IFAO

Four unpublished drawings related to the monastery of Bawit are kept in the archives of the French Institute. The group contains two maps from the excavation led by Jean Maspero in 1903 that give little information regarding other published documents. However, the recent reopening of excavations in this area makes them worthy of consideration. Two fragments of mural paintings, now lost, present some iconographical interest: A Saint on Horseback Killing the Evil, sketched by François Daumas, and the Murder of the Innocents, by Jean Clédat.

The monastery of Bawit (Middle Egypt) was discovered by the French archaeologist Jean Clédat in 1900. The site was excavated from 1901 to 1913 by Ifao which published several reports. The new excavation concerns two places on the kôm: the so-called “north church” and sondages. Sondages 1 and 2, completed in 2003, have permitted the clarification of the stratigraphy of the northern part of the monastery, where excavations were made in 1913 by Jean Maspero. The structures indicate that they were originally dwellings dating to the Byzantine period (from the sixth to the second half of the seventh centuries).

This paper is divided in two parts. Part one is a translation and a commentary on the sections of the Kamose stelae mentioning the conquest of the oasis of Djesdjes by the king of the Theban XVIIth dynasty. It is argued that all the passages about the oasis, in the Kamose text, concern only one campaign and one oasis, Bahariya. Bahariyans are considered enemies like other Egyptian populations from Middle Egypt who collaborated with the Hyksos rulers. Part two presents the recently prospected cemeteries of Bahariya in the context of the material culture of Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period. The IFAO mission in Bahariya has discovered on the surface of the necropolis of Qaret al-Toub some clear fragments of Tell al-Yahudiya ware, probably imported from one of the production centres located mainly in the Eastern Delta of the Nile. This attestation to commercial relations between Bahariya and the Northern part of Egypt, directly under Asiatic rule, provides interesting data complementary to textual evidence suggesting that Bahariyan elites were in contact with the Hyksos at the end of the Second Intermediate Period.

The Marischal Museum of the University of Aberdeen houses a fine collection of more than 60 individual copies of the Book of the Dead written on papyrus and mummy linen. The present survey, which is the first detailed treatment of the Book of the Dead material in Marischal Museum, starts with a short introduction to the history of the collection of Egyptian antiquities (N. Curtis) and continues with an overview of the Book of the Dead documents (papyri: I. Munro, mummy wrappings: H. Kockelmann), specifying names of owners, spell sequences and measurements. Moreover, it discusses a number of peculiari-ties found in some of the manuscripts.

During the last campaigns (2002-2004) carried out at the necropolis at El Deir (Kharga Oasis) by Fr. Dunand and the French team, a significant collection of mummies and skeletons of dogs were discovered inside several human tombs. These tombs, which had been occupied during the Ptolemaic period, were reused for mummified animals. Many of these were carefully wrapped. X-rays identified traces of violent death. So it is obvious that they must have been offered as ex voto to a canine god, Anubis or Wepwawet , whose sanctuary has not yet been discovered in this area.

During the 2003 season of excavations at El Deir (East area of the necropolis), several fragments of a painted shroud were discovered in a lot of funerary wrappings much disturbed by pillaging. The body is decorated with a diamond pattern and a column of hieroglyphic text inscribed on the centre of the shroud gives the name of the deceased with the usual funerary formulas. Comparative analysis of these fragments with shrouds preserved in select museums located in Cairo, London and Paris shows that it belongs to a well-known series, dating primarily from the first to second centuries a. d., found throughout the Theban area.