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Uncovering evidence of a workaday world along the Nile
Posted on Thursday, July 03, 2008 (CDT) by Isis
 Archaeologists have long fixed their sights on the grandeur that was ancient Egypt, the pyramids, temples and tombs. Few bothered to dig beneath and beyond the monumental stones for glimpses into the living and working spaces of ordinary Egyptians. That is changing slowly but steadily. In the last two or three decades, excavations have uncovered urban remains and swept aside the conventional wisdom that the Egypt of the pharaohs, in contrast to Mesopotamia, was somehow a civilization without cities.
"We can now confirm that this was not the case," said Nadine Moeller, an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Moeller was speaking of her own recent findings, as well as those of other excavators who practice what is known as settlement archaeology.
She described the discovery of a large administration building and seven grain silos buried at the site of an ancient provincial capital on the Upper Nile. The partly preserved round silos, more than 3,500 years old, appear to be the largest storage bins known from early Egypt. Seal impressions and other artifacts associated with commodities put a somewhat older date for the central building, with at least 16 columns.
An official
announcement of the discovery was made by Zahi Hawass, secretary
general of the Supreme Council for Antiquities in Egypt. He is best
known for the more spectacular research on mummies and tombs, but is
now promoting greater attention to settlement exploration.
"This is a really amazing
site, at the cutting-edge of recent Egypt archaeology," said Stuart
Tyson Smith of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not
involved in the project. "Digging into towns, you get the full range of
life, not the very narrow view of society as seen from the top, from
the rich and elite."
Mark Lehner, an
Egyptologist who uncovered remains of settlements for workers who built
the pyramids at Giza, said that at Moeller's site he inspected layers
of sediments showing occupation extending back 5,000 years to the dawn
of Egyptian civilization and forward to the early Islamic period in the
first millennium AD The silos are near temple ruins from about 300 BC
"Where there are temples, we are learning, they were surrounded by towns which have usually been overlooked," Lehner said.
The site of the recent
discovery is at Tell Edfu, halfway between the modern cities of Aswan
and Luxor (Thebes in antiquity). For much of Egyptian history, the
central government was based in Memphis, in the north, or Thebes. The
town at Tell Edfu was an important regional center with close ties to
Thebes.
Moeller and a team of
European and Egyptian archaeologists began excavations near the temple
there in 2005. They exposed a large courtyard surrounded by mud-brick
walls. Underneath the courtyard, they came upon foundations of the
first three of the seven silos. From artifacts, the archaeologists
dated the silos to the 17th dynasty, 1630 to 1520 BC
These storage bins,
presumably for barley and emmer wheat, which were used for food and as
a medium of exchange, were built of mud brick, with diameters from 18
to 22 feet. If their height was greater than the diameter, as was the
usual case, the silos probably stood at least 25 feet tall.
"Their size was a surprise, nothing we had encountered before, certainly not in a town center," Moeller said.
In the last three years,
the team excavated the column bases and chambers of what they think was
the town's administrative center. The building layout suggests it may
have been part of the governor's palace, and artifacts mark it as the
economic heart of town.
Seal impressions, which
established the building's existence in the 13th dynasty, 1773 to 1650
BC, indicate their use in identifying different commodities. Some seals
showed ornamental patterns of spirals and hieroglyphic symbols
belonging to different officials. Archaeologists said this was evidence
of the activities in the building like accounting and the opening and
sealing of boxes and ceramic jars in the course of business
transactions.
"The work at Edfu is
important in that it allows us to examine ancient Egypt as an urban
society," said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute.
As a specialist in
Mesopotamian archaeology, Stein noted the longstanding assumption that
the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers was "a land of cities and
Egypt was something else, because in Egypt we had not been looking at
or for cities."
Egyptologists credit
Manfred Bietak of the University of Vienna, Barry Kemp of Cambridge
University in England and Lehner, now with Ancient Egypt Research
Associates in Boston, as leaders in nudging excavators toward research
into everyday urban life along the Nile. "It's a smallish club, but
gaining converts," Smith said.
Copyright: International Herald Tribune
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