Egyptian Archaeology 58

This two week tour, staying in top hotels throughout, begins in Cairo with in-depth tours of Saqqara,The Giza Plateau and Old Cairo.We fly to the Southern City of Aswan with time to visit Abu Simbel, Philae and Qubbet el Hawa. Driving to Luxor we stop at the vast Temple at Edfu and enter the striking tombs at el Kab.

Dr Campbell Price is Curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum, one of the UK’s largest Egyptological collections. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the university of Liverpool, and has undertaken fieldwork in Egypt at Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham, Saqqara and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

We continue our journey in Luxor with five nights at the elegant and nostalgic Old Winter Palace, Garden Pavilion Wing. Visits include the Valley of The Kings, the Ramesseum, the Temple of Hatshepsut, Deir el Medina, the Colossi, Luxor and Karnak Temples, and much more. We even take time to relax and enjoy a lunch from The Old Winter Palace while sailing the Nile on a traditional Felucca.

is the perfect tour for those wanting to discover the most spectacular sites in Egypt

Editor Jan Geisbusch

Editorial

With this issue, EA is taking a new departure: as the Egypt Exploration Society increasingly seeks to address its colonial legacy, we aim to reflect that direction in the contents and perspectives of the magazine, too.

The guiding principle is simple enough: give more room to Egyptian voices. For this reason, I will say little more about the new direction myself, as the thinking behind it is explained much better in the guest editorial led by Heba Abd el-Gawad and in the article on Egypt’s dispersed heritage co-authored with Alice Stevenson.

More room for Egyptian voices also inspired us to experiment with a different format: comics. The centrefold has been taken over by the Alexandria-based cartoonist Nasser Junior, with his very own view on his country’s heritage. I look forward to feature more of his work and that of other graphic artists in future issues.

Missing from EA this time round is the Digging Diary – not as a result of editorial changes, but a reflection of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has stopped the work of many missions.

Our other contributions this spring range from the Delta to Sudan: Aiman Ashmawy summarises the discovery of a cemetery that throws some light on the early history of Tell Basta; together with his colleagues Simon Connor and Dietrich Raue he also gives an update on ongoing work at Matariya (Heliopolis); Martin Bommas connects a liturgical innovation in the cult of Osiris to a tiny chapel at Karnak and a king of the late Third Intermediate Period, Taharqa; across the river from Karnak, the tomb of Ramesses III (KV 11) is the focus of conservation efforts undertaken by the team around Willem Hovestreydt, Lea Rees and Anke Weber; finally, we meet Taharqa again, this time in Sudan, where Kathryn Howley has been leading work at the Amun temple at Sanam,

fourth Nile cataract.

see

Jan Geisbusch

A wall mural by Moataz at Abdeen Square, Cairo, showcasing Egypt’s intertwined ancient and recent past through the famous Egyptian singer Um-Kalthoum (left) and Tutankhamun and Nefertiti (right).

Repositioning EA Guest editorial

Is Egyptian Archaeology magazine part of the Egypt Exploration Society’s colonial practices and legacies? If yes, what role can it play now that the EES is starting to unpack its colonial practices, confront its legacies, and initiate a long overdue honest and healing dialogue with Egyptian and Sudanese communities? In this guest editorial, we were generously invited by EA to reflect on these questions and find some answers.

By Heba Abd el-Gawad, Anna Garnett and Campbell Price.

Right: view of the temple of Sanam in Sudan, located near the fourth Nile cataract. Sanam (ancient Napata), was the religious and administrative centre of the Nubian state in the mid-first millennium BCE.

This approach is timely as EA revisits its position within the Society’s current initiative of unpacking colonialism. Based on our recent independent experience with permanent gallery redisplays at our respective museums, and our team experience with the ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’ project, we sought to offer this ‘repositioning’ roadmap to help re-centre past and present Egyptian and Sudanese people in the narrative. This is not intended to be a topdown best-practice model; rather, we strongly encourage EA, and the EES, to openly critique and discuss our proposals with local source communities, the EES membership, and their professional and public international audiences.

Living archaeology

The Egypt Exploration Society has long recognised the importance of settlement

archaeology for our understanding of lived experience: whether through its publication of the minutiae of archaeological fieldwork, its financial support and advocacy for settlement fieldwork in Egypt or through its educational activities for students and the public. The Society’s periodicals promote a crossdisciplinary approach to the subject of Egyptology through their wide-ranging thematic scope, but we want to take this further. More can – and should – be done to shed light on the lived experience of both ancient and modern Egyptian communities (image above), and Egyptian Archaeology will be the starting point for this. By moving away from reductively ‘traditional’ Egyptological subjects and closer towards more diverse themes that provide a critical focus on the human story of Egypt over millennia, Egyptian Archaeology will strive to

Photo: Heba Abd el-Gawad

offer a more transparent, balanced viewpoint of the field of Egyptology. Central to this approach is the meaningful inclusion of Egyptian voices, both modern and ancient, and greater input from Egyptian scholars. Through this broader remit, EA readers will now have more of an opportunity to learn from Egyptian authors about the heritage of their own country.

Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology

It is also important to recognise that Egypt has never existed in isolation. The Nile Valley has been a corridor for ideas, people and goods for millennia, and therefore the histories and cultures of Sudan and Egypt in particular have long been intertwined. To reflect this reality, it is vital that Egyptian Archaeology’s new broader remit explores this complex relationship moving forward. Ongoing archaeological fieldwork projects in Sudan both directed and supported by the Society continue to shed light on this fascinating connection, building on the legacies of past EES campaigns in Sudan in the late 20th century (image below). This work reflects a positive extension to the Society’s remit to encompass the study and promotion of the Sudanese Nile Valley, alongside ancient and modern communities in Egypt and Sudan. A commitment to the inclusion of Sudanese research in EA, including by Sudanese scholars, will ensure that this publication reflects more effectively the diverse cultures of the Nile Valley. A broader thematic scope will offer readers more holistic interpretations of the ancient and modern cultures of both Egypt and Sudan, which will significantly benefit our understanding of the history of the Nile Valley as a whole. The articles by Kathryn Howley and Martin Bommas in this issue explore some of the issues raised here.

see also the article by Heba Abd el-Gawad and Alice Stevenson in the present issue).

While EA’s publishing of new results remains vitally important, the Society and its publications must be critically aware of the historical circumstances of previous excavations and of the practical needs of today. Publishing a periodical – whether in print or, increasingly, in digital form – remains a key communication tool for the Society and those undertaking research with its support when we address both members and a broader scholarly, interested community.

Amplifying ethical standpoints

Given its relatively wide and more public readership, the EA has a unique and critical responsibility of not only voicing the Society’s mission but equally its values and ethical standpoints. This is, currently, especially important as the Society is gradually unpacking its colonial practices, and their past and present legacies. The Society’s, and subsequently EA’s, ethical commitment and accountability should be towards people of Egypt and Sudan past and present, the EES members and donors, the archaeological practices and policies both in the field and in the museum, and finally towards wider international publics. EA is the Society’s window to reflect on and renew its ethical promises to its local – in Egypt, Sudan, and the UK – and global public and professional beneficiaries and audiences.

Confronting colonialism

A commitment to unpacking colonialism

Like some other long-lived institutions in existence today, the EES has started to take seriously its responsibility to address its past (image next page, top). It is no coincidence that the Society was founded in the same year – 1882 – that Egypt was invaded by Britain. European interference in Egyptian and Sudanese affairs has resulted in a deep and ongoing legacy. The work of the Society has in the past benefited from the colonial apparatus in many ways and these conditions influenced the trajectories of objects – through complex networks of permissions, personalities and patronage – from the field to museums (on this subject,

In this respect, EA can be a platform through which to expose and emphasise in a critical, transparent manner the colonial injustices and exploitations as committed by the Society’s founders, excavators and collectors. There is a public misperception that bringing this history to light is intended to induce guilt in and shame modern successors of colonial empires. EA, as a representative of the custodians of the EES, can clarify and confirm that, contrary to this misconception, the Society has a responsibility to provide full and honest accounts of its history and its practices. This is a public duty. For example, any reference to the contribution of EES founders, excavators and collectors should be balanced by emphasising their colonial (mis)practices, be they documented instances of racism, white supremacy or exploitation.

Photo: Sanam Temple Project

Centring local communities

In the same light, EA should actively recognise the emotional, economic, political and cultural impact of the Society’s colonial practices upon past and present Egyptian and Sudanese communities. This can be done by respecting their local needs and expectations and being responsible for amplifying their voices, visibility and validity. One way to achieve this is by openly acknowledging and crediting each Egyptian and Sudanese mind and hand that has contributed to our understanding in its wider sense, funded or supported by the EES – in both the field and the museum. Similarly, the role of Egyptian and Sudanese individuals in archaeological knowledge production as well as its scale and scope should be named and defined based on their personal preference, rather than passively conceding and recycling the argument of ‘this is how things have always been done’.

by its monuments and artefacts – of any period – is to not only misrepresent but to disenfranchise, displace and discriminate against their living communities. EA should fully reflect Egyptian and Sudanese tangible and intangible heritage: from its pyramids to its modern clothes-lines and shop window displays, and from its monasteries and mosques to the many abandoned chairs in streets and alleys, representing Egypt’s and Sudan’s continuity and change (image below).

A holistic view of Egyptian and Sudanese heritage

The Society’s earlier fieldwork – consciously applying the ‘exploration’ aspect of its name – was undoubtedly conducted to the exclusion of local audiences in Egypt and Sudan, a situation which has more recently been transformed in varied and inspiring ways. Yet previous fieldwork, and its interpretation and presentation, also compounded certain Egyptological judgements of chronological value. Post-pharaonic material has at best been overlooked, at worst suffered incalculable losses, in favour of objects, features and entire sites that date to the Dynastic age. Egyptian Archaeology aims to continue its inclusion of material from the Roman, Christian and Islamic periods to give a broader and more holistic view of Egyptian and Sudanese heritage.

This view should reflect living Egyptian and Sudanese people and places as seen and felt by local communities, both then and now. The Society needs to confront its past, and perhaps present, colonial practices and how it has (un)consciously widely contributed to the current Western imagined construct of ‘ancient Egypt and Sudan’. In this construct, the Nile Valley is a concept ‘frozen in time and place’ rather than a living, multi-layered and multi-ethnic culture where the present and the past are closely intertwined. These layers cannot and should not be divided into isolated historical periods with rigid clear-cut divisions of where the past ends and the present begins. This Western (de)construction is a biased – and to some extent, racist – view of Egyptian and Sudanese cultural continuity and change, one that the platform of EA should be used to challenge.

Heritage is a highly personal and unique experience that means different things to different people at the same, or different, places and times. To focus solely on Egypt’s or Sudan’s tangible heritage as captured

Left: The young members of Haytham el-Sayed’s mobile story-telling truck initiative in the Sharqiya governorate during a workshop on ‘Unpacking British archaeological colonialism’, organised by the ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’ Project.

• Heba Abd el-Gawad is the postdoctoral researcher for the AHRC-funded project ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’. She specialises in the history of Egyptian archaeology, focusing on the collection and distribution of archaeological finds from Egypt, their perception and representation. Anna Garnett is Curator of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool. She has over a decade of fieldwork experience in Egypt and Sudan. Campbell Price is Curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum and Vice-Chair of the EES Board of Trustees.

Below: a copper maker’s shop window, displaying his personal family inheritance and showcasing the history of Egypt’s multi-layered people, places, flora and fauna.

Photo: Haytham el-Sayed and ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’ Project, with families’ and children’s permission.

Photo: Heba Abd el-Gawad with the shop owner’s permission

Who owns ancient Egypt?

Egypt’s dispersed heritage

Rivalled only by dinosaurs, coming face to face with the ancient Egyptians is one of the most popular encounters people around the world experience during a typical museum visit. But just how did Egyptian objects get to be dispersed this far and wide? The project ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’, building on the the findings of ‘Artefacts of Excavation: British Archaeological Fieldwork Between 1880–1980’, provides some of the answers, write Heba Abd el-Gawad and Alice Stevenson.

‘Artefacts of Excavation: British Archaeological Fieldwork Between 1880–1980’ was a threeyear, AHRC-funded collaborative project led by Dr Alice Stevenson at UCL and Prof John Baines at the University of Oxford. It documented hundreds of thousands of Egyptian artefacts that were exported to nearly 350 institutions across 27 countries in five continents by British-led fieldwork in Egypt. In the UK alone, some 200 museums and institutions today host Egyptian collections, putting ancient Egypt at the heart of nearly every British town and its local story. This is the ancient Egypt that captivates children and adults today.

Rarely, however, does a short museum label tell us how or why these artefacts travelled all the way from Egypt and its colonial context. And nowhere do we hear of how Egyptian communities, historically and in the present day, feel about having their heritage extracted and exported globally. Even today, as Western museums are increasingly urged to confront the colonial histories behind their collections, ancient Egypt, and wider Middle Eastern collections, remain a ‘blind spot’ in decolonisation efforts. This is, perhaps, because the Egypt we see in museums is itself a Western construct, a concept frozen in time and place rather than a living society buzzing with continuity and change. It is almost

exclusively ‘pharaonic’, orphaned physically and intellectually from modern Egyptian communities who continue to draw meaning from and have emotional engagements with the histories, monuments and antiquities they live amongst.

The ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’ project builds upon the findings of ‘Artefacts of Excavation’ and also incorporates Heba Abd el-Gawad’s research into Egyptian perceptions and representations of ancient Egypt on social

‘Egypt, Past and Present in Dialogue’, held at the National Museum of Scotland in February 2020. The event speakers, from left to right: Alice Stevenson, Heba Abd el-Gawad, Margaret Maitland and Samira Ahmed.

Photo: Alice Stevenson

Moira Adel is a Cairobased graphic designer and illustrator.

media. It was one of her key observations that posts written in Arabic by Egyptians on Western museums’ social media accounts were almost always left unanswered by those museums. These were often deeply emotional responses to seeing Egyptian artefacts displayed outside Egypt, regardless of whether they had been legally exported or donated. Some were proud to see Egypt represented internationally, others were angry that Egypt’s heritage was being exploited, many held more ambivalent attitudes. New ways of acknowledging, sharing and opening dialogue with this diversity of sentiments is long overdue.

‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’: Re-centring Egypt

To confront the colonial construction of ancient Egypt within British museums the project, from the very outset, has been codeveloped with a group of Egyptian visual and comic artists, storytellers, community educators and enterprises. We have additionally worked in partnership with the Egypt Exploration Society and five British museums, including the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, Liverpool World Museum, Manchester Museum, the National Museums Scotland, and the Horniman Museum and Gardens. The collections of these institutions form the raw materials for the project’s outputs. The Egyptian artists we have partnered with include Moira Adel (below), Rania elHelw, Mina Nasr, Nasser Junior (right), El3osba (John Maher, Maged Raafat, Ahmed Raafat) and Deena Mohammed. Using the findings of ‘Artefacts of Excavation’ to serve their local community needs, the activities have been designed by Egyptian

educators and community coordinators at Educate Me and Tawasol. Both are non-profit community schools providing education and incomegeneration opportunities through teaching and traditional crafts for two economically deprived neighbourhoods, in Talbeya, Giza, and Ezbet Kharallah, Cairo. The outputs from these

groups take a variety of forms, such as printed comic books, cartoon strips for social media, school resources in the form of card games, infographics tracing the journeys of objects, and storytelling performances. All are rooted in Egyptian story-telling traditions, cultural idioms and language in order to make the colonial histories en-tangled with the export of Egyptian artefacts more transparent within Egypt, to open them up to critique and to bring Egyptian expressions to their interpretation in British museums.

Our choice of Egyptian partners was guided by a commitment to social justice and inclusion. All of our artists are renowned for using their art to fight social stigma, give voice to vulnerable groups and challenge Western stereotypes. For example, Deena Mohammed created Qahera, a bilingual English / Arabic webcomic starring a female, visibly Muslim, Egyptian superheroine who tackles issues such as Islamophobia and misogyny. Meanwhile,

each one of El3osba’s (‘The League’) six Egyptian super-heroes embodies a different aspect of modern Egyptian culture. They challenge Western stereotypes and tell stories focusing on contemporary issues such as corruption. Our concern for inclusion is equally reflected in our choice of outputs seeking to ensure that what we produce is accessible for multiple literacy and social levels within Egypt. In these small ways, dispersed Egyptian collections might begin to not only engage and better represent Egyptian publics, but actively benefit them too.

Image: Moira Adel

Photo: Mohammed Nasser

Left: Nasser Junior is a comic artist and illustrator based in Alexandria.

The outputs developed in Egypt will be shared with the education, programming and curatorial departments of our five British partner museums with the intention that they form a basis on which to transform how ancient and modern Egypt is talked about and used within the museum, not just in displays but through a wide range of museum activities.

buried. The activity on street walls was matched by dialogue on the digital walls of social media, with female artists taking the lead on topics that have been gaining new ground for Egyptian female rights movements. In this respect, we felt that any attempt to capture Egyptian sentiments of loss, self-defeat or humiliation that removal of heritage abroad has created would

Left and above: Moira Adel’s take on the displacement of artefacts from Egypt, based on EES archive image DB.NEG.05-06.014 (EES excavations at Deir el-Bahari, 1893–1905).

This will, hopefully, not only challenge some of the Islamophobia and stereotypes associated with modern Egypt, but can amplify the voice, visibility and validity of modern Egyptians within Western museums.

Visual identities

Following the 2011 revolution, new opportunities emerged for female street art. What was once taboo became widely discussed as female graffitists took to Cairo’s walls to protest a range of issues, including sexual harassment. The sincerity and simplicity of their expressions made it not only accessible but brutally honest, bringing to the surface what conservative society usually prefers to remain

be incomplete unless expressed by a female Egyptian artist. We worked with Moira Adel, an upcoming visual artist and graphic designer, to bring these emotions to the digital surface. Moira has been using social media to actively protest male and female gender struggles, with a focus on discrimination in social expectations. Moira produced six visual identities for the project in response to the documentation of excavation, collection, distribution and display of artefacts held in the EES archives. These visual identities, or ‘sentiments’, capture how she perceives artefact extraction and export, and its impact on artefacts’ interpretation. Moira used two methods: first, she reimagined an archival photograph of an excavated object (images above). Second, she mixed ancient Egyptian motifs with modern symbols of travel (images following page). Moira, as with many Egyptian responses on social media, identifies Egyptian artefacts abroad as displaced individuals. They are forced outside of Egypt against their will, reflected in her art by the cut-mark symbols surrounding the artefact. She contends that only by engaging with modern Egyptians can

Images: Moira Adel and ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’ Project

Telling stories of displacement: ancient Egyptian motifs mixed with modern symbols of travel.

the displaced artefacts be recontextualised and brought to life. By mixing ancient and modern motifs, Moira further reveals the connection between extracted artefacts and the Egyptian soil (images below). Using the lotus flower, for instance, she vividly depicts how exporting ancient Egyptian artefacts severs them from their roots to the land. These are roots they share with modern Egyptians whose connection with the landscape forms a crucial and emotional part of identity today. A plant disconnected from its roots is a dead plant, as are Egyptian artefacts when taken out of Egypt. In another set of motifs Moira chose the rays of the sun god Aten directed upwards throughout the globe to capture the wide scale and scope of dispersal of Egyptian artefacts through Britishled excavations.

communication relevant to wider Egyptian concerns, relatable to Egyptian sensibilities and humour, and responsive to both local and global events. The talented cartoonist and comic artist Nasser Junior helped us to effectively realise these ambitions.

For the last five years, Nasser has been using social media to share his sketches, building in the process a large fan-base. The bi-weekly comic series ‘Nasser, Heba, and Our Dispersed Heritage’ narrates the backstage dialogue between Nasser and Heba and the adventures of Egypt’s dispersed heritage in the UK. Each comic is based on archival images and objects from the EES and our British museum partners. Using Egypt’s sense of humour, the comics cover some of Egyptology’s most heated debates, from dispersal to the display of human remains, and from destruction of heritage to Petrie’s eugenicist legacy (images right). The latter exemplifies the many subtexts that the comics address. The subject in this comic is Flinders Petrie, most often celebrated as a founding father of Egyptology, but less often acknowledged as a eugenicist. To make its point on how to appraise the legacies of historic figures, the comic drew from Egyptian debates concerning the legacy of former President Hosni Mubarak following his death in February 2020. Mubarak’s passing prompted mixed emotions and these tensions were encapsulated in a common Egyptian meme at the time; ‘some things are in his favour, some things are against’. This provided the punchline to the comic, in which Heba is shown introducing Petrie to Nasser as someone who had accomplished important work on ‘our heritage’ to which Petrie responds, ‘You mean our heritage!’, a reference to the appropriation of Egypt within Western narratives and the exclusion of Egyptians. Heba’s response to Petrie, ‘some things are in his favour, some things are against’, is presented as an Egyptian solution for how to evaluate such situations.

Egyptian-British dialogue

Online comics

With nearly 42 million users across most of Egyptian society, Egypt has a strong presence on social-media platforms. Social media has therefore been our gateway to opening dialogue with Egyptian communities. From the outset, we sought to make our methods of

Returning to the UK, the project aims to initiate a reciprocal dialogue between Egyptian and British publics. One example was a public discussion hosted by our partner in Edinburgh, the National Museums Scotland (NMS), featuring project researchers Alice Stevenson and Heba Abd el-Gawad, together with Margaret Maitland (NMS, Principal Curator

Images:

of the Ancient Mediterranean) and the writer and broadcaster Samira Ahmed. The event opened with presentations on the project’s motives and outputs, and NMS museum efforts to increase and improve the representation of modern Egypt within its galleries. Encouraging public input, the discussions that followed touched on the position of ancient Egypt within British school curricula and imagination, as well as exploring why and how Egypt’s image could be recontextualised through views and voices of modern Egyptians in the UK and Egypt. You can listen to a podcast of the event on the ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’ project web page on the NMS website.

• ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’ is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and based out of UCL’s Institute of Archaeology. Heba Abd el-Gawad is the postdoctoral researcher for the AHRC-funded project ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’. She specialises in the history of Egyptian archaeology with a focus on the collection and distribution of archaeological finds from Egypt and their perception and representation. Alice Stevenson is Associate Professor in Museum Studies at University College London. Her research interests include the history of museums and collections of archaeology, anthropology and Egyptology, museum archaeology, and museums and source communities.

Left: clippings from the comic series ‘Nasser, Heba and Our Dispersed Heritage’ by Nasser Junior and Heba Abd el-Gawad (see pp. 22–23).

Top right: bomb damage at Liverpool Museum, 1941.

Above right: Petrie and his collection – today the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology – at University College London in the 1920s.

you notice the progress here in England!

mean our heritage!

Photo: National Museums Liverpool, World Museum (16.11.06.403)

Photo: Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology

View of Area 251 in September 2019, with the pumping system allowing us to excavate 2-m deep trenches west of the large wall.

A brewery, a cemetery and monumental walls 3,000 years of occupation at the heart of Heliopolis

The ancient Heliopolis, at the north-eastern periphery of modernday Cairo and today largely built over, is one of the most significant archaeological sites in Egypt. It served as the centre for the worship of the sun from the Old Kingdom to the Late Period, making it a leading cultural and religious centre. Since 2012, an Egyptian-German joint mission has been working here, and EA has repeatedly reported on its ongoing activities. In this latest instalment, field directors

Aiman Ashmawy and Simon Connor, together with Dietrich Raue, summarise the findings of the 2019 seasons.

The spring and autumn 2019 seasons at Heliopolis were partly devoted to a rescue excavation in the central part of Matariya’s archaeological grounds, Area [251]. This area is located some 190 m south of the temple of Amun and Mut that was built by Ramesses II [Area 248], 230 m south-east of the Ramesside temple, in front of which Psamtik I’s and Ramesses II’s colossi were found, and 430 m west of Senusret I’s obelisk.

The excavated area covers approximately 825 sqm. An elaborate system of pumping allowed us to dig 2 m below the groundwater, i.e. approximately 1 m above the natural gezira, and to excavate, while staying almost dry, into the predynastic layers of occupation.

The main architectural feature of the investigated area is a large north-south oriented mud-brick wall, which was built in two phases (mid-Eighteenth and Twenty-sixth

Photo: S. Connor

Left: map of the archaeological area of the city of Heliopolis.

The excavated area is highlighted red.

Bottom left: map of the excavated area.

Dynasties, c. 1450 BCE and 664–525 BCE, respectively). The upper levels of the archaeological ground were poorly preserved and no traces have remained of occupations later than the 5th century BCE.

The western side of the large wall, however, has undergone several phases of occupation, testifying to intense activities of various kinds from the Predynastic Period to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. This article presents these phases in their chronological order.

1. A predynastic brewery

The deep trenches dug west of the massive wall revealed a sedentary predynastic occupation, with several straight mud-brick walls, fire pits and a brewery installation. The 1-m-thick layer of predynastic occupation

brought to light more than 2,000 lithic tools and debitage material, as well as pottery belonging to the Buto-Maadi Lower-Egyptian culture, with only about 10 percent represented by Naqada imports.

Late Ramesside debris directly overlay this predynastic layer, suggesting that the whole area was levelled during the New Kingdom and that all traces of previous activity on the site have been removed. Nevertheless, all the upper levels contain a significant proportion of Old, Middle and early New Kingdom pottery, mixed with later pottery, indicating occupation in this sector, even if this is no longer visible in the stratigraphy.

2. An enclosure wall from the second half of the Eighteenth Dynasty

Such levelling may have occurred in the second half of the Eighteenth Dynasty, when a deep foundation trench was dug through the predynastic layer in order to build a large mud-brick wall. The pottery found in this foundation trench, filled with pebbles and stone chips, belongs to periods prior to the post-Amarna period. Given its dimensions (at least 4 m wide and probably much more, since it was cut in its eastern part during the Twenty-sixth Dynasty to built a new, larger one), this straight wall, covered with a thick layer of white plaster and built on a solid base made of several layers of mud bricks, must have enclosed an important structure, which remains to be identified.

3. A late Ramesside or early Twenty-first Dynasty settlement

During the transition from the Ramesside to the Third Intermediate Period (around 1070 BCE), the west side of this wall was used as a dumping ground. A 3-m-high layer of pottery was laid against it, covering the podium and foundation trench and extending almost 10 m to the east on a slow slope. This dumping activity probably went through two phases, but over a relatively short time, since the

Drawing: Simon Connor, Eman El-Keshky, Michel Tawfik, Randa Ali Ramadan, Amany El-Naggar and Florence Langermann

contents of all the layers are substantially similar. This deposition can probably be associated with the construction of a well (see below). The latest sherds date to the advanced Ramesside era.

These layers mainly contained pottery sherds from the late Eighteenth / early Nineteenth Dynasties (around 1300–1280 BCE). Several hundreds of so-called beer jars had a pre-firing hole pierced in the bottom, the practical function of which is still the subject of debate. Perhaps they can be identified as vases or flower pots used in industrial quantities for cult or festival purposes? The dump also delivered up a number of blue-ware pottery sherds of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, as well as residual material from the Middle and Old Kingdoms, and from the Buto-Maadi culture. A few fragments of statues and reliefs also appeared, but very few bones were found, which speaks in favour of ‘clean’ garbage, containing no food, but mostly pottery and fragments of stone structures.

Among the sculptural and architectural fragments, the most remarkable are two massive palmiform capitals in red granite (image p. 16, top left). Although uninscribed, given their stylistic features they were likely carved in the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2500–2350 BCE). They may have been reused in a New Kingdom structure, as evidenced by the many such columns that were re-inscribed by Ramesses II or later rulers, and found in later buildings, notably at Tanis or Herakleopolis Magna.

The material found in the same layers included a quartzite fragment of sunken relief showing Akhenaten as a sphinx with upraised human arms (1351–1334 BCE, identified by his cartouche). The small dimensions may suggest that this was a statuette offering presented by a larger figure of the sovereign (image p. 16,

top right). A small calcite-alabaster

pschent found nearby belonged to a composite statuette of a king or deity. Another particularly significant fragment of a statue found in this succession of layers is a nemes lappet and left shoulder from a quartzite sphinx (both images, p. 16, centre and bottom, respectively). Its dimensions and stylistic features make it the first in situ discovery to date of a large series of quartzite sphinxes from the Middle Kingdom and attributable to Heliopolis (most of these were otherwise found in the vicinity of Alexandria or Old Cairo).

4. Continuous occupation through the Third Intermediate Period

Occupation continued with the construction of several silos and small walls, apparently reusing mud bricks from the Eighteenth Dynasty wall, now largely dismantled. Some of these silos were set up within the masonry of the wall itself, while two others were built to the west of it, above the two granite capitals mentioned. The walls of these two silos were themselves covered with layers of the same pottery material as the lower dump layers, suggesting a succession of events occurring in a relatively short period of time.

A series of thin walls in the northern part of the excavated area, partly above the ancient enclosure wall, partly above the layers of dumped soil and pottery, formed a house. They surround a kiln (or perhaps just a succession of superimposed fireplaces) and several large standing vases found in situ, a few limestone door-pivots as well as a Ramesside funerary relief (probably a tomb lintel) that had been reused as a threshold.

Apparently during this transition between the late Ramesside period and the Twenty-first Dynasty, a cemetery was established against the west face of what was left of the wall. The remains of 14 bodies were discovered there, most of them oriented south-north (with the head to the south), except for a few east-west cases (with the head to the east). Afaf Wahba Abd el-Salam determined these individuals to have been of both sexes and all ages (four infants, two elderly individuals and several young adults). Except for one individual in a terracotta coffin, they were all directly buried in the ground, often with pottery sherds used as protective shields for the head. A layer of small limestone blocks covered the two elderly individuals, perhaps also serving as grave markers. Most of these burials, while undisturbed, yielded no other funerary goods but a few modest beads and scarabs on a finger or at the neck. All these individuals thus appear to have belonged to a relatively low stratum of society. One unusual feature is the presence of two young cattle buried close to and at the same level as the human

Photo: Giulia Pizzato

Photo: S. Connor

bodies, as though constituting offerings for this group of individuals. While it is difficult to establish that this was done intentionally, the position of the legs of these two calves is reminiscent of the amulets and images of cattle sacrificed and bound at funerals.

This cemetery was apparently only used for a short period, since it is covered by several layers of dumped pottery – layers that yielded the same ceramic material and at the same concentration as the layers underneath the skeletons. These late Ramesside / Twenty-first Dynasty layers reach a much higher level south of the excavated area, suggesting that at least part of it was a kind of ‘secondary dump’, i.e. a partial removal of the soil and pottery, in connection with the construction of a well. This well reaches the gezira at a depth of more than 5 m below the level of the structures of the late Twentieth / early Twenty-first Dynasties, which may have been the level of the water table around 1000 BCE. The blocks forming the walls of this well are mostly undecorated

Right: the southern part of the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty wall and its podium (eastern face). The foundation trench is filled with white limestone chips. The flooded area covers the remaining predynastic layers (still visible in the southern profile).

limestone, some quartzite chips and a large block of fossilised wood – the same material was apparently frequently used in the Predynastic Period, as evidenced by the many fragments found among the Buto-Maadi material mentioned above. Only two limestone blocks showed remains of large hieroglyphs in sunken relief (including two feathers topping a cartouche, probably of Ramesside date).

The Third Intermediate Period occupation seems to have continued without interruption, since the northern profile of the excavated area shows a succession of layers from the Twenty-first to the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, over a height of more than 3 m.

Far left: brewery installation (Trench 3, west of the wall).

Centre left: upper level of the predynastic occupation in Trench 1, south-west of the wall.

Left: southern section of the excavated area, showing the predynastic layer in yellow, cut by the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty foundation trench (blue) and covered by the late Ramesside / early Third Intermediate Period succession of dump layers (green).

Left: eastern section of the excavated area, showing the podium of the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty wall. The wall itself is well-preserved only in its southern part, where the level of dumping from the late Ramesside / early Third Intermediate Period is also the highest.

Photo: S. Connor

Drawing: S. Connor, E. El-Keshky, Michel Tawfik, Randa Ali Ramadan, Amany El-Naggar and Florence Langermann

Drawing: S. Connor, E. El-Keshky, Michel Tawfik, and Randa Ali Ramadan

Top: two palmiform capitals in red granite, possibly Fifth Dynasty, today in the open-air museum of Matariya.

Top right: quartzite relief showing Akhenaten as a sphinx with upraised arms (10.6 x 10.9 x 3.4 cm).

5. A massive new wall during the Twenty-sixth Dynasty

Right: calcite-alabaster crown once fixed to a statuette made in separate stone.

A new, straight mud-brick wall was cut through the Third Intermediate Period occupation layers. It is likely that parts of the Eighteenth Dynasty wall were still visible at that time, since the orientation of this new wall is exactly parallel to and probably covers part of it. A foundation trench cuts diagonally across the eastern part of the first wall. The pottery material found here allows us to date it to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (and probably more exactly to the later part of it). The most recent pottery sherds found within the matrix of the bricks themselves point to the same dating. This well-built, straight wall was about 8 m wide and must have reached a fairly considerable height. However, it would seem that it was at least partially destroyed shortly after its construction, since the occupation layer on top of it, at the northern extremity of the excavated area, does not contain any Ptolemaic, Roman or later finds.

Right: fragment of a quartzite sphinx, probably dating to the Middle Kingdom.

The part of the wall extending east seems to have been completely devoid of any built structures for several metres (at least in the undamaged area), down to the gezira. This suggests the existence of a street or perhaps a canal running along the wall. 8 m to the east, a wall of mud bricks, parallel to the temenos , delimits an area dedicated to industrial activity dating from the 5th century BCE, with a series of longitudinal deep kilns oriented east to west.

6. (Preliminary) conclusions

The very heart of the ancient city-temple of Heliopolis is still not well-known to us. The 2019 rescue excavation allowed us to lift a corner of the veil on the different levels of occupation the city experienced. However, it

still represents an isolated space within a vast unknown area. The Predynastic occupation that Schiaparelli identified north of Matariya in 1904 seems to have extended over an enormous area, including even hard-built structures and settled production activities. An important construction with a massive mudbrick enclosure wall subsequently took place in the second half of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

A New Kingdom temple, including reused columns from the Fifth Dynasty, was pulled

Photo: S. Connor

Reconstruction: S. Connor

Photo: S. Connor

Photo: S. Connor

down at the transition between the Ramesside and the Third Intermediate Period, when the mud-brick enclosure wall was given a second life as the basis of a settlement.

The presence of a cemetery dating from the 11th century BCE for individuals from a modest social stratum is particularly noteworthy: sitting close to living quarters and in the centre of the city-temple, it is distinct from the vast necropolis that extended east of Heliopolis, under the present-day suburb of Ayn Shams.

Finally, we may wonder whether the 8-m-thick wall rebuilt during the Twenty-sixth

Dynasty and following the same line as that of the Eighteenth Dynasty might not be a part of a set of new enclosure walls, which, according to the account of a priest called Djedatumiuefankh, were built in 528 BCE by king Amasis in the last years of the Twentysixth Dynasty.

Left: scarabs found in some of the burials.

Right: the late Ramesside / early Third Intermediate Period urban installation seen from the south.

• The Egyptian-German Mission is grateful for the continuous support, attendance and interest in our fieldwork at Matariya by the Minister of Antiquities, Dr Khaled el-Enany, and the General Assembly of the Ministry of Antiquities. Representing the archaeologists and restorers of the Inspectorate of Antiquities of Matariya and Ayn Shams, we would like to thank Khaled Abu al-Ela, Hoda Kamal Ahmed, and Iman Riad. We are grateful to the workmen from Quft in Upper Egypt under reis Ashraf el-Amir Kamil Seddiq and the workmen from Matariya / Arab el-Hisn. For funding, the mission would like to thank the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Fonds Khéops pour l’Archéologie, the Egyptology Forum of the University of Zurich, the Prix Marie-Françoise et Jean Leclant of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres Paris, the Berthold-Leibinger-Stiftung Ditzingen, the Bernard Selz Foundation, the Greiss Stiftung Cologne, and the European Foundation for Education and Culture of the Rahn Dittrich Group.

Bottom left: the late Ramesside / early Third Intermediate Period cemetery (detail).

Bottom right: an oven or superposition of baking plates in the middle of the late Ramesside / early Third Intermediate Period ‘house’.

Photo: Amira Farag

Photo: S. Connor

Photo: S. Connor

Orthophotography:

F. Langermann

General view of the cemetery looking north.

Tell Basta before the Old Kingdom

A newly discovered cemetery from the early dynastic settlement

The cult centre of the cat goddess, Bubastis reached its zenith in the Third Intermediate Period. Yet its origins go back to early-dynastic times. Few traces survive from that period, among them the cemetery described here

by Aiman Ashmawy.

Tell Basta is situated about 80 km north-east of Cairo, near Zagazig, the capital of the Sharqiya Governorate. In ancient times, the site was known as Bast or Per-Bastet, Bubastis in classical rendering, the ‘domain of the goddess Bastet’, well-known in her representation as a cat or a cat-headed woman.

Our knowledge about the history and monuments of the site since the late Old Kingdom is quite detailed: two ka -temples of

the Sixth Dynasty (c. 2350–2220 BCE), for Teti and Pepy I, respectively, have been discovered next to an extensive cemetery; they are the most ancient extant in-situ buildings at Tell Basta. By contrast, we lack much information on its earlier history: there is little beyond a reference to the site in Manetho’s much later History of Egypt, mentioning that in the time of the first king of the Second Dynasty (c. 2890 BCE) a vast chasm opened in the ground,

Photo: Tell Basta Mission / Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

resulting in the death of many people; and one tomb of a child dating to the Protodynastic Period (Naqada III, c. 3200–3000 BCE), discovered in 1970 during the excavations of Ahmad El-Sawi, an oblong structure of sun-dried mud bricks, that contained some tomb deposits.

An early dynastic cemetery

The recent excavations (team members were Shimaa Rashid Salim, Monira Ali Hassan, Ahmed Bahaa el-Din, Ahmed Mokhtar, Shimaa Nagi, Khaled Youssef) took place in 2018 on private land directly west of the temple of Pepy I. It resulted in the discovery of a cemetery from the Early Dynastic Period. Numerous trenches were dug across the site, leading to a more systematic excavation campaign when some of the trenches began to yield archaeological features.

Several burials have since been found in an area covering about 200 sqm, at least 14 in the north-western section of the site, one in the south-eastern part. The burials start in the sand of the gezira or directly on top of it. The excavated area shows four successive cemeteries dating from Naqada III to the Archaic Period. Earlier burials consist of pits cut in the soil, while later strata show rectangular or square pits lined with one or two courses of mud brick with half a brick in thickness. Most bodies were found in a crouching position oriented north to south, with the head to the north and facing east, with the exceptions of two burials whose inhabitants were facing west and another two that were found buried lying face down.

Nearly all the burials discovered so far were of single individuals, except one that contained two skeletons buried together. Their osteological study by Ahmed Gabr shows that they belong to two children of 3 to 6, respectively 6 to 9 years of age. The way they were positioned suggests that they died and were buried at the same time. Some individuals were wrapped in mats, indicated by the residue of a white layer on top from the decayed mat fibres.

Grave goods were noticeably rare, with only a single burial (no. 10) out of the mentioned 14 holding any such deposits (image above). At its foot end we discovered a flat flint bracelet; a cosmetic palette grinder made of quartz, with traces of red colour; a stone jar with a tubular handle; two travertine vessels and a deep bowl

of the same material; a small pottery jar; and a miniature vessel made of carnelian.

Also noteworthy is the discovery in Burial 12, which according to Ahmed Gabr’s study contained the remains of a 20 to 30 year-old woman, of the lower part of a pig’s jawbone, found near the woman’s left knee.

Traces of a domestic area

Sections of a domestic area from the Early Dynastic Period were discovered in the uppermost layer to west of this cemetery. Its traces consist of parts of walls and round silos, half a brick in thickness, and round mud pits.

Apart from the grave goods of Burial 10 and the pottery from the burial in the southeastern section, the small finds we discovered came mainly from the debris in the domestic area (images next page). They include pottery vessels, lithic tools, faience beads and worked bones. Among the lithic tools were grinding stones made from sandstone, most of them boat-shaped, of different sizes, with grinders of the same material, besides a large number

AMUN IN NUBIA: NEW WORK AT THE TEMPLE OF TAHARQO

SANAM

Small finds from Burial 10.

Photos: Tell Basta Mission / Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

of tools such as bifacial knives with and without handles, (denticulate) sickle blades, scrapers and borers plus a substantial amount of flakes and debitage that demonstrates the existence of a local lithic industry at Tell Basta.

Based on the pottery and the lithic tools, we have dated the cemetery to the period from Naqada III until the late Second Dynasty (c. 2700 BCE). The tubular beer jar from the burial in the south-eastern section is a typical vessel for the Second Dynasty, alongside the flint knives of the same period.

Top: flint tool.

Above left: selection of lithic tools.

Right: grinding stones made of sandstone.

Below: pottery objects.

The scarcity of grave goods and the kind of objects discovered, with just two burials yielding such deposits at all, suggest that this cemetery accommodated the lower social strata. Yet its discovery about 300 m south-west of the proto-dynastic tomb found by El-Sawi proves the vast extent of the pre- and early dynastic cemetery, covering the entire western side of Tell Basta and reflecting a very dense occupation in this period, as suggested by the Manetho tradition.

• Aiman Ashmawy Ali is Head of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector in the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. He holds a PhD in Egyptology from Cairo University and has for many years worked as an antiquities inspector. He has extensive fieldwork experience, working with many Egyptian and joint foreign missions.

Photos: Tell Basta Mission / Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

Worshipping Amun in Nubia

New work at the temple of Taharqo at Sanam

Sanam Temple, located in the Twenty-fifth Dynasty’s heartland of Napata, is relatively well-preserved and, unlike other surviving Amun temples in Nubia, archaeologically accessible. It was first excavated in 1912 by Francis Llewellyn Griffith, but only a preliminary report of this work has ever been published. Kathryn Howley argues that the temple has huge potential to provide evidence of the place of Egyptian visual and material culture in 1st-millennium BCE Nubia and to address the question of why the Nubian kings used it so extensively.

On the banks of the Nile at Sanam, near the fourth cataract and within sight of the sacred mountain of Gebel Barkal, the great king Taharqo of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty built a temple in approximately 680 BCE. The temple had a traditional Egyptian tripartite plan with pylon gateway, and according to textual sources was probably constructed by Egyptian builders (images opposite page). But other aspects of the temple seem out of place in an Egyptian context. Sanam Temple was not built alone, but as one of a network of at least three Amun temples in Nubia (including Tabo and Kawa), all built by Taharqo with an almost identical plan. There is also a significant difference between the relatively small, free-standing temples that Taharqo built in Nubia and the structures that the Twenty-fifth Dynasty kings erected in Egypt, which comprised mostly of additions to other temples in Thebes. Taharqo appears to have had different aims with his building programmes in his two different territories: and why, in fact, would we expect anything different? Taharqo was a Nubian, building in Nubia for a Nubian audience. Sanam was located in the political and religious heartland of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty kings and therefore had an important impact on the surrounding Nubian population and the functioning of the Kushite state.

A Nubian temple environment

Understanding Sanam, then, can offer an insight into the functioning of Kushite royalty and religion in Nubia that is not accessible from Twenty-fifth Dynasty monuments in Egypt. This potential is not available elsewhere: Sanam is the only one of the Taharqo temples that is still archaeologically accessible to us, with Tabo mostly destroyed and Kawa hidden under metres of windblown sand that makes further archaeological investigation impractical.

The study of Sanam Temple is also important because of the history of study at the Amun temples in Nubia. Francis Llewellyn Griffith, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford, conducted a season of excavation at Sanam in 1912 for the Oxford Expedition to Nubia. With only himself and his wife supervising, over the course of three months their enormous team of local workmen cleared the 68-m-long temple, over 1,500 graves in the nearby cemetery and parts of the large administrative building he named ‘the Treasury’. The breakneck pace of the work was designed to quickly uncover the monumental statuary and inscriptions that Griffith was sure the temple would deliver: but he was mostly disappointed by the collapsed and degraded temple, bringing only a few objects and decorated blocks back to Oxford and the

Right: plan of the temple.

Ashmolean Museum. It took ten years before he published his findings in a preliminary and very discursive article in the Liverpool Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology in 1922, and he never returned to Sanam.

Griffith’s interpretations of the site were hampered both by the racist structures of his society and a lack of archaeological research in Sudan at the beginning of the 20th century. George Reisner’s investigations in Nubia, which would lay down the foundations for an understanding of Sudan’s ancient history, were only just beginning and would not be published for several decades. Quite simply, Griffith had nothing to compare his findings to, except the monuments of Egypt with which he was so familiar. In this comparison, he found the monuments of the Nubian kings severely wanting: the Twentyfifth Dynasty kings were mere copyists of the glories of Egyptian culture, ‘the pious and impressionable barbarian marvelling at the antiquity, the massiveness, and the beauty of the Egyptian monuments’ as they constructed temples such as Sanam and Kawa. Through interpreting the temple as a copy of Egyptian originals, Griffith saw Sanam

Temple and other Twenty-fifth Dynasty Nubian monuments as evidence that Nubian culture was derivative and therefore inferior. But besides the unsavoury connotations this judgment has for our picture of a black African culture, it grossly simplifies the workings of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty state, when Nubian rulers successfully controlled a vast stretch of the Nile and several different cultural groups. Through their flexible manipulation of cultural forms from both Egypt and Nubia, wielded differently according to the environment, the Nubian kings led a century-long period in which both Egypt and Nubia flourished. Given that the temple at Sanam would have had a Nubian audience, how might they have reacted to a

Left: aerial view of Taharqo’s temple at Sanam.

Photo and map: Sanam Temple Project

The Taharqo shrine, located in the hypostyle hall.

monumental dressed-stone building in their midst? How Egyptian is the temple, actually, and how did the Nubian kings manipulate the Egyptian elements of the temple in order to accommodate the requirements of their Nubian culture? To this end, the Sanam Temple Project has, since 2018, been excavating in and around the temple in order to better understand how it would have been used and how it would have been experienced by the people who used it. What was it like, as a Nubian, to be inside this monumental space? How did the building effectively act upon its audience? Why did Taharqo and the other Nubian kings so enthusiastically adopt Egyptian styles and motifs?

the time of the coronation in order to celebrate a festival of Amun at each one. The large processions that would have accompanied such festival parties as they moved between the temples are depicted on the exterior of the temple walls at Sanam as well as at Kawa, underlining the repeated nature of the rituals: processing people, donkeys and musicians proceed in crowded lines along the registers. The movement of celebrants is also reflected architecturally in the presence at Kawa of two kiosks in the vicinity of the temple – small shelters with columns around the edges and intercolumnar curtain walls. These structures are quite removed from the temple itself and would have facilitated the transport of cult statues during processions and festivals. While no kiosks have been identified at Sanam, Griffith did discover a brick platform at a 25 m remove from the temple walls, which the Sanam Temple Project will be investigating further in future seasons. These architectural additions to the central temple building all reflect the importance in Kushite ritual of moving through the Nubian landscape, and give architectural shape to the festival circuit that is described in the enthronement stelae.

Once inside the temple, its decoration would have worked on the celebrants to ensure that they felt the closeness of the king to the gods.

Right: a block from the second pylon, showing a cartouche of Taharqo with surviving pigment.

Far right: blue pigment in a pottery ‘paint palette’.

Sanam Temple as a multi-sensory experience

A Nubian worshipper’s experience of the temple would have begun before they even entered it. The layout and appearance of the temple was likely already very familiar to them: both Kawa and Tabo temples were built with almost exactly the same plan and scale, and enthronement stelae belonging to several Kushite kings (among whom Anlamani) describe kings travelling between the temples at Gebel Barkal, Sanam, Kawa and Tabo at

One of the aspects of Sanam that disappointed Griffith was its relatively poor level of preservation compared to many temples in Egypt. The walls are to a large degree collapsed and the decoration has in many places been damaged or destroyed because of the friable surface of the local Nubian sandstone. Griffith did not backfill the temple after he excavated and therefore its condition has deteriorated even further since its first excavation over a century ago. Nevertheless, it is possible to

Photos: Sanam Temple Project

some extent to recreate the atmosphere within the temple through careful study of the surviving architecture.

The many fallen decorated blocks to be found at the temple, although no longer in their original position, in many cases still preserve traces of pigment. Seen together, they show how complete the colouration of the temple walls would have been and how vibrant the colour selection. The two shrines built in the hypostyle hall demonstrate the totality of coloured surfaces: the engaged pillars at the threshold of the Aspelta shrine were painted yellow, while the collapsed ceiling blocks from the Taharqo shrine (image left, top) revealed a repeated pattern of yellow and red stars, set against a bright blue background. This design, which mirrors that on the ceiling of the tomb of Queen Qalhata nearby at elKurru, would have emphasised the darkness of the small, enclosed space and its holy atmosphere. A fallen block from the second pylon gateway that bears the cartouche of King Taharqo exposes the rich palette available to the Nubian craftsmen (image left): traces of green, blue, white and yellow are all visible on close inspection. Even the columns of the colonnaded and hypostyle hall would have been decorated and painted. But perhaps the most charming attestation of the importance of bright colour in the decoration of Sanam is the small pottery dish filled with blue pigment that had been used as a paint palette (image left), found during our 2019 season. Vibrant colour and profusion of decoration came together to make the interior of the temple visually overwhelming for the Kushites who lived nearby in an environment where bright colors are not terribly abundant in nature.

Riotous colour was not the only sensorial experience that would have influenced a worshipper at Sanam: smell would also have played a role. While smell can often feel out of reach to the archaeological record, during the project’s 2020 season a number of chunks of dark brown resinous material were recovered from holes in the temple floor. Some experimental archaeology confirmed that the substance was, in fact, incense: on burning a small sample back at the dig house, a heavy and spicy scent drifted through the courtyard. One of our team members, Dr Shadia Abdu Rabo, found it similar to the bahur incense that is used in modern-day Sudan. Large quantities

must have produced an overwhelming scent with the power to create a transformative experience during worship.

The material culture of small finds

We can say that the worshippers at Sanam Temple would have had a sensorially intense experience within the temple. But what would they have done while experiencing the colours and smells just described? While Griffith was focused on the larger material remains at the temple, he missed the smaller signs of daily activity: and small traces can in fact tell us something important about Nubian religious practice.

Particularly around king Aspelta’s chapel in the hypostyle hall, miniature bronze votive Osiris figurines were a common find for both our project and for Griffith (images above): perhaps the most impressive was a 15 cm tall example, discovered lying directly on the original white plaster floor of the temple (both floor and figurine had been protected by a secondary mud-brick wall built on top of them). All the Osirises are small, designed at a scale to be held in the hand; one had a suspension

A bronze Osiris figurine found in situ on the floor of the Aspelta shrine in the hypostyle hall.

A miniature Osiris figurine with suspension loop.

Photos: Sanam Temple Project

Right: faience votive appliqués found at the threshold of the Taharqo shrine in the hypostyle hall.

Below: large beads discovered during the 2020 excavation season.

ring welded to its back, which would have enabled it to be worn as a pendant. The number found at Sanam by the two projects is considerable, running to approximately 40: since all the examples we have found were embedded into cracks between flagstones or incorporated with other floor debris into secondary mud-brick walls, this suggests that originally there would have been immense numbers of figurines, strewn in large quantities across the floor of the temple.

More votive objects that function through their small, handheld nature emerged at a particularly charged space within the temple, the threshold of the Taharqo shrine. This series of moulded faience votives, mostly still retaining their original bright blue colour, represents a range of subjects: from hieroglyphs conveying good luck, to Amun, to lotus flowers, to reclining lions (image below, right). The majority of the objects exhibited small perforations at their edges, suggesting that they functioned as appliqués. The perforations would have enabled them to be attached to other objects, perhaps items of clothing. Most striking of all is that the eclectic selection of representations corresponds exactly to a series of votives that were excavated in the 1930s at the Taharqo temple at Kawa, many days’ journey away near the Nile’s third cataract. The cache is not only a gorgeous find, therefore, but an important testament to how ritual was shared and mirrored across multiple temple sites in Kush.

Small finds as ritual objects

The final class of literally small finds that may attest to worship practices in Sanam Temple is the stupendous variety and number of beads in the temple, mostly found embedded between gaps in the flagstone floor or in rubbish pits.

Some contexts yielded hundreds of beads, mostly small annular and cylindrical faience examples, while in 2020 we also found two larger barrel beads, one of deep blue faience and the other a ribbed red stone (image below, left). This is in line with Griffith’s findings at the temple: while he did not record what he considered as bulk finds in any detail, he came across beads in such great quantity that he measured them in ‘pints’ rather than by number. The sheer quantity of beads makes it difficult to imagine that these were carelessly lost or came solely from broken jewellery pieces; rather, their concentration seems to indicate a more conscious use of beads at the temple. Indeed, in royal reliefs, Angelika Lohwasser has shown that the king assures his legitimation by Amun by depicting himself presenting a necklace and counterpoise to the god. Jewellery was a way for the king to establish a link between himself and the deity, and the large quantities of beads at Sanam suggest that this may have been possible for other worshippers as well.

The Osiris figurines, faience appliqués and beads are testament to the fact that Nubians repeatedly returned to the hypostyle hall of the temple to worship. The archaeological remains therefore show that ritual consisted of leaving these small, perhaps not terribly valuable objects, often at the smaller shrines within the temple. The monumentalism with which Griffith was so concerned therefore seems not to have played such a crucial role for the Nubians who

Photos: Sanam Temple Project

used the temple: here, large scale statuary was less important than leaving small objects with an intimate bodily connection, which could be carried along in procession, at the smaller spaces within the temple.

The spatial organisation of the temple environs

The space around the temple was also manipulated by Taharqo in order to act upon the local population using the building. Just to the rear of the temple, the project has excavated production areas for faience and pottery: there was a high concentration of broken faience pieces and wasters, an immense quantity of ceramic sherds, and many grinders and grinding stones, all of which are consistent with production debris. A large, flattened and burnt mud surface was also found, which was likely part of a kiln installation. Other – more attractive! – examples of the production activity that took place at Sanam include moulds for faience objects, including shabtis (see image p. 1). These funerary figurines, although small and not made of valuable materials, were only permitted to be used in the graves of the royal family in Nubia, and were never found in non-royal graves.

From an Egyptian point of view, directly adjacent to the temple walls was a strange place to have a faience manufacturing facility: in Egypt, faience was generally made in domestic contexts. To have a large oven and production activity in such close proximity to a place of worship also seems out of place, given that it would have produced large amounts of noise, heat, smoke and smells. But the location and exclusivity of the objects produced there demonstrate how the Nubian kings were able to use the temple as an effective means of social control within Nubian surroundings. Nubian craftsmen would have here made faience objects in an Egyptian style, of a type they were unable to own themselves, and they did so literally in the shadow of the monumental stone walls of the temple, covered in images of the king and his closeness to Amun. Egyptian style became synonymous in Nubia with Kushite royal power.

The ‘Egyptian-ness’ of the Amun temple at Sanam, and its sister temples elsewhere in Nubia, has been the overriding feature of previous commentary. But what has not been discussed is how this Egyptian-style building would have acted on its surrounding populations in Nubia, and how these Nubian worshippers

would have used the monumental, dressed stone building in an environment where such buildings had little indigenous history. Sensorial experience was emphasised in the experience for worshippers and would have made the temple, relatively small by Egyptian standards at 68 m long, a deeply imposing place to be, where incense filled the air and the richly decorated walls blazed with a multitude of pigments. Worshippers would have entered the temple after a long procession carrying or even wearing small votive offerings, a fact that allowed them to transport the offerings with them and gave the votives a particularly intimate connection with the bearer. These would have been borne into the spacious interior of the temple, but preferentially deposited in the small chapels in the hypostyle hall, with Taharqo’s providing a purposefully dark and sacred atmosphere through its diminutive dimensions and sepulchral starry ceiling. On leaving the temple, they may have heard, smelt or seen the production going on behind the rear wall of the temple: this would have further cemented the connection between the control over Egyptian style and the Nubian royal family in their minds. The cycle would have been repeated as the procession moved on to the other Amun temples around Nubia, where the same rituals would have been repeated. The Nubian kings, therefore, did not utilise Egyptianstyle buildings such as Sanam out of admiration of their superior Egyptian neighbours, as Griffith thought back in 1912: rather, particular elements of Egyptian visual culture were chosen and consciously deployed for the useful effect they would have on a Nubian audience, while others (such as monumental statuary) were not adopted. Thus Egyptian motifs, far from overwhelming or replacing Nubian culture, were a tool that the Kushite kings skillfully and selectively wielded to better communicate their royal power within Nubia.

• Kathryn Howley is Lila Acheson Wallace

Assistant Professor for Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. The Sanam Temple Project would like to thank the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums in Sudan for facilitating their work, and the White-Levy Foundation, the Explorers Club, the EES and the Institute of Fine Arts (NYU) for funding the project.

Innovative Kushite kings

The origin of Osiris liturgies in the temple of Karnak

Usually overlooked in the vast space of the Karnak complex, the diminutive temple of Osiris Neb-ankh, possibly Egypt’s smallest, nonetheless holds intriguing clues about the emergence of a liturgical innovation towards the end of the Third Intermediate Period, argues Martin Bommas. Its archaising iconographic programme aimed to legitimise kingship and royal succession in a time of political instability.

The temple of Karnak in modern-day Luxor is home to 20 securely identified Osirian cult chapels, which have not received much scholarly attention and are often overlooked by tourists as well. Given the site’s vast surface area of c. 0.75 sqkm (image right), it is perhaps of little surprise that one of its best kept secrets is a temple that the French Egyptologist Georges Legrain once dubbed ‘le plus petit des monuments religieux de l’Égypte, perdu dans l’immensité de Karnak’ – ‘the smallest of Egypt’s religious monuments, lost in the immensity of Karnak’: the temple of Osiris Neb-ankh (see indication in the aerial photograph). Located between the northern gate of the hypostyle hall and the northern gate of the temenos wall, close to a procession axis that gives access to a number of buildings before reaching the temple of Ptah, this temple is positively miniscule. Despite consisting of two rooms, its interior covers a ground area of only 2.52 sqm – equivalent to no more than two changing rooms in a modern swimming pool facility. Not much, it seems, should be expected from such a miniature building: with a passage height of the interior door of only 124 cm, this temple appears more like a small cave barely able to accommodate a high priest,

Photo: WikiCommons

let alone supporting staff. The interior walls are fully decorated and so is the main entrance into the chapel: here, King Taharqa (690–664 BCE) is seen embracing Osiris Neb-ankh Paweshed-iad (south) and the Divine Adoratrice Shepenupet II greeting Isis (north). The other exterior walls of the chapel were built of stone but left undecorated. Given the fact that this temple appears as a mysterious, almost tomblike miniature cavern, it seems likely that the chapel of Osiris Neb-ankh was covered with Nile-sediment, thus resembling the mount of Osiris or: a reconstruction of the mythical tomb of Osiris. Parallels are known in Karnak, for example the chapel of Osiris Ptah Nebankh south of the Tenth Pylon (shown at very bottom of the photo below) and elsewhere. They were preceded by courts and columns, indicative of temples, and some of them employed dedicated priests.

Raising the djed pillar

Tombs in temple precincts dedicated to Amun are well-known since the beginning of the Third Intermediate Period in Tanis, Sais,

Mendes and Medinet Habu. Towards the end of this time, during the Kushite Period (744–656 BCE), this novel approach was furthered by building Osirian tomb-like chapels buried underneath earth mounts. In order to establish the relationship between King Taharqa and the mummified Osiris Neb-ankh, the decoration of the windowless second room offers crucial evidence, documented by Jean Leclant in his study Recherches sur les monuments thébains de la XXVe Dynastie dite Éthiopienne (1965; figs 11–12). Here, the north wall is divided into two registers: the top register shows the raising of the djed pillar by the king, with a priest and a fan-bearer in attendance. The bottom register depicts people jubilating in the east and west. The raising of the djed pillar combines two meanings, merging political connotations with significant symbolism of the beyond, embedded in the Osiris-Horus myth: while the symbolic act of raising the djed pillar refers to political stability safeguarded by the king, it also marks the victory of Osiris over his enemies, the gang of Seth. As a result, the east wall, which has only survived in a drawing, depicts Horus and

Karnak, aerial photograph, showing the two chapels (after Ahmed Bahloul, 2012).

Chapel of Osiris Nebankh.

Chapel of Osiris Ptah Neb-ankh.

Right: inscribed faience kohl pot dating to the reign of Amenhotep III, from Thebes. Macquarie University History Museum (MU5018), h: 4.6, Ø: 3.9 cm.

Thoth tying the djed pillar. While symbolically more complex, the raising of the djed pillar emphasises the dichotomy between discontinuity (starting with the death of Osiris) and transition (investiture of Horus as the king).

These episodes are already attested in the Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts spells 337 and 338, and the Book of the Dead spells 18 and 20. They also made their appearance in the tomb of Kheruef (TT 192), steward of Queen Tiye, where positive conditions for the sed festival of Amenhotep III are conjured by the means of including this ritual. A number of blue faience kohl pots dedicated to Sokar, dating to the reign of Amenhotep III (c. 1388–1350 BCE) confirm the realisation of the Sokar Festival in Thebes during the New Kingdom (images right). There can be no doubt that for a Kushite king such as Taharqa this approach could provide a blueprint for the legitimisation of his succession to kingship (690 BCE). The date of this ritual offers a further clue to the political importance of the raising of the djed pillar: it was celebrated as the final act of the Sokar Festival on the 30th day of the month of Khoiak, the end of the inundation period, which marked the beginning of sowing.

wall) where it marks the chapel’s main theme: welcomed and embraced by Amun, the king is described as ‘<the one who is foremost of> the kas of all the living, who appears on the throne of Horus eternally’. While the chapel was built and to some large extent decorated under Taharqa, this particular scene was done under his successor Tanutamun, attesting to the longevity and desirability of this topic during Kushite rule in Upper Egypt.

Raising of the djed pillar: scene on the west wall of the Osiris Hall at Abydos.

Kushite kings employing the Osiris-Horus myth

The legitimisation ritual of Taharqa in Karnak is by no means encapsulated in a singular piece of evidence. An image depicting the assumption of power was also included in the decoration of the chapel of Osiris Ptah Neb-ankh mentioned above (room 1, east

The intellectual achievement of the Kushite kings who introduced the assumption of political power to temple rituals had even furtherreaching impact than has been explored so far. This is where the actual accomplishment played out most visibly. As has been noted above, the lord of the chapel of Osiris Neb-ankh is one of the many mummified forms of Osiris. In Book of the Dead spell 142, both Osiris Nebankh and Osiris Ptah Neb-ankh are attested since the Eighteenth Dynasty (1550–1292 BCE) and thereafter well into the Ptolemaic Period (323–30 BCE). Following the principle of reciprocity, by offering to Osiris Neb-ankh the Kushite kings are established as Horus and confirmed as ruling kings. Since the Old Kingdom, mortuary liturgies laid out the necessary procedures: the spell accompanying the Osirian procession, Pyramid Text 422, serves as one of the loci classici in the context of the Osiris-Horus-myth. This text determines the awakening of Osiris, the organisation of the procession among the members of his entourage and culminates in the offerings the newly proclaimed pharaoh prepares as Horus for his father Osiris.

Image: Olaf Tausch / WikiCommons

Photo: Macquarie University

Performing mortuary liturgies in the Old Kingdom

Mortuary liturgies serve the purpose of transforming a dead individual into Osiris ‘soand-so’ who, upon successful completion of the ritual, becomes an akh spirit, a glorified spirit. As such, they are at home in tombs, not in temples. Unfortunately, depictions of the actual procedures accompanying the recitation of mortuary liturgies are very rare. However, two almost identical scenes survived on the north

thus making sure that the ritual ends with the final words uttered by the priests and does not continue at random. The ritual starts again, this time employing three persons carrying out the satj ritual (6), funerary priests who bring offerings (7) and two lector priests, both confirmed as performing ‘glorifications’ (8).

A surprise reappearance

There can be no doubt that it is this scene that made its reappearance in room II in the

and south walls of room VII of the tomb of Kagemni in Giza, dating to the Sixth Dynasty. Kagemni was vizier during the first half of the reign of King Teti (c. 2340 BCE). Measuring 32 by 32 m, Kagemni’s tomb is the largest in the Teti cemetery. The depiction on the north wall can be read as follows (image next page, top):

In front of the tomb owner Kagemni, who faces an offering table with foodstuffs (not depicted in the image), a row of men approach the from the right. From left to right, a standing person is shown pouring water on an offering table at which a kneeling person is washing his hands in what is known as the satj (= ground) ritual (1). Next come two lector priests, one of which holds an open papyrus roll in his hands (2); the hieroglyphic text between them confirms that they are ‘reciting glorifications (mortuary liturgies)’ (3). They are followed by three men kneeling and beating their breast, obviously creating ‘body music’ that accompanies the recitation in what is called the henu gesture (4). The text above them reads: ‘Many glorifications by the lector priest.’ This part of the ritual comes to an end with a priest performing ‘the covering the footprints’ (5),

miniature tomb / chapel / cavern of Osiris Neb-ankh c. 1,650 years later (image next page, bottom). It is one of four vignettes that share the 92 cm long south wall. The deceased, Kagemni, is replaced by the mummified ‘Osiris Lord of Busiris, the Great God, Lord of Abydos’ (1). The accompanying text reads: ‘Performing many glorifications by the lector priests’ (2). In the top register, three persons are depicted performing the henu gesture, which is confirmed by the accompanying inscription (3). A person follows who, however, does not attempt to cover the footprints as seen in Kagemni’s tomb. The bottom register shows the satj ritual (4), followed by a lector priest holding a papyrus scroll in his hand (5) and a woman holding two unknown objects.

Differences between the two scenes are marginal. They are mostly owed to the fact that the artists who copied the image from Kagemni’s tomb were faced with the difficulty of transferring a scene from the largest tomb of the Teti cemetery to the smallest temple in Karnak, a task they completed in the most admirable fashion. Given that the two locations are c. 650 km distant from each other, a master

MU5018, 3D scanned and unwrapped. Photography, photogrammetry and cylindrical projection.

Image: Macquarie University by Michael Rampe

copy on papyrus may have been the most likely medium used to transfer the scene. Once in Karnak, the artists split the single register scene into a top and bottom register, the same way Miss Broom did (perhaps intuitively) when she had to copy the scene for A. H. Gardiner’s article in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 24 (1938) (image top left). It is not the only appearance of glorifications in Karnak, though: on the eastern wall of the first room in the chapel of Osiris Kheri-ib-pa-ished, dating to the reign of Tanutamun, a female deity is shown next to the title of the so-called Book of Glorifications, Liturgy SZ.2.

Archaism as innovation

There can be no doubt that the inspiration to transfer an entire Old Kingdom wall scene to a location in the Theban area was fuelled by the concept of archaism, which appeared at the same time in Thebes, but also at Deir el-Gebrawi. Not only tomb scenes were transferred, but also Liturgy SZ.2 as attested on the coffin of Anchnesneferibre (British Museum EA32, reign of Psamtik II [595–589 BCE] from Deir el-Medina) and Theban Tombs TT 196, 389 and 410 dating from the Twentyfifth Dynasty to the reign of Psamtik I (c. 664-610 BCE). The transferrals of SZ.2 were primarily embedded in funerary culture, except for the passage in the chapel of Osiris Kheriib-pa-ished.

A paradox solved: the advent of Osiris liturgies

The advent of mortuary liturgies in temples created a rather paradox situation at first, as they did not serve a dead individual nor were they performed by funerary priests. Instead, they addressed the god Osiris and were carried out by the living king or his substitutes. This textual tradition was fully developed by the early Ptolemaic Period as attested on mainly papyrus manuscripts that the clergy of the time included in their tomb libraries, such as Papyrus 3129, Papyrus Schmitt and many more. However, the origin of this development has never been established. It can now be concluded that the emergence of mortuary liturgies performed in Karnak started a revolution that would enjoy a longlasting impact until Roman times.

As these texts are to a large extent based on revised versions of Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts, especially SZ.2, they are to be regarded

as the latest use of these millennia-old recitation texts. As Osiris liturgies, they formed a new genre as they were recited in temples not only during the Kushite Period in Karnak but well into the Roman Period. Papyrus Sekowski (Kraków), dating to Roman times, has the title Book of Glorifying the Glorified Spirit, Performed within the Temple of Osiris, the Lord of Busiris, which can now be identified as a parallel to the heading preserved on the south wall of room II in the chapel of Osiris Neb-ankh. Overlooked by scholars in the past, the event of transferring an icon of Osirification from the tomb of Kagemni to the smallest temple of Karnak created remarkable cultural impact. From the Late Period onwards, groups of intellectuals concerned with the emergence of a cultural and ethnical identity built on Osiris as a state god to support divine kingship and to counter-balance foreign occupancy of Egypt. The inclusion of glorifications in Osirian chapels of the Kushite Period may be regarded as the earliest evidence for this far-reaching and impactful development, and an intellectual achievement of significant proportions. At its beginning during the Twenty-fifth and Twentysixth Dynasties, though, the development of Osiris liturgies was a product of the same Zeitgeist that favoured archaism as innovation, rather than living in the past.

Top: performance of glorifications in the tomb of Kagemni, Sixth Dynasty. Numbers refer to ritual actions, after A. H. Gardiner, in JEA 24 (1938).

Bottom: performance of glorifications in the chapel of Osiris Neb-ankh Pa-weshediad, after J. Leclant, Recherches sur les monuments thébains de la XXVe dynastie dite Éthiopienne (BdÉ 36; Cairo, 1965, 33, fig. 9).

• Martin Bommas is a Professor at Macquarie University and Director of the Macquarie University History Museum, Sydney, Australia. Since 1994, he has been studying ancient Egyptian funerary texts and rituals. He would like to thank Michael Rampe for 3D-scanning the faience object MU5081 and the innovative cylindrical projection shown here. To view the 3D scan in full, go to MQ pedestal: https://foa.mq. pedestal3d.com/r/EGNQdhsz0-

KV 11 revisited

Collecting archive material in Oxford and London concerning the tomb of Ramesses III

Between 1890 and 1914, the tomb of Ramesses III (KV 11) suffered severe damage caused by several flooding events. Nevertheless, it will be possible to reconstruct a substantial part of the decoration with the aid of notes, drawings and squeezes produced by early travellers and researchers. Willem Hovestreydt , Lea Rees and Anke Weber report on their archive research, which was carried out with the support of the 2019 EES Centenary Award.

The tomb of Ramesses III (KV 11, map above) is one of the most renowned in the Valley of the Kings. It is also one of the most threatened by progressive decay. This applies in particular to the rear part of the tomb, where most of the decoration has disappeared or is severely damaged. In order to collect as much information as possible about the historical state of the tomb, we visited several British archives. The research was undertaken within the framework of the ‘Ramesses III (KV 11) Publication and Conservation Project’, which aims to record,

preserve, study and publish the tomb of pharaoh Ramesses III (1186–1155 BCE). The project holds the concession for KV 11 and is hosted by Humboldt University of Berlin.

A major focus is the reconstruction of the tomb’s decoration programme, which will help us to understand the ‘semantics’ of the tomb (referring here to Jan Assmann’s concept of ‘Grabsemantik ’). Using state-of-the-art methods like photogrammetry, digital drawing and 3D-modelling, the team will be able to form a picture of the tomb’s current and original

Drawing after the Theban Mapping Project

state and thus reconstruct the wall reliefs, which is an essential precondition for seeking to decipher the interplay between architecture, images and texts.

The documentation left by early travellers and scholars before the tomb was flooded can provide a solid basis for the reconstruction of the now lost sections of the decoration. Of fundamental importance is the work carried out by Jean-François Champollion in 1829. A series of drawings in his Monuments de l’Égypte et de la Nubie show elements of the tomb’s decoration in great detail. He also made extensive notes on the tomb in its entirety, published later in his Notices descriptives. More than 50 years after Champollion, Eugène Lefébure produced useful additions to these notes in Les hypogées royaux de Thèbes , all the more valuable as they were made not long before the tomb’s rear sections were damaged by flood waters.

situation that remains so to this day. This is a matter of regret as their work is no less valuable than that of Champollion. This holds true in particular for drawings produced with the aid of the camera lucida, an optical device that projects an image of a wall or object on the artist’s drawing paper. The results are thus free of distortion and remarkably precise.

Robert Hay and his collaborators

One of the first to employ this technique in Egypt was Robert Hay (1799–1863), who was assisted by a team of hired artists. Of these, Joseph Bonomi (1796–1878), who often signed his drawings with his initials, was one of the most important. The camera lucida was used regularly to create detailed drawings of the decoration of tombs, including that of Ramesses III. A significant number of particular scenes drawn in this way can thus be directly combined with photographs and photogrammetry-based orthophotos produced during our fieldwork

Left: burial chamber of KV 11, view to the east wall. Overlapping modern photograph and drawing by Joseph Bonomi.

Opposite page: map of KV 11.

Already before Champollion, visitors from various European countries were travelling around Egypt and creating records of the monuments they encountered. Some stayed in Egypt for a very long time and in this connection a number of visitors from Britain must be singled out for their work in the tomb of Ramesses III: between them, Robert Hay, John Gardner Wilkinson and James Burton produced masses of drawings and notes, but in stark contrast to Champollion and Lefébure, very little of their work was ever published, a

in the tomb. When overlaying a drawing of the burial hall by Bonomi with a recent photograph taken at the same spot, it becomes possible to visualise this heavily destroyed chamber in its former splendour once again (image above).

It is fascinating to see that even the outlines of later collapsed parts, such as can be seen between pillars 3 and 5 above the entrance, align perfectly with the overlapping image, thus confirming that this part of the ceiling was already in danger of collapse when

Photo: The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, The Ramesses III (KV 11) Publication and Conservation Project / J. Kramer Drawing: © British Library Board, Add. MSS. 29818, fol. 29

Bonomi worked in the tomb. Today, this section has dropped from the ceiling and lies in the middle of the hall. Almost the entire decoration of the pillars is lost and only traces remain. While Champollion’s descriptions remain essential for their reconstruction, Bonomi’s drawing is particularly helpful since it provides information about the colours and details, such as crowns and staves. Clearly, a combination of scaled drawings, modern photographs and early travellers’ notes will be an important element in any reconstruction attempts. Some of Bonomi’s drawings, which he produced for himself and not for Hay, are kept in the Griffith Institute in Oxford. During our research there, we newly identified three drawings that depict the cow’s head pilasters at the entrance of the tomb.

Another artist working in Hay’s service was Francis Arundale (1807–1853), a trained

architect. An unexpected boon to our project was the discovery of a large-scale drawing by Arundale of KV 11 in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (image above). Measuring more than two metres in length, it must have been made in 1832/33 and shows a section and plan of the tomb of Ramesses III, including fairly detailed renderings of the now lost decoration in the tomb’s rear compartments. It provides graphical confirmation that this part of the tomb was to a large extent taken up with almost life-size depictions of guardian gods and apotropaic demons who kept watch over the king’s embalmed body and his reawakening.

A group of 36 guardian gods is symmetrically arranged over the two rooms H and L, both groups facing the sarcophagus hall. In a similar fashion, groups of apotropaic demons are

Francis Arundale, section and plan of the tomb of Ramesses III.

Drawing:

Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Museum

displayed in rooms I and K1-K2 (images below left) as well as in the gateways leading in and out of the sarcophagus hall and in the four corners of the hall, where they are located over the doorways to the side-rooms. The distribution of these groups over such a large part of the tomb and on such a scale is unique for a royal tomb of the New Kingdom.

James Burton

Another traveller using the camera lucida was James Burton (1788–1862). His drawings include details from the decoration of the ten small side-chambers in the front part of the tomb. In these rooms, the upper parts of the decoration are relatively well preserved, but the lower parts were largely destroyed. The illustration (image below, right) shows a detail from the decoration of room Cf, which has an unusual version of the vignette of Spell

110 of the Book of the Dead. Like the records of the Hay expedition, Burton’s drawings are now kept in the British Library.

Sir Gardner Wilkinson

The Bodleian Libraries in Oxford hold the papers of Sir Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875). In the course of several prolonged stays in Egypt, the first of which lasted from 1821 till 1833, Wilkinson produced an immense amount of drawings, sketches, maps and squeezes as well as extensive notes. Working through this collection, we were able to add new sketches and notes to the already published references in Porter/Moss, Topographical Bibliography. A number of these reproduce details from the decoration of the side chambers in corridors B and C as well as the rear part of the tomb that had not been recognised as such until now.

Left: drawing of a part of the west wall in room Cf by Burton.

Opposite page: two groups of apotropaic demons in room K1. Left: a detail of Arundale’s section of KV 11, showing the east wall. Right: a camera lucida drawing by Hay, showing the west wall.

Drawing: Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Wilkinson dep. a. 21, fol. 147 © National Trust

Photo: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, The Ramesses III (KV 11) Publication and Conservation Project / J. Kramer

Reconstruction: A. Weber

Again, a comparison of the older drawings and modern photographs will contribute to the reconstruction of scenes that are lacking reference material such as the depiction in room Ba – the famous so-called ‘royal bakery’ (image left). Although they are not to scale, Wilkinson’s drawings provide valuable information about scene content and colours. On the modern photograph (centre), one may see the current state of the wall relief, which is in a very poor condition due to destruction by water ingress and scratches.

The image below right shows a typical page from Wilkinson’s notebooks. It depicts 19 deities, the last 15 of which represent a selection from the 20 guardian deities on the walls of corridor H. The image is an example of the rather haphazard way in which Wilkinson recorded his notes. At the same time, the notes provide a useful check against the observations of Champollion, Hay and Lefébure, all of whom made occasional small errors.

In summary, the study of the tomb’s decoration programme, together with its

• We would like to thank the Egypt Exploration Society for generously supporting this project and making our visits to the archives possible. We are indebted to the British Library, the Bodleian Libraries, the Griffith Institute and the Victoria & Albert Museum, who provided not only support but also granted permission to publish the archive material. Willem Hovestreydt is a Dutch Egyptologist and team member of the ‘Ramesses III (KV 11) Publication and Conservation Project’. Until his retirement he was editor of the Annual Egyptological Bibliography (now continued as the Online Egyptological Bibliography ). Among other projects, he is currently working on the interpretation of scenes in royal tomb iconography. Lea Rees is a German Egyptologist and PhD candidate at the Egyptological Seminar of Freie Universität Berlin, writing her thesis about the transformations of the cultural landscape of Dahshur. Her research within the ‘Ramesses III (KV 11) Publication and Conservation Project’ focuses on the pharaoh’s burial equipment. Anke Weber is a German Egyptologist, who received her PhD from Freie Universität Berlin on the depiction of offerings in New Kingdom offering table scenes in the Theban necropoleis. She specialises in private and royal tomb decoration and the analysis of their iconography and ways of multimodal communication. She is field director and project leader of the ‘Ramesses III (KV 11) Publication and Conservation Project’.

architectural layout and inscriptions, will provide new insights into religious concepts employed in Ramesside royal tombs. The authors intend to reconstruct a major part of KV 11, the results of which will be published in a monograph. More information on our archive research will be presented in our upcoming ‘Third Report on the Publication and Conservation of the Tomb of Ramesses III’, which is planned for the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 107.

Opposite page: drawing by Wilkinson (top), modern photograph (2019) (centre) and reconstruction with aid of Wilkinson’s notes and drawings (bottom).

Below: a page from one of Wilkinson’s notebooks, showing various deities.

Drawing: Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Wilkinson dep. e.59, fol. 246 © National Trust

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Thanks to your help, we’re able to continue our mission to support and promote Egypt’s cultural heritage. Throughout our long history, some of our greatest work was made possible by legacies.

If you choose to leave us a gift in your will, you will become part of this generous philanthropic tradition, and become part of Egypt’s history too.

Books

Edward William Lane, Description of Egypt. Notes and Views in Egypt and Nubia, 1825–28. Ed. and with an introduction by Jason Thompson. AUC Press, 2020. ISBN: 978-977-416-934-2. Price: £24.95 (paperback)

Edward Lane is best known for his famous work The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, which first appeared in 1836.This was meant to be part of a larger compilation entitled Description of Egypt, but that part of his project was never published in his lifetime. The manuscript languished unread until it was edited by Jason Thompson and appeared in 2000. It has now been reissued in paperback.

The editor gives a brief introduction outlining the history of the manuscript until publication. Lane’s work largely consists of his description of his voyage from Alexandria to Rosetta, then up the Nile to Cairo and on to Wadi Halfa. The value of his account lies in the depictions of the sites he visited along the Nile, many of which have changed substantially since his time. The book is a valuable snapshot of the ruins in the 1820s before clearance and in some cases, destruction. His progress is dated, and so can be closely followed. He mentions a few fellow travellers such as Linant and Caviglia, and also Robert Hay with whom he visited the Faiyum as well as Giza in May 1827 on his return northwards. There are essays on the history of Muslim Egypt, the career of Muhammad Ali and, at the end, an account of the ancient Egyptians, now obviously outdated but useful to show the extent of knowledge at the time. The work is illustrated by Lane’s own contemporary drawings.

MORRIS BIERBRIER

Aidan Dodson, Nefertiti: Queen and Pharaoh of Egypt. Her Life and Afterlife AUC Press, 2020. ISBN: 978-977-416990-8. Price: £29.95 (hardcover)

Dr. Dodson has embarked on a series of ‘biographies’ of royal ancient figures. Following the lives of Sety I and Ramesses III, he has now produced an account of the famous and controversial Queen Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten. Her life has been recounted before with much speculation but actual facts in short supply. She is generally more widely known for the sculputure of her head now in the Berlin Museum and from the many reliefs with her husband from the town of Amarna.

The author seeks to define her role and place in Egyptian history. He has his own definite views on the Amarna period, but this book is the most objective and wellbalanced summation of her career to date. He does not hesitate to dismiss some of the earlier outdated theories concerning the queen, but faithfully reports views that are divergent from his own interpretation. He cites the most recent evidence judiciously. His sceptical view of the use of DNA evidence when we know the royal family was interrelated is well made. His theory that there was indeed a male co-regent named Smenkhare (possibly Akhenaten’s brother) who died before him and who was then succeeded by Nefertiti herself as pharaoh is contentious but plausibly argued. Most interesting is his last chapter concerning the queen’s resurrection from oblivion, so her name once more lives forever. This volume is well-produced and sumptuously illustrated and a fine addition to this welcome biographical series.

Chris Naunton, Egyptologists’

Notebooks. Thames & Hudson, 2020. ISBN: 978-050-029-529-8. Price: £32 (hardcover)

Following the template of Thames & Hudson’s Explorers’ Sketchbooks, this book targets the same general interest market. It is a visually sumptuous, beautifully textured feast – but also offers more in the way of exposition than sketchbooks. Many of these colourful illustrations have previously been admired in redacted form: extracted, cropped and inserted to decorate countless popular Egyptology books, leaving unclear how the images themselves came to be recorded and transmitted. This book attempts to chart that process of production.

Arranged biographically, it sketches the lives of a mixture of very well-known individuals like Flinders Petrie and Howard Carter but also practitioners that will be new to many readers. From the late 19th century onwards, a particular accent is placed on activities sponsored by the EES, of which Naunton was Director from 2011 until 2016, highlighting the Society’s impact in the field.

For the vast majority of readers this will be an eloquent sufficiency. But for a more specialist audience uneasy with celebratory histories of archaeology this book will fall somewhat short. While Naunton acknowledges the colonial setting of ‘our adventurers’, the inclusion of just a single Egyptian archaeologist, Hassan Effendi Hosni, suggests the potential for shifting the narrative in histories of Egyptian archaeology.

George Hart (1945–2021)

Obituary

The Egypt Exploration Society, and many friends and colleagues around the world, mourn the death of George Arthur John Hart, who suddenly and sadly passed away on Monday, 15 February 2021. George had been a passionate and devoted member of the Society since 1970 and for many years served on its Board of Trustees.

His lifelong passion for visiting Egypt began with his first trip in 1971 and his degrees in Classics and Egyptology from University College London. George was a regular guest speaker on tours and cruises, both in Egypt and the wider Mediterranean area, and many members will have travelled with him and benefitted from his expert knowledge and good companionship. Back home, his more than 30-year-long career in the Education Department of the British Museum (1973–2004) led to encounters with students and interested audiences through educational courses and lectures, focusing on Egypt and the Bronze Age civilisations of the Mediterranean. It was also while at the British Museum that George became a familiar name as a prolific author of books, including A Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses (1986), Egyptian Myths (1990), Pharaohs and Pyramids: A Guide

Through Old Kingdom Egypt (1991), and his latest two-volume book, The Pharaohs, for the Folio Society (2010).

George served as a committee member of the Sudan Archaeological Research Society and was a founding member of the Friends of the Petrie Museum, serving as their first Chairman from 1988 to 2000. In 1991, George continued to pioneer access to and engagement with Egyptology by becoming a founding member of the Editorial Board of our own Egyptian Archaeology magazine. He continued to serve on the Editorial Board until 2014 and continued writing or editing many of the book reviews published there until more recent issues. From 2009, George brought his educational skills to the Society by initiating our Egyptian language evening classes, which continue even today – though currently held online.

As a valued Trustee, George was always a supportive and caring advisor to staff of the Society and a regular attendee at Society events and receptions. He will be missed greatly and remembered very fondly by all who knew him.

George, front right, during a meeting of the Board of Trustees in 2014.

Bloomsbury Summer School 2021

Courses & study days on Egypt & the wider ancient world

March – April (online)

Beginning hieroglyphs & Coptic

in Graeco-Roman Egypt

June – July (online & in person)

Intermediate & advanced hieroglyphs

Coptic Gods &

Royal tombs & elite statuary

spells, oracles, & amulets

Persia

September (online & in person)

Mesoamerican art & archaeology

Stone tools & technologies

Civilisations of the Nile Valley Concepts of pharaoh

Recent discoveries in the Royal Cache Wadi on Luxor's west bank

Directors

Egyptian art through the ages

course, 8 April to 10 June 2021

A 10-week course to explore surviving artistic reliefs and monuments from domestic, sacred and funerary contexts, illustrating key aspects of ancient Egyptian society, culture and religious belief.

With several object case studies and detailed looks at particular archaeological sites, this course will delve into artistic conventions and practices across a wide range of iconic (and more unusual!) sculpture from the Predynastic through to the Ptolemaic Period.

Egyptian art through the ages is for anyone interested in the topic, no prior knowledge is required. Optional further reading through free-access and online resources will be available for those interested in learning more.