Field Notes
012
The Man Who Would Be King
Or, A Big Fish in a Small Pond?
The wildly wealthy governor Zed-Khonsu-ef-’ankh ruled Egypt’s remote Bahariya Oasis 2,600 years ago. When he died, he was buried in a manner normally reserved for pharaohs: He was mummified and placed in an expensive, imported, human-shaped sarcophagus. The sarcophagus was then housed in an elaborate painted tomb watched over by the gods Osiris, Anubis and Isis.
Egyptian archaeologists recently found the governor’s tomb in a labyrinth of sandstone caverns near the oasis’s central town, el-Bawiti, 250 miles southwest of Cairo. Just a year earlier, in October 1999, the Bahariya Oasis had yielded one of the most sensational finds ever: more than a hundred Roman-period mummies, many with gilded, gleaming faces and breastplates.a
The discovery of Zed-Khonsu-ef-’ankh’s tomb ends an archaeological treasure hunt that began in 1938, when the Egyptian archaeologist Ahmed Fakhry found three tombs beneath modern mudbrick houses on a ridge just outside el-Bawiti. These tombs contained inscriptions identifying them as belonging to one Ped’ashtar, his grandson Thaty, and Thaty’s wife (and sister) Ta-Nefert-Bastet. Ped’ashtar, we now know, was also the grandfather of Zed-Khonsu-ef-’ankh.
“I am convinced that the tombs of this family of priests and governors of Bahariya are grouped in this ridge,” Fakhry wrote. “If the site is properly excavated, more inscribed tombs of several generations of men and women will be found.”
At least as early as the Middle Kingdom (2040–1783 B.C.), the Bahariya Oasis was famous for its wine, made from both dates and grapes. It is said that Egyptian pharaohs demanded that Bahariya wine be entombed with them, so they could enjoy it in the afterlife. By the 26th Dynasty (664–525 B.C.), the wine trade had brought great wealth to the isolated oasis—and with great wealth came the right to lie in state. Now, not only priests and royalty could be mummified and buried in elaborate tombs painted with sacred scenes. Bahariya’s rich merchants and officials could, too.
The tomb of Bahariya’s greatest governor was found, as it were, over the grapevine. Egyptian authorities heard talk from local villagers that antiquities were exposed beneath some houses outside el-Bawiti. A team of archaeologists headed by Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s Undersecretary of State for the Giza Pyramids, soon re-discovered the tomb complex Fakhry had described 60 years earlier.
The detritus of latter-day squatters and looters was evident in the tomb’s empty sarcophagi and sooty, flaking stucco. Not everything was recently disturbed, however. The team found two stone coffins with the mummified remains of a man and child dating to the third century B.C., when the tomb had apparently been reused.
During their excavations, the archaeologists spotted an opening beneath a rock wall in an empty cavern. “We had already excavated everything Fakhry had referred to in his work on the Bahariya Oasis,” Hawass said. “So I concluded that there must be another, undiscovered room on the other side of the wall.” Hawass and his assistant crawled under the wall, wriggling through red sandstone powder and emerging into a vaulted room with spectacular images from the Egyptian Book of the Dead—a tomb untouched since antiquity.
The archaeologists noticed a hole in one of the tomb’s walls. Peering inside, they saw a burial chamber with a human-shaped sarcophagus.
This was the tomb of Zed-Khonsu-ef-’ankh, of whom we know a good deal. An alabaster statue found in 1900, and now in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, is covered with text listing his titles. As governor of Bahariya, he held all of the important priestly offices: He was, for example, a prophet of the god Amun, the chief god in the Egyptian pantheon.
Zed-Khonsu-ef-’ankh’s name 013appears twice in a temple he built to honor Pharaoh Apries—who ruled Egypt from 589 B.C. until Pharaoh Amasis usurped his crown in 570 B.C.—just a few yards away from his family tombs. His name, along with that of Pharaoh Amasis, is inscribed on a wall of a temple near one of el-Bawiti’s bubbling springs. Other temple walls at this spring portray Amasis and Zed-Khonsu-ef-’ankh presenting offerings to the gods.
Only a powerful man could secure a place beside the pharaoh—and be preserved on a temple wall.
Hawass and his team entered the tomb in May 2000. They found a regal face chiseled on the lid of the sarcophagus. Images of Isis and Osiris are etched on the stone lid, along with hieroglyphics recording the names and titles of the man once entombed inside.
This sarcophagus shows just how wealthy the governor was. Its limestone probably came from the royal quarry in Tura, in northern Egypt; the stone would have had to be shipped up the Nile and then carried across 200 miles of desert.
The team also found gold amulets, bird and cobra figurines, pottery vessels and canopic jars, which were used to contain the soft inner organs of the deceased.
Inside the limestone sarcophagus was another sarcophagus carved of alabaster, a stone found hundreds of miles away. “When we opened the inner sarcophagus, we found that the coffin of the deceased, which was made of wood, was completely deteriorated as was the mummy,” said Hawass, who is now hoping to find the burial chambers of other members of Zed-Khonsu-ef-’ankh’s family.
Even now, from beyond the grave, Bahariya’s governor wields influence. Curiosity seekers are already arriving at this remote oasis, armed with guidebooks and cameras. “After they discovered the Valley of the Golden Mummies and El-Sheik Sobi—the place where they discovered the governor of Bahariya—there’s a lot of people who come to visit this place,” says Saleh Abdulla, owner of the newly built El-Beshmo Lodge. “We will have a lot of business from tourists; they’ll visit because there’s history.”
014
The Year One
Now Playing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Historically speaking, 1 A.D. was a very big year. It was traditionally the year of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem (though most scholars now believe he was really born around 4 B.C.). It was the 28th year of the emperor Augustus’s reign in Rome and the 80th year of the Han dynasty’s rule in China. In the mountains of central Asia, in 1 A.D., an exotic Indian religion known as Buddhism was spreading toward the Far East; and in Mesopotamia the cities of the Seleucid empire were falling prey to waves of Parthian invaders. As the Roman poet Virgil put it, it was a “crowning era foretold in prophecy”—full of strange portents, powerful personalities and momentous transformations.
Now, in celebration of the coming of a new millennium, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched an exhibition exploring life exactly 2,000 years ago. Drawn almost entirely from the museum’s own collections, the exhibit features nearly 150 works of art produced in the period just before, after or during the life of Jesus.
The items on display are usually stored in six separate curatorial departments at the Met, and they come from all over the ancient world. An ornate landscape painting (above) from a first-century B.C. Italian villa hangs near a sculpted silver rhyton from Iran (below), and a terracotta statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis rubs shoulders with a first-century B.C. ceramic Chinese dancer.
The reasoning behind this eclectic arrangement of objects is simple. “This exhibition [illustrates] the richness and variety of cultures that flourished 2,000 years ago … and the extraordinary artistic discourse that often existed between different parts of the world,” says the museum’s director, Philippe de Montebello.
Throughout the early centuries of the first millennium A.D., the great powers of the East and West enjoyed unprecedented levels of cultural and economic exchange. Greek and Roman colonists carried Hellenistic art, architecture and learning throughout Europe, central Asia and the Near East, while Indian merchants and Chinese silk traders traveled as far west as the Persian Gulf in their search for fresh markets. In some heavily trafficked parts of central Asia—such as the kingdom of Bactria (in modern Afghanistan)—strange hybrid cultures that fused Hellenistic and Buddhist traditions flourished for centuries.
While The Year One exhibit contains many famous objects, including a first-century A.D., 12-inch-high marble bust of Augustus (above), its signature artifact may be a little-known 2,000 year-old headless torso of a Bodhisattva (an enlightened man who has not yet become a Buddha) from the Gandhara region of Pakistan. Looking at this statue—with its seamless blending of Greco-Roman artistry and eastern iconography—it seems obvious that the cultural boundaries of the ancient world were not as fixed or immutable as history textbooks have led us to believe. Could it be, perhaps, that multiculturalism is not a 20th century invention after all?
015
Cleopatra’s Signature
An Ancient Royal Decree in the Ancient Royal Hand
A humble papyrus fragment from one of the storerooms of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin may have been signed by the most exotic (and dangerous) woman in antiquity: Cleopatra.
The last queen of Egypt’s Ptolemaic dynasty (323–30 B.C.), a period of Greek rule after the death of Alexander the Great, Cleopatra shrewdly manipulated powerful men to protect her kingdom from ever-expanding Roman power. She was courted first by Julius Caesar, who was assassinated in 44 B.C., and then by Marc Antony, who happened to be the husband of the sister of Octavian (the future Roman emperor Augustus). Incurring Octavian’s wrath proved to be fatal to Antony and Cleopatra: After the queen’s navy was defeated by Octavian at Actium in 31 B.C., they both committed suicide to avoid capture.
Peter van Minnen, a research fellow at the Dutch Academy in the Netherlands, recently re-examined a Greek papyrus fragment formerly thought to be part of a private contract from the village of “Kaison.” The original editor of the fragment simply mistranslated the text, van Minnen told Archaeology Odyssey: “The Egyptian villager from Kaison is in fact Publius Canidius (kani– in Greek, misread as kasi-).” According to van Minnen, the papyrus is in fact a royal order exempting Publius Canidius, one of Marc Antony’s closest allies, from paying taxes on wheat exported out of Egypt and on wine imported into Egypt. At the bottom of the edict appears the command genestho (“Make it so!”), in handwriting different from that of the rest of the document. The papyrus bears a date that translates to 33 B.C., during Cleopatra’s reign (51–30 B.C.). Van Minnen maintains that only the ruler could have authorized such a decree.
How did this document end up in Berlin? Around 1 A.D., Minnen said, there was a wholesale clearing of the Ptolemaic state archives in Alexandria. Many of the documents later turned up in cartonnages (plaster wrappings used to make mummy casings) in the necropolis at Abusir el-Melek, south of Cairo. When the necropolis was excavated in the early 20th century, papyrus fragments, some of them perhaps endorsed by the Ptolemaic queen, were shipped to Berlin and put into storage.
015
What Do You Know About The Vestal Virgins?
1) The Vestal virgins were
a) an ancient order of Catholic nuns
b) Amazonian warriors who swore off sex
c) Greek maidens who were sacrificed to the minotaur of Crete
d) priestesses of a Roman goddess
2) The cult of the Vestals was founded
a) around 600 A.D.
b) around 600 B.C.
c) around 1000 B.C.
d) in 10 A.D.
3) The original Temple of Vesta is in
a) New York
b) Athens
c) Rome
d) Carthage
4) The Vestals were responsible for
a) pardoning criminals
b) guarding Rome’s sacred flame
c) presiding over annual feasts
d) all of the above
5) A Vestal’s more secular duties included
a) officiating at weddings
b) authenticating legal documents
c) distributing money to the poor
d) caring for the sick
6) Once a woman became a Vestal, she could never
a) hold property
b) marry
c) participate in secular affairs
d) none of the above
7) In the first century B.C. the Vestals stayed the execution of
a) Julius Caesar
b) Mark Antony
c) Pompey the Younger
d) Alaric the Visigoth
8) If a Vestal virgin was convicted of being unchaste, she was
a) ostracized
b) crucified
c) beheaded
d) buried alive
9) The last Vestal died
a) in 200 A.D.
b) around 410 A.D.
c) in 200 B.C.
d) never: there are still Vestals today
Answers
(1)d (2)b (3)c (4)d (5)b (6)d (7)a (8)d (9)b
013
OddiFacts
Mrs. Spartacus?
Who says girls can’t fight? Not the ancient Romans, apparently. This past autumn archaeologists from the Museum of London discovered what appears to be the first known grave of a female gladiator. Although the twenty-something-year-old woman’s cremated remains reveal little about her profession, her burial mound—in an ancient Roman cemetery in Southwark, England—contained an ornate plate decorated with the image of a fallen gladiator, along with eight ceramic lamps bearing symbols commonly associated with the gladiatorial games.
“She was a gladiator or someone deeply involved with gladiators,” said Jenny Hall, a curator with the Museum of London, at a press conference last September.
Finding women warriors is not altogether surprising. From references in ancient inscriptions and reliefs showing women fighting in the arena, scholars have long suspected that the fairer sex, too, engaged in combat.
The Man Who Would Be King
Or, A Big Fish in a Small Pond?
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Footnotes
See Zahi Hawass, “Mummies: Emissaries of the Golden Age,” AO 03:05.