New Kingdom Ostraca from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

AuthorDarnell, Colleen Manassa
PositionBook review

New Kingdom Ostraca from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. By FREDRIK Hagen. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 46. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Pp. xiii + 124, illus. $155.

This slim, elegant volume represents the type of primary publication of New Kingdom ostraca that remains one of the desiderata of Egyptological scholarship. As a quote from C. Eyre (from a review in this Journal over a decade ago) in the preface of the volume eloquently expresses, the goal of the volume under review is "the slow, often thankless task of primary publication of New Kingdom hieratic ostraca ... typically cherry-picked for publication ... leaving the less legible, fragmentary, unpromising pieces" (Eyre 2000: 239). From its comprehensive catalog and appropriate commentary to its detailed facsimiles, Hagen demonstrates how useful such "thankless" tasks remain to the study of ancient Egyptian texts.

The volume begins with a short introduction to the corpus, consisting primarily of the history of the collection of the Egyptian ostraca in the Fitzwilliam Museum. As Hagen summarizes, the majority of the almost fifty documents (including one fake--E.GA.6122.1943) were registered in three lots (1926, 1943, and 1946), with others entering the collections as individual artifacts; the second lot was part of a bequest of Grenville Gayer-Anderson, whose collection is now dispersed in museums around the world (for a biographical sketch and the Cairo collection, see now Ikram 2010). Of the provenanced ostraca, most are from Deir el-Medina, but additional find-spots include Deir el-Bahri and Abydos, information included in the catalog entries for each of the ostraca. The contents of the ostraca are unsurprisingly heterogeneous, ranging from part of the Amun-Re hymn attested in R Boulaq 17, trial tomb decoration, administrative documents, and model letters, to quotations from Middle Kingdom literary texts.

The catalog proceeds in numerical order and each entry includes a basic physical description, summary of the contents, translation, and commentary; the plates include photographs, facsimiles, and hieroglyphic transcriptions of each ostracon. Missing from the physical description is a measurement of the depth of each ostracon, which in cases like E.GA.6130.1943 (pi. 32) would have been interesting to include. Another useful category of information that might have been included in the catalog is the fabric designation for each of the ceramic ostraca; for example, E.63.1946 is described as "a pottery sherd, gray/white in colour"--is this from a marl sherd or perhaps a white-slipped silt vessel? Other pottery sherds (i.e., E.74.1926 and E.75.1926) are not otherwise specified.

Additionally, one would have expected the author to provide transliterations of the texts within the catalog, but transliteration is otherwise present only in the index (pp. 50-56). As the author notes, his textual commentaries "occupy a middle ground...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT