*I wrote this several years ago, in 2016, and now can’t remember what my original intention for it was, but I never did anything with it. I came across it again recently and thought it was worth posting. Just a bit of archaeological whimsy but still…

I was listening to a very heated debate on the radio recently about the mingling – or not – of communities in certain parts of northern England. The central issue seemed to be that some groups leave their rubbish lying around outside their houses, while others are more rather more enthusiastic about keeping refuse out of sight. Those from the second group who were calling in to complain seemed to believe that there was a right or better way of doing things, and that ‘scruffy’ was unacceptable.

Modern activity – a goatherd and his flock – among modern and ancient detritus at an archaeological site in the Egyptian Delta.

This reminded me of a thought I often have in Egypt, whether pondering archaeological remains or wandering the modern streets. I dare say some of the callers on the radio might consider Egypt to be a bit scruffy. Household waste and other kinds of rubbish are generally more visible around the streets, but nobody seems to mind very much. Rubble from building works is often left uncleared, and indeed building projects are often apparently left unfinished. 

I visited a colleague’s excavations at the site of the ancient city of Bubastis recently. She had been saddened to find that the Egyptians of the New Kingdom had been very efficient in clearing away the remains of an earlier cemetery, as it meant we would never quite know what had been there during the earlier Middle Kingdom phase. I thought then of the build up of waste on Cairo’s streets, and how wonderful it will be for archaeologists in the future to dig this great city up and to find layer on layer of evidence of continuous human activity.  

I was also reminded that perhaps the greatest single discovery of ancient texts ever made came about thanks to the preservation of ancient rubbish heaps. The people of Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine Oxyrhynchus in the Faiyum region of Egypt had discarded their unwanted papyri in great heaps over a period of more than 1,000 years. When these were excavated in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries the remaining scraps were found to preserve uncanonical gospels, tragic and comic plays, epic poetry, scientific treatises, and non-literary texts relating to everything from tax assessments to wills, letters and horoscopes.

When the dumps at Oxyrhynchus were excavated over a century ago they turned out to be full of thousands of fragments of ancient papyri which have provided a vast trove of information and are still being studied today. Image from Graeco-Roman Branch sub-archive (GR). GR.NEG.201. Available online the Society’s archive at flickr.com. Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.

Of course recycling is an important part of modern refuse management, and this was also of relevance in ancient Egypt too. Essential parts of the funerary equipment such as mummy masks were made of a material called cartonnage, which was composed of layers of ancient linen or papyrus held together with plaster, and then painted. The papyri used were often recycled, having served their purpose as written surfaces and then been discarded. The texts they bear often survive although they are difficult to read. In the past this has led some to commit the heinous crime of destroying the cartonnage to get at the texts, but this in turn has now led to the development and application of new, multispectral imaging techniques that allow the texts to be read without the funerary equipment being damaged in any way.

Perhaps rubbish isn’t so bad after all.