The Road South
Journal: Friday 10 January 2003
We had a good send off from our hotel on Birket Qarun this morning. Maybe they were keen to get us off their hands, because for the first time this week we managed to get permission from our police guards to be away by 9.00am, knowing that we had a very long and busy day ahead. The policeman we have named ‘The crazy One’ rode with us in the taxi while Chief Ashraf and his troops rode shotgun in their truck in front of us, driving right through the Faiyum as far as the bridge at el-Lahun. On the bridge I disgraced myself by attempting to take a photograph of the Bahr Yussef Canal through the taxi’s window of what I thought was a pretty rural scene with little boats fishing in the waters below the bridge. This almost caused the Crazy Policeman to have a heart attack because unbeknown to me taking photographs anywhere on or near bridges in Egypt is strictly forbidden. Luckily I was yelled at and stopped before my finger hit the shutter button - otherwise I might have been slung into jail and the key thrown away.
At the other side of the bridge, the border between Faiyum and Beni Suef traffic areas, the ‘handover’ took place. At the checkpoint we all got out of our vehicles and there were handshakes and hugs all round. Chief Ashraf, damp-eyed (with relief I suspect) bid us all a fond farewell and made sure Abdul had his mobile number for emergencies before a rather large tip was passed over in gratitude for their ‘assistance’. We were then officially handed over to the Beni Suef police and several troops piled into their truck and waved us to follow behind. Our first stop today was Ehnasya el-Medina, a site on the southern edge of Faiyum.
This vast ancient site covers about 67 hectares of land on the edge of the desert, which my notes told me, had been occupied since the First Intermediate Period. As soon as we got out of the car we were mobbed by village children but the police soon chased them away good-naturedly and we walked over to a fenced-off area that was the site of current excavations by a Spanish team. I had done my homework and knew a little of what was going on here and we looked down into a deep pit where mudbrick and stone tombs from the Third Intermediate Period were being cleared. This area revealed burials from Dynasties XXI to XXVI but were re-used tombs for successive generations which must have been confusing to the excavators. Many important Libyan names have been found here giving much information from this obscure period of history, especially on the political and religious links between Ehnasya and Tanis, the Libyan capital.
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