Egypt, China resume archeological team up
CAIRO: Egypt, an ancient country with a history going back thousands of years, is full of mystery for many people in the world including the Chinese archeological team who went there.
When given the task of going to Egypt for the project, the mood of the head of the Chinese archaeological mission, Jia Xiaobing, was complicated. He told the Global Times that HE WAS VERY EXCITED AT fiRST.
“Having an opportunity to go to such an ancient country is exciting for every archeologist,” he said. But he also felt a bit worried and stressed since he had never been to Egypt and all his understanding of the country came from books or online information.
SINCE THIS WAS THE fiRST-EVER CHINESE archaeological mission in Egypt, how to carry out the work was another unknown area for him.
In November 2018, the Chinese team from the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences departed to Egypt for a joint archeology project at the site of the Montu Temple in Upper Egypt’s city of Luxor.
“Luxor is rich in many Egyptian antiquities,” Jia said and explained that the best season for archeology work in Egypt is from late November to April since the temperature in other months of the year can reach over 40 degrees Celsius.
According to Jia, a total of four experts including him participated in the project, and the job in the 2018 to 2019 season was to clean up the site as there were many weeds and some abandoned rubbish left by some former Western archeologists.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the French Oriental Archaeological INSTITUTE fiRST CARRIED OUT SYSTEMATIC archaeological excavations in the Montu Temple area. However, the work was interrupted by World War 2, so a lot of information could not be recorded and preserved in time.
In the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, archaeologists continued to conduct exploration and surveys in the temple area, but they were all short-term studies of single buildings, lacking a perspective to look at the temple area as a whole.