EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
region, though this was close to Giza, well to the north of the city itself. Just how compelling are the arguments on either side for the location of Perunefer at either Avaris or Memphis? It is worth comparing the general situations of the two sites. The layout of Avaris/Piramesse (Tell el-Daba-Qantir) has become far better known in recent years, largely due to the geophysical work carried out there by Helmut Becker and his colleagues (see EA 14, pp.13-15), which has identified whole segments of urban plan, including river branches and possible corniche-type avenues, waterfront structures and storage areas. In particular, the geophysical survey has revealed evidence of palace structures of the early Eighteenth Dynasty, one of which is producing the fascinating Minoan painted plaster fragments (see EA 2, pp.26-28, EA 3, 27-29, EA 26, pp.13-17 and this issue p.26).These palaces are situated in a bend of the river that makes them effectively peninsular institutions (rather like Canary Wharf or the Millennium Dome on the Thames) and provides a remarkably close topographical context. The main site of Memphis, on the other hand, has a mostly complex stratified multi-period occupation, or is otherwise deeply buried, and does not lend itself to such useful survey methods;nevertheless there has been progress in identifying movements in the course of the river over time, and part of the Roman river front (probably not far from that of the New Kingdom?) has been located. One intriguing possibility is that the city was discontinuously occupied, parts of it being on islands at least during the inundation, and one suggestion is that such islands would have formed natural and convenient harbours as well as being magnets for new development. What are we to make of all this? In some ways it is another case, so familiar from Egypt, of field archaeology chasing the documentary evidence: we are perhaps sometimes too ready to persuade ourselves that we have enough evidence to ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ the written record. If we had had no textual references to Perunefer, for example, we might very well be content to receive the archaeological evidence on its own merits, and interpret Avaris as a fascinating zone of foreign (Aegean and Levantine) settlement and influence from the seventeenth to the fifteenth centuries BC,and perhaps examine more closely the reasons for its re-emergence as a centre of national importance in the Ramesside Period. Similarly, we might already have concluded that Memphis too was at times an ethnically mixed metropolis with an important harbour (or harbours), since other texts from here mention such features as the ‘storesheds in the lake’,‘the great shipyard of the palace’, and the ‘dockyard on the Island of Ptah’. One main objection to the use of the Amenhotep II stelae to justify a Memphite location for Perunefer is the fact that they describe the king as having to travel from Perunefer to Memphis. As Professor Bietak asks, why would this have been necessary if they were the same place? It is, however, worth considering the sheer scale of
these large New Kingdom conurbations: the waterfront at Memphis may well have stretched for 20 km or more along the river. One important characteristic shared by both Avaris and Memphis is the amount of settlement (including cemeteries) that lies beyond the main, officially-recognised archaeological area: at Memphis, the present visible ruin field preserved above floodplain level is one of the largest in the Nile valley, at about 600 hectares, but this almost certainly represents only a small proportion, perhaps no more than 10%, of the full extent of the city over time. The same is clearly true of the tell site of Avaris/Piramesse: all the recent discoveries at Tell el-Daba and Qantir lie under the modern agricultural land surrounding the mound, and at its full extent Piramesse must have been vast.At both Avaris and Memphis there is remarkably little in the modern landform to indicate where these very old river channels had been, which is one reason why, prior to the devlopment of geophysical methods of survey, the identification of ancient Nile ports and harbours had been so rare, with the exception of temple quays and the huge, unfinished and enigmatic example of the Birket Habu at Thebes. To sum up, it would seem that both proposed locations for Perunefer – Avaris and Memphis – remain based on evidence that is, in its different ways, equally circumstantial. Avaris had a river harbour and a significant foreign population in the New Kingdom; so did Memphis. Avaris now has a monumental residential structure of the early Eighteenth Dynasty; but royal estates of the Tuthmoside kings at Memphis have been known for some time from the written records;Amenophis II is thought to have been born at Memphis, presumably in a royal palace.There is a collection of documentary references to Perunefer from the Memphite region; so far as I am aware, this is something that is still missing from Avaris. Most importantly, neither site yet has an indisputable link with the port: no standing structures, for example, have been found in situ confirming its identity. What the debate clearly highlights is the need for more concentrated work on these neglected parts of Egyptian town sites, especially as more and more of the Nile Delta is investigated, mapped and archaeologically recorded. A question of particular interest is what happened to the ports and their populations as the river or river branches moved about and silted up, attaching islands to one or other riverbank and perhaps causing the earlier harbours to be abandoned.Were harbours originally a way of controlling immigrant and maritime communities, and was the disappearance of those communities a result of social integration as much as environmental change? Perhaps the most tantalising question of all is: what happened to all the ships? Ô David Jeffreys is Senior Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology,University College London and Field Director of the Egypt Exploration Society’s Survey of Memphis.
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