http://www.wadielhudi.com/
IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT THE COLOR PURPLE
Most of our purple today is from made from dyes or synthesized materials. But 4000 years ago in Ancient Egypt, purple was not common. The mineral amethyst was one of the only natural sources of purple. There are only a handful of examples of amethyst in the ancient Mediterranean world prior to 2000 BCE, but everything changed at the start of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (2000-1700 BCE). Egyptian prospectors discovered the ancient world's largest source of purple, in Wadi el-Hudi. During the Middle Kingdom, amethyst became very fashionable as officials and courtiers scrambled to get these purple jewels, like this one from our excavations and from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collections. It likely became an object of high status that the pharaoh acquired through massive expeditions and doled out to privileged individuals, like princesses.
WELCOME TO THE WADI EL-HUDI EXPEDITION
Since 2014, the Wadi el-Hudi Expedition has been surveying and excavating as part of our ongoing archaeological project. Now in our fifth season, we are working to map the standing architecture, document the sites and inscriptions, create a 3D model of the sites, and study how the ancient Egyptian state provided luxury mineral resources for a royal gift economy. Wadi el-Hudi lies in Egypt's Eastern Desert, east of Aswan, and is dotted with well-preserved ancient fortified settlements and mines that ancient peoples built while they exploited the geologically rich zone for rare mineral resources: amethyst as well as gold, copper, and granite. First exploited in Paleolithic times, the Ancient Egyptians established over a dozen very important mines there in order to acquire objects for making jewelry during the Middle Kingdom and in the Roman Period (c. 1st century BCE-4th c. CE). Next to these mines, they established several settlements that housed the laborers and the administrators of the mines. These settlements are still well-preserved today, standing close to their original height at two meters tall. WHAT'S NEW?
March 13 was our last day in the field for Season 5. For the first time, we had students from California State University, San Bernardino joining us in the desert. We focused on survey, mapping, and the making of 3D models of our sites this year. We hope to return to Egypt again in fall 2019. We submitted a photo from our field work to the Archaeological Institute of America's 2019 Photo contest and we won! For up-to-date information, make sure to check our Facebook page! Also, we now have a Twitter page and Instagram full of fun, new content. Thank you to the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities and especially the Aswan Inspectorate for their continued support of and assistance with our project.
-- Sent from my Linux system.
No comments:
Post a Comment