Our First Full Week
Excavation got underway last Saturday (our work week is Saturday-Thursday), with teams working in Temple A, at the structures north of the Mut Temple’s First Pylon, and in the Taharqa Gate. The restoration of Chapel D is also making rapid progress. Let’s have a look at the week’s work, starting from the east in Temple A.
On the left you are looking west along the north side of Temple A’s Forecourt at the start of the season. The arrow shows the spot where we found the decorated lintel last year, leaning against the precinct’s mud brick enclosure wall. The space between the enclosure wall and the sandstone north wall of the court was completely filled with earth and, in fact, seems to have had a plastered floor that probably dates to the Roman Period. This year we want to find out what lies below this level.
It’s not going to be as easy as we had hoped, as you may be able to see from the photo on the right. Rather than a corridor running the length of the Forecourt behind the stone wall, we have a mass of mud brick at the east end (right of photo) that blocks the space. West of it, the area has been robbed out and only a trace of the plaster floor, sloping down to the east, is visible against the remains of the face of the enclosure wall. How do the mass of the brick and the enclosure relate to each other?
After puzzling over the area for some days, we decided on Thursday that since the brick mass seems to continue into the mound of debris to the south, our only hope of figuring out the problem is to clear the area between the 2nd Pylon and the enclosure wall – not an easy task given the steep slope of the area. By noon (right) the mud brick of the enclosure wall had begun to emerge.
On the south side of the Forecourt, Qufti Abdel Aziz has spent the week defining the outlines of the various mud brick walls in the area so that William Peck, Associate Director of the expedition and our draughtsman, can begin drawing them when he arrives next week. This is painstaking work as it is often hard to distinguish between mud brick, especially damaged mud brick, and the surrounding soil.
We got back to the rooms north of the Mut Temple’s First Pylon this week as well. At the end of the last season, we uncovered an unexpected stone footing (upper left) to the east wall of the largest room in the area and traces of what looked like a hard lime plaster on the floor. So that’s where we started this year. As you can see in this view to the southeast, the plaster is mainly concentrated on the west side of the room, with a few pieces near the pit in the room’s center. When we removed the pieces it became obvious that they are not the remains of a simple plaster wall as they are very thick (as much as 2 inches) and have clearly been shaped. We’ve kept the pieces and will study them further. Under them we found a level of mud brick that fills at least the northern half of the room.
Since we need to let the bricks here dry out for a few days to make them easier to define, we moved east to the smaller room next to the large room and to the area just north of it. This area, shown in the photo on the right, was already defined by a wall running north from the northeast corner of the smaller room and the east wall of the larger room. We immediately uncovered another wall linking the walls just mentioned; it runs across the lower portion of the photo. It is not clear if the row of brick to the right of the meter stick extends the full length of this new room. We have yet to determine how these various walls fit together.
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