MORE EGYPTIAN BURIALS DISCOVERIES

MORE EGYPTIAN BURIALS DISCOVERIES

Although most of the Amarna archive consists of letters, it also includes 32 other kinds of texts that do not seem to have been directly connected with international diplomacy. These tablets were probably related to scribal education and the process of translation itself, including a dictionary-like list of Akkadian and Egyptian words, a fragment of a syllabary, as well as several scribal exercises and literary texts. We therefore not only have the royal correspondence itself, but also some of the evidence for the activities of the scribes employed to write and translate the letters. Our steadily adjusted and reframed picture of Egyptian civilization has periodically allowed earlier ﬁnds to be reviewed and reinterpreted, sometimes quite radically.

Although the circumstances of the discovery of the Tell el-Dab‘a frescos and the Amarna Letters were quite different (and separated in date by around a century), both were nevertheless fairly rapidly recognized as important ﬁnds. There are, however, many instances of important ﬁnds that were at ﬁrst totally misinterpreted or regarded as unremarkable, and only came to be recognized as really signiﬁcant sources of evidence long after the discovery had been made. For instance, the American Egyptologist Charles Wilbour bought nine sealed papyrus rolls from local women at Elephantine between 1890 and 1893. He assumed at ﬁrst that they were inscribed in some kind of Phoenician script, and, although he eventually deduced that the script was actually Aramaic (spoken and written throughout the Near East in the 1st millennium bc), he simply put them into storage and they were not published until 1953, after his daughter had bequeathed them to the Brooklyn Museum. In fact these documents – along with others that emerged in later excavations on Elephantine – turned out to be among the most important written sources for life in Egypt during the First Persian Period.
Surprisingly, a good example of a great discovery that was initially completely misunderstood comes from the career of the great Flinders Petrie. In his excavation of the Naqada cemeteries in 1895 he found that virtually all of the graves comprised rectangular, sometimes brick-lined, pits containing one or more bodies in foetal positions, placed on reed mats with the head oriented towards the west. Occasionally the bodies appeared to have been deliberately dismembered before burial, and there were some indications of human sacriﬁce. The varying quantities of grave goods usually consisted of some combination of pottery, stone vessels, slate palettes, ﬂint knives, beads, bracelets, and ﬁgurines. Petrie immediately recognized that these were quite different to conventional Egyptian burials, but his conclusion that they belonged to a ‘New Race’ from outside Egypt, who had supposedly invaded Egypt at the end of the Old Kingdom, was to turn out to be drastically wrong, both chronologically and ethnically.