Fieldwork at Saqqara, Egypt, September-October 2023

In early autumn, the project team took a temporary residency at Saqqara to conduct a much anticipated fieldwork. Our specialists focused on the core elements of the project, including the study of human remains, documentation and examination of funerary textiles, and identification of botanical remains from burial contexts.

Iwona and Emily continued the study of human remains excavated during extremely busy pre-pandemic field seasons. The number of inhumations excavated over the years by the Polish-Egyptian Archaeological team is now nearing 800, and the study of human remains from different periods of Ancient Egypt offers an unparalleled insight into the life and death at Saqqara and the ancient Memphite necropolis more broadly. To investigate the impact of changing environmental conditions on the ancient inhabitants of the region, our focus has been on collecting skeletal data and establishing temporal physical health profiles of the Saqqara cemetery population.

This field season was also extremely busy for Magda, our textile specialist, who managed to document and examine nearly 200 pieces of textiles recovered from burial contexts. While the majority of the textile collection was represented by mummy wrappings in various stages of completeness and preservation, also present were large sheets of linen used as mummy shrouds, as well as identifiable – on closer inspection – pieces of garments.

One of the season’s highlights was the identification of a group of linen fragments with clear evidence of pleating. This is a very exciting find for us! Magda’s diligent and painstaking investigative work delivered even more surprises, as she was able to determine that one of the late Old Kingdom/First Intermediate Period coffined burials contained fragments of two pleated dresses, and one of those dresses was likely never worn! Exciting results kept coming with the news that one of another linen assemblages examined by Magda was found to comprise two small and fragile fragments decorated with yellow and red threads made of wool!

With all these exciting finds and many questions to answer pertaining to the textile production, its use and application, Magda collected dozens of samples, which were subsequently transferred to the Research and Conservation Centre in Cairo for laboratory analyses (GC-MS, HPLC-MS and SEM). These will allow for identification of (1) fibres and dyes; (2) fixative substances used in pleating linen; and (3) the composition of resin residues on linen from mummified remains. We expect the results to be available sometime next year, so stay tuned!

Equally exciting was the study of botanical remains, conducted by our specialist, Mennat. She conducted a naked-eye examination alongside microscopic analysis to identify botanical species used to make funerary garlands and wreaths, which adorned some of the mummified remains recovered from the Upper Necropolis. We were excited to learn that the garlands were mostly made of persea (Mimusops laurifolia) leaves, which were folded over a central string of papyrus to make funerary garlands that were then affixed to a wrapped mummified body. We hope to present the complete set of findings in a series of publications and further announcements will be made in due course.

Equally important was the work conducted by the project documentalist, Agnieszka, who was responsible for cataloguing the finds, and our project photographer, Mateusz, who was in charge of digital documentation of finds and human remains, as well as our work in the field.

We would like to thank the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities for granting the permission to continue our work at Saqqara and for approving our extensive programme of research. We are equally grateful to our Egyptian colleagues at the Saqqara Antiquities Directorate for their support and assistance throughout our fieldwork. We would like to acknowledge Dr Mohammad Youssef for his support and supervision of the transfer of samples to the Research and Conservation Centre in Cairo.