Black organic coatings and ritual deposits on ancient Egyptian coffins and cartonnage cases are important and understudied sources of evidence about the rituals of funerary practice. Sometimes, the coatings were applied extensively over the surface of the coffin, resembling paint; in other cases, they were poured over the mummy case or wrapped body, presumably as part of a funerary ritual. For this study, multiple samples of black coatings and ritual liquids were taken from 20 Egyptian funerary items dating to a specific time period (c. 943 to 716 BC). Multiple sampling from each object enabled several comparisons to be made: the variability of the black coating within one application, the variability between two applications on one object, and the variability from object to object. All samples were analyzed for lipids using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS), and 51 samples from across the 20 items were further analyzed for the presence of bitumen using solid phase separation followed by selected ion monitoring GC-MS. The majority of the black substances were found to comprise a complex mixture of organic materials, including bitumen from the Dead Sea, conifer resin, and Pistacia resin, providing evidence for a continuation in international trade between Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean after the Late Bronze Age. Both the coating and the anointing liquid are very similar to mummification balms, pointing to parallels with Egyptian embalming rituals and raising questions about the practical aspects of Egyptian funerary practice.
Bitumen has been identified for the first time in Egyptian occupied Nubia, from within the town of Amara West, occupied from around 1300 to 1050 BC. The bitumen can be sourced to the Dead Sea using biomarkers, evidencing a trade in this material from the eastern Mediterranean to Nubia in the New Kingdom or its immediate aftermath. Two different end uses for bitumen were determined at the site. Ground bitumen was identified in several paint palettes, and in one case can be shown to have been mixed with plant gum, which indicates the use of bitumen as a ground pigment. Bitumen was also identified as a component of a friable black solid excavated from a tomb, and a black substance applied to the surface of a painted and plastered coffin fragment. Both contained plant resin, indicating that this substance was probably applied as a ritual funerary liquid, a practice identified from this time period in Egypt. The use of this ritual, at a far remove from the royal Egyptian burial sites at Thebes, indicates the importance of this ritual as a component of the funeral, and the value attributed to the material components of the black liquid. Black materials were excavated from different contexts in the pharaonic town of Amara West in Upper Nubia, dating from around 1300 to 1050 BC (19th-20th dynasties), and its cemeteries (1250-800 BC). The materials were of three types: black paints on ceramic sherds used as palettes; a black coating on a coffin plaster fragment; and a black friable material excavated from a tomb. Considering a group of contextually different black materials from a single site together offers an opportunity to understand the cultural and practical preferences for the choice of materials used to make black substances, and in which contexts they might be applied. Molecular analysis using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) was used to identify the components of the different materials using three separate methods. Identifying the components allows the ingredients of the black substances to be connected to their end uses both in practical and symbolic terms. Amara West. Amara West lies between the Second and Third Nile Cataracts, in the heart of Nubia, a region that stretched from Aswan in southern Egypt southwards to the Sixth Nile Cataract 1 (Fig. 1). This region was intermittently occupied by pharaonic Egypt in the third and second millennium BC; during the New Kingdom (c. 1548-1086 BC), pharaonic towns were founded to control and administer resource extraction 2. First excavated by the Egypt Exploration Society between 1939 and 1950 3 , fieldwork was then undertaken at Amara West by the British Museum from 2008 to 2019 4-6. The town, founded around 1300BC (on the basis of inscriptional evidence), comprised a sandstone temple, a governor's residence, storage facilities, and housing, set within a 108 m square enclosure wall 2 (Fig. 1). From the late 19th Dynasty residents of the town began to build larger and more spacious houses outside the town wall, an area designated by the excavators as the "w...
Pigments from paint palettes and a grindstone excavated from the pharaonic town of Amara West (c. 1300–1050 BCE), which lies between the Second and Third Cataracts of the Nile, were examined using polarized light microscopy, attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR), X-ray diffraction, and scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. Most of the pigments were consistent with the typical ancient Egyptian palette, but the greens and some blues were unusual. Two types of green pigment were identified, chlorite (varieties clinochlore and penninite) and copper chloride hydroxide (atacamite type). The former constitutes a type of green earth which has only rarely been identified in pharaonic Egyptian contexts and may be more widespread than is currently reported. The majority of the blue pigment samples were Egyptian blue, but some were found to be a blue earth, the main component of which being sodic amphibole riebeckite. The use of this mineral as a pigment has not previously been reported in any Nile Valley context. These results prompt questions around local and potentially indigenous practices within an ancient colonial context, and highlight avenues for future research.
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