Digging Diaries 2022 - fourth week
The Digging Diaries tell the joint mission of Museo Egizio and Rijksmuseum of Leiden to Saqqara.
The excavation project in Saqqara began in 1975. Until 1998 the Leiden Museum cooperated with the Egypt Exploration Society in London. Leiden University (since 1999) and the Bologna Archaeological Museum (since 2011) were also involved in the project.
In 2015, the Museo Egizio joined the project as a third partner.
The current mission directors are Lara Weiss, curator of the Egyptian collection at the Leiden Museum, and Christian Greco, director of the Museo Egizio.
Digging Diary 4: fourth week in Saqqara
Written by Paolo del Vesco (Curator and archaeologist, Museo Egizio). Photos by Nicola Dell’Aquila (Photographer, Museo Egizio) where not explicitly mentioned
Hi, I’m Paolo Del Vesco, I work as a curator and archaeologist at the Museo Egizio and I’ve been taking part in the Saqqara project since the beginning of the joint Dutch-Italian collaboration in 2015. It’s always very nice to return to Egypt and see so many friendly faces again, but this year, after the long pandemic break, even more so than ever before.
My task here is supervising the excavation activities. I joined the team in the field two weeks ago, and these have been very interesting! In the first days we continued the preparation of the excavation area already started by Daniel Soliman as soon as the mission was opened. This was a very important activity, as it allowed us to better delineate the limits of the new tomb, especially along the west and south sides, and then to safely work inside it. And there we’ve got the first surprise: the lower part of the west wall of the tomb has, at a certain point in time, apparently been razed and reused, together with another wall built parallel to it, as the base of some kind of walking surface.
Assam Sayed, Paolo, Magdi Rubi, Rafa’at Eid, Mohammed Sayed and other workmen looking at one of the upright limestone slabs marking the walls of the western chapels of the tomb.
After we had finished with the surroundings, we began digging inside the tomb superstructure. It is here that we expect to find the most interesting things and deposits, although sometime quite the opposite happens. Since ancient times, tombs have attracted the attention of people looking for precious materials, reusing stones for other constructions or acquiring nice artefacts and reliefs for collections of antiquities. All their activities were of course concentrated inside the tombs. As a result, archaeologists in Saqqara are confronted with much disturbed contexts and tombs that are almost completely stripped of their original decorated limestone walls.
Already in 2018 we had documented traces of plundering activities. Therefore, our expectations for finding decorated chapel walls this season were rather low. Yet as soon as we started working inside, a series of upright limestone slabs appeared. They are still standing in the same position where they were originally placed by the tomb builders, clearly marking the walls of the three western chapels of the structure. What is more: some of the blocks still preserve the bottom part of their relief decoration!
Remains of the relief decoration on one of the wall slabs.
Other decorated limestone fragments have been found in the deposits filling the chapels. These were mixed with fragments of funerary objects (coffins and shabtis) and bones most likely coming from the plundering of burials. Under these complex circumstances, I’m very glad that last week Nico Staring joined the team and is now supervising the digging activities with me.
The job involves a lot of troweling, brushing, filling baskets, carrying and emptying them, photographing soil deposits and structures, labelling but, above all, brushing. Indeed one of the most important parts of the work is cleaning, cleaning and cleaning again, in order to be able to see tiny differences in color or compactness in the deposits that fill the tomb. None of this works would be possible without the help of the Egyptian specialized workforce that is hired locally and that has been working with us for years now.
We feel like detectives looking for traces that could tell us how the tomb was built and decorated, and what happened when it was abandoned and later reused, when it collapsed, when it was inevitably covered by wind-blown sand and then when it was robbed in both ancient and modern times and how it was finally covered by the dumps of the modern archaeologists. For me, the highlight of the week was without any doubt marked by the re-discovery of an old acquaintance: a large robbers’ pit dug in the middle of the tomb courtyard, probably in the 19th century, that we are tracing since 2018 and which we could now finally see in all its technical beauty, with a wonderfully built dry-stone retaining wall that allowed the diggers to reach down to the tomb shaft opening. What a great emotion for an archaeologist!
The large robbers’ pit with its dry-stone retaining wall. Photo by Nico Staring
We look forward to seeing you next Friday for a new digging diary!
