Unexpected Treasures. Thirty Years of Excavations and Cooperation at Umm el-Breigât (Tebtynis - Fayoum). BiGen 57.
IFAO| N° d'inventaire | 21682 |
| Format | 21 x 28 |
| Détails | 328 p., paperback. |
| Publication | Cairo, 2019 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782724707472 |
The village of Tebtynis, located on the southern edge of the Fayoum, was inhabited for approximately 3,000 years from the 12th pharaonic dynasty to the 12th century AD. After its discovery in 1899, it was excavated by several scientific missions, ransacked by antiquities researchers, and extensively ravaged by sebâkh excavators. Thus, no archaeologist returned to work in its ruins for more than fifty years after the last Italian campaign in 1936, the site being considered exhausted. When the Franco-Italian mission, formed by the IFAO and the University of Milan, resumed excavations in 1988, the news was greeted with skepticism in some scientific circles. The results obtained over the years, however, have been so satisfactory that the team has already conducted thirty-one campaigns and is preparing its thirty-second. New neighborhoods have been uncovered, large gaps in knowledge of the village have been filled, and thousands of objects and texts have been discovered. Of the mass of material recovered, this catalog presents a small selection, but one of great scientific and museological interest. Some pieces are exceptional, even unique; others, thanks to their provenance from dated archaeological contexts, have become benchmarks that chronologically situate many similar examples; still others are common, but present the different aspects of daily life in Tebtynis much more clearly and in much greater detail than elsewhere.
The village of Tebtynis, located on the southern edge of the Fayoum, was inhabited for approximately 3,000 years from the 12th pharaonic dynasty to the 12th century AD. After its discovery in 1899, it was excavated by several scientific missions, ransacked by antiquities researchers, and extensively ravaged by sebâkh excavators. Thus, no archaeologist returned to work in its ruins for more than fifty years after the last Italian campaign in 1936, the site being considered exhausted. When the Franco-Italian mission, formed by the IFAO and the University of Milan, resumed excavations in 1988, the news was greeted with skepticism in some scientific circles. The results obtained over the years, however, have been so satisfactory that the team has already conducted thirty-one campaigns and is preparing its thirty-second. New neighborhoods have been uncovered, large gaps in knowledge of the village have been filled, and thousands of objects and texts have been discovered. Of the mass of material recovered, this catalog presents a small selection, but one of great scientific and museological interest. Some pieces are exceptional, even unique; others, thanks to their provenance from dated archaeological contexts, have become benchmarks that chronologically situate many similar examples; still others are common, but present the different aspects of daily life in Tebtynis much more clearly and in much greater detail than elsewhere.