Tag Archives: Khnummose

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!

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

This week in Munich: Bioarchaeology in Nubia

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I am delighted that in this week AcrossBorders welcomes, jointly with the Egyptian Museum in Munich, Michaela Binder from the Austrian Archaeological Institute here in Munich. Michaela will give a public lecture about her work at cemeteries at Amara West on Thursday, April 26 at 6 pm.

Possibilities and limits of modern bioarchaeology will be discussed with material from Amara West as a case study. Michaela will also illustrate the latest insights into the living conditions during the New Kingdom in Nubia (cf. Binder 2017). This is of course highly relevant to AcrossBorders’ research focus of the past five years, comparing evidence from the New Kingdom town of Sai with the contemporaneous elite cemetery SAC5. I am therefore very much looking forward to this talk and excited to hear more about the anthropological findings at Amara West, especially from the point of view from Sai and the latest study of Andrea Stadlmayr and Marlies Wohlschlager on Tomb 26. Some pathological finds in Tomb 26 are quite remarkable, concerning Khnummose as well as other New Kingdom individuals buried in Tomb 26 – will be great to compare these findings and possible conclusions about the lifestyle of the occupants of 18th Dynasty Sai with the life histories of Ramesside officials at Amara West!

Reference

Binder 2017 = Binder, M. 2017. The New Kingdom tombs at Amara West: Funerary perspectives on Nubian-Egyptian interactions, in: Spencer, N., Stevens, A. and Binder, M. (eds.), Nubia in the New Kingdom. Lived experience, pharaonic control and indigenous traditions. British Museum Publications on Egypt and Sudan 3. Leuven: Peeters, 591-613.

 

Valentine’s Day Special: An exceptional heart scarab from Sai

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Last year on Valentine’s Day, excavations in Tomb 26 on Sai were still ongoing. As Meg Gundlach put it back then “there are few things more romantic than a dung beetle”. Well – exactly! One year later, it’s again time to write about this very special heart scarab, SAC5 349, found next to the skeleton of chief goldsmith Khnummose. Let’s start with a spoiler: no, I still cannot read the name on the heart scarab, there is no complete love story to tell about Khnummose and his wife. But: my assumption that it is possibly the wife’s name on the scarab who was buried next to Khnummose at a slightly later moment still stands, although it remains hypothetical.

The heart scarab of Khnummose’s tomb group is an exceptional example also for other reasons. The general appearance of gold flakes and use of gold for the funerary equipment and jewellery in Tomb 26 is striking and seems to be connected with Khnummose’s profession. Very remarkable, among others, is this beautiful signet ring made of silver and gold found in Chamber 5.

But coming back to the heart scarab: during the process of cleaning it in situ in Chamber 6, very fragile strips of gold came to light.

One piece was clearly attached around the base, other fragments where found close to the head of the scarab.

Possibly there were originally also gold bands across the elytra and at the division of the wing cases; this arrangement finds a close parallel in a Late New Kingdom example now kept at Liverpool – 1977.112.257 is a very nice heart scarab made of green jasper, it still has strips of gold attached.

Heart scarab Liverpool 1977.112.257, http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/wml/collections/antiquities/ancient-egypt/item-317198.aspx

In general, such gold bands on heart scarabs of the New Kingdom are rare – for our example from Sai, I believe that they could attest to Khnummose’s job as chief goldsmith and to the general connection of the island to the gold exploitation in Nubia.

New releases – some papers on Tomb 26 on Sai Island

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Having just returned from Sudan and the student excursion, it’s very pleasant to find some new releases on one’s desk – especially because these also comprise papers highlightening the significance of Tomb 26 and especially of the burial of Khnummose on Sai Island.

The following new articles are relevant for AcrossBorders’ work in cemetery SAC5:

Budka, J., Pyramid cemetery SAC5, Sai Island, Northern Sudan: An update based on fieldwork from 2015–2017, Ägypten und Levante 27, 2017, 107‒130.
Budka, J., Das Grab eines Goldschmiedemeisters auf Sai in Obernubien, Sokar 35, 2017, 52-63.
Budka, J., The Tomb of a Master of Gold-workers on Sai Island, Ancient Egypt 18, No. 3, 2017/2018, 14-20.

Within the article published in Ägypten und Levante 27, I tried to reconstruct the complete use-life of Tomb 26, presenting for the first time preliminary results from the pottery analysis.

Please note that all of these articles still have to be regarded as “preliminary” – the final analysis, including the anthropological findings in Tomb 26 and the results from the Strontium Isotope analysis, is already well under way and will be published as another monograph in the series Contributions to the Archaeology of Egypt, Nubia and the Levant.

On the move again – from Munich to Berkeley

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Thanks to the general agreement of cooperation between the University of California, Berkeley and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), I was able to visit the San Francisco Bay Area for the first time!

In June, we enjoyed an inspiring workshop dedicated to “Archaeologies of human mobility and migration” here at the LMU – this past week, we gathered in Berkeley to discuss the theme “On the move” further. My own presentation focused on Tomb 26 – presenting some of the preliminary data from our ongoing analysis of the systematic variation in the isotopic composition of strontium in the environment of Sai and its significance for exploring the origin of people and their migration along the Nile. I also stressed the significance of Khnummose’s shabti: its raw material serpentinite is not local to Sudan, the prime sources are located in Egypt (Wadi Semna and Wadi Atalla); furthermore, name and title of Khnummose were added in a different handwriting, suggesting an “off the shelf” purchase – so we can assume that this shabti, one of AcrossBorders highlights of five years of digging on Sai, was actually an “object on the move”, being produced at a workshop probably located in Egypt (or close to the border).

I am very grateful to all LMU and Berkeley colleagues for these wonderful days both in Munich and Berkeley – especially to the organisers Carline von Nicolai and Benjamin Porter. Loads of thanks go also to Ruth Tringham for a marvellous tour through “her” San Francisco – this was definitely the highlight of my first trip to California!

 

In the spotlight: Khnummose and other finds

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Summer has definitely arrived in Munich, the teaching term has almost ended and our AcrossBorders conference is quickly approaching.

In the last weeks, Khnummose and his tomb at Sai has received quite some attention, see e.g. an article by Owen Jarus on Life Science (https://www.livescience.com/59534-ancient-nubia-tomb-of-gold-worker-found.html). Interestingly, most articles focused on the question whether the people buried in Tomb 26 were mummified or not – I will discuss this issue as well as other aspects at the upcoming Sudantag of the Staatliches Museum für Ägyptische Kunst, July 29.

Some of the general aims and preliminary results by the AcrossBorders project are presented today on the LMU website. With a small photo gallery, the most important aspects of our work on Sai Island are addressed, focusing on the complex relations between Egyptian and Nubians in the New Kingdom.

LMU website https://www.uni-muenchen.de/index.html, July 24 (screenshot).

Being very proud of and grateful for all the attention paid to Khnummose and other discoveries by AcrossBorders, I am very much looking forward to our upcoming international conference.

Tomb 26 – a short update from the field

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As recently highlighted on the “Archäologieblog” at DerStandard.at, Tomb 26 really yielded fantastic finds, especially in the current 2017 season.

We have finished clearing Chamber 6 (holding the burial of Khnummose and presumably his wife) and now also Chamber 5. In the latter, all together a minimum of nine adults and two infants (one pre-natal) were buried – with quite rich equipment and nicely preserved, although partly smashed because of the collapsed roof of the chamber.
The best preserved and probably two earliest burials were put in East-West direction (head to the west) in the southern part of the chamber. Probably a male and a female, these two burials resemble the ones discovered in Chamber 6 – remains of the painted wooden coffins, the wooden funerary masks with eye inlays and gold foil applications were found as well as faience scarabs and intact pottery vessels. Most exciting are here four small pottery vessels which were found next to clay lids with human heads – a very charming small sized variant of clay canopic jars!

Some of the finds including pottery “canopic vessels” in the head area of the southernmost burial in Chamber 5.


But the highlight of Chamber 5 is clearly a very nicely worked scarab ring made in gold and silver – still found in situ between the legs of a female individual close to the entrance of the chamber. The quality of it is simply amazing, really the work of a very skilled craftsman – probably a master goldworker…

Not only the highlight from Chamber 5, but one of the most beautiful objects from Tomb 26!


Unfortunately, no personal names have survived from Chamber 5. The pottery and funerary equipment suggests a date in the mid-18th Dynasty, thus very close to Khnummose’s burial – for now, I would therefore like to suggest that at least some of the persons buried in the western Chamber 5 were related to the master gold worker Khnummose. The quality of the finds, especially the jewelry and also the use of gold foil, would definitely seem suitable for a family of gold workers living on Sai during the 18th Dynasty.
Tomb 26 will keep us very busy in the next weeks and months – but for now, loads of thanks go to Andrea Stadlmayr and Marlies Wohlschlager for their excellent job – alf mabruk, more than well done!