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Dr Chris Naunton

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What I wanted to see more than anything else at Antinoopolis but didn’t think would be visible from the ground or part of our trip, was the hippodrome. To my surprise and delight the south side was visible, albeit only as what looks like two long, straight mounds, one higher than the other, the smaller on the inside as it were, representing the rake of spectators’ seats around the outside of the race course (I think?). The north side has been swallowed up by the modern cemetery next door. Shortly after the city’s foundation, in 131 CE, Hadrian inaugurated a sporting event called the Antinoeia involving athletics, chariotry and horse-racing. A rare example of a coloured papyrus from this era was discovered at the site and shows a group of charioteers. I forgot to include an image of Antinous himself in my previous post so here’s a good one - a bust I came across by chance at the Chicago Institute of Arts recently. The papyrus was found at Antinoopolis in 1914 by John de Monins Johnson, and of course all this had me thinking of our dear, recently departed colleague, and JdMJ’s near namesake, John J Johnston, who was of course an expert on Antinous, and would have loved to see this site I’m sure. Antinoopolis was built on the site of the earlier town of Hir-we but all the older buildings were razed except a temple of Ramesses II which had been built using stone from nearby Akhetaten (Amarna). The original surfaces had been plastered over so that new decoration could be applied - although the newer layer is almost indistinguishable from the original stone surface - and where it has fallen away traces of the Akhenaten-era reliefs are still visible. Antinoopolis / el-Sheikh Ibada. Founded by Hadrian in 130 CE memory of his favourite, Antinous, who drowned in the Nile nearby and was deified as Osiris-Antinous. It was the first Hellenic city in Middle Egypt and served to promote Greek/Roman culture in the region. I’d wanted to visit for a long time and in some ways this was the site more than other that made me want to pursue the ‘Missing Cities’ idea: Napoleon’s savants recorded a number of spectacular monuments that have since disappeared, and like Herakleopolis, Hermopolis and other large city-sites it has never been fully explored and is relatively little-known. Its outline is still very visible in satellite images and there’s still enough to see to give a compelling sense of what would once have been here. Italian excavations have recently revealed what seems to be a temple - perhaps the temple of Osiris-Antinous himself? Herakleopolis/ Ihnasya was the seat of the kings of the 9th and 10th Dyns, who ruled at the same time as a rival line of Theban rulers. It was again the seat of a king, Peftjauawybast, in the Third Intermediate Period. Another first for me: the ancient city of Herakleopolis, in the modern town of Ihnasya. And this is my favourite photo from the trip: a seated colossus of Ramesses II which would have stood at the front of his temple to Heryshef. The top half is missing so what you’re looking at is the side of the king’s throne and the pleats of the kilt at the the top of his right leg, and the side of his bum. Something that really struck me when we visited the Alabaster Tomb was the extent to which some of the weird patterns in the stone match what I remember of the painted, mock-alabaster decoration in elite tombs at other nearby cemetery sites including Anfushy (photos 7-9) and Mostafa Pasha (10). If the builders of those tombs wanted to paint them as if to look like they were made of alabaster was that because they had some kind of incredible, more expensive tomb elsewhere in mind(?). Which tomb might this have been? The obvious candidate would be the tomb of Alexander. There are also references to Alexander having been buried in a sarcophagus of ‘glass’ but could this have been a garbled reference to alabaster, part of the appeal which is its translucence? A great highlight of this trip for me was our visit to the Alabaster Tomb in Alexandria. I/we (AWT) had been trying to gain access to this enigmatic monument which lies within the modern Latin (European Christian) cemetery for years and finally managed it on this trip. It is formed of massive slabs of Egyptian alabaster discovered by the Italian head of the Graeco-Roman Museum Evaristo Breccia at the beginning go the 20th century and reassembled by his successor Achille Adriani in the 1930s into this simple, single chamber. It is thought perhaps to have been part of one of the two (probably) iterations of a very grand tomb that was built for Alexander the Great and would have been among the most important - founding - monuments of the new capital city of Alexandria. I had been under the impression that these slabs could have been anything and were assembled into a building by Adriani more in hope than anything else but one of them is clearly cut with a door and doorframe in relief, while others are polished in some places, and left rougher in others, suggesting they might have been used as lining for a rock cut chamber of some kind which matches classical descriptions of the tomb. We can’t prove this was the tomb of Alexander of course but no better evidence survives, and having thought about it so much it was great to see it for the first time on this trip. It was six years since my last visit to Tanis, another capital city of the Third Intermediate Period. Although it has suffered from the removal of a number of obelisks and statues to the GEM and new capital etc in recent years, a new visitor centre provides excellent information about the archaeology and discoveries of the last 200 years, and there’s still a huge amount of the temple left along with the massive 21st and 30th Dynasty enclosure walls and the tombs of the so-called silver pharaohs. I had never been to the Mut temple at the site until this visit and loved seeing the enormous enclosure walls and Nilometer. Good to be back at Bubastis for the first time in ten years a couple of weeks ago. According to Manetho this was the capital of Egypt during in the Twenty-second Dynasty. The site remains the extraordinary ruin field - remains of the temple of Bastet - it has always been but the site museum is now fully operational, and does a good job of telling the story of the city and its history.

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