20th
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. After saying ‘goodbye’ to Salwa and thanking her for all her help, we did some shopping and returned to our hotel to pack. Tomorrow we will drive to Balamun to drop off some equipment there, then we have two days in Cairo - to return our hire car to Hertz and the Topcon to the EES Office, and to meet up with friends, before we fly home on Easter Sunday.
Our first season at Daba has gone very well. We were able to survey the whole site and now have a much better understanding of its archaeological remains and the development of the tell’s current appearance. Next year, we hope to return and undertake targeted excavations to try to establish the dates of the brick walls and house plans that we have noted and started to investigate this year.
Since I started this account of our stay in Kafr es-Sheikh with an image of the mosque near our hotel, it seems appropriate to ‘sign off’ this season’s Delta Survey updates with a view of the same mosque at sunset on our last day here.
