NAUKRATIS – ANCIENT AND MODERN NETWORKS: A CASE STUDY
Alexandra Villing
Department of Greece and Rome, British Museum
The British Museum’s work on the ancient site of Naukratis (see
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/research_projects/all_current_projects/naukra
tis_the_greeks_in_egypt.aspx) is a classic case study exemplifying many of the issues
and problems, but also opportunities, arising from the wide distribution of finds from
early British fieldwork in Egypt. Much of ancient Naukratis reflects the
interconnected 1st millennium BC, the dispersal of its finds reflects the links –
political, economic as well as intellectual – of the time of the site’s rediscovery. In
turn, this distribution – but also other factors, such as early excavators’ and modern
scholars’ preconceptions and preoccupations – influenced perceptions of Egypt,
Greece, and Egyptian-Greek relations.
1. Ancient Naukratis: problems and opportunities1
The ancient city of Naukratis was an Egyptian-Greek city and trading post in the Nile
Delta established in the later 7th century BC, operating until at least the 7th century
AD. Home to resident Greek traders with their own Greek sanctuaries, Naukratis was
one of the main Egyptian gateways to the Mediterranean, its role in a far-reaching
network reflected in its rich and varied material culture.
The network of ancient Naukratis
1
For more details and reference on the issues discussed in this section, see A. Villing, ‘Introduction’, in
A. Villing et al., Naukratis: Greeks in Egypt, 2013: http://www.britishmuseum.org/naukratis .
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Owing to the site’s presence in literary sources such as Herodotus, Naukratis had long
occupied a special place in the minds of scholars and the general public alike: to 19th
century writers it was as an exotic, cosmopolitan city, where cultures mixed and
mingled, a trading port akin to the Dutch trading station of Dejima/Japan, or – to
British writers – the treaty ports of Hong Kong or Canton in China, mirroring
contemporary colonial political and economic experience.
The discovery of Naukratis was thus high on the agenda of the EEF when it was
founded in 1882 (the same year as the British military occupation of Egypt) as a
private society funded by public subscriptions to promote the scientific exploration of
ancient sites in the Egyptian Nile Delta, the focus being particularly on sites relating
to biblical or Greek history not least because of their popular appeal, and hence
likelihood to attract funding.
Alerted by dealers from Giza offering a Cypriot figurine for sale, the EEF’s explorer,
Flinders Petrie, was soon led to Naukratis, and the site was formally identified in
1884. Finding it already much destroyed by the work of the sebbakhin mining the tell
for fertile earth. Petrie’s excavations – as well as those as Hogarth – were essentially
rescue excavations, taking place in tandem with ongoing work by the sebbakhin. Four
excavation seasons were conducted: one by Petrie and another mostly by his assistant
E.A. Gardner in 1884-6 and two by David Hogarth in 1899 and 1903. Today, the
settlement mound has essentially disappeared, though remains of the site are still in
situ, under fields and villages.2
Schematic site map of ancient Naukratis (combining maps of Petrie, Gardner and Hogarth)
2
As our recent fieldwork (2012 and 2013) confirms, see
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/research_projects/all_current_projects/naukratis_the_greeks_i
n_egypt/naukratis_project_fieldwork.aspx
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Ever since its rediscovery, ancient Naukratis has remained a focal point of research to
the modern day, particularly among Greek historians. Yet the scholarly assessment of
the site is built on shaky foundations, for reasons ranging from the aims, organisation
and context of the 19th century fieldwork, through to modern scholarly biases.
Five factors in particular have shaped the modern perception of the site:
1. The early excavators’ find selection strategies
The amount of material recovered at Naukratis must have been enormous and,
unsurprisingly, the bulk of the finds was pottery: Gardner recovered an estimated
150,000 fragments from a single layer in the Aphrodite sanctuary. Yet no more than
ca. 8000 pieces of pottery are today preserved – a tiny fraction of the original
assemblage – and most of them are Greek.
More recent fieldwork by W. Coulson and A. Leonard Jr., shows that this material
cannot reflect the actual find spectrum: the bulk of pottery at the site overall (though
not perhaps in the Greek sanctuaries) must have been locally made, an observation
confirmed by remarks in the diaries and publications of the 19th century excavators:
Egyptian, and generally locally made, pottery, is thus almost entirely missing from the
record.
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This Greek bias does not extend to other groups of finds, though, which present a far
more balanced picture: Petrie, Gardner and Hogarth diligently preserved most of the
scarabs, bronze and terracotta figurines and other groups of evidence from the site – if
not always in their totality, at least as type specimens.
2. Highly selective and incomplete published reports
Of this material, however, only a small portion has so far been available for
scholarship to work with, with published excavation reports including a mere
selection of finds. Most of the terracotta, limestone and bronze figurines, for example,
remained unpublished, while some groups of material were completely left out. These
include phallic figurines, bronze animal coffins, and the complete group of over 1500
stamped amphora handles (vital evidence for understanding trade links), despite Petrie
recording them meticulously in his excavation journals.
3. Scarce contextual information in publications
While Naukratis is the first excavation in Egypt for which stratigraphic sections were
published (by both Petrie and Gardner) as part of a new, ‘scientific’ approach to
archaeology, this pioneering fieldwork cannot of course be expected to conform to
modern standards. Published findspot information is usually very limited or altogether
nonexistent. However, much more can be restored with the help of museum registers,
archival documents and markings on the objects themselves, so that at least 50 % of
the finds can actually be re-contextualised to some degree.
4: Hellenocentric focus in scholarship
A particular interest in Greek material and the Greek aspects of the site was clear
already among the early excavators of Naukratis, although they also studied and
published Egyptian material. In subsequent scholarship, a hellenocentric focus,
however, became increasingly prominent, due largely to a continuing fascination with
the site on the part of Classicists, and general lack of interest in the site – and the later
periods of Egypt in general – on the side of Egyptologists. It is this Greek focus – or
bias – in particular that has been central in shaping the modern perception of the site
and its role in Greek – Egyptian relations. The notion of Naukratis as a Greek colony
founded on virgin soil today still dominates much of (Classical) scholarship, standing
diametrically opposed to Yoyotte’s vision of Naukratis as an Egyptian town with a
later Greek suburb, sign of a fundamental ideological divide between the disciplines.
5. Wide distribution of extant finds
The patchy and lopsided picture of Naukratis has so far been impossible to redress
largely due to one final, crucial factor: today, the overall ca. 17,000 extant finds from
the early excavations are dispersed over more than 60 collections on five continents.
This distribution is a fascinating reflection of 19th century networks of social,
economic and political connectivity, and it has both served to maintain and foster
interest in the site of Naukratis and ancient Greek-Egyptian contacts, and, conversely,
to obstruct a thorough scholarly reassessment of these topics.
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Objects from Naukratis in museum collections (as at January 2013)
Finds from Naukratis broadly fall into three categories:
1. Objects excavated in the first two seasons by Petrie and Gardner, some left at
Bulak, the rest dispersed widely via the EEF to over 50 museums on five
continents.
2. Finds made by Hogarth, some left at Bulak, the rest given to Cambridge
(divided between the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cambridge University’s
Museum of Classical Archaeology) and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford,
with a small number of objects in the British Museum and possibly other
collections.
3. Objects found at the site at other times, picked up at site by travellers, acquired
from locals and dealers; this includes objects in the collections of Friedrich
Freiherr von Bissing (now in Amsterdam, Leiden and Bonn); of Otto
Rubensohn and Percy Gardner (now in Heidelberg); and of Seymour de Ricci
(now in the Louvre).
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Of course much of this distribution was built on colonial power structures and
imperial, institutional and personal competition. But it also reflects a desire to
preserve archaeological heritage, to rescue knowledge in the face of ongoing
destruction, notably by the removal of sebakh, to learn about ancient civilisations and
their interaction and to spread scientific practice and knowledge. It appears to have
been a particular concern of Petrie’s, for example, that major world museums – such
as Berlin and the Louvre – should receive a share of the finds from Naukratis, so that
material evidence of this important site, and of this scientifically conducted fieldwork,
be widely distributed, so as to educate and inspire others. Many finds also went to
university and school collections to the benefit of generations of students.
The disaggregation of the archaeological assemblage has positively resulted in the
diversification of access and of research, by a multitude of scholars in a multitude of
places, contributing to a diversity of scholarly approaches and scientific analyses.
‘Ambassadors’ of Naukratis found themselves distributed from Moscow to Sydney,
from Greenock to Kyoto, forming a new international network that reflects, inversely,
the ancient ‘international’ network in which Naukratis played a crucial role as the
node that linked Egypt with the Mediterranean cultures, thus determining the
‘international’ nature of its archaeological assemblage. Today this distribution is
helping to build new bridges and engender a new discourse. In our project today,
Classicists and Egyptologists collaborate, attempting to bridge the divide that has
been growing between the disciplines (as my own participation in this Egyptological
conference shows). And as a part of our detective work, tracing objects from
Naukratis, we have travelled far and wide, from Cairo, Alexandria and Damanhour, to
Toronto and Montreal, Bristol and Nottingham, Bonn and Heidelberg, discussing
objects, debating questions, and making new friends along the way.
The ultimate reasons for our project, though, were of course to overcome the more
‘negative’ aspects of the distribution; these include

fragments of one and the same objects being distributed over different
museums;

over half of the finds from Naukratis remaining unpublished and
unstudied, the reasons for this including that
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small collections in particular often do not have the expertise and capacity
to catalogue and publish material;
large collections often focus on more ‘important’ material; and
fragmented archaeological finds are generally unsuitable for public display
and hence not prioritized;

the patchy and decontextualised selection of material available to research
making it impossible to verify or correct the original excavators’
conclusions reliant on typologies and terminologies hard to equate with
modern equivalents and shaped by 19th century knowledge and
preconceptions;

different museums containing objects of different of typological, ‘cultural’
and chronological significance, making ‘sampling’ misleading and
requiring the totality of finds to be considered for understanding the site.
Categories of material from Naukratis as represented in individual museum collections.
2. Reassessing Naukratis: experiences and perspectives
The wide finds distribution (alongside the distribution of archival material) is thus
clearly one of several factors to have shaped contemporary perceptions of Naukratis
and of cross-cultural relations between Egypt and the Mediterranean, which our
current project tries to reassess. The project’s aim is to study and digitally re-unite the
surviving 17,000 finds (nearly half of them in the BM) from the early 19th
excavations, recontextualising them with the help of surviving archival
documentation, and integrating them with recent scholarship and fieldwork, to enable
a new, 21st century perspective of the history and significance of the site, but also to
re-integrate the wealth of data from this site into the wider scholarly discourse and
public view.
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It is a rather large undertaking: when we started out a couple of years ago we were
only aware of some 11,000 extant finds from the early fieldwork – today, the number
is 17,000, and still growing (if only very slightly). In addition, there are some further
5000 finds made by Leonard and Coulson in the 1979s-80s, and now also finds from
our own fieldwork at the site, although this is mostly just geophysics at this point.
Archival documentation, held by the EES, the Petrie Museum, the Griffith Institute,
UCL archives, various museum archives around the globe, as well as private
individuals is essential for putting the finds into context. Hundreds of pages of
excavation diaries, correspondence, photographs and notes have been digitised and
transcribed to date, providing information that can be as important as that offered by
the objects themselves, and forming an integral part of the material heritage (or
‘archive’) of an excavated site which should not be underestimated. They have been
vital for establishing original find contexts, important not least for understanding local
social and religious practices, and providing information on topography and
stratigraphy, crucial for establishing the site’s chronological development. In addition,
they offer a wealth of insights into the process of the site’s discovery and its wider
historiographical, social, economic and political background, including the
archaeological methods and (local and global) social networks that have shaped the
surviving archaeological assemblage (and hence our current knowledge of Naukratis
and the dynamics of Egyptian-Greek contacts in general).
Currently, the Naukratis Project’s database contains some 16,000 objects in some 60
different museums (the final 1000 are to be added soon). 2000 objects are already
freely accessible worldwide via the Naukratis Online Research Catalogue
(http://www.britishmuseum.org/naukratis), where they are searchable by findspot,
date, place of production etc; the remaining 15,000 will go online once work on the
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records is completed. Currently the catalogue is accompanied by an extensive
introduction, to be supplemented soon by more detailed analyses of the site’s history
and material culture. Essentially, the catalogue thus represents a new ‘site report’ of
the early fieldwork at Naukratis – more complete than the originals, revised in the
light of 21st century scholarship, and using current technology to reconstruct the
complete and recontextualised set of surviving material.
Work on the project is carried out by the three project researchers (and various
academic collaborators), who travel to respective museums, cataloguing,
photographing and researching objects and archival documents. The basis for this is a
reciprocal arrangement: in exchange for access to objects, the Project will return sets
of photographs (copyrighted to the object-owning institutions) and fully researched
object records (exported from our database) to collaborating institutions. It is a model
that has worked well, with colleagues across museums having been exceedingly
supportive, investing time to make our work possible, but also profiting from the
collaboration, particularly in smaller collections lacking specialist expertise, time and
capacity to catalogue and publish material.
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The model for research and data storage is thus essentially a ‘centralised’ one: while
we were often able to import basic information and sometimes images from existing
databases at different institutions, all information and records are held centrally in the
BM’s Naukratis database. This forms a separate section of the BM’s overall object
database, which – luckily – is highly sophisticated and particularly good at integrating
material of different type and from across all eras, places and disciplines, having been
developed over the past 30 years so as to accommodate the needs of the BM’s own
highly diverse holdings.
In many ways this data storage model is of course an ‘old-fashioned’ one, essentially
‘duplicating’ existing records in other museum database. This was the most practical
way of doing things when we started out (in fact the only way that meant the project
was completed within the intended timeframe), enabling us to easily manage the data,
control its quality, and deal also with those many objects not already in any kind of
database.
Were we to begin the project today, we might well do things differently, as, right
now, it is just beginning to be possible to take a more decentralised approach, using
the possibilities offered by the semantic web and linked data. By keeping separate
databases as the basis, but linking objects across them, projects such as ours do not
become ‘fossils’, frozen in time much as any book or article invariably is, but can stay
live, evolving and reflecting new research, with information theoretically usable for
an infinite variety of research, analysis and presentation far beyond any original
projects’ aims.
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To take an example: objects from Naukratis in the British Museum, in the Museum of
Fine Arts and in the Egyptian Museum would all be catalogued in their respective
databases in London, Boston and Cairo – but brought together through a single web
surface, which might look just like the surface of the current Naukratis database, but
in fact draws data from three different databases, without the user necessarily
noticing. This is possible if this data has been transformed into a standardised form
(which the British Museum’s own online database already offers:
http://collection.britishmuseum.org/), using the Resource Description Framework,
RDF, and the conceptual reference model CIDOC CRM to describe it. All this can be
applied to any database, independent of its structure, software, language etc, with the
standardised version of the data sitting, as it were, alongside the original database,
acting as an interface. This pool of harmonised data is then available freely on the
internet to be queried and analysed in different ways; structured access (in whatever
format, language etc.) can be developed via websites which can be hosted e.g. on a
cross-institutional platform (such as ResearchSpace, http://www.researchspace.org/)
which may provide storage for additional data not already in an institutional database,
and additional tools for digital analysis etc.
From
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=cmVzZWFyY2hzcGFjZS5vcmd8cmVzZWFyY2h
zcGFjZXxneDo2YjEyYjFjYmUyNmM5MmM2
One additional advantage of using linked data is that it is possible to link different
types of information in a very flexible way – not just object data but also e.g. maps,
archival material and photographs (to which annotations can be added). Once they
have been marked up, the information contained in them or attached to them can be
searched, linked and analysed, not just in the context of Egyptology, archaeology or
ancient history, but making a contribution to fields as diverse as 19th and 20th century
social history, modern Egyptian history, British (colonial) history, the history of
archaeology and development of its methodologies, or the history of photography.
The possibilities are great and it is not surprising that a myriad of (mostly European
sponsored) initiatives trying to develop the usability to linked data (Europeana
http://www.europeana.eu/; Ariadne http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/). But there
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is also a danger of thinking this is an easy fix that solves all problems, and that
technology replaces research and reflection: it still holds true that the output is only as
good as the input!
1. Mapping data so that it can be linked requires a considerable amount of thought and
knowledge, and time (and, hence, crucially, money). Thesauroi and hierarchies now in
the public domain (such as those of the BM) are a great help in resolving many
problems, but not everything is sorted out yet.
2. The greater the mass of data that is handled, the further removed researchers are
from the data, the greater is the danger of misleading results when information is
assumed to be correct without checking. One example is searching for ‘Naukratis’ in
the online database Claros http://www.clarosnet.org/XDB/ASP/clarosHome/, which
already works with linked data. The result comprises only a handful of objects with
Naukratis listed as the findspot (several of which are actually not necessarily from
Naukratis) even though Claros is linked with databases of projects (such as the
Beazley Archive) and institutions (such as the Ashmolean Museum) that hold several
thousands of objects from Naukratis. Undoubtedly this picture will improve as data
linking improves, but at the moment the picture is rather misleading.
3. Research still needs to be done on each object, document or site, just as before the
‘digital revolution’. Descriptions, database entries, object photographs all still need to
provided – and in many cases, databases established, and published on the internet.
Information needs to be considered and defined: which Hermopolis are we talking
about? Is the findspot recorded in the Brussels Museum’s registers as ‘Al Kawm
Ju'ayf’ = Kom Geif = Naukratis? And we still need to look closely at our objects.
Observation of clay fabric and of faint pencilled findspot numbers of objects, may
give vital clues to provenance or context that cannot otherwise be gained.
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