Update on the 2022 field season at the Abydos Royal Brewery / ???? ????? ???? ?? ????? ????? ??????? ??????? ?? ??????
Field Diary 2022.1 © Abydos Archaeology
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T.E. Peet (striped jacket) in front of the first Egypt Exploration Fund field house at Abydos in 1909. Photo courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.
Archaeological excavation is a lot like watching an old photograph develop in slow motion — you stand over a chemical soup in the dark and watch the colors and shapes imprinted on a negative as they transfer onto a piece of paper that will, once printed, preserve a moment in time. In archaeology, our picture of the past becomes clear only too slowly, over many field seasons — generations of seasons, even. Here at Abydos, we are continuing work begun by archaeologists more than 150 years ago, in very different parts of this complex site. Since the excavations of Auguste Mariette for the Egyptian Antiquities Service at Kom el-Sultan; of Émile Amélineau, Flinders Petrie, and Günter Dreyer at the royal tombs of Umm el-Qa‘ab; and in the northern cemeteries, the work of John Garstang for the University of Liverpool, of T.E. Peet and Arthur Mace for the Egypt Exploration Society, of Flinders Petrie again, and of David O’Connor and many of his students for the University of Pennsylvania and the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, we have slowly come to understand the funerary complex of ancient Abydos over its thousands of years of religious significance in Egyptian culture, from the late predynastic until the destruction of its ancient temple to the god Osiris sometime in late antiquity.
In this picture, for example, we can now see how the royal tombs of Dynasties 1 & 2 at Umm el-Qa‘ab and their subsidiary burials fit together with the monumental funerary temples (or “cultic enclosures”) and their subsidiary tombs built at the same time a kilometer-and-a-half to the north. But how does the royal brewery, which is contemporary with these monuments and another half-kilometer or so farther north, fit into this picture? That’s the question our 2022 field team is hoping to answer this season, thanks to the generous support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Archaeological and Ethnographic Field Research grant.
Objects recovered from T.E. Peet’s 1912/13 spoil heaps during the 2020 & 2022 field seasons. Clockwise from top: Painted head from a Ptolemaic funerary figurine / Demotic ostracon / Coptic stela fragment / Modern tureya (c.1912). Below: Part of the Demotic ostraca collection undergoing treatment in the conservation lab with with last season’s backlog from the “Cemetery D” Royal Brewery site. Photos by Wendy Doyon for Abydos Archaeology.
Through continued excavation of the brewery structures, first excavated but misinterpreted by T.E. Peet in 1912 and studied in more detail by us over two seasons, in 2018 and 2020, we aim to complete our picture of the political, social, and cultural relationship between the activity at the brewery site and the kinds of cultic ritual evidenced at the Early Dynastic royal funerary monuments in the north cemetery. The stratigraphy of this part of the site begins with the late predynastic/Dynasty 1 activity. After the brewery fell out of use, the area was sanded in and the tops of the structures eroded away by wind scouring. In the Third Dynasty, when the royal necropolis and funerary complex moved north to Saqqara, the local community at Abydos established a cemetery here, which was in use for part of the Old Kingdom and then again after the Twelfth Dynasty into the Late Period. During the Ptolemaic period, the ritual landscape of Abydos was completely reconfigured as the cultural focus shifted away from the festival of Osiris, and this northern section of the cemetery was built over by a Ptolemaic town site.
Our first two seasons in 2018 & 2020 focused on defining the boundaries of Peet’s earlier excavations; looking in detail at the areas he excavated but left largely unpublished, including the brewery features; and documenting the many small finds left behind in the backdirt from Peet’s 1912/1913 seasons. These have included, among many interesting artifacts, hundreds of well-preserved Demotic ostraca, which, once studied, will help us to understand the nature of the Ptolemaic community and its cultural landscape at Abydos in the 4th-1st Centuries BCE.
This season, our third excavation at Peet’s so-called “Cemetery D,” we’re now in a position to shift our focus onto the sections of the brewery site not fully excavated or seen in Peet’s time, and to complete the full documentation and scientific analysis of the Early Dynastic brewery installation as a whole.
Part of the pre/Early Dynastic brewery site excavated by T.E. Peet for the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1912. Photo courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.
Carbonized fragment of wood fuel in situ next to the “fire legs” of a vat emplacement at the brewery site in 2020. Photo by Wendy Doyon for Abydos Archaeology.
Detailed documentation and analysis this season will include advanced spatial documentation of the brewery structures, which will complement the archaeological illustrations of Kay Barnett and photographic documentation of Ayman Damarany with highly accurate 3D models, made by NPS archaeologist Katie Simon and NYUIFA Egyptologist, Peter Johnson. It will also include macrobotanical analysis of the plant remains associated with beer production at the site, for example, the identification of wheat species in use at this early stage of state-level industrialization, in consultation with paleobotanist Dr. Amr Shahat, in addition to the chemical analysis of residues left behind in the production process. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, and DNA analysis by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities Research and Conservation Center’s labs in Cairo will help determine the yeast species for fermentation, as well as the nature of the brewing process at the scale of production seen here at the Abydos breweries. C14 dating at the IFAO labs in Cairo will also help pin down a precise date range for the brewery during the late predynastic and Early Dynastic period, and ceramic analysis by archaeologist May Chu will add further detail to the site chronology. IFA conservators Sarah Montonchaikul and Ameya Grant, along with senior conservator Hiroko Kariya, collections manager Amany Amer, and bioarchaeologist Logan Dean, will be taking care of all the material excavated on-site by archaeologists Ahmed Hassan, Christine McAllister, Joel Gamache, Nisha Kumar, and the excavation team from Quft, for permanent housing and storage in the Abydos research collections. The all-important survey and mapping data from this season’s excavations is thanks to archaeologists Jo Young, Carole Graham, and Mark Gonzales.
All of this data (along with a second NEH-funded field season to follow) will add substantially to our knowledge of state-level administration, the definition of royal power, and the early history of political unification and social complexity in Egypt — like watching a photograph of Narmer’s Egypt develop out of the thin, dust-filled air. And if we’re lucky, we may even find out what Narmer’s beer tasted like 5,000 years ago.
—Wendy Doyon @digabydos, January 21, 2022