The archaeological mission from the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Cairo has unearthed a fragment of a seal impression at Tel El-Dabaa in the Nile delta. It bears cuneiform script in the Akkadian language and dates to the last decades of the Old Babylonian Kingdom. Sealings of this type were impressions made on lumps of wet clay to seal the contents of a box or bag as part of an administrative system. This impression of a foreign seal implies that the sealed object was a trade item or a gift brought to Egypt from Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq).

Culture minister Farouk Hosni announced the find today, adding that the sealing was found inside a pit which cuts into layers of the Late Period in the Tel El-Dabaa archaeological site in Sharqiya governorate, 120 km north-east Cairo.

Dr. Zahi Hawass secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) said that the inscription includes the name of a top governmental official who served during the Old Babylonian era specifically under the reign of King Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC).

“This is the second cuneiform inscription of this type to be found,” Hawass pointed out, adding that a fragment of a baked clay letter in cuneiform was unearthed on the same site last year in a well of the palace of the Hyksos King Khayan (1653-1614 BC). The Hyksos were foreigners from western Asia who ruled northern Egypt for around 100 years.

Dr. Manfred Bietak, the head of the mission, said that both inscriptions are of great archaeological importance as they are the oldest Akkadian texts to be found in Egypt. He indicated that they are dated 150 years before the Amarna Letters, diplomatic correspondence in the Akkadian language found in the capital of King Akhenaten at Tel El-Amarna. “They are evidence that the Hyksos had foreign relations and far reaching connections in the Near East that stretched as far as southern Mesopotamia,” concluded Bietak.

For her part Dr. Irene Forstner Muller, director of the mission, said that the story of these finds at Tel El-Dabaa can be dated back to 2006 when excavators found a palace that dates to the middle of the Hyksos era (1664-1565 BC). Inside it they unearthed a number of sealings of Khayan, a well known Hyksos king.

Tel El-Dabaa is an important site in the Nile Delta and is already famous for the evidence it has yielded of Egypt’s vibrant foreign contacts with Nubia, the Near East and Crete.