Zeitzeugen aus dem Wüstensand

Since the beginnings of Egyptomania around A.D. 1800, many human remains from ancient Egypt have been removed from their find contexts, which caused enormous loss of scientific information that still remains to be compensated to this day. The material studied here consists of mummies’ heads and macerated crania from Abusir el-Meleq at the entrance to Faiyum Oasis, which are now kept in the Osteological Collection of Tübingen University and the State Museums in Berlin. There are many arguments to support the hypothesis that they had been deposited from the Late Period until Hellenistic and Roman times, however, they do not represent a fully excavated funeral population of its own and with an established chronology and burial sequence. Apart from the reconstruction of find circumstances, the anthropological investigation comprised age and sex determinations, a pathological estimation, and the documentation of metrical and non-metrical characteristics. All this permitted a regional and supra-regional demographic description of this sample from Faiyum and its re-incorporation into the historical and anthropological context.