Amongst the holdings of the British Museum are twenty-two tombstones (twenty-one sandstone and one limestone) associated with the site of Aswan, an important town situated on the Nile overlooking the First Cataract and close to the border with Nubia [Figure 10.1], whose vast necropolis has yielded several thousand tombstones, most from the Fatimid period (358/969–567/1171). The tombstones in the British Museum entered the collection at different times, the majority in 1887 through Wallace Budge, Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities between 1894 and 1924. They comprise a tiny fraction of the corpus of Aswan tombstones that, from the late nineteenth century onwards, were being removed and relocated to various museums in Egypt and elsewhere. Those remaining in Egypt were documented in a series of magisterial catalogues by Monneret de Villard, Gaston Wiet working with Hasan al Hawari and H. Rached, and ‘Abd al-Rahman M. ‘Abd al-Tawwab and Solange Ory, and a significant number are reproduced in the Thesaurus d’Épigraphie Islamique. The importance of these publications is that the inscriptions are fully transcribed along with many accompanying photographs. This rich resource has however, largely remained under exploited, a fact recognised by the organisation of a conference in 2010, which was intended to put in place an extensive research project on the subject within the context of the major project of survey and excavation of Aswan undertaken by the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo in collaboration with the Ministry of Antiquities. Focusing on the southern necropolis, these excavations took place between 2006 and 2014 led by Dr Philipp Speiser.

The aim of this chapter is not to discuss the corpus of Aswan tombstones as a whole, but to make a modest contribution to the subject by highlighting what can be learnt from a small group in the British Museum. Starting with some brief contextual remarks about Aswan and the circumstances around the removal of the tombstones, the chapter will discuss the group in the British Museum, detailing their acquisition, the key features of the content and style of the inscriptions including the names of the deceased and their nisbas, the nature of the religious texts and the materiality of the tombstones themselves in terms of size, style and layout.