They were overlooked or inadvertently buried with the bulldozer. About 100 figurines of the priest Imephor, a mysterious character who lived during the ancient kingdom and the first intermediate period of the Egyptian dynasties, between 2400 and 2050 BC. C., have just appeared at the Kom el-Khamasin site, southwest of Saqqara. There are approximately 100 pieces that by some chance escaped the greed of the tomb raiders, who devastated this place years ago, even using heavy machinery. A dozen pieces from this deposit have appeared on the illegal market, and it is known that some of them are in a private address in Barcelona.
Those hundred figurines, all of them with the name of the priest inscribed on the right arm, present an absolutely unique characteristic, and that is that at some point in the last 2,500 years someone broke their faces. Literally.
On one side are the bodies, between 15 and 30 centimeters, and on the other are the faces, which someone, with great dexterity, possibly with a sharp blow with a blunt object, separated from the skull. Only two are whole. “We do not think that it is an exercise in damnatio memoriae, in the elimination of identity by erasing the face, as was done in ancient times, because the faces are there, mixed with the bodies, I wonder if perhaps someone in ancient times dedicated himself to play with those figurines. It's a risky, strange hypothesis, but I can't think of another”, explains Josep Cervelló, director of the excavation and professor at the Department of Ancient and Middle Age Sciences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), and also director of the Institut d'Estudis del Pròxim Orient Antic (IEPOA). "It was certainly an unexpected finding."
Another feature that distinguishes them from other sculptures of this period is that they keep both legs parallel, and not with one foot forward as usual.
These figurines have appeared in the third archaeological campaign that Cervelló has carried out at this site, and in this case in a hurry. Because heavy machinery will go through this place again, but legally. Next to the site, a large five-lane highway and a new railway will soon run, as part of the urban expansion plans of the Egyptian government, which is building a new capital in the desert. Therefore, a 3D reconstruction of the site will be built.
Cervelló will return to Egypt in October for the second phase of this campaign.
Apart from the unknown faces, this year's excavations have analyzed the remains of stone industries from the Palaeolithic era. The researchers suspected that there were remains of tools from before the Egyptian dynasties, and this year they went to the site with a specialist in prehistory, the archaeologist Roser Marsal.
In this way, it has been possible to determine that there was a human presence in this place in the Paleolithic, which allows us to venture -albeit very prematurely-, that Homo sapiens could have used this area for the transit towards the north, in its expansion towards towards Europe.
No other remains exist in the Egyptian Western Desert, or even this far north. It is known that the route of ascent could have been through the Arabian peninsula and through the eastern desert, but remains of Homo sapiens had never before been found on this supposed migratory route.
Before the highway passes through there, the Cervelló teams have also worked on what they consider to be a building dedicated to the cult, identified in 2019 and which this year has fully come to light. It is a real building, almost square: it measures 37.5 × 33.8 meters and built in tufa with calcareous stone elements, basically on the edge of the access and at the bases of the columns.
The building exhibits a well-defined central body and various corridors and side rooms. The central part offers an exceptional discovery, a set of colored paintings, although only fragments of the stucco on the walls are preserved, some 30 cm long and which allow various royal figures to be identified, such as a king, a Horus or a falcon with wings. deployed, or a chariot with its horse.
These excavations are organized by the UAB and the IEPOA, the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, the Ministries of Science and Innovation, the Ministry of Culture and Sports, by the Institut Català d'Arqueologia Clàssica, the Palarq Foundation and the Image Tours company. But it also has the support of individual donors, who have co-financed the work thanks to small individual contributions.
