(guest post by Jack Cheng, our draftsman, artist, and my friend and colleague for almost 20 years!) In excavating the pyramid at El Kurru, we calculated that about 100 tons of fill had been deposited in just the last room (similar amounts were removed from the first two rooms in last season). Some of the…
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Between the hectic work at the end of the season and the terrible internet connection, I wasn’t able to post about our final results for the season. So in the next few days, I’ll write about where things stand and our plans for next season. Our most dramatic result was in the burial chamber of…
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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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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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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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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