Message #115770

[Bianca]

Mohamed Abdel-Maqsoud, head of the Central Administration of Ancient Egyptian Monuments, presented his paper on the remains of what is up to now the largest fortified city of the New Kingdom.

Tell Habua I and II, three kilometres northeast of Qantara East in North Sinai, measures 400 by 200 metres and is reinforced by 24 towers.

Archaeological evidence has revealed gates on the north and south sides and two complexes of large storerooms dating from the beginning of the 19th Dynasty, notably the reign of Pharaoh Seti I.

The team has also found a temple from the reign of Ramses II. "This discovery confirms the identification of Tell Habua with Tharw, as mentioned in the inscriptions of Pharaoh Seti I at Karnak, describing the Way of Horus," Abdel-Maqsoud said. The Way of Horus or Horus Road was the main trade and military route from Egypt to Palestine.

Suaan Sherratt from Sheffield University said investigation into intercultural contact in the Mediterranean area during the second and first millennia BC was often a matter of reconciling various types of textual information with archaeological data.

"We should not feel that we can afford to neglect either but attempts to integrate them frequently run up against issues of theory and methodology," she said, adding that methodology was arguably less of a problem as long as it was borne in mind that all types of information needed their own contextual source criticisms and that the devising of methodologies to address particular questions had to be approached on a strictly ad hoc basis.

"All that we need to think about lies in the shadows, susceptible more to informed imagination than to direct information, whether textual or archaeological, or to theory derived from anthropology or the social sciences," Sheratt said.

Gert Jan Van Wijngaarden from Amsterdam University stressed in his paper that the relationship between Egypt and Mycenae covered a long period of time, as finds of Mycenaean pottery at several areas around the Mediterranean testify. Only in Egypt, however, is ample additional epigraphic and pictorial evidence found. A number of faience plaques from Mycenae have even been interpreted as royal gifts from Egypt.

"The cultural contexts of the Mycenaean finds in Egypt and the Egyptian finds in Greece will assess the significance of Egyptian-Mycenaean relations in their Mediterranean context," he said.