We arrived in El Kurru having heard that there was some new graffiti in the funerary temple we had excavated last year, and I was concerned about my first visit to see the damage. Our small brick wall to reduce water erosion had worked well despite heavy rain, and the small barbed wire fence was…
Read More
This was a challenging and interesting season at El Kurru. We worked long hours, and our work was often physically demanding. We made progress toward our goals of understanding the ancient settlement, but our current results are not yet fully satisfying. We worked on monumental structures that we will hope to finish excavating in the…
Read More
Because we spent much of our effort clearing monumental remains whose fills were largely empty, we did not find as many objects as we normally would during the course of an archaeological season. There were, however, several contexts that were rich in nearly whole ceramic vessels. One of these was a later occupation level…
Read More
We began this season hoping to establish a date for the largest pyramid at El Kurru and perhaps even to find the name of the king buried there. We knew that we would have a challenge navigating the possibility that the underground rooms would be structurally unsound and we had prepared to build support structures…
Read More
By the end of the season we had excavated two underground rooms of the building we’ve been calling a temple, following Reisner’s designation of it as a “mortuary temple”—a temple dedicated to the worship of a dead king. We succeeded in excavating the two outer rooms of the temple, shown here in a nice kite…
Read More
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….
Read More
Due to overwhelming demand, I am giving my answer to the question of how tall our pyramid would have been when first built. The angle of the facing stones is about 73 degrees, and if you just do a calculation on that basis (yes, it’s trigonometry), you get a height of about 43 meters. If…
Read More
Here’s a real-life math problem: How tall was our pyramid when it was built? You can see that it has some original stones left toward the bottom, but the upper part is all rubble that would originally have been invisible behind a nice stone facing. We are working on this question ourselves. Here is what…
Read More
The Sudanese team working at El Kurru is directed by Prof. Abbas Sidahmed Mohamed-Ali, with Prof. Jamaal Karfis of the University of Dongola at Karima (pictured here) as field director. We have had a chance to become good friends during this field season. The Karima team is continuing to clean and restore the dramatic tombs…
Read More
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