Thursday, April 14, 2011

New Book: Qasr Ibrim: The Textiles from the Cathedral Cemetery

Egypt Exploration Society

The Egypt Exploration Society’s new title, Qasr Ibrim: The Textiles from the Cathedral Cemetery by Elisabeth Grace Crowfoot is now available to order.

Elisabeth Grace Crowfoot is an expert on ancient textiles and in 1976 she was invited to join the Egyptian Exploration Society’s expedition to Qasr Ibrim, after having worked in Cambridge on textiles from the Ibrim seasons in the 1960’s. She worked with the expedition until 1984, analyzing, sorting, washing and cataloguing textiles as they were excavated, assisted in the field by Nettie Adams. Miss Crowfoot had completed this text before her death in 2005 and it has been edited for publication by Nettie Adams.

The dry height of the site of Qasr Ibrim above the Nile river has resulted in superb preservation of organic material. The textile collections from the excavations have already become one of the largest from any site in the middle Nile valley. They are unique as an unmatched sequence, dating from the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty to the Late Ottoman Period and ranging from the domestic remains of town life and tiny exotic imports of the site’s great years to the cast off garments and furnishings, pitifully mended and re-mended, from ages of disaster and decline.

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