Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean (14.2002(2003))

ALEXANDRIA

CONCLUDING REMARKS

While the use of wooden coffins is not
unknown in Moslem burial practices,it is
certainly rare. Suffice it to say, that of the
few hundred graves explored in the past
forty years in the three successive phases of
the Moslem burial ground on Kom el-
Dikka in Alexandria, no traces of wooden
coffins of any kind have ever been noted in
the archaelogical record. Admittedly, the
conditions at the site are not the most
conducive to the preservation of wooden
objects, even so pieces of worked wood
from levels corresponding to the Moslem
necropolis have been discovered in the
past.4 5) 6

At this point in the research, it seems
plausible to think that these two separate
instances of burials in wooden coffins were
the outcome of pure necessity: as G. Maj-
cherek has suggested in his report, the dead
may have been transported to this burial
ground from some distance outside the city,
in which case the accepted form of a bier
would simply not have sufficed.
The two tombs with the secondary
burials in wooden coffins, albeit situated in
different parts of the cementery, belong to
the same phase of the so-called Upper
Necropolis, which is dated by the
excavators to the 11th-12th centuries AD A

4) T. Ins'oll, The Archaeology of Islam, Blackwell Publishers 1999, p. 168.
5) For a presentation of the worked wood finds from Polish excavations in Alexandria, cf. I. Zych, “A note on the collection
of wooden objects from the Polish excavations at Kom el-Dikka in Alexandria”, Alexandrian Studies in Memoriam Daoud
Abdu Daoud, BSAA 45 (1993), 413-427.
6) For the most convincing dating of this phase of the burial ground, cf. W. Kubiak, Inscriptions arabes de Kom el-Dick,
II, BSAA 43, 1975, 133ff. Recent work at the site has yielded much new evidence substantiating this dating, cf. reports by
G. Majcherek in successive volumes of PAM.

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