Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists Abstracts of Papers

XICE – Abstract of Papers
debris surround these pits to confirm the former existence of such small monuments
crowning these steep hills. One of these pits, DAS 53, is so large, an intended
substantial superstructure can be assumed. Thirteenth Dynasty pottery was associated
with these structures.
In 2007 one of these sites, Dahshur South 49, was investigated by a brief trial
excavation. The top of a large brick lined shaft could be cleared. Despite being
heavily robbed, the tomb offered various finds: Limestone blocks and small fragments
of relief had once formed part of the superstructure. Substantial amounts of pottery
corroborate the initial dating to the early Thirteenth Dynasty. In the robbers’ debris
the offering table could also be found, confirming the owner as a member of the
residential elite. The inscription is damaged but a preliminary reading of his name and
titles (confirmed titles are jrj-p c t rx-njswt) will be presented.
Possibilities and Limitations of Fine Dating Egyptian Middle Kingdom Pottery –
the Middle Kingdom Pottery Handbook
Robert Schiestl and Anne Seiler
In the course of the SCIEM 2000 research project (based at the Austrian Academy of
Sciences, Vienna) a “Handbook of Middle Kingdom Pottery” is being devised. It
represents the first attempt in Egyptology at combining all data on pottery for a period
of approximately 300 years (from the mid 11 th to the mid 13 th Dynasty) from all of
Egypt in order to gain a comprehensive morphological overview and in order to
formulate dating criteria. The handbook consists of two parts, part 1, the Corpus
Volume, is being written by the authors of this paper, and part 2, the Regional Volume,
is a collection of contributions by numerous colleagues. The pottery assembled in the
Corpus Volume derives from three sources: well published, dated sites, unpublished
material from recent and ongoing excavations provided by the excavators and
redrawn and reanalysed pottery from old excavations stored in museum magazines.
Many users will approach the book in order to receive an as exact as possible date for
“their” pot(sherd)s and thus for their archaeological feature, layer or site. While the
book was conceived with a strong chronological focus, the newly emerging picture of
Egyptian pottery is clearer, yet no less complicated. In this paper we would like to
provide a brief manual, showing how the book should be used and how potential
dating-pitfalls lurking in the Middle Kingdom corpus can be avoided. Traditionally,
Egyptology has had to lean heavily on the Riqqeh-Harageh-Lahun Corpus, to which
the crucial sites of Lisht 141 and Dahshur 142 could be added more recently. The latter
sites’ royal links have formed the backbone for absolute dating of Middle Kingdom
pottery and the thus established corpus, deriving from residential funerary contexts,
has become what is generally perceived as “Middle Kingdom Pottery”. The addition
of pottery from the late Eleventh and the earliest Twelfth Dynasties, of material from
settlement sites, from Upper Egyptian towns and tombs and from socially diverse
contexts, provides us with a new and uniquely rich collection of material, which
forms the basis of our discussion. A prerequisite of typological groupings is the
detachment of the unit (the individual pot) from its context. In other words, pots
deriving from functionally and socially diverse deposits from different regions are
141
DO. ARNOLD, ‘Pottery’, in: DI. ARNOLD, The Pyramid of Senwosret I. The South Cemeteries of Lisht
I (New York, 1988), 106-146.
142
DO. ARNOLD, ‘Keramikbearbeitung in Dahschur, 1976-1981’, MDAIK 38 (1982), 25-65.
227