This grant is for the preparation of a multi-authored, two-volume publication of the University of Michigan’s excavation of the late third millennium BCE mastaba tomb complex of Weni the Elder in the Middle Cemetery at Abydos, Egypt. A synopsis in Arabic will be included at the beginning of each of the two volumes.
The site of Abydos (ancient Abdju) is located in Sohag Governorate, about 11 kilometers west of the Nile River near the modern Egyptian town of El Araba el-Madfuna. Abydos was identified by the ancient Egyptians as the burial place of Osiris, god of the Underworld, and as the primary entrance to that next world. A wide range of stakeholders both royal and private maintained this place as a conceptual and political landscape for more than three thousand years.
The primary burial ground for nonroyal individuals in the Old Kingdom was a part of the site called the "Middle Cemetery" by modern excavators. Targeted by antiquarians in the early 19th century, the site was then investigated in the 1860 by the first director of the Egyptian antiquities organization, Auguste Mariette, who excavated a series of inscriptions from the graves of important Sixth Dynasty officials (2407-2260 BC). Among these was one of the longest biographical narratives known to date from the late Old Kingdom, that of the official Weni the Elder. Viewed by Mariette as his most important discovery that year, the content of Weni’s text far outweighed the significance of its context. Mariette therefore provided only scant information on the form and spatial setting of Weni’s tomb, other than the fact that it was a mastaba (Arabic for “bench” describing the shape of the structure) at the top of the Middle Cemetery hill and that the biographical slab was found in the eastern chapel of the tomb. A series of British Missions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries revealed a substantial non-elite cemetery of smaller graves on the slopes below Mariette’s hill of officials’ tombs. But the development and significance of Weni’s mortuary landscape on the summit remained poorly understood, with no subsequent excavators working in that part of the Middle Cemetery until the University of Michigan applied for permission to resume survey in 1995 and excavation in 1999.
With the kind permission of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, Egypt, University of Michigan teams have undertaken new work on Weni’s tomb and its context, highlighting the importance of Weni and of the Middle Cemetery. The results of this research have helped to rewrite the political and social history of the later third to early second millennium BC in Egypt, and allowed the contextualization of the Middle Cemetery phenomena more generally in memory studies. This multi-authored book project, supported by the Shelby White and Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications, will bring to bear a multidisciplinary approach to data from this new field research integrated with the results of Mariette’s 19th century campaign, working between field records, objects in storage and in museums; and taking into account recent Weni-related discoveries and scholarship by colleagues at Saqqara.
These data streams – GIS, archaeological, biological, visual, textual, ethnographic, and experiential - will allow the book’s authors to explore the multi-sited biographies of Weni the individual and his political involvement in the initiation of a public cult of Osiris at a time of transition on state, social, and religious fronts. The authors will also explore Weni in memory, from the time of his monument’s construction and his burial, processes materializing central government authority and personal wealth and status; through shifting narratives of association, execration and the ritual retirement of Weni’s monument as his memory was demolished and then eclipsed by that of the local saint Idi; through the reorientation of the mortuary landscape around the saint’s complex as a vast community cemetery; through a sacred recycling of the space in the late first millennium BCE followed by new narratives in the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine periods and abandonment as of the Islamic Period; up to Weni’s reception and meaning in modern contexts.
The publication project is directed by Dr. Janet Richards, in collaboration with Ayman Damarany, Suzanne L. Davis, Salima Ikram, Christian Knoblauch, Peter Lacovara, Franck Monnier, Mohamed Naguib Reda, Caroline Roberts, Hamada Sadek, Heather Tunmore, Korri Turner, and Mohamed Abuel Yazid.
