My last post was a review of the excellent and very interesting exhibition Alan Sorrell ‘Nubia’ at the Beecroft Art Gallery in Southend on sea. The exhibition provided a fascinating look at the archaeological, landscape and life of southern Egypt and norther Sudan, prior to Lake Nasser. Although the accompanying information panels included a wealth of interesting archaeological details I did note one possible misidentification in the paintings. Painting number 45 shows a place named ‘Marea’, with vaulted ruins overlooking a watery landscape and a riverbank in the background. The painting and associated information are presented below:

The label suggests that this paintings shows Marea, a town near Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast. The Alexandrian Marea has recently been excavated by a Polish-Egyptian team and based on the report of Babraj (et al. 2014), the site is located on the south side of Lake Maryut (Mareotis) about 45 km south-west of Alexandria. The outline of the excavated buildings are clearly visible in the Google satellite imagery. Today the site is on an oddly right-angled peninsula projecting into the lake, but water levels and the lake extents are likely to have changed over time.

It would be quite surprising if Sorrell had painted the Alexandrian Marea. Most of his paintings relate to southern Egypt, almost a thousand miles away. Although the vaulted ruins in painting 45 could easily be Late Antique, the landscape behind them is not particularly Alexandrian. The desert is rather arid. I would expect more vegetation on Lake Maryut, and the colours of the landscape are darker. The buildings in the right background of painting 45 have the pointed corners also seen on Nubian houses in, for example, Sorrell’s painting (number 50) of Dabud. The Nubian-style buildings appear much more clearly in painting 46, which is also labelled Marea. The signage describes painting 46 in Sorrell’s words as ‘a posting-station on the riverbank’, which is unusual phrasing if he painted the Alexandrian Marea on the lakeshore.

The solution appears in Sorrell’s map, which shows a place named ‘Maria’, associated with paintings 45 and 46, on the Nubian Nile between Sabagura and Kalabsha. The Survey of Egypt 1:500,000 scale map of 1944 confirms that a settlement existed in this location, labelled ‘Mariya’. It is fairly common to find the same Arabic placename spelt in multiple ways, and Marea, Maria and Mariya are also reasonable transliterations of the same Arabic word.

I suspect this misidentification is due to the existence of two sites with the same name, which can be translitered in different ways from Arabic into latin letters. This is not uncommon with Egyptian placenames. Some Arabic names can be translitered in different ways, particularly when they are heard by speakers of different languages, who may use different latin phonemes to render the same sound based on the rules of their own languages. Arabic placenames may also be rendered differently depending on whether the foreign author heard (or saw in the case of written examples) the name in the classical form of the language or in the local dialect and accent. Since the Nubian ‘Mariya’ is not commonly written ‘Marea’ and has long since been drowned, a reasearcher would be most likely to find the much better known and, still above water, Alexandrian ‘Marea’.

References

Babraj, K. Drzymuchowska, A. and Willburger, N. 2014. ‘Marea 2011’, Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean 23/1 (Research 2011): 45-62.

The map of Egypt showing Marea and Mariya was made in Quantum GIS with Natural Earth data.

The location map of the Alexandrian Marea and Survey of Egypt image were created using ArcGIS® software by Esri. ArcGIS® and ArcMap™ are the intellectual property of Esri and are used herein under license. Copyright © Esri. All rights reserved. For more information about Esri® software, please visit http://www.esri.com.