Pražské Egyptologické Studie (Apr 2018)
Staroegyptské měděné a bronzové artefakty v Egyptském muzeu Lipské univerzity. Průběžná zpráva o projektu // Ancient Egyptian copper and bronze artefacts in the Egyptian Museum of Leipzig University. Preliminary report on the project
Abstract
This article presents a preliminary report on the first results of the interdisciplinary project Early copper metallurgy in Ancient Egypt- a case study of the material from Agyptisches Museum - Georg Steindorff - der Universitat Leipzig, in cooperation of the Czech Institute of Egyptology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, Institute of Chemistry and Technology in Prague and the Egyptian Museum in Leipzig. The project is focused on the analysis of a selected corpus of artefacts from ancient Egyptian and Nubian sites (fig. 1 ). The analysed material was found in greatest part at the Egyptian sites of Abusir, Abydos and Giza and at the Nubian site of Aniba (fig. 2). The artefacts represent an outline of the development of ancient Egyptian metallurgy over more than one and half millennia, from the First Dynasty (ca 3100 - 2900 BC) until almost the end of the New Kingdom (ca 1200 BC). The selected corpus of artefacts has been documented by X-ray radiography and computer tomography last year at the Institute of Mineralogy, Crystallography and Material Science of the Leipzig University. ln all, 86 artefacts were then sampled and a I most 100 samples obtained. The results of a metallography and SEMIEDS analysis of five selected artefacts, representing five different chronological stages of the corpus, are discussed in this article (Table 1 ). The first one is a Dynasty 1 vessel from Abusir South (AMUL 2162; Fig. 3). This bowl was hammered out of copper sheet, with high contents of Ni, As and Fe. Non-metallic admixtures of copper sulfides are present in the inner structure, which is highly deformed by the hammering. The second is an Old Kingdom vessel from Giza made of arsenical copper, hammered and annealed (AMUL 2169; Figs. 4-5). The third is a lugged and decorated Middle Kingdom axe blade, hammered and annealed and made of copper with admixtures of As, Fe and S (AMUL 3952; Fig. 6). The fourth is a pair of tweezers from a C-Group tumulus N83 at Aniba, which was made by the cold hammering of arsenical copper, bul with rather surprising amount (1 .0%) of tin (AMUL 4647; Figs. 7-8). The fifth is the middle part of an early Dynasty 18 dagger cast from a tin bronze alloy (AMUL 2153; Figs. 9- 1 0). A poster with the analysis of the XRF results was presented at the 41st lnternational Symposium on Archaeometry at Kalamata (Greece) and received honorable mention from The Society for Archaeological Sciences in the Best Student Poster competition (Kmošek - Odler et a/. 2016). All samples will be submitted to neutron activation analysis, and the selected corpus will be also analysed for lead isotope ratios.
