Mystery bones identified
Recently, staff at Bolton Museum have been attempting to identify a mystery bone that came out of bundles of Egyptian linen from Qau el-Kabir (see previous bone bundle story here).
For 83 years the identity of the bones contained within the bundles has remained a mystery, but Tom Hardwick and David Craven, Egyptologist and Geologist respectively at Bolton Museum, recently decided to re-open the investigation, hoping to find an answer.
Images of the bone were sent to experts around the world, and several ideas were suggested. Eventually Dr Laura Bishop, Senior Lecturer in Palaeoanthropolgy at Liverpool John Moores University, and an expert in North African fossil animals, offered to come over and identify the bone in person.
David and Laura spent a morning examining the bone, trying to settle on an identification. Eventually, after looking at reference texts and comparing the specimen to bones from the museum collections, they were both happy with their answer.
The bone is the scaphoid, one of the bones of the wrist, from the left front leg of a large Antelope species, probably a Wildebeest; a species that would not have been present in Egypt as the time the bone was found and wrapped.
Why were the bones there?
The tombs where the bones and bundles were found date to the early Dynastic Period (c. 2800 BC), but the ivory objects were of a type which was not made until the New Kingdom (c. 1300BC), 1500 years later.
Brunton assumed that the Egyptians had accidentally discovered the bones and re-buried them in the nearest convenient place. Other Egyptologists ignored the fossil bones and considered the ivories as the debris of a workshop.
In 1926, however, K.S. Sandford conducted explorations within a 500 mile radius of Qau but was unable to determine the source of the fossil material. It seems that the bones had been brought from a distance and deliberately buried in the tombshafts. What was going on?
The local god of Qau el-Kebir was Nemty, an aspect of the god Seth.
Seth was the god of darkness, storms and confusion, and was often represented as a fantastic animal with a curved snout and forked tail. Red and black were colours especially associated with Seth, and he was also connected to the Hippopotamus, a savage and unpredictable danger to people using the Nile.
Many of the ivory objects found at the site were made of Hippo ivory, and some of the bones found at the site were hippo bones. It seems possible that the Egyptians recognised that some of the fossilised bones came from Hippopotami. More generally, they may have connected the unnatural black colour and unusual size and weight of the bones to Seth.
Did the Ancient Egyptians realize how old the bones were, or believe that they were the bones of Seth? It is impossible to know for sure. At any rate they were deposited reverently – in some cases being wrapped before burial – and accompanied with “modern” ivory objects.
The use of an already 1500-year old tomb for the burial of the bones may have been a practical piece of recycling, or may have had a deeper symbolism: at this time a tomb of one of the earliest Pharaohs at Abydos was regarded as the burial place of the god Osiris. Were the Egyptians leaving offerings of fossil bones and ivories at what they thought was the tomb of the fearsome god Seth himself?
Mystery Bone Competition
Bolton Museum and Archive Service ran a competition asking the public to guess the identity of the bone. They were inundated with entries, not only from locally, but also from other countries such as Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Italy, Canada and the U.S.A. as word of the contest went global!
In the end, no-one got the answer quite right so Tom and David decided to give two prizes.
The closest to the correct answer was Ian Finney, 21, from Ballyboughal, County Dublin, Ireland. He suggested the bone was from the ankle of a gazelle. Ian wins a copy of The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor, the book that first re-awakened interest in the bone bundles.
They also decided to give a prize for the most creative entry, which will go to Charlotte Harrison, 10, from Salford. She provided a list of possible answers, ranging from part of a horse’s tail, through to parts of various Gods! Charlotte gets a museum goodie bag.
Background on the bones
During 1923/24 Egyptologists discovered several tons of fossilised bones and ivory objects in the shafts of tombs at Qau el-Kebir in Middle Egypt, several of which were wrapped in linen.
The bones, which were up to 2 million years old, belonged to a variety of African animals, but as no detailed scientific classification of them was carried out at the time, they disappeared off the scientific map.
In 1998, staff from London’s Natural History Museum located the bones in their warehouse, still stored in the original crates in which they had been shipped to England. However, the linen-wrapped bones were missing.
One year later they were discovered – right here in Bolton! They had been collected by the museum’s then keeper of Egyptology, Angela Thomas, in the late 1970s, who took possession of some unwanted specimens of ancient Egyptian linen, including two of the bone bundles.
The bone bundle story was featured in Adrienne Mayor’s book The First Fossil Hunters, published in 2000.
