UA ANTHROPOLOGIST WINS MAJOR NSF GRANT TO STUDY THE ORIGINS OF EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - In 3000 B.C., Hierakonpolis was a flourishing metropolis on the Nile, 650 miles south of the city now known as Cairo in upper Egypt. Centuries later, archeologists would come to discover it was the home of Egypt’s first mummies, its first temples and its first industrial breweries.

For over 100 years, scientists have examined this birthplace of the ancient Egyptian state, uncovering spectacular finds such as the palette of Narmer, the most reproduced image from Egyptian antiquity and the large ceremonial mace heads of King Scorpion and Narmer. Jerry Rose, an anthropologist in Fulbright College at the University of Arkansas, has joined in the search to recover ancient history and culture, supported by a $267,646 two-year grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant was the largest award the NSF made in 2001 in the anthropology division.

Rose left January 16 for the field, joining Dr. Renée Friedman, Hierakonpolis site director, three graduate students and other conservation specialists brought in to assist, such as a paleopathologist mummy expert. Their task will be to unearth the bodies and artifacts contained in HK43, the cemetery of the working class, which may contain up to 2,000 burials.

"Hierakonpolis is the first site at which three widely separated and distinct cemeteries for the different classes of society have been found: elites, skilled middle class and laboring poor," said Friedman. "They show clear evidence of a complex, multilevel social structure. The site is relatively unique in that here are habitations, craft activities, evidence of religion and the skeletal remains of the people themselves."

Hierakonpolis is intimately associated with kingship and the birth of the ancient Egyptian state. Items uncovered during the last century, such as the earliest painted tomb, royal houses, statues and rock paintings, have played a pivotal role in current thinking about the unification of ancient Egypt and the origins of Egyptian society and culture.

"The enormous growth of the settlement in mid-Predynastic times indicates the site was a thriving regional center and possibly the capital of an early kingdom prior to unification," Rose said. "No other site can tell us as much about when, how and ultimately, why Egypt was transformed from a scattering of undifferentiated farming villages into one of the great nation states of antiquity."

For the first time, Rose and his colleagues will be able to test theories that explain the development of the Egyptian dynasties by analyzing the health and diet of all social classes, from the wealthy to the working poor.

Many of the bodies have been remarkably well preserved by the hot, dry sand. Delicate matting, basketry, fabric and food, as well as human skin, fingernails, hair, internal organs and stomach contents are all intact. Teams of archaeologists and bioarchaeologists will excavate and record each item and then analyze the skeletons and teeth to test for differences in diet, disease, stress and workload among the different social classes.

"We want to look at their quality of life and the amount of work that they were doing," Rose said. "So far, it seems that they were well fed and grew to a good size, but at the same time they performed hard physical tasks. These people are big and well-muscled."

Some bodies show evidence of ritual cutting and dismemberment, which could be associated with religious practices or attempts to prevent the dead from harming the living.

The cemetery, on the southeastern edge of the desert, is under imminent threat as land is being reclaimed for agriculture. The irrigation canals dug to make the land arable are also raising the water table, which will eventually damage the contents of the site. Friedman and her team have been excavating since 1996, trying to salvage all the endangered graves. Each season they excavate 200 and record their contents.

By comparing their results to previous discoveries at other sites in Egypt, these scientists may finally determine the origin of the Egyptian dynasties, if indeed they arose out of Predynastic cities such as Hierakonpolis or instead were founded by immigrants from other lands.

Rose wrote the grant proposal in collaboration with team leader Dr. Renée Friedman and fellow researchers Joe Powell from the University of New Mexico and Joel Irish from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Rose has successfully led an archeological field school in Jordan for the last eight summers, providing many students the opportunity to engage in cutting-edge research.

The work of Rose and his fellow team members in Egypt will offer unprecedented research opportunities for graduate students at the U of A, Alaska and New Mexico, likely resulting in numerous published papers and dissertations.

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