth by Day / Book of the Dead, the Litany of Re, and the Amduat) that would enable their owners to reach the Beyond and survive there in optimal conditions. These texts were probably copied by those who wrote on papyri and ostraca using the same tools, but on a non-perishable vertical surface.

The three chosen chambers, plus a fourth example integrated in this study of scribes in the New Kingdom and in which the author has been working for the past six years – that

echelons of the administration, had close contact with the king or the vizier, enjoyed access to abundant material and human resources to erect their monuments, and were probably acquainted with different sorts of funerary and religious compositions, which were specially selected to accompany and protect them in their final resting places.

Despite these commonalities, the three casestudies also display distinctive individual features. The burial chamber of the vizier Weseramun in TT 61 is accessible through a shaft lowered into the courtyard close to the tomb’s façade. It is decorated with passages from the Litany of Re and the Amduat (image on the following page), being the only monument of a private individual in the New Kingdom that utilised funerary texts from the royal repertoire, specifically those that the reigning king – Thutmose III – used in KV 34.

EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY ISSUE NO 57 AUTUMN 2020

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Photo: NKS Project / Carmen Ruiz

Close-up photograph of the Amduat in the burial chamber of Weseramun (TT 61).

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The burial chamber of the steward of Weseramun, Amenemhat, can be accessed through a shaft opened in the tomb’s innermost room (TT 82). The decoration comprises spells from the Pyramid Texts, the Book of Going Forth by Day, and various mortuary liturgies.

As a member of the second-rank elite, Amenemhat could not secure the means to build his eternal dwelling by himself, but it is possible that he diverted some resources for his own benefit while supervising works in the tomb of the vizier. Finally, the burial chamber of Nakhtmin (TT 87) is situated at the bottom of a shaft and a corridor built within the courtyard of the tomb of his son, Menkheperraseneb (TT 79), which stands at a higher level up the hill. Its walls feature spells from the Coffin Texts and the Pyramid Texts, seemingly copied from an old manuscript that was already decayed – hence the lacunae dubbed in the texts as ‘found missing’. The example of Nakhtmin is quite exceptional, since it is one of the few cases in the f ield of tex tual transmission in ancient Egypt where the intermediate model (in the form of disposable ostraca) and the final product (the chamber walls) have been preserved, offering us a unique chance to track scribes at work.

The three burial chambers were visited during the late 19th and early 20th centuries by renowned figures of the discipline, such as Karl Richard Lepsius and Sir Robert Mond.

During the 1910s, the 1960s–70s, and

1970s–80s, they were excavated (or simply documented), studied, and published by teams of archaeologists and philologists led by Alan Gardiner, Norman de Garis Davies, Erik Hornung, Eberhard Dziobek, and Heike Guksch (née Heike Heye). However, the photographs included in their publications are too general, often only in black and white, and lack precise details, so that they are not valid tools with which to conduct an in-depth analysis of scribal hands, writing habits, idiosyncrasies and instruments. The absence of high-resolution and close-up images of such relevant material for the study of scribal culture during the New Kingdom was one of the reasons that prompted our fieldwork.

The NKS Project is currently composed of two epigraphers and a photographer, but it has benefitted from the advice of restorers and architects. In the immediate future, it aims to incorporate chemists, topographers and geologists in an interdisciplinary effor t to understand a textual artefact from as many perspectives as possible. During the first season of fieldwork, conducted in Luxor in 2019, we under took the initial photogr aphic documentation in the three chambers. In the 2020 season, work concentrated on TT 61 and TT 87 and consisted of new photographic shots that applied different techniques; the start of epigraphic study; reconditioning of the shafts’ mouths; and a conservation assessment of the chambers.

Photo: NKS Project / Lucía Díaz-Iglesias

SCRIBES AT WORK: DOCUMENTING THEBAN TOMBS 61, 82 AND 87

Left: detailed photographs are taken of all the surfaces in the burial chamber of Nakhtmin (TT 87).

Photos: NKS Project / José Galán

Above: the burial chamber of Nakhtmin (TT 87).

New, very high-resolution full-colour images, produced with modern digital cameras were generated during the two seasons. They included both general views of the chambers, walls, and sections thereof, and close-up photographs of individual signs, where the strokes of the rush pens can be seen and which will allow the reconstruction of how the scribes traced each sign and how often they needed to re-ink their pens (images above). Photogrammetry was used to create 3D models and orthographic photographs of the walls, which not only avoid distortions – both existing in the camera and in the burial chamber’s architectural surfaces – but also reflect their correct perspective. In 2020, different filters and digital treatments using Adobe Photoshop

and DStretch software were applied, in order to improve the quality of the images and to reveal information that is difficult to see with the naked eye (images on the following page, right). A set of infrared pictures were taken using a specific camera and another one with ultraviolet lighting, to reveal any hidden strokes or underpaintings, or to clarify details in areas of the decorative surface that were darkened by soot or partially blurred.

Epigraphic and palaeographic analysis began in 2020, making use of these digital images and the in-situ observation of the writing medium and the signs and non-linguistic marks left on it (image on the following page, left). Through the careful study of the layers of muna and gypsum, the layout of the texts, internal EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY ISSUE NO 57 AUTUMN 2020

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REGULAR PHOTOGRAPHY

characteristics of the signs (size, ductus, morphology, slant, etc), and features of the copying process (brush dippings, mistakes – in the form of added, omitted, changed, or transposed signs – corrections, insertions of hieratic graphemes, etc.), our objective is to understand how many scribes were involved in the decoration, how they worked, and how they were trained.

DSTRETCH YBG FILTER

Application of DStretch filters to a scene in the burial chamber of Weseramun (TT 61).

DSTRETCH YBK FILTER

Magnifying glasses are used for the observation of all material traces left when a sign is traced by the ancient scribe.

44

Photo: NKS Project / Carmen Ruiz

DSTRETCH YYE FILTER DSTRETCH YRE FILTER

Finally, steps were taken towards the preventive conservation of the structures and decorations. Outside the chambers, the mouth of the shaft of TT 87 was reconditioned by removing the largest limestone blocks and loose debris, building low retaining walls of mud bricks and stones, and installing a new metal platform, a diamond-shape grid, and a gate to replace the old fixed metal bars (image on the opposite page). We can thus guarantee the safety of the workers, prevent birds from entering the chamber, and stop debris from falling to the bottom of the shaft. Inside the chambers of TT 61 and TT 87, we undertook an assessment of the state of preservation of the decorated surfaces to determine if any cleaning and consolidation should be carried out, and to prepare a conservation plan to be implemented during upcoming seasons.

In the immediate future, the team intends t o g r ow t h r o u g h t h e a d d i t i o n of a topographer who will aid in georeferencing the photogrammetries and drawing precise

DSTRETCH LBK FILTER

Photo: NKS Project / Lucía Díaz-Iglesias

SCRIBES AT WORK: DOCUMENTING THEBAN TOMBS 61, 82 AND 87

plans, and of geologists who will study the quality of the bedrock and the composition of the preparation and writing layers. Finally, chemists will apply non-destructive analytical techniques (Raman spectroscopy) with the aid of portable equipment to determine how inks were prepared and what pigments and binding agents were used.

The in-depth analysis of the decorative programmes in these Theban burial chambers, plus that of Djehuty in TT 11, is a novel avenue from which to approach the identity of the tomb owners, since it can offer plenty of data

on their degree of knowledge of, and access to, various corpora of funerary and cosmographic literature. Moreover, the application of digital and archaeometric analyses to the material traces left during the writing process will shed new light on aspects that are now at the forefront of debates about scribal culture.

An anthropological, historical, and social approach to these funerary compositions will transcend a purely philological study and overcome the traditional division between archaeology and philology.

Below: reconditioning process of the entrance to the shaft of the burial chamber of Nakhtmin.

Photo: NKS Project / Carmen Ruiz

• Lucía Díaz-Iglesias Llanos is a postdoctoral researcher at the Spanish National Research Council. She is the director of the NKS project, in which Daniel Méndez-Rodríguez (epigrapher) and Carmen Ruiz Sánchez de León (photographer) currently participate. The project is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-105057GA-I00 / AEI / 10.13039 / 501100011033) and the Palarq Foundation. She is also deputy director of the Spanish Mission at Dra Abu el-Naga.

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Behold the falcon gods: new finds from Kom el-Hettan Since we last reported on the site in autumn 2017, Hourig Sourouzian and her team have continued conservation work at the funerary temple of Amenhotep III (1387–1348 BCE) at Kom el-Hettan (Thebes), known in ancient Egypt as ‘House of Millions of Years’. Among the most interesting finds are a monumental falcon head and the statue of a standing, falcon-headed god that may hint at the iconographic programme of the temple.

Right: head of a falconheaded alabaster statue, probably representing the god Sokar.

Once the largest structure of its kind, covering an area almost as large as the Karnak Great Temple precinct, the mor tuary temple of Amenhotep III began to deteriorate already in antiquity. Apart from the famous ‘Colossi of Memnon’ that once flanked the entrance to the First Pylon, few visible remains of the temple have survived into the modern period. For 20 years, the Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Projec t has been working at this site to preserve and restore what is left of this once magnificent monument.

Season summary 2018–20 Since the last report from the site, in EA 51 (autumn 2017), new inves tigations have been carried out and more monuments restored and returned to their original locations. Seasons took place in spring 2018, spring and autumn

46

2019, and spring 2020. A quick summary: monitoring of the Colossi of Memnon at the temple entrance has found the statues to be stable, with no signs of movement or tilting. It has, however, become necessary to repel increasing numbers of birds and regularly remove their droppings.

Despi te mul tiple investigations, not much information has come to light about the structure and position of the First Pylon behind the Colossi.

A trench dug this spring revealed remains of mud bricks within the pylon’s nor thern wing and evidence of white wash on its eastern façade.

At the Second and Third Pylons, cleaning, documentation, grouping and reassembling of t h e t h o u s a n d s of scattered fragments continued. They derive f r o m t h e colos s a l statues of Amenhotep III that stood here, made of quartzite or alaba s ter, and the decorated sandstone gates. Several inscribed

Photos: Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project

BEHOLD THE FALCON GODS: NEW FINDS FROM KOM EL-HETTAN

and decorated quartzite pieces could be fixed back on the colossi of the Second Pylon and their bases (image above left): a large piece of the right arm of the South Colossus was lifted and reset. New fragments were added to its base, decorated with personifications of foreign lands. It was possible to reconstruct a long panel s h ow ing no r t h e r n peoples, which is now ready to be fixed to the nor thern (left) side.

Work was also done on the pair of alabaster colossi at the Third Pylon: like a giant game of puzzle, these had partly been constructed from separate pieces slotting into each other – a remarkable technical achievement, as can be seen in the top right image . T he new l y assembled pieces were fixed with joins and recorded in 3D photography, their surfaces cleaned and consolidated, especially where traces of polychromy remain. The queen standing near the right leg of the colossus now again reveals the great skill of the sculptors and artists of the time (image centre; compare to EA 51, p.3). The northern alabaster colossus was also subject to

research and study. Protective structures around its magnificent head were temporarily removed to allow photogrammetric recording.

A team has been working on the granodiorite pieces from the large blocks that once formed the alabaster colossi’s monumental pedestals. Decorated with personifications of foreign lands, they bear multiple place names.

Six new blocks were added to the six brought back in 2006 from Karnak South (where they had been reused in Late Period) and two more that we had discovered earlier.

The appearance of the processional way from the Third Pylon to the Great Peristyle Cour t still remains unk nown, though evidence of sphinxes was recently found along the start of the processional way, i.e. at the back of the Third Pylon. From masses of very badly decayed limestone, partly submerged in groundwater and invaded by vegetation, we recovered one piece that suggested the face of a sphinx with royal head – an assumption confirmed the season after, when drying,

Above left: the South Colossus of the Second Pylon. Right: the right hand of the southern alabaster colossus at the Third Pylon.

Left: portrait of the queen standing by the right leg of the southern alabaster colossus, after cleaning.

EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY ISSUE NO 57 AUTUMN 2020

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Photos: Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project

Below: the head and chest of the northern monumental limestone sphinx at the Third Pylon, during restoration.

cleaning and consolidation clearly revealed the head of a sphinx with a nemes headdress, its chest decorated with stylised manes and inscribed with the names of Amenhotep III (image below). Further fragments of the sphinx were recovered in 2019, followed by parts of its southern companion in spring 2020, which are now awaiting conservation treatment while drying out.

More plinths were installed in the Peristyle Court and two new royal quartzite statues mounted, alongside royal heads and other pieces (image opposite page). Statues already in place were completed with additional fragments, some of them returning to the site from the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA)

Left: the waterlogged and overgrown find site of the southern limestone sphinx at the Third Pylon.

magazines in Gurna, others from the stores at Medinet Habu, by kind permission of the Permanent Committee and in cooperation with the Inspectorate and the Oriental Institute of Chicago. Among the ‘returnees’ is a stela of year 6 of Horemheb (image above right), bearing in its lunette an offering scene to Ptah, Sekhmet, and the deified Amenhotep III, with a text describing the restoration of the ramp leading to the great court. It was discovered broken in six large pieces and a few smaller ones at the entrance of the Peristyle Court

48

during excavations by the Swiss Institute in 1970, which also published the object in 1981.

Another, larger stela in granodiorite, found earlier by the Inspectorate and published in cooperation with our team members, was also brought back and placed in the Peristyle Court.

At the same time, conservation work was carried out there on the two large quartzite stelae already standing, with undecorated pieces fixed to the back of the southern stela, while the northern one was complemented by an inscribed fragment from the Medinet Habu stores. Also from Medinet Habu, we received a fragment of the left arm of the western colossus of Amenhotep III, which we had raised at the North Gate.

Above: stela of year 6 of Horemheb, newly restored and returned to the temple.

Excavations in and around the Peristyle Court continued, as did the construction of the lower par ts of the wall that once surrounded the Great Court, respectively of the wall separating the Cour t from the Hypostyle Hall. In the west portico and the west gateway of the Peristyle Court, deposits of statues discovered between crushed sandstone remains provided new evidence of the earthquake of 1200 BCE. Most of the fragments derived from representations of Sekhmet, with the exception of a ver y

BEHOLD THE FALCON GODS: NEW FINDS FROM KOM EL-HETTAN

beautifully carved granodiorite torso of Ptah (1.30 m high), obviously placed there by earlier excavators to preserve it from looters. Our project enjoys the cooperation of the Armenian Academy of Sciences for archaeo-seismic and archaeological investigations and of the Theban Harbours and Waterscape Project.

As part of ongoing site management, we continued with preparations to open parts of the temple to visitors and installed more security cameras. Donors have purchased a piece of land to be offered to the temple through the Minis tr y of Tour ism and Antiquities. In the SCA magazines at Gurna, in tandem with continuing documentation and restoration work, we started an extensive

Years, we ran an exhibition in the Bibliotheca Alexandr ina in Januar y 2018 and the Mummification Museum Luxor during April / May 2019, dedicated to Rainer Stadelmann, co-director and initiator of this project, who joined the stars in January 2019.

Yet more Sekhmet statues surfaced at the south-west corner of the Peristyle Court, surrounding a colossal alabaster head of a falcon wearing an atef crown, with two lower par ts of maat feathers remaining (find no.

34964). It probably belongs to a statue of Sokar, the second major deity venerated in the temple (see image p. 46). Earlier we had also discovered here a small head of a falcon in hard limestone (find no. 156).

Left: a computergenerated image showing the eventual layout of the restored Peristyle Court.

Sekhmet Project together with the Gurna Inspectorate, the Scientific Committee of the Theban Magazines and the Musei Vaticani. Its aim is the documentation of all statues of Sekhmet in a database, in which we are joined by the Museo Egizio Turin, and the Mut Temple Projects. The data will be available to the international community and the project remains open to further participants. A second symposium on Sekhmet is planned for the near future. To celebrate 20 years of work at Kom el-Hettan in the Temple of Millions of

Below left: the Peristyle Court with newly lifted quartzite statues of Amenhotep III in the northern portico.

Above: head of a small royal statue of Amenhotep III in greywacke.

The falcon gods of Kom el-Hettan In the Hypostyle Hall, within the mixed rubble of various refills of 19th- and 20th-century excavations, we uncovered foundation blocks of the columns in the northern half, alongside surrounding brick structures that may have been scaffoldings during the elevation of the columns.

More statues of Sekhmet were found buried, including a standing one, so far the tallest recorded in the temple at 2.14 m, even without sun disc and the feet. There was also a royal head in greywacke, showing on smaller scale a EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY ISSUE NO 57 AUTUMN 2020

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Photos of the Munich statue: Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst, Gl. WAF 22 / Marianne Franke

Photo: Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project

Left: statue of a falconheaded god discovered in the Hypostyle Hall.

Centre and right: statue of a similar falconheaded deity in Munich.

Below: representation of jackal-headed Souls and falcon-headed gods Montu and Sokar leading King Amenhotep I before Amon-Re, Karnak.

Photo: CFEETK / H. Sourouzian

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new portrait of Amenhotep III wearing the nemes head-dress (image previous page; find No. 36444). The highlight of the autumn season, however, was the discovery of a standing, falconheaded deity (image above left). The statue is made of granodiorite, measuring 108.5 cm in height (find no. 35803). Its lower part is missing and its arms broken. The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities chose the statue to represent Horus in the newly founded Museum in Hurghada, which was inaugurated in February 2020. As the statue’s back pillar is not inscribed, the deity cannot be identified exactly. Horus is certainly the most likely, yet there are other possibilities that may be considered, based on two other, similar statues that represent possibly the same deity: One is of Theban origin and comes most likely from the temple of Millions of Years of Amenhotep III, as it was found stored among

other statues presumably from that site, most of them Sekhmet. It has just been selected by the authorities to be put on display in the National Museum for Egyptian Civilisation (no.

184). Like our recently discovered specimen, it is also falcon-headed, feetless, with arms broken, the back pillar uninscribed. The beak has been restored in antiquity, leaving a slot on the face, which is the only difference from the two others.

The second is today in Munich at the Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst (SMÄK) (inv. Gl. WAF 22) (images above, centre and right). It was discovered in Rome, in 1636, in the ruins of the Isis temple, which means the statue was brought there in antiquity. The future king of Bavaria, Ludwig I., then still crown prince, acquired it for the Glyptothek in 1814. Beside its striking similarity with the two others, this statue has the advantage of having its arms and

BEHOLD THE FALCON GODS: NEW FINDS FROM KOM EL-HETTAN

hands preserved (its feet and base belong to another statue and were added in Rome). The left hand, expectedly, grasps the ankh, symbol of life and attribute of gods. Its right hand, however, is highly unusual, shown flat open, the back of the hand to the viewer, an exceptional feature in the iconography of divine sculpture.

Representations of falcon or falcon-headed deities are attested throughout Egyptian history since predynastic times. Despite the systematic destruction of divine images in the Amarna Period, many examples also survive from the reign of Amenhotep III. Among the most original of that period are three-dimensional representations of the Souls of Pe and Nekhen, the divine ancestors of the ancient Egyptian kings. They are shown, respectively, falcon- and jackal-headed, kneeling, one arm raised, the other on the chest, fists clenched. Found in Karnak, they have been reconstructed in the Egyptian Museum Cairo (JE 41210 and 41211). A third example, with a falcon head, stored in the SCA magazines at Gurna (Nr. 274), derives most likely from Kom el-Hettan.

At Old and Middle Kingdom royal funerary complexes, these gods are found standing on both sides of the false door. They appear more frequently in New Kingdom divine and royal temples and tombs, kneeling, seated or standing, present in birth scenes, coronation ceremonies, and processions of royal and divine barks or emblems, like the Osirian symbol in Abydos. The three falcon-headed statues mentioned above could be representing the Souls of Buto in standing attitude.

The stance of one hand holding the symbol of life, the other with open palm might be a three-dimensional representation of the gods leading the king before the supreme deity, simultaneously holding his hand and granting

him life. Just such a scene dating to the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty decorates a large gate lintel of Amenhotep I (1526–1506 BCE) in Karnak with the jackal-headed Souls of Nekhen and the falcon-headed gods Montu and Sokar (image on the previous page, bottom). The latter are soon to be replaced by the falcon headed Souls of Buto, in similar depictions, which show Thutmose III (1479– 1425 BCE), also in Karnak, and Amenhotep III in Luxor being carried in a palanquin by these Souls. In temples of the following dynasties in Thebes and Abydos, the falcon- and jackalheaded gods multiplied, towing the royal bark or leading the king to the supreme deity.

This suggests the possibility of such a scene dramatically created in the round at the temple of Millions of Years of Amenhotep III, showing the deities as they escort the king in his ascent to heaven Further reading For a catalogue of divine statues in the reign of Amenhotep III: B. Bryan (1997), ‘The statue program for the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III’, in: S. Quirke (ed.), The Temple in Ancient Egypt. British Museum Press.

For the statue in Munich and relations between Rome and Egypt: S. Schoske (1989), ‘Ägypten und Rom: Die Kunst des Nillandes in der antiken Metropole’, Kunst und Antiquitäten 3.

For the statue in Munich: A. Grimm (2001), Münchens Barberinischer ‘Osiris’: Metamorphosen einer Götterfigur, R.A.M.S.E.S. 3.

For the stela of year 6 of Horemheb: G. Haeny, L. Habachi, H. Ricke (1981), Untersuchungen im Totentempel Amenophis’ III, Beiträge Bf 11.

For representations of the Souls of Pe and Nekhen, with bibliography: A. Oppenheim (2008), Aspects of the Pyramid Temple of Senwosret III at Dahshur: The Pharaoh and Deities (available online in ProQuest) C. Karlshausen (2009), L’iconographie de la barque processionnelle divine en Egypte au Nouvel Empire (OLA 182).

• The project is supported by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and the German Archaeological Institute, whom of

whom are due kind thanks. We are grateful to the Association des Amis des Colosses de Memnon, Fonds Khéops pour l’Archéologie: with Christian Louboutin, Farida and Henri Seydoux, Memnon Verein, World Monuments Fund, Stephanie and Bernhard Buchner, Horus Egyptology Society and Chesterfield Society for the Study of Ancient Egypt, for their invaluable support. The team members of this project were Rainer Stadelmann†, Nairy Hampikian, Carmen Lopez Roa, Armine Hayrapetyan, Alessia Amenta, Angus Graham, Maria Antonia Moreno, Miguel Angel Lopez Marcos, Elena Mora Ruedas, Benjamin Blaisot, Emiliano Ricci, Mario Capozzo, Manuel Abelleria Duran, Abdulrahman Nusair, Ahmed Abdelgawad, Aysam Magdy, Matta Rifaat Adly, Mohamed El-Azab (Abuhakim), Mohamed Abdelbaset (Baree), Hassan Demerdash, Tayeb Hasan, Ali Hassan, Sayed Haggag (Lambo), Antoine Chéné, Odile Chéné, Pauline Calassou, Mélanie Crescent, Linda Chapon, Kasumitsu Takahashi, Cinderella Fayez, Miret Mohamed, Salma Ibrahim, Mariam Taha, Renaud Pietri, Ludovic Thibout, Daniela Galazzo, Lesley Payne, Hayley Goddard, Jayme Reichert, Hana Hussein, Zahra Yussef, Asmaa Hussein, Mohamed Gemsan (Bell), Sahar Mahmud and Sayed El-Tayeb Abdel-Rassoul, with Rais Mohamed Ali El-Ghassab, Hassan Youssef and Youssef Said heading an average of 300 workmen per season. For photo permission and information, the author would like to thank the Permanent Committee of the SCA, the Franco-Egyptian Center in Karnak (CFEETK), Sylvia Schoske and Alfred Grimm in Munich.

EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY ISSUE NO 57 AUTUMN 2020

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Chasing shadows: graffiti in the Eighth Pylon at Karnak Page 4

The discovery of a Roman catacomb at North Saqqara Page 10

Behold the falcon gods: finds from Kom el-Hettan Page 46