Here’s one more note for the 6th graders in Ms. Donnelly’s class. They asked about what we hope to find in the burial chamber in the pyramid, and whether the kings and queens of Kush were mummified like Egyptians. They also wanted to know if there might be traps waiting for us in the burial chamber.These…
Read More
We have continued to work on the mortuary temple that we think was devoted to the cult of a dead king (or maybe all the dead kings and queens in the cemetery). It’s a large building, and we have now nearly excavated the entire outer room with 26 columns. Stay tuned for a photo within…
Read More
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…
Read More
Another installment of answers to Ms. Donnelly’s 6thgrade class that have to do with life on the dig…. We live in a house in the village—here’s a photo of the outer courtyard, which is really a nice place to have a cup of tea in the afternoon, and we do a lot of work here…
Read More
I’ve encouraged the team to write guest-blog posts too. Here’s a note from our geologist/geophysicist, Dr. Carola Stearns, along with a photo of the area she’s working in—the mortuary temple: The landscape around El Kurru is one of remarkable contrasts: dry vs. wet. We are here in the dry season. The temperatures are slowly rising…
Read More
National Geographic has asked me to blog on their site too. Here’s my first post, which is an introduction to our project: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2014/03/03/discovering-the-story-behind-a-temple-devoted-to-the-cult-of-a-dead-king/
Read More
It’s been a very busy week on the dig, and I haven’t had so much time to write. But I can give an update on the pyramid now. We had completed excavating the stairs a bit over a week ago, and opened up the door block that we had put in over the hole that…
Read More
I received a nice note from Julie Donnelly, who teaches at Clague Middle School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her 6th grade students had a bunch of really good questions about the dig and about living in a village in Sudan. It turns out that 6th graders are pretty smart! I’m going to try to answer…
Read More
We are fortunate to be working at El Kurru with a group of 5 professors of archaeology from the University of Dongola at Karima. Led by Prof. Abbas Sidahmed Mohamed-Ali, with funding from the Qatar-Sudan Archaeological Project, they are working to restore and protect portions of the royal cemetery excavated by George Reisner nearly 100…
Read More
On Thursday, we reached an amazing moment in our exploration of Kurru Pyramid 1: we uncovered the doorway to the burial chamber. In the pyramids of the kings and queens of Kush, the ancient builders cut a staircase into the rock that led down to two or more burial chambers. The staircase was open to…
Read More