Dispatch from the Field: Greetings from Elkab!
Greetings from Elkab! It was a toasty 119°F yesterday, but with a north breeze today, it felt almost cool. We are a week into the summer field season of the Elkab Desert Survey Project, and I am writing this from the expedition HQ, a historic 1908 mud-brick house designed by British architect George Somers Clarke based on the style of ancient Coptic monasteries (more to come about our exciting conservation project).
On May 7th, John delivered a lecture at the Institut français d'archéologie orientale (IFAO) on the remarkable number of early hieroglyphic inscriptions that he has discovered in the Eastern and Western Deserts. Dating to Dynasty 0 (ca. 3250 – 3100 BCE), these are some of the first hieroglyphs in Egypt. While the rock inscriptions cannot be directly dated, ivory labels from Tomb U-j at Abydos (often associated with King Scorpion), from about 3250 BCE, provide a chronological anchor. As John has noted, an early hieroglyphic inscription at el-Khawy, a few kilometers north of Elkab, may contain the first word we can read phonetically in all of human history (get all the details in his 2017 article and his 2021 volume with Cambridge University Press, Egypt and the Desert [purchase the PDF, not the hard copy or you will miss out on the color images]). That same day, I was out in Media City, Cairo, on a completely non-Egyptological project: acting in an episode of Season 2 of the Egyptian sitcom “Diary of the Quack Family,” which will come out on the streaming service Shahid in September.
John on stage giving a lecture at the Institut français d'archéologie orientale (IFAO).
In Cairo, we also stopped by the original Egyptian Museum (at Tahrir Square—not the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza) to see the amazing new installation of the carved wood panels of the tomb of Hesyre, from the Third Dynasty. The exhibit has a reconstruction of the niched corridor of the mastaba and its painted walls, with the wood panels placed within the niches as they originally were. Standing in front of the panels, it’s difficult to comprehend that they are from about 2650 BCE—the same time as Djoser’s Step Pyramid. Each hieroglyph is itself an exquisite work of art.
Carved wood panels of the tomb of Hesyre
Then, it was off to Luxor to pack up the Land Rovers for the drive south to Elkab (and we had time to visit Deir el-Medina, always an incredible experience).
Land Rovers for the drive south packed with supplies
Our goal the first day in the field was to complete recording of a rock art site near the southern portion of the concession, near the road (modern and ancient) that links Edfu with the Red Sea. We discovered the site last year and immediately photographed the half-dozen rock inscriptions, most of which date to about 3500-3400 BCE. To find these sites, we don’t just walk through the desert—we follow ancient roads. This and several other sites are located at the juncture of the well-known east-west road and a north-south road that we found in 2018.
View from the rock art site
How do we find the roads, you might ask? John has been doing this for over three decades, originally with topographical maps and old aerial photographs and now with the help of satellite imagery. Every potential route must then be mapped on the ground, and we can date the roads by studying the pottery sherds, rock art, and rock inscriptions left by ancient travelers. What did we find at this site? Stay tuned for the next Dispatch from the Field.