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Friday, November 02 2007 @ 04:27 AM CDT

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Last month, Polish archaeologists celebrated an excavation tradition going back to Kazimierz Michalowski at Edfu in 1937, says Nevine El-Aref

Zbigniew E Szafrañski describes Michalowski's work as the first milestone on the Polish road to the scientific status that Warsaw University's Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology (PCMA) enjoys in Egypt today.

"It was the visionary approach of Kazimierz Michalowski and his personal efforts that led to the establishment of a Franco-Polish Mission," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. "It is to the centre's founder, Professor Michalowski, that we owe foremost our friendship with the land on the Nile and with our Egyptian colleagues, [and] the dozens of years of warm intimacy with all our associates without whom Egypt would not have become a second home for so many of us, a home to which we return with the greatest joy."

Michalowski's initial work was harshly interrupted by World War II, and Polish researchers had to wait almost two decades before they could return to Egypt and resume their archaeological work. In 1957, Michalowski was invited to lecture at the University of Alexandria, and his eagerness for excavation in Egypt reached was reignited when he saw the mound of Kom Al-Dikka in downtown Alexandria. He observed concrete pillars being driven into the ground and described "a fountain of mosaic cubes" rising into the air.

The Egyptian authorities needed little cajoling to come to the decision to call in Polish and Egyptian archaeologists to replace the building machines, and in 1960 the mission began its field work at Kom Al-Dikka. Since then the Polish mission has uncovered a whole Graeco-Roman residential town with baths, theatre building, houses, wine presses, and carefully laid-out streets and alleyways. Recently, after many years of investigation, explains Szafrañski, it was found that part of the area functioned at one time as a huge assembly hall, a kind of auditorium maximum, of the ancient academy of Alexandria. The ruins are the oldest known standing remains of an ancient university, which means that you can actually touch the walls and sit on the stone seats in one of the ancient lecture halls. Thus, Alexandria became the second milestone on the Polish centre's road to success, after Edfu and Tell Atrib on the outskirts of Benha, right at the base of the Nile Delta.

Michalowski launched a broad foundation of cooperation with the Egyptian Antiquities Service. With his associates he carried out an extensive archaeological prospective of sites in Upper Nubia in 1958, and a year later began a similar programme in the Delta. This initial reconnaissance was organised in response to an appeal made in 1955 by Selim Hassan of the antiquities service in a bid to provide protection and scientific documentation of the monuments of Egyptian architecture and art in Nubia. Michalowski's survey report covered 17 sites from Philae to Abu Simbel. The survey report, which contained a proposal for the protection of specific features, was addressed to the General Director of the antiquities service; it proved inestimable in pushing through UNESCO's decision late in 1958 to announce an international action plan for the salvage of monuments in Nubia.

During the 1960s the Polish responded to UNESCO's appeal to save the monuments of Nubia, which were soon to be inundated by the waters of Lake Nasser being created behind the Aswan High Dam. During the Nubian Campaign, Polish architects dismantled the temples at Tafa and Dabod before they could be drowned in the rising waters of the lake. Excavations conducted at Dabod unearthed the vestiges of earlier sacral architecture from the New Kingdom. A Polish proposal for saving the Abu Simbel temples was among the projects submitted to UNESCO. Professor Michalowski was called upon to preside over the international commission of the Egyptian government and UNESCO for the dismantling and transference of the Abu Simbel temples to a higher location.

At the same time that Egypt was pushing ahead with its political unification with Syria the Polish centre carried out excavations at the famous desert city of Palmyra which resulted in the discovery of some hundreds of statues and inscriptions.

In Egypt, meanwhile, monumental ruins were found at Tel Atrib that proved to belong to an extensive town that existed from the time of the last Pharaohs of Egypt through Ptolemaic and to Byzantine times. The Greek Athribis was actually the capital of the tenth Pharaonic nome of Lower Egypt. Each season of field work provided more knowledge about the ancient town as an important administrative and artistic centre of the ancient Mediterranean.

An enormous challenge presented itself in 1961 when Michalowski, who was in Faras, received a cable from the director of the Department of Archaeology in Cairo asking him to begin the conservation of the famous terraced temple of Hatshepsut in Deir Al-Bahari. "It was a great distinction for the centre considering the uniqueness of the temple in world architecture and the fact that the lower terraces had already been restored by the Egypt Exploration Fund and the Metropolitan Museum of Art," Szafrañski says. The third terrace of the temple had already been excavated, but it remained in ruins. "Some 10,000 blocks and fragments of blocks had been left by our illustrious predecessors to be inserted in their proper place in the temple walls," Szafrañski says.

"This great monument and fine example of Egyptian architecture had been reduced to rubble by earthquakes and falling rocks from the high cliff above," adds Szafrañski. "Work was started there in the early years of the 20th century, resulting in clearing most of the temple, but only lower parts were restored. Thousands upon thousands of stone fragments waited to be reassembled in a gigantic jig-saw puzzle, which continues until today."

Clearance of some eroded rock that commenced with the start of work at Deir Al-Bahari revealed in 1962 a structure that no one had expected next to Hatshepsut's building. In those days, the discovery of an entirely unknown temple was an exceptional event and it was widely commented in the world media and appeared on the covers of some renowned international periodicals. The structure was identified as a previously unknown temple of Hatshepsut's nephew and successor, Tuthmosis III.

Another interesting part was the Upper Terrace and the rock platform discovered above it, identified as an ingenious solution designed by ancient Egyptian engineers themselves to protect the edifice from rocks falling from the cliff above. This required a specialised task force.

Blocks collected in the stores gradually found their way back to the Upper Terrace and the architectural form of the building slowly took shape. The mission took 20 years to complete this stage. However, some conservators began to question the Polish approach.

Responding to questions voicing some criticisms of the restoration being carried out in Hatshepsut which have accused the Polish mission of not being up to the job, Szafrañski says restoration in Hatshepsut's temple was implemented according to international restoration rules embodied in the Venice charter.

"When I began my work as director of the Hatshepsut temple restoration [project] I did the restoration of the main courtyard and main sanctuary and other elements in a quite different way than was known in the early 1960s, since restoration policies are always changing according to new technology, studies and international thoughts," Szafrañski says. "Looking at the temple now a person will find different ideas of restorations and this is shown everywhere, for example in Karnak Temple, Mesopotamia, Babylon and other sites that have had several restoration processes over quite long time, as the strategy of restoration is in continuous challenge according to world opinion. But from the Egyptological point of view I am able to defend every part of the temple."

"If some people say that our restoration is not up to the standard they did not read our reports, because we explain all restoration steps being taken," Szafrañski says. He adds that if objectors had concrete evidence of poor practice "they must write and tell us where we are wrong."

"This is a static way of thinking," he says. "I am a scientist and I deal with scientific facts and evidence and not blame flying around or unravelling different points of view."

Concealed among the thousands of blocks standing in rows on the temple terraces was the message of an exceptional queen who became "king" of Egypt in the 18th Dynasty. The architectural form had to be reconstructed, the images identified and the texts read. The polychromy and stone had to be preserved. The implementation of a project on such a scale, with all its inherent technical problems, required the cooperation of specialists in various fields. Slowly, this huge puzzle was put together. The reconstruction of the Upper (Coronation) Portico with its columns, pillars and some Osiriac statues of Hatshepsut was ready for the last day of the Eight International Congress of Egyptologists held in Cairo in April 2000.

The shattered wall reliefs of Hatshepsut's upper courtyard have now been reassembled, and the reliefs of the rock-cut sanctuary have recovered their original hues. Although the restored temple is officially inaugurated, work nevertheless continues, notably in the side chapels next to the temple of Tuthmosis III. These were discovered by the Polish team while they were looking for missing fragments from Hatshepsut's temple. It is to be hoped that an on-site museum will be built at Deir Al-Bahri to show the rich history of the site and many of the magnificent objects found there.

The colonnades and walls of the Upper (Festival) Courtyard and the Main Sanctuary of Amun-Re were also completed, and President Hosni Mubarak officially opened this part of the temple to the public on 21 March 2002. "The ceremony served to underline the temple's status as one of the monuments on UNESCO's list of world cultural heritage (where it was placed in 1977), expressing at the same time presidential appreciation for the Queen and the role she played in Egypt's history, not to mention the Polish effort in returning the temple to its former magnificence," Szafrañski says proudly.

The Polish presence at Deir Al-Bahari kick-started some other Polish projects in West Thebes. The tomb of New Kingdom Pharaoh Ramses III in the Valley of the Kings was documented. In 1996 studies were undertaken of ancient Greek and Latin graffiti in the tomb of Ramses VI, also in the Valley of the Kings.

In nearby Sheikh Abdel-Gurna, Szafrañski said, Coptic hermitages had been found installed in and in front of some rock- cut tombs dating from the Middle Kingdom. In 2005 three manuscripts from the mid-eighth century were found in the hermitage's midden. These are currently undergoing conservation by specialists from the Polish Ateliers for Conservation of Cultural Property at the laboratories of the National Museum in Alexandria.

The Cairo Preservation Mission was charged with the restoration of the early 16th-century funerary complex of Amir Qurqumas located in Cairo's Northern Necropolis. Today, what they describe as "our" mosque stands out among the many buildings in Cairo's City of the Dead. The minaret can be seen by everyone driving up Salah Salem Road in the direction of Cairo airport. Sticking out from the windows on the highest floor are wooden poles that were used to hang colourful lanterns. The adjacent Islamic complex of Sultan Inal was also restored by the Polish mission.

Polish specialists arrived in picturesque Ashmunein, the Greek Hermopolis, in 1987. A Christian basilica with granite colonnades was the object of studies and provisional restoration, and an archaeological mission in Dendera uncovered a section of the town from the end of the First Intermediate Period and the beginnings of the Middle Kingdom, that is, the close of the second and beginning of the third millennium BC. Recently, a Polish-Slovakian Archaeological Mission began exploration of Tel Al-Retaba, a site at the exit of Wadi Tumilat, thought to be the biblical "land of Goshen" which, according to the Old Testament, the Pharaoh gave to Joseph, his father and brothers.

The early 1980s were an important pause in the history of the Polish Centre. In 1986, excavations started in Naqlun in Fayoum Oasis and in Dakhla Oasis in the Western Desert. Marina Al-Alamein on the Mediterranean coast was another ancient town to be protected from the bulldozers of building contractors. Polish teams carried out several seasons of excavation and restoration there to uncover the extensive ruins of the ancient town of Leucaspis, and a site management project is now underway so the site can be opened to the public.

Szafrañski says the SCA is turning the focus of its scholarly interest to the threatened sites of the Nile Delta and Sinai, and their appeal has raised a response from the PCMA. In 1993 the centre undertook the documentation of a Roman theatre in Pelusium (Tel Al-Farama). In 2003, a Polish-Egyptian mission began work on the site. The main objective of the work in this famous town, which was destroyed by time and recent military conflict in the region, was the protection of the theatre. Probes dug on the site resulted in the unexpected discovery of a Late Roman mosaic which, after conservation, can now be seen on display in the museum in Al-Arish on the north Sinai coast.

The last few seasons of the mission's field work have been spent at Tel Al-Farkha in the eastern Delta. The site is of particular importance for research on pre-dynastic and early dynastic Egypt in the second half of the fourth millennium BC. The discoveries have demonstrated the position of the Delta in relation to Sinai, Palestine and Upper Egypt, and its role in the emergence of the powerful dynastic state at the dawn of Egyptian history.

The most recent find is a deposit of 62 figurines carved from hippopotamus tusks and two large figures covered in gold sheet, presumably on a wooden core. The objects from Farkha are unparalleled among finds from Egypt of the period.

Excavations and conservation work have been carried out since 2000 in the Byzantine lakeside town of Marea, once an important harbour on Lake Maryout (formerly Lake Mareotis). Archaeologists have been bringing out of the salty ground, one by one, buildings that testify to the magnificence and importance of this Christian city from an age when Islam was on the rise in Egypt.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg


Anti-clockwise from top right: statuette of Ptah-Sokar-Osiris from Saqqara necropolis; excavations at Tel Farkha; temple of Hatshepsut in Deir Al-Bahari; Kom Sidi-Youssef in Tel Atribe Delta; pre-dynastic domestic instruments unearthed in Tel Farkha
photos courtesy of the Polish Embassy and PCMA in Egypt

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