by Sarah Parcak
Beyond the village fields, where white ibises and orange-crested hoopoes dart about the vegetation, the Nile floodplain gives way abruptly to chert-scattered sand running to hills that rise into the vast Western Desert. The cemetery is just there, on the desert edge, facing us. The site is serene, a place where history asks you to take a deep breath and waits for you to exhale.
In antiquity, it looked just like an overcrowded cemetery today, full of family mausoleums stretching in every direction in painted or limestone-lined mud brick. Unlike most in the United States, though, Egyptian cemeteries were quite lively, as relatives came to give offerings and even share meals in the tomb forecourts,30 like a never-ending Mexican Day of the Dead. Up above the cemeteries, the pyramids of Senwosret I and Amenemhet I are mountains of sandy rubble today, with some stone casing still intact at the lowest levels. Next to each pyramid are smaller pyramids belonging to the relatives of the king, and a series of deep-shaft tombs created for the highest echelons of society during the Twelfth Dynasty. For the elite citizens who lived and worked in the city of Itj-Tawy, the closer they could be buried to the kings and their pyramids, the more prestigious the spot: desert penthouses for the afterlife.31
Mohammed Youssef brought us to the tomb that looters had attacked, just to the east of Senwosret I’s pyramid. We saw hints of a T-shaped outline set against the sandy gebel where fragmented bedrock peeked through. And we were definitely in a high-priced neighborhood: princes’ and viziers’ burials might have abutted the pyramid itself, but other prime locations could be found near the pyramid causeways. That’s what we had—a tomb overlooking the causeway of Senwosret I’s pyramid.
Our mission was to clear enough of the tomb to affix strong metal doors and keep the looters firmly out. The trouble was, the more we cleared, the bigger the tomb got. Several hundred tons of sand in, the place had grown to a warren: we’d need to go large to clear the complex, rock-cut doorways and shafts for lockdown.
Between us and our Egyptian colleagues, the core team was small. We hired about 50 local villagers to do the heavy digging, supervised by six men from the village of Quft, just north of Luxor. Quftis have worked alongside foreign missions since the 1880s, and many have more field experience than Western archaeologists could dream of. They are not only foremen supervising the general workforce, but they also help do fine digging and are skilled practical engineers in the tradition of their ancient Egyptian ancestors. They can move any large stone or shore up any wall. Greg has worked with Quftis for nearly 30 years, and they have essentially adopted him. He happily debates in Arabic with them about the exact sequence of a wall’s destruction.
Every excavation in Egypt has a reis, a chief workman. Ours, Omer Farouk, has worked beside me since my PhD research in 2005. One day at Amarna, we discovered we are twins—born on the exact same day, six hours apart. His family is now my family and vice versa, and my son calls him Uncle Omer. On our dig, Omer is effectively the Reis of Reises, as the other Quftis working on our team all supervise digs elsewhere. With a gap in his front teeth, a mustache to make a Viennese gentleman envious, and a quick laugh, Omer is straight out of central casting. He also has eyes in the back of his head, and he can smell when a member of our workforce isn’t doing what they are supposed to—me included!
If you’ve seen pictures of the grand old excavations of the early 20th century, you’ve got a good idea of how that first Lisht season played out. The large workforce arrayed against the desert and our World War II–style camp with white canvas tents had more than a touch of glamour about it. The outhouse, less so.
As Molly Haight, our former student, and Chase Childs got under way mapping the looted tombs, the excavation units went deeper into the tomb’s hall. Time seemed to have been particularly ruthless with the site, and it was not because the person who commissioned it cheaped out on design.
Upmarket Afterlife Property
Like other Middle Kingdom tombs that aimed high—even higher than the nomarchs of the Old Kingdom—this tomb had, when new, sought to imitate a pyramid’s front driveway. The wish list for the wealthy began with a mud-brick causeway marching up from the Nile floodwaters to the tomb.32 Brilliant white with paint or limestone, a chapel might await offerings outside the plastered entryway, before a wooden door presented the visitor with the image and name of the illustrious tomb owner.
Inside, a dim hall might be cut into the gebel, where six columns held up the roof, and the tomb owner frowned out of the shadowed wall decoration. Tomb shafts might open into the floor of the hall or the forecourt. At the back, three niches sank even further into the rock, housing statues of the deceased, surrounded by his carved biography. All this, so that his body, possessions, name, and achievements live forever. And this tomb owner had ordered everything in the ancient tomb catalogue.
But time doesn’t care too much for the aspirations of the wealthy. Only the door’s stone hinge socket remained, and the hall was open to the sky. Seemingly because of quarrying and earthquakes, the roof had collapsed. Nature, it seemed, had stripped the tomb owner’s name from the walls: maybe a natural catastrophe in antiquity explained the incredible destruction we realized we were seeing. Barely a hieroglyph of the rich decoration abutted another.
But modern sand filled the three niches, the hallway, and the causeway, strewn throughout with 21st-century rubbish. It seemed modern looters had also played their role in its damage.
Our Egyptian colleagues reported that they had recently chased some away and recovered inscribed limestone blocks. We suddenly had hope of some sort of identification … And then our colleagues showed us the photographs. The blocks provided the names of the tomb owner’s five sons, but not him—or her.
Excavated stone fragments we found had circular-saw marks, showing where the reliefs that would have given us answers had been stolen, and the meters of debris spoke of the ministry’s desperate backfilling to stop the thieves. We dug down, to sift facts from the chaos, and the biography of the tomb, if not the owner, took clearer shape.
At the back of the hall, the gebel had thwarted the architects’ grand plans: the builders had completed the center and right niches but apparently stopped work on the left when they ran into the same weak limestone that eventually brought down the roof. Then, on a wall of the central niche, where the tomb owner would have walked into the world of the living, we found that his image had been hacked out by hundreds of pick strokes, the shape of his kilt and legs a hatched scar in the artwork’s smooth surface. Earthquakes cause destruction, but not with a pick, and it is not a modern looter’s habit to ruin what can be sold.
In every shovelful we cleared, the beauty of what had been destroyed shone brighter. Gorgeous painted limestone fragments surfaced, in a vibrant palette of lichen green, red, ocher, yellow, black, and precious Egyptian blue.33 Paintings of fruit, cakes and loaves, flowers, oxen and birds, and countless offering-bearers bringing the feast were smashed into pieces. One little face of an official peered from a fragment, his eye and nose as fresh as if the artisans had completed them yesterday.34
Beneath the paint, the sunk relief was finely carved, rendering the detailed contours of each hieroglyph and figure. Some of the inscribed fragments were monumental in scale, rivaling royal or temple inscriptions. And that was just the polychrome niche. The right-hand niche, where the looters had ripped out the blocks recovered by the ministry, had the subtlest unpainted carving. As tombs went, there was no expense spared, and this one must have been a lucrative long-term project for high-level artisans living in the city nearby.
But the tomb owner’s anonymity still hung over the site.
A Name for Eternity
“T’alla mudira!” The shout echoed across the hillside one morning, midseason, while I was sorting equipment in camp. Hurry here, boss-lady!
I ran to see. The corner of a block stuck out of the ground. One clear inscribed face showed the hieroglyphs in-t-f: Intef. We finally had a name. And from the elaboration of the block—t
he corner of a pillar—it was his name. Everyone buzzed in to take a look and in-situ photos before we turned the block. A second inscribed face contained a title, “Hereditary Noble.” His wealth was already obvious, but now we knew he was a very high-ranking official.
That broke the dam. More titles followed on other limestone fragments: “Great Overseer of the Army” and “The Royal Seal-Bearer,”35 meaning the deceased had been a combined secretary of defense and secretary of the treasury. Intef was a military man in a military man’s court, a powerful and influential part of Senwosret I’s administration, judging by how close he’d parked his tomb to Senwosret’s causeway.
Outside the unpainted niche, another relief block appeared showing his sons, or at least their feet, bearing offerings, beside the last words of columns of text. Again and again, Intef describes himself as “Born of Ipi.” A stunning in-situ black granite block appeared, on which both their names were inscribed. While it was not unusual for sons to honor their mothers like this in Middle Kingdom tombs, we clearly had a mummy’s boy on our hands … if no mummy, just yet. The rock-cut structure was still getting more complicated, and voids gaped through the cleared niche walls into later, intrusive shafts. And that’s when we hit the find of the season.
Inside the right-hand niche, facedown in the sand and modern debris, we found a 2-meter-tall limestone block covered in inscriptions. It was a false door, a portal between this world and the next, where offerings were made to be consumed by the deceased. Above, in the chamber’s characteristic subtle, sunk relief, Intef sat in front of a laden offering table, while below, six text columns outlined his biography.
Smashed. Obliterated. Call it what you want. Great lumps had been pounded off, the text and offering scene scraped and chipped by some form of wide-bladed chisel. Intef’s face was gone. Who knows who did it, or when. The missing top-left corner was almost certainly the work of modern looters attempting to get to the more portable—and salable—relief blocks lining the room. The rampant chisel marks seemed to suggest less materialistic motives.
False door of Intef [PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR]
Was this monumental sour grapes? Or modern thieves destroying what they could not steal? Something about that doesn’t ring true, but then again, looting can be illogical. Maybe this was an older violation, or even punishment.
Either way, fortunately for us, false doors are reasonably formulaic and symmetrical. From the partial glyphs that remain on either side, we could again decipher Intef’s key titles, and his insistence that he is born of Ipi. But we still did not know who she was, or why her son was so keen to highlight his maternal lineage. As the season ended, we were left with only questions.
Common though the name Intef is in the Middle Kingdom, we are still wondering how long this Intef served in his positions, since he is not mentioned elsewhere in any previous inscriptions. His title “Great Overseer of the Army”36 corroborates that he lived in the late Eleventh or early Twelfth Dynasty, backing up his possible position under Senwosret I. Perhaps he stepped on one too many toes, leading to the eventual desecration of his tomb. Or perhaps the sheer scale of his tomb was too arrogant, too conspicuous a challenge to the royal monuments looming over it. Or maybe it was simply nature’s comeback for choosing bad rock.
The Mystery Deepens
We went back to Lisht in December 2016 and December 2017, accompanied by additional team members to handle the larger scale of the dig. To get to the bottom of Intef’s funerary hall, we had to excavate the 12 meters that remained of the causeway and the tomb’s main entrance. In the loving and diligent hands of Rexine Hummel and Bettina Bader, potsherds from increasingly good context gave Middle Kingdom dates and a solid range of wares connected to funerary offerings.
Layers of sand contained mud-brick debris and hundreds of limestone relief pieces ranging from tiny to massive. Despite the overwhelming wave of finds, our dig artist, Shakira Christodoulou, was delighted to have such beautiful things to draw. On-site, Kira sat at a desk up above the main dig crew, humming opera arias while creating perfect watercolor reconstructions of the relief fragments. From a high-end London art shop, she had even managed to get her hands on a paint called, appropriately, “Egyptian Blue.”
We had a glimpse, infuriatingly partial, of Intef himself. Only a quarter of his portrait remained, showing the back of a man’s wig similar to those seen of Senwosret I elsewhere, and revealing his shoulder, chest, and waist. And our man was taking his soldiering seriously. Where other wealthy courtiers might have themselves portrayed as prosperous and well-fed, Intef could have fronted the cover of a muscle magazine. Perhaps it stood to reason, given how frequently he mentioned his military title, written with a pictogram of a kneeling archer.
As the 2016 season wound up, there were still no other clues about Intef’s role or family connections; and amid the madness of the last week of digging, we also had a TV crew filming us. On the day they arrived, just as we dug down into the entryway of the hall, we had a find so spectacular that whispers went around the site that we must have planted it.
As if you could plant a relief block the size of a child’s sled and three times as thick.
Image of Ipi, Intef’s mother [PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR]
At first glance, we took it for a seated figure of Intef—the image only extended up to the waist.37 When the film crew had gotten enough footage, Shakira could finally look.
“Hey, guys … how do I put this?” she shouted up to the rest of the registration team. “Dude looks like a lady?” And that’s why you still have a dig artist in the age of photography.
The seated man was a woman. Lifesize, down to her delicate feet, she wore a sheath dress with goffered streamers running down her back.38 In her bangled hand, she held a flail. Royal regalia. This lady was a wielder of power in her own right. We’re sure she is Intef’s mother, Ipi: no wonder he was so keen to make the point.39
Down to the Tomb Floor
Over the course of the 2017 dig, we realized the excavation of Intef’s tomb could easily be a lifetime’s work. Greg was meters down in the end of the tomb’s entrance causeway, peeling back layers where mud-brick walls sealed, crossed, and intersected rock-cut shafts. He was in his bliss, figuring out what layer happened when, and did not want to be disturbed by anyone, especially his wife. He even put up a skull-and-crossbones “do not enter” sign, and if any unfortunate soul walked across his perfectly delineated mud brick, he let it be known that the tomb shafts were already there, waiting …
Scattered throughout it all were fragments of one or maybe two red granite offering tables, finely inscribed to Intef’s memory. What would have been a fabulously expensive and prestigious object had been burned and truly smashed to smithereens. Increasingly, we got the impression that someone didn’t want Intef enjoying his afterlife.
Even the bones of the family were unusually fragmentary, according to our resident bone genius, bioarchaeologist Christine Lee. Christine is one of the best in the world at picking through the welfare of past populations, their diseases and diets, and she had found the remains of male and female adults, and a few children, all of whom were sturdy and mostly healthy. Also, no apparent nutritional deficiencies appeared, showing that the people represented had access to good protein and other wholesome foods—what you’d expect from a prosperous population in a capital city. The bones were likely disturbed by the long-term looting at the tomb, but the breaks were not fresh. So, it happened long ago, and perhaps the bones were smashed at the same time as the tomb. As yet, it is impossible to say.
Finally, as we neared the floor of the tombs’ main hall, we began to find mummy wrappings and grave goods among the fragments of painted relief. Despite the extensive looting across millennia, there were pieces of fine alabaster vessels,40 statuary fittings and amulets made of faience, a gorgeous glazed blue ceramic material,41 including a broken Sekhmet and little cats only as big as a pinky fingernail.42
The gemcutters of Itj-Tawy, whose workshops we ha
ppened upon while coring in 2010, had clearly met enthusiastic consumers in Intef’s family. Sharp-eyed workmen spotted beads of lapis lazuli, amethyst, agate, and turquoise. In one spellbinding find, an eye inlay stared up out of the sand beside a skull: white marble tinted in lifelike pink at the corners, the onyx pupil polished to a mirror finish. When inset in its original position on the coffin, the effect must have been mesmerizing.
These finds illustrate the great shift in fortunes experienced by many in the Middle Kingdom. We know Intef is a southern Egyptian name, which means his family probably traveled north from Upper Egypt with Amenemhet I. All the art we see in Intef’s tomb, the finely carved hieroglyphs, the architecture of the tomb itself, resurged from the dust, starvation, and upheaval of the Pyramid Age’s ruins 300 years beforehand.
While the Lisht cemetery had not seen architects and engineers in action for 3,800 years, we had glimpses of Egypt’s deep building traditions in action with our Quftis. We occasionally came up against massive limestone pieces the weight of juvenile elephants, and without their removal, we could not excavate deeper. Our Qufti team developed an ingenious system using ropes, intricate knots, ramps, and coordinated manpower to lift them from the 3-meter-deep hall.
With Reis Omer at the helm yelling “As One!” the men would stand six in front, holding ropes, with two at the back pushing, calling “Heyaaaa-HUP,” every few seconds. As one indeed, they converted the sum of their power into something greater than the parts. We all watched, amazed. These could have easily been the 150th great-grandchildren of the original Lisht tomb builders.