Narmouthis and Tebtunis
Journal: Wednesday 8 January 2003
If we’d been staying in Faiyum City today’s trip would have been a lot easier, but opting to stay by the lake meant a long and bumpy drive across the desert to our first stop today at Medinet Madi. This site is said to be the one of the most difficult places to get to in the whole of Faiyum, but it is the site I most wanted to see - one of the most important sites too because it contains a Middle Kingdom Temple, which are rare in Egypt. We had a police escort with us in the taxi as well as several in a car up ahead, which was just as well because Abdul wasn’t too sure of the way and luckily they knew how to get to the site.
After leaving the south-western end of Birket Qarun and driving east along the desert road, we eventually reached a remote village called Abu Ghandir, where to my surprise we turned off straight across the sand. There was no track to follow but the police car ahead was making straight towards a sandy ridge in the distance and I’m sure as he was zigzagging about Abdul was praying that his taxi wouldn’t get stuck in the powdery sand. We stopped at some distance from the ridge, not able to go any further and we were told that we had to walk the rest of the way and climb up the mound. That was fun - one step forward and three backwards in the deep sand! At the top we found a little square hut and a gafir and looking down the other side of the ridge I could see the temple buildings and town site stretching out below me half-buried in the sand. Accompanied by the gafir we slid down the bank and walked to the entrance to the site where many stone sphinxes and lion statues were poking their heads out of the sand. Apparently they regularly appear and disappear as the desert blows over them. The light here was dazzlingly bright. The temple is constructed from pale golden limestone blocks which hurt the eyes to look at and played havoc with the exposure on my camera, but I thought it was very beautiful. There are teams of archaeologists who are currently excavating here but today nobody was about and it felt so remote and lonely and quite romantic.
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