Archaeology in Egypt and Sudan

The 2nd Intermediate Period (c. 1800-1570/30 BC) is one of the most complicated periods of Egyptian history, beginning after the end of the Middle Kingdom and spanning the later 13th to 17th Dynasties. This project aims to verify the existence of regionality and to investigate its possible manifestations and causes in order to question the currently favoured explanation of political fragmentation into small empires.

This project is dealing with the synchronisation of the relative chronologies of selected sites from the Levant with the relative chronology of Tell el-Dabʿa. Aside from pottery, small finds, historical texts and the results of scientific analyses will be taken into account.

The Swiss Institute for Egyptian Building Research and History has been carrying out the pioneering project »urban archeology in Aswan« since 2000 in cooperation with the Egyptian ministry of antiquities. The work has demonstrated that Aswan was already an important site in the Middle Kingdom. The analysis of the pottery confirms a permanent occupation of this site during the late Middle Kingdom.

The site of Kom Ombo has been settled since the prehistoric period to the 19th century CE. In the Greco-Roman period Kom Ombo was the metropolis and capital of the first Upper Egyptian Nome. Starting in November 2017 research on this important city and its hinterland will be conducted by the Cairo Branch.

We know a lot about what ancient Nubian people did with their dead, but how much do we know about their lives? The ›Living Nubia‹ project sets out to bring us closer to understanding where and how ancient Nubian communities lived, and how their social structures and identities might have become manifest in the living environments that they built for themselves.

The state-of-the-art analysis of the well-dated pottery from various New Kingdom tombs (c. 1550–1000 BC) in the Valley of the Kings is an important contribution to the fine dating of the periods of use of the ceramic inventory throughout Egypt.

Tell el-Dabʿa/Avaris, the capital of the Hyksos, is located in the eastern Nile Delta along the Pelusian arm. Since the modern landscape is considerably different than in antiquity, the reconstruction of the ancient city and its integration into the original landscape is a fundamental aspect of the research at this site.

Tell el-Dabʿa, ancient Avaris, the capital of the Hyksos, was one of the largest cities of the ancient Near East in the 2nd millennium BCE and an important harbour for inland and maritime shipping. The Cairo branch of the OeAI has been conducting archaeological research for the study of the harbour since 2013.

After the abandonment of the large palace-like building of the early 13th dynasty in Area F / I, its ruins were used to bury part of the population of Tell el-Dabʿa within them. In the following phases large villas with intra-mural cemeteries were constructed in this area. More than 400 tombs were found in this area dating from 1st half of the 13th Dynasty to the beginning of the Hyksos period. Although largely robbed, they still provide essential information about the people who lived in Tell el-Dabʿa during a difficult period of the Egyptian history.

The goal of the project is to obtain a better understanding of the living conditions of people in ancient Egypt during the late Middle Kingdom (ca. 1800–1700 BC). Whereas relatively many facts are known about the realm of the dead, many living conditions remain unstudied.

In the area of the extenxive palace complexes at Ezbet Helmi, a large number of scarabs, seals and seal impressions was found, including those with the names of kings. By originating from stratified contexts, this group of finds provides a good overview of the development of stamp seals at the beginning of the New Kingdom.

As a consequence of the divergent results to the origin of the Levantine Imports to Tell el-Dabʿa between the archaeological research on one hand and the Neutron Activation Analyses (NAA) on the other hand, more than 400 samples were taken from imports of this region for petrographic analyses since 2004 onwards. The results of these investigations will be presented in this project.

Within this project the use of cosmetic utensils and substances during the New Kingdom in Nubia will be compared with their use in Egypt. The goal of the project is to investigate how much did the body care in Nubia change after the Egyptian conquest.

Ancient Nubia has long been divided into cultural ›boxes‹, but why? And what are the problems with those divisions? The ›InBetween‹ project challenged these old assumptions of cultural boundedness and encouraged more nuanced approaches to Nubian cultural diversity.