Journal: Wednesday 24 November 2004
Sam and I left the hotel after breakfast this morning, with Abdul driving the car. We have decided to see a couple more sites in the Minya area then press on to Asyut today, so we left our bags in the hotel to collect later.
Our first stop was Tihna el-Gebel to the North of Minya, a place we visited only briefly last time we were here. It’s a large, mostly Graeco-Roman town site, known as Akoris, with a rock-temple of Hathor, built on a hill in a very dramatic situation. This time we wanted to try to visit the Old Kingdom tombs known as the ‘Fraser Tombs’, which are nearby. There is always a great fuss with the police who will insist that it is TUNA el-Gebel we want to go to, which is the better known site of Ashmunein on the other side of the river. Nobody pronounces TIHNA el-Gebel the same way twice so it’s difficult to get across where we want to go as they’ve never heard of it. In the end the police were sensible and let Abdul lead the way. We met the gafir and he led us up the hill through the very extensive mudbrick town site and we had another look at the rock-cut temples. One of them is supposed to date to Rameses II & Merenptah, but the only poorly-preserved reliefs in the temple court are from much later. The temples are in a very sorry state and the whole site is a confused jumble, with deep pits everywhere. The site dates from the Old Kingdom but has been used and reused right through to Christian times.
We wandered around the back of the temples, scrambling over the rocks with the gafir shaking his head and saying ‘no, no’. In the end he just let us go – must have realised by now that we are quite mad. On the other side of the hill past dozens of sanded up late period tombs in the necropolis, we found an area where a Japanese team have been excavating for the past three seasons. They have uncovered Late Period granaries, a textile workshop, leatherworking shop and a copper/bronze refinery and a great deal of pottery and other artefacts. There is so much here at this site and there are wonderful views from the top of the hill over yellow and green agricultural fields to the Nile.
We asked about the Old Kingdom ‘Fraser’ tombs but the gafir said they were a few kilometres further up the wadi and he didn’t have a key. Standing on top of the hill we could see hundreds of tombs cut into the slopes all around, but I think these are mostly Late Period or Roman. There are some very odd bits and pieces, such as a lovely heart-shaped column base on the temple platform – I’ve never seen one like it before. There is quite a lot of inscribed stone but nothing really complete enough to read properly, and I didn’t recognise the cartouches, which probably means they’re Late or Graeco-Roman. After a while we decided we had tried the patience of the gafir enough for one day, so it was time to leave.
Next stop the tiny pyramid of Zawiyet el-Maiyitin, Zawiyet el-Amwat, or Zawiyet el-Sultan as it is called locally. This is just across the river from Minya. The pyramid only has its lower courses remaining and is one of the seven Old Kingdom mini-pyramids in the Nile Valley, known as the Sinki Pyramids and sometimes ascribed to King Huni. However, we wanted to walk up to the Dynasty XVIII tomb of Nefersekheru, up on the gebel. There are many New Kingdom tombs but this is the only one open, so we puffed and panted our way up and went inside. I left with little recollection of what the tomb looked like – which just proves I need photographs (not allowed) to jog my memory and should have taken notes. We also saw what we think is the Old Kingdom tomb complex of Khunes, which has recently been re-excavated and still has reliefs in the outer parts.
We find more and more, and especially in Middle Egypt that wherever there is a modern cemetery there is almost certain to be an ancient site nearby. This theory has been very helpful when we are searching for places. The Muslim cemetery at Zawyet is one of the biggest in Egypt and dates back a long time. Its little mud domes stretch for miles along the banks of the Nile. We walked back down towards the pyramid and looked at the site of a New Kingdom Temple. There are few remains except in the quay area, but you can just make out the ground-plan of the temple to the north and we saw a nice block of stone with a Seti I cartouche.
We left Zawyet and drove back to the hotel to collect our bags and then on to Asyut, arriving around 3.30pm. The only hotel which took tourists and had rooms free was the Hotel Badr Touristic, quite expensive for an Egyptian-run hotel at $29 per night and not really tourist standard but not too bad. A strange place, it looked more like a nightclub than a hotel, with lots of mirrors everywhere on the red plush walls and large glass chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. We were allowed out to play on our own here and went out to eat later in a local restaurant serving the usual meat, rice and vegetables, followed by a coffee shop. I can’t decide if I like Asyut or not, it’s not as pretty as Minya and much bigger, being one of the main university towns.
Also known variously as Kom el-Ahmar, Zawyet Sultan, or Zawyet el-Amwat, Zawyet el-Maiyitin was the ancient pharaonic town of Henenw, the one-time capital of the 16th Upper Egyptian Nome of the Oryx. A very large town site still exists here, though the low and scattered mudbrick walls are generally in poor condition, apart from one very big chunk of enclosure wall. The site is most well-known for the remains of a small Dynasty III step pyramid, one of a series of seven similar structures throughout Egypt. There was a German team working at the pyramid today, so we kept our distance, but the remains were much more substantial than I had been led to believe from the books which mostly say it’s destroyed. It is thought that these small pyramids were never intended as burial places but were perhaps placed to mark the ancient Nome capitals. We wandered around the ancient town and looked at the very scant stone remains of a temple on the northern side of the site, dated to Amenhotep III and dedicated to Horus of Hebenw. Amenhotep’s temple seems to have been dismantled and rebuilt by Seti I during Dynasty XIX and there are a few remaining blocks showing Seti’s cartouche near a wooden ramp over the quay area. Stone steps leading into the temple were built in the pharaonic and Roman periods, but little else now remains. I thought that one of the most impressive things about Zawyet el-Maiyitin is the adjacent Muslim cemetery. This area has been in use as a necropolis since Predynastic times, with additions right through to the Ptolemaic and Roman eras and until recently served as a cemetery for the whole population of el-Minya governorate. The tomb area is vast, its little blue and cream domes stretching almost from the river up into the gebel and we were told that it is one of the largest Muslim cemeteries in Egypt. We are finding more and more that if we’re looking for an ancient necropolis and we find a modern one, chances are it has been built on top of or next to an earlier site. In the distant gebel behind the site about 1km away we could see the rock-cut tombs that served as the burial places of local officials of the Old and New Kingdoms. We were told that only one of them, that of the Royal Scribe Nefersekheru, is open and photographs were not allowed, so we didn’t spare the time to walk up to the mountain.
We headed back north along the Nile as far as the Minya bridge where, even though we had Police Captain Ezza in the car with us, we still had to wait for an hour until the next troop truck arrived to escort us further north to el-Siririya. This was a pretty drive through small villages with the high limestone gebel reaching right down to the road. We saw many small limestone industries along the sides of the road – the quarries here are one of the major sources of limestone blocks for building in the country – a fact which is obvious from the dazzling white dust which covers the land and everything on it for miles around. When we came to a cement factory that was belching out clouds of thick white dust, we knew we were in the right area. There are many galleries of quarries at el-Siririya where the cutting technique can be seen, some with ancient builders marks still on the faces of the rock. What we had come to see here was a rock-cut speos (rock-shrine), decorated by Merenptah during Dynasty XIX and dedicated to Hathor ‘Lady of the Two Infernos’ – a fiery aspect of the goddess well suited to this parched site. But first we had to find it. Nobody local seemed to have heard of it and Captain Ezza and two young policemen spent about half an hour wandering the area with Sam, Jane and I looking for it. We eventually found the Hathor chapel just as we were about to give up. It was located on a steep rise, which may have been at one time, cut from a cliff face, but now stands alone. The shrine has a single doorway with a badly worn hieroglyphic text incised on the jambs. Inside is a single chamber with a vaulted ceiling, once carved and painted but now poorly preserved, although remains of the paint can still be seen. At the rear of the chapel, three statues are carved from the rock in high relief, including one of the goddess Hathor on the right-hand side. Below the speos on the western side, a stela is carved into the rock, now quite worn and with the lower part completely gone. The stela depicts a king named in two cartouches of (probably) Rameses II, offering to a god who is difficult to identify, but could be Sobek. Hathor stands behind the king with a hand on his shoulder. How I love these expeditions to places nobody in their right mind would bother with! Then it was back to the car, parked by an ‘Entry Forbidden’ sign near a helicopter pad.
Our final stop today was at Tihna el-Gebel, half-way back towards Minya and another little-visited but important site. Here were the Old Kingdom rock-cut tombs known as the ‘Fraser Tombs’ and the later Graeco-Roman Period town site of Akoris. It was already getting late. The police were becoming impatient with us and we knew we wouldn’t have time to visit the tombs a couple of kilometres further up the wadi, but the two youngest policemen agreed to take another hike with us and we trudged up the steep hillside to the town site. This is the most amazing place, built up the side of a high outcrop of rock that was once the pharaonic town of Dehenet, attested from the Old Kingdom when there was a Temple of Hathor here. Another temple, built during the reigns of Rameses II and Merenptah has four dark chambers cut into the rock and originally had a pronaos or portico with four columns at either side of the entrance. The temple is poorly preserved, but damaged remains of Hathor-headed columns could still be seen in the dark interior. In front of the Temple of Hathor there are wide plain columns still standing and nearby there are Roman and Coptic inscriptions in ink on scattered blocks. A ramp was added during the Roman Period by the Emperor Nero and there are two more small Roman temples that have only single chambers with statue niches at the rear. I climbed around the precarious edge of the cliff to see the Greek and Roman tombs that were cut into the rocks high above the temples, some elaborately decorated on their facades with life-sized reliefs of their owners. Everywhere there were deep open shafts of graves and if we’d put a foot wrong we would have hurtled off the edge of the cliff or down a shaft, but the setting is certainly very dramatic. Our two young policemen (they looked about 16) seemed to be really enjoying themselves even though we all knew we would be in trouble as we’d stayed much longer than the time we had been allotted here.
