Prosopographia Memphitica

The Project

The region of the ancient Egyptian residential city of Memphis is best known for its monumental pyramid complexes from the 3rd millennium BC. At the same time, the archaeological remains of the New Kingdom (1539–1077 BC) remained unexplored for a long time. Ongoing excavations at the burial grounds of the Egyptian elites in Saqqara and other sites within the Memphite region have revealed many inscribed objects and monuments. These artifacts, which belong to the material legacy of the royal residential city Memphis and its inhabitants, form the core of the research database presented here. They document a person’s name and institutional and genealogical affiliations and represent social identities within a complex network of persons. This project aimed to create a regional prosopography for the New Kingdom, focusing on all documented members of Memphite society. It seeks to identify individuals and shed light on their relationship patterns within a historical network of persons.

The searchable web database results from the author’s dissertational project, Prosopographia Memphitica. Individuelle Identitäten und Kollektive Biographien einer königlichen Residenzstadt des Neuen Reiches at the Freie Universität Berlin, supervised by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Jochem Kahl (Freie Universität) and PD Dr. Dietrich Raue (Universität Leipzig) and funded by a Doctoral Fellowship at Excellence cluster TOPOI 264(Research Group C-1: Deixies and Frames of References: Strategies of Perspectivation inLanguage, Text, and Image. 

The sources

The archaeological remains of Memphis and its related necropoleis are located 18 km south of modern Cairo on today's west bank of the Nile. Although the scientific discussion about the site and its monuments forms an independent research focus, the archaeological legacy of the New Kingdom burial sites (1539–1077 BC) remained uninvestigated for a very long time. It was not until 1975 that the Egypt Exploration Society initiated the systematic documentation of tombs of the necropolis at Saqqara Memphite elite in cooperation with the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden. Since then, several other fieldwork missions have been able to unearth further New Kingdom burial sites. As a result, the region known as Memphite Necropolis covers an area of about 40 sqm and reaches from Zawiyet el-Aryan in the North to Dahschur in the South.

Although numerous inscribed objects of Memphite origin have found their way into various collections and museums around the world since the mid-19th century, and a wealth of epigraphic material continues to be unearthed regularly in the course of ongoing excavations, previous studies on the city of Memphis during the 2ndmillennium BC have mainly focused on gathering personal information about individuals or specific groups of persons such as the mayors of Memphis or the high priests of the local main deity Ptah. Therefore, our comprehension of Memphite society has been restricted to specific officials and institutions. Additionally, more than a small amount of data from these studies is needed for comprehensive analysis or digital processing.

First Steps

To provide a representative prosopography, the compilation of prosopographical data has begun at the outset of the project by incorporating all data entries of a so far unpublished card box collection that Dietrich Raue has compiled since the 1990s; it comprised 1,121 individuals: 878 male and 243 female persons. Throughout the dissertation project duration (2015–2020), data was enriched with information from excavation reports, other relevant studies, and collection catalogs.

Moreover, inscribed monuments of Memphite origin, housed in museum collections worldwide, have been thoroughly studied on-site and documented for the ProM-data collection. Due to collaboration with other museum collections, the author gained access to archival documents regarding acquisition history and photographic materials.

The Database

To collect and archive as much data as possible on the Memphite region and its inhabitants, 1,700 objects and monuments from over 120 museums and collections worldwide, along with 2,409 individuals and 992 Egyptian functional titles documented on them, have been entered into a complex relational database using the PostgreSQL database management system.  

This collection is the most extensive, free-accessible, object-based data collection for an ancient Egyptian site in the 2nd millennium BC. It serves as the primary reference work for prosopographic research on this period.

As a result of a NfDI4Objects dataship (July-October 2024), the existing ProM dataset was revised according to the FAIR criteria for scientific research data management and subsequently made freely accessible to the scientific community. For this purpose, the following points were implemented as part of the N4O-dataship:1. data enrichment2. data consolidation3. data documentation4. data publication (Third Version)

For more information, see: 10.5281/zenodo.13089803