The Cairo Museum collection of artefacts from Zaki Saad's excavations at Helwan

The Egyptian Museum in Cairo holds a unique and very large collection of Early Dynastic artefacts resulting from the extensive excavations conducted by Zaki Saad during the 1940s and the 1950s in the necropolis of Helwan, close to Cairo. These objects used to be stored in an on-site museum until they were transferred to the Cairo Museum in the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967. Thirty years later Christiana Köhler was able to locate this collection in the Museum basement, and was given permission to study the more than 6000 objects in conjunction with her on-going new excavations at the site of Helwan. The collection comprises a wide range of mostly unpublished material such as jewellery, stone, pottery and copper vessels, stone tools, ivory objects and, importantly, several dozen inscribed funerary stelae. It is the objective of this project to record and document these artefacts for publication as they represent a large corpus of significant material evidence for the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3100-2700 BCE) in general and for Egypt's first capital city, Memphis, in particular.