Burying the Dead in the Eastern Desert
The Eastern Desert must have been a bustling place throughout much of its history, but especially in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Many people—men, women, and children—from various walks of life and from a number of places in Egypt and the wider Mediterranean world traveled between the Nile and the quarries, mines, other civilian settlements, and military installations of the Eastern Desert. Individuals and groups from the Red Sea and Indian Ocean basins also journeyed between the Nile and ports along the Red Sea coast. Many people, of course, resided for various lengths of time in the region and it follows that a number ended their days here especially in the Roman era. While some of the deceased were transported back to the Nile for burial, as we shall see below, most people probably could not afford this expense and would have been laid to rest near where they expired.
Though ubiquitous, ancient burials in the Eastern Desert have been little-studied by archaeologists. This is an unfortunate oversight as there are many hundreds if not thousands of graves and tombs from throughout antiquity scattered about the region. Most burials that we see today are quite modest and can be found especially near the settlements and along the roads that crisscrossed the region. Unfortunately, most of these graves, usually shallow cist burials marked by modest piles of stones or slightly larger cairn graves, have been badly looted over the centuries; thieves engaged in one of the oldest professions in the world, grave robbing, have desecrated the last resting places of their distant ancestors looking for valuable burial goods. We cannot know with any certainty who the culprits were, but it is likely that they recovered little of any intrinsic value. Their depredations, though, have in most instances, destroyed or badly damaged the archaeological evidence that might have told us more about the deceased who were buried in this hostile and arid environment. In many instances on our surveys we have seen the bones and broken pots that have been scattered close to their graves by looters. Evidence from all eras of antiquity indicates that bodies were inhumed and not cremated. This would have been in keeping with historic Egyptian practices of preserving the mortal remains for the afterlife. There would have also been practical reasons for inhuming the dead: the fuel to cremate would have been in very short supply, indeed, in this hyper-arid and relatively treeless region.
What did the desert graves look like and what type of funerary goods might have been found in most of these poor sepulchers? Many of these final resting places were no more than simple and sometimes rather shallow holes dug in the ground in which the body had been deposited in a crouched, fetal position. Crowning a typical example was a pile of stones. In some cases, a single course of smaller stones outlined by larger ones lay immediately on the surface of the ground (Fig. 8.1) beneath which the bones and artifacts accompanying them had been deposited.
The slight information from the very few graves that have been found intact and that have been scientifically excavated suggests that personal possessions including beads, some pottery and, occasionally, some nicer jewelry were interred with the deceased; sometimes, there were no grave goods placed with the most destitute. In most instances, however, the bones from the robbed graves have been so badly disturbed and scattered, and so few archaeologically investigated graves have been quantified, that it is impossible to determine much at all about the demographics of those buried here. Were those interred in the Eastern Desert predominantly male adults or were there sizeable numbers of females and children also laid to rest there? What were their social statuses and ethnicities, if these can be determined?
The graves themselves tell us little, but a surprising source for who might have been deposited in these last resting places, in Roman times anyway, comes from the documents written by and about those living and traveling in the region that have turned up in excavations at some of the ancient quarries, forts, and ports. We can extrapolate from these that, indeed, in addition to the adult males, there were numbers of women and children who resided here as well. If they lived here, some certainly died here, too.
Fig. 8.1: Example of a small oval-shaped grave, likely for a single individual, near the Via Nova Hadriana.
Written sources abound, which provide us with insights on the official and daily lives of men, women, and children and, therefore, give some indication of a cross section of those people who would have died in the region. These include thousands of ostraca from the Roman quarries at Mons Claudianus and from Roman praesidia excavated by French archaeologists along the road linking Myos Hormos to Coptos. There are hundreds of documents written on ostraca, papyri, and stone from Berenike and others from Myos Hormos. The quarries at Mons Porphyrites as well as inscriptions carved on stone and letters preserved in papyri from the Eastern Desert also add to our knowledge.
Most of those who appear in these documents hailed from the NileValley or beyond. Of course, indigenous desert peoples, the predecessors of today's Bedouin, would have appeared only obliquely, if at all, in the written sources—such as references in ostraca to barbaroi/raiders attacking the stations on the Myos Hormos-Nile road—but would certainly have been buried in the desert. How different the burial customs and appearance of graves of the indigenous peoples were from those originating from the Nile Valley and beyond remains to be determined though we make some general observations about this below.
The earliest intact graves we have seen during our desert surveys were in a large Predynastic (before about 3000 BC) cemetery at Bir Asele in the deep south, which we visited in June 2002 (Fig. 8.2). This burial ground seems to consist of several groups of tombs, built within short intervals of time. This is the largest, the most complete, and the oldest necropolis ever identified in the Eastern Desert. The vast majority of graves appear to contain inhumation burials. Small piles of stones mark the last resting places of individuals and the entire Bir Asele graveyard was enclosed by a low boundary wall made of larger stones and boulders. It is clear that there were two separate cemeteries in close proximity to one another that eventually grew together. The overall size of this necropolis is quite impressive: 137 by 53.5 meters. The few graves that were robbed here prior to our visit revealed scraps of ostrich egg shells, probably originally used as beads or other forms of jewelry, and some handmade Nubian-style pottery; these lay scattered around the looted burials. We are not certain why such a large cemetery appears at Bir Asele, as our survey did not locate any habitation centers, mines, or quarries in the immediate environs. The nearest area of human activity that we know of is a gold working site of later date seventeen kilometers to the north. The closest known contemporary mine lies even farther away, about 105 kilometers to the north. Necropoleis similar in appearance to the one at Bir Asele have been identified in the Sinai.
Fig. 8.2: The Predynastic or early Dynastic cemetery near Bir Asele.
We cannot determine what percentage of those dying in the Eastern Desert in the vicinity of Bir Asele was interred in the necropolis here, and what numbers may have been transported back to the Nile for final burial. Thousands of years later, the Coptos Tariff, a Roman period inscription of the late first century AD (discussed in Chapter 7), records that bodies were transported from the Eastern Desert to the Nile and that a toll was levied on them. The amount was small, one drachma and four obols. A month's pay for a skilled workman at the Roman quarries at Mons Claudianus was forty-seven drachmas (as we noted in Chapter 4), so the toll levied on the funeral procession “going up and down,” as the inscription indicates, was, in this context, rather modest. “Going up and down” may well refer to the initial funeral procession of friends and relatives who were traveling from the Nile Valley to retrieve the deceased's remains from the desert and accompany them back to the Nile for burial. That there is a special category for this round trip in the Coptos Tariff suggests that it was probably a fairly frequent occurrence, at least in the Roman era.
There is no indication in the Coptos Tariff of who these deceased individuals were, but we might speculate that when alive they were financially well enough off that they could stipulate in their wills or to surviving friends and relatives that they were to be taken home, that is, back to their villages in the Nile Valley, for burial. This may help explain why various archaeological surveys have noted so few apparently well-to-do tombs and graves in the Eastern Desert. Nothing resembling the famous painted and very realistic Fayyum mummy portraits that are so ubiquitous in Fayyum and some cities of the Nile Valley especially in the first, second, and into the third centuries AD, has been found in the Eastern Desert thus far. As these portraits seem to have been associated mainly with relatively prosperous mid-level ranking individuals one would expect far fewer of them to have been in the Eastern Desert in the first place. Those that were may, in many instances, have been returned to their homes along the Nile for burial. As we noted above, perhaps it is this group, especially, that is noted in the Coptos Tariff. A parallel situation suggested by the Coptos Tariff may have existed in earlier periods in the Eastern Desert as well, with those of higher status being returned to the Nile for burial and those of lesser means having their mortal remains laid to rest near where they died.
We have also noted another type of burial in the Eastern Desert, one in which large circular tombs many meters in diameter and often a meter or more high contained the remains of several individuals. Where we have examined these tumuli-like structures containing multiple burials associated with nearby sites, they seem to be late Roman in date. These have also been found and studied in the Eastern Desert of southern Egypt and northern Sudan. Nothing like these tombs survive in the Nile Valley suggesting that they were built by and contained the mortal remains of desert dwellers, but we cannot be certain. In the late Roman examples we have investigated in the Eastern Desert, individual compartments made of large flat upright stones appear within these round sepulchers. The bodies would have been placed on their sides in a crouched, fetal position and the chambers then covered by one or more large flat stones. We assume that funerary goods would have accompanied the bodies though we have not seen any in our surveys. Large cobbles and small boulders then topped the entire round structure in which these compartments were situated. The exterior edges of these round tombs often comprised large upright stones, which corralled the cobbles and boulders surrounding the individual chambers.
At Berenike we located and excavated, in part, a late Roman era cemetery. Found during our excavations in winter 2000–2001, this necropolis lay at the extreme northwestern edge of the city flanking the road that led to the Nile (Fig. 8.3).Though we excavated only a small portion of this cemetery, we noted two types of burials. The more high-status tombs were built of the omnipresent coral heads that comprised all late Roman buildings at Berenike. Inside the variously shaped mausolea had been placed, in some instances, wooden coffins fastened together using iron and copper alloy nails (Figs. 8.4–8.5). All but the smallest scraps of these wooden sarcophagi had long since disappeared and from our excavations only paltry evidence survives indicating that this was the mode of interment. These burials all seem to have been of adults, but they had been thoroughly looted and the bones unceremoniously thrown out of the graves or tossed to one end of the cubicles in which we found them. The decoration of the exterior tops of some of these graves, small black pebbles mixed with small pieces of broken white coral, resembles burial decorations from other areas of the Eastern Desert of southern Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia. In fact, just south of Berenike we noted a concentration of small black and white stones and tiny chunks of coral on a low mound. It remains to be determined if this was a tomb.
Fig. 8.3: Berenike, plan with late Roman-era cemeteries in and around the city.
Fig. 8.4: Berenike, late Roman cemetery with bones scatteredby looters inside mausoleum. Scale = twenty centimeters.
Fig. 8.5: Berenike, reconstruction of late Roman mausoleum.
The second type of burial we found in our limited area of excavation in the late Roman necropolis at the northwestern comer of Berenike consisted of cist graves. These intermingled with the fancier mausolea and were not spatially segregated from them. The cist graves were merely cuts in the surrounding ground into which human remains were then placed and covered with stones. One contained a complete skeleton of a small girl who we estimate died at about the age of two. She had been deposited lovingly in a small, shallow oval-shaped hole laid in a fetal position (Fig. 8.6). Her head had been covered with a large broken potsherd the underside of which had fragments of some textile, clearly the remains of a burial shroud. Accompanying the lime girl were a few beads. The burial, potsherd, and beads had been topped by largish pieces of coral placed in such a way as to cover the burial pit completely. Another cist grave was substantially larger and contained the prone remains of what appeared to be an adolescent whose gender we could not determine. The body had also been deposited in a long shallow hole though we did not find either the covering of corals for the final resting place as we did for the little girl nor did we find any grave goods.
Else where around Berenike we found other human remains. Some were digits—fingers, toes, and so on—found in the trash dumps, perhaps amputations due to medical procedures or accidents. We also found the remains of a prematurely born infant or fetus elsewhere on site from a Roman context. In the Ptolemaic area atop the mound beneath which we found the Ptolemaic-era brick factory in 1996 we excavated the remains of a woman lying on her back (Fig. 8.7). A large potshard covered her pelvic area. Her estimated height was 1.61 meters and she was between forty and fifty years old when she died. We found no grave goods with her and we could not determine precisely when she was buried, but it was certainly long after the kiln had fallen out of use.
Another skeleton found during that same excavation season appeared near the eastern end of the site and in a late Roman context. This one was of an adult male with an estimated height of 1.71 meters who died when he was between thirty and forty years old; he was found on his right side, facing west, next to a wall. Study of his bones indicated that he had been a very robust and muscular individual suggesting that he may have performed heavy manual labor. Perhaps he had been a stevedore. His skull and pelvis were crushed, but the position of his head, with the neck bent backward, would not have been one a living person could have maintained. He seems not to have been buried so much as discarded here and his presence in this location remains a mystery. He may have died in an accident or he may have been murdered. Whatever the circumstances of his death, his final placement inside a building was very unusual, at least at Berenike.
Two other skeletons found at Berenike are also worthy of our attention. We excavated both in areas of the Ptolemaic industrial area. In fact, both had clearly been placed here long after the region had been abandoned. Yet, we could not determine when this might have been. Neither individual seems to have been buried properly so much as thrown out. We found no grave goods and scavengers had gnawed at one foot suggesting a period of exposure before being covered by sand. Both skeletons, lying on their backs, lacked heads (Pl. 8.1). Whether these individuals had suffered some very traumatic accident that caused death by decapitation, or they had been executed by decapitation is uncertain. Another skeleton we found in the same area was complete. We excavated yet another skeleton that we found placed in a fetal position inside the broken portions of an earlier Ptolemaic cistern. It was so fragile, however, that we could not determine its gender or estimate its age at death.
Fig. 8.6: Late Roman-era burial site of a two-year-old girl at Berenike. Scale = ten centimeters.
Fig 8.7: Berenike, remains of an approximately forty-year-old woman with a large potshard covering her pelvic area. Scale = fifty centimeters.
West of Berenike in the region of some modern military bunkers erected in the 1970s, and southwest of the city atop the low hills flanking the route leading between Berenike and the Roman praesidia in Wadi Kalalat, about 8.5 kilometers away, are numerous doughnut-shaped ring tombs. Like the other burials we have described in the region, the vast majority of these have been looted, in some cases the bones and some paltry grave goods, usually broken pottery, have been left scattered near their final resting places. Ceramic evidence suggests that these were all late Roman in date. We are then left with the unanswered question of where the Ptolemaic and early Roman cemeteries of Berenike were located.
Our surveys throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and into the new millennium also noted graves ncar the main early Roman quarry settlement in Wadi Umm Wikala (ancient Mons Ophiates) and scattered throughout the area near the various locations associated with the main settlement there. We have also noted graves near the late Roman fort at Abu Sha'r and in the vicinity of the early Roman port of Myos Hormos. In addition, we have seen a few of them, and all of these have long since been robbed, immediately west of the coastal remains at Marsa Nakari (perhaps the ancient Nechesia).
Other burials, some rather fancy by Eastern Desert standards, can also be seen at the settlements of Shenshef and Hitan Rayan. Both of these were late Roman communities that lay southwest of Berenike. Although close physical proximity to Berenike prompted numerous contacts between these two desert settlements and the port and between each other, the precise functions of both Shenshef and Hitan Rayan remain mysterious.
Hundreds of ring tombs surround the town at Shenshef and these, like Berenike itself, are overwhelmingly late Roman (predominantly late fourth-fifth-sixth century) in date. Several dozen late Roman ring tombs, similar to those at Shenshef, also appear near the entrance (eastern end) of the site at Hitan Rayan. While approximately nine hundred meters east of the narrow entrance leading into Hitan Rayan, our survey in winter 1995 found the remains of what appears to be an early Roman cemetery. A thin topping of pebbles and small cobbles bordered by larger cobbles covered the dozens of graves that we noted there. Floods had clearly washed many graves away over the years; pottery allowed dating of this cemetery. We found no early Roman settlement associated with this graveyard and, as noted above, Hitan Rayan itself was a late Roman community with its own small ring cairn cemetery.
We also found a huge late Roman cemetery at Taw al-Kefare (Pl. 8.2) during a survey in winter 1997 that lay on a secondary route linking Berenike to the five forts in Wadi Abu Greiya (ancient Vetus Hydreuma). This large necropolis was not related to any apparent nearby settlement and its location here remains a mystery to us. It is possible that people who died while traveling on this road between Berenike and Vetus Hydreuma were buried at Taw al-Kefare, but if so, why are, apparently, only late Roman graves found here? The interments were small cairn types though we also noted some larger tumuli with wide cleared areas surrounding them, which were, in turn delineated by a circle of stones. As this secondary route debouched into the main Wadi Abu Greiya, but south of the ancient forts there, we found another substantial necropolis that preserved both the larger ring type graves and the smaller cairn graves. Most had been badly robbed.
Our survey of the region around Berenike also discovered a small late Roman cemetery comprising perhaps only two dozen robbed graves located just off the main ancient route linking Berenike, via Wadi Abu Greiya and Wadi Khashir, to the Nile. This small graveyard at Bint Abu Greiya was, likely, the last resting place of those expiring at or near Vetus Hydreuma, which was the first major stop on the road from Berenike to the Nile. Again, as in the case of the necropolis at Taw al-Kefare, we do not understand why the burials there were late Roman in date. Where were early Roman-era travelers buried who had died during their journey between the Nile and Berenike?
Our extensive surveys of the emerald mining areas around Wadi Sikait and Wadi Nugrus, a region the Romans called Mons Smaragdus, have detected hundreds of small cist-and cairn-type burials, virtually all of which have been thoroughly looted. Some bones and a few broken potshards are all that survive of these once extensive cemeteries. This is extremely unfortunate. We know that the basement rocks of this rich beryl and emerald-bearing region emit low-level radiation. It would be most interesting, indeed, if some complete skeletons could be found. We could then determine gender, ages at death, and perform experiments to see what effects long-term exposure to this radiation might have had on the health of these individuals. We might also be able to measure the deletrious impact on those consuming food and water obtained from this area, so heavilypolluted by residues from the huge mine tailings (spoil heaps).
James Burton was born in London in 1788 and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. After receiving his master's degree in 1815, he worked several years for the architect Sir John Soane. Traveling in Italy with Sir John, he met Egyptologists like Wilkinson and Lane. In 1822 Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha invited Burton to search for coal in the Egyptian deserts. Not happy with his role as mineralogist, Burton shifted his attention to the ancient monuments in Egypt. He traveled south to Aswan, during which expedition he spent several months in Luxor. There he excavated at Medinet Habu, Karnak, and the Valley of Kings. A volume of hieroglyphic texts Burton recorded during his travels was published in 1828. In 1834 he returned to England, bringing a whole cortege of servants and animals. His family did not seem to be pleased, especially after they found out his wife-to-be was a former Greek slave girl, purchased in Egypt some years before. Acting swiftly, they disowned James shortly after his return.
During his years in Egypt Burton had collected quite a few antiquities, but most of these were auctioned off in 1836 to repay his debts. He died in 1862 in Edinburgh as a “zealous investigator in Egypt of its languageand antiquities.” Burton, unfortunately, appears rarely to have published any of his observations on the Eastern Desert, but his notes, plans, and drawings stored in the British Library in London—donated after his death by his brother Decimius—are, in contrast to Wilkinson's, extremely clear and legible and in some cases he records observations not made by his more famous travel companion.
The French-led expedition at Mons Claudianus between 1987 and 1993 located a cemetery about 320 meters west of the settlement's main fort. Many of the simple inhumation graves there had been badly looted and the team conducted only a cursory survey of the necropolis. Previous visitors, including James Burton in the early nineteenth century, and Leo Tregenza in the late 1940s, found tombstones either known or suspected to have come from this graveyard. Burton noted one that recorded the epitaph of a Roman cavalryman named Gaius Luconius. We know Luconius was active during the reign of the emperor Trajan (AD 98–117) from the excavation of an ostracon near the Mons Claudianus fort that also bears his name.
At Mons Porphyrites a Christian cemetery has long been known and inscribed tombstones have been found there. Our survey in January 1989 located a large tombstone, now broken in two, with a short inscription carved in Greek on apiece of the ubiquitous purple porphyry (Fig. 8.8); it indicated that a man named John from the city of Hermopolis had been buried here. We are not sure which Hermopolis as there were at least two cities that bore this name in the Nile Valley This same tombstone had on its back side other carvings that appeared to be upside down in relation to the “John” epithet.
British archaeologists discovered other burials and skeletal remains during their work at Mons Porphyrites between 1994 and 1998. Pit burials and cairn graves were studied with the former being by far the most prevalent. Examination of skeletal remains from some graves corroborates the thousands of ostraca exhumed and translated from the nearby quarry settlement at Mons Claudianus that women and children lived in these desert communities along with their spouses or other male relatives. Residents in these desert communities apparently had a fairly healthy diet, yet were particularly subject to gastrointestinal and eye disorders (as indicated in ostraca from elsewhere in the Eastern Desert, especially from military installations along the Myos Hormos-Nile road where women and children were also living). Examination of the skeletal remains shows, not surprisingly, that some individuals, especially the males, exhibited a high incidence of damage or strain to vertebrae, indicative of constant and long-term lifting of heavy objects, an occupational hazard for many men working at such a site.
Fig. 8.8: Detail of the tombstone of John the Christian of Hermopolis (on the Nile) from a cemetery near the Lykabettus quarries at Mons Porphyrites. Scale = ten centimeters.
The only other probable tombstone our survey has found over the years in the Eastern Desert came to light along the southern portion of the Via Nova Hadriana in winter 1998. One day an ‘Ababda man living in the region of Hamrnata, a coastal community about forty kilometers north of Berenike, reported seeing a stone with writing on it near the ‘ancient’ road. Following the end of one excavation day at Berenike two of us drove out from camp with the ‘Abadi guide to see this stone. It proved to be a small boulder that had been scratched on in Greek recording a man named Adidos from Pharan, a town in the Sinai. A Christian staurogram (cross) was scratched above Adidos’ name and a small but unidentifiable quadruped animal had been carved running to the left beneath the inscription “PHARANITES” (Fig. 8.9). A second, smaller stone also bore what appeared to be a cross inside a square or rectangle; on the other side of this smaller stone were two other crosses.
Fig. 8.9: Tombstone of Adidos from Pharan (in the Sinai) found along the Via Nova Hadriana north of Berenike. Scale = twenty centimeters.
The ‘Abadi had hidden both stones in a small gully east of, but not far from, the Via Nova Hadriana. He claimed that he had found them next to an unusually large tomb just a few meters west of the Roman highway and we had no reason to doubt him. Our epigrapher finally worked out from the forms in which the Greek letters were scratched that the text had, most likely, been carved in the sixth century. We will never know what Adidos was doing this far from home, but his burial close to the road and not far from Berenike tells us that he was probably en route between Berenike and some point farther north; it also indicates that this stretch of the Via Nova Hadriana was still in use at that late date.
At some point in the near future archaeologists should undertake a more systematic study of the ancient graves and burials in the Eastern Desert. This investigation should begin with the creation of categories of the various types of graves and burials, a quantification of the numbers, locations, and where possible, their dates. Excavation of a cross section of the different types should also be part of this study. We could, in fact, learn a great deal about lifestyles, health, and disease from an examination of the skeletal remains of ancient peoples who lived, died, and were buried throughout the Eastern Desert in various periods. This vital information, however, may never be obtained if current rates of pilferage persist and present lack of interest in systematically studying funerary remains in the desert continues.
