The newest curse of the mummy: poor drainage
KOM OMBO, Egypt — Since Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings nearly a century ago, pop culture and folklore have invoked the fabled curse of the mummy, said to plague those who unearth the hidden treasures of ancient Egypt with bad luck, disease or death.
But at the ancient temple of Kom Ombo, 400 miles south of Cairo, where archaeologists recently unearthed a stack of decaying mummies, peril takes a more prosaic form: waterlogged foundations.
Decades of flood irrigation in the surrounding fields, which were once desert, have soaked the soil beneath the temple. Water has penetrated the sandstone foundations, combining with salt and heat to scrub some hieroglyphs from the temple walls. The symbols and figures, effectively the lines of an ancient story, are fading to dust.
The solution, according to engineers on a $9 million U.S.-financed project, is some modern drainage. Since October 2017, dozens of laborers have been digging a 30-foot-deep trench around the temple walls in an effort to drain the groundwater and divert it back into the Nile.
“Expanding into the desert is a nice dream,” said the project engineer, Tom Nichols, standing on a hill behind the temple. He pointed to the fields of lush sugar cane, dotted with farmhouses, that pushed up against the temple walls. “But you need to look at the other consequences, too,” he said.
A team of archaeologists is working alongside the laborers, hoping to save any treasures that are uncovered in the dig. It has found significant objects, including a bust of Marcus Aurelius, an Old Kingdom pottery workshop and a relief of Sobek, the crocodile god of the temple. On a searing July afternoon, one archaeologist held forth an ancient lunch: a fistful of charred, 4,000-year-old grains of wheat, discovered in an excavated urn.
“This project allows us to rewrite the history of the temple,” said Ahmed Sayed Ahmed, director of Kom Ombo,
The most exciting discovery may have been in recent weeks, when archaeologists pulled a sand-encrusted sphinx from a damp hole. It has been dated to the Ptolemaic era, which ran from 305 B.C. to 30 B.C.
At less than 2 feet tall, the sphinx is a dwarf compared with the famed Great Sphinx of Giza, which rises to 65 feet and stretches 240 feet from head to tail. It also had a broken paw and no identifying markings.
But unlike the Giza sphinx, whose features are badly eroded by time and the elements, the Kom Ombo sphinx is finely preserved — as is the sense of its mythic power: a man’s head on a lion’s body, its wide eyes once again staring out after 2,000 years in the dark.
Even a diminutive sphinx symbolized a fierce devotion to the temple gods, said Matthew Douglas Adams, a research scholar at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. “It signified that the king was guarding the temple and keeping out the forces of chaos,” he said.
Keeping the water out is another matter.
The water troubles at Kom Ombo, and at many other Pharaonic sites along the Nile, are a product of one of Egypt’s proudest successes.
The massive Aswan High Dam, 30 miles upstream from Kom Ombo, transformed Egyptian agriculture when it was completed in 1971. Having tamed the ancient cycle of flood and drought, Egyptians could cultivate up to the river’s edge, helping make their land some of the most productive on earth.
Construction of the dam also set off one of the world’s most spectacular archaeological rescue missions. Through the 1960s, Egyptian and Swedish officials rushed to save a pair of temples at Abu Simbel that faced inundation from the rising water of Lake Nasser, which lies behind the dam. Engineers cut the temples into 1,035 blocks, each weighing between 20 and 30 ton, and in 1968 reassembled them on higher ground, exactly as they were.
In the decades since, though, the unwanted side effects of the Aswan Dam have become gradually more apparent. In some parts of the fertile Nile Delta, the dam has caused increased salinity, forcing farmers to switch crops or abandon fields entirely. And the Pharaonic temples lining the river also have suffered.
Many of the temples were built at a time when the surrounding area was desert, and down through the centuries became cocooned in layers of sand — near ideal conditions for preservation. But today the temples are hemmed in by lush fields, farmhouses and a country of nearly 100 million people.
Climate change has brought harsher, more variable weather, and it has accelerated the decay caused by rising groundwater and untreated sewage and water from informal houses.