We have decided to remove the fallen rubble from the north face of the pyramid to see if there might be further indications of how and when it was built and how it may have been connected to the pyramid of one of the most important kings buried at El Kurru—Piye (also called Piankhy)—whose pyramid…
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It continues to be an amazing experience to excavate a pyramid. I went into the innermost burial chamber that we are excavating after the workmen had left for the day, and really experienced what it means to be as quiet as the tomb. Based on other pyramids of this date in Nubia, we expect to…
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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…
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We have continued excavating the underground rooms of the mortuary temple—there were two spaces remaining to clear. One was a small, square, featureless storeroom that contained nothing (like the rest of the temple!). The other appeared to be a corridor connecting two rooms with columns on either side. We knew only about the doorways on…
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I’m in the town of Karima, buying construction supplies and taking advantage of the internet connection here to make a couple of blog posts. Here’s a guest post from our archaeobotanist, Naomi F. Miller: It has taken several days to get organized, so I have not yet begun to float. But I have walked around…
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Excavators in the inner room under the pyramid: El Haj, Ashari, Ghazafi, and Jaffar MadaniThe area of massive rock collapse is visible as multi-colored stone; the brown-yellow stone below is the Nubian sandstone that forms the original back wall of the chamber We are continuing to have a very difficult internet connection, but this is…
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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!
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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…
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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,…
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The condition of the burial chamber of Pyramid 1 was better than the temple, fortunately. We had blocked the door into the pyramid burial chambers with a door that was in two parts—a lower part that roughly matched the original doorway, and an upper part that attempted to fill in the looters’ cut above it,…
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