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The Lost City
A discovery in the desert could rewrite the history of ancient Egypt.
September/October 2010
by Heather Pringle
Heather Pringle is a contributing editor at Archaeology magazine.
For
much of the twentieth century, Egyptologists shied away from explorations in
the vast sand sea known as the Western Desert. An expanse of desolation the
size of Texas, the desert seemed too harsh, too implacable, too unforgiving a
place for an ancient civilization nurtured on the abundance of the Nile. In
spring, a hot, stifling wind known as the Khamsin roars across the Western
Desert, sweeping up walls of suffocating sand and dust; in summer, daytime heat
sometimes pushes the mercury into the 130 degree–Fahrenheit range. The animals,
what few there are, tend to be unfriendly. Scorpions lurk under the rocks,
When
Egyptologists finally began investigating the Western Desert, they gravitated
first to the oases. But in 1992, a young American graduate student, John
Coleman Darnell, and his wife and fellow graduate student, Deborah, decided to
take a very different tack. The couple began trekking ancient desert roads and
caravan tracks along what they called "the final frontier of Egyptology.”
Today, John Darnell, an Egyptologist in Yale’s Near Eastern Languages and
Civilization department, and his team have succeeded in doing what most
Egyptologists merely dream of: discovering a lost pharaonic city of
administrative buildings, military housing, small industries, and artisan
workshops. Says Darnell, of a find that promises to rewrite a major chapter in
"We were really shocked.”
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©Mark Zurolo ’01MFA
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Umm
Mawagir, as the city is now known, flourished in the Western Desert from 1650
to 1550 BCE, nearly a millennium after the construction of the Great Pyramid at
Giza. This was a dark, tumultuous period of Egyptian history. Entire villages
lay abandoned in the Nile River Delta, victims, perhaps of an ancient epidemic.
Taking advantage of the turmoil, Bedouin groups from Syria and Palestine edged
westward under the leadership of wealthy merchants, gaining control of the
delta. Meanwhile, far to the south, Sudan’s powerful Kerma kingdom expanded
into southern Egypt. In the wake of these incursions, Egypt’s pharaohs presided
over a diminished realm whose capital lay at Thebes, in present-day Luxor.
For
decades, Egyptologists thought the foreigners roamed the Western Desert at
will, controlling the lucrative caravan trade. But the discovery of Umm
Mawagir, in concert with finds from the more westerly Dakhla Oasis, says
Darnell, reveals clearly how the Theban dynasty succeeded in extending its
power and military might more than 100 miles into the hostile desert, building
an entire city, and controlling a vital crossroads of trade routes. Umm
Mawagir, says Darnell, is a testament to "the incredible organizational
abilities of the Egyptians.”
The
discovery is stirring major interest in Egyptology circles. "I think this is a
very important find," says Monash University Egyptologist Colin Hope in
Melbourne, Australia. "It’s from a period that we don’t know much about, and
he’s got this large economic center in the desert.” Dirk Huyge, curator of the
Egyptian Collection at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, says,
"The mass of new data that springs from the Yale surveys has produced
information beyond the expectation of any scholar working in Egypt.”
Relaxing
in a Yale office decorated with traditional African weapons, prints, and
paintings of the Nile Valley—and a small statue of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose
eighteenth-century expedition to Egypt marked the beginning of scientific
Egyptology—John Darnell has just returned from the field and is awaiting the
publication of his first paper on Umm Mawagir in an international conference
volume. The discovery, he explains, is the result of years of dogged sleuthing
along one of the most important routes in the Western Desert, the 110-mile-long Girga Road.
Darnell
first became interested in looking at desert roads in 1988, while studying
ancient Egyptian texts in Luxor. His office window at the time looked out
across the Nile, and he was struck by the sight of desert tracks crossing both
the east and west banks. "We knew that the ancient Egyptians went into the
desert," he recalls. "But we didn’t know precisely how they got there. And I
began wondering if there was any way to date those tracks.”
Curious,
he and Deborah decided to hike a route running above the Valley of the Kings,
on the west bank of the Nile—one of the most intensively studied regions in all
Egypt. Below, they could hear the rumblings of tour buses and the voices of
excited tourists. "We didn’t think we’d find anything new," says Darnell. "We
assumed we’d just find some pottery remains. But within the first three
minutes, we came across a fragmentary stela [a carved stone slab] and mountains
of ceramic materials.”
Realizing
that they had stumbled onto a new field of Egyptological research—desert road archaeology—the
Darnells began hiking the tracks leading out from Luxor. Packing as much water
as possible on their treks, the two Egyptologists walked the roads that
crisscross nearly 17,000 square miles of desert. They recorded the ancient
sites that lay beside the roads and patiently examined and tallied pottery
shards littering the ground. The distinctive ceramic styles of different eras
allowed them to date both roads and sites, and the two researchers were
astounded by the antiquity of some of the finds. In a place known as Wadi
el-Hol, or "Gulch of Terror" in Arabic, the Darnells discovered two
3,800-year-old inscriptions featuring the world’s earliest known phonetic
alphabet.
The
growing mountain of data revealed just how much traffic once flowed along the
Girga Road, which stretched 110 miles westward from Thebes in the Nile Valley
to remote Kharga Oasis in the Western Desert. "This was a major route in
antiquity," says John Darnell. And it possessed an impressive infrastructure to
keep traffic moving. Along the road, the Darnells discovered a series of
official outposts that had served as food and water depots for travelers. These
depots dated to Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, a period extending between 2125 and
1650 BCE. Yet the earliest Kharga Oasis settlements then known to scholars had
been built more than 1,000 years after the end of the Middle Kingdom.
Who
had created this elaborate desert infrastructure, and why? While mulling over
these questions, Darnell recalled an inscription left by an unidentified Middle
Kingdom pharaoh, most likely Monthuhotep II. In the text, the pharaoh proudly
described his decision to incorporate the Western Desert oases into his Nile
Valley realm. Most Egyptologists had flatly dismissed the statement, believing,
says Deborah Darnell, that "pharaonic Egyptians had not the technological
ability or knowledge to exploit the water resources in Kharga Oasis.” But the
string of Middle Kingdom outposts lying along the Girga Road suggested
otherwise.
To the
Darnells, all the new evidence pointed to the existence of a large Middle
Kingdom city at the terminus of the Girga Road, in Kharga Oasis. No such urban
center had ever come to light. But in 2000, while visiting the ruins of a temple in Kharga Oasis that dated to a much later period, Deborah, who is co-director and co-founder of the expedition, spied a small fragment of a pharaonic-era amphora, protruding from a thick scatter of other pottery. “Few people know what pharaonic oasis pottery looks like,” she notes—possibly the reason no one had ever before noticed it at the site. Strongly suspecting they were closing in on the lost city, the team began carefully surveying the immediate region.
In
2005, the team found a dense litter of ceramic molds for baking bread—vestiges
of a large industrial bakery—about half a mile north of the temple. And this
summer, John Darnell and his colleagues located the expansive ruins of a major
undisturbed city, including the foundation of a significant mud-brick
administrative building. Darnell, who leads the excavations there, named the desert
metropolis Umm Mawagir—an Arabic phrase meaning, memorably, "Mother of Bread
Molds.”
"Baking
was done on a rather massive scale at Umm Mawagir," says Darnell. To understand
why, he and his team dug up part of the bakery, exposing an area roughly the
size of a small bedroom. As they brushed away a matrix of ash and sand, the
excavators discovered further dense layers of broken ceramic molds—nearly half
a ton of pottery in an area just four meters by four meters square, a quantity
that astonished Darnell. Some molds were large and circular in shape, suitable
for single loaves; most were double "cupcake" molds, similar in style to the
baking tins modern Egyptians use for making certain sweetened breads. In
addition, the team found two large baking ovens, a stone mortar for husking
grain, and an assortment of stones for grinding flour.
The
sheer scale of the operation, says Darnell, suggests that Umm Mawagir was
producing a huge surplus of bread, enough to feed an army of soldiers. The team
found other signs that the ancient desert city once served as a major military
garrison. Scattered across the site were the broken cooking pots of Nubian
desert soldiers known as the Medjoy, troops highly valued by the Egyptian
pharaohs. Some of these pots were made of Nubian clays, indicating that they
had been made far to the south and carried all the way to Umm Mawagir. Others,
however, were fashioned from local clays from Kharga Oasis itself, suggesting
that the Nubian troops brought their pottery-making wives with them.
“We
can imagine a group of Medjoy soldiers being hired by the Egyptians—there’s no
evidence of slaves here—and stationed in Kharga," says Egyptologist Colleen
Manassa ’01, ’04PhD, an associate professor in Yale’s Near Eastern Languages
and Civilization department, who recently excavated a cemetery of Medjoy
soldiers near Luxor. Finding the cooking pots of the Medjoy troops at Umm
Mawagir, she adds, increases "the probability that a strategic military center
was involved there.”
To
date, the team has excavated less than half of one percent of the sprawling
218-acre site. While the strong desert winds have scoured down the city’s
ancient mud-brick walls, preservation at the site is excellent, with many walls
more than three feet high. Early indications, says Darnell, show that the
ancient city was home to a wide range of ancient Egyptian inhabitants, from
important officials to artisans who produced small clay figurines and
glimmering white ostrich-shell beads.
While
long years of patient excavation and research remain at Umm Mawagir, Darnell
believes that the desert city will ultimately shed crucial light on a shadowy
time in Egyptian history. For years, scholars have wondered how an impoverished
and much diminished royal dynasty at Thebes in the late Middle Kingdom
eventually managed to repel Egypt’s foreign invaders and rise to grandeur once
again in the New Kingdom—the age of Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, and Ramses the
Great. The finds at Umm Mawagir now hint strongly at an answer. "The Theban
dynasty," suggests Darnell, "may have used its military and economic control of
the Western Desert to win the war against the invaders.”
For
Darnell, however, the real wonder is the administrative genius that went into
creating a city in the desert more than 3,600 years ago. "People always marvel
at the great monuments of the Nile Valley and the incredible architectural
feats they see there. But I think they should realize how much more work went
into developing Kharga Oasis in one of the harshest, driest deserts on Earth.”  |
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