ABSTRACT
Visitors to the Egyptian galleries at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (University of Pennsylvania Museum) have the rare privilege of exploring the ceremonial throne room of the earliest royal palace known to us from Egypt’s ancient capital city of Memphis, located in what is today the Governorate of Giza. The reconstructed throne room, with its monumental gateways and decorated columns, was the ritual centerpiece of a royal palace belonging to the pharaoh Merenptah, son of Ramses II. Visitors to the Museum’s Egyptian gallery may also notice a wall label announcing the “Excavation of the Palace of Merenptah,” accompanied by a photograph of the University of Pennsylvania Museum excavations in progress at the site in 1915 (fig. 10.1). This photograph nicely illustrates the stratigraphy of Memphis, with the palatial New Kingdom columns in situ beneath the ruins of a Roman building surrounded by the cultivated fields of the nearby village of Mit Rahina. What many visitors may not notice so clearly, however, is the group of Egyptian workers actively excavating the palace. They are young men and boys from the local village, paid by the day to haul dirt, a foreman from the town of Qift, Upper Egypt, standing in the middle of the group, and a young girl looking up at the camera, who was perhaps bringing food for her father, brother, or uncle on site the day this photograph was taken. 1 As a visual record of the archaeology of Memphis, these local people, who excavated hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of dried mud to make this archaeological perspective possible, were not really meant to be seen in the photograph at all.
