Between 1924 and 1932, the American expedition of Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) conducted extensive excavations in the Egyptian fortresses of the Nile’s Second Cataract. Nearly a century after the beginning of the works, the documental archives and material artefacts recorded during these campaigns continue to be a source of information to gain knowledge on the daily life in the Middle Kingdom Egyptian demarcation line.
During the Summer of 2023, the speaker was a visiting scholar at the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) as part of his resMA thesis project, compiling and collecting a comprehensive set of data from an unpublished corpus of clay figurines unearthed from the Second Cataract fortresses. In the lecture, he will present the preliminary conclusions extracted from the analyses and documental exploration conducted in Boston, shedding new light on the fortifications themselves and the everyday reality of the ancient Egyptian frontier inhabitants from four thousand years ago.

photo©Andrés Martín García de la Cruz / Courtesy of the MFA, Boston