Daniel Soliman

Decoding Signs of Identity is the volume of proceedings resulting from the symposium with the same name and held in Leiden, 13-15 December 2013, in the framework of the NWO research project ‘Symbolizing Identity: Identity marks and their relation to writing in New Kingdom Egypt’. The aim of the project, and indeed of the symposium, was to investigate identity marks of Ancient Egyptian workmen, both in a specialist, in-depth manner, and in a more general, comparative perspective.

The reader will recognise both of these approaches in the present collection of papers. In the course of its three sections, the topic is narrowed down from general considerations and non-Egyptian cases, to various sorts of Ancient Egyptian identity marks, and finally to the specific marking system of the royal necropolis workforce of the Egyptian New Kingdom, which was the core material of the NWO project.

This volume can be considered a follow-up to Pictograms or Pseudo Script? (EU XXV, 2009), and testifies to the continuing scholarly interest in systems of identity marks, both in Egyptology and outside.

Available online: https://www.sidestone.com/bookviewer/9789088909276

Dit boekje gaat over de manier waarop Egyptisch textiel uit het eerste millennium werd gebruikt en waar het is opgegraven, en hoe weefsels in de verzameling van het Rijksmuseum van Oudheden terecht zijn gekomen. Daarnaast komen het weefproces en de betekenissen van de versiering op het textiel uitgebreid aan bod. Duik in de wereld van Egyptisch textiel en ontdek hoe in de weefsels verschillende tradities en culturen samenkomen.

In the 2019 season, the joint Leiden-Turin Expedition to Saqqara continued work in the area north of the tomb of Maya with the aim of lowering the terrain above the new tomb discovered during the 2018 season (V82.1) and to prepare the area for further exploration in 2020. Many layers of deposit situated immediately to the north of the new tomb were removed and – although they mostly originated from previous excavations in the 1980s and 1990s –  systematically investigated. Several dumps of organic material such as linen and wood as well as numerous small finds and relief fragments were identified and recorded. In addition, existing storage facilities on site were renovated and upgraded. In this process, part of the underground structures of the tombs of Horemheb and Meryneith were surveyed by the 3D Survey Group (Politecnico di Milano). Thanks to the cooperation with the same Milanese team, a new documentation method was tested during the ongoing excavation work. Within a 3D-model t...

Soliman, D., ‘Duty rosters and delivery records composed with marks and their relation to the written administration of Deir el-Medina’ in: Haring, B.J.J., Moezel, K. van der and Soliman, D. and (eds), Decoding Signs of Identity. Egyptian Workmen’s Marks in archaeological, historical, comparative and theoretical perspective. Egyptologische Uitgaven 32 (Leiden, 2018) 155-189.

The earliest duty rosters composed with marks date to a period before year 24 of the reign of Ramesses III and might be as old as year 20. The last securely dated duty roster with marks dates to year 1 of Ramesses V, although there are several duty rosters that must date to a slightly later period. Ostraca composed with workmen’s marks recording deliveries
and the wrš duty roster from the first half of the 20th Dynasty have been discussed in a small number of studies. Since then, dozens of other unpublished ostraca with marks recording duty rosters have come to light. The current corpus of these documents contains 80 ostraca, mostly unpublished, ranging from large pieces to very small fragments. This substantial number coupled with the fact that there are also numerous contemporaneous hieratic texts that document the duty roster and deliveries raises a number of questions. What exactly do the ostraca with workmen’s marks record, and to what extent are they
similar to or different from hieratic duty and delivery texts? How and by whom were such ostraca with marks composed, for whom were they produced, and where were they kept? These matters will be addressed in this paper.

Very little is known about the administration of the 18th Dynasty crew of royal necropolis workmen, but ostraca inscribed with non-textual identity marks provide a significant source of information for this period. Many of the ostraca are kept in Cairo in the Egyptian Museum and the IFAO, and remain unpublished and poorly understood. This article discusses the functional and social context of these documents. Although the precise meaning of the ostraca with identity marks is often elusive because of their implicit nature, the documents provide valuable insights into the organisation of the crew of workmen, the administration of work, the size of the crew, as well as the absence of a local scribal tradition.

Two colossal quartzite statues from Ihnasya el-Medina, now Egyptian Museum Cairo JE 45975 and JE 45976, dating to the late Middle Kingdom but reworked under Ramesses II, were recently attributed to Amenemhat IV. Examining the inscriptions, iconography, and style of the statues, it is argued here that they represent Senwosret III. Remarkably, the statues depict the king with both hands lying flat on the thighs, an iconographic detail that is not attested until the reign of Amenemhat III.

Numerous workmen’s marks known from ostraca found at the village of Deir el-Medina as well as in the Valley of the Kings are also attested on objects from the tombs around the Deir el-Medina settlement. This paper presents some preliminary results of the research project ‘Symbolizing Identity: identity marks and their relation to writing in New Kingdom Egypt’ at Leiden University, and considers the significance of the marks in pre-Amarna tombs. For the majority of these tombs, the owners are still unidentified. The presence of workmen’s marks proves that the anonymous tomb owners were in contact with the individuals working on the royal tomb, and perhaps even belonged to that group. Noteworthy is the fact that very few pre-Amarna tombs around Deir el-Medina contained inscribed material, and that the forthcoming inscriptions are often incorrectly or oddly written. The combined occurrence of marks and erroneously written inscriptions could indicate that the tomb owners were marginally literate.

https://leidenislamblog.nl/articles/an-egyptologists-breakdown-of-the-prince-of-egypt-1998

Last month, London saw the premiere of “The Prince of Egypt,” a musical based on the eponymous animated film that came out in 1998. The DreamWorks picture tells the story of the Book of Exodus, and depicts Moses as an Egyptian prince who discovers his Hebrew roots, flees the palace and returns to deliver the enslaved Hebrews to the promised land. The story is almost entirely set in ancient Egypt, but the film was never released in contemporary Egypt. The Egyptian government banned it for its portrayal of a prophet, often considered forbidden in Islam. But perhaps more significantly, the movie outraged several Egyptians who believed it misrepresented ancient Egyptian history. Similar concerns were the reason for the Egyptian ban of the 2014 motion picture “Exodus.” Nonetheless, “The Prince of Egypt” is, in many ways, demonstrably inspired by Egyptian material culture. Here’s an Egyptologist’s breakdown of selected aspects of the film.