Advancing Ancient Egyptian Woods Identification

Despite the abundance of preserved wooden objects and archaeobotanical remains from pharaonic times and their unequalled historical and cultural value, their wood identification has only rarely been undertaken today. Moreover, the restriction on removing samples from archaeological excavations in Egypt hinders the possibility of studying them locally due to facilities' long waiting lists and difficult access. Therefore, we designed a combined macroscopic and microscopic wood identification key for Egyptian objects, including only timbers used during the third millennium BCE, one of the peak epochs of wooden object production in Ancient Egypt. Our wood identification key suggests a step-by-step process that at first only applies easy-to-observe macroscopic characters that require no sampling. Then, the identification key aims at the most accurate level of identification reachable, including targeted microscopic features and underlying the limits of the process and suggesting possible solutions. The new identification key works as a base for an initial screening and wood species identification of Egyptian objects and will soon be tested on museum collections. This guided wood identification procedure allows the revealing of new insights into the use of ancient Egyptian timbers, which enables further innovative research in both wood anatomy and Egyptology.