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But the first appearance of our landscape was a little disappointing… there were neither hills nor definite quarry-faces to look at… but in the afternoon they had found an immense new quarry… and here, on a platform between two great gneiss boulders, stood a black granite block bearing the inscription of Khufu or Cheops, the builder of the Great Pyramid. The cartouche of the great king was plain, and the inscription afterwards read as ‘The desert workshop of Khufu’. [Extract from The Road to Chephren’s Quarries by George Murray. The Geographical Journal. August 1939]
Lost Landscapes: Looking for Ancient Lives in Egypt’s Deserts - by Dr Elizabeth Bloxam
George Murray and Rex Engelbach’s explorations into Egypt’s Western Desert in the 1930s, in search of the lost quarries of King Khufu, must be the closest you can get to high adventure and endless horizons. The lure of exploration stories, both real and imagined, might underpin many childhood dreams of being an archaeologist - heroic tales of finding lost cities and treasures of ‘the ancients’. My own addiction to the study of ancient lives is certainly peppered with these romantic ideas, yet, the real inspiration came from true stories much closer to home. To begin with, an obsession at the age of eight (partly the fault of Dr Who) with ‘stone age man’ – but most inspirational were the stories my parents told me about my great grandmother’s travels to Egypt in the heyday of the early explorers and pioneers of Egyptology in the 1920s - it was these that shaped my passion for ancient Egypt.
Although my great grandmother, Mabel Bloxam, had some strange ideas about who built the Great Pyramid - as spelt out in her book ‘God’s Stone Witness – the Great Pyramid of Gizeh Its Message to the Anglo-Saxon Race’ (1932) – she suggests that ‘The Divine Architect of the Universe’, or in other words God, must have masterminded these phenomenal structures. She was not alone though in trying to find God and the Bible through the monuments of ancient Egypt – even towering figures in Egyptology such as Flinders Petrie initially had similar ideas. Egyptian archaeology today has, of course, greatly moved on from these biblical quests, yet, our knowledge of ordinary life in ancient Egypt is still a lot less known than that of the elites. Although the temples and pyramids of Egypt are astonishing architectural achievements, they only tell us a partial story about ancient lives - what about ordinary people? How did they live?
I had never really thought much about these questions until I first visited the tomb-makers village of Deir el Medina in Luxor. Housing over 500 highly skilled crafts-people, who created the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings during the New Kingdom (late 2nd millennium BC), the village is one of my favourite places to show Andante guests when we’re on our tour in Luxor. Visitors can get a remarkable feel for ordinary lives lived 4,000 years ago in this village, their attitudes to life and death from their own gorgeously decorated tombs, and from their writings and other material culture, insights into their daily lives.
Even after my epiphany from visiting Deir el Medina, it still took another 10 years to pluck up the courage to ditch my well-paid marketing career and enrol on an undergraduate degree in Egyptian archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London - and I never looked back.
Pursuing my research interests as an archaeologist to find out about ordinary past lives led me towards the study of ancient quarries and mines - which might sound to many the most boring archaeological sites you could ever wish to study in Egypt. What can you ‘find’ in these dull places? people have asked. A hell of a lot is my answer… as the ghost towns of antiquity, these archaeological landscapes provide us with exceptional glimpses of technological and logistical innovation, diet, environment, ritual places and also identities, particularly when we have good inscriptional evidence. The thousands of names etched into the rocks in the Wadi Hammamat greywacke quarries in the Eastern Desert are a spectacular example.
My favourite ancient quarry brings this article full-circle to its opening passage about the finding of ‘Chephren’s Quarries’ by Engelbach and Murray - almost a hundred years ago. I never thought that my own romantic ideas of desert exploration would ever be realised, in the way that they were, when we first drove into those infinite horizons of the Western desert. The Chephren Quarries were so named because the pharaohs of the Old Kingdom pyramid age (3rd millennium BC) loved the luminous blue stone (Chephren Gneiss) for their life-sized statues. With only one source, 65km north-west of Abu Simbel, intense quarrying activity during the Old Kingdom has left us a well-preserved time-capsule of ancient lives lived 5,000 years ago.
After several years of surveying and excavating these quarries, with my now-husband Ian Shaw, we established that the environment 5,000 years ago was quite different from what we see today – rather than hyper-arid desert, it was likely to have been a much more savannah-like terrain, able to support cattle and other grazing animals. The quarry workers enjoyed quite a rich and varied diet – including beer and wine. Lifting the lid off a cooking pot left in a bakery hearth that had not been touched for over 5,000 years was an incredible moment that archaeologists dream of.
But there were so many other marvellous experiences that account for my love of these quarries – not only the archaeological ones, but also classic instances of high drama when our camp was consumed by a sandstorm that raged for 24 hours. Finding the remains of Engelbach and Murray’s 1930s camps, their beer bottles, tins of sardines and petrol cans told us about how they survived in the desert during their excavations… dreams of archaeological adventures in Egypt are thoughts that might help us get through these strange days of isolation.
Find out more about Elizabeth Bloxam here.
