Macadam Collections on funerary cones from The Sudan Library

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This website publishes manuscripts on the ancient Egyptian funerary cones, which were written by the late Norman de Garis Davies, a famous Egyptologist and epigrapher, and the late Miles Frederick Laming Macadam, a renowned archaeologist and philologist in the fields of both Egyptology and Nubiology. Here you will find high-resolution pictures and transcribed JPEG images of all 958 pages that I found at The Sudan Library, Khartoum, wholly free of charge.

I found the manuscripts by the merest coincidence.

It all started with an email I received from my junior colleague, Tsubasa Sakamoto, on January 3, 2011. At the time, he was an international student studying Nubian archaeology at the University of Khartoum. Whilst browsing some books, he found three manuscripts concerning funerary cones at The Sudan Library, and was then kind enough to tell me about them via email with some pictures attached.

He then offered to send photos of all the pages, but my researcher’s spirit led me to the decision to visit the library myself. Seeing with one’s own eyes may not always be efficient, but it is a necessity.

Thus, I arrived in Sudan about four months later, and worked from April to May.

In the library, having not found any online cataloguing systems, I had to manually scour disordered heaps of dusty books in hope of finding more material.

In the end, by good fortune, I could find a total of six relevant works:

1. A Davies notebook owned by Macadam. As Davies studied cones from about 1920 until his death in 1941, this notebook is the fruit of over twenty years of research. It includes many sorts of archaeological data and facts about the number of cones formerly held by Davies himself.

2. A copy of Davies/Macadam’s co-authored A Corpus of Inscribed Egyptian Funerary Cones with Macadam’s notations, an analysis of which can help us deduce how Macadam would want us to correct certain errors.

3. Four of Macadam’s files, which are based largely on Davies’s notebook mentioned above. Macadam intended to publish these files as a second volume of the Davies/Macadam's Corpus. Two of these files are catalogues of each cone, and the other two are indices of personal names and titles. Museum holdings, reference, and so on are included, too. Macadam organised and partially typed the information in Davies’s notebook and added his ideas. Of particular interest is the richness of his remarks on ancient vocalisation. Macadam knew at least Arabic, Coptic, Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew, and he was keen on the pronunciation of words, so he sporadically comments on this subject.

The materials, however, pose certain practical problems for the researchers; in particular, the latter part of Davies’s notebook has been severely damaged by insects and some of the entries are illegible due to both Davies & Macadam’s small script and occasionally bad handwriting.

Many parts of Macadam’s texts are illegible. Thanks to the help of another great contributor, I could read almost every word, phrase, and note, but some still remain undecipherable. I have marked such parts with ‘????’, so if you can read them, please do tell me.

Any suggestions are most welcome!

May you enjoy this website and this digital archive of Macadam’s collections help to develop the study of the funerary cones!

*Note that I was authorised to use and publish the pictures shown here; if you would like to use or reproduce these images, please do ask for official permission from The Sudan Library.

For more details on funerary cones, visit my websites: The World of Funerary Cones.