Hi, my name is Manuela Lehmann
and I work as a project curator for the Amara West project at the British Museum,
Welcome to my corner.
That was horrible, nevermind....
So Amara West is a pharonic settlement in what we call now Nubia.
This is modern northern Sudan and this is a settlement of pharonic Egyptians
and we also excavated some of their tombs,
so it is very nice to have a comparison of the material
between the finds from the settlements and from the tombs.
When we look at the pharonic Egyptian culture we can see that the people were often
buried in coffins in tombs and these people often get things from their daily lives
placed with them in the tombs. So for example beds but also chairs or boxes or things like that.
And if we look at the Nubian culture we can see that in Nubia
people are also buried with beds but in a different way.
So in Nubia the bodies are often placed directly on top of the beds,
they are buried with example leather hides or something like that.
So we can see that in both cultures we find beds in the tombs but they are treated in a different way.
So when we excavate in Sudan we usually have an inspector from NCAM with us
and for many years Mohamed has been working for us in Amara West.
My name is Mohamed Saad from National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums Sudan.
Excavation at the Amara West cemetery provides us with many wooden objects
and most important is the bed, we call it angareeb bed,
it is sometimes well preserved and sometimes it is fragmented.
The work in the cemetery for the Amara West project
is sometimes very easy and sometimes is really difficult
it depends on how they bury their relatives and sometimes it is very deep
and sometimes it is shallow, sometimes it’s not far from the surface
but with some hard work we get through and dig all the graves there.
I like working in tombs because I found myself there, [laughs] or I find myself there....
People usually think that we find complete, very nicely preserved beds
but it's not always the case
so most of the bark material we find look like this
so we have to go through each and every fragment and see if we can identify what one of this was originally.
Yeah?
I love Jigsaw puzzles (laughs) Comes in handy when you get the job!
So yeah by starting to study these wooden fragments the beds were easiest to identify
and if you walk around in the modern Nubian villages you will see a lot of wooden beds
that are very similar. They are not identical but they have a lot of things in common.
So of course while I worked on them it was just natural to go round and see because almost
any Nubian house, also the house where we live, will have one old wooden bed in a corner somewhere.
So just walking around and looking at these beds you start comparing them
and see what is different, what is the same. So it started to get very interesting for me to understand
my ancient fragments better.
We tried to find local Nubian carpenters and that actually turned out to be really difficult
because in the last 20 years or so people switched to metal beds.
And less and less people asked for wooden beds because they have termites in their houses,
they don't last as long, so we started realising that this is a really important cultural tradition
and it's just completely dying now.
Eventually we were lucky and found several carpenters.
One of these carpenters, his name is Mustafa, lives on the island of Maqasir by Kerma and on an island
context often traditions are kept up a bit longer than on the main land.
So, on Maqasir island people still ask to get wooden angareeb beds made.
So, he had much more in-depth knowledge of how to make these beds
and what materials to use for the stringing and all sorts of stuff.
It was successful to find Mustafa, because he is a really patient guy
and he is really nice and he is intelligent at making angareeb and is really super fast.
We asked him to make modern angareeb beds compared with to the older angaeeb
I think this give also an idea how the old people how they make their angareeb
and also we can provide for, we can just open the mind of many students
they can look for the other things similar to angareeb, they can do their studies for this heritage
as now they are being lost because of modern things, plastic and metals and similar.
Obviously when you study these objects you come up with a lot of questions and you can't
really ask anybody anymore but for a modern carpenter it's really nice because you can ask
'why do you do this like this' and 'why do you take this tool and not that tool' and things like that.
So that was really a big advantage for us.
Mustafa came to us, and lived with us for 10 days on Aneta island and so we showed him
our ancient fragments to see what he thinks about them we showed him drawings of them as well
Yeah, he was very surprised because the fragments are quite small.
So the modern bed legs are a bit more, are larger in size also are a bit sturdier so
he was also very impressed by the fine decoration of the ancient peoples.
we asked him to reproduce some of them and he came from this modern perspective
and we kept saying ' can you make this a bit smaller' and he was always afraid that it would break in the end.
And that is one of the big questions we also had for our ancient fragments.
So some of them are so small and it happens sometimes that objects are only made for the tombs,
they were not really used in life so one of the questions we had:
Could these ancient beds actually support the weight of a full body and a coffin?
or would they just be made for the tombs
and then you would close the tomb and hope that it doesn't collapse.
And so I don't know if any of you have made a bed,
I haven't, I would just go to my local store and buy one.
But if I would ever have to make one, I would probably go to a do-it-yourself store
and just buy planks. As a Nubian carpenter you just go and start with a piece of tree,
So you don't have the planks you actually have to make the planks
He brought chunks of wood that he would make into planks
and he brought Halfa grass with him and showed us how to make the rope as well
so he also showed us how to twist the rope, how to tighten it,
how to string it and how to do different patterns.
So what I thought was really interesting is that they don't use any measurement tools
but all measurements are based on pieces of your body, so they use cubits and hand spans,
and fingers so when we came and said 'oh Mustafa can you make this bed like 35cm high?'
and he was like 'HMMM, how many hand spans or fingers is that, actually?'
So that was really interesting to see and that is something that we can see
in the ancient Egyptian times as well. So all the measurements are based on exactly the same parts
so it would be the cubits, the hand spans and the fingers that are still used nowadays.
So he would produce one leg and then the other three legs
he would always lie next to the first one and then take the measurement from the first one
to make sure they are all the same size.
The English introduced the so called Neem tree to Egypt
and that's a tree that according to Mustafa tastes very bitter so the termites don't like it so much
so that's why carpenters really like to use Neem tree nowadays
but they also still use Acacia that is a local tree and that's a very hard wood so it's very good for the bed legs
and we identified some of our ancient fragments and they are also sometimes made out of Acacia wood.
Its really nice to have this modern Nubian bed now as part of our collection
so that future generations can come and do research on it
and also for us still doing the research on the ancient fragments
it is still very useful to have a comparison material within our collection.
I would just like to thank everybody who helped us doing this project
and thank- you for watching.
We hope you enjoyed it and this was just a small sub-project
from one excavation that the British Museum is doing
so let us know if you are interested in other digs
or want to hear other stuff about digging.
Thanks for watching!
I feel like a news reporter, this is so stupid, blah blah blah....