Digging in the Ancient Town of Abydos	Volume 54 Number 4, July/August 2001
by Matthew Douglas Adams

Early town sites in Egypt are rarely excavated; Abydos provides an important exception. Today, the site of the ancient town is marked by the presence of massive mud-brick enclosure walls of various periods and by the exposed wall foundations from the Dynasty XXX (380-343 B.C.) temple of Osiris. Our excavations at the site, which began in 1991, have revealed a large area of mud-brick houses. Most were occupied from ca. 2300 to 2000 B.C.--the late Old Kingdom, through the First Intermediate Period, and into the early Middle Kingdom--and most underwent several phases of renovation. Nearby we found an open-air workshop where faience beads and amulets were made during the later Old Kingdom, the earliest faience production facility ever discovered in Egypt.

Matthew Douglas Adams is a research scholar at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Abydos Intro

© 2001 by the Archaeological Institute of America archive.archaeology.org/0107/abstracts/abydos2.html