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 it must have been built around 700 AD. We hope that exposing its entire length may give us further hints about the location of the town of the Napatan period when the royal burials were built. And the city wall itself is really impressive, not just in its massive stone construction, but in its collapse—here is a particularly large section that shows collapse both in stone and in “red bricks”. The upper part of the wall—or a later reuse of the wall—must have been built of red bricks.

The settlement along the wall is also slowly coming into view. Last year we excavated part of a house with preserved ceramic vessels still on the floors. This year, we expanded the area of excavation and found a Christian cemetery with burials neatly laid out in rows.

We are in the process of excavating these, and will then be able to see more of the house below.