Abstract
New Kingdom of Egypt is known as an "imperial" phase of the ancient Egyptian history, with unprecedented wealth of written and iconographic sources. Yet, the studies of Egyptian bronze objects of this period uncovered complicated picture of recycled and remelted material with unclear signals of lead isotopic ratios and trace elements.
We have had the opportunity to sample an assemblage of 40 well-dated objects coming from archaeological contexts at the Nubian site Aniba excavated by Georg Steindorff and now deposited in the Ägyptischen Museum - Georg Steindorff - der Universität Leipzig. They are datable to the C-Group and New Kingdom, i.e. to the 2nd millennium BC in Egypt (preliminary results published in Kmošek et al. 2016).
New dating of pottery assemblage from Aniba enabled us to reassess the archaeological context and determine between reliable and less reliable contexts. We have applied a wide range of archaeo-metallurgical methods on the obtained samples.
Selected artefacts have been studied by metallographic methods in combination with micro hardness tests and XRD. Chemical composition analyses were carried out by the ED-XRF, SEM/EDS and neutron activation analysis.
Lead isotope analyses were carried out using a MC-ICP-MS spectrometer in order to better understand the geographic provenance of the copper ores used. In this paper, we would like to discuss the results and preliminary interpretation of data, bearing evidence of the wide-spread recycling and use of several sources of ore origin.
On the background of already published studies (e.g. Rademakers et al. 2017; Shortland 2006), we would like to address anew the question of the reuse of copper on the "imperial" scale in the New Kingdom Egypt, through the data from its southern "province".
This case study might bring new insights to the wider issues of the identification and interpretation of recycled material in ancient metallurgy.