URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND REGIONAL IDENTITIES IN PROVINCIAL EGYPTA DEEP HISTORY OF THE ASYUT REGION

Research context Asyut in Middle Egypt is one of the country’s largest cities with almost 400,000 inhabitants. Located 375km south of Cairo, it is the capital of the modern Asyut Governorate, which accommodates the largest Coptic community in Egypt. Over centuries, traders, farmers, diplomats, nomads, travellers, and others passed though the city on their way to the northern Delta or the southern Nile valley bringing their science, literature, art, mathematics, and other cultural attributes with them. Asyut served as a crossroads along Egyptian trade routes such as the Darb el-Arbain (‘40-day route’) into Sudan. The city has been of great strategic importance for at least five millennia.

In antiquity, Asyut was the capital of the 13th Upper Egyptian province. Attested from the 4th Dynasty (c. 2600BC) onwards, the province stretched south on the Nile’s west bank to what is today Deir-Durunka, and north to Umm el-Qusae covering a distance of about 45km. Ancient Asyut (%A.wtj, Greek Lycopolis) was a typical city with temples, mansions, and palaces, but also of humble dwellings of functionaries and peasants, their workshops, granaries, storage magazines, shops, and local markets.

Because of rapid urban expansion, Asyut’s ancient heritage almost completely disappeared under a modern maze of paved streets, or ended up in international museum collections. Comprised of sculpture, models, and ceramics, funerary equipment, textiles, ostraca and papyri, the British Museum collection of Asyut objects reflects a thriving cultural hub where works of art were copied and re-copied for thousands of years. Textual sources from other parts in Egypt have confirmed the importance of ancient Asyut for the shaping and subsequent diffusion of Egypt’s cultural memory (Kahl 1999, 2012).

Archaeological excavations focused on Asyut’s western mountain, where the ancient necropolis is located. The city (ancient and modern), and the relationship with its suburbs and smaller settlements in the vicinity, are still poorly understood. The village of Shutb, 5 km to the south of Asyut, is a case in point; currently a rural village, Shashotep was once the capital city of the neighbouring 11th Upper Egyptian province. How, when and why did Shutb lose its leading status while the city of Asyut remained a provincial capital?

Although Asyut and Shutb were capital cities of their respective nomes, the current distance between them is only 5km (See Fig. 1). Their suburbs and hinterland must have been close to each other. Ancient texts reveal a relationship between the two, but the nature and dynamics of this

relationship are unclear. In addition, their necropolises host the highest elite of the region, but where were the non-elite buried?

Research objectives Through research on the Asyut collection in the British Museum and fieldwork in the region, we aim at (1) reconstructing the deep history of Asyut in relation to its suburbs and neighbouring cities, (2) enhancing local sense ownership and awareness through values-based public engagement of different stakeholders (the people of Shutb, inspectors of the Ministry of Antiquities, officials of the Asyut governorate), and (3) use those local perceptions to contextualise displays in the British Museum.

In order to gain as complete a picture as possible of the settlement history of the region, the entire scope of archaeological sites as well as the changing course of the Nile will be documented. Auger core drilling and remote sensing will be used to reconstruct the course of the Nile and possible palaeochannels.

Collection Objects from Asyut that entered museum collections remain largely unstudied. The large collection of Asyut material in the British Museum has been listed in M. Zitman’s publication on ancient Asyut (2010), but few have been the focus of more in-depth studies. For many objects in the collection, basic meta-data such as dating, exact provenance and meaning have never been established. A thorough comparative study of Asyut material in the British Museum and other international collections (mainly in Turin and Paris) will enhance understanding of the region’s material culture and provide context for the objects housed in the British Museum. The material from Asyut is likely to remain a key component of future Egypt displays within the Museum.

Wooden coffin of the Middle Kingdom from Asyut (EA 29575)

Deep history The village of Shutb, in particular, provides an ideal archaeological and anthropological context rarely preserved in the Egyptian Nile valley: a middle-sized provincial town combined with its hinterland in a continuous historical setting accessible for research. The ancient tell (settlement mound) is particularly exposed along the north-west side of the village where the Ministry of Antiquities has built a storage facility. Taking into account the traditional architecture in the village, the exposed stratigraphy would allow for a full reconstruction of the village’s history from its emergence in antiquity to its present day existence.

Shutb’s old centre is an outstanding example of traditional vernacular mud-brick architecture, increasingly at threat in Egypt through a move towards red-brick, cement and breeze-block architecture. An initial study visit to the village of Shutb in March 2016 identified a chain of conditions that forces inhabitants to abandon residential mud brick buildings; malfunctioning water systems and illegal digging causes substantial structural problems to mud brick houses.

An initial survey carried out in March 2016 defined significant buildings with architectural/heritage value. Documentation of these buildings is given priority and includes building floor plans, facades and their residents’ life style (i.e. how they use the building and its different spaces and furniture).

Vernacular architecture in Shutb.

The project thus provides synergies with the current development of a Modern Egypt research and collecting strand at the BM. While the urban is likely to be a focus of any collecting, the proposed Asyut project will provide perspectives from a regional town, and particularly one that relates to an ancient past and collections in the BM.

Heritage awareness Field projects have, without exception, been physically and intellectually separated from present-day inhabitants of rural areas with large numbers of low-profile sites and unlisted historic buildings and have therefore missed opportunities in engaging local communities. Local histories are little appreciated in Egypt, with the school curriculum foregrounding a national history. Local communities have therefore not benefitted from archaeological work in their country, and as a result do not function as working partners in preserving it.

Rather than merely look upon archaeological sites as salvage missions or academic pursuits, the British Museum project will appeal to local interests, and support that through deploying methodologies drawn from archaeology and heritage preservation. Key components are: training and capacity

building of local stakeholders (local heritage professionals, builders/craftsmen) through hands-on involvement in restoration and conservation projects, and defining values and needs important to the community, and meaningful ways of intervention to support those in order to promote community participation.

Such a holistic approach has never been tested in Middle and Upper Egypt, where fieldwork has traditionally focussed on the extensive rock necropolises, alongside the temples of Luxor and further south. The need for such an undertaking has never been more pressing, however, as intensification of land use by the rising population for agriculture and expanding settlements is rapidly destroying archaeological sites.

For more information on this component; see section ‘community and heritage’.

Selected bibliography Beck, T. 2016. Perspektivenwechsel. Eine Reflexion archäologischen Arbeitens in Ägypten: Die lokalen Grabungsarbeiter des Asyut Project. The Asyut Project 8. Wiesbaden.

Kahl J. 2013. Die Zeit lag nun tot darnieder. Die Stadt Assiut und ihre Nekropolen nach westlichen Reiseberichten des 17. bis 19. Jahrhunderts: Konstruktion, Destruktion und Rekonstruktion (translated by Mohamed, Youssef). The Asyut Project 5. Wiesbaden.

Kahl J. 20122. The Asyut Project / Ancient Asyut. The first Synthesis after Three Hundred Years of Research. The Asyut Project 1. Wiesbaden.

Kahl J. 1999. Siut-Theben: zur Wertschätzung von Traditionen im alten Ägypten. Probleme der Ägyptologie 13. Leiden-Boston-Köln.

Zitman M. 2010. The necropolis of Assiut: a case study of local Egyptian funerary culture from the Old Kingdom to the end of the Middle Kingdom. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 180. Leuven.