Friday, August 5, 2016

Tell Dafana reconsidered: the archaeology of an Egyptian frontier town

Leclère, François, A. Jeffrey Spencer, A. W. Johnston, Sabine Weber, Mohamed Abd El-Maksoud, Aiman Ashmawy Ali, Al-Sayed Abd el-Aleem, et al. 2014. Tell Dafana reconsidered: the archaeology of an Egyptian frontier town.
London : The British Museum, [2014] ©2014
Research publication (British Museum), no. 199.
ISBN: 9780861591992 0861591992
This volume arises from the British Museum research
project ‘Egyptian–Greek Relations at Daphnae (Nile Delta)
in the Seventh Century bc’, funded by the Leverhulme
Trust for three years from 2008. The main aim of this
project was to re-assess the objects discovered in the
excavations carried out by Flinders Petrie for the Egypt
Exploration Fund at the site of ancient Daphnae in 1886.
This site, on the eastern edge of the Nile Delta in Egypt,
was already known at that time by the name Tell Defenneh,
which survives today with the modern transliteration of Tell
Dafana. Study of the finds has been combined with a
reconsideration of the site and the architecture of its
monuments to determine the extent of Archaic Greek
influence and whether Petrie’s interpretation of the ancient
town as a camp for Greek troops has any validity. Arising
from his discovery of some fine Greek ceramics at the site, it
seemed that Petrie’s assessment, made soon after his
discovery of the great Archaic Greek centre at Naukratis on
the other side of the Nile Delta, and heavily influenced by
the writings of Herodotus, may have overestimated the
impact of the Greeks at Tell Dafana...

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