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Real and Literary Landscapes in Ancient Egypt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2011

Judith Bunbury
Affiliation:
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EQ, UK, Email: jmb21@cam.ac.uk
David Jeffreys
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 31-34 Gordon Square, London, WC1H OPY, UK, Email: d.jeffreys@ucl.ac.uk

Abstract

During the past thirty years the Survey of Memphis and others have acquired more than two hundred borehole logs from the Capital Zone of Egypt. Combining these boreholes with maps and satellite images, we show that, during the past five thousand years, the geography of the Nile has been in constant flux with mean rates of migration around 2 m/y and one of its channels becoming extinct, by nature or through human intervention. Re-visiting ancient texts in the light of this changing environment, we show that the literary settings of both fictional and historical texts were real landscapes known to the authors. Hence we infer that ancient descriptions of landscape can be interpreted in a more literal way than before and that the authors were not as prone to writing of a metaphorical realm as was previously thought.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2011

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