ABSTRACT
The subject of heirlooms seems not to have been very frequently or specifically addressed in the Egyptological literature. Generally speaking, artefacts might be speculatively presumed to be and described in passing as heirlooms if, for example, they have been found in funerary contexts but show signs of use, or if their manufacture or acquisition is thought to be substantially older than the context itself (e.g. Arnold 1999: 310, 446; Baumgartel 1960: 102; Sparks 2003). Similarly, objects that have been broken and mended in antiquity may be classed as heirlooms; conversely many heirlooms or their fragments may have gone undetected in the vast body of archaeological material judged to be residual, such as Old Kingdom ceramics so frequently found in younger (sometimes much younger) contexts, and therefore often ignored or relegated to a lower echelon of information value. In the case of ceramics, as a rule it is only when intact pottery forms present clear evidence of ancient damage and repair, or even ‘repair’ where there had been no damage, that questions of their purpose, longevity and shared value arise, for example some of the predynastic vessels, especially black-topped and black-burnished Badarian (e.g. Brunton and Caton-Thompson 1928: pls. 12, 13).
