65 Real and Literary Landscapes in Ancient Egypt Real and Literary Landscapes in Ancient Egypt Judith Bunbury & David Jefreys During the past thirty years the Survey of Memphis and others have acquired more than two hundred borehole logs from the Capital Zone of Egypt. Combining these boreholes with maps and satellite images, we show that, during the past fve thousand years, the geography of the Nile has been in constant fux with mean rates of migration around 2 m/y and one of its channels becoming extinct, by nature or through human intervention. Re-visiting ancient texts in the light of this changing environment, we show that the literary setings of both fctional and historical texts were real landscapes known to the authors. Hence we infer that ancient descriptions of landscape can be interpreted in a more literal way than before and that the authors were not as prone to writing of a metaphorical realm as was previously thought. past 12,000 years since the last ice age. These lines of evidence include, detailed borehole records from Lake Yoa in Chad (Kröpelin et al. 2008), borehole studies by Stanley & Warne (1993) and geoarchaeological evidence collected by the Survey of Memphis (Jefreys & Bunbury 2005). The Memphite foodplain has been explored by the Survey of Memphis who have made around 140 borehole records during the period 1985–2009 that reveal the past geomorphology. The interpretation of satellite imagery (Lutley & Bunbury 2008; Hillier et al. 2007) and topographic maps also reveals the geometry of the changing foodplain and a model for the direction and rate of river migration. Typically for this part of the Nile, the bends migrate outwards and downstream with the channel migrating at a rate of around 2 km per millennium. Thus, since our earliest text from the Middle Kingdom, channels could have crossed the foodplain from one side to the other. Combining this evidence with that from the boreholes we can construct a map of these past landscapes and their waterways. By focusing on texts that describe the Memphis area, the site of an important scribal school, through time we are able to compare the way in which the rapidly changing landscape is described by the texts and by the sediments. Landscape descriptions and imagery are compara- tively rare in ancient Egyptian literature. Those that do exist are ofen difcult to place in the known landscape and have thus been characterized as mythical land- scapes. Some geographical narratives are quite clearly fantastical, and were meant to be so (e.g. the ‘Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor’: Papyrus Leningrad 1115). Recent studies of landscape evolution in the Memphite foodplain of northern Egypt (Fig. 1) allow us to redraw the maps of the region for each period. Thus literature such as the ‘Prophecy of Amenemhat’, the ‘Tale of Sinuhe’, and the later ‘Stele of Piye’ can be more confdently placed in the landscape in which they were writen. Comparison of the ancient geography of the relatively well-known Memphite area with the landscapes of the texts reveals that they represent a more literal approach to landscape in ancient literature than previously supposed. In addition, some perceived difculties with the texts can be clarifed by reference to the local geography of the time. We note also that texts where the fullest landscape descriptions occur are generally assumed to have a fctional component and perhaps relied on their realistic seting for their credibility. In this work we provide a context for the examina- tion of selected texts by reviewing the geological and geographical evidence for landscape changes over the Cambridge Archaeological Journal 21:1, 65–75 © 2011 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research doi:10.1017/S0959774311000047 Received 11 Jan 2010; Accepted 20 May 2010; Revised 19 Jul 2010 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774311000047 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 20 Jan 2017 at 06:53:07, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms.