Trade Roads in Ancient Deserts: An Egyptian Case Study. The unrecognized Late Bronze Age commercial route between Mediterranean and Middle Egypt

Project Information

TRADES

Grant agreement ID: 326693

Project closed

Start date 6 January 2014

End date 5 January 2016

Funded under

• Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Total cost € 221 606,40

EU contribution € 221 606,40

Coordinated by

THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL
United Kingdom

Objective

This project focuses on the possibility that extensive trade and movements of goods imported both from the Eastern Mediterranean and the Oases of the Western Desert took place along a relatively unexplored and unsuspected NW-SE route between the Mediterranean coast of northwest Egypt and Middle Egypt, via the Western Desert and the Faiyum region during the Late Bronze Age – New Kingdom (1580–1065 BC). This would have effectively created an ‘alternative Nile valley’ trade connection, comprising a sea/land/river route to the west of the Nile Delta and northern Nile Valley. In order to explore this situation, the project will (1) analyse imported artifacts along the new route, focusing particularly on the maritime fortress site of Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham at the northwestern end of the route, and the roughly contemporary commercial port and royal city of Gurob, in the Faiyum region, at the southeastern end of the route, (2) undertake geo-archaeological study of the landscape with a specific focus on the eastern portion of the Faiyum region and (3) study areas of the desert via a detailed analysis of aerial photographs and satellite images. The principal goals of the current project are to obtain a complete and comprehensive study of the imported pottery corpus unearthed in the eastern Faiyum region and in the site of Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham; to study the Egyptian pottery found in the same archaeological contexts of the imported one; to carry out chemical analyses on the imported materials to achieve information on the areas of productions; to define precisely what were the trade connections in the northeastern Western Desert and to obtain important new data related to the role of the eastern Faiyum as a regional and interregional trade hub during the New Kingdom.

Fields of science

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.

• engineering and technology › mechanical engineering › vehicle engineering › aerospace engineering › satellite technology

Programme(s)

• FP7-PEOPLE - Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Topic(s)

• FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF - Marie-Curie Action: "Intra-European fellowships for career development"

Call for proposal

FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

MC-IEF - Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)

Coordinator

THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL

• EU contribution: € 221 606,40
• Address: BROWNLOW HILL 765 FOUNDATION BUILDING ; L69 7ZX Liverpool ; United Kingdom
• Region: North West (England) › Merseyside › Liverpool
• Activity type: Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
• Total cost: No data