Evidence for the bichrome wheel-made ware in Egypt

Abstract

"Of all fields of Near Eastern ancient history, none paradoxically has suffered more from neglect than the Pharaonic civilisation of Egypt. Despite more than a century's scientific exploration, excavation and research, a major facet of ancient Egyptian life, the material or everyday culture, remains as little known or understood amongst Egyptologists as by experts in other fields of Levantine archaeology. Though it is generally accepted that the relative and absolute chronologies of the Bronze Age civilisations in the eastern Mediterranean basin depend to a major extent on direct and indirect correlations with Egypt, which can be demonstrated by the movement of peoples, goods and influences between these different areas, no systematic study of the cultural chronology of the Pharaonic period has ever been attempted. Indeed it would be no exaggeration to say that interest in establishing dating criteria and identifying cultural characteristics and trends amongst the minor arts or small finds from Egypt has come not so much from Egyptologists, who have been more preoccupied with the civilisation's outstanding developments in the spheres of architecture, art and literature than with socio-cultural history, as from specialists outside the field, who have been compelled for other reasons to use the archaeological data from the Nile Valley. Even then the latter, profiting from the lack of study and expertise developed by their Egyptological colleagues, have had an unfortunate tendency to manipulate the information from Egypt so as to conform to chronological and cultural frameworks devised indepen- .. dently by a circumstantial interpretation of internal evidence from their own particular regions"