Seal-palooza

No, not seals the animals.  Seals as in seal impressions.  The ancient Egyptians really, really liked administration and bureaucracy (modern Egypt really isn’t that different- try to renew your visa sometime and you’ll see what I mean), and sealings were a large part of administration.  A sealing is a piece of mud which was stuck over a door, box, letter, or bag, which then had a scarab seal pressed into it, leaving an impression of the design on the seal.   Thus, if the sealing was broken, the person would know that someone else had gotten into their shipment, letter, or storehouse.  They were in the most widespread use during the Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period.   In Edfu in the columned hall area (Zone I), we have pulled up over 1,000 sealings in the past five years.   We thought that when we moved over to Zone III on the other side of the site, we were done pulling them up.

We were so, so wrong.

A sealing I found inside a pot. 

In an area approximately 50 cm x 75 cm I excavated a few days ago, I found over 100 sealings.  Nadine had previously found in that area 65 sealings.   The area was adjacent one of the silos, but was actually a fireplace.  How did so many sealings end up in a fireplace?  Your guess is as good as mine.  The really neat thing though was that these appear to be earlier than the sealings we found in the columned hall area.  It would be really, really cool to develop a chronology of sealing designs which could be useful for dating strata, since we have so many.