A new discovery at Tel Al-Dabaa provides a link with ancient Mesopotamia Early last week during routine excavation work at the Delta site of Tel Al-Dabaa the archaeological mission from the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Cairo unearthed a fragment of a seal bearing a cuneiform impression, reports Nevine El-Aref. The script in the Akkadian language helps date the seal to the last decades of the Old Babylonian Kingdom. Seals of this type consisted of impressions made on lumps of wet clay to seal the contents of a box or bag as part of an administrative system. This impression of a foreign seal implies that the sealed object was a trade item or a gift brought to Egypt from Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq). Culture Minister Farouk Hosni announced the find on Monday, adding that the seal was found inside a pit which cuts into a layer dating from the Late Period in the Tel Al-Dabaa archaeological site in Sharqiya governorate, 120km north-east Cairo. Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), said the inscription included the name of a top governmental official who served during the Old Babylonian era, specifically under the reign of King Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC). This is the second cuneiform inscription of this type to be found. Hawass said that a fragment of a letter fashioned in baked clay and written in a similar script was unearthed on the same site last year in a well of the palace of the Hyksos King Khayan (1653- 1614 BC). The Hyksos were foreigners from western Asia who ruled northern Egypt for about 100 years, considered a dark period in Egypt's history. Manfred Bietak, the head of the mission, said that both inscriptions were of great archaeological importance as they were the oldest Akkadian texts to be found in Egypt. He indicated that they were dated 150 years before the Amarna Letters, a diplomatic correspondence in the Akkadian language found on the site of the capital of Pharaoh Akhenaten at Tel Al-Amarna in Upper Egypt. "They are evidence that the Hyksos had foreign relations and far-reaching connections in the Near East that stretched as far as southern Mesopotamia," Bietak said. The Austrian Institute's director, Irene Forstner Muller, said the story of these finds at Tel Al-Dabaa began in 2006 when excavators found a palace that dated to the middle of the Hyksos era (1664-1565 BC). Inside it they unearthed a number of seals from the reign of Khayan, a well known Hyksos king. Tel Al-Dabaa is an important site in the Nile Delta and is already famous for the evidence it has yielded of Egypt's vibrant foreign contacts with Nubia, the Middle East and Crete.
