Well, good evening everybody. My name is Steve Tinney as you
probably know by now, most of you and I'm the deputy director of
the Penn Museum. Many thanks to all of you for
coming to tonight's sold-out installment of our
annual greats lectures This year, of course, our theme
is the rise of the city. To tie in with the opening of
our new Middle East galleries in April 2018. And we have selected speakers
and topics which will give us, sort of a 360 degree look at
what makes a city, how they grow where, and why. The next lecture in our series
will be on December 6th and will feature our own Dr.
Simon Martin, Associate Curator in the
American section, who will be talking about the
urbanized jungle, ancient Maya Garden cities. Yes, sounds interesting doesnt
he? Simon's always do, Aliens,
Gardens. There always great. So as usual, after our speakers
presentation, there will be time for some Q and A. And if you would like to ask a
question, I think they'll be a microphone
being passed around, so you everybody can hear the
question and so to our speaker Dr. Joseph Wagner is associate
professor of Egyptian Archaeology in the
department of Near Eastern languages and
civilizations. He is also an Associate Curator
in the Egyptian section of the Penn Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology. He received his ba in 1989 and
his PhD in 1996 Both from the University of
Pennsylvania. So Joe really is one of our own His dissertation was on the
topic of the development of the Osiris
cult in Abydos during the Middle Kingdom. And he's a specialist of the
archaeology of Egypt's Middle Kingdom. Joe is one of the more active
field archaeologists in the museum, conducting regular field season
to Abydos. Sometimes more than one a year. And he has lavished Decades of
attention on that site in various forms. And in 2014 Abydos rewarded his
persistence when he discovered the tomb of
a new Pharaoh, one Woseribre Senebkay. I who ruled Abydos. in the 17th
century BC. Closer to home. Joe is a valued member of the
curatorial community here in the museum. And recently, co-authored with
Jennifer Houser Wagner, a wonderful book which would
make an excellent holiday gift. Entitled, the Sphinx that
travel to Philadelphia, the story of the Colossal
Sphinx in the Penn Museum, Yeah, In addition with his colleagues
in Egyptian section, Joe has put a very substantial
amount of time and thought into the reinstallation of the
Egyptian galleries, the design of which is part of
our new fundraising campaign, building transformation; which was officially announced
today. For some of us, this has been a
long and exciting day along with the groundbreaking we had in the Harrison
Auditorium, you remember the Harrison
Auditorium, we ritually remove some seats, and won't be long before we're
back in there. Well, it will, but... *Crowd laughs* So you may have, you may have
seen The Inquirer and Metro pieces
about our work. I think the Metro piece was
headlined, "Making the Mummies Dance", *Crowd laughs* so keep an eye open for more
great press about that. So with all this, it gives me
great pleasure, to welcome Joe to talk to us tonight on a
topic, which I first encountered, as it happens, a few months back during one of the Egyptian
galleries meetings, So please join me in welcoming
him for his presentation on the Lost Cities of ancient Egypt. Joe *Applause* Good evening, ladies and
gentlemen. Thank you, Steve, for your kind
words of introduction. It's a real pleasure to see
such a full house. I never realized there was so
much interest in the old, moldy, cities of ancient Egypt. My goal tonight is to kind of walk you through
a very quick look at the study of ancient
Egyptian, Urban centers, settlement
archaeology, Urban archaeology, as we like
to call it, is one of the most vibrant and dynamic areas of research into
ancient Egypt. And we'll delve into a little
bit of my personal experience with that topic. So getting underway here. I thought I'd start today with a quote, from a very famous
egyptologist, probably not known to many of
you in the room; but a well-known egyptologist,
nonetheless One John Wilson. He was a professor of
egyptology at the University of Chicago and back in 1961, he authored an article that we
do like to make fun of nowadays quite a bit. You see this title there, "Egypt Through the New Kingdom,
Civilization Without Cities. This was a study that voice a series of
opinions about the nature of ancient Egypt. And it was kind of a current
thought amongst archeologists and researchers into ancient
civilizations of that era that we do have a number of, kind of,
ancient civilizations; throughout the world that don't
really go through a development of an urban phase
that we're looking at societies, with sort of agricultural
product, productive activities. But primarily Centers that were
focused on kind of ceremonial activity that left us stone monuments
and things. But really kind of a much more
rural kind of development. So John Wilson left us this
statement: "ancient Egypt was a
civilization without cities. " We can just disregard that I
think. This was really a failure and we do like to ridicule him
somewhat nowadays. I think it was influenced to a
large extent by the really kind of robust representational record in
ancient Egypt. We do have these wonderful
tombs scenes, which present a sort of a bucolic
view of Egyptian life, things like this tomb scene you see here from the New
Kingdom, showing a beautiful country
estate and this high official, a man named Neba Moon kind of
presiding over the administration of his
estate. Things like this tomb model
here from about 2000, BC, this belonged to a Vizier of
Egypt named Meketere. It's a series of models actually of his kind of country estate. And you see a beautiful Portico
with a pond and a garden, courtyard. This thought was kind of
influenced by these kinds of records and
Wilson; amongst others, I think didn't really
appreciate the really kind of major physical evidence that we
have that Egypt was from it's very beginnings, a highly
urbanized society. And in fact, through the Millennia of
Egyptian development, we can trace the kind of
magnificent evolution of many cities throughout Egypt
dotting, the banks of the Nile. Since Wilson came up with this
comment awhile ago now, obviously, 1961. Urban archaeology has really
come into its own in Egypt. So, as I mentioned, this is
really one of the most vibrant areas of research. It's a challenging one. In that, the Nile environment;
the place where the Egyptions lived along the banks
of the Nile, is a constantly evolving, and
changing kind of flood plain. It's a rivering flood plain. And many of the settlements
that they lived in, were right on the banks of the
Nile or close to it. And so, thousands of years of
change, of course, have tended to obscure the
physical remains of these cities of ancient
Egypt. So many of them are in fact,
kind of lost cities, this doesn't deter
archeologists of course. We are interested in overcoming
these kinds of physical hardships, and
learning what we can about ancient Egypt. and really right after Wilson,
came up with that sort of controversial statement, we have in the 1960s, the beginnings of really kind
of a fluorescence of urban research in the Nile
Valley. A great example of this is a
site that some of you may be familiar
with. This is a site called Tell
el-Dab'a. It's in the Nile Delta, quite
close to the Mediterranean Sea, actually on a branch and the of
the Delta called the pelusiac branch If you translate the name, it actually translates into
English as "The Mound of the She Dog," and of course, there's a more
colorful English term that one could apply to this, I'll leave you all to figure
out what that might be. But anyway, "The Mound of the
She Dog," Ah Tell el-Dab'a was an ancient
city called a varus, which was the capital city of a
group of kings called, the Hyksos. The 15th Dynasty and Egyptian
chronology, they ruled in Egypt about 1700
to 1500 BC. And they they settled in and develop
this kind of massive capital city which was one of
the largest cities in Egypt at the time. Time it was right on the banks
of this pelusiac branch of the river. And as you can see in the
schematic diagram here, includes a whole kind of range
of different settlement areas, palace areas, all of it
centered on a kind of a central harbor area where these kings were engaged
in quite extensive trade and interconnections throughout the
Eastern Mediterranean. Since the 1960's, the Austrian Academy of
Sciences and particuarly, the Austrian archaeological
Institute in Egypt, have been investigating this
and at this point in time, it's actually the largest most extensive and
informative Urban project on Ancient Egypt. So we know a lot about this
place. It's a difficult site to work,
like many ancient settlements, it's in the floodplain and in
order to excavate this place, you have to use remote sensing
to find structures. And in fact what the the
primary kind of modus operandi is to rent fields from local farmers,
they'll ecavate it. Retrieve what evidence can come
out of the ground and then they just turn it back
over to the local landowners. So, through this process, since
the 1960s, Tel el-Dab'a is the one, great
example of a huge Urban site. A really kind of major kind of
entrepot on the Northern Northeastern
Frontier of Egypt and Northeastern Nile, Delta that tells us a lot about an
early urban center in Egypt. Another great example, I think many of you probably be
more familiar with this because it tends to be featured
on TV from time to time, is this more specialized
example of an Egyptian town or city which is the the settlement of
the Pyramid Builders that's been excavated over the
last 30 years or so by Mark Lehner and his
organization called "The Ancient Egypt Research
Associates" which is based up in Massachusetts. But you can see from that
diagram there on the lower right-hand side, what they've revealed is really
kind of a dense urban center that it's not properly a city
in its own right. But it's kind of a suburb, it's
an outlier, to the main capital city of
Memphis. It's a special place that housed the Pyramid Builders of the
fourth Dynasty, who were involved in building
the Great Pyramids at Giza. They found Palace areas again,
extensive areas for storage of materials, administrative
areas, and settlement, or occupation
habitation structures as well. So that's kind of a major
contribution to kind of the early phases of Egypt and
an important part of it is actually, and for all of
urban research in Egypt, is appreciating the
relationship of these. 'Lost cities' to the Nile
environment. How do they adapt to the Nile
flood plain? And you can see in that
reconstruction, they've been able to reconstruct some of the
kind of water features, the harbours and canals and
things that created the landscape around the
pyramids, back in the time of the fourth
Dynasty, about 2500 BC. Moving onwards, there on the
map on the left, you can see the two sites, I
just mentioned. It's not, maybe the labeling is
not very clear, but at the very top, there is
tell a Dhaba that I mentioned the capital of
the Hyksos quite close to the
Mediterranean Sea Giza of course, is very close
to Memphis, which we'll return to in just a
little bit, but they're down in the South. You see in the larger lettering,
on the western side of the Nile in Upper Egypt, or Southern
Egypt is Abydos. This has been an important site for the
research of the Penn Museum, since the 1960s and my own work
started up in the 1990s. What I've been working on there. As you see in the schematic
here, is a, in fact, a royal Mortuary
complex, a place where we have a King, a
Pharaoh's, tomb dating to about 1850 BCE along
with a temple, in which the cult of that King
was celebrated and maintained; his Mortuary cult. But near there we've discovered,
in fact, a lost city, so I kind of have have
experience with this. And so this is Is the area I'm
talking about. This is the tomb of Pharaoh
Senwosret, the third of the 12th Dynasty who reigned
about 1850 BC. His Temple here, close to the
edge of the Nile flood plain, and this blob on the map is the
ancient town which we discovered in the 1990s and here just kind of zooming
in on it. You see the again, the characteristics the features of
this Mortuary complex. We were very fortunate in the
1990s to, one of the great exciting
discoveries was actually to find the ancient name of this
place. And you see that kind of a
shield-shaped little feature there in the middle with
hieroglyphs in it. This is a line drawing of in
fact, a whole series of clay seal
impressions which are tiny things, just about like an inch and a
half big. You can see they crammed a huge
number of hieroglyphs into this. This is the ancient place name
for this Mortuary complex and in Egyptian, as well as in
English it's quite a tongue twister. The place name here was ah-sut-Khakaure-maa-kheru-em-Abd
ju And surprisingly, that was the actual name that
was conferred on this town that you see here. This town was the place that
housed the administrators, the people, officials, priests
all the Personnel involved in maintaining the cult of this
King Senusret the third in the nearby Temple, and in
your mind, Just imagine if you were one of
the ancient occupants of this town, and you
kind of journeyed away from your house, perhaps to
another part of Egypt, and someone, you know, you met
someone and they ask. Well where are you from? And you had to reply. I'm from ah-sut-Khakaure-maa-kheru-em-Abd
ju You think the name of
Philadelphia has enough syllables in it? Obviously, you didn't want to
say that every time you met someone, so the
Egyptians were incredibly logical people and they abbreviated it. So what you see there, labeling the area of the town
site that we've discovered is the shortened version of ah-sut-Khakaure-maa-kheru-em-Abd
ju which is Wah-Sut. They just took the first two
words of it. Which means 'Enduring are the
Places.' The at the whole name means
enduring are the places of Khakaure, which is one of the names of
its Kings, Senwasert the third 'true of
voice in Abydos.' So, we've been excavating, this
town of Wah-Sut, we started in the 1990s, we've taken breaks from it
because one of the one of the drawbacks, I guess
not really a drawback, but one of the elements of
settlement and urban research is the volume of material that
sites like this yield and you often have to take
pauses in the excavation program to analyze the backlog of
material. So, we have been working on it
methodically, but with sort of breaks here
and there to process the finds. And here you see the ruins of
it. It's perched, kind of on the
edge of the load Desert. You can see the Nile flood
plain, the greenery behind, and modern houses that line,
the edge of the Nile cultivation, and you get a sense of the
preservation of this site. This is what we would consider
a well-preserved settlement site. You can't walk into these
buildings anymore, but when they're exposed, you get a
sense of the ground plan, you can walk through doorways
and look at rooms, and in fact, there's a lot of
preserved elements of the architecture there on
the right. You see, for example, brick floors with a series of
stone lined doorways and column bases and things. So comparatively speaking, it's a relatively, well,
preserved settlement. And it's a kind of a good
example of one type of urban development in ancient
Egypt, which is what we call the state
planned or government initiated Urban
site. This isn't a site that
developed kind of spontaneously, but it was actually laid out by
Royal Architects. Designed specifically to house
particular people, who were responsible for
maintaining the King's Cult. It looks a little bit like sort
of colonial Philadelphia, with it's very, you know,
regular rectilinear ground plan. It's that kind of an urban site. You know, planned by the
Central State. One of the very exciting
discoveries is the big structure that you
see on the left side there of the plan, this big structure here, this
is a kind of a palatial residence. Archaeologists aren't always
very inventive. When we name or label things, It's the biggest building in
the town that we know of, and was the first one that we
actually started excavating. So we called it 'Building A' 'Building A', what is it? Well, it's the mayoral
residence. It's kind of a palatial
structure that housed a series of Mayors who ruled over
this place over several hundred years. And there you see a
reconstruction of 'Building A' in its original form. We actually think that building
a might, when the town was first
established, it might have actually served
as a temporary kind of residence for the king himself. One wonders at places like this, what happened when the Pharaoh
arrived? He didn't just pitch a tent, there had to be some kind of
accommodations for him. And, in its original design, it
has this kind of immense, pillared courtyard at the center that takes up like a third of
the building, But that structure was actually
very rapidly altered, and the whole building began to
evolve in a more kind of organic way. So in its original design, it might have actually been
briefly used by the king himself or other high
officials. But through most of its history
at house, this series of Mayors who ran
the establishment of The Cult of Senwosret the third. I have a lot of fun with these computer aided designs, CAD
reconstructions. A lot of archaeologists do so we can play around with
these a lot. These are, these are kind of
bare bones, reconstructions, it's obviously, just based on
the ground plan and the physical evidence that we have
that survives. This one's a little bit washed
out looking, obviously, just kind of white; but we get
can begin to elaborate these things quite
a bit. We know that a lot of these
buildings were were decorated, were painted, with different colors of
painted elements. The walls sometimes the wall
scenes. In fact, we have remnants of
small pieces of wall image like figural imagery that would have
decorated this building. You can see one of the elements
of it that characterizes it is the use of a we call a black
dado It's kind of a shiny, black,
lower part to the wall, that would would resist kind of
damage and scuffing, where most of the activity was
going on and many of the rooms had kind of a
yellow upper part. So you can see there a bit of
application of color to give you a bit of sense of
it. What becomes a little harder is
to really reconstruct it really to give you a full
sense of the living spaces of these
ancient settlements. And at the point that I was
doing this, a number of years ago, my son
actually; was really into this video game that some of you may
be familiar with, Minecraft. It's this video game where you
can build structures and cities and
things. And if you go online, you'll
find some amazing Egyptian cities where people
must have spent hundreds of hours in front of
their computers creating these very inspired
Egyptian cities. I tried to convince my son
Alexander to do a reconstruction of the
town of Wha-Sut and the mayor's residence for
me. He said 'Dad I'm not going to
do that, that's really boring.' Um, so but anyway, other people have
used, they've been more inspired and
you can, of course, find these kinds of things. We, with archeological
reconstructions, we tend to not go quite so
overboard. One of the things that we've
discovered at South Abydos, of course, is evidence for
these mayor's, the mayors of Wah-Sut compose,
a sort of a dynasty. They descended from father to
son over about three centuries from
about 1850 to about 1550 BC, or
thereabouts. And there, you see the names of
some of them, from seal impressions in clay
and other inscribed objects, we can reconstruct this kind of
local history of these mayors of the town of Wah-Sut. We can follow this building
that they occupied as it evolved over the
centuries. And here, you see, just another
one of these renderings. Now, you see that big pillared Central Courtyard that I
mentioned that was in the, the, previous
images that's now gone. And in fact, there's a whole
series of other, more complex, structures that are occupying
the center of the building. So it was an evolving kind of
organic structure, and we see this in a lot of the
other parts of the town as well. When you excavate ancient
Egyptian towns and cities, one of the fun things about it
is, you often discover the kinds of
objects that we know existed in the ancient texts that are
mentioned from time to time. The things that are in fact are
very rarely seen and one of the most exciting
discoveries I've ever made occurred in the town of Wah-Sut
in the mayor's house. There, you see a reconstruction
of it. It's an ancient Egyptian birth
brick. It's a quite large mud brick
about yay big that was painted with imagery
of a mother in childbirth. And there you see a scene of
the mother having given birth. There's a line drawing, and my wife did that painted
reconstruction there. It's covered with kind of
magical images associated with childbirth and it allows us to
in fact, reconstruct, a lot of the
magical practices, the physical practices, and
religious rituals that surrounded childbirth, which
involved women squatting on a set of four bricks that
were stacked up and there's a reconstruction of
it. The this is the kind, this is
the practice of delivery of children in ancient
Egypt and some of the implements that
were involved with this. So it would give us a really
kind of nice insight into some of the social and cultural
practices of the time. As luck would have it , the year we found the birth
brick at Abydos right after that, my wife was
actually pregnant. It must have been the magical
effects of the birth brick having some influence on her
and I briefly, colluded with the Penn Museum's Director of
Public Information, Pam Kosty. We had the idea that it might
be nice to invest in a little bit of kind of
experimental archaeology. And we had the idea that I
would make these birth bricks and decorate them and then my
wife could actually deliver our son, Alexander on them and
and we would film the proceedings and make a documentary. So you can imagine her reaction
to this idea. It's one of the greatest
documentaries that was never produced. So, anyway, we had a lot of fun, of
course, in the the birth brick event. Let's go on to the next. I think my little my remote here has stopped
operating, so I guess I'll just switch to
this. One of the interesting things, just to finish up our brief,
look into this, this town, this lost city of Wah-Sut at
Abydos. Is after we found the name of
it. We discovered that the sanction
name Wah-Sut. We actually found in a number
of ancient sources, papyri and other documents,
mentions of this very town. And here you see a papyrus
today in the Brooklyn Museum, that mentions Wah-Sut and it
gives us some interesting information. Connected with Wha-Sut were a
bunch of guys who were working in the fields, it mentions, the
fields and orchard lands of Wah-Sut. And these weren't regular kind
of locals. They were in fact, captured
fugitives who were incarcerated and signed to physical labor in
the fields. So they're criminals. We have evidence for crime in
this town of South Abydos. So you know the, the range of
things we have here preserved in the evidence. We have mayor's, we have
criminals. We have all the makings
obviously of a city really in, you know, in a familiar way. And some of those mayor's might
have actually been criminals to, who knows? So work suit gives us a really
nice kind of snapshot of Egypt in a particular timeframe. The timeframe of Egypt's late
Middle Kingdom through to the beginning of the
New Kingdom were sued brings up a very
important aspect of the study of cities and settlements
in ancient Egypt; which is, if you think back to the photos
you saw of its location. It's not down in the floodplain, but it's perched up on the edge
of the desert. And this is a reflection of one
of the realities of the ecological setting of ancient
Egypt. The environment in which people
lived and worked. Of course is a very active
riverine environment. The Nile River is effectively a
meandering river which is always kind of changing its
course. It's breaking up and creating
islands and eroding other parts of land away. It's kind of like a snake that
slithers around in this kind of muddy floodplain that it's
flowing through, and so, the Egyptians were always
contending with that reality. The land, of course, they
called Kemet 'The Black Land', which is the alluvial plain
that they lived in and farmed. But for positioning settlements, this was a critical issue for
them, because one of the features of
the river, of course it was the, the annual inundation of the
Nile which, you see here, this is a very beautiful event,
that no longer occurs, obviously, because the Nile was
dammed in the 1960s and the inundation no longer
reaches Egypt. But here's some, some old views from postcards
and a photograph on the right hand side, this is a
fundamental reality for positioning Egyptian
settlements, towns, and cities. They had to contend with this
annual event where the Nile Flooded its banks and
spread out across its floodplain all the way to
the very edge of the desert. This was a particular season
the Egyptians call 'Akhet'- 'The Season of the Inundation'. And in our calendar it occurred
in kind of the late summer to the beginning of the Fall,
usually end of June to September. But as you can see in that
photograph there on the lower right-hand side, the
positions of settlements in the Nile Valley really have
to contend with the comings of these waters. And so, one of the things that the
Egyptians did was pick areas of the terrain
that were elevated above the reach of the waters, this
could be the edge of the desert, like the town of Wah-Sut, it's
right up on the desert margin, it's beyond the
reach of the flood. But there were other places that the Egyptians gravitated
towards. And one good example of this is
certain kind of high spots on the terrain that are kind of
situated just high enough above the waters of the flood. These could be Islands, a great
example of a city that developed in this
kind of environment, is the city of Elephantine, the
modern town of Aswan, which is Egypt's southern
frontier city. This city developed very, very
early on. We have evidence of it, even in
the pre-dynastic period, before the Advent, the
beginnings of history, and the time of the Pharaohs. And you can see it occupies
this beautiful, picturesque, island setting, you can see
it's elevated above the waters of the river. So this kind of a thing, kind
of a rocky outcropping an island or in other places, perhaps similar kind of
elevated areas, were occupied as the Nile moves
around, as this meandering river. One of the things that it did,
was it pushes up, and creates these kind of
gravelly levees, river levees. The edges, the banks of the
river that are pushed up, you know, to a higher elevation. And many of the ancient
settlements gravitated towards these
ancient levees the river, the river left, as it kind of
evolved and moved around. So the sighting of towns and
cities was really critical for the Egyptians because of
the Nile inundation and here's just some views of
Elephantine, it's a really picturesque place. You can see many of you probably visited, Egypt have probably
been there. The first cataract, this was
the Frontier City of Egypt. You can see how tightly situated to the the the
rather confined island it occupies how it really fits beautifully
into that environment. Elephantine is today, it's
known Aswan, in ancient times, it was called
Abu, which means elephant, elephant Town. We're not really sure why it
was called elephant town, in fact, Elephantine is, of course, the
derivation of the ancient Egyptian word, there are two major theories. One is that this was the place where the
caravans went south into sort of the Sudan and kind
of Central African regions that brought back. Elephant Ivory which the
Egyptians were quite interested in those Caravans left and
returned to this site. So it may have to do with kind
of the trade and acquisition of
ivory. Or it may have to do with the
boulders. You can see that flanking, the
island ramming it, are these beautiful Granite
Boulders that look like the bodies of
elephants. So we're not actually quite
sure why it was called 'Elephant Town. But these two, maybe these two
things kind of converged in the ancient name of
Elephantine, but it's a great example of a
very dense city of not a huge City, but a city of
relatively modest proportions that evolved over thousands of
years; and the German archaeological
Institute in Egypt has been excavating this site
since the 1960's. A lot, like Tell el-Dab'a And you can see some of the ruins of it there. A temple at the center
dedicated to one of the gods, a goddess of this town, I
called Satet at the stone core of that. And then you can see the urban
remains, that kind of surround the
temple. Which is a typical kind of a structure for an
Egyptian town. And here's the Reconstruction
of it, sort of an artist view. On the Nile there you can see
moving away, one of the major products of
this town. One of the major activities
apart from trading caravans was the local stone. And some of you may have visited this wonderful unfinished
obelisk in the granite quarries of
Aswan. The granite of Aswan, was one of the major exports
that was quarried here, and move northwards primarily
to many other sites in Egypt for construction of great
monuments. And there's this wonderful
Obelisk that was abandoned because of a
crack in it. The previous slide shows a
Obelisk that was successfully quarried. You can see it on the boat
there being moved northwards. As you move north from Aswan or Elephantine into the
Northern parts of Egypt. You find that there are other
interesting kind of settings that the Egyptians used for
their towns and cities. If you move all the way up into
Northern Egypt, into the Delta, one of the challenges there is
there are no cliffs. There were, there were, there were however in ancient times these kind of
natural outcroppings or gravelly kind
of hills which are one result of the kind of a geological
formation of the Nile Delta; we call these 'Turtle Backs' or in Arabic, they're called
Gezira or Gezira, it just means Island. It's the same word as the TV
network, Al Gezira news. These islands, so-called, are
kind of raised or elevated areas in the floodplain of the
Nile Delta. And it's here that we get some
of the really big cities developing on these elevated
areas they created over time because
it was kind of choice. real estate, urban centers that
kind of developed upwards. They grew upwards and this is
the classic form of what we call a 'tell' in near Eastern archaeology. A tel is an urban mound, and
the Delta is full of these huge urban mounds. This one looks a lot like the
one we just saw. In Egypt they're often called
Koms. It just means Mound. And they, in almost every part
of Egypt, there's Kom, such and such; it's an ancient city that
survives as a kind of decayed mound urban
core. And some of these were massive
cities. This is a great example. This is the ancient town or
city of Tanis, which was one of the bigger
ones in the Nile Delta in later times. You can get a sense of the
massive scale of it and some of the surviving
architecture. It has a picturesque name in
Arabic, it was called, it's called
today, 'San el-Hagar' which means 'The Place That
Keeps Rocks.' And the place that keeps rocks
is called that because, there are these architectural
remains. Temple remains, and monuments
decorating, the kind of central part of it. Where the ancient temples of
Tanis were, and magnificent things like this great Ramesside statue of
Ramses. This Ramses II that was reused by later. Kings in decorating, one of the
large temples at autonomous. As if he environment of Egypt
is not enough to contend with, in terms of how the Egyptians adapted to it
and the preservation over time of these settlements, one of
the unfortunate things that happens relatively
recently actually in Egypt. And by relatively recently, I
mean mostly the, the 19th and 20th, centuries,
early 20th centuries was the process of mining out
of these ancient; the remains of these ancient
towns for fertilizer. As Egypt population began to
grow in the eighteen hundreds, they realize that they could
mine out from these towns, something called Sebakheen
which is fertilizer. It's a basically, an
organic-rich material that they apply, local farmers,
landowners applied for permission to go to ancient
sites and dig out the organic contents of rooms
and buildings; and a place that suffered
extensively from this, kind of good example of it, is
a site called Karanis. Which is in an area of Egypt
called the Fayum and you see it there. It's actually very close to
ancient Philadelphia there on the kind of the
northern part of the Fayum. You may see there. You see the batteries are dead
on this thing. But hopefully you can see the
lettering. That is Karanis and a little
bit to the lower. Little bit off, to the right, is the location of ancient
Philadelphia. But anyway, this is a place
that was mined extensively for the Sebach by these guys
called the Sebakheen, who dug out the fertilizer, and
deposited it on the fields. But as this was going on
archeologists were increasingly worried about what
was going on. And people began to get more
active in urban research. Karanis is a place that was
extensively worked on in the early 20th century by
the University of Michigan. They were actually attracted to
the place; initially, by papyri. There were reports of papyri
coming out, and they began to excavate. But as an offshoot, it became a
good example of the early development in the
beginning of the 20th century. Of kind of urban archaeology. So Carranis is a great example
of a nicely preserved site, but one that suffered through
the depredations of these Sebakheen and many many
settlements really were affected by this kind of
thing. The ancient Egyptians had many
different terms for towns and cities of different
scales. Here you see three of the most
common terms. We encounter I ancient texts; they're sort of ranked by size. Whyt was a kind of a small
hamlet, a little tiny village. Dmi, is sort of in between, it's applied sort of
generically to settlements of kind of modest scale. And at the top of the, the
ranking, here is the term Niwt. Niwt literally means city, Niwt it was actually applied to
a whole range of cities of different scales. They could be really massive,
Urban centers, like the capital city of
Memphis, for instance, but other more modest kind of
local cities also got this term. Smaller towns and towns and
Villages, like this one. This is a very famous town. The town of the Tomb Builders
of the Pharaohs on Western Thebes called Dier
el-Medina. This was regularly just called
the Demi, which just means the town or
the inhabited area. But when we're looking at
cities in ancient Egypt, we often talk about what we
call the Niwt, which is the kind of the
highest order of towns and cities. And at the top of this is one
of the largest, and most significant cities in
ancient Egypt. Many of you are familiar with
it. The city of Memphis. It's which developed at the
beginning of Egyptian history. The foundation of Memphis
corresponds with the beginning of the dynasties, the beginning of Egyptian
history. It was established in a very
kind of logical, kind of geographical, kind of
central setting. You see it there in red. Right at the point where the
Delta, of Lower Egypt, or Northern
Egypt, meets the ribbon of Upper Egypt
where those come together. This was a strategic point
where the early pharaohs chose to establish their
control. And Memphis has been a major
focus of interest and research all the
way back to the Napoleonic era. And here you see on the right, a image from the Description de
l'Égypte, from the time of Napoleon, of the kind of
environment of Memphis, people began to be interested
in this place. The archaeology of Memphis is a
fascinating example of one of the great cities of
ancient Egypt. One, that's very challenging,
again, because of these issues of preservation that I
mentioned. But, increasingly we can we can
appreciate the scale and the the significant scope of
this urban center. This is just an artist's
reconstruction of kind of what it may have looked like in the
floodplain. It was on the western side of
the Nile. Originally probably, very close
to the Nile. Now, the Nile has actually
shifted substantially to the east away from where Memphis
was, and Memphis is kind of, kind of strangled in the local
Fields as it were. Um, it's a city with a
fascinating history. We know a little bit about its
foundation. The ancient records tell us
that it was founded by the first pharaoh, a man called
Menes in Egyptian records. And there's this intriguing
little tail that's told by Manetho, the ancient Egyptian
historian in his document called the
Aegyptiaca. He tells us that the king
called Menes ruled for 60 years. He won renown, but he was
carried off by a hippopotamus. So he founded Memphis, but then
later on, I dont know, a hippopotamus took him off
into the Nile. So a little kind of interesting
colorful tale about it. But Memphis is an incredibly
important and long lived center, urban center in Egypt, one of
the most important cities through most of Egyptian
history. There you just see the map of
it. It has many names. When it was founded, it was
called Ineb-Hedj, which means 'The White Wall.' It later on became known as
Men-Nefer, which was a derivation from one
of the local pyramids that was called, Men-Nefer-Pepi. That pyramid, which you can
just see on that plan there on the left-hand side, was very
close to Memphis. And so the name of the pyramid
began to be used more and more. And that's actually the origin
of our word 'Memphis', in the Greek, the Greek version
of Men-Nefer or Men-Nefer-Pepi That's how it was frequently
known. But in other names as well, it was often called 'The Life
of the Two Lands' or, Ankh-Tawy, and my favorite one
here is on the lower image there, is a very important name. This is the name for the major
temple that stood at the core of ancient Memphis. It was called Hout-ka-Ptah 'The Temple of the Spirit of
Ptah.' Ptah was the main god of Memphis and Hout-ka-Ptah was such an
important that, in fact, it is the origin for the word
Egypt itself. Derived through the Greek,
Hout-ka-Ptah, is the origin for the word
Aegyptos, which evolves, then into our
modern name for Egypt. So the name of the temple at
the center of Memphis is why we call Egypt, Egypt
today. But Memphis has attracted tons
of interest in one of the, one of the fascinating areas
that people are interested in, is in its early manifestation. When it first develops. The beginning of the age of the
Pharaohs, around 3000 BC. People have been searching for
'The City of the White Wall', or Ineb-Hedj as it's known. We think a lot of The Monuments,
the Pyramids, that stand on the desert edge. Like the famous Step Pyramid of
Djoser actually should use in stone, symbolic architecture that echoes the ancient appearance
of Memphis, and if you visit the step
pyramid, as many of you probably have, surrounding it is this kind of
remarkable crenellated wall. We think that this is a kind of
a simulation in stone of the original appearance of
the walls of Memphis. The White Walls that surrounded
the residents core capital city. Just recently, a couple of
years ago, very quietly working away at Memphis for a long
period of time, is this excavation of the
Russian Academy of Sciences. and they announced two years
ago, that they actually have
discovered physical remains of the original walls of Memphis. The White Walls that presumably
looked like this, and they're still working down
into the excavations to reveal physical evidence of that. And of course, Memphis is a
city. It's one that we are familiar
with here in the Penn Museum, because our museum has a long
history of interest and active research at Memphis;
with our exposure and work on the Palace of King
Merenptah which is one of the great
monuments of Memphis in the New Kingdom. Which is displayed currently in
the lower Egyptian gallery. And if you wander around in
there, you can you can find, actually on the
columns, and other parts of the building, the name, for the Ancient
Temple of Ptah, the god of Memphis. There you see in the
hieroglyphs, it says, Hout-ka-Ptah. This Temple that was so
important at the center of ancient Memphis. Memphis is a great example of
the sort of important continuities that in
which these ancient cities, evolved through long time
frames; trajectories of evolution that
actually are echoed in modern times. One of the important things
about where Memphis was, where they chose to build
Memphis at the beginning of Egyptian
history, 5000 years ago has really kind
of remained a kind of a logical control
Point. As the, cuz the, For the
capital of Egypt and through later Antiquity,
and to the Middle Ages and into the Islamic period, the capital
of Egypt has always gravitated to this place where Memphis
developed. So, in the Middle Ages it moved,
slightly across the river to a place called Fustat, and
then just a little bit north of there, up to the area
of Cairo itself, which was founded in 969, by
the Fatimids dynasty who moved into Egypt from
Tunisia. And so, it's evolved, but it's
always remained in this kind of same place. And so these Echoes of kind of the importance of the ideas that found and governed the
locations of cities, and how they work within their
environment, evolved and connect modern
developments with these ancient cities, and Memphis is
really kind of the antecedent in many ways to the modern city
of Cairo. Cairo itself, in fact, in the
Middle Ages was substantially built out of
reused blocks taken from Memphis and other nearby cities. Today it's one of the largest
cities on Earth and it's the sort of inheritor
of ancient Memphis. Other great cities
characterized Egypt, of course. And there are many, many; just one that's incredibly
important in the study of ancient Egypt worthy of mention
is this great capital city founded by Akhenaten, called
Akhet-Aten 'The Horizon of the Otten' in the middle part of Egypt in
sort of a desolate desert bay. Akhenaten, over a period of
about 20 years built, this huge capital city which
was then abandoned. And so it becomes a great sort
of laboratory for the study of Urban Remains in Egypt,
preserved on the landscape there. A lot of the houses that
flanked the main kind of administrative and Temple areas, which you see in that
reconstruction there. For the better part of a
hundred years, Akhenaten or, Tell el-Amarna as
it's called, has been one of the most
important Urban Sites where we can study ancient
Egypt. Another of these great cities
of course, and many of you who visit Egypt
have certainly been there, is the city of Thebes, modern
Luxor in southern Egypt. This is sometimes called 'The
Southern Capital' and for the Egyptians, as I put
in the label there, Thebes Court kind of embodies
many of the key ideas of the ideal, or the model city. The city of Thebes, infact,
spans both banks of the river, as you can see it has a Eastern
part and a western part. The eastern part was where the main temples of the gods were
located, the temple to the god Amun. Amun was the main god of the
city of Thebes. And he has a great Stone built
Temple complex there, and this other kind of
satellite temples. But the main city of Thebes
grew up around these temples on the Eastern
Bank. So this was kind of the living
City. But then as you cross over to
the west across the Nile, you entered another special
part of Thebes, which was the city of the Dead. This was the for we call the
Theban necropolis, and this is where many of the
temples to the, the Pharaohs were built along
with their tombs in the Valley of the Kings. And so, there's this kind of
beautiful kind of echo, the living world and the world
of the Dead in this kind of, you know,
integrated physical space. So this is, in many respects,
sort of the ideal, kind of layout that the
Egyptians would gravitate towards, is having a
living city and a on the other side of the Nile, the City of the Dead. Here's some just some reconstructions of parts of it. The Temple of Amun there, you
get a sense of the Wall Precinct at perhaps the
height of its development with the urban urban areas
around it here. This is a little bit of a sparse kind of watercolor but you get
a sense of the living city, the city on the Eastern Bank
and then the Theban necropolis away on
the west. The city of Thebes, modern
Luxor, is one of the great archaeological treasures
of Egypt, and indeed the world, because so much of it actually
survives physically. And it has to do partially with
its location, in a fairly kind of, traditionally kind of remote
rural area of Upper Egypt. That hasn't seen a lot of
development. Other major cities haven't had
that luxury, and one of the great examples
of a lost city of Egypt is the Incredibly important
city of Heliopolis. Heliopolis was never a capital
city, but it probably housed the biggest temples that were
ever built in Egypt. Including the great temple to
the Sun God Ra. Today, you can see that
Heliopolis is a little bit of a compromised
environment. Contrast, the painting there
from about 1800 of the somewhat nice attractive, rural setting
of Heliopolis a couple hundred years ago with
the pyramids, the way in the distance with
what it looks like today. It's in totally encased,
encumbered, with the urban development of modern Cairo,
and so archaeologists have been digging there have really had
to contend with a lot of, kind of issues of preservation and
access. But nevertheless, they're
striving to reconstruct this major city. If you visit Heliopolis today
almost all you see is one single standing Obelisk
that once was just one of probably dozens and dozens of
obelisks that devote, decorated the temple precinct
of this huge urban center of Heliopolis, almost all of it
gone and buried. But, there you see some of
these excavations that have been intent on revealing
the nature of Heliopolis. And Heliopolis did make it into
the news relatively recently. Some of you may be familiar
with this discovery. A couple months ago, they came
upon a beautiful kind of fragmentairy but colossal
figure initially identified as Ramses II, or Ramses The Great,
that actually turned out to be a different Pharaoh. Psametichus the first from the
late period of Egypt. Dynasty 26. There was a lot of fanfare. Of course, when they discovered
this and you can see the exuberant crowd there as
the statue, was being pulled from the
ground. But this is just one kind of
tidbit from this major, lost city of ancient Egypt. Heliopolis, which
archaeologists are striving to reconstruct. Along with the urban remains,
the physical remains, the archaeological evidence. One of the, one of the very important
sources of information on cities in ancient Egypt is the
documentary evidence papyri and monuments with text and
inscriptions that record evidence or information
relevant to reconstructing these lost cities. Among these, one of the most
important early records comes in the form of this
relatively small, modest looking building which
sits today in Thebes very close to the
Temple of Karnak in Upper Egypt. It was a kind of a festival
building connected with what we call the
Sen Festival of a king called Senwosret the
first around 2000 BC, at the beginning of the 12th
Dynasty. But when they decorated this
building, interestingly they they created a map, an
inscribed map, all around the base of this
building and if you walk around this
white chaple of Senwosert the first What you'll encounter is all
around it, decorating the whole kind of
perimeter of the building is a record of the different towns
and cities of Egypt, their division, into what we
call the Gnomes or the provinces. And there you see in that
example, just a group of three of these
gnomes, or provinces, with the name of the gnome and
then what's called the Gnome Capital. The regional Capital, kind of
like the state capital, like Harrisburg, it lists the
name of that City. Interestingly they even give us
numbers. They give us the dimensions of
these gnomes along the Nile. And so you can take these
inscriptions and you can create a actually a
two-dimensional map of Egypt as it existed four thousand
years ago, based on these inscriptions. And here you see it
reconstructed, in a kind of confusing drawing
there, but the Gnomes, and The Gnome capitals of Upper
Egypt and Northern Egypt, the Delta. Traditionally, there were 42
domes of Egypt. Like the states of the United
States, 42 gnomes, usually 2022 of the South and
20, or thereabouts up in Northern
Egypt. But this kind of evidence is
something that pairs very nicely with the
archaeological evidence, and many, many people are, of
course, searching for physical remains
that we can tie into this inscriptional evidence. Amongst these cities that are
listed, and recorded in these
inscriptions, like the Whitechapel, are many,
many important places that have never been discovered. Have never been found. Have never been glimpsed
through excavation, and just two worthy of mention
here, two that I would love to find
on the left. There is a place called
Itj-Tawy, we know a lot about it from the
ancient texts. It was the royal capital of
Egypt for several centuries. It was built by a king called
Amenemhat the first around 2000 BC. And we even know roughly where
it was because the king built his pyramid near
the capital and his pyramid still survives at a place
called leashed. This city of Itj-Towy should be
somewhere near there, but archaeologists have never
managed to find it. It may simply be submerged or
buried in the floodplain. So the search for Itj-Towy is
something that interests me and there's some archaeologists
working on that attempting to find it currently. Another city that I would
really like to find is the one on the right hand side
there. This is one of the gnome
capitals, these Regional capitals, it's called Thinis in the
ancient texts. Thinis was actually the place
where the first pharaohs came from the Kings who founded
Egypt at the beginning of the first
dynasty who unified it. They came from this place, later on it was the known
Capital. In which the important called
center of Abydos, where I've been working, was located so it should be
somewhere near Abydos. But we're not quite sure where
it is. And at brief other moments in
time, it may have actually had a
brief resurgence as a kind of a dynastic capital. And one of the discoveries that
Steve mentioned just in the introduction, is the recent discovery of the
tomb of a lost Pharaoh Senebkay, his tomb is one of a group of
eight tombs. In fact, there's seven others that
belonged to Kings of the same era. And we think that these guys
probably ruled from this city Thinis, we call them the Abydos
dynasty, but Thinis was very likely
there dynastic Capital around say 1650 to 1500 BC, or
so. So I'd love to find Thinis and
find the Palace of King Senebkay. Then we'd have his Palace and
his tomb! That would be quite a coup,
right? But unfortunately, it's
probably buried somewhere, deep beneath the muck of the
river. Just to wrap up the talk this
evening, no discussion of Egyptian
City's, the Lost Cities of Egypt would
be complete without a mention, of course, of how one of the Queen's cities of the Mediterranean ancient
Alexandria. Of course, Alexandria dates
very late in the history of Egypt from the Greco-Roman
period. It was founded, of course, by
Alexander the Great and primarily developed by the
Ptolemaic dynasty, the successors of Alexander in
Egypt. So it's kind of prime period of
development, is roughly 332 BC to about 30 BC, when Cleopatra the great died and Egypt was invaded by the
Roman Empire. As Augustus Caesar took over
Egypt as a province of the Roman Empire. But Alexandria is a great
example of the importance of studying
ancient cities in the the ways that they linked with
kind of Modern urban experiences. Alexandria, at the time the
Ptolomy's ruled Egypt was primarily thought it was a
special city, that was kind of a part from
Egypt itself. It has many of the of the key
trappings, really of a Greek Metropolis, many of the institutions of a
Greek city. But it's much more complex than
that, it was a really trying of a
true Multicultural city of the type that's familiar in
our modern experiences. There are very few cities of
the ancient world but represent the scope of kind of the urban
center of this type, that the scope of kind of a
multi cultural development. It had different quarters
occupied by different ethnic and religious groups. And of course the study of
Alexandria is one of the very important areas of
archaeological work in Egypt. It illustrates something that's true of many of these
ancient cities, which is that one is contending,
like in Heliopolis as well, contending with the modern
development that kind of super imposes itself
over ancient remains. So much of ancient Alexandria
is beneath this major modern city of about 5 million
people. Nevertheless archaeological
work is revealing many important
aspects of it. A prime focus has been this
harbor area. Of course, this was where the
palace quarter, the Royal quarter of Alexandria
was, and of course, the famous
lighthouse at the western side of the the
coastline of Alexandria is of Interest. Here's just a Illustration from
National Geographic, recently showing kind of a
reconstruction of this, with the Pharaohs island, with
the famous lighthouse kind of on a
smaller island off to the East, and the Royal City. But Alexandria is a great place
to kind of illustrate kind of the fascinating and of turns of events that can
occur in archaeological excavation. Some of you are probably
familiar, of course, with this amazing work that's
been done in recent years in the harbor area in the
Mediterranean itself. Work, especially by the French, has revealed amazing monuments,
royal statues and sphinxes that are submerged and as you can
see in this diagram, much of what was once the
ancient coastline is now submerged beneath the
Mediterranean. These very striking images of
Pharaohs beneath the sea and sphinxes with scuba divers in
front of them. This is a testament to the the interest and kind of
dynamic work that's being done on Alexandria, and one of the one of the other interesting
just kind of links, in terms of urban history, that tie ancient Alexandria
with the modern city, is the famous Library of
Alexandria, which of course was burned when
the Romans took it in 30 BC, which doesn't exist physically, but survives as a kind of a
symbol. And the Egyptians in recent
times have actually, kind of symbolically rebuilt
the ancient library in the form of this thing, which looks a
bit like a UFO that's landed on the coast of the Mediterranean. on the coast of the
Mediterranean. It's not that but it's this new library which is meant to
evoke the symbol of the great past of this
Multicultural City, with its centers of learning
and The Great Library, recreated now in modern form. So modern city kind of tapping
into symbols of the past and the lessons of history. And my final slide, just to finish with this, to kind of push this point to
as the final conclusion is; Egypt today, of course, many of you are aware, is one of the most densely
settled countries in the world. Because, the fact of the fact
that human life does depend, so dramatically in this arid
environment, on the life-giving waters of
the Nile and the banks of the Nile. You can appreciate this from
space, where you see Egypt lit up at
night. The cities on the banks of the
Nile really, kind of, lighting it up. Contrasting with the desert
regions around it, but that Urban Development is
one that has evolved over thousands of years and really
kind of understanding our modern experiences is archaeology, archaeological
work and appreciating these lost cities
and how they set a precedent for modern
urban experiences. Alright? So, that's the end of my lecture. I'd be happy to take any
questions as Steve mentioned. *Applause and Cheers* I think there's a microphone that may be passed
around. * woman off camera* You call on
someone, and I'll give them the mike. How about that Joe? *Dr. Wagner* Sure, there's someone over there, I
think. * Audience Member* Yeah, in your discussion, the the
kind of the three sizes, the village, town, city, scale in terms of population; what would they? What would that represents? Just to give us a sense of scale and also the Wah-Sut town, the reconstruction that you
were showing us, what would a population of a
town like that have been? *Dr. Wagner* Yeah, you ask
great questions. They are ones that are hard to
answer. The, in the sort of gradation of
terminology, the village, town, and city, it's a little bit more
complicated, and the use of those terms
doesn't quite equate all that neatly with those kind
of concepts. So I mean, for example, the
word 'Niwit'- which we translate as usually as town or
city. I mean there's quite a range in
population and scale that seems to be represented by that
particular term. The term in the middle that I
introduced; Demi, it literally just means
settlement or occupied place, and we find in the text, both
referring to kind of regions of population as well
as specific towns. So they sometimes they vary in
the way they apply the terminology. In terms of, estimating population. This is one of the real
challenging issues. It's very difficult to, to estimate ancient population
levels. In the case of Wah-Sut, we can sort of extrapolate
outwards from. We have a lot of evidence for
kind of the elite levels, people that are recorded in
monuments, and on seal Impressions. This is, I mean, sort of the kind of a higher
echelons of that town. Probably numbered any point in,
you know, in the hundreds you know something like a
hundred to two hundred kind of high level administrators and
officials connected with the Temple of the king, you know? So, extrapolating out from that, to sort of, you know, a larger
population of families and local farmers who were
supporting that town. It could have been something
like one to two thousand people
probably, but very hard to really
calculate with any accuracy. Yes. *New Audience Member* You say
about the Gnomes and cartography, you know, if they put on them Papyrus and
what era did it start? *Dr Wagner* When did they begin
recording the geography? It goes way way back. I mean, we begin to get the
names of towns and cities already, actually already
before the final unification of Egypt in the pre-dynastic. They have these monuments
called the the pallets, late pallets, and one of these
has a basically a list of cities. It has little enclosures with like a
city wall, and the name of the city inside
of it. So it's a tradition that goes
way way back. A lot of it had to do, either with administrative
activities. So in papyri you get
compilations or listings often kind of, organized into groupings, say by Gnome or some other
categorisation for administrative purposes. Or, it has to do with kind of
religious activities, symbolic activities. So, the White Chapel that I showed
of Senwosret that has this kind of inscription around
it, that that symbolizes the realm
of the king. I mean, the King is shown, as
and is worshipped, inside this building venerated, in terms of his political and
territorial power that encompasses this whole country, Which is then laid out in detail in the inscriptions around. So there's more of a symbolic
statement but it but it's done in tremendous detail, in order to emphasize the the
role of the King and his authority as the supreme, kind
of leader in government. Yes? *New Audience Member* I bet
there's probably not one answer. But do you know what caused these
cities to be abandoned? Or were they destroyed? *Dr. Wagner* Yeah, that again is it's a it's an answer that would depend a lot on the
individual towns or cities you're talking about. In a lot of cases, we do know
that cities that were occupied over long time frames
eventually, something does change in the
local landscape that makes that particular location less
viable. So a good example, it showed one of these great
town mounds, called called 'Tanis' in
Northern Egypt. That City actually developed
because, not far away was a capital city
founded by Ramses the Great called Purimsa 'The House of
Ramses' which was the capital of of Egypt in the late New
Kingdom. But, the Nile actually moved away
from that City. And so they abandoned it. And they relocated it to this
site called Tanis, which they grow up into this
massive urban center. So that, you know,
environmental changes, the shifting of the water
courses and things, this could certainly influence
places. Other places, just kind of, I mean, a good example of a place that just kind of lost
its reason for existence would be this the small settlement
called Der el-Medina that I showed, which was the
town of the Tomb Builders of the Pharaohs
in the Valley of the Kings. At the end of the New Kingdom, they stopped building the great
decorated tombs, and the money dried up. The government stopped paying
the wages of the people and they
just weren't needed anymore. So, Deir el-Medina sort of
dissolved, its reason for being just ended. So there's all kinds of
interesting stories in these towns and cities as to why they
were abandoned. Yeah, so it's sort of a
case-by-case issue. Yes. *Inaudible Question* *Dr. Wagner* I show you how the
Fyume region *Unintelligible* *Audience member* in portrait, I have seen a
couple of examples of love it. How, what was the significance? *Dr Wagner* Yeah, so the Fiume is a region of Egypt,
which, where there's a branch of the
river on the western side, that's
called the Bihar Yusuf; it breaks off, and then it
flows out into a depression in the kind of Western desert
where there's a lake called Lake Moeris in ancient
times or Lake Fyume today. And it's a really rich kind of
Oasis like region, that's tied to the main valley
of the Nile. And it was really important in
certain periods of Egypt, especially in the Greco-Roman
period. The site of Karanis that I
showed in the northern part of the
Fyume. It's one one example of many,
many cities that were developed in the
Greco-Roman period. The Fyume portraits date to
this same time frame. So they primarily come from the early Roman period, very, very end of the Ptolemaic
period, but primarily the early Roman
period and they're connected with kind
of the final stages in the development of
mummification in Egypt, they were used to, as basically
kind of a face mask placed over the face of the Dead to preserve, kind of a physical
appearance. So preservation of the body was
very important in mummification and this is one, one practice
that emerges in the Greco-Roman period. Particularly in the Fyume. *Unintelligible Question* Mmm. *Unintelligible Question* *Dr Wagner* Yeah, I'd be I I don't know enough on those
connections to really comment on that. Yeah, it's a period of time. That's quite a bit later than
what I work on. Yeah, I'm sure various theories
have been suggested about possible similarities in early,
Christian icons, and, and the fine portraits, but,
yeah, I don't know. *Unintelligible Comment* Thanks. So, a couple other questions is
one in the back and one in the middle and one on
here. I think *Audience Member* I'm just
curious, practically about how you know where to start
digging and I mean is it from something
like the Whitechapel, or they're just all these I
mean and then also you know; you talked about taking you
know; renting someone's field and
ripping it up and then re; how does all that work
practically? *Dr. Wagner* Yeah it's a it's
an ongoing process of detective work I guess is one
important part of it. I mean Archaeology is little
bit like a detective case, where you're looking for
evidence and trying to figure out how to
how to find it. So yeah, from in from my experience with them in, for example, finding the town
of Wah-Sut, we did a ground survey and we we found any visible on the
surface where mud-brick walls indications that there were
structures buried under the ground there. A lot of pottery, which was
obviously what we call settlement debris. So we knew there was a
settlement on the site. We were lucky in that case that
it was actually right below the surface. And once we started Excavating, you know, just I mean half a
foot down, we hit the tops of walls, so it's a relatively shallow
kind of sight. Other sites are much much more
deeply buried, and often encumbered by layers
and layers of later occupation. So, that's often a challenging
thing. Urban archaeology and in Egypt
and throughout the world is really benefiting from
scientific techniques nowadays. So various kinds of remote
sensing. So a lot of things we found at
Abydos, we've initially identified
using magnetometry, which is essentially magnetic, magnetic resonance imaging
under the ground, and can pick up things like mud
brick structures so you get sort of a signature
of a maybe a rectangle, rectilinear building. You're not sure quite how far
down it is but that's often a good clue. Yeah so they mean is all kinds
of techniques that people use Remote sensing is more and more
kind of a crucial first step in finding sites and gaining a sense of where to dig. Yes. *Audience Member* Okay, in your work. when you excavate, have you ever found any forms
of writing or hieroglyphics? And you mentioned, you just
mentioned Pottery on the surface. But have you found any other
artifacts? *Dr Wagner* Yeah, we find
writing all the time and this the town of Wah-Sut. For instance, I mean it was a
major administrative Center. So one of the things we get tons
and tons of in fact, we have about 25,000 of them at this
point, are clay seal Impressions. So an ancient, in this
particular period, they would they would often seal objects,
like containers, like boxes or or doorways with wads of clay
and they would stamp it with a Scarab that has the names and
titles of a person, like an official, who's taking responsibility for
the closure of that object or that room or whatever
it is. And so when they open it again,
you get these broken clay seal Impressions. And so that's how we actually,
we know the names of a lot of the people like the
mayor's that I mentioned. It's from these clay seal
Impressions, but we got other objects, commemorative objects, statues, and Steely, usually in tiny
fragments, which is often very frustrating
because you often have the beginnings
of a name and the rest of it's missing, it's a little bit of a, its like a jigsaw puzzle, with most of the parts missing, and you're trying to piece it
all together. Yeah. *Audience Member* Dr. Wagner, there may not be an answer to
this. But, when you have the beginnings of
urban centers, especially large Urban centers
like you talked about in Egypt. Obviously, the people that live
there can't they can't raise crops and they can't raise livestock. Are there any thoughts in
archaeology or in Egyptian archaeology about how many people it takes in terms of the the
agriculturalists, the people living outside the
city to support one Urban dweller? *Dr wagner* Yeah, I can't off
the top of my head quote, any studies, but, you know, people have certainly looked at
those kinds of issues. I mean, it's obviously, those are complex kinds of
calculations to come up with. You know, a lot of these cities
were, they were both ceremonial
centers, as well, as administrative centers as
well as the nucleus for kind of a wider agricultural region. I mean, so, I mean, really the
development of urbanism in Egypt is part and parcel of
the developments of Agriculture. I mean, when we get sedentism
and people beginning to undertake farming practices, they settled down nearby and
they begin to develop, settlements which evolved into
towns and cities over time. So I mean, it's integrally
connected with the surrounding kind of
agricultural Matrix. Yeah. I mean, in general, we think
that means for every one of like the top administrators
there's dozens or probably hundreds of
agriculturalists they were, who are represented and it I mean, it probably
depends a lot on the period you're talking
about. *Unintelligible Question* *Dr Wagner* Yes, it's true. And I mean one of the realities
is we tend to have just little
snapshots here and there, parts of what are obviously
large settlements, it really I mean reconstructing the total spatial scope of a town at any
given point in time, it's often beyond the
capabilities of our excavation or remote sensing. But in general, the feeling I think currently
is that mean urban centers. Were probably much more
significant in scale already very early on
in Egypt. And people have given Credence to and going back to people like
Wilson. These were not just, you know, empty ceremonial centers, with a few people that, you
know, priests and you know, and you know, surrounding rural
population. But in every case, you know, these Ceremonial centers, the temples structures, dedicated to the
worship of the Gods is the nucleus for an
administrative center with a big kind of surrounding
Urban Development. Yeah. Estimating populations is tremendously difficult. Yeah, people have tried to come up
with figures like just going on area estimating
that the average number of people,
you know, per per square meter, kind of. But I mean, they're probably just vary
wildly inaccurate figures. I think guesstimates, I guess
is the way to think of them. Other questions up here? *Audience Member* Yeah, this is
kind of a general question, but I'm curious how difficult or easy Is it for the science
of archaeology without corroborating
historical evidence? To identify these ancient
Egyptian urban centers as predominantly administrative religious centers or even like
commercial centers? *Dr Wagner* Well, Archaeology
is really the primary source and we get physical remains of
all those activities. So I mean, just going back to my
experience in Wah-Sut. We have a temple which was the
primary kind of focus for the higher echelons of the
population with priests and administrators
kind of running that. We also have evidence for
industrial activity, so we have we have bakeries and
breweries. I didn't talk about that, but physical remains of a large
kind of productive facility where
they're brewing beer and bake baking bread on large-scale and there's other there's other productive
activities, we have indications of Metalworking and carpentry work. Yeah. So those kinds of industrial
things emerge from the physical evidence, and then, and then in terms of
administration, we actually have parts of the these buildings
where we can see that scribes were at work and we have the seal Impressions, recording the openings of papyri as they
open document boxes and put records in and sealed
them. You know, hundreds and hundreds
of Papyrus ceilings all dropped in one place. Behind the mayor's house, for
instance, there's a structure called the
R8, which was translates roughly as
'The Administrative Gatehouse.' And that's where the scribes primarily worked, I guess on a daily
basis. So yeah, I mean, archaeological remains
really allow us to study and kind of create a lot
of texture in our understanding of towns
and cities, you can assume in the major major, two major kind of caveats, of course, are the preservation of these sites
is often partial or spotty, none of these sites are, you
know, really like Pompeii, for
instance, you know, sealed beneath lava and accessible kind of at the
moment of death, their settlements that have
suffered, in many cases extensively. And then really just the scale
at which archaeology, archaeological work can be, practiced is another limiting
factor. It's often pointed out that it
often takes archaeologist longer to excavate analyze and
publish an ancient building. That it did the ancient people
to produce it in the first place. So yeah, so it's a slow,
painstaking process. *Applause* Thank you. *Applause*
