Naukratis

The Naukratis project is interdisciplinary and collaborative, involving scholars from many museums and research institutes across the world – in the UK, Europe, Egypt, the USA and Australia.

Work began in 2003 with a focus on Greek pottery, the largest single group of finds from Naukratis, and one of the most important and varied Archaic and Classical pottery assemblages known from the ancient world. The British Museum's research on this was in part conducted in collaboration with researchers of the SFB 295 B.1 ‘Griechische Kunst und Kunsthandwerk in Ägypten. Kulturtransfer und Interaktion in archaischer Zeit’ at the University of Mainz, Germany, led by Ursula Höckmann.

While the main focus was on the British Museum collection, a loan of nearly 1,000 sherds of Greek pottery from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford enabled us to study them alongside our own material.

In 2004, a joint conference at the British Museum examined Greek pottery from Naukratis in the context of exchange in the Eastern Mediterranean. The proceedings were published in 2006 (Villing and Schlotzhauer 2006), revealing much new information on the early Greek inhabitants and visitors of Naukratis, their religious life, and the networks of exchange of which the town was a part. Greek pottery from Naukratis also provided a rich field for scientifically investigating Archaic pottery production in the East Greek ‘mother cities’ of Naukratis that remained poorly understood. One of the results that emerged from this work was the identification of a workshop of Greek-style pottery in sixth century BC Naukratis.

In 2011, efforts were concentrated on working with partner museums that hold large portions of the finds, in the UK, US, Egypt and elsewhere, as well as on cataloguing material in the British Museum collection.

Huge thanks are due to the curators, registrars and administrators at all of these museums, whose assistance is vital to the project. An exciting (if somewhat alarming) development resulting from this phase of work is that numbers of known objects from Naukratis have been going up steadily.

Gathering and studying excavation diaries and notes is another aspect of the work we began in 2011. The Egypt Exploration Society, the Petrie Museum and the Griffith Institute at Oxford kindly allowed us to examine and digitise many documents relevant to Petrie’s work at the site. The diaries of Hogarth’s two seasons at the site were also generously provided for study and documentation by his granddaughter.

Some 700 pages of relevant documents have now been digitised and work on transcribing them is nearly complete.

While much of 2011-12 was dedicated to gathering evidence, we were able to engage in at least some research and preliminary synthesis. A first overview of the hitherto much neglected Egyptian material alongside excavation documentation proved particularly interesting, suggesting that Egyptian Naukratis is earlier than is often thought. A preliminary study of 1400 terracotta and limestone figurines catalogued to date revealed significant local production from the seventh century BC to the Roman period displaying a notable variety of cross-cultural influences over time.

Research on these and other groups of material is continually informed by scientific analyses. Greek, Cypriot and locally made terracotta figurines and pottery have been sampled for NAA and petrographic/SEM-EDX analysis, and we expect first results from this new batch of analyses (which follows on from earlier work) soon. This should help resolve some tricky questions of provenance, but also allow us to investigate potting technology and its transfer in a cross-cultural environment.

A two-day workshop on Naukratis and the Nile Delta at the British Museum in December 2011 was attended by around 60 scholars from the UK, the rest of Europe, Egypt, Israel and the USA.

It featured 24 papers on topics ranging from sites such as Naukratis, Herakleion, Alexandria, and Schedia to the distribution of Greek trade amphorae in Egypt, the Nile Delta landscape and waterways, pottery and faience production and trade, and developing interaction between Greeks, Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Cypriots in the Eastern Mediterranean. A further workshop is planned for early 2013.