Beer Jars

In the absence of chronological anchors for the twelfth century BCE in southern Canaan, scholars have often relied on two interrelated, geopolitical events that affected the region at this time:  first, the migration and settlement of the Philistines; and, second, the withdrawal of the Egyptian hegemonic presence.  According to the traditional paradigm, the Philistines wrested control of southern coastal Canaan from Egypt ca. 1175 BCE.  Recent revisionist theories, however, hold that the Philistines arrived after the Egyptian withdrawal from the region at about 1130 BCE.  At the heart of the matter lie the following questions:  Did the Philistines and Egyptians coexist and, if they did, were their material culture boundaries impermeable?  An examination of sites that possess either Philistine or Egyptianized material culture may provide an answer.  An analysis of the excavations at Tel Mor, a small Egyptian outpost located close to the Philistine city of Ashdod, is an especially important case study in this regard.

The aim of this paper is to discuss a single context from a small mudbrick tomb, AS 84b, built immediately south of large wooden boat AS 80 at Abusir South. This context is exceptional due to the fact that the relatively small Shaft 2 contained a very large number of fully preserved vessels found in situ at diverse depths of the shaft, as well as hundreds of additional fragments in the general fill. The vast majority of the pottery belonged to a single type, namely beer jars with a tall slender body with a sharp pointed base (Abusir J-1c). Among them, at least half of the examples exhibited an intentional hole made in the base of the jar. This paper also offers a short typological and morphometric study of these beer jars and an interpretation of the deposit as a whole within our current knowledge of diverse funerary contexts.

A late Old Kingdom necropolis situated to the west of Netjerykhet’s funerary complex at West Saqqara
has yielded large amount of vessels referred to in ceramological jargon as “beer jars.” They demonstrate
a range of shapes, sizes and surface treatment methods. Until 2013, 87 pot marks were identified
on the beer jars, making it the largest such group up to date. Eight distinct types of pot marks representing
simple geometric figures have been distinguished, all without exception have been made prior
to firing in a pottery workshop. Analysis of such a large assemblage added some insight into the
meaning and the purpose of the marks.

This paper presents a preliminary report on the most significant ceramic contexts from the tomb of official Kairsu, excavated at Abusir Centre in the autumn of 2018. Based on the pottery finds, the activities in the tomb can be divided roughly into three main time frames. During the middle to late Fifth Dynasty, the tomb was constructed and four main burial shafts and apartments were equipped. The preliminary analysis shows that Kairsu was buried at a slightly earlier date than the owners of Shafts 2, 3 and 4, although all the pottery belongs to the span of the middle to late Fifth Dynasty.
The area east of the tomb is characterized by secondary activities – in the course of the late Fifth and early Sixth Dynasty, two small additional shafts were built; one in the corridor of AC 33 (Shaft 6) and another in the corner north of the so-called Entrance Rooms (Shaft 5), the second one very likely serving as an embalming deposit for an (at this point) unknown burial. The so-far analysed destruction and refuse layers in and around Entrance Rooms 1 and 2 can be dated to the Sixth Dynasty, with some contexts associated with pottery characteristic of the first half of the dynasty (within a time span of Pepy I to Merenre) and one cluster containing vessels typical of the second half of the Sixth Dynasty.

This chapter analyses the ceramic finds from the tomb of Neferinpu. This tomb contained only relatively small amount of
pottery, however this is important due to several reasons: mainly, one of the burial chamber was found undisturbed, with all its original contents still in situ. Secondarily, the tomb is precisely dated on the basis of several epigraphic sources, such as the titles of the owner on the graffiti found on the western limestone wall of the mastaba and the seal imprints on the mudstoppers of the wooden boxes designated for canopic jars found in both main burial chambers. Thus, it is possible to state with certainty that priest Neferinpu lived during the reigns of kings Nyuserra or Djedkara Isesi or possibly
shortly after. Thus, all the pottery found in the primary refuse of the tomb (especially the two burial chambers as well as the remains of the sealing deposit in front of the mudbrick wall in Shaft 6) can be assigned to a well defined time span. Besides these, the ceramics also reflect the two main stages of the tomb, namely the older mudbrick stage in which only the northern shafts (Shafts 3–6) were built and the younger limestone enlargement that encompassed shafts 1 and 2 and their respective burial chambers. The beer jars from the older shafts are relatively smaller and have lesser volume, especially when compared to the ones from Burial Chamber East and some from the fill of Shaft 1 (see supra). Some of the archaeological context allowes us to assume intentional ritual deposits, such as a beer jar found on the bottom of Shaft 6 in front of a sealing wall leading to the burial niche, with several parallels in the necropolis of Abusir South and other sites. In the case of Shaft 1, intentional ritual fill consisting of several beer jars, stands and one bread form is also possible.
The ceramic assemblage from the tomb of priest Neferinpu is an interesting example of the late Fifth Dynasty despite its small extent. It enlarges our knowledge and finer chronological delimitation for some of the less usual pottery types, such as the four fine wine jars with a tall vertical neck from Burial Chamber West as well as clarifies the metric determination of sizes and volumes of beer jars for the late Old Kingdom.

One of rather ancient articles dealing with a hypothesis of standardised beer jar volumes in the Old Kingdom and their potential economic importance for the premonetary exchange economy seeing beer jars as one of the principal mediums of exchange in local markets.

This chapter presents ceramic finds from the anonymous Third Dynasty tomb AS 33 at Abusir South that was excavated in 2005 by the Czech Institute of Egyptology. Pottery was found only in a few contexts, including the areas outside the mastaba walls along the northern and especially eastern façade and in several rooms of the substructure of the tomb. All of the ceremics found are of Old Kingdom date, but most correspond to the later activities in thea area of the tomb during the late Old Kingdom, especially the Fifth and Sixth Dynasty.

Beer jars belong among the oldest pottery groups that were continually in use. They are attested from excavations already in the Early Dynastic Period and are evidenced as part of the burial equipment or ritual offerings even in the most modest graves throughout the whole of the Old Kingdom. They are also present in the relief decoration of the tombs, and the jars termed Dwjw are depicted both during beer production and in the offering lists that name different types of beer (for extensive iconographic examples see i.e. Faltings 1998). They are recognized as one pottery group on the basis of their hand-made technique of production, coarse low quality material, very rough surface treatment, function and, with a few exceptions (such as the tall and low tubular forms), a rather similar general shape with an ovoid or spindle-shaped body.
During the past decades, their chronological significance has also increased due to studies of beer jars from primary contexts, enabling us to explore not only topics such as the spatial distribution of beer jars, but also their morphological development as a dating criterion (Bárta 1996; Rzeuska 2006, etc.).
In the course of the Old Kingdom, large-sized beer jars were copied in miniaturized form. Their numbers are distinctly lower compared to regular beer jars and they appear only in certain contexts. This paper would like to explore not only the development of the shape of these miniaturized beer jars throughout the period of the later Old Kingdom, but also compare their spatial distribution and occurrence in relation to the full-sized originals.
This research is based on a theoretical analysis, as well as on a practical study of the ceramic material from the cemeteries in Abusir. The explored tombs in these cemeteries are unique in that they encompass almost the whole span of the Old Kingdom and have a wide scope of social affiliations, ranging from members of the royal families buried in the Pyramid field of Abusir to high officials such as viziers and priests uncovered in Abusir South to lower officials and anonymous persons buried in the area of the so-called Lake of Abusir. This study will concentrate on a diachronic comparison within the course of the Old Kingdom, with a focus on the area of the Memphite necropolis.

One of rather ancient articles dealing with a hypothesis of standardised beer jar volumes in the Old Kingdom and their potential economic importance for the premonetary exchange economy seeing beer jars as one of the principal mediums of exchange in local markets.