The Fossil Bone Pits of Qau el-Kebir: What Egypt's Excavators Recorded

Fossils are easy to find in Egypt. The Nile cuts through limestone cliffs and old gravel terraces, and the bones and shells of long-dead animals weather out of them. Whether ancient Egyptians cared about such things is a harder question, and the best evidence comes from one provincial town in Middle Egypt, Qau el-Kebir, where British excavators in the 1920s dug out pits packed with heavy, stone-like animal bone.

What follows sets out what the excavators wrote down, how they explained it, how later scholars have treated their explanation, and, for contrast, what two Greek visitors said about fossils elsewhere in Egypt.

A provincial capital and its god

Qau el-Kebir lies on the east bank of the Nile, about 45 kilometers south of Assiut. In antiquity the town was Tjebu, capital of the 10th nome (province) of Upper Egypt; the Greeks called it Antaeopolis.¹ According to Wolfram Grajetzki’s entry in the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, its main deity was Nemtywy, a god the Greeks identified with Antaios.¹ The cemeteries in the desert east of the town hold burials from almost every period of Egyptian history, beginning with the Badarian Period, and three huge rock-cut tombs of Middle Kingdom governors are among the largest private tombs of their time.¹ A Ptolemaic temple, built under Ptolemy VI, still stood in part in the early nineteenth century before a shift in the river’s course destroyed it.¹

That local god is worth keeping in mind. Popular summaries, and some specialists, describe Qau as a center of the god Seth (also written Set).² The town’s own chief deity was someone else, and any link between Qau’s bones and Seth has to be argued rather than assumed.

The pit in Cemetery 400

The British School of Archaeology in Egypt worked in the Qau and Badari district over three seasons, from late 1922 to 1925, led in the field by Guy Brunton. In 1923-24 Flinders Petrie, the School’s director, ran a camp of his own in Brunton’s old quarters at Qau, while Brunton worked from new huts about five miles to the north.³ Brunton published the results in Qau and Badari, three volumes issued between 1927 and 1930.

In the first volume Brunton describes tomb 562, a large stairway tomb. Its original burial was early, but the upper part of the pit, he wrote, had been reused in the Nineteenth Dynasty to hold discarded objects of hippopotamus ivory together with “a great quantity of mineralized bones, mostly hippopotamus but including some other animals and a few human.”³ He added that Petrie had found a second deposit of the same kind the following season and that the bones “will form the subject of a special memoir.”³ The team took the source of the bones seriously enough that Gertrude Caton-Thompson spent part of her time studying the geology of the Qau bay “with a view to tracing the source of the mineralized bones.”³

The third volume gives the fuller account. The tomb, a Second Dynasty stairway tomb in Cemetery 400, had a brick surround enclosing an area of about 8 by 16 feet. Into its mouth a “great mass of animal, and even human bones, mostly heavily mineralised,” had been “thrown pell mell.”⁴ Brunton admitted the quantity was hard to judge, but thought there were “probably as much as two or three tons of bones,” mostly hippopotamus and “often large and heavy.”⁴ Ivory objects were wedged among them with no order at all, and it took some six weeks to clear and sift the mass.⁴ The ivories were mostly kohl tubes, mirror handles, toilet spoons and similar pieces, many damaged before they were thrown in, which led Brunton to conclude they were objects of daily use rather than offerings.⁴ He dated the deposit to the Nineteenth Dynasty on the style of the ivories, supported by a plaque of Ramesses II found a few feet away.⁴

Petrie’s second deposit, found in 1924 near the North Cemetery, was again in the mouth of a tomb shaft, this one used for an Eighteenth Dynasty burial. Brunton saw nothing to show the two deposits were of different dates.⁴ He also reported that Petrie had found, in a tomb shaft near the large rock tombs, mineralized bones “carefully wrapped up in linen, evidently to serve as charms.”⁴

Not everything in the pits was ancient. Brunton noted a fresh hippopotamus skull with its lower jaw still in place, and the small finds included pieces of fossil wood and a few pieces of sawn or worked fossil bone.⁴

A bone in London

At least one piece from these deposits can be traced to a museum catalogue. The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London holds a fossilized vertebra of a large mammal, about four inches long, with gravel lodged in the canal that once held the spinal cord. The record, which names Brunton as donor, says it was “probably from one of the great deposits of hippopotamus bone, unworked and worked, found at Qau.”⁵ The museum is cautious: it queries which deposit the bone came from and gives the date only as “(possible) New Kingdom.”⁵

The gravel may matter. One reading, offered here rather than by the museum, is that the bone had lain in river or desert sediments long before anyone picked it up, which would fit Brunton’s word “mineralized” and the idea of bones gathered from older deposits rather than from recently dead animals.

Brunton’s explanation: the bones of Seth

Brunton offered a reason for the pits, and he was open that it was a guess: the purpose of the dumping, he wrote, “can be guessed.”⁴ His case rested chiefly on Petrie’s linen-wrapped bones and on a damaged limestone stela from Cemetery 400 showing the deceased worshipping a hippopotamus standing in a papyrus swamp. Its five columns of text were almost illegible, but the name of Seth could be made out.⁴ Battiscombe Gunn, who translated the inscriptions for the volume, read part of it as “An offering that the King gives and Seth the Mighty,” followed by damaged titles involving Tjebu.⁴ Grajetzki describes the same stela as showing a “mayor of Tjebu” adoring a hippopotamus.¹

From this Brunton reasoned that the hippopotamus was revered locally in the Nineteenth Dynasty, that people who came across mineralized bones while digging thought it proper to bury them, and that two pits at least were set aside for the purpose. In his words, “all these heavy black bones were considered to be those of Set,” whether or not they came from hippopotamuses, and worn-out ivory household objects went into the same holy pit instead of onto the rubbish heap.⁴

Later scholarship has kept the idea alive while treating it with care. Grajetzki writes that several New Kingdom hippopotamus bone deposits are “perhaps connected with the cult of Nemtywy and Seth,” and elsewhere in the entry attributes that argument to Brunton and to a 2002 study by Eric Welvaert.¹ Welvaert’s article, “The fossils of Qau el Kebir and their role in the mythology of the 10th nome of Upper-Egypt,” appeared in the Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde; its argument could not be consulted for this article.⁶

So the facts and the inference separate cleanly. That people at Qau gathered heavy mineralized bone, much of it hippopotamus, and buried it in quantity in old tomb shafts during the New Kingdom is recorded by the excavators. That they did so because they took the bones for Seth’s is a reasonable reading of a single damaged stela and the setting, not a statement found in any Egyptian text from the site.

Iron bones and a new look at the collection

The question returned in the 2010s through a project on iron. Iron from the Sky, a 2014-15 research project led by Monica Grady at the Open University with Paul Nicholson of Cardiff University and postdoctoral researcher Diane Johnson, set out to study how ancient Egyptians used iron, much of which in early periods came from meteorites.⁷ Its project summary observes that “The earliest references to iron in Egyptian texts are frequently as iron bones of gods,” and suggests that dark, dense mammal fossils, which look much like weathered iron and were sometimes placed in burial shafts and tombs, may have inspired that idea.⁷ The project planned to identify which mammals were present.⁷ Its partners included the Natural History Museum, the Petrie Museum and Bolton Museum.⁷

In 2016 the Egypt Exploration Society funded a follow-up by Johnson titled “The ‘iron’ bones of Seth: a study of the massive funerary fossil collection from Qau el-Kebir,” with the work to take place at the Natural History Museum in London; the announcement shows her identifying hippopotamus anatomy there.⁸ The iron hypothesis is exactly that, a hypothesis framed by the researchers themselves.

Johnson has since reported progress. In an abstract for a 2024 British Museum colloquium on animal mummies, she writes that many of the Qau bones and linen bundles were taken to Britain after excavation and then lost track of, and that the fossil bones were only recently re-identified at the Natural History Museum in London, while two bone bundles were found at Bolton Museum; one, Bolton Museum 1977-345-3-1, is illustrated with an x-ray CT model.² She describes the bones as belonging to “a wide variety of species,” many of them hippopotamus, and says the paper would present results of x-ray CT, Raman spectroscopy, isotope analysis and scanning electron microscopy. Her question is whether the bundles were local offerings to Seth, with ritual functions perhaps like those of animal mummies.² The surviving bundles also bear out Brunton’s report of bones wrapped in linen. The abstract is a conference summary, not a full publication of the analysis.

Greek visitors read fossils differently

Classical writers who visited Egypt noticed fossils too, but they read them as clues to the past rather than as sacred objects.

Herodotus, arguing that Egypt had once been a gulf of the sea, gave as part of his evidence that the land juts out into the sea and that “shells are exposed to view on the mountains,” along with salt that shows even on the pyramids.⁹ He was reasoning from marine shells to a changed coastline, a geological argument. He says nothing in this passage about fossils at the pyramids themselves.

That observation is Strabo’s. He reports heaps of stone chips in front of the pyramids containing pieces like lentils in shape and size, and a story that they were the petrified leftovers of the workmen’s food. English translations disagree on his verdict. The Loeb translation has him say “this is not improbable,”¹⁰ while the older Bohn translation renders the same clause “which is not probable,” noting that it follows an editor’s correction of the Greek.¹¹ Either way, Strabo compared the stones with a hill near his home in Pontus full of lentil-shaped pebbles and admitted the puzzle was hard to solve.¹⁰

Nineteenth-century travelers supplied the answer. John Gardner Wilkinson wrote in 1835 that the rock around the pyramids “abounds in nummulites and other fossil remains,” which Strabo “supposed to be a petrified residue of the lentils of the workmen.”¹² In Wilkinson’s account, then, Strabo’s lentils were fossils, not food.

The comparison with Qau is instructive. The Greek writers turned fossils into arguments about seas and stories about builders. At Qau, centuries before either man wrote, people appear to have treated big mineralized bones as things that deserved burial.

Further reading

The study of how people in many cultures have collected and used fossils has a long bibliography. Kenneth Oakley’s two-part “Folklore of Fossils” appeared in Antiquity in 1965,¹³¹⁴ and his Decorative and Symbolic Uses of Vertebrate Fossils was published as a Pitt Rivers Museum occasional paper in 1975.¹⁵ Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters (Princeton University Press) treats fossil discoveries in Greek and Roman times.¹⁶

For Qau itself, material identified as the excavated collection is now known in the Natural History Museum in London and at Bolton Museum.² The open questions are concrete: which geological deposits the bones came from, what the scientific analyses show once they are fully published, and whether the Seth reading survives a full study of the collection. Brunton’s promised memoir on the bones, if it was ever written, is not among the works listed in the current encyclopedia entry on the site.¹

Footnotes

1. Grajetzki 2012, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, “Qau el-Kebir.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. Johnson 2024, British Museum colloquium abstract, “Animal mummies: from beliefs to practice,” p. 6. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Brunton 1927, Qau and Badari I, ch. I, sec. 4, and p. 12, sec. 562. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. Brunton 1930, Qau and Badari III, pp. 18-20, secs. 39-43, and ch. XVIII (Gunn’s translations). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

5. Petrie Museum, UCL, UC13300. ↩ ↩²

6. Welvaert 2002, ZÄS 129, 166-184 (bibliographic record). ↩

7. Science in Culture, “Iron from the Sky” project page. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

8. Egypt Exploration Society, grant awards, 23 March 2016. ↩

9. Herodotus 2.12, trans. Godley. ↩

10. Strabo 17.1.34, Loeb trans. H. L. Jones. ↩ ↩²

11. Strabo 17.1.34, trans. Hamilton and Falconer, with translator’s note. ↩

12. Wilkinson 1835, p. 335. ↩

13. Oakley 1965, Antiquity 39, 9-16. ↩

14. Oakley 1965, Antiquity 39, 117-125. ↩

15. Oakley 1975, Pitt Rivers Museum Occasional Papers on Technology 12. ↩

16. Mayor 2011. ↩