Weekly Websites

Request for Information: Online searchable museum databases.

Next week I want to publish a Weekly Websites which looks exclusively at museums who have made all or part of their online catalogues of Egyptian artefacts available to the public in the form of a search engine. Examples are the Petrie Museum of Archaeology and the Egypt Centre, Swansea. If you know of others, please email me (andie@easynet.co.uk) with the web address. Many thanks in advance to all who can help.
Kind regards

Andie


Precolonial Beja - at the Crossroads
http://www.njas.helsinki.fi/pdf-files/vol15num4/hjort.pdf

The Beja, or Bedawiye, people speaking the Northern Cushitic language called “Bedawiet”, have literally since “time immemorial” occupied the Eastern deserts of Sudan, Egypt and possibly Eritrea. They today consist of the subgroups Ababda, Bishariin, Atmaan/Amar´ar, Hadendowa and sections of the Beni Amer. These subgroups are relatively loosely integrated confederations of endogamous lineages based on assumptions of shared descent and cohabitation in an ancestral territory. In this hot and arid land, where there is little evidence of large-scale climatic change the last 2500 years, they have eked out a livelihood presumably originally as hunters of wild game and gatherers of wild grain, later as herders of small stock in the drier areas and of cattle in the delta lands, combining pastoralism with some take-a-chance cultivation. Some centuries after Christ they also acquired camels and became mounted brigands, guides and sycesin relation to the caravan trade. The present paper is an attempt to trace what can be said about the way larger context of empires, trade routes and security impinged on their lives in pre-colonial times.

The Wendorf Collection
British Museum

In autumn 2001 Professor Fred Wendorf, Henderson Memorial Chair at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Texas, generously donated his entire collection of artefacts and environmental remains excavated over a period of 40 years to The British Museum. In the early 1960s archaeological monuments in Lower Nubia were destined for obliteration due to the construction of the Aswan High Dam. UNESCO launched an international appeal to all excavators, no matter what their geographic area of interest, to help save the heritage of this region so densely populated with archaeological monuments and sites. Fred Wendorf was one of the investigators that responded and beginning in 1962, he participated in his first season of the Combined Prehistoric Expedition. Professor Wendorf continues to excavate in Egypt and Sudan even after his retirement in 2002.

Over the years millions of artefacts were transported to SMU for storage and further study. The collection, largely composed of prehistoric lithics, also contains human and faunal skeletal material, pottery, environmental samples (shells, snails, seeds), in addition to Professor Wendorf's complete archive. Photographs, negatives, slides, field notes, specialist reports, prepublished manuscripts, photo layouts and many other items are available for perusal.

The collection is currently being organised and housed into two rooms in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan devoted solely to the Wendorf Collection. To date, the pottery and human skeletal remains have been catalogued and are available for interested scholars. The Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, welcomes and encourages archaeological and anthropological researchers to avail themselves of this exceptional collection.

Rock art and cultural responses to climatic changes in the Central Sahara during the Holocene
http://jean-loic.lequellec.club.fr/page76/assets/EMAM.pdf
By Le Quellec, J-C., in (ed) Peddarapu Chenna Reddy 2006, Exploring the Mind of Ancient Man (Festschrift to Robert Bednarik), New Delhi: Research India Press, p. 173-188.

Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology, University of Memphis

IEAA

The Institute of Egyptian Art & Archaeology, founded in 1984, is a component of the Department of Art of The University of Memphis, in Memphis, Tennessee (USA), and is a Tennessee Center of Excellence. It is dedicated to the study of the art and culture of ancient Egypt through teaching, research, exhibition, and community education. As part of its research and teaching objectives, the Institute of Egyptian Art & Archaeology, (hereafter IEAA), is engaged with various field projects in Egypt. Currently, the IEAA conducts an epigraphic survey in the Great Hypostyle Hall of Karnak Temple in Luxor, Egypt, sponsors an excavation in the Valley of the Kings at the tomb of Pharaoh Amenmesse, and partners with the Italian Archaeological Mission at the tomb of Harwa at Thebes.

Temples of Ancient Egypt
History of Temples (by Monroe Edgar)

This is quite a nice short introduction to ancient Egyptian temples, which is aimed at the newcomer to the subject, and frames ideas and concepts in a way which is easily digestible but never patronising. Note that all of the links to individual temples, which provides a useful index in its own right, go to pages on the Tour Egypt website.

Writing an introduction to ancient Egypt temples is considerably more difficult then examining any specific structure, for a number of different reasons. First of all, the term "temple" is misleading, and secondly, the term covers a huge variety of different structures that evolved over such a vast period of time that many people have a difficulty comprehending just how long a time this period spans. The Ramessuem on the West Bank at Luxor (Ancient Thebes)For example, think of the Roman Coliseum (in Rome). It is almost 2,000 years old, and most of us would think of it as very ancient. Yet, when the Romans first came to Egypt, they were awe struck by Egyptian temples, some of which at that time were already more ancient to the Romans, then the Roman Coliseum is to us.