http://www.smh.com.au/news/0106/16/review/review9.html
A journey of 5,000 years
Treasures from the sands ... Dr Christiana Kohler.
** Australian archaeologists are shedding light on how ordinary people lived in ancient Egypt, writes Caroline Overington.**
It was hot, dusty, immensely rewarding work. From sunrise to sunset, for three long weeks last January, Dr Christiana Kohler and a team of 10 enthusiastic Egyptology undergraduates from Macquarie University set about removing the desert sand from an ancient burial ground near Cairo.
They moved a bucketful at a time, sifting each one, labelling and storing the contents and, as they dug deeper, the more certain Kohler became that tombs were underneath.
"As we removed the topsoil, to expose the ancient surface, it began to change colour, as though organic material was below," she said. "We were looking for dark circles, which almost always mean there is a pit underneath, and in that, you hope to find the tomb."
In the end, the team found six tombs, all of them containing virtually intact skeletons, including that of a 16- or 17-year-old girl, who was buried with little pots and vases for her essential oils, and two boys, buried together, their knees tucked under their chins. The remains are likely those of citizens of Memphis, the ancient first capital of Egypt, and they had been undisturbed for 5,000 years.
For Kohler, the discovery of the tombs marked the end of a satisfying journey that began six years earlier. In 1995, the German-born academic, who has lived and worked in Australia for five years, had been working on a German excavation in the north of Egypt when she decided to take a weekend trip.
She went to Helwan, the site of an ancient burial ground, 25 kilometres south of Cairo. It was excavated in the '40s by an Egyptian archaeologist, Dr Zaki Saad, who uncovered 10,000 tombs, many of which contained intriguing artefact, such as small containers for food and drink, cosmetic pots and jewellery.
Although devoted to his work, Saad was forced to abandon the site when Egypt's King Farouk was exiled in 1952. He emigrated to the United States, suffered serious depression, and eventually committed suicide. Nobody knew what had happened to his notes, and the desert sands blew over the work he had done at Helwan.
Kohler was keen to see what, if anything, remained. But when she arrived at Helwan the desert was gone.
"And so was the burial site," she said. "It almost broke our hearts. Over a decade, the area had become populated. Half the site was built over, with apartment blocks. Some of the tombs were being used as rubbish dumps.
"I later heard from officials that the site had been de-classified as one of importance in the '80s. Largely, it was because of the expanding population. The Ministry of Construction just needed space, and although they value the site, there is nothing glamorous there: no pyramids, no tombs for kings."
Kohler applied to Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities for permission to excavate what was left. She was also interested to know what happened to the artefacts Saad had collected.
"I was always intrigued by this, and I was always investigating it. I was always asking colleagues, 'what do you think happened?' And people would just say 'forget it, they were probably stolen, they are gone'. But I couldn't forget about them because they were objects of enormous importance: jewellery, ivory, whole coffins, little containers, things that would help us understand who lived in Memphis and what kind of civilisation it was."
Permission to start looking for those artefacts and to excavate was difficult to get, particularly in the face of competition from British, American and German Egyptologists.
But it was granted and, in 1998, Kohler and her team made the first of four trips back to Egypt. Early on, she set about finding Saad's artefacts, believing they had last been seen by a Swiss archaeologist in the '60s, who had taken some black-and-white photographs, and recorded some details .
"But they disappeared after that," Kohler said. "We only recently learnt that what happened, in the late '60s, when the whole Middle East was threatened with war, small regional museums like the one near Helwan, were advised to pack up their things, and bring them to Cairo, where they would be safer."
And forgotten: the museum in Cairo is enormous, and its basement is crammed with crates, statues, shelves and boxes - and dust. Kohler suspected the artefacts from the Helwan graves were there. She cajoled a curator to have a look , and he spent hours poking around, "and then he came up smiling".
"In the last and darkest corner, he found a crate with the word 'Helwan' written on the outside," Kohler said. "And then looked around and found another, and another." In total, there were 158, "all numbered, but dusty and unopened for 50 years, and we had no idea what might be in them."
Kohler's team received permission to open the boxes. Accompanied by guards they opened a crate.
It was crammed with musical instruments made of ivory, and ivory jewellery and bracelets.
"It was an incredible moment, and we were again lucky, because when we opened the box, we found an inventory list on top, with the tomb number, a description of each object, and then each object was also numbered and defined." Another group of boxes contained tombstones, which caused Kohler to whoop with joy. Helwan is famous for its tombs, because some had gravestones with hieroglyphic inscriptions.
"These people were buried 5,000 years ago, about the time Egyptians were just starting to use writing," she said. "The inscriptions are the first examples of private people, not kings, using writing. These tombstones have names and professions, and that is unbelievably important for scholars. It tells us so much about the work people did, and what they were called, and the relationship between their names and their professions.
"I had known that these stones existed, because the Swiss archaeologist that had seen them in the '60s had taken some very coarse black and white photographs of them, and that is why I was keen to find them again."
Over four weeks, the team found all 33 tombstones in three of the crates, numbered and fully recorded them. It became an ongoing project: in 1999, the team returned to Egypt and opened a box with "little bits and pieces, interesting carvings, things like that, but also a beautiful ivory plaque, with a representation of a woman, the wife of the first king of Egypt, with a carved wig, because of the lice in those days. Somebody had taken a portrait of her into their tomb, and was buried with it."
Then, in January this year, a team of 10 undergraduates set about exploring not the boxes, but the site. They marked out an area, and began removing the layers of desert. Sharan Bradley, 35, majoring in ancient history and Egyptology, was part of the team.
"You can't describe the feeling when you realise you are going to find tombs," Bradley said. "Ever since I was a child, I have spent all my pocket money on Egyptian books, and I used to dig in the backyard, pretending I was excavating, and then there I was, actually digging. Your heart pounds, and your mouth goes dry, you're just so elated."
In total, the team found six tombs, with the skeletons of the young woman, an older, possibly wealthier matron (whose tomb contained many offerings), two small boys (probably poor, since they had no offerings) and two men, one perhaps 60 years old when he died.
The team has since returned to Australia and is recording its findings. Meanwhile, the artefacts and remains they found have been taken into storage in Egypt, where experts in the study of human remains will try to find the cause of death.
"There was no evidence of trauma, no act of war, on any of the skeletons," Kohler said.
"We think they died of natural causes, or of diseases. The young woman perhaps died in childbirth, since that was a very common cause of death. But we really don't know, and that is the next exciting part."
Kohler will return to Egypt in the summer.
"A lot of Egyptology is very glamorous, because of Tutankhamen and the gold, and so forth," she said. "But we are interested in more simple things: how did ordinary people live, and of what did they die? What did they do, and what did they believe about the afterlife? These are the questions we are now seeking to answer."
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