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I walk the desert site of ancient
Abydos, Egypt - early in the morning till afternoon, over rises and into troughs. Abydos sits west of the Nile and near the escarpment that divides the high and low desert. It's in the low desert and neither the high or the low desert are the kind dotted by cacti, only sand and sand-polished stone.
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| climbing the escarpment above Abydos, Dec. 2008 |
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| looking south, the escarpment to the right Jan. 2013 |
Organic material is scant and limited to places of human activity.
Villages and towns bordering Abydos add the energy of daily living. They add the
sound of rural life - truck and tractor, pumps and animals, and the
call to prayer many times daily. And across some of Abydos they add remnants - organic waste and
plastic, animal carcasses, and Nile mud transported to make agricultural fields
on top of desert.
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| Exposed to wind and sun everything fades and is rebuilt or
discarded. This has happened for centuries, as the living
towns spill over the ancient town site. Jan. 2013 |
I step over concentrations of limestone, mud brick,
potsherds, and bone fragments - the materials of ritual and burial, homage to
another world. In Abydos the chief concern seems to have been life after this
one. Many of the mounds, rather than dunes, are heaped debris from episodes of
excavation and looting. The structures beneath are tombs, foundations of
funerary buildings, temples, and chapels – places where the dead were buried
and the living came to remember. These features are the focus of archaeological
inquiry and sometimes of illegal looting.
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| To check the urban growth a wall was begun in 2005 and helps
delineate a boundary to protect the archaeological site of Abydos. Jan. 2013 | | |
I am glad to walk, and to work here, again - this season with the PYIFA Abydos Excavation project - and with folks from the west and Egypt, people I've had the opportunity to work with in previous seasons.
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| Photo courtesy of Mark Gonzales, Jan. 2013 |
