Chapter 17 A Desert Pottery from Late Middle Kingdom Fortresses, the Fourth Cataract, and the Atbai
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Abstract
In 1964, the Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition (OINE), under the direction of James E. Knudstad, excavated quarry dumps outside the Middle Kingdom fortress of Serra East. These dumps contained pottery and seal impressions that had been discarded and removed from the fortress proper, well after its construction, sometime in the eighteenth century B.C.E. The sherds included many of convex bowls with deeply incised linear and geometric designs of clearly non-Egyptian origin. While a few others occur in Nubia, these bowls differ from the known products of the contemporary C-Group and Kerma cultures. Similar vessels have been excavated at considerable distance, however, near Kassala and beyond, near the Red Sea, and in the Fourth Cataract region, also by the OINE. Their widespread distribution strongly points to a connection with the Medjay people, who are known to have occupied areas in the Eastern Desert and who appear in Pan Graves in Lower Nubia and Upper Egypt. They are most probably responsible for the appearance of this pottery in the far southeast Atbai and the Fourth Cataract, a geographic distribution confirmed by a well-known dipinto in the tomb of Sebeknakht II at el-Kab in the Second Intermediate Period.