The 1924-1935 University of Michigan excavations at the Graeco-Roman period Egyptian village of Karanis yielded thousands of artifacts and extensive archival records of their context. The Karanis material in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and the University of Michigan Library Papyrology Collection forms a unique body of information for understanding life in an agricultural village in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. In 2011 and 2012, the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology presented the exhibition Karanis Revealed in two parts, using artifacts from the excavations and archival material to explore aspects of the site and its excavation in the 1920s and 1930s. As preparation for the exhibition progressed, it became clear that part of the story of the Michigan Karanis expedition lay in the current and ongoing research on the material it yielded by curators, faculty, staff, and students from the University of Michigan. Such projects include new work on known artifacts and papyri, the discovery or rediscovery of important unpublished artifacts and archival sources, new field research at Karanis, and even sonic investigations of the site and its history. The present volume summarizes the recent exhibition and presents some of the new research that helped inspire it.

Karanis Revealed: Discovering the Past and Present of a Michigan Excavation in Egypt (Kelsey Museum Publication)

History

T G Wilfong

Ancient Civilizations

Kelsey Museum Publications

This catalogue of a Kelsey Museum of Archaeology exhibition showcases a selection of Islamic art works held in the University of Michigan's collections. Rather than arranged chronologically, geographically, or by media, the objects are organized thematically and conceptually. Themes include the intersections between function and decoration, the aesthetic power of everyday objects, visual play, wit, and magic, connections and interrelationships across art forms, and light symbolism and illumination. The volume not only highlights the strengths of the university's collections of Islamic art but also explores various issues integral to the conception and production of art in the Islamic world from the medieval period until the present day.

Pearls of Wisdom: The Arts of Islam at the University of Michigan (Kelsey Museum Publication, 10)

Arts & Photography

Gruber, Christiane

Dimmig, Ashley

History & Criticism

This catalogue documents an exhibition at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology on the mysterious ancient Egyptian jackal-headed gods associated with death and the afterlife. These gods are immediately identifiable symbols of ancient Egypt, but their specific identities and roles are often less well known. Death Dogs is the first exhibition to examine their mysteries. The exhibition and catalogue focus on the three most important jackal gods: Anubis (embalmer and guide to the dead), Wepwawet (opener of the ways to the afterlife) and Duamutef (son of Horus, protector of the canopic jar). Jackal gods are represented by a variety of artifacts in the Kelsey Museum collectionstatues, paintings, amulets and other objects. These artifacts are used to examine the jackal gods and their functions in the wider context of ancient Egyptian religion and follow their changing roles into the Graeco-Roman period and beyond. The catalogue features 44 artifacts from the exhibition, some never before exhibited or published, many from University of Michigan excavations in Egypt, along with supplementary artifacts, archival photographs, vintage book illustrations and explanatory graphics. Modern pop cultural manifestations of the Egyptian jackal gods are included to document their persistence into the present. Includes 181 colour illustrations.

Death Dogs: The Jackal Gods of Ancient Egypt (Kelsey Museum Publication)

This catalogue documents an exhibition at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology of watercolor paintings by American artist Wendy Artin and selected objects from the Museum's permanent collections. Wendy Artin has been working for over a decade on a series of watercolors of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures and related subjects. She is thus a fresh presence in a long line of artists who draw inspiration from antiquity. Indeed, this tradition has very ancient precedents. The exhibition and catalogue place a selection of 47 of Artin's paintings--including landscapes and figure paintings as well as images of ancient sculptures--in dialogue with 14 objects drawn from the Kelsey's collections, among them works of Greek art inspired by Egyptian precedents, examples of Roman imperial portraits that were copied in numerous media for circulation around the empire, and reproductions of the same figure types featured in some of Artin's paintings (such as Aphrodite Rising from the Sea). Wendy Artin's masterful watercolors offer new and arresting ways of looking at ancient sculptures and buildings--and of remembering the classical past.

Rocks, Paper, Memory: Wendy Artin's Watercolor Paintings of Ancient Sculptures (Kelsey Museum Publication, 12)

Ratté, Christopher

Artin, Wendy

Larson, Katherine A.

Passionate Curiosities explores the collections held in the University of Michigan's Kelsey Museum of Archaeology through the lens of the people whose intellectual interests, financial backing, and social networks brought artifacts to Ann Arbor from the 1880s to the 1990s. Through purchases and expeditions, these individuals shaped the Museum's internationally recognized antiquities from the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome, North Africa, Egypt, and the Near East, extensive photographic documentation of these regions from the early 1900s, and significant assemblages of early Christian and Islamic visual culture. An intriguing array of personalities--from archaeologists, missionaries, and diplomats to industrialists, bankrollers, and inventors--weave through these pages. They include Ernst Herzfeld, the eminent Orientalist who helped forge antiquities legislation in Iran; Luigi Cesnola, the rapacious harvester of Cypriot sites; Esther Van Deman, the pioneering feminist and scholar of Roman construction techniques; and Samuel Goudsmit, the renowned nuclear physicist and avid Egyptologist. World-famous dealers who established standards in antiquities connoisseurship likewise populate these sagas. Readers will encounter Edgar J. Banks, a swashbuckling purveyor of Mesopotamian antiquities and entrepreneur of biblical documentary films; Maurice Nahman, the "lion of Cairo"; and the colorful members of the Tano dealer dynasty in Egypt. This copiously illustrated book will interest general readers as well as scholars curious about the holdings of the Kelsey, early collectors and dealers, and the history of museums.

Passionate Curiosities: Tales of Collectors & Collections from the Kelsey Museum (Kelsey Museum Publication)

Lauren E. Talalay

Margaret Cool Root

Religion & Spirituality

Aphrodisias is one of the most important archaeological sites of the Greek and Roman periods in Turkey. Excavations at Aphrodisias have been carried out by New York University since 1961 and have revealed an unusually well-preserved and picturesque ancient town. A survey of the surrounding territory undertaken between 2005 and 2009 resulted in the discovery of hundreds of new sites spanning three millennia of human occupation in the region. This book presents the rich archaeological remains of the countryside of Aphrodisias, ranging from isolated farmsteads to fortified citadels, from burial mounds to marble quarries, and from Roman aqueducts to Ottoman cisterns.

The Countryside of Aphrodisias (Kelsey Museum Publication) (Kelsey Museum Publication, 15)

Angela Commito

Christopher Ratte

Artist Jim Cogswell's "Cosmogonic Tattoos" is an ambitious work of contemporary art created for the windows of the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. Drawing on imagery from both museums, "Cosmogonic Tattoos" liberates museum objects from their cases and pedestals to run wild and transform, dramatizing the complex and tumultuous ways in which art and artifacts go from creation to museum display. This handsome artist book, designed by Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo, contains a full photographic documentation of the installation, as well as the artifacts that inspired it, preliminary studies, and related work, accompanied by artist statement and essays and reactions to the work by artists, scholars and museum professionals.

Cosmogonic Tattoos

Jim Cogswell

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Tel Anafa II, III comprises the last installment of final reports on the objects excavated at the site between 1968 and 1986 by the University of Missouri and the University of Michigan. The volume presents studies of several categories of finds from the excavations: pottery of the Bronze and Iron Ages, imported Attic pottery, medieval pottery, jewelry of stone and glass, equipment related to textile manufacture, figurines, and, finally, the stucco wall decoration that inspired the name of the site's main structure: the Late Hellenistic Stuccoed Building (LHSB). The current volume joins Tel Anafa I, which presents the overview of the occupation history, chronology, and stratigraphy of the site along with the externally datable objects, coins, and stamped amphora handles; Tel Anafa II, i, which presents the local and imported pottery of the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods; and Tel Anafa II, ii, which contains studies of the glass vessels, lamps, metal objects, and ground stone and other stone tools and vessels.

Tel Anafa II, III: Decorative Wall Plaster, Objects of Personal Adornment and Glass Counters, Tools for Textile Manufacture and Miscellaneous Bone, ... Medieval Pottery (Kelsey Museum Fieldwork)

Graffiti -- unsanctioned marks in public built spaces -- are increasingly recognized as worthy of study in contexts both ancient and modern. For ancient societies, graffiti are personal expressions that are otherwise rare in the archaeological and historical record. This volume is focused around a group of ancient and medieval figural graffiti found in 2015 by an archaeological project of the Kelsey Museum, University of Michigan, at the site of El-Kurru. Located in northern Sudan, El-Kurru was a royal pyramid burial ground of kings and queens of Kush from about 850 to 650 BCE. Written in conjunction with the exhibition "Graffiti as Devotion along the Nile" at the Kelsey Museum (on view 23 August 2019-29 March 2020), essays by an international group of seven scholars present the site of El-Kurru and its graffiti in historical context. Chapters discuss the history of Kush, ancient graffiti in a funerary temple and medieval graffiti on a pyramid at El-Kurru, and graffiti at other sites in Kush and Egypt (Musawwarat es-Sufra, Philae, and Banganarti) and beyond (Pompeii). Other chapters discuss the rock art of Sudan and methods used for the conservation and documentation of graffiti at El-Kurru. The volume concludes with an annotated catalog of graffiti from El-Kurru and a photo essay of the contemporary Nile Valley practice of "hajj images" that commemorate Muslim pilgrimage. Written to engage non-specialist readers, the book will be of interest to archaeologists, ancient and medieval historians, and art historians working in the Nile Valley and beyond, and to a broader community interested in these subjects.

Graffiti as Devotion Along the Nile and Beyond (Kelsey Museum Publication)

Between 1964 and 1971, renowned Islamic art historian Oleg Grabar directed a large-scale archaeological excavation at the site of Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi. Drawn to the remote eighth-century complex in the hopes of uncovering a princely Umayyad palace, Grabar and his team instead stumbled upon a new type of urban settlement in the Syrian steppe. A rich lifeworld emerged in the midst of their discoveries, and over the course of the excavation's six seasons, close relationships formed between the American and Syrian archaeologists, historians, and workers who labored and lived at the site. Featuring previously unpublished documents and illustrating over fifty photographs from the Qasr al-Hayr dig, City in the Desert, Revisited recounts the personal experiences and professional endeavors that shaped the fields of Islamic archaeology, art, and architectural history during their rise in the US academy.

City in the Desert, Revisited: Oleg Grabar at Qasr Al-Hayr Al-Sharqi, 1964-71 (Kelsey Museum Publication) (Kelsey Museum Publication, 17)

Al-Ferzly, Michelle

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Books by Kelsey Museum Publications