A hollow scraper from Armant

This large crescent-shaped piece of flint is flaked all over. It has one concave edge 100 mm across and some cortex (the outside of the original flint pebble or slab) is visible. Hollow scrapers are usually found in the Thebes area and seem to be Middle Palaeolithic (around 300,000 years old). This example is from Armant, 12 miles South of Thebes. The brown patina shows it to be Palaeolithic.

From Seligman 1921, p. 124

Such items were described by General A. H. Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers in 1882. In 1921 Seligman suggested that these were probably prepared cores with the hollow retouched. One can imagine that they may have been used to scrape cylindrical hafts for other artefacts. However, what these were actually used for and why they have only been found around Thebes remains a mystery.

Hérisson et al 2016, fig. 22

Outside of Egypt there is a similar example from the Acheulean of La Grande Vallée at Colombiers (Hérisson et al 2016, fig. 22).

  

References

David Hérisson, Jean Airvaux, Lenoble Arnaud, Daniel Richter, Emilie Claud and Jerome Primault ‘Between the northern and southern regions of Western Europe: The Acheulean site of La Grande Vallée (Colombiers, Vienne, France)’ Quaternary International, 2016, 108–131.

Pitt Rivers, L. F. 1882, ‘On the Discovery of Chert Implements in Stratified Gravel in the Nile Valley Near Thebes’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 11, 382–400.

Seligman, C.G. ‘The Older Paleolithic Age in Egypt’, Journal Royal Anthropological Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1921, 51, 115–153.

Amarna, looking at flints, playing with dogs!

I know loads of you will disagree but I find the whole business of the royal family at Amarna, who succeeded whom, etc., a bit dull. I'm not really interested in who Smenkhkare was, or Nefertiti. What I do find interesting is the fact that this site is really good to study New Kingdom Egypt more generally. It has a relatively short chronology, so not so much intrusion from earlier or later periods than on many other sites. Also it's a big site with several different social/technological areas so it gives some idea on how ancient Egyptian society and technological changes worked. And, of course, lots of settlement type artefacts as opposed to purely funerary ones.

What's this leading too? I am interested in lithics, so have felt very privileged to be allowed to study the lithics at Amarna. In 2009 I looked at the material from Panehsy's Great Aten Temple House (associated with cattle butchery). There is a brief report here (see page 7). Then, a couple of weeks ago I went to look at material from other areas of Amarna. Many, many thanks to the Middle Egypt inspectorate of the Ministry of Antiquities, especially Inspector Marwa Ahmed Osman, and also to the Amarna Project directed by Barry Kemp

I arrived in Cairo at the end of September. A small team of us traveled from Cairo to the Amarna dig house. For those of you who are used to digging in the UK, the dig house at Amarna is very civilised with showers and proper rooms with beds (no camping in a field). We even had fans to keep us cool. And, it also looks very pretty. Here it is. There is a police HQ right outside to keep us all safe and a couple of lookout towers.

On the 1st of October the magazines were opened under the watchful eye of the Inspector. How this was done was a bit like an ancient Egyptian ritual. The brick blocking to the magazine was knocked down with hammer and chisel, etc. Then the lead seal on the door was checked by the Inspector Marwa Ahmed Osman. Here she is checking the seal to make sure it wasn't broken. Yes, a lady Inspector (well I liked that).

The artefacts we were all working on were taken into the dig house. Chris Stimpson from Oxford was making a study of bird bones. Gretchen Dabbs from the Southern Illionois University was looking at human bones from the North Cemetery. And, William Schaffer, from the same University, was looking at teeth and how very small variations in them could be used to study ancestry. All much more exciting, in my opinion, than the identity of Smenkhkare. 

And here is my work station. The flies were more annoying than the heat! I have yet to write up a proper report so wont tell you about that in detail now. However, it can be said that as one would expect in a late Bronze Age culture, the lithics were largely expedient tools. That is, most weren't deliberately made to a particular shape. Rather, they consisted of flakes and blades which would be selected and used as and when needed. This would be a very efficient way to use the material. A freshly knapped flint flake would be much sharper than a metal knife. There were one or two, what one might call 'formal' tools, mainly sickles and round scrapers. Several different types of flint was used.

And back to life in the dig house. We were fed and the site generally looked after by the Amarna Project's Egyptian team. The cook is excellent! 4 cats help keep the rodent population down. Here is one eating a hoopoe bird (a snake was eaten the day before). Bit sad about the bird as there had previously been two hoopoes.

Outside the dig house, on the way to the toilet block, we would often encounter the dogs. Most of the dogs around Amarna are semi-feral and bark and growl. They have grown used to people throwing stones at them. However, two dogs were really, really friendly. I really wish I could have 'rescued' them and brought them home. They were mother and daughter. The daughter wanted to play and would cling onto your clothes when you went back to the dig house. Here they are. The photograph was taken in the morning. The mother is on the left.

Weird things used in the Opening of the Mouth ritual

The Opening of the Mouth ritual was used to bring the mummified dead and also statues 'back to life', or rather to imbue them with some life-like qualities. Most Egyptologists know about the flint knife, the peseh-kef being used for this (please don't confuse this with the fish-tailed knife); which was altogether 'another kettle of fish'!

Here is a pesesh-kef (this example is from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 11.765)

Here is a fish-tailed knife from the Petrie Museum (UC10244).

And if you want to know why they are different the best paper is Thomas Hikade's 'Getting the Ritual Right'. You can find it online here. And he has lots of references about the things. I would like to 'talk' more about these because they are flinty, but must move on....

People also know about the model adzes waved in front of the mummy too. Here you can see a detail of a piece of the Book of the Dead in the Egypt Centre showing the priest on the far right waving things at the mummy. The adze is on the top of his heap of magic tools and you can see the foreleg of an ox under that.

And, if you want to know more about this fragment of the Book of the Dead, click here.

Well what about this:

Things like this have proved a bit of a mystery to Egyptologists, and have been considered granaries or even cosmetic containers! However,a few years back I was privileged to hear Silke Grallert talk about them. It seems they were used in the Opening of the Mouth Ceremony from the 26th Dynasty. And if you want to know more, here is the link.

Of course, I can't actually resist flints. So, a picture, not very good I'm afraid of some miniature polished stone knives from a photo I took in Cairo Museum in 2003. They are from the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Similar ones were found in KV55. Their context suggests they were part of the 18th Dynasty Opening of the Mouth 'toolkit' put in tombs. Such things aren't listed in texts, or drawn on tomb walls in association with the Opening of the Mouth ritual.

Science, Technology and Innovation

This week is science and engineering week (we have plans to celebrate at the Centre) and I have just been reading Ian Shaw’s Ancient Egyptian Technology and Innovation (Bloomsbury 2012) and thinking about how it fits with what I know about Egyptian lithic (i.e. flint) technology.

So, after a long time of know blogging, a few thoughts on Egyptian technology and of course their lithics! The Egyptians used flint tools much later than others in the region. Tillmann (1999) drew up a comparative table of flint use for Egypt and adjoining regions. The detail could be debated. For example, Tillmann stated that flint working ceased in Greece c. 1500 B.C. However, a study by Runnels (1982) showed that obsidian and chert was used until the 10th and 9th centuries BC. Obsidian was used until 400-300 BC. Part of the difficulty lies in differentiating between a lithic and metal using society when there is a continuum, not dichotomy. For example, threshing flints were known in the Levant until the 20th century. Yet, this society would not be considered ‘stone-age’. However, Tillmann’s general conclusion that flint was used in Egypt until a surprisingly late date is correct, in fact it was commonly used into the New Kingdom. 

Does this mean that in some ways they were backward? I would say ‘no’. Flint is sharper than metal, it is lighter (so arrows tipped with it will go further) and is ubiquitous in Egypt as far south as Thebes. Even the fact that it breaks easy may be seen as an advantage. A flint-tipped projectile point breaking in a body is more likely to kill than something which can be pulled cleanly out. The serrated quality of bifacial tools further enhances cutting and their irregular surface might additionally encourage hemorrhaging. Modern hunters sometimes draw a file across metal arrowheads to produce the same effect. One might almost say it is such a great material why did anyone ever use metal? I would guess because metal was pretty, great for making sparkly things.

It’s sometimes said that the Egyptians used flint for a long time because it was bound up with their ideology. To summarize, flint was associated with meteoric iron, it was described in ophidian terms (like the uraeus), it is associated with Seth and Thoth, the fiery daughters of Re, with doorkeepers of the underworld and the northern sky, it is a perfect celestial weapon against the enemies of Re. All this ideological stuff continued into the Ptolemaic Period. Maybe because flint was ideologically important, it was used for a long time. May be, or may be it was used because it was so good (I have even wondered if flint went out of use in graves because arsenical copper was shinier than it, and shininess was an important ideological facet - See Graves-Brown 2013).

If the former, does this make the Egyptians strangely illogical; in thrall to religion? Again no! It has been shown time and time again that people will rarely take up new ideas unless it fits with their own ideologies. Even in the history of weaponry, which one might think was purely logical, development has been guided by ideology, including such unlikely or seemingly illogical areas as aesthetics (van Creveld 1989, 75-76). 

Runnels, Curtis. “Flaked stone artefacts in Greece during the Historical Period.” Journal
of Field Archaeology 9 (1982): 263-273.

Tillmann, Andreas. “Dynastic stone tools.” In Encyclopedia of the archaeology of ancient Egypt, edited by K.A. Bard, 262-265, London: Routledge, 1999.

 Van Creveld, Martin. Technology and war from 2000BC to the present. New York: The Free Press, 1989.

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.

The end of the week: Flint bracelets and Palestinian pots

The end of the four weeks for our Practicum Egyptology students, a brand new module at Swansea University in conjunction with Kasia Szpakowska (http://www.swan.ac.uk/staff/academic/artshumanities/szpakowskakasia/),
 lecturer in Egyptology. The students come to the Centre and learn a bit about museums and artefacts in the Centre and hone their skills in communicating their knowledge to the public. Today they learnt about key skills in education, the skills the Welsh National Curriculum expects pupils to acquire. The Centre gears school activities to these key skills. These include social skills, numeracy, etc. You can find out more about the activities on our web site at: http://www.swan.ac.uk/egypt/Schools/Educational%20visits.htm

Also answered an enquiry on flint bracelets. These really are amazing things. We have a fragment of one. See: http://www.swansea.ac.uk/egypt/infosheet/AB%2029%20flint%20bracelet.htm
They're so fragile, I think they must have been much more than utilitarian.

Today I also did a few more audit checks on objects (an ongoing, never ending process). This included some pottery from Tell Fara (Beth Pelet), a site in southern Palestine. The site was excavated by Petrie in 1928. We have about 50 pieces from this site. Although we are called the Egypt Centre, and most of our artefacts are from Egypt, we also have artefacts from elsewhere, including Palestine, Greece, Rome and even Britain. All can be accessed via our online searchable catalogue at:
http://www.egyptcentre.org.uk/
Finally, we ended the day with Jayne's baby shower, organised by Wendy. This wasn't Egyptological, or museological, but a good way to end the day