Emily Chan
At an ancient Egyptian fortress that was part of Egypt’s Ways of Horus military route, the remains of children interred in ceramic jars were unearthed during a series of digs.
Initially, the child burials puzzled archaeologists since they were found in a militaristic zone, but further research over the years helped clear up the confusion.
The fortress of Tell el-Retaba is located at the border that separates the Nile Delta and the Sinai Peninsula.
More than 3,000 years ago, during the reign of Ramesses the Great, it served as part of a defense network along the north coast of the Sinai. This arrangement of fortresses was called the Ways of Horus and was used by the Egyptian army to fight their enemies across the Near East.
Tell el-Retaba housed both soldiers and their families, a fact that was discovered when a British archaeologist named William Matthews Flinders Petrie was conducting excavations in the 20th century. He came across a burial that was outside the fortress rather than in the dedicated cemetery.
The burial was cut into one of the fortress’s mudbrick walls and contained an infant likely less than a year old. The infant’s body had been placed inside a ceramic storage jar or pot.
Petrie claimed that the jar burial was evidence of a human sacrifice and non-Egyptian occupation at the site. However, Petrie was wrong. Many more similar burials found throughout Egypt proved otherwise.
In ancient Egyptian pot or jar burials, the body is interred in a ceramic container. Other ancient civilizations were known to practice such customs as well, including the Philippines, Malaysia, Japan, and Iran.
After Petrie’s initial discovery, hundreds of pot burials containing both children and adults were uncovered all over Egypt. They dated from 6,000 years ago to as early as around 30 B.C. In the past, scholars considered jar burials as a practice of the poorest people in ancient Egypt.
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