Tell el-Dabʿa XXIV

The current volume presents the final excavation report of three late Middle Kingdom settlement layers at the site of Tell el-Dab‘a in the Egyptian Nile delta. These settlement layers comprise a number of dwellings, which belonged to non-elite people judging by their size and remaining inventories, who lived in the marsh-like environment in the north of Egypt in the late Middle Kingdom (ca 1830–1700 BC). Beside the mud brick architecture typical for ancient Egyptian housing, storage facilities such as rounded silos, open air hearths, industrial ovens, and irregular alleyways were unearthed. The houses are systematically described and analysed in combination with the associated finds. These finds include pottery and stone vessels, stone tools such as querns and grinders, chipped stone tools and a few other items made of faience. A small number of objects made of hard rock imply that they must have been imported because such stones do not exist in the delta. Importantly animal bones inform us about the diet of the people living there, whilst imported pottery vessels from the Levant and Upper Egypt show these exchange networks. This book provides a much-needed primary source for late Middle Kingdom settlement archaeology, a topic generally neglected in the literature. In addition, the book describes a settlement type so far not represented in the known repertoire, namely a self-organised settlement with individual dwellings not uniform in size or lay-out. Such lay-outs stand in contrast to intentionally founded settlements following a rigid plan in rows with orthogonal streets and regular blocks of houses as known from Lahun in Northern Upper Egypt or from the forts in Nubia. Moreover, due to the fact that three successive settlement layers are presented, it is possible to follow the development of the settlement over a period of more than 100 years. In this way the book adds information to the current corpus of settlement types.