EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
Notes and News
Tell el-Amarna. In the late summer of 2005 the foundations were laid for a new Amarna Site Museum and Visitor Centre on the reclaimed land beside the tourist ferry at el-Till.The building itself, a simple enclosed space rising to the height of three storeys, is scheduled to be finished towards the end of the year.The installation of displays will follow. Their aim is to explain the nature of the city and to communicate to the visitor something of what it was like to have lived there in the fourteenth century BC. Where appropriate, explanation will be illustrated by finds from the EES excavations.As a quite separate project the Supreme Council for Antiquities is also building an Akhenaten Museum on the east bank at el-Minia, beside the Nile bridge.This is a much larger project and will aim to display a range of artwork and other objects from the Amarna Period. New Director of PCMA, Cairo. There has been a change in the management of the Cairo office of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology of Warsaw University. Michał Gawlikowski left in September 2005, to be replaced in the post by Zbigniew Szafranski. Dr Szafranski’s first work in Egypt was in the early 1980s, when he joined the Polish project at Deir el-Bahri. He has also been a member of Manfred Bietak’s team at Tell el-Daba and worked with Karol My!liwiec in Saqqara. For a decade, he has chaired the Department of Egyptian Archaeology of the Institute of Archaeology of Warsaw University and since 1999, he has been head of the Polish-Egyptian Archaeological and Conservation Mission to the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut in Deir elBahri. News on the activities of the PCMA can be found at: www.pcma.uw.edu.pl The Coptic Museum in Cairo will be reopening shortly, after having been closed for refurbishment. The Museum, within the walls of the Roman fortress of Babylon in Old Cairo, houses one of the world’s finest collections of Coptic art.
The design for the Amarna Site Museum and Visitor Centre, a project of the Supreme Council for Antiquities of Egypt in conjunction with Mallinson Architects and Engineers Ltd Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. The Museum has redisplayed a small number of its objects excavated by Petrie (1891) and the EES (1931) atTell el-Amarna.The emphasis is on the intimate link between an object and its find spot, with Petrie’s less precisely provenanced finds displayed alongside his sketch map of the site, and the EES’s carefully recorded finds marked on three squares of the comprehensive plan by Kemp and Garfi (B J Kemp, and S Garfi, A Survey of the Ancient City of El-‘Amarna, EES 1993).The Museum is grateful to the EES for allowing it to display details of this site plan. Luxor Temple. Conservator Hiroko Kariya and Stonecutter Dany Roy of the Epigraphic Survey, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, have assisted in the moving and storage of fragmentary inscribed material found in trenching for the USAID-supported ground water lowering project for Luxor Temple. So far over 80 inscribed blocks and fragments have been recovered from the drain trenching and transferred to the LuxorTemple blockyard where they will be integrated into the Epigraphic Survey’s blockyard programme. Yarko Kobylecky photographed 30 inscribed blocks reused in the walls of a tunnel piercing the Corniche Boulevard at the southern end of Luxor Temple.This tunnel will be used for the exit pipes which will carry pumped ground water into the Nile, and will be inaccessible after this winter.
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The two main Egyptian galleries will reopen on 25 May 2006 having been completely redesigned and refurbished. The new galleries will contain many objects which had been previously in storage including stelae from the Early Dynastic royal tombs at Abydos, a relief from the Ptah temple at Memphis, animal mummies and coffins, a newly Tell Basta (Bubastis).The re-erected colossal statue of Queen conserved Roman mummy porMeretamun, wife of Ramesses II (see EA 21, front cover, and EA trait and Middle Kingdom coffin fragments from Beni Hasan. 27, p.7). Photograph: Chris Naunton
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Griffith Institute Oxford. The digitised records of Howard Carter’s excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun ‘Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation’ can be found on the Institute’s website: www.ashmolean. museum/gri/4tut.html
Framing Plots:The Grammar of Ancient Near Eastern Narratives.This conference, jointly organised by members of the Institute of Archaeology, UCL, and the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Cambridge University, took place on the 16-17 December 2005 at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL. Papers explored a variety of linguistic and narratological approaches to Egyptian, Near Eastern, Indian and Medieval literature, and delegates enjoyed dramatic performances of Isis and the Death of Osiris and The Poor Man of Nippur. A poster session and energetic panel discussions on each of the days highlighted the value of inter-disciplinary communication in literary research, and gave colleagues a forum to explore areas of mutual interest. Further details, including updates on the anticipated publication of the proceedings in a refereed volume, are available at www.oriental.cam.ac.uk/FramingPlots/ Ramesses II statue.The removal of the colossal statue from Ramesses Square in Cairo to the new Grand Museum of Egypt at Giza (see EA 25,p.20) has now been postponed,and the preparatory scaffolding in which the statue has been encased since 2002 is being removed.The statue will be moved to its new site as soon as construction of the first phase of the Grand Museum has been completed. Immortal Cities - Children of the Nile. Further to the review of this computer game which appeared in EA 27 (p.43) a reader has pointed out that there is now also a free ‘Amarna’ scenario which can be downloaded from the SEGA website (www.sega.com) Thanks to the following for providing information and photographs: Sally Ann Ashton, Tomasz Herbich, Rawya Ismail, Ray Johnson, Barry Kemp, Hugh Kilmister, Jo Kyffin, Jaromir Malek, Chris Naunton and Doug Richardson.