Now, however, the long-term excavations at sites such as Elephantine in Upper Egypt and Tell el-Dab’a in the eastern delta have provided a more reliable view of the gradual processes of urbanization by revealing successive strata of settlements spanning many centuries. The published evidence from Elephantine (Kaiser et al. 1988), for instance, charts the growth of the site from an Old Kingdom settlement of some 16,000 square meters to a congested late-period city covering more than 70,000 square meters. The excavations at Tell el-Dab’a (Bietak 1975, 1992) have revealed a detailed local socioeconomic history in which the Egyptian inhabitants of the first intermediate period (ca. 2134–2040 b.c.) were gradually supplanted by Asiatics during the second intermediate period (ca. 1640–1532 b.c.). The results of the scientific investigations at Elephantine, Tell el-Dab’a, and other sites have not only vastly increased the knowledge of Egyptian domestic economy but have also begun to show how Egyptian settlements changed over the course of time. The Egyptian urban database has therefore expanded sufficiently to allow the different chronological phases of urbanization in Egypt to begin to be discerned and studied separately (see Kemp 1977, 1989) so that the idiosyncrasies of individual sites and particular periods of urban growth can be clearly distinguished from overall trends.

The Growth of Science in Egyptology

Eric Peet’s inaugural lecture as reader in Egyptology at Oxford University in 1934 concerned the “present state of Egyptological studies.” Already acutely conscious of the impact of science on Egyptology, he suggested that “many of the questions, especially those of the origins of materials and the technical processes of the arts and crafts, which have puzzled us for years, will eventually reach definite solution through the resources of chemistry and the other sciences” (Peet 1934). He was no doubt mindful of the fact that only eight years earlier the Cairo-based British chemist Alfred Lucas had published the first edition of Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, a brilliant summary of the surviving evidence for Egyptian materials and crafts that effectively served as the essential manual for Egyptological science until the 1990s. Lucas had access to much of the material in the Cairo museum, which enabled him to publish data, chemical analyses, and bibliographical references for a great deal of the most important material excavated since the mid-nineteenth century, including the objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Lucas may have been the first scientist to survey the whole range of available data from Egypt, but there were many earlier scholars who pioneered various procedures. The field of bio-anthropology, focusing principally on the study of human and animal remains, has been one of the most active areas of scientific research in Egyptology from the early nineteenth century until the present day (see David 1979, 1986; Davies and Walker 1993). The surgeon Thomas Joseph Pettigrew took part in the unwrapping and dissection of numerous mummies from 1820 onward, and in 1834 he published his History of Egyptian Mummies that was to serve as the most reliable volume on the subject until the X-raying work of Grafton Elliot Smith at the beginning of the twentieth century (Elliot Smith 1912). In 1896, the German researcher W. Konig was the first to make radiographs of Egyptian mummies, and two years later, Petrie published radiographs of mummies from his excavations at Deshasheh (Petrie 1898). These photographs are thought to be the earliest instance of the archaeological use of X-rays in Britain, and they were perhaps made by J.N. Collie, who was making pioneering medical X-rays at University College London in the same year. Most of the subsequent work on Egyptian mummies has concentrated on examinations of this type, but some of the most recent research has concentrated on molecular biology and the extraction of DNA (e.g., Goudsmit, Decker, Smit, Kuiken, Geelen, and Perizonius 1993; Nissenbaum 1992).

A growth area in the 1980s and 1990s was the study of human diet in Pharaonic Egypt, based principally on the analysis of surviving fragments of food from both domestic and funerary contexts. Projects of this type have included studies of Egyptian bread and beer making, wine production, and meat processing. A