 | John Darnell, shown here at an expedition site, is accompanied on his travels by undergraduate and graduate students. His discoveries have yielded new insight into ancient Egyptian civilization. |
On either side of the Nile Valley of Egypt stretch rocky cliffs and deserts, much of which was formerly thought to be of little archaeological note.
Expeditions in the Western desert -- directed by John Darnell, associate professor of Egyptology, with co-director Deborah Darnell, research affiliate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) -- have challenged previous assumptions about the archaeological value of the area, however. (see related story.)
In a dozen seasons, Darnell's expedition, the Theban Desert Road Survey, has discovered a wealth of material spanning over 4,000 years. Contrary to what once was believed, Darnell's work has demonstrated that the ancient Egyptians were using a network of roads that crisscrossed the desert and provided economic and cultural links to various parts of Egypt and Africa.
The Theban Desert Road Survey's discovery of a group of the world's earliest known alphabetic inscriptions in an area called the Wadi el-Hol, in the Western Desert northwest of Luxor, Egypt, shed new light on the so-called Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. Researchers have long thought that Proto-Sinaitic -- the letter-form precursor of the first alphabet -- originated about 1600 B.C.E. in the deserts of ancient Sinai and Palestine.
Based on the expedition's discoveries in the 1990s, however, it now appears that the alphabet began two or three hundred years earlier, in Egypt.
In the Yale researchers' view, the invention of this alphabet afforded a means for overworked Egyptian scribes to deal with an influx of foreign mercenaries who had come across the Sinai to fight in the Egyptian civil wars at the end of the third millennium B.C.E. The scribes, they surmise, needed a way to write the names of non-Egyptians in a purely "syllabic" fashion, and an adaptation of the system resulted in the Proto-Alphabetic scripts, of which Darnell's team discovered the earliest known examples in the Wadi el-Hol. Some of these mercenaries eventually took this script back to their homelands.
At another inscription site, Gebel Tjauti, also in the Western Desert, the Theban Desert Road Survey found in 1995 a tableau of incised drawings that may be the world's earliest historical document. The scenes and symbols likely refer to critical events at the dawn of Dynasty O, about 3250 B.C.E., during the transition to a unified monarchy under the first pharaohs. The tableau consists of a combination of images and proto-hieroglyphic annotations, one of which -- a falcon over a scorpion -- appears to label the mace-wielding "hero" of the event as the ruler Horus Scorpion, who is known to have played a prominent role in the unification of ancient Egypt.
Other discoveries include a new Middle Egyptian literary text and the first evidence for intensive contacts between the Nile Valley and Kharga Oasis, hundreds of miles out in the Western Desert, during the Predynastic and Protodynastic periods of the late fourth millennium B.C.E. The Darnells also found a rock inscription giving the only direct historical information concerning the northward expansion of Thebes at the end of the First Intermediate Period, about 2000 B.C.E.
The discoveries by Darnell and his expedition have resulted in widespread media attention, including articles in The New York Times, as well as in several scholarly publications.
Yale undergraduate and graduate students regularly participate in the archaeological project, joining team members from other universities and institutions. In particular, Colleen Manassa, a graduate student in Near Eastern languages and civilizations, has assisted with the work both in Egypt and at Yale, and is now helping finalize the publication of inscribed material from the fabled "Chephren Quarries" of the Western Desert.
T H I S
Desert expeditions challenge previous
notions about early societies
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