the 8th international Conference "Egypt at its Origins" Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egypt
16-20 September 2024, Jagiellonian University in Krakow
Iswid team: Myself, Samuel Guerin, Nathalie Buchez, Jade Bajeot, with Maria Carmela Gatto
Abydos Team: Beth Hart, Amber Hood, Allison McCosey, Myself, Vincent Oeters, Chrisitana Köhler
My presentation with E. C. Köhler:
Title: What does a queen need? The Small finds discovered in the tomb of Meret-Neith (Abydos, Umm el-Qaab, 1st Dynasty)
Abstract:
Despite the many lootings and cult activities since antiquity as well as Petrie's excavation campaign (1899-1900), the recent excavations at Tomb Y at Abydos - Umm el Qaab have yielded a very large number of artefacts. Petrie had selected some of the 'beautiful' objects that had survived these disturbances for publication and many of them are today held in museums around the world. Since 2021, the new excavations by the DAI and the University of Vienna have produced a large quantity of fragments of different materials. The old and new excavations form two corpuses of material that we are in the process to analyse. The first step is to bring together all the diagnostic material in relation with their archaeological contexts into a database. In this paper, we focus on the small finds, i.e., non-ceramic artefacts. As this paper will outline, one key challenge is to arrive at a definition and categorization of these kinds of artefacts, and for various reasons, we choose to group the small finds by functional categories. Another methodical aspect to be discussed is the quantification of each category. The difficulty lies in the fragmentation and wide context distribution of the artefacts. Our approach is to use calculations based on the minimum number of individuals, which seems obvious for stone vessels, but not necessarily for wooden/ivory furniture or other kinds of objects. We also have to take into account the complex taphonomic history and the potential mix with spoil heaps from different royal tombs and subsidiary tombs in the cemetery. It is hence our objective to find a method that will allow us to counterbalance these difficulties and to hopefully reconstruct, as closely as possible, the “trousseau funéraire” of this queen who was buried among the kings of the First Dynasty.
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