DATING EGYPTIAN BURIALS

DATING EGYPTIAN BURIALS

The most galling aspect of getting this wrong from Petrie’s point of view was the fact that one of his great rivals, Jacques de Morgan, came up with the correct solution when he published a similar set of graves at Abydos. The people buried in the Naqada and Abydos cemeteries were different not because they were a ‘new race’ but because they were the Egyptians of late prehistory whose long sequence of culture preceded the pharaonic period, and had until then been virtually unknown. As if to make amends for his colossal error, Petrie went on to use the Naqada material to develop the ingenious ‘sequence dating’ system. This typological system enabled him to create the ﬁrst Predynastic chronology, which many would rate among his greatest achievements.

Conversely, some of the most famous ﬁnds made in Egypt have not necessarily had very signiﬁcant effects on our views of Egypt. Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, for instance, obviously had enormous impact on the public awareness of Egyptology from the 1920s onwards, but, apart from providing the ﬁrst tantalizing glimpse of the sumptuous range of equipment which must once have been contained in the tombs of much more renowned and long-lived pharaohs, such as Amenhotep III and Ramesses the Great, it included very little genuinely new historical data. Arguably Carter’s greatest achievement was to raise the public proﬁle of Egyptian archaeology to a much higher level, but the contents of the tomb did not take the subject in any new directions or change opinions on any great historical debates (apart from the possibility that the calciﬁed blood clot at the base of Tutankhamun’s skull might show that he was murdered). The tomb is of course arguably the most exciting ﬁnd in the history of archaeology.
As a result of the increasing application of innovative methods of survey, excavation, and analysis, the professional Egyptologist has begun to require at least a nodding acquaintance with a number of scientiﬁc disciplines, such as bioanthropology, geology, genetics, and physics. This process of expansion has added strength to the subject , with each of these different academic disciplines providing fresh sources of stimulation and new directions for future research.
In Carter’s time, science was only just beginning to have an effect on the world of Egyptology, primarily in the form of a man called Alfred Lucas, who, within four years of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, was to publish the ﬁrst edition of Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, a brilliant summary of the surviving evidence for Egyptian materials and craftwork, which served as the essential manual for Egyptological science until the 1990s. Lucas was a chemist working in Cairo, who had access to much of the material in the Egyptian museum, enabling him to publish data, chemical analyses, and bibliographical references for a great deal of the most important material excavated since the mid-19th century, including the objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun.