Newest curse of the mummy: bad 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.
Unusually, 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-yearold grains of wheat, discovered in an excavated urn.
“This project allows us to rewrite the history of the temple,” said the director of Kom Ombo, Ahmed Sayed Ahmed.
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.