Category Archives: New Kingdom

Now published – the monograph about Tomb 26

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What began back in 2015 on Sai Island in Sudan is now officially fulfilled and published according to plan: the book about Tomb 26 in the New Kingdom elite cemetery of Sai, its architecture and material culture, including chapters on geology, human remains, scientific analyses and a compilation of the material discovered, is finally in my hands!

I would like to repeat my heartfelt thanks to all team members who worked very hard in the field to document everything in Tomb 26 in the years between 2015 to 2017 and of course in particular to the contributors of the new book: Johannes Auenmüller, Cajetan Geiger, Rennan Lemos, Andrea Stadlmayr and Marlies Wohlschlager. I am also very grateful to Veronica Hinterhuber and Patrizia Heindl who helped in many ways with the final version, primarily with illustrations. Many thanks also go to the funding agencies of our work, the ERC and the FWF.

You can read the book, published by Sidestone Press, online for free or order it as an Ebook, as Paperback or Hardback edition: https://www.sidestone.com/books/tomb-26-on-sai-island

We are all very much looking forward to any kind of feedback and hope our work will contribute to the ongoing discussion of the importance of investigating the variability of funerary practices of colonial Nubia since these are rooted in distinct social practices.

Tomb 26 allows us to address the distinct cultural character of Nubia during the New Kingdom which was marked by considerable variations and regional differences and still provides several open questions for future research. Some of these open questions are now being focused on by my DiverseNile project – thus, my journey which began in some respects back in 2015 with the discovery of Tomb 26 is far from being over and continues with fresh ideas and new material.

Status: Forthcoming – the monograph about Tomb 26

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As announced in January, what began back in 2015 in Sudan is now on the finishing straight. The monograph about Tomb 26 on Sai Island is in production and will appear later this year, published by Sidestone Press. This book is the final publication of Tomb 26, its architecture and material culture, including chapters on geology, human remains, scientific analyses and a compilation of the material discovered. New information provided by AcrossBorders excavations of Tomb 26 contribute to recently discussed questions regarding cultural encounters and social practices in New Kingdom Nubia. Comparable material from other tombs on Sai and elsewhere in Nubia is discussed in order to stress the relevance of the new discovery.

The cover of the forthcoming book, in production by Sidestone Press.

As most of you who followed this blog know, Tomb 26 is one of the Egyptian style pyramid tombs on Sai where the local elite living in the New Kingdom was buried. We had more than 36 burials in this monument and we are now able to reconstruct in detail the life history of the tomb and its users, including the overseer of goldsmiths Khnummose.

The archaeological contextualisation of Tomb 26, in combination with scientific analyses like strontium isotope analysis, offers fresh information on the complex coexistence of various cultural groups on Sai with slightly different approaches to their cultural and social affinities during the New Kingdom. The monument and its finds illustrate as a case study that a high degree of variability of funerary practices within a common repertoire of burial customs adopted from Egyptian standards is most probably rooted in distinct social practices. Overall, Tomb 26 and its associated finds are of prime significance for understanding lived experience on New Kingdom Sai and more broadly in New Kingdom Nubia.

I am very thankful to all team members who worked very hard in the field to document everything in Tomb 26 from 2015 to 2017 and of course in particular to the contributors of the forthcoming book: Johannes Auenmüller, Cajetan Geiger, Rennan Lemos, Andrea Stadlmayr and Marlies Wohlschlager.

Now all I have to do in this respect is to calm my impatience – I can hardly wait to hold the printed book in my hands!

New Open Data and Open Access of the AcrossBorders Project

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Time flies by, also during the Covid-19 crisis – one of the small advantages of cancelled archaeological fieldwork in Egypt and Sudan is that there is more time to process old data and publish these accordingly.

I am proud to announce that we just submitted a book manuscript about Tomb 26 on Sai Island which will be hopefully printed later this year. This book is the final publication of Tomb 26, its architecture and material culture, including chapters on geology, human remains, scientific analyses and a compilation of the material discovered. As part of this publication, we prepared two sets of supplementary data which are already freely available via Open Data LMU:

Furthermore, I am happy to inform that the AcrossBorders 2 volume is now available online (free open access provided via the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press). Hoping that this new access to important data from our excavations on Sai Island, including raw data, will be useful to many around the world – more will follow soon and we keep you posted.

Tracing the New Kingdom population on Sai Island

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One of the main tasks of the AcrossBorders project was investigating the New Kingdom population and answering questions about not only the individual lifestyles, but also the origin of the persons. Were the people who lived in the New Kingdom Egyptian town on Sai and were buried in the pyramid cemetery SAC5 Egyptians, or Nubians – or rather a mix of both and the evidence of ‘cultural’ respectively ‘biological’ entanglement?

I am very proud to announce that our paper on the application of strontium isotopes to investigate cultural entanglement in Sai and its surroundings is now out and published (Retzmann et al. 2019)! The main author is Anika Retzmann and many thanks go of course to her and the complete team of authors!

Strontium isotopes were applied to identify possible ‘colonialists’ coming from Egypt within the skeletal remains retrieved from Tomb 26 of the pharaonic cemetery SAC5 on Sai Island. Tooth enamel of nine individuals including the Overseer of Goldsmiths Khummose and his presumably ‘wife’, dating from the 18th Dynasty, were investigated to gain information whether these individuals were first generation immigrants from Egypt or indigenous members of the local population inhabiting the area of Sai Island.

The local strontium signal on Sai Island during the New Kingdom was derived from archaeological animal samples (rodent, sheep/goat, dog and local mollusc shells, all dating from the New Kingdom) in agreement with local environmental samples (paleo sediments and literature Sr isotope value of Nile River water during the New Kingdom era).

As you can read in more detail in the article: the strontium values suggest that all people buried in Tomb 26 are members of the local population. A striking outcome, since the tomb, the tomb equipment, the personal names and titles are all clearly ‘Egyptian’.

Khnummose and the other persons buried in Tomb 26 belonged to the local population of Sai

To make it short: our results are simply exciting, tie in nicely with similar research at Tombos and Amara West – and will be of great importance also for my new DiverseNile project. More information on the complex coexistence and biological and cultural entanglement of Egyptians and Nubians during the New Kingdom are urgently needed. In this respect, we will continue to investigate the isoscape in my new concession – I am very happy that the successful team who did this for Sai will be again involved! The MUAFS area will provide new data from soil, water, molluscs and of course animal bones and human teeth which will allow us to place the data from Sai in a broader context. The periphery of Sai and Amara West, our Attab to Ferka region, also has rich potential to check the validity of our present strontium analysis.

Reference

Retzmann et al. 2019 = Anika Retzmann, Julia Budka, Helmut Sattmann, Johanna Irrgeher, Thomas Prohaska, The New Kingdom population on Sai Island: Application of Sr isotopes to investigate cultural entanglement in ancient Nubia, Ägypten und Levante 29, 2019, 355–380

More details about the pottery from House 55

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My week here at Elephantine passed by very quickly. Despite of all the work, I also had the chance and pleasure to enjoy the beauty of this place and of the landscape at the First Cataract.

More ceramic material from House 55 is now processed – my pottery database holds currently almost 2400 pieces from the structure, including 350 Nubian sherds. Of particular interest are painted and imported wares as well as functional vessels. The latter allow a close comparison with the material we excavated in the last years within the New Kingdom town of Sai in Sudan.

In general, the functional ceramics from House 55 at Elephantine compare very well with the Sai material. Despite of close parallels regarding the general corpus and the vessel types, I have suggested that a distinct difference applies to the use of Marl or Nile clay for functional vessels (Budka 2018). This can be illustrated by spinning bowls, but also the so-called fish dishes (‘Schaelbecken’), pot stands and zir vessels.

The class of spinning bowls is quite interesting – these are dishes with two handles attached to the interior of the base. The handles are used for wetting linen fibers during spinning. Such spinning bowls are frequently attested in Egyptian settlements like Amarna and Elephantine (where also other evidence for textile working is found).

Example of a spinning bowl from House 55.

As of today, I have recorded 15 pieces of spinning bowls from House 55 in detail, some of them in a very good state of preservation. More were found in fragmented state and are not considered in my database. 50% of the recorded material was made in Marl clay, 50% in Nile clay. This proportion between Marl and Nile clays differs considerably with the evidence from Sai – although only a small number of spinning bowls were found there within the New Kingdom town, almost all of them are made from Nile clay and were most likely locally produced for demand at the site. Almost no Marl clay spining bowls were imported from Egypt.

All in all, my short stay here at Elephantine was extremely productive and important for working out further details of comparisons between the pottery corpora from Sai and Elephantine.

Reference

Julia Budka 2018. Pots & People: Ceramics from Sai Island and Elephantine, in: Julia Budka und Johannes Auenmüller (eds.), From Microcosm to Macrocosm. Individual households and cities in Ancient Egypt and Nubia, Leiden, 147‒170.

Busy with Egyptian and Nubian pottery from House 55

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As usual on excavations, time flies by. I was busy in the last days with drawings of important pottery vessels from House 55. The importance can be of different character: 1) completely preserved vessel and thus significant for the corpus of shapes and pottery types; 2) chronologically interesting piece and of significance for the ceramic phases and their fine-dating and 3) functionally relevant vessels including so-called hybrid vessels illustrating the intermingling of Nubian and Egyptian pottery making tradition on the island.

I had a bit of all three main categories during the last days, besides some very nice imports found in House 55, coming from the Levant and Cyprus, as well as a unique sherd of the famous Tell el-Yahudiya ware.

Among my favourites are the Nubian sherds from House 55. The Nubian cooking pots are mostly of Pan-Grave style with incised decoration, but a minority of the cooking vessels shows basketry impression and is very similar to pieces from Sai. Within the fine ware, Kerma Black Topped cups and beakers dominate, sometimes with the silvery band on the outside characteristic of the Kerma Classique period. Today, I made a drawing of a very nice Black Topped beaker and was able to reconstruct its complete outline.

Besides making drawings, I am busy with material excavated in the 26th and 27th seasons in House 55, thus more than 20 years ago. Among other interesting pieces, today I had the sixth piece of a so-called fire dog on my table. These fire dogs continue to fascinate me – especially since my work at Sai. At Elephantine, almost 50% of the ones found in 18th Dynasty levels are coming from House 55! But the small number is completely different to the large amount of fire dogs we found within the New Kingdom town of Sai Island. Research about the proper functional use of these devises thought to hold cooking pots above the fire will have to continue.

Another reunion in Vienna – preparing Tomb 26 for final publication

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The winter term is about to start in Munich, but I took the opportunity of the period still free of teaching obligations to spend some time in Vienna for different meetings and especially for get-togethers with former and also future team members for my work in Sudan.

Especially productive and full of positive memories was yesterday’s reunion with AcrossBorders’ physical anthropologists, Andrea Stadlmayer and Marlies Wohlschlager.

Andrea and Marlies have already published first insights on the burials within Tomb 26 – available online as part of our recently published book “From Microcosm to Macrocosm”. But the complete data from Tomb 26 will be published as a monograph in Vienna, in one of the OREA series by the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. Yesterday, we discussed the general outline of this book and very soon talked already about exciting details about the New Kingdom interments of Khnummose and others in Tomb 26. There is still a lot of work to do, but we’re all very much looking forward to this task, bringing together results of three seasons of fieldwork with plenty of data from post-excavation processing.

Insha’allah the book on Tomb 26 will already be available next year – compiling all kinds of data from the excavation, the objects, the architecture to the human remains, C14 dates and strontium isotope analysis and thus highlightening the tomb’s significance for understanding New Kingdom Sai.

On the move: Barcelona, Vienna, Paris

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These days are full of action, movement and travelling – having just returned from a splendid EAA 2018 in the beautiful city of Barcelona, where AcrossBorders was represented in a very interesting session on “border zones” and “mobility”, I am back in Vienna, just in time to participate in the Be Open Festival, celebrating 50 years of the FWF.

The EAA 2018 was fantastic, including a lecture hall with a slendid view of the town! (photo: Patrizia Heindl)

Yesterday’s Science Slam was great fun; I talked about the discovery of Tomb 26 on Sai with all its problems and the happy end, discovering Khnummose and his family.

All participants of yesterday’s Science Slam, including winner Miriam Unterlass. Photo: Helmut Satzinger.

Tomorrow starts the next event which will for sure also be of great inspiration – the Nubian Conference will take place in Paris; of course I’ll be talking about Sai again. My paper aims to provide a short summary of AcrossBorders work in the past years, stressing the new findings which are relevant to understand the site’s history in the 18th Dynasty.

Looking much forward to tomorrow’s travel to Paris, especially meeting all the colleagues working on ancient Sudan!

Of merits and flaws preparing archaeological publications

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It has been silent from my side the last months. Too silent for my opinion; for too long, even during summer break. Almost no tweets and no updates or posts on this blog.

Well – I believe I have the perfect excuse: we’ve been extremely busy preparing the next AcrossBorders monograph in the last weeks and I am delighted to say that it’s actually done! Just printed all of it!

This volume is quite substantial – under the title “AcrossBorders 2: Living in New Kingdom Sai” it brings together our most important results of work about the New Kingdom remains at Sai Island in northern Sudan in the last years. Johannes Auenmüller, Annette M. Hansen, Frits B.J. Heinrich, Veronica Hinterhuber, Ptolemaios Paxinos, Nadja Pöllath, Helmut Sattmann, Sara Schnedl and Martina Ullmann have contributed apart from me to this new book. It focuses on the landscape and environmental remains of the Egyptian town on Sai and it introduces AcrossBorders work at sectors SAV1 East and SAV1 West. Archaeology and architecture are presented together with the objects and ceramics as well as specialized chapters on sandstone quarries, animal bones, molluscs and botanical remains. The occupants of New Kingdom Sai are discussed and some new ideas are put forward regarding the ‘social fabric’ and the intermingling of Nubians and Egyptians at the site.

The manuscript has a total of 700 text pages and comprises all together 300 tables, figures and plates – so indeed a substantial next volume in the AcrossBorders series of monographs which will again be published by OREA in Vienna. I will submit the manuscript on Monday and hope that the peer reviewing process will start soon!

As proud as I am today, as tired I feel. The last two weeks have been extremely intense, one could also say crazy. Working hours did not just increase but plainly doubled and several panic attacks about my own insufficient timing took turns with unexpected and very time-consuming problems with hard- and software. Most of us know all of this – finalising a manuscript means just loads of things, loads of organization and occupies one completely. No matter how much I love my occupation as archaeologist, these are the days and weeks when the really important things in life fall short – family and friends, pets and sports. In Munich, the inconvenient opening hours of grocery shops start getting on your nerves and your fridge stays empty. You’re so occupied with these texts and figures of the book you’re working on, you forget to eat and drink – and look at least 10 years older every evening and every morning in the mirror. A certain line for me was drawn when I completely forgot about and just heard it in the radio next morning that my favourite soccer team actually made it to the group phase of the European League after all (and this is the Austrian team which really deserved it, not the other one which simply keeps failing the qualification to the Champions League…).

Well – now it’s done and I cannot believe it. Without the tremendous support and help of Veronica Hinterhuber, this would not have been possible – she took so much work off my shoulders and was perfectly organised as always. Cajetan Geiger also deserves loads of thanks for preparing last minute new versions of figures and plans.

Of course as archaeologists it’s the major task to publish our results – and here, I do not necessary mean the general “publish or perish” policy which is putting so much pressure on especially young scientists from all fields. No, in archaeology, I completely agree with Peter Drewett and the following: “The only truly bad archaeologist is one who does not publish the results of his or her field investigations. All else is opinion” (Drewett 1999, 6). Our work does not stop in the field, but it is actually there where it starts.

Preparing results of archaeological excavations for publication is, however, not an easy task. One always has to balance between a descriptive way of presenting the results in a clear way, and an interpretative analysis of the same. And, since modern fieldwork is usually very interdisciplinary, one also has to bring together a large number of diverse lines of research and try to combine and/or compare results from various groups of data.

The AcrossBorders 2 volume will hopefully meet up to these standards and expectations – I am really looking forward to the reviews, always happy to incorporate some suggestions and to improve certain aspects. But in the end, I believe we did already quite a good job as an archaeological project, finishing the second monograph within one year after our final season at Sai. And I hope this will also be appreciated by the community and colleagues.

I have to stop now. Sportschau is about to start on TV. Back to normal life, at least for a while. Work on the third AcrossBorders monograph will commence soon, but the really crazy days are still a long way off.

Reference

Drewett, Peter L. 1999. Field Archaeology: An Introduction. London.

Presenting new C14 results from Tomb 26 in Vienna

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Teaching classes and exams were finished this week in Munich and now some time for research has arrived! While we are still busy preparing the next monographs about the New Kingdom town of Sai, I am delighted that I will take a short break in the upcoming week going to Vienna. Thanks to an invitation for a lecture at the NHM Vienna, I will be talking about Tomb 26 and our latest findings there.

Among others, I will be presenting for the first time the very interesting results from C14 samples from Tomb 26. Unfortunately, the bone samples all failed to yield any extractable collagen for dating. This is why only charcoal samples were used and processed by the Beta Analytic Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory. Nevertheless, these results are informative and support the phases of use of Tomb 26 as proposed based on the stratigraphy and the ceramic evidence.

I would like to highlight the results for the individual who was the first person interred in Chamber 5. This adult male was the one buried along the northern wall with a deposit of flower pots and other vessels at his feet.

Burial in Chamber 5 of Tomb 26 associated with flower pots deposit.

My archaeological dating – not earlier than Thutmose III, most likely mid-18th Dynasty – is now nicely supported by the calibrated dates of 1451-1291BC.

Looking much forward to this small break and the trip to Vienna which is very likely to result in fresh input for our ongoing analysis of Tomb 26.