The Middle Quarterly — an academic literary review of Middle Egypt's museums and sites

Contents of this issue · five long essays
Article 01: The Beni Hasan Tombs and the Question of the "Provincial" in Middle Kingdom Painting
Article 02: The Mallawi Museum after the 2013 Looting: A Decade of Reconstitution
Article 03: Reading Akhetaten: Field Notes on the North Palace at Tell el-Amarna
Article 04: The Asyut Necropolis and the Long Tradition of the First Intermediate Period
Article 05: The Sohag Regional Museum and the Textile Witness of the White Monastery

Lead article · Spring 2026 · Beni Hasan

The Beni Hasan Tombs and the Question of the "Provincial" in Middle Kingdom Painting

A reading of the rock-cut tombs of Khnumhotep II and Amenemhat at Beni Hasan as a coherent regional school, against the long historiographical tradition that has read them as a poor reflection of the Theban court.

The Beni Hasan tombs have for a century occupied an ambiguous place in the literature on Middle Kingdom painting. Variously praised for the freshness of their hunting scenes and dismissed for the rigidity of their procession panels, they have been read mainly through the lens of a presumed Theban court ideal — a lens which, this essay argues, has flattened a sophisticated provincial tradition into a mere comparative footnote.

By Doaa El-Masry · University of Minya · forty-eight minute reading

The painted hunting scene from the tomb of Khnumhotep II at Beni Hasan, showing antelopes and ibexes in stylised desert

Research articles & field notes

Article II

Mallawi Museum · provincial museums · 2013 looting · post-restitution

The Mallawi Museum after the 2013 Looting: A Decade of Reconstitution

AbstractThe fire and looting of the Mallawi Museum on 14 August 2013 removed approximately one thousand and forty objects from the institution's possession. This article surveys the recovery, restitution, and re-display work undertaken between 2014 and 2024 by the Ministry, the local antiquities inspectorate, and the international conservation community, and reads the rebuilt museum as a quietly successful experiment in provincial-museum practice.

Read article II →

Article III

Tell el-Amarna · North Palace · Eighteenth Dynasty · field notes

Reading Akhetaten: Field Notes on the North Palace at Tell el-Amarna

AbstractTwo seasons of attentive walking on the North Palace site at Tell el-Amarna, between November 2024 and March 2026, with notes on the painted-floor fragments held in the Mallawi Museum, the column drums at the central court, and the long question of how a court that abandoned its own city only fourteen years after its foundation can be read by anybody not present at the abandonment.

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Article IV

Asyut · First Intermediate Period · provincial autonomy · necropolis

The Asyut Necropolis and the Long Tradition of the First Intermediate Period

AbstractThe cliff necropolis at Asyut preserves the longest unbroken record of provincial mortuary practice in Egypt between the late Old Kingdom and the early Twelfth Dynasty. This article reads the principal tombs — Tomb V of Iti-ibi-iqer, Tomb IV of Khety II, and the more recently re-cleared Tomb of Mesehti — as evidence for a continuity of regional power that the Theban reunification narrative has tended to underwrite.

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Article V

Sohag · Coptic textiles · White Monastery · provincial museums

The Sohag Regional Museum and the Textile Witness of the White Monastery

AbstractThe 2012 reopening of the Sohag Regional Museum gave proper display, for the first time in fifty years, to the textile fragments excavated from the cells of the White Monastery (Deir el-Abyad) of Saint Shenouda the Archimandrite. This article argues that the museum's textile gallery offers the single most important counterargument to the long-running characterisation of late-antique Egyptian Christianity as a coastal phenomenon.

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From the editor

"Middle Egypt is not, despite a century of scholarship, the middle of anything. It is its own argument, made of provincial centres that have been continuously inhabited for five thousand years, and that have produced — at Beni Hasan, at Amarna, at Asyut, at Sohag — some of the most original artistic and theological innovations in the country. The Quarterly exists to read them on their own terms."

— Dr Doaa El-Masry, editor · spring issue, 2026

The bare desert plain of Tell el-Amarna with low ruined walls and the cliffs of the eastern desert in the background

From Article III · Tell el-Amarna · field photograph

"Akhetaten was a city of nine years' construction and fourteen years of life. The site teaches almost everything an archaeologist can be taught about how to read absence."

Notes on standing at the central court of the North Palace at three in the afternoon, when the eastern wadi cliffs throw their long shadow across the foundations and the courtyard's painted-floor outline becomes visible for about eleven minutes at a particular angle of low light.

— Field notebook, March 2026