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Richard and I spent most of our last days at Mut photographing pot sherds, a necessary but decidedly unphotogenic task. However, I did have time to take a few other photographs, mainly in the early morning before starting on the pots, that I thought readers of this blog might enjoy. One of the most wonderful things about Egypt is the light: the strong golds and reds of dawn and sunset, the sharp shadows of mid-morning and afternoon, and even the blaze of the sun at noon are a photographer’s dream. Many of the photos here owe their interest to the quality of the light. Click on any images in the slideshow to view the captions or explore further at Flickr.

Slideshow created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Thursday, February 28 was our last day of work. It has been a very satisfactory season. We accomplished most of what we set out to do, and more besides. Finding the footing of the Mut Temple’s 1st Pylon was particularly exciting, as was the successful restoration of Chapel D. We also found a new and interesting building in the last few days of work, described briefly below.

We want to give special thanks to the Luxor staff of Supreme Council of Antiquities who greatly facilitated our work: Mansour Boreik, General Manager for Upper Egypt; Mohamed Assem, General Manager for Luxor; Ibrahim Soliman, General Manager for Karnak; and our inspector Osama Abdel Maougoud Abdulla, with whom it was a great pleasure to work. And of course, nothing would have been possible without the hard work and dedication of our Egyptian technicians and workmen, to whom we owe many thanks.

Our most notable conservation project this season was the restoration of Chapel D. Here is the west wall of the first room in its final state. Its foundations are solid, its walls are vertical with the blocks properly aligned, and the spaces between the stones have been filled with a mortar tinted to match the sandstone. Khaled, Mohamed Gharib, Sayed Ahmed and their crew have done a wonderful job and we thank them for their efforts. (more…)

The final week on site was spent finishing up various small projects, catching up on treatment notes, and packing up the tools and supplies for next year. It was also satisfying to watch the progress on the west wall of Chapel D, pictured here, where Mohammed Gharib and Khaled did the final filling of losses between the original carved blocks with a mortar that closely matches the color of the stone when it dries.

My three weeks here at Mut have gone by fast and it’s been fascinating dealing with some of the problems conservators face in the field where the challenges range from preserving large scale stone and architectural elements to treating small excavated objects like coins and pottery. I’ve also made a lot of new friends and had the chance to see beautiful vistas everyday, like this one looking up the Avenue of Sphinxes toward the south entrance to the Karnak Temple complex. A special thanks to everyone who made it all possible!

After my second week on site I feel a bit less dazed and confused by the layout, the routine, and the scope and direction of the project, and more able to focus on the conservation issues at hand. A good thing considering I have less than a week remaining to finish out the season! I continued with the projects I described in my last entry including the removal of the cotton gauze facing from the badly deteriorated limestone block with Montuemhat’s name on it now that it’s been moved to a nearby mastaba for permanent display.

I continued to treat and clean coins as well but also had the pleasure of cleaning this small bronze lion, about five centimeters in length, with crossed forepaws. Pictured on the right, I’m cleaning the recently discovered relief fragment with an image of Khonsu on it to help make the incised lines more legible. (more…)

You are looking northwest at the Taharqa Gate late Thursday morning. We are now down to the paving in the whole gateway, except for a small area in the center of the west side. As is true throughout the site, the sandstone paving has been badly damaged by ground water over the years: the bright yellow sand used to be stone. The meter stick is sitting on a flat block set into and partially covered with mud brick that may be the earliest phase of the brick constructions that once blocked the gate. (more…)

My first day on site was Saturday, February 9th and I’m amazed at how quickly the week flew by. One of the things I did right away was walk around the entire precinct with Mary, who explained the layout and history of the excavation. It was great to actually walk around and locate features that I’ve only read about or seen in pictures. Richard, Bill, Elsie, Jaap and Ben have also been bringing me up to speed on various aspects of the site and sharing stories and anecdotes of seasons past.

In addition, I met my Egyptian colleagues for the first time including Khaled Mohamed Wassel, the Egyptian conservator on site who has been doing an admirable job of consolidating the carved sandstone blocks in the west wall of Chapel D, and supervising the master mason, Mohahamed Gharib and his team in rebuilding the wall. They’ve all been attempting to teach me a few words of Arabic with often humorous results.

I set about surveying my conservation supplies, and examined the small finds from this season, including a group of about forty coins. Pictured above is one of the first coins I cleaned mechanically with brushes and dental tools that shows the head of a Roman emperor yet to be identified. In the other picture I’m cleaning another coin with the pointed end of a wooden skewer after softening the outer layers of corrosion in a chemical solution of 10% EDTA (ethylene diamine tetra acetic acid) in water made basic with ammonia. Uncovering legible details on heavily corroded coins requires a steady hand and a lot of patience but if successful can aid in dating the area the coins were found in. (more…)

This week we moved a couple of teams of workmen from the Taharqa Gate (where working space is getting a little constricted) to the excavations north of Mut’s 1st Pylon. We now have teams working both on the structures built against the pylon face and in the area bounded on the north by the remains of Temple A’s columned porch and on the west by the Mut Temple’s East Porch. (more…)

Clearing the Taharqa Gate is one of the season’s main goals, a goal we achieved, at least in part, this week: the north wing of the gate is visible from top to bottom, along with some of the ancient paving. On the left you are looking from the east end to the west. On the right, the arrow (indicating north) points at the original pivot for the gate’s door. The darker areas of stone were buried until this year. (more…)

The weather continues to be uncooperative. Last week it rained. This week, we’ve had unusually cold temperatures and high winds that sweep enormous clouds of dust across the site, usually just as we are ready to take a photograph (or so it seems). All we can do is keep our heads down and go on working. It has actually been a very productive week. (more…)

We just received a call from Richard Fazzini and Mary McKercher.  The internet is down in Egypt and many other countries, so the Dig Diary posting for this week will be going up a bit later than usual after service is restored.  Stay tuned and if you are curious, you can read a bit more about the outage.