Ein Hahn von der "Elefanteninsel" (original) (raw)

The settlement on the island of Elephantine at the northern edge of the first Cataract has been the focus of archaeological research for a long time. Since 1969 the Deutsches Archäologische Institut, Abteilung Kairo, and the Schweizerisches Institut für Ägyptische Bauforschung und Altertumskunde have conducted excavations there that have also focused on the Late Antique until early Islamic time. During the study of different workshops of this period a small but exceptional figure of a rooster made of copper alloy was examined, too. A comparison with several similar pieces known from private and museum collections shows clearly that this figure, found among debris from several floors together with 33 coins in the house M12A, served as the closure of an amphoriskos. The rooster not only gives new insights in the furnishing of a Late Antique / Early Byzantine household, but provides us also with a new and precise date for the whole vessel group as it must have been lost during the last third of the 5th and the first third of the 6th century AD.