Launch of the Sixth Egypt Exploration Society Congress

This week sees the launch of the Sixth biannual Egypt Exploration Society Congress (#EESCon6), which is hosted by colleagues at Swansea University. The Congress provides a platform for researchers to present their ongoing projects and discoveries to a broad audience of peers and the interested public through brief 20-minute presentations and posters. Because of the COVID-19 Pandemic, the previous Congress (hosted by Durham University in 2020) took place exclusively via Zoom. This helped the Society to engage with different audiences, both academic and non-academic, while also greatly increasing accessibility. Following on from this success, the Congress will be held across online events throughout September and will culminate in an in-person/hybrid weekend on Saturday 1st–Sunday 2nd October. The online event is completely free and can be booked here. Note that you will have to register for each of the panels that you wish to attend. The full programme of events can be found here.

The event kicks off on Thursday 1st September with the keynote lecture and poster session. The keynote will focus on the objects in the Egypt Centre collection associated with the Egypt Exploration Society. Many originate from the collection of Sir Henry Wellcome, who sponsored the excavations at Amarna and Armant during the 1920–30s. The objects from Amarna include pottery, painted plaster from the North Riverside Palace (fig. 1), statue fragments, architectural elements, and styli. From Armant we have a large stela commemorating the burial of the mother of the sacred Buchis Bull, which dates to the reign of Commodus (AD 190), a scribal statue of a well-known Thirteenth Dynasty official called Teti, pottery, coffin clamps, and two spheroconical vessels, which are often interpreted as grenades from the crusades!

Fig. 1: Painted plaster from the North Riverside Palace at Amarna

Over 300 objects were donated to the collection in 1978 as part of the dispersal of the “disposable remains” of the EES excavations. Kate Bosse-Griffiths, the curator of the collection in Swansea at the time, talks about going on a “treasure hunt” to London to collect these objects. The majority of the objects are small, with many originating from the excavations at Amarna (fig. 2). Others can be traced to Abydos, Bubastis, Deir el-Bahari, Ihnasya el-Medina, Naukratis, Nebesheh, and Sesebi. Several other donations containing material excavated by the EES will also be highlighted in the keynote lecture on Thursday.

Fig. 2: A ring bezel from Amarna with the name of Amun-Re

Following the keynote, audience members will be able to view the poster presentations and ask questions to the presenters. The posters have already been uploaded to the EES website and are available to view in advance here: https://www.ees.ac.uk/eescon6-posters

Other events will take place throughout the month, including a quiz (16th September) and a virtual tour of the Egypt Centre collection (30th September). During the latter, attendees will be able to see the recently refurbished House of Life gallery for the first time. To coincide with the Congress, we will be putting on a temporary exhibition in this gallery to showcase objects excavated by the Society. Throughout the month of September, I’ll be preparing this exhibition, but in the meantime, here’s a sneak peek of the case (fig. 3)!

Fig. 3: Sneak peek at the new case waiting to be filled with EES objects

If you’re able to join us in-person over the weekend of the 01–02 October at Swansea University, you’ll have to opportunity to see the museum and the temporary exhibition. Once again, the online portion of this hybrid weekend is free, with a small fee for those attending in-person. Do note that tickets for the in-person event are limited, so please book ASAP via the following link if you haven’t already. We look forward to hosting the EES Congress and to welcoming some of you to Swansea in October!

Coins in the Egypt Centre Collection

This blog post is written by Dr George Watson, a Roman historian and numismatist, with particular interests in the social and economic history of the 3rd century AD and bronze coinage in the Roman world. His research focuses on the ways in which coin production reflects societal relations in the ancient world, and in particular the relationship between the Roman state and the wider population of the Roman empire.

When I began working in the Department of Classics at Swansea in January 2021, colleagues quickly made me aware of the brilliant collections of the Egypt Centre and in particular—given that my research focuses on the coinage of the Greek and Roman worlds—its coin collection. Conversations with Ken Griffin made it clear that not all of the Egypt Centre’s coins had been fully documented. Before the COVID-19 Pandemic, Professor Nigel Pollard organised weekly workshops for students to document the coins, but this had to be curtailed because of the subsequent lockdown. Following on from this work, we put together a plan to make it easier to use the coins in teaching, research, and of course, displays in the Egypt Centre itself.

The first step was to identify and catalogue the coins, and to record all of this information in the Egypt Centre’s online database. This would ensure that anyone wanting to use the coins—for whatever purpose—would know what was there! We then planned to link the coins to a number of numismatic portals hosted by the American Numismatic Society and others that would make the specimens more readily available to researchers—more on this below.

All of the coins had already been photographed, which meant that I could do a lot of the work from home during the pandemic, but I also spent a number of afternoons in the stores of the museum, looking more closely at the coins, weighing them, and recording other measurements. Some of the coins had already been tentatively identified, but I wanted to make sure that reference was made to the latest scholarly literature wherever possible. This initial cataloguing allows a summary of the collection as follows: 14 Greek coins, 2 Roman republican coins, 56 Roman imperial coins, 13 Roman provincial coins, 20 Parthian coins, and 9 post-antique coins. Below is a brief discussion of some of the highlights of the collection:

Fig. 1: Silver denarius of Domitian

The majority of coins in the collection are Roman, and the principal coin of the Roman empire was the silver denarius, of which EC1527 is an excellent example (fig. 1). It is a denarius of the emperor Domitian, who ruled AD 81–96, weighing 2.93g and with a diameter of 19mm. The inscriptions on both sides are in Latin and give Domitian’s names and titles. Because the emperor’s titles changed throughout his reign, we are able to use this information to date the coin to the period AD 95–96. The reverse image shows Minerva, the goddess of wisdom who was Domitian’s patron deity.

 

Fig. 2: Bronze sestertius of Caligula

Alongside the silver denarius, the Roman empire’s monetary system also included bronze and gold coins. EC1534 is an example of a bronze sestertius, four of which made up a denarius (fig. 2). It was struck during the reign of the emperor Caligula (AD 37–41). Although the coin is quite worn and the image difficult to make out, the reverse originally bore an image of Caligula’s three sisters, who were all named in the reverse legend: Agrippina, Drusilla, and Julia. This is quite a momentous depiction: it was the first time any living woman had been depicted and identified on an issue of Roman coinage. This was not, however, a case of happy families. After Drusilla died in AD 38, Agrippina and Julia plotted with Marcus Aemilius Lepidus to overthrow Caligula. The plot was foiled, Lepidus was executed, and the two sisters were exiled.

Fig. 3: Roman provincial coin of Trajan

The coinage of the Roman empire was a very varied entity. Alongside the gold, silver, and bronze coins struck at Rome, there existed a vast array of coins produced by cities of the provinces. These coins, now commonly known as the Roman provincial coinage, were principally made of bronze, and have legends written in Greek. EC1493, struck in the city of Mytilene during the reign of Trajan (AD 98–117), is a good example (fig. 3). Roman provincial coins often combine local and imperial images. The portrait on the obverse of this coin is identified in the legend as Dada, who appears to be a mythical figure associated with Mytilene’s history, but she appears with the features of Matidia, the wife of Trajan.

Fig. 4: Silver drachm of Trajan

 

Not all Roman provincial coins, however, were bronze. EC1494 (fig. 4) is an example of a silver drachm from the reign of Trajan (AD 98–117) (a drachm was a Greek unit of value, equivalent to one Roman denarius). There has been considerable debate about two aspects of this coin type: the species of camel on the reverse and the place of minting. The camel on the reverse is commonly linked to Trajan's creation of the province of Arabia in AD 106, but if this is the case, we would expect to see the one-humped camelus dromedarius (Arabian camel or dromedary), not the two-humped camelus bactrianus (Bactrian camel). Indeed, many other coins celebrating Trajan's new province of Arabia show a one-humped dromedary (e.g. http://numismatics.org/ocre/id/ric.2.tr.245). So why do these coins show a Bactrian camel? Many different explanations have been put forward without agreement: perhaps this coin was celebrating long-distance trade with Bactria, perhaps the humps were simply an engraver's mistake. The place of minting has also been much debated. The style of the obverse dies is very similar to the style of dies used in Rome, but other technical aspects of minting suggest production in Arabia. The most recent study of these coins narrowly favoured production in Rome. Wherever they were minted, hoard evidence shows that these coins circulated predominantly in the Levant.

Fig. 5: Billon tetradrachm of Numerian

Unsurprisingly, the Egypt Centre’s collections contain numerous Roman provincial coins from the Roman province of Egypt. Egypt’s provincial coinage was a little different from other provinces, firstly because the mint of Alexandria struck coins for the entirety of the province, and secondly because most coins produced were not made of bronze, but of debased silver, an alloy that we call billon. EC1540 (fig. 5) is an example of a billon tetradrachm (four drachms) struck at Alexandria during the reign of the short-lived emperor Numerian (AD 283–284). An interesting feature of the Alexandrian provincial coinage is the inclusion of a regnal date. On this coin, you can see the letters L B on the reverse. L is the Egyptian demotic symbol for “year”, and B is the Greek numeral for 2. So this coin was struck during the second year of Numerian’s reign, that is to say—because Egyptian years began in August—between August 283 and August 284.

Fig. 6: Example of a brockage

 

The collection also includes a nice example of what might be termed a minting mistake from antiquity. EC1526 is a type of coin that we call a brockage (fig. 6). You can see that instead of having a normal reverse design, the reverse shows the same image as the obverse, but mirrored and in incuse. This occurs because coins in antiquity were struck between two engraved dies. Sometimes a coin would get stuck to the upper die and not be removed before the next coin was struck. In this case, the second coin would be imprinted with the proper obverse design from the lower die, but the upper die would impart not the reverse design but an incuse of the obverse from the stuck coin.

Fig. 7: Siver tetradrachm of Ptolemy I

 

Although all the examples above come from the Roman period, there are also some nice Greek and Parthian coins in the collection. GR100 is a beautiful silver tetradrachm of Ptolemy I, the first king of the Ptolemaic empire (fig. 7). This coin dates to 306 BC, relatively early in Ptolemy’s reign, and the obverse shows Alexander the Great wearing an elephant headdress, advertising Ptolemy’s connection with the great conqueror. Later in his reign, Ptolemy’s coins would feature a portrait of Ptolemy himself on the obverse.

Once all the coins were catalogued, we wanted to make them more widely available to the scholarly community. One great way to do this is to get them included in various online numismatic portals. These portals typically host a standardised typology, which can then list various specimens of each type, where the specimens are hosted on the websites of individual museums. The two major portals the Egypt Centre was able to contribute to were Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE) for Roman imperial coins, and Roman Provincial Coinage online (RPC online) for Roman provincial coins. These portals are all designed according to the principles of Linked Open Data, which provides a stable format for referring to real-world concepts (like coin denominations or Roman emperors) and makes it easy to connect the mass of numismatic data available on the internet.

These portals gather coins from many of the most important coin collections around the world, and it is great to see the Egypt Centre’s coins alongside specimens from, for example, the British Museum, the American Numismatic Society, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. For example, on this type, the Swansea coin finds its place alongside 180 other examples (as of 29/06/2022) from museums right across the world. Sometimes, however, the Swansea coin really stands out. For this denarius type of Nerva, the Egypt Centre’s coin (fig. 8) is the only example of the type that has been digitised. Therefore, whenever anyone searches online for an image of this coin type, the Egypt Centre’s coin is the one they will come across.

It has been a lot of fun diving into the Egypt Centre’s coin collection, and I’d encourage you to explore the coin collection online, or maybe pop into the museum and ask Ken to show you the coins themselves!

The Nomarchs of the Middle Kingdom

The blog post for this week is written by Linda Kimmel, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the United States. When she retired from full-time work as a data research manager in late 2020, she began studying the ancient world, and serving as a docent at the University of Michigan’s Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. Linda had never heard of the Egypt Centre before the COVID-19 Pandemic but has taken every course offered since she first noticed a tweet about the museum in the fall of 2020 and hopes to visit Swansea in 2023.

Many people can name at least one Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt. But the Pharaohs could not rule Egypt alone. In a time before planes, trains, automobiles, and modern forms of communication, and in a land spanning hundreds of miles, other officials were needed. If the Pharaoh was to rule efficiently and have control over the entire country, he needed representatives permanently placed throughout the country, and the nomarchs helped serve this purpose (fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Statue of Ukhhotep II and his family (MFA 1973.87)

In the final session in the latest Egypt Centre course—Middle Kingdom Studies—our instructor Ken Griffin focused on lower-level officials, with most of our time devoted to the nomarchs. Egypt was divided into nomes, or administrative regions, to enhance control of the entire country by the Pharaoh. Each nome was governed by a nomarch, a regional governor or ruler, although sometimes one nomarch would govern two nomes. The number of nomes fluctuated over time, but for the Middle Kingdom there were 42 nomes, with 22 in Upper Egypt and 20 in Lower Egypt. The nomes served as religious and economic centers for the surrounding countryside and villages.  

 

Duties of the Nomarchs

In return for royal favors, the nomarchs were expected to help with the defense of the country, to enhance its economy, and to act as the Pharaoh’s deputies. Depending on the location of the nome, some nomarchs had strategic importance for defending the frontier, serving as a staging point for the defense of the country from foreign countries. Nomarchs also played critical roles with Egypt’s economy, being charged with collecting taxes from their nomes. Nomarchs were responsible for maintaining facilities in their nome related to agricultural production such as irrigation and the canals. The relative power, and independence of the nomarchs fluctuated throughout the period, and seems to have declined precipitously under the reign of Senwosret III.  

Sources about the Nomarchs

As a political scientist who has focused on American politics and political behavior, if I wanted to know what the responsibilities and duties are of local governors or mayors, I would consult such official documents as state constitutions and city charters. If I wanted to learn about specific past local officials, I might consult their autobiographies or biographies (if the person was prominent enough). Our sources for the nomarchs are quite different. Much of what we know comes from their tombs, with a few having extensive biographies on their tomb walls.

Fig. 2: The tomb of Khnumhotep II (https://benihassan.com/dictionary/)

The tombs of the nomarchs reached their peak during the Middle Kingdom. Most of the tombs were rock cut, constructed at sites with striking natural features in the cliffs along the Nile. They were highly decorated, with painting typically used rather than relief carving. Themes of nature and landscape were common, as well as scenes of agriculture, cattle breeding, and trades such as boat building, pottery, and weaving.

In our class we covered the major centers of importance for the nomarchs: Beni Hasan, Meir, el-Bersheh, Elephantine, and Thebes, and within those centers, the key nomarchs. I found all of them interesting, but will focus here on my favorites, Khnumhotep II and Amenemhat, both nomarchs at Beni Hasan, the capital of the 16th nome of Upper Egypt.

Fig. 3: Khnumhotep II fowling

Khnumhotep II

The Khnumhoteps were a primary family of nomarchs from Beni Hasan, with Khnumhotep II the most well-known. Khnumhotep II served as nomarch in the Twelfth Dynasty, during the reigns of Amenemhat II and Senwosret II. The extensive autobiographical inscriptions in his tomb (Tomb 3 at Beni Hasan) provide much of what is known about the nomarchs, including such information as what they did, how they performed their duties, and the transmission of the Khnumhotep family’s positions and properties. The text runs below this scene of Khnumhotep II (fig. 2). A closeup of the scene on the left shows clearly how much larger Khnumhotep II is in scale than anyone else in the scene; he is presenting himself in the same over-sized way as the Pharaohs (fig. 3). We learned in class that such fishing and fowling scenes represent order over chaos, and by this depiction, Khnumhotep II showed that he could control nature. In addition to the autobiographical inscriptions, the tomb is perhaps most known for what is often termed the “Beni Hasan painting,” featuring a group of representatives, often labeled Hyksos (fig. 4). Without getting into any controversies about interpreting the meaning of the people in the scene (see Cohen 2016), I wonder what is being said about Khnumhotep II by including this scene in his tomb. Is the scene meant to indicate that Khnumhotep II was respected, or had authority over, people from other countries? Or did it mean he was somehow involved in foreign trade?

Fig. 4: Leaders of the "Hyksos" ((https://benihassan.com/dictionary/)

Amenemhat

In contrast to Khnumhotep II, little is known about Amenemhat, who served as nomarch during the reign of Senwosret I at the beginning of the Twelfth Dynasty. His father is unattested, and his relationship with other nomarchs is unknown. Texts in his tomb indicate he participated in a military expedition to Nubia (see Favry 2016). So why would this somewhat mysterious nomarch be one of my favorites from the class? In addition to the more typical hunting scenes, Amenemhat’s tomb [Tomb 2 at Beni Hasan] features a wall of “wrestlers” (fig. 5). I have been thinking about this scene, and looking for more information about it since the class ended last week. Ken noted that some of the wrestlers are carrying shields. Is the scene meant to show soldiers practicing for battle? And if so, what was their relationship to Amenemhat? Is the scene meant to relate to the military expedition to Nubia?

Fig. 5: "Wrestlers" in the tomb of Amenemhat

As always, I already am looking forward to our next class, which will start most likely sometime in October. In the meantime, I have barely started tucking into all of the wonderful materials Ken has shared with us about the Middle Kingdom, so anticipate learning much more about the Middle Kingdom before the next class! 

Bibliography:

Callender, Gae 2000. The Middle Kingdom R

enaissance. In Ian Shaw (Ed.) The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, 148–184. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cohen, Susan 2016. The Beni Hasan tomb painting and scholarship of the Southern Levant. The Ancient Near East Today VI. https://www.asor.org/anetoday/2016/07/the-beni-hasan-tomb-painting-and-scholarship-of-the-southern-levant/ [Accessed July 28, 2022]

Favry, Nathalie 2016. The transmission of offices in the Middle Kingdom. In Gianluca Miniaci, Wolfram Grajetzki (Eds.) The World of Middle Kingdom Egypt (2000–1550 BC): Contributions on Archaeology, Art, Religion, and Written Sources Middle Kingdom Studies 2, 117–131. London: Golden House Publications.

Grajetzki, Wolfram 2006. The Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt: history, archaeology and society. Duckworth Egyptology. London: Duckworth.

Grajetzki, Wolfram 2009. Court officials of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. Duckworth Egyptology. London: Duckworth.