[www.academia.edu]

Excellent as always and some good comments at the end

" This guide is fairly brief as there is scant data to go on. Though the pyramid was opened in 1880, it is only in recent years that excavation has resumed and some preliminary articles have been published. Much remains to be done, including the queens complex, which I have omitted from this guide; but it is hoped that in the future a detailed monograph of the complex is published, as we can ill afford to have further excavations unpublished. Djedkare’s complex has suffered like so many sites of not being published or poorly published in the early days, and as a result important data has been lost. Various reasons exist for non publication, from the death of an excavator, lost notes, or an institutions reluctance to fund a detailed publication etc.

"The end result is valuable data being lost forever: I have already mentioned this lack of detailed publication in previous guides, and unfortunately this practice of excavation and non-publication is very much in practice today. Egypt is cursed with too much archaeology, new sites and finds are being regularly discovered, that it’s hard to keep up. Often new sites get their fifteen minutes of fame in the media, followed by a brief summary in a journal, and that is often the last we hear of it. One only realises how bad the situation is when you go searching for detailed data, only to find there is none. This malaise even applies to well known structures such as the Great pyramid, which one would rightly assume was drowning in detailed data, given the interest that it attracts; but my guide on that structure just highlights a sea of confusion. Maybe Egyptology needs to slow down a bit, and revisit some of the earlier sites that were poorly recorded; for example, it beggars belief that one of the finest and best preserved substructures in Egypt, that belonging to the Southern South Saqqara Pyramid has been forgotten about, since the 1940’s when Grinsell walked its corridors. Maybe its tourism and the drive to find new discoveries that is the driving factor today; unfortunately, we are all poorer by neglecting the earlier sites."



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/27/2023 03:46PM by Hermione.