Iconografía de élite en la Baja Nubia. Un felino grabado en cerámica del Grupo A hallada en Aksha

The artefacts recovered by the French-Argentine Mission to Aksha (Serra West, Lower Nubia, 1961-1963) which are currently housed in the Museo de La Plata, include a series of vessels found in local funerary contexts but originally imported from Egypt. These belonged to burials from the so-called A-Group (3800–2900 BC), which encompasses a number of Nubian communities contemporary with the processes of state formation and expansion in the Nile Valley. Despite being important testimonies of the social practices of their time, the corpus of A-Group pottery from Aksha has remained little studied to date. Here, we focus on a large imported vessel with painted decoration and an intriguing zoomorphic engraving. To contextualise this artefact within the historical period in which it was created and used, and based on stylistic comparisons and a microscopic analysis of the piece, we were able to determine the animal it represents, its origin, and the date of its decoration. The results suggest that Aksha may have played a more significant role than previously thought in the interregional circulation of goods and the sociopolitical differentiation of Lower Nubia at the end of the 4th millennium BCE

Beaker · Grave goods · Pottery · Social life · Ancient Egypt and Archaeology · Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies · Paleopathology and ancient diseases