Asyut, situated c. 375 km to the south of Cairo, on midway between two ancient Egyptian capitals Memphis and Thebes, was a political and cultural centre of Middle Egypt since the First Intermediate Period (c. 2100 BCE) at the latest, and remained such to the decline of the Pharaonic epoch. The city formed a part of the cultural memory of Ancient Egypt and also had a highly strategic importance thanks to its location. Moreover, during the Byzantine and Islamic Periods, Asyut played, and still plays, an important superregional role in Christianity.

Since 2003, archaeological fieldwork has been conducted on Gebel Asyut al-gharbi, the western mountain of Asyut (Middle Egypt). Supported by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, an international team of scholars, scientists and students from Africa, Europe and Asia has been doing research on the more than 6,000 years long history of the mountain and the city Asyut under the name The Asyut Project. In the meantime, more than eighty researchers, more than one-hundred local workmen and more than fifty accompanying inspectors have been working on the mountain. In addition, about thirty Egyptologists contributed to The Asyut Project by studies in libraries, archives and museums. The academic disciplines involved in The Asyut Project range from Egyptology, Byzantine Archaeology and Coptic Studies over Islamic Studies, Papyrology, Building Research and Cultural Anthropology to Physical Anthropology, Veterinary Medicine, Zooarchaeology, Botany and Geology. From 2005 to 2023, The Asyut Project has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG long-term project ‘The Ancient Egyptian Necropolis of Assiut: Documentation and Interpretation’ and German-Polish project ‘Asyut – centre of ancient trade’ founded by DFG and Narodowe Centrum Nauki). Project partners are the Freie Universität Berlin (Jochem Kahl), Sohag University (Mohamed Abdelrahiem), Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz (Ursula Verheoven, up to 2019), the Polish Academy of Sciences (Teodozja Rzeuska, since 2020), and the Kanazawa University (Chiori Kitagawa, since 2022: joint Japanese-German-Egyptian research project “Religion and animals of Greco-Roman Egypt - case studies of Middle Egypt”; JSPS KAKENHI).

Selected bibliography: Jochem Kahl, Ancient Asyut. The First Synthesis after 300 Years of Research (The Asyut Project 1; Wiesbaden 2007 [²2012]); Jochem Kahl, Alice Maria Sbriglio, Paolo del Vesco & Marcella Trapani, Asyut. The Excavations of the Italian Archaeological Mission (1906-1913). Studi del Museo Egizio, vol. 1, Modena 2019; Jochem Kahl & Andrea Kilian (eds.), Asyut – The Capital That Never Was (The Asyut Project 18; Wiesbaden 2022); Jochem Kahl et al., The Asyut Project: Seventeenth Season of Fieldwork (2023), in: Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur 53, 2024, 127-156. In addition, cf. the other volumes of the series The Asyut Project, edited by Jochem Kahl, Ursula Verhoeven, Mahmoud El-Khadragy, and Andrea Kilian: https://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/series_412.ahtml