With the gracious permission of Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the SCA, we are now able to make the English and Arabic reports for the 1996 through 2009 seasons available online as well through the museum’s website.  We hope the reports will be a useful resource for anyone interested in the Mut Precinct and the museum’s work there.

We are in the midst of planning for the next season of fieldwork, scheduled for January-March 2010. Watch for the 2010 Dig Diary, starting in mid-January.

Hieroglyphs for Mut and Sakhmet on the Propylon (main gate) of the Mut Precinct.

The season is over. We finished digging on Tuesday and spent the rest of this week cleaning up, checking notes and taking final photographs. Our major achievements this season were the restoration of the Taharqa Gate and Chapel D and the excavation of part of the area to its west. You are looking at the west face of the gate across the front area of the precinct to Temple A in the background.

As enjoyable as it is, excavation is only one part of archaeological exploration. After fieldwork comes research back home on what has been found and – most important – publication of the results so that others can benefit from the work.

The west faces of the north (left) and south wings of the gate, taken in the afternoon when the sun illuminates the reliefs. The god on the north wing now has a head and shoulders and the king and goddess on the south wing have their feet back. The top block on the south wing restores part of the goddess’s body, although the deep gouges in the stone make it hard to see.

In pharaonic times and perhaps even later, people believed that the stones of a temple were imbued with power and would scratch temple walls to obtain bits of stone to use for healing and purposes requiring the intervention of the gods. Over the years such scratching produced the deep gouges you see on many temple walls in Egypt. This Ptolemaic inscription in the Propylon (the precinct’s entrance) was actually carved over one such gouge.

Khaled and his team finished work on Chapel D as well this week, laying new paving where the original was too damaged to preserve. We thank Khaled, the masons Mohammed Gharib and Sayed Ahmed Sebbak and the rest of the restoration team for all their hard work this season.

With the work on the Taharqa Gate done and all the small finds treated, John had time in the last week to tackle another project that we have been wanting to do for several years: removing the bird droppings that have long defaced the facade of the Contra Temple, built against the Mut Temple’s rear wall. This rather unpleasant task was made more difficult by having to be done while standing on a ladder. You can see the success of his efforts on the right.

We can’t even begin to guess what this complex south of the Taharqa Gate area is: we just don’t have enough of it. All we know is that it is bounded on the north by the south wall of the gate area (right in the photo) and on the east by the north-south wall parallel to the Taharqa Gate wall (foreground; the gap is a cut we made to determine how these walls related to each other) and that it is earlier than the buildings to its south, a portion of which are visible in the upper left corner with a thick layer of grey ash in front of them.

Here are the southern structures at the end of the season, seen from the west. We now believe that the walls marked (a) all belong to the same phase of construction, as does the plaster floor in the center. The remaining brick walls are later constructions whose sequence is still unclear. It is certain, however, that there was an open space between the mud brick buildings and the baked brick building on the right. We have been following the thick layer of grey ash seen in the previous photo across this area as well, where it appears to continue below the plaster floor. Such distinctive features are very useful in helping to determine the relation among various levels of construction.

The baked brick building, too, remains enigmatic. This view to the NW shows the south face of the northern Tuthmoside enclosure wall (left arrow) with the baked brick building built on it. The wall that forms the eastern boundary of the structures associated with this building is indicated by the arrow on the right. This wall runs to the Taharqa Gate parallel with the gate’s own wall.

Here you are looking east at the same area showing the mud brick foundations of the northern side of the building, the gap between it and the mud brick structures to the north, and the north face of the Tuthmoside enclosure wall, which lines up with the Mut Temple’s 1st Pylon.

I want to take this opportunity to thank the Qufti, the skilled technicians who have worked with us for many years and have become fast friends. Foremost among them, of course, is our foreman, Farouk Sharid Mohammed, who has been with us since the beginning and whose friendship and talents we value highly. The Qufti do superb work in often trying conditions and with great good humor. Excavating at Mut would be impossible without them.

When we were in the Amun Precinct last week we came across this block that at first puzzled us. Since it has been a puzzling season, I thought I’d include it here. Can you tell what it is? The answer is at the end of the posting.

One morning this brightly colored balloon drifted east across the river. What a sight to see before breakfast.

And for the final shot of the season, another view of the Taharqa Gate taken early in the morning at the end of the season. We will miss the beauty of the Mut Precinct but look forward to coming back next year.

The answer to the block puzzle: it’s part of a relief of a winged sun-disk with cobras hanging from each side of the disk – a common motif but an unusual fragment. What we have here is wing feathers and part of the cobra’s body.

During this past week I continued to treat small finds excavated from the west side of the Taharqa gate, and to watch the progress of the stabilization and rebuilding of the south wing of the gate. In his last blog entry, Richard wrote about the processing of the hundreds of pottery sherds dug up over the course of the season. Occasionally there are enough sherds from a single vessel to reconstruct it, and for me there is a certain zen-like satisfaction in assembling these 3-D puzzles. In the picture on the left, I’m sorting through pieces looking for possible joins, and I’m using the sand-filled tubs to prop up the pieces that I’ve already glued together. The adhesive of choice in this case is the ever-useful Paraloid B-72 acrylic resin. Pictured on the right is part of a large, double-handled vessel with white slip decoration that I put together.

I also continued to clean coins using the mechanical and chemical methods described in my previous blog entry. One of the clearer images I found on the dozen or so coins I’ve cleaned so far is pictured on the left. It’s probably the profile of a Roman emperor wearing a laurel wreath, and hopefully there’s enough information visible for a specialist to identify and date the coin. Another of this week’s projects, a broken limestone fragment with part of an inscription carved on its face, is pictured on the right. The block was found reused in the north side of the Taharqa gate, and probably dates to the time of Ramses II according to Jaap van Dijk, our team’s hieroglyph specialist. The fragile face of the stone was consolidated with a 2% solution of B-72 resin in acetone and ethanol, applied with a syringe.

This season I’ve had the opportunity to check the condition of many of the repairs done on the large-scale sculptures in the precinct by the Brooklyn Expedition in past seasons. Stone, though a seemingly impervious material, is actually very susceptible to degradation caused by the moisture and soluble salts found in the ground here in Egypt. One of the most significant preservation initiatives in the precinct over the years has been to move many of the free-standing sculptures and architectural fragments onto raised brick and mortar platforms (mastabas) with moisture barrier material built into the mastaba bases that isolates the sculptures from water and salt in the soil.

With Bill Peck as my guide, we looked at many of the lion-headed Sakhmet sculptures in the second court of Mut Temple that were repaired and placed on mastabas such as those pictured above on the left. The badly eroded ram-headed sphinx pictured on the right was repaired and moved onto a new stone pedestal under the direction of Brooklyn Museum conservator Lisa Bruno and our Egyptian conservator Khaled Mohamed Wassel. I’m happy to report that the repairs are holding up well. Many of the sculptures in the precinct have suffered extensively from centuries of burial and vandalism but at least now the deterioration process has been slowed somewhat.

It’s hard to believe that the season is almost over: this was our last full week of work, and it has been hot. Still, we finally reached the level of the paving west of the Taharqa Gate. In the center and north the paving is fairly well-preserved. On the south, however, it has been widely robbed out. Directly above the paving lies about 50 cm of fairly compact soil (although still with considerable amounts of pottery) that built up over the years and was probably a walking surface. Built on this level is the mud brick wall mentioned last week that forms the southern boundary of the area.

To the north we have been excavating mud brick structures built on a higher level of accumulated debris or fill that included the concentration of broken blocks of stone and pottery visible by the meter sticks. The wall in the rear of this photo eventually meets the wall running north from the Taharqa Gate, but we don’t yet know how far down it extends or if it is contemporary with the gate. The odd-shaped hole in the center, by the way, is an ancient animal den dug into the wall.

The situation with the mud brick in the excavation north of the baked brick building remains complex, as you may be able to tell from this photo. The walls in the foreground, to the left of the meter stick sit on a level of black ash that is itself above a thicker level of fairly dense grey ash. These walls are all earlier than the walls in the left of the photo, which are clearly built over the south end of the long narrow wall in the foreground. Mud brick architecture can be complicated.

Now that the walls of Chapel D have been restored (you’ll see the finished results in next week’s blog) we can turn our attention to the paving. We cleaned what is left of the paving in the central room of Chapel D this week. As the last phase of our restoration of this building we will be replacing the missing or badly decayed blocks with new stone next week.

Just to refresh your memories, the photo on the left shows the back (south side) of the Taharqa Gate’s south wing early in the restoration process, with a long board holding the remaining blocks of the facade in place. On the right is the same area on Thursday. Following the footprint of the gate’s foundations, we have built a new core to support the blocks of the facade.

On the left is the east face of the south wing, with its single decorated block (the lower part of a kneeling fecundity figure) back in place. Originally two of these figures faced each other and supported the king and a deity, as on the west face (right). Here we have given the king and the goddess back their feet. The tilted block on the right is the last block, which will go back on the prepared area to the left on Saturday. All that will be left then is to cover the repairs with a final coating tinted to match the stone, as we did with the north wing.

We found a couple of nice fragments of sculpture this week. On the left is part of the belt and kilt of a king, whose name would have been written on the belt buckle – just where the break is. On the right is a sandstone fragment of an elaborate robe. We’re not quite sure what part of a statue it comes from. If only we had more of both!

Even we tend to take Sakhmet statues for granted, rarely looking closely at them. Richard, however, noticed these two busts, which are on view at the front of the precinct. At first glance, both seem equally beautifully carved, with detailed manes and wigs. But look at the eyes: the Sakhmet on the left has the usual well-proportioned, clearly-defined, somewhat sad eyes. The other statue has tiny, shallowly-carved eyes that are out of proportion to the rest of the face.

And finally, here is our on-site office: 3 metal tables under a pair of tented shelters. Here John can work on coins while Jaap registers objects, Ben draws a pot and Richard consults his notes. It’s the only shade on the site and is popular with us all, particularly on hot days like we’ve had this week.

Late last week we uncovered the top of a fairly substantial mud brick wall running across the Taharqa Gate square (left), but we only had its north face. On Saturday we opened a new area to the south of this square, hoping to find the wall’s south face.

We got more than we expected. On the left you can see the line of the south side of the wall across the Taharqa Gate square. To its south (right) are 2 ash-filled ovens that were set in a layer of disturbed earth lying over part of the wall. To their south, 3 rows of baked brick with mud brick to their south cover the rest of the area. The mud brick seems to continue into our southern square, below the levels reached to date. Investigating this complex will be interesting.

Aside from the wall on its south side, so far this small limestone wall is the sole architectural feature in the square opposite the Taharqa Gate, which continues to produce lots of dirt and pottery but very little else.

In the southern square we cleared some of the intrusive pieces of brickwork, bringing the central area down to a single level. Here you are looking east across the square, where it’s beginning to look as though there really is an alley or passage between the baked brick building on the right and the rest of the buildings.

Work on the south wing of the Taharqa Gate continues at a great rate. By Thursday 3 courses of stone were back in place, and the masons were able to move one of the more delicate blocks of the 4th course back into position.

With the removal of some of the mound of earth to the west of the Taharqa Gate, it is now possible to appreciate the gate’s full width (almost 7 meters) and to get a clear view through it to Temple A, in the northwest corner of the precinct.

We were happy to welcome Dr. Ben Harer back this week. Ben has been doing invaluable work for us the past few years drawing pottery, a task that he performs with skill, patience and good humor. When finished, the drawing he is working on will show both the exterior of the pot and the shape and thickness of its walls. Such drawings are essential to the publication of an expedition’s pottery finds.

Pottery is one of the most useful materials archaeologists dig up. It does not corrode like metal or decay like organic materials and is used for everything from food preparation and serving to transporting goods. Because it is so common, changes in style occur fairly quickly, allowing us to date various types of pottery (and the levels in which they are found) at least relative to each other. When found with coins or other datable material (e.g., inscriptions, imported wares of known date), closer dating is possible – within limits. It is rare to be able to say “this pot was made in 20 BC”; we normally speak of ranges such as “third century BC” or “late Ptolemaic to early Roman Period”, which is the range of these sherds.

This is how pottery looks when it comes out of the ground. Each basket represents a single location, which is written on the label attached to the basket. It is important to keep the baskets separate as mixing pots from different areas can lead to confusion in dating.

Before you can determine anything about the pottery, you have to be able to see it clearly, so the first stage is to wash the sherds, a job that Ahmed has been performing admirably this year (left), using a shower pan as a basin (a clever idea of the Johns Hopkins University team). Once cleaned the sherds are spread out on plastic mats to. When examining the cleaned pottery (right), we look for vessels that can be reconstructed and for “diagnostic” sherds such as rims, bases and handles that identify particular styles or types of vessel. We also look at surface treatments: has the clay been painted or covered with a thin coating of clay (called a slip)? What kind of clay is the pot made of? What has been mixed with the clay, for example to make it easier to work or able to stand a higher firing temperature?

Selected diagnostic sherds are photographed, which we are able to do this year right next to the pottery mats. This set-up allows enough soft side lighting to bring up details of the pottery (right) without casting harsh and distracting shadows. Photographs are used in conjunction with the pottery drawings in further study of the pots.

Thanks to Dr. Mansour Boreik, General Director of Antiquities for Southern Upper Egypt, Mary and I were lucky enough this week to be able to visit the mosque of Abu el-Haggag, built on the ruins of the Luxor Temple. The minaret on the left dates probably to the Fatimid Period (10th-12th century AD), but the rest of the mosque was rebuilt in the 19th century.

Restorations made necessary by a disastrous fire a few years ago revealed that the mosque’s walls actually incorporate Ramesside columns and architraves. Below the 10th-12th century AD minaret is a 13th century BC Ramesside architrave that includes a rare relief of an elephant. This photograph is illustrated courtesy of Dr. Mansour Boreik, who will be publishing the results of the work at the mosque in a forthcoming issue of Memnonia.

My first few days here were spent recovering from the two day journey and seven hour time change, as well as organizing the conservation supplies and hunting down a few things in the souq (the market) that I didn’t bring with me. I also walked around the site to view a month’s worth of excavations, and then staked my claim to one of the tables under the tent shown in the photo on the left where I began to treat small finds (coins, ceramic sherds, and faience objects). Shown in the photo on the right is a small faience object broken into three pieces that I repaired with Paraloid B-72, an acrylic resin widely used in conservation because of it’s stability and reversibility. The object is actually a crouching male figure holding a rather large appendage between his legs that extends over his shoulder. Yes, the ancient Egyptians did have a sense of humor!

The photo on the left shows what excavated coins often look like. They are round lumps of blue or green mineralized copper corrosion products and encrusted soil that may or may not have copper alloy (metal) left in their cores. They have to be carefully cleaned because frequently the only details remaining from the original surface of a badly corroded coin are in the corrosion layer itself. Cleaning can be done mechanically with wooden tools and soft brushes or in a very controlled way with chemicals. In the photo on the right I’m making treatment notes while soaking some of the coins in a 10% solution of EDTA (ethylene diamine tetra acetic acid) in water made basic with a little ammonia. This solution softens the encrusted dirt and mineralized corrosion products allowing them to be carefully removed. Stay tuned to see if I find any legible detail on this year’s coins, which might help the archaeologists date the place where they were found.

Mary has already written describing the stabilization of the north wing of the Taharqa gate. Khaled has been doing an amazing job with Mohamed and his team on this huge project. As I arrived, work began on the south wing, which is in worse condition than the north. Many of the sandstone blocks are badly deteriorated and require hours of consolidation with dilute solutions of B-72 acrylic resin applied with a syringe or brush. Some blocks are beyond help and have lost all cohesion and reverted to sand. These will be replaced with new sandstone blocks necessary for the structural stability of the wing. In the picture on the left I’m helping Khaled apply B-72 consolidant to a stone fragment from the south wing, and on the right is an overall picture of the wing where you can get an idea of what bad shape it’s in.

As I said before, I’m glad to be back and looking forward to the challenges of another season of conservation on site. I was reminded that I’m working outdoors again by the strong winds and blowing dust during my first couple of days. I made sure the artifacts were safe, held on to my hat, and kept my mouth shut…good advice for any number of situations, LOL!

The month on the traditional Egyptian calendar known as “Imsheer” (mid-February to mid-March) began this week and so far is living up to its reputation for unpredictable weather and high winds. Monday was incredibly hot. Tuesday the site was scoured all day by clouds of dust borne on the blustery Imsheer winds that continued to kick up on Wednesday. No treat for people or digital cameras.

On the 8th we restored the last of the blocks to the facade of the Taharqa Gate’s north wing. With all the blocks in place, the masons began to apply the final facing, using an improvised scaffolding to reach the upper levels.

A view from the west of the north wing of the gate at the end of work on Thursday, just as the light is beginning to make the figures on the facade visible. You can make out the back of Amun’s crown with its hanging streamer on the west face of the top block – the first time in centuries that it has been back in its proper place. I just wish we had his face and the rest of Taharqa’s body!

Khaled and his team did a great job on this wing of the gate, seen here at the end of the day on February 12. The blocks that could be restored are in place and the color of the finishing coat matches the original stone very well (the darker patches are still drying). Congratulations guys!

We have now turned our attention to the gate’s south wing. At some point in history, the east face collapsed to the south, leaving a heap of large blocks (left) that had to be removed before we could begin work. This was accomplished fairly quickly on the 8th, revealing the wing’s foundation course (right), which is in pretty good shape. We have found no trace of a core of large blocks similar to the north wing’s. Either this gate was built without one or the core blocks were robbed out ages ago, leaving only the facade. At any rate, even from the back you can see that this wing has not fared as well as the other.

In fact, the blocks of the south wing are in worse shape than expected; perhaps the lack of a supporting core caused the more serious deterioration of this wing, or perhaps it was simply made of poor stone. Khaled and crew immediately got to work cleaning and consolidating these fragile blocks.

With perfect timing, conservator John Steele arrived this week in time to see the last phase of work on the Taharqa Gate’s north wing and the start of work on the south. Welcome back, John! Here he and our inspector Osama examine a few of this season’s deteriorated bronze coins that John will be treating. John will begin blogging soon on his work at the site.

In the southern part of the square west of the Taharqa Gate we have been digging mostly through earth with a heavy concentration of pottery, mostly large cooking pots and storage jars. While it is probably the remains of an ancient dump, it may also have been intentionally deposited as landfill to level up the area. To give you some idea of how deep we have dug from the modern surface, Qufti Abdel Aziz (arrow) is about 6 ft. tall.

And finally Abdel Aziz and his team are getting some reward for their work. They have uncovered a substantial mud brick wall running across the entire south end of the square (rear of photo) with a narrower wall to its north. The large wall meets a north-south wall uncovered some years ago; it is just to the left of the man with the wheelbarrow.

In the south square, we continue to find mud brick walls that continue to be somewhat confusing. In this photo, for instance, the bricks labeled 1-3 are all part of the same wall (cut by later pitting) that runs under the course of bricks labeled 4, so 1-3 are earlier. Wall 5 is not part of wall 4 but was built against it. It is a shallow wall, only a couple of courses deep, so was probably the latest part of this construction. The pottery at the lower left lies against wall 1 on a surface that is associated with the wall. Confusing isn’t it?

We did make one interesting discovery in this area this week: at least the north wall of the baked brick building has a sand foundation trench, just visible behind the meter stick, and 2 small walls run up to its face. By the way, the rather dramatic curve to the building’s foundations is the result of a subsidence of the land on which it was built; it is not intentional.

Here are a couple of the small finds from the season so far. On the left is a very detailed mould for making wadjet-eye amulets. On the right is the upper part of an odd terracotta figure that seems to be a bearded man with what we think is a heavy wig that is broken off on the proper left side.

On Thursday we saw our first cattle egret of the season wandering among fallen mud bricks and camel thorn in the area of the houses west of the Taharqa Gate. We wonder if it’s the same bold bird that we saw last year as he allowed us to get quite close before flying off.

The block with the king’s legs was carefully lifted onto a “nagala” or litter and carried to the gate (left) – no easy task as you can tell. Using a baulk of wood as a rail, the block on its nagala was slid up to the top of the gate where it was offloaded, again very carefully.

Once the block was in roughly the right place, the masons used a crowbar (padded to avoid damaging the block) and a wedge to move it the last few critical centimeters into its proper position (left). Khaled and Mohammed check that it is aligned with both faces of the gate while workmen stand by to do any final adjustments.

By the end of the day on February 3, the block was in place and the blank space to its right had been filled in; the block that once formed the right side of the scene is long gone. First thing Wednesday morning (February 4), we put back the second and last block preserved from this end of the gate and began work on the north face.

These two adjoining blocks come from the west end of the gate, the head of Amun (left) from the facade and the inscription from the jamb. The problem is that there is a gap between these two blocks and the gate’s existing top course. Once work on the east end of the gate was finished Wednesday, work began on replacing the missing row of stone. In the meantime, excavation continues west of the gate, with Elsie taking notes of the progress.

West of the gate, we are uncovering more walls in the northern part of the square, but in the southern section (background) we have yet to find any traces of walls or anything else.

We expanded the southern square to the west this week and came on more mud brick, which is hardly surprising. To our pleasure, the brick walls are finally starting to make some sense, although that may be hard to believe from this picture. We are beginning to see connections between sections of walls.

North of the Mut Temple’s 1st Pylon the situation is still unclear. Left of the meter stick is the edge of a row of bricks at the lowest level reached yet. The thin brick wall running south from the kiln/furnace runs over this row, so at least we have a sequence of construction for this section. To the west, in the center of the photo, several more courses of brick have come to light, but as yet they don’t connect with any of the other brick features. Archaeology takes patience.

Wheelbarrows serve more than one purpose at Mut. In addition to being blank canvases for creativity (as we saw last week) and useful for hauling dirt, they also make comfortable seating for workmen idled during photography. These guys seem to be enjoying their rest.

We are so happy that William and Elsie Peck could join us again this year. After a look around the site first thing Saturday morning (their first day), they had a chance to catch up with Jay van Rensselaer, the Johns Hopkins University Expedition’s photographer.

One of our goals this year is to find out what lies under the Ptolemaic or early Roman Period houses that fill the area west of the Taharqa Gate. On January 25 we laid out a new square that spans the width of the gate and Mamdouh and his team got right to work.

It was a productive week for Mamdouh in the north end of the new square. On the left and right, mud brick walls (Ptolemaic or Roman) discovered in an earlier season run east to the gate, whose north wing can be seen in the background. By the end of the week we had found a third east-west wall between them, partially cut by a later pit. Against its south side is a large pottery bin or jar set in a neat frame of packed mud or mud brick.

Sometimes activities overlap. Bill began mapping the baked brick building on Thursday while Mahmoud continued to work in the square next to it. We are getting a number of mud brick walls, but so far they don’t make much sense. Against the long north-south mud brick wall that defines the east side of the area we have discovered a group of pottery bins or ovens, visible in the foreground.

Here is a closer view of the bins/ovens, which are sitting in very ashy soil and are divided by narrow mud brick walls. The west side of this grouping has not yet been defined, but the arrangement reminds very much of similar bins/ovens discovered north of the Mut Temple’s 1st Pylon in 2006.

On the left, Abdel Aziz hands Elsie an interesting bit of pottery as he continues to clear the area north of the pylon. On Thursday, working in the area of the kiln/furnace discovered last year, he uncovered a fragment of a north-south mud brick wall (under the north arrow) east of the burnt brick area. He has also found a few more burnt bricks in the center of the area, so the kiln/furnace may be larger than we first thought.

Dr. David Aston is a leading expert on pottery from the late New Kingdom through the Ptolemaic Period, so you can imagine how pleased we were when he agreed to come and have a look at some of our pottery on Wednesday afternoon. He was able to confirm that much of what we are finding is Ptolemaic or later (which is what we had thought), but did give us one surprise: the delicate, small jar on the right, with a very tiny neck, proved to be from the 1st Persian Period (Dynasty 27, 525-404 BC), somewhat earlier than expected. This will cause some rethinking of the area from which it came.

The restoration of the east side of Chapel D’s middle room is almost complete. The blocks are all back in place and all that remains now is to apply the final tinted coating to the repairs so that they match the color of the original stone.

With Chapel D essentially done, work could begin in earnest on the Taharqa Gate. Early in the week the south face was cleaned and fragile areas treated with a consolidant; those are the brightly colored areas. We determined that old repair (upper right) done when the gate was first discovered in 1977 was still holding, so it was left in place.

Khaled and his crew are making amazing progress with the gate. Above the lowest course, the original blocks of the east end had completely disintegrated and had to be entirely replaced. By January 29, this part of the work was finished, as you can see in this view that also includes the west facade of Chapel D. Next week we can begin repositioning the decorated portions of this end of the gate. The basin in front of Sayed Ahmed rests on top of a block of the gate’s core, which is also going back together quickly.

Franck Burgos, a stone mason working for the Johns Hopkins University team, gave us this print of a photograph of the west side of the Mut Temple’s 1st Court taken sometime after Margaret Benson and Janet Gourlay excavated the temple in the late 1890s. Thank you, Franck. On the right is the same view taken this week. The large Sakhmets in the old photo are clearly recognizable and are still roughly where they stood 100 years ago, although on new bases. The half-statue in the center was moved during our work in the court; it is on the extreme left in the modern photograph. Between the large statues is a gateway that was discovered by the Brooklyn expedition and fully cleared by the Hopkins expedition. The paving you can see in the older photograph once ran across the court from the gate to the temple’s main axis. In the 100 or so years between photographs it has been lost.

The precinct has obviously inspired one of our workmen; this is no ordinary wheelbarrow!