Nadine Moeller and Gregory Marouard - The Origins of Two Provincial Capitals in Upper Egypt

thank you girl for this kind

introduction and thank you all for being

here tonight I know it's late and it's

very cold outside so I feel the cold too

because they just came back from Europe

on Monday where it was a little bit

warmer I have to say and we actually

just finished excavations in Bandra on

December 20th so what you're hearing

tonight actually the very fresh results

and discoveries from our two seasons we

spent we left here in at the beginning

of October that five weeks first and

ETSU and then actually type weeks at

Dendera so a pretty long season and a

lot of work that we were able to do so

the two sites dendera Ned Phu are

actually linked via a religious ceremony

there's the goddess Hathor of the temple

of Sandra who comes to visit Horus of

edgeville and we know about these

ceremonies from the very end of the

pharaonic tomake and Roman period

because of we do have these amazing two

temples but on this side these temples

did not stand in isolation and they were

actually part of large provincial

capitals and you can see here on this

map I've mapped out for you the location

of Ed foo in southern Egypt right down

here it's about a two-hours drive from

south of Luxor and then and rise to the

north it's about 45 minutes to the north

of Luxor here and Sandra was the capital

of the six-hour egyptian province or

norm as we call it and ed through was

the capital of the sentence of egyptian

Noam

so two important regional centers and we

have the CICC unique opportunity to

compare these two sites really from the

origins from over a long term evolution

until the greco-roman period so really

fantastic of

Trinity for new research I would start

with the site of Ed foo which you can

see here on this image with the

prominent temple the main tourist

attraction in the background and also

the the modern town is actually quite

large more than town around it and then

the settlement it's a tell site composed

an artificial Mountain composed of

superimposed settlement layers where

people have basically settled for

several millennia and the remains of the

site are Cydia is this dark brown mound

on the western side of the temple and

you might notice that it looks pretty

incomplete today unfortunately

settlements in Egypt have suffered a

rather peculiar phenomenon which is

actually as far as I know mainly

restricted to Egypt that at the end of

the nineteenth beginning of the 20th

century modern Egyptians quarried away

these sites in order to use the mud

break and the soil from these abandoned

archeological mounds as fertilizers for

agriculture and so a lot of sites have

now completely disappeared and an info

we still have a large chunk of the site

preserved as you can see here but we

also missing was quite a yeah a few

parts of it so when we were starting to

search for the origins of this town you

obviously start looking and what is

actually known about the earliest

textual evidence for example what do we

know about previous research and one of

the few remains we have we knew about

before we started our work on some

pre-dynastic objects so that they -

around 3500 BC before we have the the

pharaonic period culture that came out

from a cemetery site where the French

and the Franco polish mission were

excavating in the 1920s and 30s so we do

know that there are some origins going

back to the pre-dynastic period but then

the city of edfu is first mentioned

properly in in a relief and

I hope you can see this okay yeah the

future turned out there

well it's mentioning the Kings standing

in the in front of the shrine of edfu

which is which was depicted in the

Joseph's pyramid complex at saqqara

dating to the third dynasty and then at

the beginning of the fourth dynasty

there's a small pyramid in the vicinity

of ed foo that is a small step pyramid

it belongs to a series of very similar

monuments that were erected in the

vicinity of larger provincial towns

dating to the early 4th dynasty and this

was action or in an Institute project we

did it was sort of a rescue project

between 2011-2012 so we do know that

there should have been at least a first

city and of the third beginning of the

4th dynasty but trying to find

archaeological evidence for this from

the actual town site turned out to be

much more complicated so one area where

we identified settlement remains dating

to the 3rd millennium BC so what we call

the Old Kingdom is actually located very

close to the top tomake temple and just

west of the large pile on which you can

see here so this settlement area called

zone 2 is where we've identified so far

the accessible early third millenium

remains of the the site this came at the

price I have to say because as you can

see from these two pictures we had to

dig through a huge amount several meters

of an stratified debris which was really

tedious I have to say and at some point

we had to employ about 80 local workers

because all has to be done manually you

can't really employ any machinery at

sites like this this debris came from

some of it was from these two buff

diggers the fertilizer diggers who just

discarded the the ceramics and the

stones they didn't want on the fields

and it really covered as you can see

here terrible mound covered the whole

area and we could

see from the sides where some of the

remains were exposed that we were

definitely looking at Old Kingdom and

Old Kingdom

part of the town so really important we

don't know much about the 3rd millennium

BC in the south of Egypt because most of

the activity has focused on the Memphis

and very little is known about the

provincial area so for from a research

point of view this was certainly

something that we wanted to pursue

despite the amount of work that had to

be done about 2012 we pretty much

reached an area that we could excavate

and now in 2017 this looks very

different you can imagine how much work

has gotten into this and last season our

main focus is a town quarter dating to

the fifth dynasty we were hoping would

get earlier than this but it looks like

this particular part of the settlement

here was founded in the fifth dynasty

towards the end even I'm directly on the

natural sense so it's an obviously an

extension from an earlier part that I'm

now suspecting might be under the tall

maid temple and we'll never be able to

reach so the one of the earlier walls

and and parts of buildings in k in this

case actually two large courtyards also

founded directly natural sand and

bedrock we can date now very securely to

the reign of Korea is easy

who was the penultimate ruler of the

fifth dynasty you see these rather well

built walls and large courtyard areas

where we also found a lot of activity

with various manufacturing processes and

the reason why I can date the so well

now is because in one of the fireplaces

we found a discarded discarded clay

ceiling that was stamped by a cylinder

seal with the horse name of jet carries

Izzie so this in this case it was really

useful for us to to find that piece of

evidence and another interesting find

that actually comes from this fine spot

here a two

of a small actually they're two

different limestone statues

one looks like a seated scribe you can

see the seated position here and then a

standing figure was a back pillar also

dating to the late fifth honesty of

course we did not find the gold seal

here just in case you wonder as I was

telling earlier it's not such a good

idea on the sides to find any kind of

precious object in the first place