I’m back in Karima and can make a few more blog posts… We continue to expand our knowledge of the massive city wall that separates the palm groves along the Nile from the modern village. We are still looking for evidence that it is earlier than the Christian period, but we haven’t found it yet—so…

Here’s a time-lapse photography experiment by our registrar and photographer Sebastian Anstis showing excavation at the city wall…better at small screen size because of our uploading limitations. Watch out for the face towards the end!  

We have a great team working at El Kurru and I’ve invited them to post to the blog. Here’s the first post, from Martin Uildriks, who worked at the City Wall last season and has returned this year. Continued excavations at the Great Wall at El Kurru City gateway (2014 photo) In his field notes…

By contrast to the situation in the temple and pyramid, our very simple covering of the city wall was in great shape. We had taken old shawwal (burlap sacks for dates), opened them up, draped them over the stones of the wall, and covered them with about 15 cm of sediment. Everything remained in place,…

I am finally returning to work after an end-of-season bout of pneumonia knocked me out. Not what you think of when working in the desert, but maybe the hard work, the heat, and the general fatigue caught up with me. So now I’ll give four final posts that will bring our season to a close….

One of the surprises of our work here at El Kurru has been the discovery of an apparently extensive Christian settlement of about 900 AD. The city wall we have been tracing seems to be of this date rather than the Napatan date of perhaps 700 BC that we had expected. We have now traced…

One of our three areas for excavation this year has been a city wall discovered by Reisner (but like all his settlement finds, never published). His notes say that it was 200 meters long with a gate in the middle of it. We thought we had found it last year, and we’ve been delighted this…