Material, visual & written culture

Ancient Egypt has always been studied primarily through the written and artistic sources that have survived. They reveal an ancient Egypt directly experienced by Egyptians themselves. Only a tiny proportion of the texts and works of art that were created has survived, however, and in any case they can never have covered the full spectrum of experience. Excavation on settlement sites yields large amounts of objects of diverse kinds. They are usually broken and had been discarded rather than lost or deliberately buried. They, too, offer an incomplete picture of the material accompaniments of life. We have to take it for granted, for example, that even broken bronze objects remained sufficiently valuable not to be thrown away. Nonetheless, artefacts reflect aspects of the lives and activities of people, often ones that are poorly documented by other kinds of source. The study of material culture has to take in not only the user’s experience of things but also how they were manufactured and how they reached the user. Thus the history of technology and the study of distribution networks are also served by the study of excavated artefacts.

The excavations of the first half of the 20th century were conducted on a large scale. It was possible to do this only by being highly selective in the choice of objects to be kept and recorded (see Amarna Object Database). As soon as one accepts that fragments, if studied with care, can yield more or less the same information as complete pieces, and as soon as one introduces the sieving of loose debris as it is excavated, the number of artefacts to be kept and recorded hugely increases. Amongst small houses the increase is probably around one hundredfold for objects, far more for potsherds. Even though the most common categories of material are inevitably repetitive, part of the unique value of Amarna lies in the scope for analyses based upon datasets that are statistically of reasonable size.

You can read more about some of the recent and ongoing projects to study materials recovered from excavations at Amarna at the links below.