The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology sponsored excavations at Marsa Matruh from 1985 to 1989. The excavation’s main focus was a small islet in a salt-water lagoon, Bates’s Island, locally once called the Island of the Jews (Plan 1). The islet, which had been the focus of excavations by Oric Bates before World War I, provided substantial amounts of new information, particularly on the Late Bronze Age.

Since the end of World War I, the modern coastal town of Marsa Matruh that has played host to the recently completed excavations has served as the capital for Egypt’s...

When I first visited the island at Marsa Matruh with my wife Joan in the summer of 1984, we collected a sample of Cypriot White Slip and Roman period surface sherds.¹ Most of the former (P1. 4A) turned up in the vicinity of what will be henceforth referred to as the Sponge-Divers House (S101) (P1. 4B); the later sherds were picked up either on the island’s surface or from shallow water over the sandbar off its northeast corner. When analyzed together with the 23 mostly Cypriot sherds that Oric Bates sent from the island to the Peabody Museum back in...

No attempt was made by the Pennsylvania Expedition to explore Matruh’s West Lagoon (Figs. 1:2, 1:4, 1:7) for the simple reason that the eastern half of its southern shore, where at one time Fourtau and Bates were able to observe remains of a Classical urban settlement as well as an ancient pier, had been transformed before our arrival into a modern concrete deep-water docking facility. The rest of the shore area, farther to its west, was posted off-limits by the Egyptian military authorities.¹ Instead, the expedition’s attention was concentrated primarily on the five separate lagoons that connect Matruh’s modern harbor...

The subject of this study lies in chest-high water ca. 170 m. off the eastern end of Matruh’s first salt-water lagoon, east of the modern harbor (P1. 14A–C). The lagoon is mostly land-locked, since, whatever its configuration might have been during the Late Bronze Age period, it today possesses only one entrance to the sea, which is out through the mouth of the main harbor.

From perhaps the 15th to the 13th century B.C.,¹ the island supported a small population of resident foreigners during at least part of the year. The most intensive occupation occurred in the 14th century...

Much of what follows summarizes observations that have already appeared elsewhere. They are presented here to provide background to a final consideration of two unusual tomb groups made up of a small number of terracotta and stone vessels, random sherds, and a few shells. The finds were taken to Harvard University’s Peabody Museum by their discoverer, Oric Bates. Bates’s own description and analysis of what he had found appeared in the posthumous monograph on his 1913/14 work at Matruh¹ and are repeated below in slightly modified form to facilitate their accessibility. Three years before his death, Bates returned again to...

While the evident lack of any archaeological record means that nothing can be said about the physical size of the island between the end of the 13th and the end of the 8th century B.C., it does serve to make plain that its grounds remained largely unvisited and unused during those years. The first token sign of reuse occurs in the years 730–700 B.C. in the shape of a late 8th century B.C. SOS transport amphora fragment (Vol. II, 12.36). Some continuing but desultory interest in the island is further signaled by five 7th–early 6th century B.C. sherds...