CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY

In Bruce Trigger’s A History of Archaeological Thought, there are a mere handful of references to Egyptian archaeology: only Flinders Petrie’s invention of an early form of seriation known as ‘sequence dating’ merits a full page or so of discussion. While this may well be a fair assessment of the Egyptological contribution to archaeological thought, the excavation of Egyptian sites has, over the last 150 years, provided a steady stream of valuable data. The rapidly expanding Egyptian database has provided new insights into the material culture of the pharaonic period, but, perhaps more importantly, it has also made a signiﬁcant contribution to the creation of a chronological framework for the Mediterranean region. The central role played by Egyptology in the formulation of ancient chronology has lent greater signiﬁcance to recent attempts to pinpoint ﬂaws in the chronology of the pharaonic period, but the established chronology is now a dense matrix of archaeological and textual details that have proved difﬁcult to unpick and reassemble.

Most of the work accomplished by archaeologists in Egypt between the mid-19th century and the Second World War was characterized by two distinct trends. First, the early work in particular was marked by a resolutely art-historical, object-oriented approach to the excavated data. Secondly, the ﬁeldwork was dominated by a preference for the study of religious and funerary architecture rather than the artefacts and architecture of daily life. Both of these tendencies effectively inhibited the intellectual development of Egyptian archaeology until the 1960s, when two major inﬂuences – the study of the prehistory of the Nile Valley and the increased excavation of pharaonic towns – ﬁnally began to exert an inﬂuence on the subject as a whole. In an analysis of changing patterns in Egyptological research David O’Connor has demonstrated that the percentage of published archaeological ﬁeldwork devoted to settlements almost doubled from 1924 to 1981. The situation appears to have changed even more dramatically in the 1990s, with the 1989–90 list of Egyptological publications showing no less than 44.4 per cent of ﬁeldwork dealing with settlement remains, and a correspondingly steep decline in the excavation of non-monumental cemeteries. Modern Egyptologists are therefore undoubtedly more ‘balanced’ and holistic with regard to the types of data that they now study. The next chapter will consider the different types of discovery, analysis, and interpretation of old and new evidence.