Protecting a Cemetery in Saqqara: Site Works 1975–2009

Abstract

This article considers the varied threats to Ancient Egyptian architectural remains that have been exposed by modern excavation. A number of possible measures that counter such threats are outlined, together with the practical difficulties facing the architectural conservator working in this context. The approach taken at the New Kingdom Necropolis in Saqqara — a group of elite tombs constructed c. 1350–1250 BC — during the post-excavation phase is detailed, with an emphasis on the works carried out by the author from 2004 to 2009. This encompasses the conservation of surviving limestone relief decoration in situ, the reconstruction of missing masonry elements, and the final presentation of the site to visitors.     

IN‐SITU ELEMENTAL AND Sr ISOTOPE INVESTIGATION OF HUMAN TOOTH ENAMEL BY LASER ABLATION‐(MC)‐ICP‐MS: SUCCESSES AND PITFALLS*

Trace element and Sr isotope data were obtained by laser ablation‐ and solution mode‐(MC)‐ICP‐MS analysis for tooth enamel from remains excavated at the New Kingdom period Egyptian colonial and Nubian cemetery site of Tombos (Sudan). Elemental abundances determined by both methods of ICP‐MS analysis yielded comparable values; however, ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr values obtained by laser ablation were higher compared to their solution mode counterparts. This discrepancy is related to the production of a molecular interference—Ca + P + O (overlaps ⁸⁷Sr); hence the higher ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr values recorded during ablation analyses. Laser ablation studies of enamel may provide relatively precise ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr values rather quickly but cannot be used for accurately deciphering historical population migrations.     

Engendering Egypt

Watterson, Barbara Women in Ancient Egypt Tyldesley, Joyce Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt Robins, Gay Women in Ancient Egypt Montserrat, Dominic Sex and Society in Graeco-Roman Egypt     

Das Tocqueville Problem: Individualism and Equality between Democracy in America and Ancient Regime

This article argues that there is a major inconsistency between Tocqueville's arguments about individualism and equality of conditions as described in his books Ancient Regime and the Revolution and Democracy in America. In the latter, which is the basis for conventional analysis of Tocqueville in America, individualism is taken as a spontaneously emerging feature of the modern, enlightened society, heralding the European future. In the Ancient Regime, however, leveling individualism is conceptualized as a by-product of the centralizing political dynamic of the modern European state, crushing all intermediate sources of social authority. If we accept this theory, America would be the last place one would expect to find individualism or equality, because the American institutions of a modern, centralized state were much weaker than in Europe, yet Tocqueville does look to the United States as such an example. It is argued in this article that the different genealogies of individualism developed by the French thinker cannot be satisfactorily reconciled; the alternative approach suggested here is to combine Tocqueville's analysis from Ancient Regime with modern historical research about early England and America which confirm them, making the analysis of individualism from Democracy in America largely superfluous.     

Reconnaissance of Prehistoric Sites in the Red Sea Coastal Region of the Sudan,NE Africa

This paper reports results of a recent Stone Age-focused archaeological survey in the Red Sea coastal region of the Republic of Sudan, northeast Africa. Bifaces (handaxes) are the most conspicuous artifact class encountered during the survey and are characteristic of the Acheulean technocomplex. Other recorded artifact types include points, scrapers, and prepared core products referable to the Nubian and recurrent Levallois methods. Most of the artifact-bearing localities lie landward—outside of the coastal margin—thus, the evidence does not signify direct coastal adaptation per se. Our preliminary findings suggest that multiple Pleistocene-age hominin settlements tied to a terrestrial niche existed in the region. The western margin of the Red Sea occupies a pivotal location, linking the Horn of Africa and the Levant, two vital regions in human evolutionary research. Thus, the Stone Age data from the Sudan region has direct relevance for assessing hominin dispersal routes out of Africa.     

Book Reviews

Leick, Gwendolyn. Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature Brosius, Maria. Women in Ancient Persia (559–331 BC) Gleason, Maud W. Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome Loraux, Nicole. The Experiences of Tiresias: The Feminine and the Greek Man Carabelli, Giancarlo. In the Image of Priapus     

The 24th International Conference on the History of Cartography,Moscow, Russia, 10–15 July 2011

Introduction to the History of Science. Volume III. Science and Learning in the Fourteenth Century. By George Sarton. Baltimore 1947. In 2 parts: XXXV + XI + 2155 PP.

W. W. Hyde. Ancient Greek Mariners. New York. 1947. XII+360. 5 maps.

Some American Contributions to the Art of Navigation 1519–1802. By Lawrence C. Wroth. Providence. 1947. 41 p.

Marcel Destombes. La Mappemonde de Petrus Plancius. Grav´e Par Josua van den Ende 1604, D'apràs L'unique Exemplaire de la Bibliothàque Nationale de Paris. Publication de la Société de Géographie de Hanoi. Tonkin. 1944. 52 p. XIII tab. Folio.

Ermano Armao. Vincenzo Coronelli. Cenni sull'Uomo e la sua vita‐‐‐catalogo ragionato delle sue opere —— Lettere — Fonti bibliografiche —— Indici. Biblicteca di bibliografia italiana diretta da Albano Sorbelli. XVII. Firenze. 1944. XI + 326. Fig.

El Rio Del Espi'Ritu Santo. An Essay on the Cartography or the Gulf Coast and the Adjacent Territory during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Jean Delanglez, S. J. Edited by Th. J. Me. Mahon. U. S. Catholic Historical Society, Monograph Series. XXI. New York. 1945. XIII+182 p. Facs.

Gamla Kartor. Varlden— Norden — Västkusten — Göteborg. Sjöfartsmuseet 4–30 Maj 1948. Göteborg. 1948. (Lund) 91 p. 12 Tab.

L'Africa Dalle Origini alla meta del Secolo XIX. Mostra Bibliografica. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze. Firenze. 1948. 81 p.

Catalogue of Maps in the Essex Record Office, 1566 —1875. Edited, for the Records Committee by F. G. Emmison. Essex County Council, Chelmsford. 1947, 106 p., 30 pl. Facs.

The John Carter Brown Library. Annual Report 1946–1947. Providence. 1947. 63 P.     

Review Article: Ancient Warfare

Richard A. Gabriel and Karen S. Metz. From Sumer to Rome: The Military Capabilities of Ancient Armies. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991. Pp. xxi, 182. $45.00 (us)

Victor Davis Hanson, ed. Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience. London and New York: Roudledge, 1991. Pp. xvi, 286. $39.95 (us)

W. Kendrick Pritchett. The Greek State at War. Part V. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Pp. x, 578. $60.00 (us)

Lionel Casson. The Ancient Mariners: Seafarers and Sea Fighters of the Mediterranean in Ancient Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Pp. xviii, 246. $39.50 (us), cloth; $12.95 (us), paper.     

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: The Skuldelev Ships I: Topography, Archaeology, History, Conservation and Display (Ships and Boats of the North: 4.1), OLE CRUMLIN‐PEDERSEN, OLAF OLSEN (Eds) III‐starred Captains—Flinders and Baudin, ANTHONY J. BROWN Facing the Ocean. The Atlantic and its Peoples, 8000 BC‐AD 1500, BARRY CUNLIFFE Archaeology and Seafaring: the Indian Ocean in the Ancient Period (ICHR Monograph 1), HAMINSHU PRABHA RAY The Sea in Antiquity (BAR International Series 899), G. J. OLIVER, R. BROCK, T. J. CORNELL, S. HODKINSON (Eds) Lost Warships: an archaeological tour of war at sea, JAMES P. DELGADO ‘A ship cast away about Alderney’—Investigation of an Elizabethan shipwreck, JASON MONAGHAN and, MENSUN BOUND (Eds) Archeologisch onderzoek in het tracé van Willemsspoortunnel te Rotterdam. Sluizen en schepen in de dam van de Rotte (BOO Rbalans 4, 2 vols), M. van TRIERUM, A. CARMIGGELT, A. J. GUIRAN (Eds) Schutz des Kulturerbes unter Wasser (IKUWA conference 1999 proceedings), CHRISTOPHER BÖRKER et al. (Eds) Construzione navale antica, PIER0 DELL'AMICO The Voyages of the Discovery: the illustrated history of Scott's ship, ANN SAVOURS Chicago Maritime: An Illustrated History, DAVID M. YOUNG Deux siècles de constructions et chantiers navals (milieu XVIIe‐milieu XIXe) Proceedings of 124th Congrès des societés historiques et scientifiques, Nantes 1999), CHRISTIANE VILLAIN‐GANDOSSI (Ed.) Submarine Researches by C. A. Deane (1836), MICHAEL FARDELL & NIGEL PHILLIPS (Eds.), JOHN BEVAN Naval Guns: 500 years of Ship and Coastal Artillery, HANS MEHL Lords of the East—the East India Company and its ships 1600–1874, JEAN SUTTON CSS Alabama: Anatomy of a Confederate raider, ANDREW BOWCOCK The extraordinary voyage of Pytheas the Greek, BARRY CUNLIFFE Trincomalee— the last of Nelson's frigates, ANDREW LAMBERT Galleons and Galleys (Cassel's History of Warfare Series), JOHN F. GUIIMARTIN Jr.     

An Examination of the Spatial–Temporal Isolation Model in a Nilotic Population: Variation across Space and Time in Nubians Using Cranial Discrete Traits

Nubian biological evolution has come under much scrutiny in preceding years with strong opinions dividing scholars' beliefs as to how it occurred. A new approach is necessary to elucidate subtleties of their population structure in order to shed light on the complex subject. This study employs a spatial–temporal model in an effort to test if in situ biological evolution was the mechanism for biological change. Biological distance was calculated from the phenotype using 20 cranial discrete traits observed in Nubian samples from the sites of Semna South, Kerma, and the islands of Hesa and Biga. The periods represented at Semna South are Meroitic, X‐Group and Christian, whereas the Kerma site yielded skeletal material from the Kerma period, and the islands of Hesa and Biga date to the Christian period. Mahalanobis D² with a tetrachoric matrix was used to calculate biological distances among the samples, and three‐way Mantel tests were applied to the distance, spatial and temporal matrices. Time was not significantly correlated with biological distance. However, an inverse relationship of time and biological distance is expected under the spatial–temporal model. A lack of significant geographic correlations, as found here, is unusual in most populations, but given the spatial construct of the sites along the Nile, this relationship is not completely unexpected. The lack of significant correlation among time, space and biological distance does not support the in situ hypothesis. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Simone Weil's Political Theology

This article suggests that Simone Weil's political theology is characterized by the idea of labor and the event of laboring. I begin by arguing that her thinking is shaped by a materialist reading of Christianity that employs Marx's concepts — labor, capital and alienation — to examine the political implications of three theological ideas, fall, slavery and sin. Next, I suggest that although laboring should be understood as a creative endeavor, Weil argues that it is always conditioned and constrained by a force she terms social matter. This constraint produces what Marx called alienation and Weil will refer to as enslavement (and even sin). Finally, I contend that Weil's idea of labor — and its call for a minimization of constraint — provides a counter-force to social matter. I conclude by suggesting that Weil's labor provides a different way of conceptualizing not just the political subject, but political theology itself.     

The Particle γάρ: From Ancient Greek Sentence Connector to Blatant Line Filler? A Case-study on the Late Medieval Greek Chronicle of Morea

Ancient Greek is widely regarded as a language with an extraordinary number of so-called “Wackernagel P2 particles” such as γ?ρ, δ(?), and μ?ν, which serve a multitude of discourse functions. From the post-Classical period on, however, these small words gradually lose their importance in discourse and die out. This is reflected in the interest of scholars: while there are many studies on particles in older stages of Greek, not much research has been conducted on the particles in late medieval Greek (LMG; twelfth to fifteenth centuries). At this stage of the Greek language, the P2 particles are acknowledged to no longer be part of the living spoken language. Nonetheless, some of these small words still turn up in texts written in the vernacular. Since most LMG vernacular literature is composed in the metre of the 15-syllabic πολιτικ?? στ?χο? (vernacular prose being extremely scarce in this period), these occurrences are traditionally explained by appealing to metrical and/or stylistic reasons: the particles constitute archaizing relics merely inserted to give a classicizing flavour to the text, or are even used “metri causa”, simply to achieve the required number of syllables. In this note, I present a case-study on the “explanatory” particle γ?ρ (“for”) in the Chronicle of Morea, the best-known verse chronicle of the Greek Middle Ages. I show that γ?ρ is more than a blatant line filler. First, γ?ρ is not at all distributed at random, but consistently occupies P2 and thus obeys the so-called “Law of Wackernagel”, as the particles in Ancient Greek do. Moreover, γ?ρ can still exert a clear discourse function, albeit often a different one than in Ancient Greek.     

‘Barons’ Wars,under Other Names’: Feudalism,Royalism and the American Founding

SUMMARY

The Machiavellian Moment was largely responsible for establishing what remains the dominant understanding of American Revolutionary ideology. Patriots, on this account, were radical whigs; their great preoccupation was a terror of crown power and executive corruption. This essay proposes to test the whig reading of patriot political thought in a manner suggested by Professor Pocock's pioneering first book, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. The whig tradition, as he taught us, located in the remote Saxon past an ‘ancient constitution’ of liberty, in which elected monarchs merely executed laws approved by their free subjects in a primeval parliament. This republican idyll, whigs believed, was then tragically interrupted by the Norman Conquest of 1066, which introduced feudal tenures and monarchical tyranny. Did patriot theorists accept this narrative? The answer, I shall argue, is strikingly mixed. By the early 1770s, appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’ had become less common in patriot writing. And by the end of the 1770s, many patriots had absorbed a completely different understanding of the feudal past—one pioneered by Royalist historians of the seventeenth century and then adapted by Scottish historians of the eighteenth. This shift reflects a broader transformation in patriot political and constitutional theory.     

Getting/After Foucault: Two Postantique Responses to Postmodern Challenges

Goldhill, Simon Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality Dowling, Linda Hellenism & Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford     

The Dragoman and the Scholar: Two Polish Translations of Saʿdi’s Golestān

This article discusses two Polish translations of Sa?di’s Golestān, prepared by Samuel Otwinowski and Wojciech Biberstein-Kazimirski (alias Albert Kazimirski de Biberstein) and published in 1879 and 1876 respectively. Though edited at the end of the nineteenth century, Otwinowski's translation had been originally completed in the first half of the seventeenth century and is assumed to be the first one or one of the very first renderings of Sa?di's work into a European language. The question that remains unresolved is whether or not Otwinowski's translation, despite being unpublished, was known to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Polish poets. One can find some stories and motifs “picked” from Sa?di’s Golestān in their poetry, but they seem more likely to have been influenced by non-Polish renderings. This article describes the different translation strategies adopted by the two translators, the literarily gifted dragoman Otwinowski and the nineteenth-century philologist Biberstein Kazimirski.     

Commuter lives: a review symposium on David Bissell's Transit Life

This article presents a series of commentaries on Transit Life: How Commuting is Transforming Our Cities, published by MIT Press in 2018. Centring on an in—depth case study of Sydney, the book argues the need to attend carefully to the fine—grained detail of the commuting experience. In all sorts of ways, Transit Life presents a way of thinking about urban transportation radically different from that used by mainstream transport planners and geographers. Geographical Research asked six researchers—Tim Edensor, Michele Lobo, Debbie Hopkins, Helen Fitt, Juliana Mansvelt, and Donald McNeill—to reflect on what kind of research vistas might be opened up bring the tools of cultural geography and mobility research to the world of commuting. Here are their responses, rounded out by a reply by David Bissell, Transit Life's author.     

Imago Mundi bibliography

A Guide to historical cartography. A selected Annotated List of references on the history of Maps and Map making. Compiled by W. W. Ristow and C. E. LeGear. The Library of Congress, Reference Department, Map Division. Washington 1954. 18ff. Mimeogr.

Ancient science and modern civilisation. George Sarton. Published by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, 1954. 111 p.

Carlo F. Capello. Studi sulla cartografia Piemon‐tese. I. Il Piemonte nella cartografia pre moderna (con particolare riguardo alla cartografia Tolemaica). Università degli studi di Torino, facoltà di magistero Scritti vari: vol. III. Facs. 1. Torino 1952. 157 p. + 90 Tav.

The Madaba Mosaic Map with introduction and commentary. By Michael Avi‐Yonah. Jerusalem. 1954. 80 p., with the Madaba map 1–10 plates. Colour reprod. 4°, Jerusalem 1953.

Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance. 1420–1620. By Boies Penrose. Cambridge, Massachus. 1952. IX + 369. Illustr.

Amerigo Vespucci nel V centenario della nascita. Numero speciale della Revista geographica Italiana. A cura della Società di studi Geografici. Firenze 1954, 95 p.

Carte geografiche cinquecentesche a stampa della Biblioteca Marciana e della biblioteca del Museo Correr di Venezia. Istituto Veneto di scienza lettere ed arti Venezia, Venezia 1954. 63 p.

Alte Europäische Städte‐Bilder. 24 farbige Blätter nach Georg Braun und Franz Hogenberg. Eingeleitet von Ruthardt Oehme.— Ein farbiges Tauchnitz‐Buch. 1954. Haarlem. 1954. 120 pp.

B. van't Hoff. Jacob van Deventer, Keizerlijk‐Koninklijk Geograf. ’s‐Gravenhage 1953. 89 p. 3 Reproductions.

Kodama, Sakuzaemon; Takakura, Shinichiro; Kudo, Chôhei: Ezo ni kansuru Yasokaishi no hôkoku: Jesuit Reports on Yezo. Separate print from: Reports on the Study of Civilisation in Northern Japan, University of Hokkaido, Vol. IX, Sapporo, March 1954, 95 pages, 13 reproductions.

Ayusawa, Shintaro: Mateo Ritchi no sekaizu ni kansuru shiteki kenkyu—Kinsei Nippon ni okeru sekai chiri chishiki no shuryu—A Historical Study of Matteo Ricci's World Map—On the Main Current of the Knowledge of World Geography in the Age of Tokugawa. In: The Journal of Yokohama Municipal University, August 15th, 1953 No. 18; 239+14 pages, 31 reproductions.