Abydos, Egypt 2004
As we came near to the town of Abydos, traveling from Luxor through Qena, incredible rock cliffs rose up to the sky. Our tour guide announced that the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas had been found at the bottom of these rock cliffs; it apparently washed down from where it had been hidden by a monk in one of the caves.
Upon arriving in the town itself, we left the bus and split into four groups, piled into taxis, each group was accompanied by a guard with a gun. We were whisked along dirt roads through the village and sometimes on "the ring road" which was a packed dirt road bordered on one side by a large sand dune and on the other, with small houses. I convinced our guard to let me out to photograph some of these houses which had paintings on their walls representing their inhabitant's trip to Saudi Arabia to perform the Hagg.
This was an exciting trip because we were able to speak with the two groups of archaeologists working at sites near Abydos temple. Their discoveries this year and last, challenge preconceived ideas about the history of Egyptian civilization. My guide books do not yet contain the impact of these new finds which evoke more questions than answers.
The sites at Abydos, (the archaeologists put the accent on the second syllable and call it A -bie-dos, and everyone else accents the first syllable and calls it A-be-dos) hold not only some of the earliest evidence related to Pharaonic Egypt-they named it the zero dynasty- but also the remains of the last pyramid that was built.
Just last month, they uncovered a grave of dogs, representing a cult that eventually mixed in with the cult of Osiris. According to legend, the head of Osiris was found at Abydos, and as one of the earliest pilgrimage sites in Egypt, people came to participate in a ritual enactment of the death and resurrection of this god. In the temple of Seti, which still stands intact, there are some of the best preserved temple paintings found anywhere in this country.
When I tried to explain to my Arabic professor (in Arabic) what I had seen on the trip she was not impressed. "You go all that way to look at four walls?" she asked. I had been trying to explain to her about the first site we visited, a large enclosure with mud brick walls originally 13meters high covered with white plaster only on the outside and enclosing an area 120meters by 27 meters.
There was no evidence of anything that had been inside except remains of one small sacrificial temple buried in the sand in one corner. The rest of the space was empty with no attempt at finishing either the floor or the insides of the walls. As we stood in the middle of this enormous enclosed space, I wondered what this was built for. What did they do here? Why would someone make such an effort?
The tomb or cenotaph of the king is built further away in the rock hills, but surrounding these walls are graves; one group contains 14 boats! And there are traces, under the sand, of earlier similar enclosures- some of those have human sacrificial graves, not of servants but of people from a higher class. The graves are associated with specific enclosures and each group seems to have been dug and filled at the same time. The earliest of these could date back to 4,000 B.C.
As we listened to the archaeologist speak I watched a team of local men (which the graduate student working there referred to as "the boys") carrying buckets of sand on their shoulders only to be dumped a few meters away where it was sifted. What they were uncovering from the sand, were the remains of the plaster walls, and we were told that at the end of the season, the men would be asked to carry, in buckets, all the sand back to where they had taken it from so the walls would again be hidden. I wonder what these men thought of the project!
It is hard to describe why I found this place so exciting. My photographs don't capture the sense of awe that I felt there. I have better photographs of the Medinat Habu temple decorations (which we also visited in Luxor) and our early morning visit to Luxor temple. I think for me, it had something to do with standing in the middle of this enormous space which had been demarcated by humans so long ago, without being able to understand the motivation that propelled these people to undertake this enormous endeavor.
There was something about this site that had brought the Pharaohs, through all their dynasties, back to this place which they considered sacred. We also noticed the cells of Christian monks who carved niches into the thick walls so they could also live and worship at the site.
Even the temple of Seti the first, which dates back to the nineteenth dynasty, has behind it a structure they call the Osireion, which no one seems to know much about. My blue guide has only two paragraphs on it. It says, "It was constructed on a mound surrounded by a lake and there was a plantation of trees thought to be connected with the original mound which arose from the watery waste of Nun". It also says that the structure does not resemble anything else from the 19th dynasty and relates more to Old Kingdom structures in the style of stone cutting even though the name of Seti appears on it.
My sense is that the early Egyptians felt this place to be one of the most sacred in the world. Even today they speak of Egypt as "the mother of the world", and for some reason, throughout time the pharaohs returned again and again to this spot, to reaffirm their connection with its historical significance.
I would love to know, what that early history really was. The archaeologists working there are finding new things every season. But their work has been threatened by a new building project: a new road connecting Cairo to Aswan. For the moment the project has been stopped. But moving the road, behind the mountains where the tombs lie means putting it in the middle of the desert at a much greater cost. On the other hand, what will the cost be to Egypt, in the long run, if they lose the remaining history of the earliest part of their civilization?