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Dr Chris Naunton

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Channeling Dr Jones in the tomb of Pabasa (TT 279) yesterday.… Lovely light at Kom Ombo recently… Granite quarries, Aswan. Not far from the famous unfinished obelisk another huge piece of rock was even closer to being freed, showing how the ancients continued cutting the underside of the piece which is now supported only by what looks like a perilously thin uncut… fin? Looks dangerous and yet it’s been like for a couple of thousand years at least so… relax… First time seeing the Tutankhamun material at the GEM. King Tut’s gang. Don’t mess… Finished our desert day at Dimeh / Soknopaiou Nesos, and slightly later than planned which meant the risk of driving home in the dark. But also that we were there as the sun god Ra began his nightly descent down into the ground and perilous journey back to towards the new day. It’s not called the magic hour for nothing… Love me a bit of desert exploration… Just at the end of a two week exploration of sites in Egypt with a group from Ancient Origins and catching up with photos. Early on we spent a day exploring the western end of lake Qarun in the Faiyum, visiting Qasr es-Saga and Soknopaiou Nesos. Also the Widan el-Faras where I was delighted that we were able to stop by the ancient trackway, which I’d only ever seen in photos before. Aeons ago this whole area was densely vegetated and sections of huge petrified tree-trunks lie all around. They seem to break naturally into short sections of around a metre / 3 feet in length and around the Fourth Dynasty the ancients laid thousands of these pieces neatly together to create a trackway 11 km in length. This was used for the transport of blocks of basalt from quarries to the north across the desert towards the lake, and from there they would be transferred to the Nile Valley for use e.g. in the floor of the pyramid temples at Giza. Utterly wonderful to see it, this alone has made my trip. 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.

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