The Oasis Papers 10: The Land Where the Sun Goes Down. The Archaeology of Egypt’s Western Desert

This volume presents the proceedings of the Tenth International Conference of the Dakhleh Oasis Project held at the British Museum, London, on 7–8 September 2023. The event formed the British Museum’s Annual Egyptological Colloquium. Like previous conferences, the symposium focused on research in the Dakhleh Oasis and the broader Western Desert. The volume contains 19 papers that touch upon a variety of topics, from heritage management (Lamiaa Sayed Abdallah), the spread of domesticated animals in Egypt (Juliet V. Spedding et al.), rock art studies (Nourhan Moustafa Ahmed, John C. Darnell, Rita Simon, Paweł L. Polkowski, Nikolaos Lazaridis and Salima Ikram), dynastic and later iconography (Olaf E. Kaper, Laure Pantalacci, Günter Vittman), Ptolemaic and Roman settlements and temples (Roberta Casagrande-Kim, Arnault Gigante and Gaëlle Tallet, Colin A. Hope, Gillian E. Bowen and Iain Gardner, Paul Kucera, Marina M. Serena Nuovo), to Christianity in Dakhleh and Kharga (Gillian E. Bowen and Christian Turney, Victor Ghica, Rhiannon Williams). The paper by Colin A. Hope on Mut al-Kharab in Dakhleh presents a re-evaluation of its archaeology and ranges across all periods from the late Neolithic to late Roman periods, indicating its centrality in the study of Dakhleh. The contributions by Paul Kucera and Günter Vittmann were written specially for inclusion in this volume. Such a collection of papers offers a thorough overview of recent archaeological, environmental, prehistoric and historic research and analyses, and related issues across a broad chronological scope.