Artifacts, Bones, Tombs, (and a Hospital?): ASP 2024, Week 1
“Oh, I’ll be leaving for Egypt soon.” If you have spoken to me at any point between January and June of 2024 you have probably heard this sentence escape my mouth. Clearly “soon” meant something different for everyone associated with the project and the Egyptian government, as our planned departure date of May 8th was pushed a total of seven times before I finally left for the airport on June 28th. This is, in some ways, part of the “joy” of working in Egypt – we’re all on Egyptian time. Egyptian time can match your usual conception of time, but sometimes it’s instead a wild and unpredictable thing, especially when it comes to paperwork (the only piece of the puzzle we were missing). Malesh! Approximately a week and a half before my departure date I finally had travel plans that were set in stone and I was headed back to Abydos.
Traveling to Egypt is usually fairly simple – I favor the Lufthansa flight out of PHL, which stops briefly in FRA, and gets you to CAI around 4pm the next day. Due to the delay in our paperwork, the only flight I could grab was JFK to FCO to CAI. It wasn’t ideal (nor was ITA forcing me to check my carry on) but I arrived safely and sleep-deprived the evening of the 29th. Sadly, Egyptair has all but gotten rid of its CAI to Sohag flight so I spent the night at the airport Marriott before meeting up with the UPenn team to fly to Luxor. We arrived in Abydos by car on the 30th and settled in nicely – since ASP and Penn both have small teams, we are afforded our own private rooms, which can make the entire experience more comfortable. Sadly, upon arrival, we found out that our beloved Kofta had passed away. We don’t know exactly what happened but we will miss him dearly and will never forget the playfulness and love he brought to the house. There have been no attempts to bring another dog into the house yet, although, with the size of the feral cat population, it may become a necessity soon!
I planned on beginning work the next day, although Debbie (my advisor) was not set to arrive in Abydos until the 2nd, however, shortly before breakfast on July 1st I experienced crippling pain in my lower-right abdomen – everyone’s favorite way to start a trip! We were concerned enough about appendicitis that I was taken to the hospital in Luxor (2.5 hours away – there are closer hospitals but with the risk of appendicitis I wanted to go somewhere more populated). The long and short (and TMI) of it all is that it turned out to be a kidney stone that temporarily blocked my kidney causing renal colic and all the fun associated pain. Although the words “Hospital in a Foreign Country” struck as much fear into me as I’m sure it would many people, my overall experience was exceedingly positive and – honestly – why I am bringing you all this story. Getting sick abroad can be nerve-wracking, but I was given a liaison as soon as I entered the hospital, quickly deposited into the largest two-room-private-bathroom suite I’ve ever seen, equipped with a wall of windows overlooking the Nile and Deir el-Bahri, and received every test I needed within an hour of my arrival.
Every person who assisted me was kind and knowledgeable and while I ended up staying way longer than I wished (a hemophilia test was incorrectly run so they kept me 10 hours to retest), I came out of the experience really impressed and a lot more confident about the quality of care I could receive abroad (and the price – my insurance covered it all, but it would have been approximately $45 out of pocket had they denied my claim). Was this the way I wanted to spend the first day? No. Did I spend most of the day crying to Matt and complaining to family and friends? Yes. Would I trust the hospital with any future health issues that may (inshallah, never) arise? 100% [although I am well aware that the quality of care I received was likely linked with my position as a foreigner in the country]. The TLDR of it all is that if your fear of getting sick in a country like Egypt has stopped you from traveling, don’t let it. If one of the world’s most anxious humans can handle it, you can too.
I returned to the dig house the next day a little battered and bruised from the poking and prodding I had received, but I rather quickly hopped back in the saddle and got to work. My primary goals for this season were:
1. Rectify duplicate tag numbers for my database
2. Measure as many items as possible to use as data points
3. Photograph the remaining items from my tombs
4. Discuss my ideas with my team and work out some philosophical approaches to the data.
5. Facilitate any work Afaf (our Osteologist) can complete within the brief season.
This isn’t as fun as making new discoveries, but it is just as (if not more) important.
Afaf decided to primarily focus on the large shaft burial that featured a ramped entrance for her tenure here, which, when complete, would mean that we have an analysis of the remains found in all three of the large shaft tombs. The first few days were spent separating the bones into piles (this can be tedious work, especially if you have bags of bone shards, but it’s so fascinating to watch her identify fragmentary pieces with such ease). A preliminary analysis has shown us that the shaft’s two chambers contained very different population numbers. The northern shaft, which, if you remember, is where we found the white mask, contained only the remains of a young mother and her four to five-year-old child. The southern chamber, in comparison, contained a total of eleven adults and four children of varying ages. Although this is only the tip of the iceberg of information she can offer us, it is already fascinating to consider how and why one chamber was used only once, whereas the other was used several times by the family unit. I have to dive into this, but I suspect the mother and child died first, and were given some semblance of a special burial due to the situation at hand.
I started my own work by tediously measuring items. This, however, let me closely examine items that had escaped my attention in past seasons giving it the feel of making new discoveries. One of the items that I had very specifically set out to examine more closely was the walnut shell we discovered in the same aforementioned ramped tomb. We’re awaiting further confirmation from an archaeobotanist but if this is a walnut, we actually have something very very special. Walnuts were not grown in Egypt, as far as we are aware, and I can’t find any archaeological evidence for them in prior reports. If this is a walnut then it must have been imported (either just the nuts, or a tree) from the area of ancient Iran, a process that would have made walnuts exceedingly exotic and expensive. Although they could have been placed within the tomb for as simple of a reason as “so and so loved walnuts” we have to consider the implications of an individual even being able to taste a single walnut in their lifetime, never mind the implications of including something so rare within the tomb itself. I suspect the lack of additional walnuts (and the lack of the nutmeat itself) is due to the rodent activity we’ve seen in some of the tombs, but questions like this are somehow even more difficult to answer.
In order to not drive ourselves crazy spending all our time within the house, we also took trips to local sites - some of which I have shown you before – and chatted about how our own sites fit into the wider historical and physical landscape of Abydos as a whole. One of these was Umm el-Qa’ab, which we visited back in January of 2023, while the other was the mortuary complex of Senwosret III, the fifth king of the 12th Dynasty. This complex stretches from the agricultural valley, where there is a temple to the king, all the way to the desert cliffs, where the king’s mortuary temples and tomb were housed. The complex is a beautiful, monumental example of Middle Kingdom royal funerary monuments, and appears to have served as a model for the later New Kingdom tombs at the Valley of the Kings (over 300 years later!).
At the moment, the complex is mostly subterranean, although it has been excavated and well-studied by Dr. Wegener from Penn – in fact he’s out working on the area as we speak. What remains visible in the landscape are the two “dummy mastabas” as well as the entrance to the king’s tomb, which has been marked by an official ministry building. The tomb is not open to the public but since we have an “in” we got to climb inside. The tomb, as you can see on the plan, is a massive rock-cut passage that extends nearly 245 meters into the mountain, and 45 meters down. Getting to go inside was so unbelievably exciting and felt wildly adventurous due to the lack of supports, lights, ventilation, and, in some places, easy means of egress! The tomb was robbed in antiquity and the robbers somehow managed to pull the muti-ton, solid granite sarcophagus and canopic chest of the king a fifth of the way towards the entrance of the tomb before giving up. Interestingly, we don’t actually know where they were originally placed because Dr. Wegner still hasn’t found the burial chamber. You read that right, this massive tomb is likely LARGER than we can currently see.
The interior is undecorated, although, red lines marking every two cubits (a unit of measurement) are still visible on the wall from the original engineers and individual chisel marks are still visible along the ceiling. The passage closest to the burial chamber was also lined with multi-ton solid red granite slabs, meant to give it that extra je ne sais quoi that every king desires. Climbing back up the tomb also made it abundantly clear that this space was not built for the living. The very still air was wildly humid, and as you rose in elevation you started to realize how much more hospitable the sunny outdoors were. It’s no surprise that the funerary texts describe the king awakening and making his way back up to the entrance instead of staying permanently within his new ghostly abode!
We were then spoiled with a quick visit to the nearby tomb of Seneb-Kay, a previously unidentified king from a heavily debated (but well-evidenced) group of rulers known as the Abydos Dynasty. Dr. Wegner made this remarkable discovery back in 2014, which you can read about here: https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/discovering-pharaohs-sobekhotep-senebkay/ . This dynasty would have been one of the immediate precursors to Ahmose, making them a significant thread for me to grasp onto in my examination of the landscape and political situation when Ahmose arrived in Abydos and built his mortuary complex. The tomb is microscopic compared to that of Senwosret, but the beautiful painting is still in place making it a magical tomb to visit. We regularly joke that when Joe Wegner touches the ground in Abydos, something magical and history-changing appears, so we will have to see what else he discovers this season!
That’s all for week one and I, for sure, am happy that it ended better than it started (alhamdulillah!). Stay tuned for next week’s osteology update, visit to Akhmim, and a glimpse at a newly discovered temple at Athribis (that still hasn’t been announced by the Ministry, so you know the drill, shhhhhh).
Emily
