9 - 15 August 2001
Issue No.546
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 9 - 15 August 2001 Issue No.546 |
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Democracy Pharaonic-style
The newly-discovered, life-sized statue of a high-ranking military officer has dispelled the myth that such effigies were only sculpted for royal personages Nevine El-Aref reports
Archaeology is a thrilling and multi-faceted profession. Egyptologists often find themselves on the brink of a discovery which, if not quite matching the breathtaking legends of Howard Carter or Indiana Jones, at least offers a new challenge, a new concept, or that missing link which makes everything else fall into place.
Such a challenge was the recent find of a life-sized statue of a military officer, unearthed at the town of Zawiyet Umm Al-Rakham in the Marsa Matrouh governorate. It had always been thought that such statues were only sculpted to manifest the glory of kings, queens and deities. Thanks to the find, this theory has now been dispelled.
The statue was found early this year by a British-Egyptian mission excavating in a rock-hewn chapel which itself was only discovered last year. The chapel lies inside a fortified town dating from the reign of the 19th dynasty Pharaoh Ramses II. The effigy is of Neb-Re, a military commander in Ramses' army, who was charged with protecting Egypt's western border against Libyan attacks.
Gaballa Ali Gaballa, general secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), said the limestone statue was very well- preserved, 124cm high and erected on a 12cm-high stand. It features the commander wearing his military costume and holding a text in his right hand. Two inscribed limestone stele were also found, one showing Neb-Re offering a sacred lotus flower to the goddesses Sekhmet and Hathor, and the second featuring the commander with the goddess Sekhmet and holding the lotus stem in one hand and an ankh symbol in the other.
Also unearthed were pieces of pottery and an interesting but unidentified limestone head wearing a dark wig and a necklace.
The treasure has been transferred to the Marsa Matrouh museum for restoration and eventual exhibition.
Gaballa said the excavation work was carried out in collaboration with a mission from Liverpool University, which last year discovered the fortified town and a temple of Ramses II. The town is considered among the most significant structures of the defence line Ramses built to defend the border. It contains mud-brick grain stores, covered with a layer of gypsum and containing various pieces of pottery imported from Cyprus, Greece, Crete and Palestine.
"This collection of imported pottery is one of the most important ever found in Egypt, and provides the best evidence for the importance of Egyptian foreign trade in the reign of Ramses II," Gaballa said. He said eight of the storehouses found so far in the area were at the northern side of the temple dedicated to Ramses. Every storehouse has a separate entrance, which is clearly identifiable by a limestone doorway set into the mud-brick of the store house itself. Each doorway had a threshold, inscribed jambs and an inscribed lintel. Not all the doorways were complete, but there was enough evidence to provide an idea of how they must have looked. The titles of Ramses II are inscribed on the text over the doorways.
Zawiyet Umm Al-Rakham is much larger in internal area than was previously thought, and adds to the evidence that the area was a major settlement with massive defence constructions, rather than a small and vulnerable outpost at the western end of Egypt's zone of control on the Mediterranean coast.
The annual excavation report of the Liverpool mission described the area of Zawiyet Umm Al-Rakham as vital to the trade network of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean. It ranks with other north coast archaeological sites such as the ancient ports of Ugarit and Kommos and the Ulu Burun shipwreck in providing tangible evidence of international trading of goods and services. Our present understanding the site is that it was crucial in the trading 'loop' by being the major landfall of traders crossing the Mediterranean after leaving Cyprus, Southern Turkey, the Aegean and Crete on their trading odyssey. At the harbour, they may well have refitted their ships and restocked on basic supplies before heading east along the coast to the major markets at Memphis and beyond.
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