Large Tomb Research Articles

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE DING BRONZE VESSELS FROM XIN'GAN

Shang and Zhou period bronzes that exhibit a number of regional features are being discovered more and more frequently in southern China. Comparative studies of these bronzes are needed to establish their evolutionary sequences. The ritual bronzes from the large Shang tombs at Xin'gan, Jiangxi, are an example. Among the vessels from this tomb, the ding vessels account for more than half of the total. Comparison with their counterparts in the Zhengzhou Erligang phase and the Anyang Yin period shows that typologically the bronzes from Xin'gan distinctly differ from those in the Central Plains, as the main vessel type at Xin'gan is the ding, and in the Central Plains, the gu and jue wine vessels. The Xin'gan ding has a variety of forms, with the flat-legged ding constituting the major group, thus suggesting that this subtype might have developed first in the south. The Xin'gan ding often bears tiger-shaped decorations on its two handles, and these seem to be an indication of totemism among the local ethnic group. Chronologically, the Xin'gan ding roughly correspond to the late Zhengzhou Erligang period.

The ramsesnakht dynasty and the fall of the New Kingdom: a new monument in Thebes

From 1993-96, the joint archaeological project of the German Institute of Archaeology, Cairo (DAI) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) partially excavated a large tomb in the hillside of Dra' Abu el-Naga on the Theban West Bank. The architecture, archaeological record, and objects found thus far indicate that the tomb had at least two major construction and use phases. The original construction of the tomb probably dates back to the late 17th or early 18th dynasties. The second phase includes an extensive remodeling of the complex and can be attributed to a high official of the late 20th dynasty, the Hihg Priest of Amun, Ramsesnakht. The present article is a first attempt to interpret the results of the 1993-96 field seasons when the inside of the tomb and half of both its forecourts were excavated. The emphasis will be on the Ramesside constructions and re-use of the tomb and the possible historical implications.

Archaeological Investigations at Bieta Giyorgis (Aksum), Ethiopia: 1993–1995 Field Seasons

The first archaeological excavations in Tigray, northern Ethiopia, since 1974 were conducted in 1993 at the site of Ona Enda Aboi Zewgé near Aksum. A large stela field associated with artificial stone platforms and human burials was investigated. Preliminary results indicate that this Aksumite cemetery dates from the 1st century B.C. to the 4th century A.C. Evidence of Late Pre-Aksumite occupation was discovered beneath one of the stone platforms. In 1994 an isolated monolith was investigated at Ona Enda Aboi Zewgé. The 1995 excavations continued at Ona Enda Aboi Zewgé, and test excavations were conducted in the settlement associated with this cemetery, Ona Nagast. A large rock-cut tomb was discovered at Ona Enda Aboi Zewgé with evidence of imported materials from the Mediterranean and Nile Valley. Ona Nagast may provide the earliest evidence of wheat, barley, and teff cultivation in Tigray Province. One radiocarbon date from Ona Nagast suggests that the origins of Aksum may go back at least to the 4th century B.C.

5. Yinxu Tomb Number Five and the Question of the Pan Geng-Xiao Xin-Xiao Yi Period in Yinxu Archaeology

ABSTRACTAt the time of the Shang's arrival at Yinxu their material culture was characterized by: (1) oracle-bone inscriptions; (2) bronze decor in Loehr Styles IV and V; (3) bronzes inscribed with societal emblems and ancestral “dedications”; (4) particular ceramic forms; (5) rammed-earth house foundations; and (6) pit graves lined with wooden chambers. These features appear for the first time in association with Tomb 5, that of Fu Hao, the consort of Wu Ding. Shang cultural data at Yinxu earlier than the Tomb 5 period are scarce and scattered. They involve: (1) the architectural remains at Xiaotun before the rammed earth house foundations; (2) earlier Shang tombs (M188, 232, 333, 388); and (3) an earlier Shang tomb at Wuguancun Locus North. Conspicuous cultural changes took place from Pottery Period I (prior to the Tomb 5 period) to Pottery Period II (Tomb 5 period), including: (1) expansion of the area of occupation; (2) oracle-bone inscriptions, rammed-earth house foundations, and large tombs, all evidently associated with the royal house; (3) Period II pottery becomes predominant and Loehr's bronze Styles IV and V come to replace I-III, with inscriptions becoming numerous. It is suggested that the series of changes that occurred with the onset of the Tomb 5 period resulted from Pangeng's move of his capital to this site. If this is so, then the period of the three kings from Pangeng to Xiaoyi must be found within the period of Tomb 5 rather than within the Pottery Period I.

A Note on Stratigraphy at Memphis

In volume XI of this journal Christine Lilyquist published a short account of the ''Middle King dom (or more likely, as she herself argues, First Intermediate Period) cemetery discovered accidentally at Memphis in 1954 and excavated by the Department of Antiquities.1 In March 1975 I paid a brief visit to the site in the company of Abdulla Sayed Mahmoud of the Department of Antiquities, who is preparing a more detailed account of this work. The observations which I made on the context should be regarded as a supplement to Dr. Lilyquist's article; to carry them much further would amount to beginning a fresh survey of Memphis, though this is badly needed. A small number of diagnostic sherds were drawn on the spot and are illustrated here (fig. 1); Mr. Abdulla Sayed very kindly supplied me with the photograph for pl. I. It may be recalled that the burial chambers so far uncovered seem all to be part of one large multiple tomb, probably within one enclosure wall, of a type known elsewhere at this time. One of the excavation photographs shows that, on the east side of the relatively small total area excavated, the eastern wall of this communal tomb was exposed, and, lying in front of it, a row of offeringtables at something like three meters below the present average ground level. In pl. I this east wall of the tomb is towards the right side of the photograph, running away from the viewer. The heap of rough stones piled up against it serves now to protect one of the two funerary stelae found in position in the wall and left standing. The offering-tables were in a row occupying the ground beyond, which has since been partly buried again by an accumulation of earth. The discovery of the offering-tables was of great importance, for it indicated directly where the local ground level was at the time when the tomb was made, and that, as a consequence, most of the burial chambers were at the then ground level. A close parallel to this situation is provided by a large tomb excavated by the Antiquities Department in 1961 at Tell Basta.2 However, beneath this level, as Dr. Lilyquist notes,3 there appear to have been at least two more chambers, and these were presumably truly subterranean, cut into the local ground level beneath the main mass of the communal tomb. In the absence of a detailed contour plan of Memphis, or of a series of spot heights, it is difficult to relate with any precision this particular Middle Kingdom ground level to the floor levels of the nearby New Kingdom shrines and temples, but all would seem to be not far from the present water-table, which provides a rough-and-ready common horizon. Thus the lower burial chambers of the tomb are now partly filled with damp earth to suggest that the water table is not far beneath, and this is the case with the nearby small temple of Hathor Nebet-Hetepet,4 whilst the floors of the great Ptah temple and of the very ruined temple of Rameses II behind the Museum housing the famous colossus are now actually under water. It thus seems likely that the tomb was built on ground which was, if anything, slightly above the level which was used as the floor for the adjacent New Kingdom temples. It is evident from the north and south sides of the cutting in which the tomb lies exposed that the site had been covered by one or more strata of ancient debris. On the north side (pl. I) it can be seen that, when this debris began to accumulate, the roof of the tomb was in ruins and the rubbish

A Hand by Antonio Rizzo and the Double Caritas Scheme of the Tron Tomb

The tomb of Doge Nicolo Tron (d. 1473) in the church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, erected during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, has a good claim to being the first of the large wall-filling tomb structures which became the fashion for high-ranking burials in Venice (Fig. 1).1 The tomb has, however, evoked widely divergent reactions. Critical opinion of the work ranges from “the most grandiose of Venetian funerary monuments of the Renaissance”2 to “an arid effort to impress by sheer size and multiplicity of detail.”3 But both positive and negative judgments stress largeness of scale as the major factor of interest. Rarely have the innovations of the tomb been closely looked at: the establishment of a new unity between wall surface and monument,4 the combination of architecture and sculpture to give a number of well-defined levels in a progressively upward movement which operates both formally and iconographically,5 and the important reinterpretation of certain earlier convention...

Archaeology in Cyprus, 1953

There was no excavation in Neolithic or Chalcolithic sites, but a notable event was the publication of the report by P. Dikaios on his excavations in the mainly pre-pottery settlement at Khirokitía, in which he reviews the relationship and chronology of the cultures preceding the Early Cypriot. A new site of the Erimi stage was located at Palaiómylos near Ayios Thomas by surface finds, including a headless andesite idol of fiddle shape, now in the Limassol Museum.Bronze AgeFurther material from the Kafkála cemetery between Dhenia and Akaki reached the Cyprus Museum through confiscation of pottery looted in the south area, where the tombs are relatively small and poorly furnished. It includes some good red polished II and III and also black polished pottery. With the sponsorship of the Department of Antiquities and the assistance of Mr. G. R. H. Wright of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, Mr. Justice Griffith-Williams undertook the excavation of two of the large looted tombs in the north part of the cemetery. These proved to be Middle Cypriot, and yielded large quantities of fragmentary but restorable white painted pottery. A small intact Early Cypriot II tomb group was excavated in the south area as part of the same operation. At Onísia near Dikomo a Middle Cypriot cemetery was brought to light by cultivation and one tomb with typical furniture, including some bronze weapons, was excavated by the Department.

Roman Milestones in Cyrenaica

The ancient coast road of Libya which runs close to the shore from Berenice (Benghasi) to Teuchira (Tocra) and Ptolemais (Tolmeita) later swings inland to reach Cyrene, and climbs to the second plateau of the Gebel Akhdar (some 500 metres above sea-level), which it reaches in the vicinity of Messa. From Messa eastwards the road can be traced without difficulty, in the form of a shallow cutting in the rock (probably of Greek origin), to Zavia Beda where the remains of the Roman town of Balagrae are still visible. On the Peutinger Map Balagrae is marked as 12 Roman miles from Cyrene, and this figure is accurate if one follows the course of the old road from Beda to the south gate of Cyrene. For its last three kilometres before reaching Cyrene, the ancient road is very clearly visible as a sunk track cut in the rock, with numerous wheel-ruts, and with ancient tombs flanking it. It is far from straight and makes several sharp bends, but there is no indication that Roman engineers attempted to eliminate these eccentricities when the road became one of the highways of the Empire.Roman milestones previously found in the area of Cyrene have all come from the Cyrene—Apollonia road, and the Trajanic column which marked the first mile on that route was found in 1915 by Italian military engineers in the course of bringing back into use the long-abandoned Roman road, which descends the upper escarpment of the Gebel. The column is now in the Museum at Cyrene, but its exact original site can be identified from photographs taken at the time of its discovery: it stood a little east of the large circular tomb immediately below the gallery which now houses the greater part of the ancient sculpture from the Italian excavations.

A Volute Krater at Taranto

In April 1898 at Ceglie near Bari there was discovered a large tomb, the principal contents of which consisted of a number of vases, some entire but most of them in a fragmentary condition, which were later acquired by the Taranto Museum, where they now are. Two of these vases, both large volute kraters, on account of the great interest of the subjects and of the general excellence of their composition and drawing, are of the highest importance for the study of early South Italian pottery and it seems surprising that they have remained so long unpublished, despite an ever-increasing amount of literature about them. One, published earlier in the present year, depicts (a) seated Dionysus surrounded by his followers and (b) on the upper register, Perseus terrifying the silens with the Gorgon's head, and below, dancers at the festival of the Karneia. The other vase (Plates VIII, IX) is even more richly figured as it has separate scenes on the neck as well. Its obverse shews (i) a scene from the fight between the Centaurs and Lapiths, (ii) the birth of Dionysus; and the reverse, (i) Herakles served by silens, (ii) an Amazonomachy. Two are subjects common in the repertory of the vase painter, two are rare.

The Amathus bowl

The masterpiece of Oriental craftsmanship reproduced in Plates I—III is said by General L. P. di Cesnola to have been found in April 1875, in a rich but partially despoiled chamber-tomb at Amathus in Cyprus. Cesnola's account of the discovery exaggerates the depth at which chamber-tombs are found in Cyprus, but his plan corresponds fairly well with that of a large tomb (still accessible in 1894, and probably to-day) in the low ground north of the acropolis of Amathus. The silver bowl, already broken, and other objects, are said to have been found in a ‘copper cauldron,’ as if discarded by an earlier tomb-robber.The ‘Amathus Bowl’ and a bronze shield-boss (rondache) said to have been found with it were published by G. Colonna-Ceccaldi in 1876 and republished in 1882 in his collected papers. The copper-plate illustration is signed S. Dardel, and was printed by Ch. Chardon ainé in Paris. If the ‘patère et rondache’ were brought separately to Paris, this may account for their alienation from the main Cesnola Collection. Dardel's engraving does not include the long ends of the rim, and is inaccurate in several details, as appears from the reproduction in fig. 1. It was reproduced on a smaller scale in Helbig, Homerisches Epos, 1884, Plate I, and repeatedly elsewhere.

A Vase of Polygnotan Style: (M. d. I. xi., 38)

The krater which is the subject of this paper is preserved in the Louvre. It has been well engraved in the Monumenti of the Institute, and discussed by Helbig in the Bulletino (1881, p. 276), by Robert in the Annali (1882, p. 273), and by Winter in his Jüngere Attische Vasen (p. 45). My object in resuming the study of it is twofold. Firstly, the vase is so remarkable for beauty and distinction of style as to have scarcely an equal, and it will be a good thing to bring it in any way to the notice of English artists and archaeologists. And secondly, in spite of Professor Robert's able paper, it appears to me that it is susceptible of a more complete explanation than it has yet received.It was discovered at Orvieto in 1880, in a large tomb consisting of two chambers. In the same tomb were found several other vases, ranging in date from the early part of the fifth to the middle of the fourth century. Our vase was in that of the two chambers in which were for the most part later vases; but Professor Helbig states that the contents of the two chambers were broken, and so much intermingled that it was difficult to say that the vases lay in distinct groups. It seems therefore that the circumstances of the finding do not compel us to assign a particular date to our vase. Professor Robert would give it to the first quarter of the fourth century.