Object of this study is an unpublished corpus of 193 bone and ivory objects dating between the Roman and early Islamic periods, preserved in the Museo Egizio. Most of the finds come from Evaristo Breccia's excavation at Ashmunein...
moreObject of this study is an unpublished corpus of 193 bone and ivory objects dating between the Roman and early Islamic periods, preserved in the Museo Egizio. Most of the finds come from Evaristo Breccia's excavation at Ashmunein (1903-1904); moreover, there are objects bought by Ernesto Schiaparelli in Egypt at the beginning of the 20 th century. In an attempt to obtain as much information as possible from these materials, an interdisciplinary approach has been adopted along with the traditional typological-stylistic analysis. We attempted a reconstruction of the excavation context about which only short reports are known. We also made a typological, iconographic and stylistic analysis aimed at the cultural con-textualization of the objects and their iconographic comparison. A physical analysis of the material was conducted with the intention to reconstruct the craftsmen's modus operandi, to identify the type of material (bone or ivory) and the selection criteria, according to the shape of the objects. The comparison between the objects found in the area of the excavations in Ashmunein, in particular the figurative ones, and the materials from sites recently investigated with modern methods, have allowed to remedy the shortage of data regarding the context where these objects were found and to reconstruct the stratigraphic phases of the site. The site was a habitation quarter with levels from the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine period: a stratigraphy therefore similar to the one found in some sites in Alexandria, which have returned materials of the same kind. Therefore, the approach adopted for these "forgotten" materials allowed to broaden our knowledge about the methods of processing objects and their context of discovery.
