THE RICHNESS OF DATA ABOUT EGYPT

THE RICHNESS OF DATA ABOUT EGYPT

The particular nature and context of Quibell and Green’s discovery of the Narmer Palette at Hierakonpolis highlight the fact that great ﬁnds can in extreme cases be rendered almost meaningless if their full context is not properly recorded. Even the most meticulous excavation may sometimes run up against interpretive problems, but, conversely, if discoveries are made or published in an unscientiﬁc way then there is only the slimmest chance of their full meaning becoming apparent. Historically, Egyptology is immensely rich in data, and Egyptologists have consequently tended to be data-hungry scholars. A constant succession of fresh discoveries has ensured that the evidence itself has been steadily increasing in quantity and diversity.

It is noticeable, however, that archaeological discoveries in Egypt have become such a cliché, in the way that the media respond to them and portray the discoveries and the protagonists, that an issue of Punch in 1986 was able to satirize very effectively the breathless and overblown way in which a new ﬁnd (in this case the tomb of a man called Maya, Tutankhamun’s treasurer) is pumped up into a mini-Tutankhamun’s tomb, as if the newspaper reports automatically switch into a particularly fossilized and naı¨ve style of reportage when confronted by the glint of hidden treasure. The subject itself has not progressed purely through discoveries of new data. New theoretical paradigms have been adopted by different generations of Egyptologists, gradually transforming the accepted picture of ancient Egyptian culture. Secondly, new methods, such as innovative excavation techniques or sophisticated methods of scientiﬁc analysis, have, at various times, altered our perceptions of the surviving evidence from ancient Egypt. Whatever the hyperbole of the media, some of the archaeological discoveries have genuinely represented signiﬁcant turning points in the history of the subject, as in the case of the excavation of Aegean-style frescos at the site of Tell el-Dab’a in 1987 or the unearthing of a rich cache of clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform script, at Amarna (the so-called Amarna Letters), in the 1890s. Like the Narmer Palette, both of these ﬁnds were quickly recognized not merely as crucial new pieces in the Egyptological jigsaw but as new types of information, necessitating signiﬁcant rearrangement of the existing pattern of pieces.