EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
Ptolemaic houses at Abydos The most recent season of work in the Northern Abydos Settlement Site was funded in part by an EES Centenary Award to Timothy Sandiford who describes how excavation is revealing domestic remains of the Ptolemaic to early Roman Periods. The area of greater Abydos is known mainly for its religious monuments, including royal tombs and funerary enclosures of the Early Dynastic Period, and New Kingdom temples. Abydos was also, however, the site of urban activity during its long history, and in particular little is known about the development or supposed decline of the ancient town during the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods The Brown University Abydos Project (BUAP), directed by Laurel Bestock under the aegis of the Pennsylvania-Yale-Institute of Fine Arts Expedition to Abydos (PYIFA), has carried out excavations investigating an area of domestic remains near the modern town of Al-Araba al-Madfunah. In 2007 the PYIFA conducted in the northern periphery of the Northern Cemetery a magnetometry survey which indicated an area of dense responses consistent with a main axial road running northwest to south-east. There appeared to be small routes of communication running between a dense but irregular area of structures broadly north-east of the presumed roadway. The total area of available deposits appears to be around 0.85 hectares. The BUAP excavations in the Northern Abydos Settlement Site encompass a total area of 20m x 20m, and have uncovered most of two multi-phase domestic structures. During the first (2010-11) season a single
The Northern Abydos Settlement Site with underlying magnetometry survey results. Base data courtesy of the Greater Abydos Mapping Project, PYIFA
10m x 10m unit was excavated to assess the general character and date of the structures encountered in the geophysical survey. That season’s excavations revealed a well-preserved building, Domestic Structure 1 (DS1), composed of unfired mud-brick walls with both ad hoc and finished mud floors in the majority of rooms. In the following season (2011-12), the area of excavation was expanded by the opening of three additional units of excavation immediately south, south-east, and west of the original 2010-11 unit. The expansion of the area of excavation allowed for the definition and investigation of an additional abutting domestic structure (DS2). The
The Northern Abydos Cemetery. Base data courtesy of the Greater Abydos Mapping Project, PYIFA