Hedvig Győry: Mélanges offerts a Edith Varga „Le lotus qui sort de terre” (Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts Supplément 1. Budapest, 2001)
ROSALIE DAVID: The Riqqeh Pectoral in the Manchaster Museum
The Riqqeh Pectoral in the Manchester Museum T he Riqqeh Pectoral, one of the key pieces in the Egyptian collection at The Manchester Museum, University of Manchester, England, was discovered by Reginald Engelbach in 1912. He was excavating for the British School of Archaeology in Egypt who donated the pectoral to the museum in 1913. 1 These excavations were started at the beginning of December and continued for four months, concentrating on the graves situated between the modern villages of Kafr ' Ammar and el-Gerzeh, on the west bank of the Nile, at the entrance to the Fayoum. Initially, Engelbach had decided to work on these graves in order to obtain more general information about the stretch of land between Lisht and Meydum, an area which he had not previously explored, but when he discovered the extent of this cemetery, he decided to devote his attention to this site. The cemetery area occupied some four miles of the desert, stretching beyond the limits of the modern village of el-Gerzeh. However, since it lay within the district of the modern town of Riqqeh, some six miles south of Kafr 'Ammar, Engelbach decided to use the name 'Riqqeh' to identify the site in his publication. He divided this area into seven separate cemeteries (A-G), according to the dates of the burials, which covered a period from predynastic times down to the modern era. 2 Cemetery A, which contained tomb-shafts dating to Dynasty 12, was situated on a hill which lay about half a mile to the north of el-Gerzeh. Almost all the graves were large and had obviously belonged to important people. In contrast, there were smaller graves in the contemporary Cemetery B which, because it was situated nearer to the inundation, had suffered more from the effects of dampness than the elevated burials in Cemetery A. Engelbach sugR. Engelbach, Riqqeh and Memphis VI, London 1915, pp. 11-13; pl. I. Engelbach, op. cit., pp. 4-5.
