About

The Gurob Harem Palace Project is an ongoing study of the urban and funerary remains at the 'harim town' of Mer-wer (or Mi-Wer) at the site of Medinet el-Ghurob - hereafter described as Gurob - in the southern Faiyum region.[1]

The main area of settlement remains at the site can be clearly identified as the remains of an independent establishment relating to royal women (a 'harim-palace'), founded in the reign of Thutmose III (1479-1425 BC) and occupied throughout the rest of the 18th Dynasty and presumably also for at least part of the Ramesside period. The inscriptions on stelae, papyri and various other inscribed artefacts from the main buildings at the site repeatedly include the titles of officials connected with the royal harim of Mer-wer. There was evidently a similar establishment at Memphis, but that site has not survived.[2]

The principal aims of the Gurob Project are:

  1. To produce an accurate 1:1000 map of the site as a whole, combining GIS so as to allow our growing databases of ceramics, small finds and lithics to be mapped onto the visible surface features,
  2. To create more detailed plans of the main points of archaeological interest in the settlement and cemeteries,
  3. To produce a basic modern corpus of pottery at the site and,
  4. To use satellite photographs, geophysical methods and core-drilling to gain a better understanding of the subsurface material and architectural remains, as well as the relationship between the site of Gurob and its landscape and environment. The vast majority of the ceramic material covering the surface of the site dates to the mid- to late New Kingdom, affording considerable potential to analyse chronological and functional patterns across the site through the study of such material.

In April 2005 we conducted a brief preliminary two-week season of fieldwork at the site, comprising GPS mapping of key features of the site and surface collection of pottery from a small number of localities. The GPS points demonstrated that it would be possible to produce a new map of the site as a whole, using a total station, while the analysis of the pottery indicated that, although the vast majority of the ceramic material dates to the mid- to late New Kingdom, there is considerable potential to analyse chronological and functional patterns across the site through the study of such material. These two approaches have therefore been adopted as key elements in the strategy for exploration and analysis of the site in 2006-9.



[1] The 2005-9 teams comprised 23 members (from the University of Liverpool, unless stated otherwise): Ian Shaw, Amir Kamal, Claire Malleson, Jan Picton (University College London), Ivor Pridden (University College London), Hannah Pethen, Nadia Mahmoud, Georgina Forrest, Tina Jakielski (Bath University), Georgia Xekalaki, Dan Boatright, Anna Hodgkinson, Eleanor Hughes (University of Cambridge), Virpi Perunka (University of Helsinki), Cordula Werschkun, Kris Strutt (University of Southampton), Robert Billington, Sarah Cooke, Marine Yoyotte (Sorbonne, Paris), Tomasz Herbich (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences), Artur Buszek (Polish Centre, Cairo), Dawid Swiech (Jagiellonian University, Cracow), Ashraf el-Senussi (Curator of the Kom Aushim Museum, SCA), as well as our Egyptian SCA inspectors: Mohammed Ibrahim Mohammed (2005), Inas Mohammed Talaat (2006), Atef Said Hashem (2007), Girges Moneir Amin (2008), and Sayed Mohamed Abdel Samed (2009), and the two successive directors of the Faiyum branch of the SCA, Dr el-Aidy (2005) and Dr Ahmed Abd-el Aal (2006-9).

[2] Reiser, 1972: 28-31.