The Archers

Not the Radio 4 programme, but archery stuff in the Egypt Centre, particularly stone arrowheads. The Egyptians also had arrowheads made of bone and metal but the flint arrowheads were especially sharp. Flint is a very effective material for making weaponary. It is lighter than metal, sharper than metal and breaks up when the animal or human moves. The latter quality means that not all the fragment can be got out of flesh. Yuk! Of course, being fragile also means it can't be used again and again. Also, if its light maybe it wouldn't be so good for piercing heavy armour.

The picture above shows some of our hollow based arrowheads dating to the Predynastic Period. The fact that these are made more elaborate than they need be suggests that they may well have had some symbolic importance too. You can read more about them here.

It is quite feasible to make much simpler arroweads from small flakes of stone. Indeed Egypt Centre has a couple of examples. The example on the left is from Armant. Note how small it is. You can read more about this type here.

The Egyptians used flint arrowheads right up until the 6th century BC, and no wonder. Why switch to metal if flint does the trick.

Renée Friedman and Armant

On Wednesday night the Friends of the Egypt Centre invited Renée Friedman to Swansea to talk about Hierakonpolis and the animal burials there. It was, as predicted, a brilliant talk.

While in Swansea, Renée also took the opportunity to look at the Egypt Centre stuff excavated by Mond from Armant cemeteries 1600, 1700, 1800 and 1900, particularly the Badarian pottery. It's always useful to have researchers visiting our collection as we get to know more about our own artefacts. I had long been amazed by our material from Armant, particulalrly the incredibly fine-walled Badarian stuff, much better made than later material. While it has been on my to do research list, it probably would never have happened. The list is somewhat long! So, I am really happy that Renée found us. She explained that our Armant material was important as it was a site which not only had A-group ('Nubian') and Pan Grave (later material in the Nubian tradition) material and Badarian pottery but also the mysterious 'Saharan' sherds which no one knows a great deal about. We have possibly the most northern collection of Nubian pottery.

The picture above is one of the pieces of Badarian pottery. The holes are where the piece had been mended. We are hoping that in the future, with  Renée to advise, we may have a small display of the Armant material discussing the different cultural groups. Meanwhile, the piece of pottery shown above and a few others from Armant are integrated into our existing display.

A big pot!

This large pot (W83) was put on display on Monday in our upstairs gallery. It measures 40.5cm high and is burnished on the outside. We are not sure of its provenance. The excavation number ‘638/1958’ might suggest that this comes from Naqada, but we aren't certain. Would be glad to here if this type of number means anything to anyone. It was purchased by Wellcome from the Rustafjaell collection in 1907 but the sale catalogue isn't very helpful as to provenance.

Vessels like this usually date from the Predynastic to Early Old Kingdom and many were used to contain the remains of the deceased. Often pots were inverted over the bodies or bodies were placed inside them, perhaps the same goes for ours.

Pot burials have been found at el-Kab, el-Amrah, Reqaqna, Ballas, Naqada, Hierakonpolis and Abydos (Peet and Loat, 20-22, pl. 4 with further references) and Minshat Abu Omar (Kroeper 1994). An example with a burial is held by the Petrie Museum (UC14857). There is no evidence that pot burials correlated with any particular class of people.  

References

Kroeper, K. 1994. ‘Minshat Abu Omar. Pot Burials Occurring in the Dynastic Cemetery’.  Bulletin de Liaison du groupe International d’Étude de la Céramique Égyptienne, 18, 19-32.

Peet, T.E. and Loat, W.L.S. 1913. The Cemeteries of Abydos. Part III. 1912-1913. London: Egypt Exploration Fund.

Petrie, W.M.F. 1895. Naqada and Ballas. London: Bernard Quaritch.