Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists Abstracts of Papers

XICE – Abstract of Papers
sources of revenue and the continuing generosity of its members, the Society’s
operations will continue, but its fieldwork programme will be greatly reduced in scale,
and other aspects of its operation, such as the maintenance and promotion of its
library and archives, will assume greater importance.
In 2007 the Egypt Exploration Society received a bequest of £40,000 from the
estate of a member, Lucy Gura, in whose name the archive is now known. So far the
money has been used to digitize approximately 14,000 photographs as the first stage
in a project to create an online image database of the archive that will be accessible at
www.ees.ac.uk. The money is also being put towards re-housing the photographs in
archive-quality storage materials and cabinets. These initiatives, and the publication
of a book of photographs and drawings from the “early years” (1882-1914) which
offers an informal look at the work of Petrie, Naville, Newberry, Carter and others at
a wide variety of sites, represent the first steps in making the photographs better
known and more accessible, and are intended to increase scholarly interest in the
Society’s current and past work, and to engage the membership and the wider public
more directly with its activities and ancient Egypt in general. In the longer term the
Society hopes to maximize the use of the archive and its other resources by making
Doughty Mews a hub for researchers and members, and a destination for any visitor to
London with an interest in ancient Egypt.
Glass and vitreous materials at Tell el-Amarna
Paul T. Nicholson
This paper examines the work of the Amarna Glass Project, directed by the author on
behalf of the Egypt Exploration Society. The project took as its starting point the
work undertaken by W.M. Flinders Petrie’s at Tell el-Amarna in 1891-2 and
attempted to assess his evidence for the view that glass was made at the site from its
raw materials, rather than simply worked from imported glass. Although Petrie’s
reconstruction of the glassmaking process at Amarna has become standard, and is
reproduced in most accounts of early glassmaking in the Near East, some have
questioned whether the Egyptians could actually make their own glass, suggesting
instead that his evidence is more likely to represent glass working. Comparison of
Petrie’s notes with his published account suggests how such confusion might have
entered the literature, and examination of the physical remains collected by him
further helps to clarify the picture.
However, there are undoubtedly serious omissions in Petrie’s account, and the
only way to reassess his work properly was to excavate a glass producing site at
Amarna. Site O45.1 was chosen for this purpose, and revealed several kilns and/or
furnaces. Two of these are of a type not otherwise known from Amarna and it is
suggested that they are furnaces used to produce raw glass. This view is examined in
the light of laboratory analyses and experimental archaeology. This latter involved the
replication of one of the furnaces at full scale and an attempt to produce glass in it
using local raw materials. Since the raw materials of glass production are essentially
the same as those for the production of faience, namely silica, soda and lime, it should
not be surprising to find evidence for the production of faience at site O45.1. Petrie
also found evidence of faience production at Amarna, though his published account
does not always make it clear just how closely this might have been linked to areas of
glass production. The new excavations show a very close physical proximity between
the installations used for both crafts, and indeed those for the production of pottery.
183