Where have all the Shabtis gone? The Effects of Petrie's Project Funding for Research in the 21st Century

The Ramesside Period nowadays appears to be one of the focal points of research not just for Edgar Pusch whom we pay our tribute with this volume, but for the whole field of Egyptology. But this intense interestin Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age Egypt has not prevailed throughout the history of the discipline. As this article will show the situation at the beginning of the 20th century was different. Aesthetic perceptions towards Ramesside objects and the idea of a cultural decline, which already was set to begin at the onset of the 19th Dynasty can be traced in the fieldwork as well as in the publications of William Matthew Flinders Petrie and – closely related to that – in the collections of museums that received objects from the excavations of the founding father of Egyptian archaeology. This results in repercussions for today’s research and influences the re-evaluation of old projects and new attempts to interpret the data of such excavations in detail. As a case study serves the 1920/21 excavation of the necropolis of Heracleopolis Magna at Sedment conducted by Petrie and Guy Brunton under the auspices of the British School of Archaeology in Egypt.