This undertaking between Mathematics and Egyptology started with the Project ‘The Evolution of Ancient Egyptian’ and has since developed independently. This project already underlined the structure mathematics can bring to Egyptological questions and how it can help in analysing a non-mathematical dataset. With the following, our aim was to take this collaboration further and see if mathematics can help in the analysis of not only textual data, but a dataset of objects as well.
Ancient Egypt has many wonders which Egyptologists are trying to uncover. With the discovery of a convolute of thousands of ancient objects in 1903 by French Archaeologists, with the finds covering large parts of ancient Egypt’s history, the so called “Cachette of Karnak” in modern Luxor, ancient Thebes, is no exception.
Among the objects that were found were hundreds of statues, depicting Ancient Egyptian kings, gods and private persons. They were accidentally and intentionally destroyed. The Egyptologists interest lies in discovering the patterns of the destruction and the clustering of the objects in the Cachette. Were statues of kings always missing their stone head? Were older statues more destroyed than newer ones? Is there a system with which the statues were buried? Why were certain statues found together? Do statues of private persons always miss a stone leg or an arm? And many more questions.
We used the logical data analysis provided by Dr. Marcus Weber and Dr. Konstantin Fackeldey as an approach to discover logical rules and patterns in the large dataset, which could explain the structure of the destruction of objects. This yielded some interesting patterns, which were then interpretated and checked with the historical data by the Egyptologist Dr. Ralph Birk with the help of the student assistant from the field of Egyptology Sarah M. Klasse.
This project was also discussed by its members in a ZIB Podcast "ZIBcast: Small Data Analysis - Kleine Datensätze" (the relatied episode is in german).