March 2012
25 posts
Kom el-Daba. Signing off.
The aim of the EES Delta Survey is to investigate those tells in the Delta about which little is known - to record surface features, get an idea of the dating of any material and the site in general and carry out surveys. If a site has any significant features, these can then be investigated in more detail. All the information gathered is fed back into the on-line data held on the Society’s...
Kom el-Daba. Last day on site.
Every morning when we arrive at Daba we park our car on the edge of the tell behind a half-finished house belonging to one of the site guards, where we have our second breakfast break at 11am. The house isn’t decorated or fully furnished but the room we use does have a canaba (a wooden bench), a bed and a desk with a black-and-white television.
Our hire car parked on the edge of the...
Kom el-Daba. Visitors, mobiles, donkeys and TV.
We had a visit this morning from Dr Assayed El-Banna and his colleagues from the Kafr es-Sheikh Museum whom we had met on Saturday when we went to Mansura. Jeff described the site in general and our current excavation. We were still tracing the line of the northern face of the house so he also demonstrated defining the wall and how to make the bricks show more clearly. Dr Assayed translated...
Kom el-Daba. Working uphill
After yesterday’s excitement in Mansura, today we returned to Kom el-Daba and continued investigating our town house, moving the work back from the southern end to the northern one where we had started our excavation in early March. We had then found part of the northern side of the house before it was cut by the sebakh pit which had destroyed the north-east corner. Today we followed the...
Kom el-Daba. Day in Mansura
We’re back in Kafr es-Sheikh after an amazing day in Mansura, which started when we left our hotel at 9.00 in a microbus with Dr Assayed El-Banna, his wife Rahab, our Inspector Magda and ten other SCA colleagues, and arrived at the Faculty of Arts at Mansura University about 10.30.
The courtyard of the Faculty of Arts with replica statues.
Banner announcing Jeff’s lecture in the...
Kom el-Daba. Day off work
Jeff has finished preparing the talk which he is giving at Mansura University tomorrow and, since we only have three more working days on site, he’s also started writing the short end-of-season report to give to the SCA before we leave. Otherwise, there isn’t much to report as we’ve just been doing our usual Friday chores. We went out for a walk this morning when the streets were...
Kom el-Daba. Foggy morning – hot day.
When we’re driving to Daba every morning our first stop is at the bus station in Kafr es-Sheikh where our Inspector, Magda, arrives from Disuq, where she lives, by local taxi. The bus station is always very busy with microbuses and the local white and yellow taxis diving in from all directions and stopping and starting without notice. Today it was even harder to see what was happening as...
Kom el-Daba. Visit of Chris and Faten.
This morning Chris and Faten taxied from their hotel to ours and came with us in our car to Daba. Once we arrived Jeff described the site and the excavation which today was concentrating on defining the outer edges of the room on which we were working yesterday.
Jeff describing the excavation of the town house to Chris.
Chris on top of the world – well, on top of the mud-brick of the...
Kom el-Daba. Another building and good company!
Many of the tells of the Nile Delta have house plans visible on their surfaces – as we had noted at Kom Ineizi on our visit two days ago. These are most visible when sites are flat and clear of surface debris or have relatively low mounds, but even on a site like Daba which has steep high mounds and areas covered in red-brick fragments, there are house plans visible in places. The mud-brick wall...
Kom el-Daba. A corner and a new wall.
Today we finally found the south-east corner of the house – better preserved than the north-east one which has been removed by the sebbakhin - but still rather cut around. This enabled us to measure the house from north to south and it is 10.4m, which is, rather neatly, 20 cubits. We expect the house to have a square foundation so knowing its width should help us to locate the western side.
...
Kom el-Daba. The Delta Survey.
Our EES fieldwork at Kom el-Daba is funded by the British Academy www.britac.ac.uk as part of the Society’s Delta Survey http://www.deltasurvey.ees.ac.uk/ds-home.html which is an Approved Research Project of the Academy. This allows us to apply for limited funding each year and we are all very grateful to the Academy for this support of EES fieldwork. In addition to our main fieldwork each...
Kom el-Daba. Start of the second week.
Saturday is suq (market) day in Riyad so, although we take a road which avoids the centre of the town, there is always a lot more traffic around and more pedestrians walking along the road with produce, including livestock and poultry. Our drive to the site takes about 35-40 minutes, depending on hold-ups which at the moment are mainly caused by the harvesting of a vegetable called...
Kom el-Daba. A day in Kafr es-Sheikh
Although Friday isn’t a work day here, we found it impossible to sleep in beyond our usual getting-up time of 6.30! We spent today doing all the various ‘chores’ that mount up during the working week and it was good to have a day without having to drive to the site and back, which is always wearing on the nerves – weaving round potholes, high road humps, slow-moving donkey-carts,...
Kom el-Daba – end of the first week.
We’ve completed our first full week of work here at Kom el-Daba and are very pleased with the progress we’ve made so far. The east wall of our ‘town house’ now extends for about 10m and just before we finished work today (as always happens on excavations!) we reached an ‘end’ which may be the south-east corner or may be the start of another sebakh pit –...
Kom el-Daba.
What we thought might be the face of the east wall IS the face of the east wall, and we spent most of today investigating it and the fill up against it, which seems to be redeposited, possibly by the sebbakhin who mined the building extensively.
A large (c.2m diameter) sebakh pit cut into the brickwork of the house.
Although it was sunny today, there was a very strong wind blowing which at...
Kom el-Daba. Excavating a 'town house'.
The house we are excavating is almost certainly what is known as a ‘town house’ – a multi-storey construction built on a massive casemate foundation. This form of house was common in urban settlements in Egypt from the Late Period into the Roman era, when models of such houses were made in pottery and stone. Similar houses have been excavated recently at Buto and Tell el-Daba (Avaris)...
Kom el-Daba. Brick dust in pits and in the air.
There was a strong wind on site today, blowing fine dust all over us and any surface we had just ‘cleaned’. It shows how the thick layer of fill could easily have built up over the remains of the brickwork of the ‘house’ we are investigating. Today we moved ‘round the corner’ to try to locate the east face of the building, and track it from its northern end. The...
Kom el-Daba. Excavation under way
The excavation of the mud-brick building really started today. The fill over the brickwork of the northern wall – in what we are, for the moment, assuming was a ‘street’ between this house and the next – was very empty with just a few sherds. It is essentially a homogenous fill made up of centuries of fine brick dust blowing down from the structures above as they have weathered and...
First day of work on site
Surprisingly, the wedding procession last night wasn’t too loud and didn’t go on too long! We started work on site today, though no-one had informed the site guard of this so he wasn’t prepared and, not being psychic, hadn’t brought any workmen. Fortunately, our arrival attracted the usual crowd of boys (not at school on Saturday) so the eldest two were detailed to be our...
Visit to Balamun
Today we drove to Balamun in the eastern Delta, where we excavated from 1991 to 2010. Its only about 85km but it took two hours each way, despite the fact that traffic was light because of it being a Friday, as the road from Kafr es-Sheikh to Mahalla goes through several villages with very broken road surfaces! After Mahalla our route took us past the ancient sites of Sammanud and Behbeit...
Preparing for work
Last year we carried out a survey of Kom el-Daba and made a contour map. We also started to investigate the high-standing brickwork which had first attracted us to the site as we had wondered if it might represent the last remains of a pharaonic enclosure wall. However, preliminary work last year suggests that the brickwork belongs to several ‘town houses’ probably of the Ptolemaic...
On the road to Kafr es-Sheikh
The drive to Kafr es-Sheikh took longer than we had anticipated (its the first time we’ve done it directly from Cairo) because of heavy traffic just north of Cairo, road works near Benha and our missing the junction onto the new Tanta-Kafr es-Sheikh road and taking an older local road instead! In places this was very scenic but the road wasn’t well-maintained so holes and bumps kept...
Taxis and a lecture
We had a rather hectic day, riding in taxis around Cairo in very slow-moving traffic, seeing various colleagues at the SCA offices in both Zamalek and Abbassiya, so it was good to return to the relative calm of the British Council in Agouza for Jeff’s EES lecture this evening. He spoke about the British Museum’s linked Dafana and Naukratis Projects – both of which are researching and...
First day back in Cairo
After a few hours sleep (our flight landed at midnight) we went this morning to the SCA office in Zamalek where Jeff signed our contract for the season, and then we went over to the EES Office at the British Council in Agouza to collect the Society’s mobile phone and discuss various things with our Cairo Representative Faten Saleh. Faten showed us some of the wonderful photos EES members had...
Returning to the Nile Delta
We’re just about all ready for our flight tomorrow to Cairo to collect our documentation from the SCA and visit Faten in the EES Cairo Office at the British Council where Jeff is giving a lecture on Tuesday (6th) at 7pm: www.ees.ac.uk/events/index/135.html. We’ll be staying in Zamalek again and will hopefully have as good a Nile view from our hotel room as we did last year!
November 2011
2 posts
EES/Freie University Delta Study Day
Today was our ‘Current Research in the Nile Delta’ Study Day, held jointly with the Freie University, Berlin at their research centre, the TOPOI House, just a short walk from our hotel.
The TOPOI House.
Unfortunately one of our speakers, Robert Schiestl, was unwell and unable to give his paper but around 70 people heard talks from Manfred Bietak, Ulrich Hartung, Eva Lange, Manuela...
Delta Survey in Berlin!
Tomorrow we are having a Delta Survey Study-Day in Berlin with speakers from the UK, Germany and Austria. Today started with a shopping trip to buy drinks and snacks for the tea/coffee breaks and reception tomorrow. We now have a supermarket trolley in our hotel room!
Jeff and Jo with our shopping!
This afternoon we all gathered outside the Neues Museum for our special guided tour by Dr...
April 2011
36 posts
Signing off
This morning we went to the SCA office for the Kafr es-Sheikh area, where Salwa wrote the ‘signing off’ document for the expedition and Jeff left a copy of the ‘short’ report Field Directors submit to the SCA at the end of a season. He will write a fuller, illustrated report after we get home and send it to Faten for translation into Arabic and onward submission to the SCA....
Last day on site
Lovely weather on site today after all the heat – sunny and warm but with a nice cooling breeze. It’s a shame we’re leaving! First thing this morning we completed recording the ten red granite mill-stones that are visible on the surface – there could well be others completely buried.
Patricia brushing earth from one of the mill-stones.
Seeking out mill-stones took us to the...
Measuring mud bricks and mill stones
Initially this morning we worked on the top of the mound containing the large brick wall, defining its upper courses and measuring the well-preserved bricks, then, after our break, we returned to the southern end of the site where we suspect from the surface sherds and red bricks, that any intact deposits will be later in date than in the northern part. We started recording and photographing the...
An end to the wall
After having worked for several days on a steep slope, we moved down to the present-day surface level of the tell to see if the large brick wall we’ve been investigating continues below the level of the mound of fill and further to the east. Cleaning away the dry surface dust (mainly composed of powdered brick from the wall) revealed what appears to be the eastern end of the wall, very well...
Still hot.....
Unfortunately the thunderstorm we hoped we’d get to clear the air and cool things down hasn’t yet arrived, so it was very hot on site today and there was a hot strong wind blowing from the south-east (khamsin-like weather), making working conditions very unpleasant, especially as we were cleaning on a slope, over what we think is a mud-brick enclosure wall, right in the path of all the...
A hot Friday
We were very glad we weren’t working on site today as it was exceedingly hot and still. Our first ‘Friday job’ was to wash the car which we started at 7.30am by which time the sun was already beating down.
Jeff washing our hire car at the back of the hotel.
The entrance to our hotel is actually at its ‘back’ (not on the main street), within the sports complex...
Last day of the week
Thursday again and the last working day of the week. We’ve continued investigating some of the high mud-brick walls, though some of the chunks of what look like mud-brick are deceptive. In some cases what has survived is a wall with fill beside it which contains some fallen or displaced bricks, but isn’t actually part of an articulated wall itself. It is just what was left when people...
Three tells (and a baby donkey)
We only worked on site for half a day today as we’d arranged with our SCA Inspector, Salwa, to go and visit three other ancient tells in an area east of Daba. This meant we had again to drive through Riyad which, even though it wasn’t suq-day, was still very busy.
The main through road in Riyad on a quiet day
The first site we went to was Kom Umm Gafar which is a very large mound...
Investigating a monumental wall
We spent most of our time on site today investigating the large chunk of mud brickwork which first aroused our interest in the site when we visited it in 1990. It is shown in the photograph of Jeff with Sabri Abdel Aziz in the first update for this season, and has clearly articulated mud bricks on its eastern exposed side, though this is not the original face of the wall, but is within its...
Driving to Daba
Since our experience with Riyad on suq-day last Saturday, we’ve continued to drive to the site along the old road from Kafr es-Sheikh, rather than (as we had for the first week) using the new international road which leads eventually to the holiday resort of Baltim. Going on the old road means we can avoid most of the crowded main street of Riyad and we come into the town from the south,...
Sakha (and some more cats)
Today it was quite hot and we had a BIG wind on site which made working conditions rather unpleasant as it blew dried earth and brick dust from the surface over everything – cleaned bricks, equipment and people. We did manage to trace some more wall faces so that we could plan them in, and to complete the survey points in the north part of the tell.
This afternoon we went for a drive around the...
Defining mud-brick walls
There was a wedding party last night – it started about 10.00pm and ended in the small hours of this morning (neither of us checked exactly when!). The music was very, very loud, but we did manage to get some sleep. The journey to Daba took us twice as long as usual today as it turned out that Saturday is suq day in the only town on our drive – Riyad. The through road was jam-packed with people,...
Trip into the countryside
There were no wedding parties last night (maybe tonight?) so we did get some sleep, and the sun was shining first thing this morning so we went for a drive out of town while the roads were quieter than normal since it isn’t a working day here. Some villages have their suq (market) days on Fridays so are even busier than usual, while others are much quieter. Otherwise we’ve spent the...
Mud bricks, bright lights and black cats
The last day of the week here and we got in a full day’s work in despite a little rain at Daba late morning. We’ve made very good progress with the planning of the site and only a few areas are yet to be surveyed. The rain shower we had today was quite useful as house/room plans showed up better in the wet ground.
Possible mud-brick rooms after the rain
Thursday is the most popular...
Granite mill stones
After yesterday’s rain, we had lovely weather today – mainly sunny and warm – so we were able to get back to work at Daba, setting survey points for the map. The work went very well again and we were able to add another 150 survey points to the 89 we set on the first day of work. We concentrated today on the south part of the site where the surface is generally lower than in the north, but...
Walk out of town
The sun finally broke through the clouds just before it was due to set so we went for a short walk in the ‘out of town’ direction and found a very pleasant ‘tea garden’ just along the road from our hotel, which looks like a good place to relax in nicer weather.
Kafr es-Sheikh has pedestrian crossings marked on the roads, though no-one uses them nor does the traffic stop...
Rain stopped work!
When we got up this morning the sky was very grey with thick cloud cover and it soon started to rain. The wind was also strong so we decided it wouldn’t be worth driving the 15km to the site if work might not be possible – our experience over the last 20 years at Balamun told us that the bad weather would be around for at least today, and so it has proved. The survey went so well yesterday...
Start of survey
We had a very successful first day, working on the survey, using the Society’s trusty Topcon EDM. We started by setting up on one of the reddish mounds near the western edge of the site to establish a base line, then plotted in most of the high mounds which are composed variously of mud and red brick. Jeff takes the readings while I walk around with Mohammed (one of the two young men we are...
First visit to Daba
This morning we went to the SCA office and met the Director for Kafr esh-Sheikh, Dr Mohammed Abdel Rafaa, who made us very welcome and actually remembered us from when we were touring around tells in 1990 with Sabri Abdel Aziz! He assigned an Inspector to us, Madame Salwa Galal, and she came with us for a preliminary visit to the site. We set off on the 15 km drive to the site in lovely...
In Kafr esh-Sheikh
We’ve now arrived in Kafr esh-Sheikh and are in a hotel (next to the football stadium) which we plan to make our base for the next three weeks. This morning we collected our hire car and drove first to the village next to Tell el-Balamun to collect some of the equipment (archaeological and domestic) which we’ll need here. The family from whom we usually rent a flat there gave us a good...
Thanks
Jeff closed the Workshop by thanking Dr Zahi Hawass, Dr Mohammed Abd el-Maksoud and the SCA for co-sponsoring the Workshop with the EES. He also thanked all the speakers, Penny and Jo for chairing sessions and Randa for kindly translating some talks into English. Finally he thanked me and Faten for organising the Workshop and Penny presented Faten with some flowers.
It’s been a great...
Final discussion
Jeff and Dr Maksoud are chairing the final discussion on behalf of the EES and the SCA.
Jeff welcomed the participation in the Workshop of so many of our Egyptian colleagues from the SCA as it is important for everyone to work together and share information.
Dr Maksoud agreed, especially as the Delta is under great threat from encroaching agriculture and construction. This has accelerated since...
Tell el-Farkha
Mariusz Jucha who was going to talk about the excavations at Tell Murra was unable to come as he’s just finishing off his season, so our last talk is on the important work of the Polish mission at Tell el-Farkha. Marek Chlodnicki and Krysztof Cialowitz are describing their excavation of this Predynastic-Old Kingdom site.
The mission started work in 2001 and has excavated in three...