Recent discoveries of BE arrowheads and Joppa coins in the Eastern desert of Egypt: in the footsteps of soldiers of the Ptolemaic army
Résumé
The article presents recent discoveries made by the French Archaeological Mission to the Eastern Desert of Egypt in two Ptolemaic forts, Bir Samut and Abbad, located along the road leading from Edfu to Berenike on the Red Sea coast. These artefacts, three copper-alloy arrowheads, marked with the monogram BE, and four Ptolemaic coins minted in Joppa, were recovered in contexts dated to the last decades of the third century B.C. Due to the sealed stratigraphy and the discovery of thousands of ostraca and dozens of coins in the same deposits, it is clear that the forts and these objects were abandoned on the eve of the Theban Revolt in Egypt, around 207–206 B.C. These discoveries offer an occasion to reassess the corpus of similar arrowheads and coins found in the Eastern Mediterranean. Our catalogue includes 43 BE arrowheads and 18 Joppa coins and a reassessment of the corpus suggests that they were produced by the Ptolemaic regime in direct association with the Fourth Syrian War, which ended with the Battle of Raphia in 217 B.C. The geographic distribution of the arrowheads and coins discussed in the article demonstrates the mobility of the Ptolemaic troops after this intense period of conflict.