El-Lahun Survey Project: The Archaeological Mission of the Museum of Fine Arts more

2 A. Hudecz and M. Petrik eds., Commerce and Economy in Ancient Egypt. Proceedings of The Third International Congress for Young Egyptologists September 25–27, 2009, Budapest, Hungary, Oxford 2010. El-Lahun Survey Project—The Archaeological Mission of the Museum of Fine Arts It is known that Egyptology, which is more an historiographic than an archaeological discipline, has created a particular relationship with archaeology, more precisely with field research due to its disciplinary nature, in that it has considered the latter in comparison with philology only as an inferior and complementary means of research based on collecting, editing, translating and interpreting old texts. From this aspect, the aim of archaeology could not be anything other than philological data collection and the discovery of ancient find with high aesthetic value and, as such, methodologically it was far behind the standards of archaeological practice conducted in other areas of the Near-East.1 This approach, which reduced field research to “cleaning”,2 or the examination and description of a given object (typically a tomb or a temple) in isolation, i.e. as an independent entity ripped out of its archaeological and topographical context, affected the image of Egyptian archaeology even at the turn of the Millennium. The greatest development has been seen perhaps in the field of regional and settlement archaeological research in the past two decades, due to the recognition of the potential in systematic archaeological research and adopting its methods. One of the triggers and main drives of this progress has been the generally poor condition of Egyptian archaeological sites and their constantly accelerating decay, which requires the immediate and detailed documentation, ideally with consolidation and conservation of known and accessible archaeological phenomena. The demand for documentation conducted with modern methods and technology also involves sites on which the “exploration” was performed in the heroic age of Egyptian archaeology. These include El-Lahun, the extended field of ruins lying at the mouth of the Fayum Oasis, named after the nearby modern Arabian market town. Although all the major ages of Egyptian cultural history are represented among the relics of the nearly 1000 hectare area, the site reached the height of its importance in the era of the Middle Kingdom, when Pharaoh Senwosret II (1880–1873 BC), the fourth king of the twelfth dynasty, selected this place to build his mortuary complex, with the pyramid town also playing the role of a regional centre.3 186 The archaeological topography of El-Lahun was essentially drawn up by the excavations of William Matthew Flinders Petrie, who needed only two seasons between 1889 and 1890 to explore the remains of the pyramid enclosure and the town, to which he then returned three times to expand the territory of his surveys of the site and to make them somewhat more precise. 4 In addition to British archaeologists, Ludwig Borchardt (1899) from Switzerland, 5 then after a long hiatus Nicholas B. Millet from Canada performed less extensive field work between 1988 and 1997.6 The excavations of the Royal Ontario Museum were interrupted by the death of the project leader; the unpublished expedition archive material was brought to the Egyptian Department of the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest for further study, so that it could serve as the starting point for renewed archaeological work. Systematic archaeological fieldwork was continued in autumn 2008, this time initiated by the Museum of Fine Arts as the El-Lahun Survey Project involving Hungarian and foreign partner institutions.7 The priorities of the research programme were marked by the following three areas: 1. deficiencies in the documentation of early excavations; 2. the poor general conditions of the site; 3. synchronising the research of the material culture with advanced philological and ethnographic studies. 1. Although Petrie was far ahead of his time in terms of his systematic and thorough work, new questions addressed to the site can not be answered after hundred and twenty years from the documentation that remains on the pages of publications, letters and excavation notebooks. Neither the stratigraphy, nor the architectural history of the settlement, considered to be a classic example of Egyptian urban architecture, has been explored; the original location and context of the finds were only recorded in exceptional cases; Petrie published only a highly 13 187 selective corpus of the rich ceramic material and the inventory of the tombs, while architectural drawings were only made of the structures the archaeologist considered worthy. 2. The destruction of the site has accelerated in the past decade to a worrying extent. The mud brick structures left uncovered have suffered from the destructive effect of sunlight, ceaseless wind and periodic rain, also some of the mud bricks have been removed by fellahs to manure their fields. Certainly as a result of this, 14 the Eastern side of the main stairways of the former Mayoral residency has practically disappeared. Signs of new disturbance can be seen at several parts of the site; of these the areas of the Crocodile Cemetery, Cemetery 900, and the forth(?) northern mansion within the settlement belonging to the activity of vandalism. 3. The continuous work on hieratic papyri originating from the site was not accompanied by simultaneous fieldwork, thus some of the philologically stated problems have been impossible to clarify due to the lack of archaeological data. The theorem is naturally true vice versa: the actual relevance of the data originating from the control excavations of the Canadian ROM mission was clarified only by comparing them with textual sources. On resumption of the archaeological fieldwork one important aspect was the provision of access to the ancient textual sources related to the site, as well as the archive materials of the early excavations conducted in El-Lahun—the latter implemented by the participation in the project of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, London. Over the past two archaeological seasons the El-Lahun Survey Project was simultaneously conducting extensive research covering the entire site, as well as intensive research focusing on the area of the complex constituted by the king’s temple and the settlement. Drawing a 1:1000 scale archaeo-topographic map is a central feature of the research programme, which will replace the superficial draft map published by Petrie in 1923. The real-time kinetic GPS technology applied in 2009 with its 5 cm accuracy has created the most precisely detailed map ever pre- 188 pared of an Egyptian archaeological site to date, and the possibility of preparing a digital surface model. The other three pillars of our research programme are the architectural survey, interpretation and 3D modelling of the explored structures; systematic collection, analysis of the unbelievably rich surface ceramic material, as well as the exploration with sub-surface detection methods of as yet unidentified objects on the field which are known from papyrological and sigillographical sources. The data gained from fieldwork, combined with information originating from early excavations is managed in a complex archaeological database. Our intensive field research is focused on the area of the king’s mortuary temple. Virtually nothing can be seen at the site of the once monumental building dedicated to the cult of Senwosret II: once the cult had ended the walls were demolished in ancient times under the reign of Ramesses II (1279–1213 BC) and reused in the carved limestone blocks of the great buildings at Herakleopolis. Petrie could only speculate on the structure of the temple: the ground plan he published in 1923 is confusing, difficult to follow and does not lack contradictions. Meanwhile, the temple of Senwosret II constitutes a very important stage in the architectural development of royal mortuary temples: we presume that the valley temple in ElLahun may have been the prototype for the new version of royal cult temples, which reached its final form during the era of the New Kingdom in the spectacular royal mortuary temples built on the western bank of Thebes. By surveying the surface phenomena of the area, the magnetic mapping of the sector and targeted cleanings, the western extension of the temple could be determined for the first time, while during the structural reconstruction we considered the relevant manuscript sources of the Berlin Archives in addition to the architectural parallels. During the examination of the temple area we managed to locate and explore one untouched king’s foundation deposit at the south-eastern and the south-western cornerstones of the former building; the rich material is currently being processed. We thank the following institutions for their cooperation in the archaeological mission of the Museum of Fine Arts: St. Stephen University—Miklós Ybl Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, the Institute of Geodesy, Cartography and Remote Sensing, the Research Institute for Visualization, Architecture and Archaeology, Kom Aushim Museum / SCA, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology / University College London, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology. The implementation of the project has been sponsored by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund. Zoltán Horváth 189 Notes 1 For more detail see Manfred Bietak’s programmatic writing: “The Present State of Egyptian Archaeology”, Journal of Egyptian Archeology 65 (1979), 156–160. Or as Lisa Giddy states very properly: the three C-s of early Egyptian archaeological research: Clearing, Cleaning, and Claiming, it’s all done archaeologically; “The Present State of Egyptian Archaeology: 1997 Update”, in Anthony Leahy and John Tait eds., Studies on Ancient Egypt in Honour of H. S. Smith, EES Occ. Publ. 13, London 1999, 109. 2 3 An excellent overview of the site is provided by S. Quirke, Lahun. A town in Egypt 1800 BC, and the history of its landscape, London 2005. W. M. F. Petrie, Kahun, Gurob and Hawara, London 1890; W. M. F. Petrie, Illahun, Kahun and Gurob, London 1891; W. M. F. Petrie, G. Brunton, and M. A. Murray, Lahun II, London 1923. L. Borchardt, “Der zweite Papyrusfund von Kahun und die zeitliche Festlegung des mittleren Reiches der ägyptischen Geschichte”, Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 37 (1899), 89–103. R. Frey and J. Knudstad, “The Re-examination of Selected Architectural Remains at El-Lahun”, Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities 34 (2007), 23–82. Z. Horváth, “Hungarian Archaeological Expedition to the Mud-brick Pyramid of Senwosret II”, Múzeum Café 8 (2009), 29–30; Z. Horváth, “Brick-moulded Eternity. Hungarian Archaeological Fieldwork at El-Lahun”, Szalon 2010/1, 19–22. 4 5 6 7 SUMMARY OF THE SERIES OF LECTURES in THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, 2009 Zoltán Kárpáti: The Budapest Animal Model-Book: The Latest Link of a Tradition, 18 January Not many traces of the quattrocento Florentine animal model-books have survived, only a few examples, the so-called Rothschild Model-Book in the Louvre, Paris, the great compendium of the hypothetically reconstructed drawing-book by Paolo Uccello, and some single anonym sheets have come down to us. Some light is thrown on the Renaissance animal model-book tradition by a thirty-two-page small booklet in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. This is today one of the richest known collections of Northern Italian animal motifs. The Budapest ModelBook is of interest not only as a curiosity, but it conspicuously demonstrates that the late medieval model-book practice was still popular in late quattrocento and early cinquecento Florence. 190