The Phoebe A Hearst Expedition to Naga pdf

The Phoebe A. Hearst Expedition to Naga ed-Deir, Cemeteries N 2000 and N 2500

Edited by Vanessa Davies

THE PHOEBE A. HEARST EXPEDITION TO NAGA ED-DEIR, CEMETERIES N 2000 AND N 2500

Book foreword

The village of Naga ed-Deir is located on the east bank of the Nile opposite Girga in Upper Egypt and some 160 km north of Luxor. Here is located an important series of cemeteries representing a long period of time principally from the Predynastic Period to the Middle Kingdom.

Sheikh Farag is located on the north and Mesheikh six kilometres to the south with Naga ed-Deir itself located about one and a half kilometres south of Sheikh Farag. Meshech is separated from Naga ed-Deir by the site of Mesaeed. The subdivisions of the site all form part of a single, large cemetery that served as a necropolis for the ancient town of Thinis, whether at Girga or nearby.

This functioned as the ancient capital of Upper Egypt nome 8, while Abydos was a secondary seat of the central government and, by the Middle Kingdom, an important religious centre of the god Osiris.

Reisner designated all these subdivisions as the “Cemeteries of Naga ed-Deir” or simply “Naga ed-Deir.”

Reisner excavated the different subdivisions at first for the Hearst Egyptian Expedition of the University of California up to 1905, when Mrs Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the patroness of the expedition, and mother of the newspaper publisher Willian Randolph Hearst, informed Reisner that owing to a fault in the gold-bearing stratum of the Homestake Mine, a large part of her income had been cut off so that she could not continue her support beyond 1905.

At that point, and after extended negotiations, the excavations resumed under Reisner’s direction but as the Harvard-University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Egyptian Expedition.

Reisner and his assistants published several volumes on the excavation in the Naga ed-Deir cemeteries, as follows:

Reisner, G. A. 1908. Early Dynastic Cemeteries of Naga-ed-Dêr, Part I. The University

of California Publications, Egyptian Archaeology 2. Leipzig.