Status: Forthcoming – the monograph about Tomb 26

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!

Another reunion in Vienna – preparing Tomb 26 for final publication

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.