Collecting Groups: the dispersion across museums of finds from Harageh
cemetery
Gianluca Miniaci
The present paper moves from an article of Stephen Quirke “Collecting Types: Rosellini, Petrie,
Montelius. The before and the after”, presented at the international congress named “Talking along
the Nile” held in Pisa in 2012 (Quirke 2013). Quirke has explored the impact and importance of
collecting types at the dawn of Egyptology, identified as one of the most efficient ways to index the
ancient Egyptian art (Rosellini 1836). Types in archaeology involve a particular atomization of
groups of objects as found together, separating each single item from its original context. Collecting
types and arranging material in categories provided a ready way to explore and describe unknown
worlds, as Egypt was at the beginning of Nineteenth century.
The coming of the postmodernist era has seen the decrease of the desire for a universal picture, and
a move instead towards “fragmentation”, emphasising pluralism, variety, decentralization (Bertens
1995). The rejection of colonialism after the Second World War had impacted massively on the
dynamics of history, giving greater emphasis to the independence of areas which had been
considered marginal. The process of de-colonisation brought more fully to other areas of the world
their own chances of controlling development and creating more autonomous centres (Barringer and
Flynn 1998). For the ancient world, the attention of scholars has slowly moved away from the
evolutionary line of types over time, towards a desire for single, independent stories. In
archaeology, the key to such microhistories is to focus research on the original deposit as found,
documenting groups of items in the ground, rather than separating them according to material,
shape, types. The groups of objects as found in their original context provide the opportunity to
encounter past civilizations in their material diversity, and from there to write their social history.
At the time Egyptology became an European university discipline, Rosellini, Champollion, Lepsius,
Mariette considered Egypt as a block, an unknown civilisation to be described and indexed; the
main aim was to describe Egyptian civilization, separating its identity from the other well-known
civilisations, Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian. Any accurate records of find-groups would have
generated a slower process of data acquisition; it would also have moved the discipline towards a
fragmentation, which was not required at that time, when ancient Egypt was still an unexplored
narrative. At the dawn of Egyptology, the classification in types was the principal means available
to scan an entire civilization and begin to understand its history in greater detail. The knowledge of
history of ancient Egypt in the nineteenth century can be imagined as an enormous jigsaw puzzle
with millions of scattered pieces to be placed in an order, as consistent as possible. The first task
was to select pieces of the same colours; in archaeology, the "colours" are the separate types of
objects or, in visual arts, types of scenes. It would have been hard to work out the whole picture, if
we tried to work on each single scene, each small history, archaeologically each context or
structure. Until late in the nineteenth century, the discovery of single histories, intact groups, did not
find a great echo, because a solid narrative was still absent; stories floating in a black canvas did not
add much more to our knowledge.
Nevertheless, here and there the practice to document intact find-groups is attested to a limited
degree from the very beginning of researches/excavations in Egypt, and today these are appreciated
in Egyptology as one of the best sources for information and knowledge.
Already in 1828-29 Champollion and Rosellini decided to write the microhistory from their
encounter with ancient individuals, recording in the first person some intact tombs, notably in the
case of the nurse of the king Taharqa of the 25th dynasty, Tjesraperet: “Dopo pranzo Abu-Sakkarah
venne ad avvertirci che gli scavatori avevano trovato una tomba intatta […] La bocca dello scavo
era ancora chiusa; scesi nel pozzo mentre l’aprivano […]. Questo pozzo era profondo almeno 25
braccia e a metà, dopo una specie di pianerottolo, prendeva un’altra direzione […]. Non poteva
dunque scendersi che in comodissimamente puntando cioè spalle e braccia alle pareti, mentre,
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secondo il solito, cadevano sempre giù sassi e terra […]. La polvere, il caldo, e l’orrore del luogo,
toglievano il respiro. A destra del pozzo era il foro che introduceva nella cameretta, o grotta
rozzamente scavata, ov’erano due casse di mummie col capo rivolto verso l’apertura” (Gabrieli
1925). The importance of the discovery had a great impact on their imagination, and was
immediately fully understood, as demonstrated by the fact that the objects were represented by
Giuseppe Angelelli on a memorial painting representing the members of the Franco-Tuscan
Expedition at Luxor. The groups found together, were unfortunately separated during the packing
and the shipping to Livorno, as documented by the list of antiquities drawn up by Rosellini himself
in Livorno (Betrò 2013). Packing and shipping and then unpacking, in other words “logistical
reasons” created an atomic separation of the components of a single group. Probably behind the
division of finds between Champollion and Rosellini there was in mind the idea to keep some of the
selected groups together, as happened in great measure for Tjesraperet (Guidotti and Tiradritti
2009). However, lapses in memory and difficulties in tracing the original provenance of objects
probably altered the original ratio of the partage. Most of the objects belonging to Tjesraperet are
still in Florence Museum, although here again, museological reasons caused a new atomization of
the group, each object being on display in separate showcases, or stored in the basement. Similarly
Giuseppe Passalacqua, some years earlier, in 1822-25, collecting antiquities in Egypt, discovered,
cleared and documented the intact late Middle Kingdom tomb of the “estate overseer” Mentuhotep
on the north-eastern slopes of Deir el-Bahri valley. In the catalogue raisonné of Passalacqua
(Passalacqua 1826), the find-group was, like that of Tjesraperet, again dismembered in order to
place each object under a separate object category: again the logic of types prevailed over the option
of narrating a single story, where we would have encountered the real maker of the history we were
seeking. Not only scholars, but also dealers and collectors had understood the importance of
documenting objects in situ, though for different reasons: the knowledge of the find place and the
objects found within a group gave the items higher value. In a report published in 1836, Giovanni
D’Athanasi refers to the discovery of the burial of king Nubkheperre Intef (seventeenth dynasty) at
Dra Abu el-Naga, in the northernmost part of the Theban necropolis “During the researches made
by the Arabs in the year 1827, at Gourna, they discovered in the mountain, now called by the
Arabs, Il-Drah-Abool-Naggia, a small and separate tomb, containing only one chamber, in the
centre of which was placed a sarcophagus […]. In this sarcophagus was found the abovementioned case, with the body as originally deposited […]. The Arabs on discovering their rich
prize, immediately proceed to break up the mummy, as was their usual custom, for the treasures it
might contain, but all the information I was able to obtain as the various objects they found, is that
the Scarabaeus, which was purchased by the British Museum, from Mr. Salt’s collection, (see
catalogue no. 209), was placed on the breast, without having, as is usual, any ornament attached to
it”. D’Athanasi had assembled most of the collection for Henry Salt, posthumously auctioned in
summer 1835, when the British Museum had acquired the scarab (D’Athanasi 1836). The idea to
keep a group together and the opportunity to create a narrative on its discovery, supply a time and a
space for a group, thus attracted also dealers of antiquities and not only scholars.
Even after the initial stage of Egyptology, the importance of identifying block-categories of objects
to describe a civilization, and separate chronological periods within the history of Ancient Egypt,
has often clashed against the necessity/difficulty to keep find-context at the centre of study, as the
most direct way to encounter and explore past societies and cultures. In Egyptian archaeology, the
acclaimed Sequence Dating method employed by Flinders Petrie to date Predynastic cemeteries at
the beginning of Twentieth Century, started to show the potential for relating objects in space and
time. On the basis of find-groups, Sequence Dating could place types in a more accurate
chronological sequence, without losing the record of the histories of single people (Petrie 1901).
The Sequence Dating of Petrie does not consider the importance of the group in itself, but again is a
mathematical superimposition onto the group, privileging the logic of the type. In Sequence Dating,
single objects become numbers and abstract entities; their purpose is not to encounter the people,
but to connect types between them in a chain of chronological and evolutionary steps. Again the
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rhetoric of the type is dominant. Shedding new light on the history of Egyptology, Stephen Quirke
has revealed an unknown side of the celebrated archaeologist Flinders Petrie, who was not merely a
brilliant archaeologist as acclaimed for his Sequence Dating, but also a “collector purchasing small,
at best loosely provenance, objects on massive scale, and even in his excavation reports the objectplace is not always recorded to any degree of precision” (Quirke 2013). Petrie in his life produced
13 typological publications from his excavating and purchasing activities. Petrie has shown how
types can be re-analysed in a more precise chronological way if they have been recorded in their
own context.
From December 1908 to February 1909 Petrie explored the Theban necropolis, where in the
northernmost area of the Theban necropolis, north of the entrance to the wadi Biban el-Muluk, he
found an intact burial of the 17th dynasty, the so called Qurna queen (Petrie 1909). In distribution,
the group was assigned to the National Scotland Museums, so that now all the objects of the find
are kept together in the same museum. In other cases too, Petrie tried to keep remarkable groups
together, as in the case of the group of the Two Brothers found at Rifeh (Petrie 1907).
The main aim of this paper is to test what is the extent of such a practice adopted by Petrie on the
smaller and less remarkable groups. The study case selected here concerns the ancient necropolis
located in the area of the Twentieth century village of Harageh, situated on the Gebel Abusir, at the
entrance to the Fayyum, on the west side of the Nile. The cemeteries found in the south-western
part of the Gebel Abusir were divided into 13 groups by Engelbach, who worked on the site in
1913, with the help of Battiscombe Gunn and Duncan Willey on behalf of the British School of
Archaeology in Egypt. The analysis will exclusively focus on the Middle Kingdom cemeteries and
intact find-groups. According to the published information, graves of the late Middle Kingdom
were found in Cemetery A (103 graves -shaft-tombs-, from the Senusret II to Amenemhat III) and
Cemetery S (from Senusret III to Amenemhat III, and later). Cemeteries E, F, and part of NZ, also
date from the early Middle Kingdom to the 12th dynasty. Second Intermediate Period graves were
recorded in Cemetery B (shaft-tombs). In wadi I and wadi II, intact graves dating from the time of
Senusret II to the Second Intermediate Period and belonging to poorer classes were not carefully
recorded by the excavators, due to the difficulty in separating the burials, closely packed together
(Engelbach 1923).
Here the list of three examples taken from Harageh records:
A) Tomb 139 (south chamber off shaft - Cemetery A) preserved three individuals (one male and
two female) and it contained the following items: pottery vases (types: 7klu, 10g, 67s, 90r), stone
vases (types: 17, 65), beads (types: 65d, 68l, 74g), charcoal, mud caps. In the distribution list drawn
up by Petrie, 6 alabaster vases were sent to the museum of Glasgow, separating the find.
B) Tomb 604 (Cemetery S) contained pottery vases (types 2a3, 7jj2n, 8m, 67s), a black rubbing
stone, a razor, a small scarab. No much information were provided from the excavators. The copper
razor alone reached the Leichester museum.
C) Tomb 312 (two north and south chambers off shaft – Cemetery S) preserved a single male
deposition and contained pottery vases (types: 2a3, 3b, 5z, 7kn2n3, 10dm, 53p, 57j, 67s, 70g3h2,
90, 92m), beads (types: 19d, 26m, 32t, 68k, 73p, 79jkm, 80j, 85l, 92l), an adze, a golden shell, an
inscribed cylinder. The inscribed cylinder with the name of Amenemhat III and the gold shell
reached the museum of Glasgow.
The examples above provide clear information about the logic regulating the dispersal of objects,
once they reached London. Already for photography on site, and then for packing for transport,
groups had been split up; in London, financial reasons encouraged Petrie to disperse groups further
among different museums. This shows the accumulated pressures in separating the finds, although
here and there we still see efforts to keep some more important groups together. In sum: a group
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would be documented together, but later the reason to preserve it together was weakened by
financial reasons, followed by museum display practice, and perhaps finally also by the demands of
teaching and learning (Bennett 1995).
The resolution of difficulties in constructing visual diachronic typologies and in presenting at the
same the find-group as a source of knowledge is still today one of the vital tasks for museums and
researchers to accomplish. The physical impossibility to reassemble find-groups and at the same
time to preserve a typological sequence is perhaps the main pragmatic obstacle in museum display.
The core question of my paper is to seek the benefit of continuing the preservation of typological
arrangement in museums for dissemination and learning and the difficulties in dismembering typesequences and reuniting objects in the original unity of their find-groups, all in the same museum.
In a world that has already shed a great light over the history of ancient Egypt, is there any reason
for continuing keeping types together? Should we now move towards the groups?
Building on the pragmatics of museum display my second question aims to explore a conceptual
methodology for scientific visualization and storage of information, possibly involving the virtual
reconstruction and re-contextualization of the reassembled groups. This would serve as an
instrument both to access this knowledge interactively in museum environments, and to support the
archaeological and Egyptological research in building and verifying scientific hypotheses.
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