Preparing the field season, getting advice from Herodotus

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Julia Budka

The preparation of the upcoming 2014 field season is getting more and more advanced – new equipment was bought or at least ordered, including a new workstation with the fabulous software aspect3D (“Photos become 3D models – REALTIME”), a brand new Canon EOS 70D and other material for the excavation at Sai Island. Tomorrow, there will be a meeting held at Lille to finalize the schedule and to talk about future plans for research on the New Kingdom at Sai.

Very soon I’ll be booking the flights and practical information will be distributed among the fieldwork team members. All of them have been already informed about the nimiti and the strength they take… It was also hard to keep them a secret as this blog is full of pictures with people carrying handsome head mosquito nets, :-)! To lift our spirits, I would once again like to come back to Herodotus and the wealth of information he has left for us with his “The Histories”. In an earlier post I have given a translation of Book Two, 95 referring to mosquitoes. A few weeks ago the brilliant new translation by Tom Holland was published – it’s an absorbing new edition which I really enjoy flipping through (not yet enough time for proper reading…) and would recommend to every lover of the Ancient World!

Here is the mosquito paragraph in the new translation by Tom Holland (Herodotus. The Histories, Penguin Classics, London 2013):

Book Two, 95: “Various methods have been devised by the Egyptians to cope with the swarms of mosquitoes. Those who live south of the marshes benefit from the towers which they climb before going to sleep, for the winds ensure that the mosquitoes fly close to the ground. Those who live beside the marshes, however, have to make other arrangements. Every man among them possesses a net which during the day is used for fishing, but at night-time is put to an alternative use. First, its owner drapes the net over the bed in which he plans to take his rest, then he slips underneath it and goes to sleep. It is no use going to sleep wrapped up in cloth or linen, for mosquitoes can bite straight through them. Through the net, however, they do not make an attempt.” (Holland 2013, p. 145)

The last sentence is the most important one if we transfer this account to modern Sudan and to nimiti bothering us during the day – “Through the net, however, they do not make an attempt!” – insha’allah!

P.S.: For Herodotus and Egypt see most recently: Hérodote et l’Égypte. Regards croisés sur le Livre II de l’Enquête d’Hérodote. Actes de la journée d’étude organisée à la Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée – Lyon, le 10 mai 2010. Collection de la Maison de l’Orient méditerranéen ancien 51. Série littéraire et philosophique 18. Lyon: Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée Jean Pouilloux, 2013. Available online!

We Proudly Present: AcrossBorders’ First Ph.D. Student

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Julia Budka

Starting with today, our team is further strengthened: Jördis Vieth has signed her contract for the next three years as researcher of AcrossBorders. She is well known to those who have followed our blog during the fieldwork in January to March – being one of the heroines fighting nimiti, wind & more!

I am very happy to have managed to bring Jördis in – not only as temporary field staff member but now enlarging the core team of my project! Being acquainted with her since 2006, I had plenty of time to get to know her as a person, both in the class room and on excavations in Egypt (Abydos), and as a very promising and highly motivated young colleague.

It was in particular her MA thesis which impressed me much: She wrote about “Egyptian Palace architecture in the New Kingdom” (original title: “Ägyptische Palastarchitektur des Neuen Reichs”) – a very difficult topic which she re-assessed meticulously and with new ideas, challenging some of the established terminology for settlement architecture in Egypt. With this excellent thesis, which received the highest grade at Humboldt University Berlin, Jördis is perfectly qualified to join AcrossBorders. She will primarily focus on the character of the fortified town of Sai Island, including the site into her envisaged PhD thesis about the so-called temple towns of Nubia in the New Kingdom. Jördis will conduct her PhD at Humboldt University Berlin and I am proud and honored acting as one of her supervisors to-be. Lots of aspects of settlement archaeology and the character of the Egyptian sites in Nubia during the New Kingdom are still little understood – with the ongoing fieldwork at Sai Island (and neighboring sites) and AcrossBorders’ focus on reconstructing the material world and its parameters, there is much potential: a study like Jördis is going to undertake seems timely and important.

Nehi at Elephantine

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Julia Budka

Nehi, Viceroy of Kush under Thutmose III, is a well-known figure of the Egyptian administration in Dynasty 18 (see e.g. Leblanc 2009). He was responsible for building several temples in Lower and Upper Nubia, also the Amun temple at Sai, located just south of our excavation area SAV1 East.

My special interest for Nehi goes back to 1998 and my first participation in the joint German-Swiss mission at Elephantine. Like other officials of the Egyptian administration of Nubia, Nehi left several records and monuments in the area of the First Cataract: in particular stelae and rock inscriptions, records which I always thought have a peculiar “personal” touch – they invoke the illusion of getting close to those persons of the past, to some of their activities and thoughts, to almost grasp them as individuals.

It was one of the very joyful moments of my early career when a great topic as MA thesis was proposed to me in the dig house at Elephantine. And one of the stars of this thesis was no one else than Nehi!

Door jamb of Nehi from Elephantine (Budka 2001, pl. 3a)

As monument per se the unpublished object I had to deal with might not seem extremely interesting: it is a surface find from the kom of the ancient town of Elephantine, a sandstone block measuring 35 x 21 x 12 cm. It has a partly faded vertical column with hieroglyphs at its front side and can be identified as lower part of a left doorjamb (Budka 2001, 69; 107, cat. 1). Within the Egyptian settlement architecture made in mud bricks, architectural features like column bases and door elements were regularly executed in stone.

The text identifies the former owner of the building to which the jamb belonged: King’s son, overseer of the southern foreign lands, Nehi!

The importance of this small piece derives from its parallels – especially at Aniba and at Sai Island. Most probably these door frames belonged to administrative buildings and magazines attesting among others the adoration for king Thutmose III. Nehi as the highest official of the Nubian administration demonstrated his loyalty to the king, combining it with the worship of Egyptian gods.

At Elephantine, the stone block by Nehi may attest a temporary residence for the viceroy: the island was an important site to organize expeditions to the South and to count and distribute goods and more.

Further monuments by Nehi discovered at Elephantine are: a splendid sistrophorous statue JE 39749 (now kept at the Nubian Museum at Aswan) and a stela found close to the temple of Satet.

Stela of Nehi from Elephantine (Dreyer 1987, pl. 17c)

On this stela only the representation of Nehi adoring Amun-Ra-Kamutef has survived – the ithyphallic god was chiseled out during the Amarna age (Dreyer 1987, 113-14, pl. 17c).

What interests me most about Nehi and other officials of his time is to try to use all archaeological data available to reconstruct patterns of their past living conditions. The similarities in the architecture and stone monuments found at sites like Elephantine, Aniba and Sai Island are striking and this official line of record would propose few differences between these places. But does this picture change if we take un-inscribed records like ceramics, objects and other materials like animal bones and organic remains into consideration? A detailed assessment of the New Kingdom town of Sai and a close comparison with Elephantine might provide some answers – tracking Nehi by his inscribed monuments is one thing, trying to contextualize these records and establish aspects of their environment goes one step further. I am confident that our research within the framework of AcrossBorders will get us closer to understand the living conditions of viceroy Nehi and his contemporaries.

References

Budka 2001 = Julia Budka. Der König an der Haustür, Die Rolle des ägyptischen Herrschers an dekorierten Türgewänden von Beamten im Neuen Reich, Vienna 2001.

Dreyer 1987 = Günter Dreyer, X. Ausgewählte Kleinfunde, in Werner Kaiser et al., Stadt und Tempel von Elephantine, 13./14. Grabungsbericht, MDAIK 43, 1987, 107-114.

Leblanc 2009 = Christian Leblanc 2009. Nehy, prince et premiere rapporteur du roi, in I. Regen & F. Servajan (eds.), Verba manent, Recueil d’etudes dédiées à Dimitri Meeks par ses collègues et amis, Montpellier 2009, 241-251.

On the road between Lille, London, Vienna and Berlin

Posted on September 13, 2013 by Julia Budka

The last two weeks have been full of travelling and meetings, not in Egypt as originally planned, but here in Europe – the excellent Table ronde at Lille, a brilliant Kirwan Memorial Lecture by Vivian Davies at London, meetings with team members and future collaborators here in Vienna, planning for the next field season at Sai Island and placing orders for various equipment. Tonight, I hope to head for Vienna Airport the very last time in September – going to Berlin and picking up equipment, materials and my SUV there. Back to Vienna by car early next week – insha’allah!

As Giulia reported, all is progressing very well, thanks to the support of our colleagues, in both the Center for Earth Sciences with studying finished thin sections and preparing the new ones and in the Atomic Institute where we will get the NAA results of the first group of samples at the end of this month. Giulia will then start to compare her petrographic observations with the data deriving from the chemical analysis.

Florence has also joined the Table ronde at Lille – she is making good progress in assessing the building phases of SAV1 North; and I am concentrating right now (whenever there is time besides all the travelling & organizational work…) on the ceramic sequence from this site. In the upcoming field season 2014 we will not only continue in SAV1 East and open a new excavation area, but will also focus on studying the small finds, tools and different materials like animal bones from SAV1 North aiming to present a concise analysis of its architecture and functional aspects within the New Kingdom town in due time. It will be in particular relevant to understand aspects of the internal organization and to test whether functionally diverse quarters existed within the town enclosure.

Round Table at Lille – Know-how and technology in Ancient Sudan

Posted on September 4, 2013 by Julia Budka

Getting ready to leave for France this afternoon – I am very happy to be able to participate at a round table colloquium, organized by a team of young French researchers and held at Université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3 (HALMA-IPEL UMR 8164), the main cooperation partner of AcrossBorders, on September 5 and 6. Lille has an outstanding history in researching Ancient Sudan including archaeological fieldwork – Didier Devauchelle holds the concession for Sai Island and has supported our project from the very beginning.

The upcoming meeting (entitled Savoir-faire et techniques au Soudan ancient) promises presentations of young researchers (both doctoral students and Post-doc researchers) working in Ancient Sudan, covering an intriguing range of topics from Prehistory to Medieval times with a focus on materials and technology. The main sessions will be dedicated to architecture; faience, textiles and metallurgic processes; pottery and economic resources. One has to congratulate the colleagues to have managed assembling a group of distinguished chair persons: Charles Bonnet, Abdelrahman Ali Mohammed, Marie Millet, Claude Rilly and Vincent Rondot are all well known archaeologists in leading positions directing current projects in Sudan.

Looking forward meeting new and familiar faces and to fruitful discussions about Ancient Sudan! Without doubt there will be fresh input to my own research and for AcrossBorders. Last but not least I will be able to speak with current French collaborators working at Sai Island and maybe also with possible future ones of the young generation.

Preparing samples for Neutron Activation Analysis

Posted on September 2, 2013 by Giulia d'Ercole

Time really goes by… not just for us but also for our dear ceramic samples. Not too long ago they were still hidden under the warm sun of Sudan in the nice setting of Sai Island. Since then, they have passed through the hands of different people and they have been – in turn – been photographed, drawn, recorded in our File Maker database and, finally, selected for the different laboratory analysis.
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At the end of July, thanks to our cooperation with the Departments of Lithospheric Research and of Geodynamics and Sedimentology and the great work done by Claudia Beybel at the ‘Dünnschlifflabor’, we successfully managed to conclude the preparation of the thin sections for a first group of 36 ceramics. Just today, we submitted the second group of 24 samples to the lab – so we will have a total of 60 thin sections for petrographic studies.

After the summer break, the first group of samples were taken to the Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics (AI) for the Neutron Activation Analysis. Johannes Sterba, Ing.Dr. will be my scientific supervisor at the AI, introducing me to the wonderful world of INAA. He has not only a lot of experience in NAA and chemical analyses on ceramic materials, but also in working with archaeologists and ceramics from Egypt and the Levant.
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Under his supervision, I have prepared all the samples and on Friday August 23 Johannes put them in the machine ‒ so by the end of September we will hopefully have the first results! Waiting for them, I will share some of my experience about the preparation of the samples, illustrated by pictures taken in the lab.

Step 1 – Sampling strategy

Example for grinding the sample in the agata mortar.

Drilling one of the samples.

Some of the prepared samples.

One of the main advantages of INAA is that you need only very few grams of powder for each sample!

For most of our ceramic samples we just selected the small chips produced after the break for the thin section and ground them in an agate mortar to obtain a fine and homogeneous powder. This procedure takes only few minutes, but then you have to clean carefully both the mortar and the pestle in order to avoid any contamination between the samples (and an agate mortar can be quite heavy to hold and to carry…).

Seven potsherds were sampled by drilling, carefully avoiding the slip and/or the painting!

The obtained powder is temporarily collected in small plastic containers.

Step 2 – Weighing the powder

After one night in the oven at 90 °C, the sample is weighted by means of a precision balance (we need about 100 mg of powder) and transferred into pure silica vials. Both the vials and the spoon used for this operation are very small and thin. This is a good training both for your nerves and your hands (better not drink too much coffee before!)

The precision balance for weighting the powder.

Step 3 – Sealing the vials by fire

Before going into the reactor and to be irradiated, all the vials must be sealed. This operation is quite delicate and, at the same time, extremely important: poor seals will cause samples to open during irradiation! The sealing is made by fire, using a soldering iron arrangement in the same laboratory in which the samples were prepared. Once finished, we used an engraving tool to write the number of the sample on the side of each vial.

Important step: sealing the vials by fire.

At this point everything is ready to start with the irradiation… just the time for our small samples to ‘rest’ a little bit immersed into a pure water solution!

Sealed sample within pure water solution.

Pots & pieces

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Julia Budka

In some respect I am very old-fashioned when it comes to analysing pottery – for example, I am still a big fan of organising a preliminary corpus of shapes on paper, with the copied drawings! It nice to have all of them together on a table and arranging them into groups, with the big advantage to simple add pieces or rearrange them differently.

A very uncomplaining cutter…

Over 800 pencil drawings from 3 field seasons at Sai Island (2011-2013) have been quite a challenge for Daniela the last weeks – after the heroic accomplishment of copying all the drawings, she is now using the spaciousness of our nice office to deal with the arrangement of the copied pieces.

This old-fashioned but effective mode of arranging pottery drawings according to shapes and ware groups goes back to my training at Elephantine – first supervised by Dietrich Raue, helping with his Old Kingdom material and later adapting it to my New Kingdom material. At Elephantine, one of the prime considerations was to have a back-up copy of all drawings in the dig house.

Samples of paper copies of pottery drawings from Elephantine: fragments of decorated marl clay vessels.

A nice group of decorated vessels from mid 18^th Dynasty contexts at Elephantine provides good parallels for sherds from the New Kingdom Town of Sai Island. Marl clay bottles with a long neck are painted either in red and black, in red, black and blue, or in black only. The motifs comprise simple linear designs as well as floral and faunal elements (e.g. flowers, lotus buds, ducks and papyrus). The as-yet published parallels are dated to the reigns of Amenhotep II to Thutmose IV (see especially Hope 1987, 108–109 and 116), which corresponds well with the stratigraphic evidence at Elephantine (see Budka 2010) and also the findings from Sai. On the basis of the parallels, a Theban provenience has been proposed for the decorated vessels found at Elephantine – and this seems also very likely for Sai. We will address this issue of provenience in the upcoming years by means of scientific analysis, especially with Neutron Activation Analysis and XRF, hopefully providing more information about the contacts and exchange of wares and pots between Upper Egypt and Upper Nubia.

References

Budka 2010 = J. Budka, The New Kingdom-Pottery from Elephantine, in D. Raue, C. von Pilgrim, P. Kopp, F. Arnold, M. Bommas, J. Budka, M. Schultz, J. Gresky, A. Kozak and St. J. Seidlmayer, Report on the 37^th season of excavation and restoration on the island of Elephantine, Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte 84, 2010, 350-352.

Hope 1987= C. A. Hope, Innovation and Decoration of Ceramics in the Mid-18^th Dynasty, CCÉ 1, 1987, 97-122.

Back in Vienna again …

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Julia Budka

Running is risky…

The rainy weather here in Vienna strengthens the impression that the summer is almost over – at least the holidays are gone. Back at my desk in Vienna, not exactly in best shape (running is risky, obviously especially in Berlin…), but very happy about the progress Giulia is making in the lab with her petrographic studies and about the advancement in digitalizing our files and data thanks to Daniela and Elke! The selected samples for Neutron Activation Analysis were successfully submitted to the Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics last week, so we’re eagerly waiting for first results in September.

Meeting so many of my team members in Berlin was just great – many thanks to Jördis, Nicole and Sebastian for taking some time to talk about SAV1 East, firedogs and more! I am furthermore keeping my fingers crossed that Julia Preisigke, like Nicole one of my indispensable pottery assistants at Abydos, will join us as planned in 2014 on Sai Island. There is quite a number of similarities between the 18^th Dynasty pottery deposited at Umm el-Qaab and the ceramics we are finding at Sai – parallels which have to be investigated further!

These nice prospects of both upcoming scientific analysis and future fieldwork make it much easier to deal with the paperwork here at my desk!

Time goes by…

Posted on August 9, 2013 by Elke Schuster

About 3 months ago I happily joined the AcrossBorders Team. In this initial phase some of my tasks were to finalize pottery drawings from the 2013 season, digitize the already inked ones from the 2012 season and labelling them for the database. So I scanned about 200 inked drawings of New Kingdom pottery sherds from Sai. At the moment I’m working on these with Photoshop: I check the quality of the scan, crop it, change levels, work with gradation curves and so on – as you can see in this example.

It is an interesting and very good training in various steps of the documentation of ceramics.

Summer break

Posted on August 2, 2013 by Julia Budka

After a busy (and successful) July, most of us are heading for vacation this month – Giulia and me are out of office the next weeks, but Florence will soon return from her break and the brave student assistants, Elke and Daniela, are enjoying the summer heat in Vienna – and holding the fort in the office, at least part-time!

Post-excavation work still keeps us busy, especially the ceramic data and analysis of other finds. Giulia will continue with her petrographic studies later in August; starting also with Johannes Sterba (Institute of Atomic ans Subatomic Physics) the sampling for Neutron Activation Analysis of our ceramics. We’ll keep you posted!

After the field season is already before the next campaign – thus, I will also use my time in Berlin for meetings with future collaborators and of course established team members like Jördis, Nicole and Sebastian. Planning the 2014 season has already started!

AcrossBorders

This is the blog of the ERC starting grant project AcrossBorders (ERC grant agreement n° 313668)

Category Archives: Upper Nubia