Slideshow created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

We want to give special thanks to the Luxor staff of Supreme Council of Antiquities who greatly facilitated our work: Mansour Boreik, General Manager for Upper Egypt; Mohamed Assem, General Manager for Luxor; Ibrahim Soliman, General Manager for Karnak; and our inspector Osama Abdel Maougoud Abdulla, with whom it was a great pleasure to work. And of course, nothing would have been possible without the hard work and dedication of our Egyptian technicians and workmen, to whom we owe many thanks.

Our most notable conservation project this season was the restoration of Chapel D. Here is the west wall of the first room in its final state. Its foundations are solid, its walls are vertical with the blocks properly aligned, and the spaces between the stones have been filled with a mortar tinted to match the sandstone. Khaled, Mohamed Gharib, Sayed Ahmed and their crew have done a wonderful job and we thank them for their efforts.

A simpler preservation task this year was to cover Temple A’s Forecourt with a bed of gravel, a method of preventing the growth of vegetation that has had some success in other areas of the Mut Precinct and Karnak.

We had hoped to finish clearing the area north of the east wing of the Mut Temple’s 1st Pylon this season, but as you may have gathered from earlier postings, the area is rather complex. It will take another season’s work to fully understand how the areas structures, seen here from the southeast, fit together.

The Taharqa Gate is open and there is now a clear view through it to Chapel D (on the left), the front area of the Precinct and Temple A to the east.

The north (top) and south (bottom) wings of the Taharqa Gate at the end of the season, with the paving fully exposed. The gate is almost 7 meters wide. The light on the north wing is generally good from about 9 am to noon, making photography easy. The south wing, however, gets no direct sunlight until mid-February and then only for about 30 minutes just after dawn, a very brief window of opportunity.

We know what the Taharqa led to (Temple A), but we don’t yet know what it led from, something that is critical to our understanding of the Precinct as a whole. We made a start this season, uncovering paving west of the gate that extends into the unexcavated earth further west. We need to explore this area more extensively next season.

The 2 holes behind the meter stick were used to bolt the doors of the gate shut and are further confirmation that the gateway originally had double doors.

On the rise of ground just north of the sacred lake and southwest of the Taharqa Gate were traces of a baked brick building. As a first step in trying to understand the northwestern area of the site, we decided to do a test clearing to see if it is worth investigating in detail. It’s a very interesting structure. In this view to the south you can see a well (left arrow), the remains of what may be a plaster-coated cistern (center arrow), and a room with a red-painted plaster floor (right arrow). Not visible is the round room south of the plastered room. All we know at this point is that the building probably dates to the Roman Period; figuring out its purpose — villa, a bath, or possibly a dye-making facility – will require further work.

This photograph looks east from the brick building to the west wing of the Mut Temple’s 1st Pylon and the rams before it. Under and to the south of the building is a wide area of mud brick that may be the remains of the wall that once ran from the north pylon of the Mut Temple (background) to the Precinct’s 18th Dynasty west enclosure wall. A centuries-old gully has washed out the rest of the wall between the brick building and the Mut Temple.

Sometimes the ancient recycling of sculptures in the Precinct was extreme. The small, rough column in the left photo was created from the upper half of a Sakhmet statue; you can still see part of her chin and mane. What building it once adorned is long gone, and it now stands between 2 of the rams in front of the Mut Temple (right). Restoration of these rams will be a challenge.

We could not have accomplished what we did this season without the expedition’s staff who volunteer their time, giving up warm beds and comfortable homes to come and work in the dust, heat and sun. They are a great team. We’ve thanked Ben Harer in an earlier posting, but want to thank the rest of the team here.

Bill Peck’s drafting talents were put to the test this year as we had very complex patterns of mud brick to draw in many areas, not to mention the various stages of the Taharqa Gate and its paving. Here Bill and I have a look at his last job, on his last day: the initial map of the newly-uncovered baked brick building described above.

As always, Elsie Peck did a superb job writing up the excavation records each day, a challenging and time-consuming task as it also involves cross-referencing the records of the objects and blocks found. The records she writes are the basis of our research once we get home. Her last task was to organize the small finds and pack them up, ready to go into storage.

On one of his last days, Jaap van Dijk sits under the watchful eye of a quartzite bust of Amunhotep III as he checks his records of inscribed blocks. Jaap’s extensive knowledge of Egyptian language and monuments make him an ideal object and block registrar.

This was John Steele’s first season with the expedition, and he adapted quickly to the challenges of field conservation. Working conditions weren’t always easy but he persevered with determination and good cheer.

Everyone but Mary and me will be gone by March 1. We have another 10 days in Luxor doing a number of mainly administrative tasks that are completely unphotogenic, so this will be our last Dig Diary posting.

We leave you with a final view out the gate of the Mut Precinct to the sphinx avenue and the Amun Temple to the north. The end of the season is always a little sad as we say goodbye to friends we won’t see until next year and to a site we all love.

The final week on site was spent finishing up various small projects, catching up on treatment notes, and packing up the tools and supplies for next year. It was also satisfying to watch the progress on the west wall of Chapel D, pictured here, where Mohammed Gharib and Khaled did the final filling of losses between the original carved blocks with a mortar that closely matches the color of the stone when it dries.

My three weeks here at Mut have gone by fast and it’s been fascinating dealing with some of the problems conservators face in the field where the challenges range from preserving large scale stone and architectural elements to treating small excavated objects like coins and pottery. I’ve also made a lot of new friends and had the chance to see beautiful vistas everyday, like this one looking up the Avenue of Sphinxes toward the south entrance to the Karnak Temple complex. A special thanks to everyone who made it all possible!

I continued to treat and clean coins as well but also had the pleasure of cleaning this small bronze lion, about five centimeters in length, with crossed forepaws. Pictured on the right, I’m cleaning the recently discovered relief fragment with an image of Khonsu on it to help make the incised lines more legible.

Another new project was the cleaning and reconstruction of a low-fired ceramic storage vessel shown here before treatment, upside down and broken apart in fragments, and held together by the packed earth inside the vessel. I first removed the broken fragments from around the packed earth form and then carefully sifted through the earth, which yielded a few more ceramic fragments but unfortunately no hidden cache of coins or treasure. The ceramic fragments were then washed and spread out in the sun to dry, and in the picture on the right I’m sealing the edges of the fragments with a dilute solution of B-72 resin prior to joining the fragments with a thicker solution of the same resin. B-72 is a commonly used adhesive in ceramics restoration because of its stability and relative ease of reversibility.

A large limestone block made a convenient table for laying out the fragments prior to reassembly. Since I’ve been here I’ve definitely learned to improvise more with the tools at hand and finding available workspace. On the right, the reconstructed vessel is propped up in a tub of sand, and I’m placing one of the final existing pieces in place. About eighty percent of the vessel was found and reassembled which means it can be photographed and the form possibly identified and dated. Working outdoors (think occasional stiff breeze and blowing sand) is a little different than working in the clean, climate controlled museum lab that I’m used to, and I’m enjoying the challenge.

You are looking northwest at the Taharqa Gate late Thursday morning. We are now down to the paving in the whole gateway, except for a small area in the center of the west side. As is true throughout the site, the sandstone paving has been badly damaged by ground water over the years: the bright yellow sand used to be stone. The meter stick is sitting on a flat block set into and partially covered with mud brick that may be the earliest phase of the brick constructions that once blocked the gate.

The area north of Mut’s 1st Pylon continues to be plagued by pits and animal holes. In the southern area (left) we have two new intrusions (left of and behind the meter stick); the lower seems to cut the south end of the mud brick wall running across the bottom of the photo. On the right, you are looking north at the northern area between the rows of limestone. We thought we might have found a bed of sand used to level the ground before foundations of a now-disappeared building were laid. Instead, we have an animal’s tunnel into which sand has drifted. This area remains enigmatic.

In the center of the area we’ve done more work on the curious installation of burned brick uncovered earlier in the season. To the south and east of the rectangular spaces (left photo) is a mass of collapsed and broken brick with pottery. Once this was removed (right) we could begin to define the center and eastern sections. We now think we have some idea of the installation’s purpose.

In the area around the installation we have found pieces of bronze and glass slag (left) and 5 ceramic moulds (right), including one for an animal’s eye (center row left) and another for a flower (center right). This suggests that the installation may have been used for smelting metal or making glass, perhaps for making jewelry or inlays.

In the past few seasons we uncovered the footing of the Mut Temple’s 1st pylon (arrow). Like the rest of the pylon, it was coated with plaster, traces of which remain. This week we dug a sounding between the walls of one of the rooms built against the pylon to find its foundations, something I have long wanted to do. This photo looks east along the pylon face, with the sounding in the foreground.

We succeeded. The pylon’s sand foundation bed was uncovered just over a meter below the footing.

The edge of the excavation into which the foundations were set (known as the foundation trench) is indicated by arrows in the photo on the left. Getting these pictures was something of a challenge for Mary, the dig’s photographer.

In the upper levels of the foundation trench we found this relief of Khonsu that dates (stylistically) to the late New Kingdom. This suggests that at least the present face of the pylon was not built until after the New Kingdom.

On the left, Mohamed (left), Sayed (2nd from right) and two assistants put one of the more shattered blocks of Chapel D’s lotus and papyrus frieze back together before it can be put back in place (right). Fifteen separate bits of stone, some of them very small, had to be consolidated, positioned and mortared into place.

On the left, Sayed positions a fragment of one of the larger, upper blocks that was re-installed this week. On the right, he, Mohamed and their assistant Feisal put lime mortar between the blocks to hold them in place. Khaled supervises the whole process.

At the start of the week, all the kings and deities were still headless. Here is their condition at noon on February 21. The siba supports the last block of the wall’s middle course, which is not yet aligned to the liking of Khaled, Mohamed and Sayed. If all goes well, the last two blocks of the top course will go up early next week.

Mary and Jaap have been trying to get a good photo of a stilted avocet, with its bright red legs, since the start of the season; Mary finally succeeded this week (left). From Jaap comes the photo on the right of a pied kingfisher, perched on a stub of reed. The birds of Mut continue to fascinate us all.

In addition, I met my Egyptian colleagues for the first time including Khaled Mohamed Wassel, the Egyptian conservator on site who has been doing an admirable job of consolidating the carved sandstone blocks in the west wall of Chapel D, and supervising the master mason, Mohahamed Gharib and his team in rebuilding the wall. They’ve all been attempting to teach me a few words of Arabic with often humorous results.

I set about surveying my conservation supplies, and examined the small finds from this season, including a group of about forty coins. Pictured above is one of the first coins I cleaned mechanically with brushes and dental tools that shows the head of a Roman emperor yet to be identified. In the other picture I’m cleaning another coin with the pointed end of a wooden skewer after softening the outer layers of corrosion in a chemical solution of 10% EDTA (ethylene diamine tetra acetic acid) in water made basic with ammonia. Uncovering legible details on heavily corroded coins requires a steady hand and a lot of patience but if successful can aid in dating the area the coins were found in.

As Mary mentioned in her most recent blog, I was also occupied this week with a very badly deteriorated, carved limestone block pictured above that is significant because it has the name of Montuemhat on one face. The block, originally part of a doorjamb, was found upside down and reused in a later doorway within the Taharqa gate. In order to continue the excavation of the gate, the block had to be moved as soon as possible. The stone though was so badly deteriorated due to damage from soluble salts in the soil that it was really just a loose pile of fragments held together by wet earth.

In order to stabilize the stone before its removal it was allowed to dry out somewhat before it was injected with Sika epoxy to strengthen its internal structure. The exterior surfaces were then faced with layers of cotton gauze, shown here, impregnated with a dilute solution of Acryloid B-72 acrylic resin that encased the top and sides and provided additional support.

After the adhesive dried, the earth underneath the block was carefully excavated around the perimeter until the block could be lifted slightly with nylon straps to free it. Here, the crew is carefully lifting the block onto a wooden support, afterwards transporting it to a nearby mastaba where it will be displayed. The operation was a success with nothing lost from the block during the move, and now I can begin to remove the cotton gauze facing.

This week we moved a couple of teams of workmen from the Taharqa Gate (where working space is getting a little constricted) to the excavations north of Mut’s 1st Pylon. We now have teams working both on the structures built against the pylon face and in the area bounded on the north by the remains of Temple A’s columned porch and on the west by the Mut Temple’s East Porch.

On the left, Elsie stands on a mass of mud brick in the south of this area and points at a row of limestone blocks extending south from the remains of Temple A’s porch (behind the worker in the black trousers). On the right is a view to the south of the whole area at the end of Wednesday, with the Temple A porch in the foreground, the East Porch to the right, and the structures against the pylon in the rear. We now have a second row of limestone blocks (red arrow) with a mud brick wall further to the east (blue arrow). The pits (or animal holes) that riddle the area make it difficult to sort out how all these features relate to each other. We have also not yet determined how this area relates to the buildings to the south.

What has been uncovered is at least clear enough to be mapped, so on Thursday morning Bill got to work. It takes great concentration to be able to map while work is going on all around you, but Bill is up to the task.

On Saturday we were very happy to welcome the last member of our team: John Steele, a conservator from the Detroit Institute of Arts (left). His first task was to treat the fragile inscribed limestone block described by Richard last week. On the right, he and Khaled wrap the block so that it can be moved (John will be describing his work in more detail in a forthcoming posting). Khaled’s assistant, Feisal, wears a soccer shirt of Abu Trika, a great Egyptian soccer star. Soccer is a passion in Egypt, and we cheered along with our friends and colleagues when Egypt won the Africa Cup of Nations for a record 6th time on Sunday. Abu Trika (number 22) scored the winning goal.

With the block wrapped, our inspector Osama and Khaled carefully removed the earth under it (left), with Bill observing. As the earth was removed, John and Feisal supported the block with a heavy nylon sling. Eventually a wooden support was slid under the block (right) and it was safely moved to a place where it can be treated further.

Once that had been taken care of, John could join Ben at the work table to start on some of the season’s small finds (left), among them a copper alloy coin (right) that we hope will be identifiable.

With the limestone block out of the way, we could get back to work on the Taharqa Gate and clear its south wing down to the paving. This photo, looking southwest, also shows the foundations of the southern room of the building that blocked the gate, something that had not been clear until this point. The walls were built of a combination of baked brick and mud brick.

Chapel D’s walls are rising at a rapid pace. On Saturday, the second course of the south wall was lifted into place (left). By Tuesday (right) the south wall was essentially finished and the first two blocks of the south end of the west wall were also in place. The level leaning against the west wall is used to level the blocks both horizontally and vertically.

On Wednesday the masons and their and crew used the siba to move one of the largest blocks, which had to be rotated into position as well as lifted (left). Khaled inspects the work at the end of the day (right) to be sure that the figures line up properly.

And here is the wall at the end of the week. The figures of the first scene are now complete to their shoulders and the block with the feet of the next scene is in place. The frieze of lotus and papyrus plants below this scene will be installed next, which may seem an odd way to rebuild a wall. However, these blocks are so badly worn that they can no longer support the weight of the upper parts of the wall so they are installed last, supported by the new foundations.

Several years ago we uncovered a colossal quartzite head of Amunhotep III (Akhenaten’s father) in the ruins of the Mut Temple’s East Porch. We moved it to the outdoor block storage area nearest the Precinct entrance, where it has been lying on its back ever since (left photo, center). It is a magnificent, if unfinished, sculpture that deserves to be seen, so on Thursday Richard had it stood upright. Osama and Khairy, one of our best workmen, admire the result. Standing up this sculpture is one small step in the process of making the site and its monuments more accessible to visitors when the Precinct is eventually re-opened.

We were pleased to welcome some special visitors to the site on Wednesday. In the morning, Dr. Farouk Gomaa (to Richard’s right) and part of his team came to see us. He is currently working in the tomb of Montuemhat, who you may recall is of special importance to the Mut Precinct. That afternoon it was a special treat to show the site to Ms. Ellie Cullman, a Trustee of the Brooklyn Museum, and her husband Edgar who were on their first trip to Egypt; here they are admiring the 25th Dynasty birth scenes in Temple A.

We are sorry to be saying goodbye to Ben Harer, who is returning to the States on Saturday morning. Ben has been indefatigable in drawing pots, right up to the last minute of the day on Thursday. We will miss him and wish him a safe trip home.

Clearing the Taharqa Gate is one of the season’s main goals, a goal we achieved, at least in part, this week: the north wing of the gate is visible from top to bottom, along with some of the ancient paving. On the left you are looking from the east end to the west. On the right, the arrow (indicating north) points at the original pivot for the gate’s door. The darker areas of stone were buried until this year.

Earlier in the week, we discovered that the limestone south jamb of the door in the wall running across the gate is a re-used block inscribed on both the east and south sides. You can see the inscription on the east face in the photo on the left. You can also see how fragile and fractured the block is. Removing the dirt from the inscribed surfaces without causing further damage calls for skill and patience, both of which Khaled (right) has in abundance.

Jaap and Khaled discuss the block and its texts (left), which Jaap copies as they are revealed (right). The copying is complicated by the fact that the block is upside down as well as badly fractured.

By week’s end both faces of the block are fully visible (left), although more conservation needs to be done before the block can be moved safely. On the right are Jaap’s notes (now part of the Expedition’s records) showing the dimensions of the block and both inscriptions.

And here are texts themselves, shown in their proper orientation. The inscription on the east side (left) is the top of a column of text that starts with a sign for heaven followed by “Great Mut, Mistress of Isheru” (the precinct’s sacred lake), one of Mut’s most common titles. The inscription on the south side (right) is part of an offering text in which Montuemhat offers cool water and wine to the goddess. Montuemhat, a powerful official under Taharqa, was responsible for a great deal of work in the Mut Precinct. This block may have come from a chapel he built within the precinct.

Two weeks ago we showed a photo of Bill and me inspecting a decorated block half-buried in dirt south of the Taharqa Gate. The arrow in the left photo points to the block, which became more visible as we began clearing the area this week; it is one of a number of blocks fallen from the gate and shows the lower part of a kneeling hapy figure (right), a type of “Nile” god that frequently represents fertility.

Pairs of kneeling hapy figures shown wearing the emblematic plants of Upper and Lower Egypt often decorate temple gateways, where they symbolize the unification of the country. On the west face of the Taharqa Gate’s north wing (left), such a pair supports a platform on which stand Amun and Taharqa. The king is on the left, entering the gateway where he is welcomed by Amun. On the south wing (right) they support a goddess welcoming the king. Only the feet of the goddess (surely Mut) remain in place.

We are in something of a quandary here: where does the newly-found hapy figure belong? Both pairs on the west faces of the gate are complete, and the east faces of the gate are too narrow for a pair of kneeling hapys on this scale. Did the interior of the gate’s wings once show a single hapy figure holding offerings? We may never know.

A particularly pleasant event this week was the arrival of Dr. Benson Harer on Saturday. Ben is a retired physician with a long-standing interest in Egyptology who has been a member of the Mut expedition for many years. I gave him a tour of our work this season (left) before he got down to work drawing pottery. It’s not glamorous work (actually, very little about archaeology is glamorous) but it is important and Ben, with his surgeon’s skilled hands and patience, does a terrific job.

The northern part of the area north of the Mut Temple has been pretty featureless so far. This week, however, it got more interesting, if somewhat confusing. The photo on the left, a view to the south, shows the remains of a mud brick wall (behind the red and white meter stick) that runs partway across the area. The wall is cut at the east end by an odd-shaped pit filled with broken stones, one of which (at the right end of the heap) turned out to be a large piece of a granite relief showing the foot of a god on a pedestal, both painted red (right). To the north (foreground, left photo) is another large pit. Both pits are filled with a very fine grayish ash that, in fact, is widespread across the area.

Just below the surface in the northern pit, we found two column drums that clearly join (left). When they were being excavated, the earth to their south collapsed, revealing the remains of a large animal hole, visible behind the column drums in the photo on the right. As we discovered a few years ago, this whole area was riddled with extensive animal dens. It may be that most of the pits in this area are actually the lowest levels of these dens.

Here are the column drums reunited. It’s not uncommon for sections of columns to be composed of two semi-circular blocks of stone rather than a single round block; that is the situation here. When complete, this column showed two scenes of a king offering to a deity. Parts of both kings are preserved (right), each with a text behind him that reads “like [the sun-god] Re forever”. The photo on the left shows all that remains of one of the gods: a leg and a hand holding a scepter.

Two distinct styles are present on this column. The heavy musculature of the king’s legs is characteristic of the art of Dynasty 25, while the less detailed carving of the god’s leg is more Ptolemaic in style. Another mixed Kushite-Ptolemaic column drum was found some years ago with the head of a Ptolemaic king offering to a Kushite-style Amun. It is possible that when the Ptolemies renovated parts of the Mut Precinct they simply recarved portions of certain columns rather than replacing them entirely.

The work on Chapel D is coming along as well. By Tuesday, the west wall of the first room had been dismantled down to its foundations, which were in good condition (left). The chiseled line you can see running the length of the foundations was cut by the original architect to show builders where to set the outer face of the wall; it helps our masons, too. By Thursday, we had put what is left of the blocks of the first course back in position (right), and the masons had begun to build up the missing portions with new sandstone. The plastic sheeting under the blocks isolates the wall being rebuilt from ground water.

With a new foundation laid for the wall west of the chapel’s door jamb (left), Mohamed Gharib and Tarek could begin the painstaking task of putting the wall back together (right). Since the original foundations are gone, they have to take great care to be sure the blocks that remain are aligned properly both horizontally and vertically.

We still enjoy watching the birds at the site. This hooded crow very kindly posed for Mary early one morning. Cattle egrets (right) are usually seen in fields, but this one seems to find our site attractive; it has hung around for several days and is very cooperative about being photographed.

Monday’s dawn was spectacular, whether looking east from our hotel room window (left) or west to the mountains across the Nile.

The weather continues to be uncooperative. Last week it rained. This week, we’ve had unusually cold temperatures and high winds that sweep enormous clouds of dust across the site, usually just as we are ready to take a photograph (or so it seems). All we can do is keep our heads down and go on working. It has actually been a very productive week.

The area north of the Mut Temple’s First Pylon has been rather uninteresting so far this season. That changed this week when Qufti Mahmoud Abadi (on the right in the left photo) began to uncover an unusual feature (left). A curved line of baked brick lies west of a set of square brick chambers whose interiors have been heavily fired (right). We don’t yet know the full extent of this installation nor its purpose; we hope both will become clear over the next few weeks.

On the left you are looking east along the north end of Temple A’s 2nd Pylon just after dawn on Thursday. We have now uncovered the full length of the pylon to the top of the footing, and have dug a small sounding down to the bottom of the footing’s first course. The arrow points to the only trace of mud brick wall we have found, sitting on a layer of earth with traces of ash; the rest of what you see between the enclosure wall (left) and the pylon is bricky rubble.

At the south end of the pylon (right) we have discovered that the post-Ramesside limestone south wall of Temple A’s Forecourt (rear) was built up against and over the footing of the pylon. Intriguingly, there is stone projecting west from the pylon’s foundations. Do we have traces of an earlier side wall for the Forecourt?

This week we dismantled the east end of the Taharqa Gate’s north wing. Not only was it somewhat unstable, but we can’t finish excavating the gate without removing the dirt (lower right) that was now this wing’s main support.

It was quite a job. After Khaled had consolidated the more fragile blocks (left), Mason Sayed Ahmed, balancing on a ladder, could begin freeing the upper blocks from the surrounding brick and mortar.

As each block came free it was loaded onto a litter and removed. Those blocks are heavy, but our workmen are up to the task.

The stone of this part of the gate was in even worse shape than we feared. As we removed the blocks, earth and sand cascaded down the face of the gate.

An amazing amount of halfa grass had grown through and around the stones of the gate (left), contributing to their decay. The bright yellow areas in the center and right of the photo are patches of sand that used to be stone. When all the rubble had been cleared (right) we were pleased to find that the lower blocks of the wing’s east end were in somewhat better condition than the upper ones. It is clear, however, that we won’t be able to complete the gate’s restoration this year.

With the decayed stone removed, on Wednesday Richard was able to begin to work on a section of the mud brick wall blocking the Taharqa Gate (left) so that we can see what is buried behind it. Later the same day he, Jaap and Bill inspect an inscribed block that had been re-used in the construction of one of the rooms in the gateway. Everyone is bundled up because of the cold.

By week’s end we had uncovered the sandstone footings of west side of both the north (left) and south (right) wings of the Taharqa Gate, which are in better condition than the east sides. These photos give some idea of the depth to which the gate was buried. Getting down into such relatively deep holes to take pictures can sometimes be awkward.

From the excavation at the west face of the 25th dynasty gate’s south wing came this lovely small fragment (less than 3” tall) of a late 18th Dynasty faience object showing part of a marsh scene with wild fowl (left). On the right, a group of snowy egrets and squacco herons (brown backs) perch along the marshy shore of our sacred lake, whose ancient name is isheru. To the ancient Egyptians, marshes teaming with birds and other wildlife could be symbols of birth and renewal while the isheru itself represented the site of creation and the waters from which life first rose.

The reliefs on the west side of Chapel D’s first room are among the most complete in the precinct, but their blocks no longer are perfectly aligned (left). The chapel had already suffered some damage in antiquity: the baked brick at the bottom of the wall is a Roman Period repair. The wall is also no longer vertical (right), possibly the result of an ancient earthquake, and is supported mainly by the earth behind it. We have added the restoration of this part of Chapel D to our projects for the season.

After Khaled and his team had cleaned and numbered the wall’s blocks, we began taking it apart late Wednesday morning. The narrow confines of the chapel and surrounding structures meant we could not bring in the crane from Karnak that we have occasionally used in the past to move large blocks. Despite this, it took a little over an hour, using just rope, wood, rollers, and lots of manpower, to remove two blocks from the upper course. Here’s how the process works.

Its face protected by foam rubber (left), the block is tipped onto planks of wood lying on rollers. The block is moved by gently sliding the planks along the rollers, the rear rollers being shifted to the front as soon as they are free (right).

When the block reaches its destination, the planks are used to flip the block into its new temporary position (left). With a little space cleared, we were able to bring in a winch and tripod (siba) on Thursday to move the largest blocks (right).

By the end of the day, only the lower two courses of the walls remain in place. Not bad for two days’ work.

On the left Abdullah holds the first snake of the season, found (and promptly disposed of) on Monday. A close-up of the head is on the right. Life at Mut is never dull.