We began work on January 28, but the highlight of this week was the January 31 visit to the site by Anne Pasternak, the Brooklyn Museum Director, and members of the Museum’s Board of Governors. We were thrilled to be able to show them the site where Brooklyn has worked for the past 40+ years. We hope they enjoyed their visit.
As promised last week, here are the members of our team. Our foreman again this year is Abdel Aziz Farouk Sharid (left). He and our inspector, Haitham Mohamed Sa’ad el-Din are discussing the season’s work. The Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) assigns an inspector to every expedition to act as liaison with the SCA and help facilitate the work. We are happy to have Haitham with us this season.
Besides Abdel Aziz, the Qufti who working with us this year are Abdel Aziz’s brother Ayman Farouk Sharid (center), the foreman for the Johns Hopkins University expedition who works with us when Hopkins isn’t in the field; and Mamdouh Kamil, who has worked with us for many seasons. All are from the village of Quft (ancient Coptos), which has a long tradition of archaeology going back to the late 19th century. Ayman and Abdel Aziz are the sons of one of the great Egyptian archaeologists, the late Farouk Sharid Mohamed, who was a beloved friend and treasured colleague. His sons are worthy successors to him.
You are looking northwest at the first court of Temple A, which stands northeast of the Mut Temple. We are working in two areas of the court this year. In 2019 we were able to confirm that that the row of limestone features on the court’s south side were sphinx bases. This season we want to see if there are remains of corresponding bases on the north side (right). We are also clearing the corridor between the south colonnade and the south wall of the court (left).
By the end of the week (February 2) the results in the north square were equivocal. Looking north, you can see an area of decayed limestone on the right side of the square that might be the remains of a sphinx base. On February 1, Mamdouh uncovered the round, dark feature to the left of the “sphinx base” that might be a tree hole. Sphinx avenues often had trees planted between the sculptures.
The work on the corridor was more productive. By the middle of the week Ayman had cleared a mass of broken stone and revealed the lowest course of the court’s south wall (left) and the footing of the temple’s 2nd Pylon. Both sit on a sand foundation that you can see below the blocks of stone. It was common to use sand in the foundations to level out uneven ground.
On February 1 our Dutch colleague, Jacobus (Jaap) van Dijk joined us for another season. First thing on the morning of February 2, Ayman called us over to show us an interesting find: a large relief-decorated block. Jaap immediately got down to have a look.
The block has a beautifully carved relief of Amun that clearly is Thutmoside in style, that is, from the reign of Hatshepsut and/or Thutmosis III, of the mid-15th century BC. What makes it particularly interesting is the small, shallowly carved graffito of a God’s Wife of Amun facing the Amun and dating stylistically to Dynasty 25 or 26, about 700 years after the god’s face was carved. God’s Wives of Amun were priestesses, usually the sisters or daughters of kings, who wielded great political power in the Third Intermediate Period and later.
Just west of the Amun block was smaller cube of stone with a sunk relief depiction of a man’s foot on base lines with the top of a cartouche and the “son of Re” title below. The style of the foot (very long) and the vertical element of the cartouche date it to the reign of Akhenaten. It probably came originally from his temple in East Karnak, built before the king moved the capital to Amarna. The artist paid attention to detail when painting the relief, painting the head of the goose (“son”) blue but its beak and eye red. The Brooklyn Museum has an interesting group of Amarna Period reliefs showing a pastoral scene.
By the end of the week Ayman and his crew had cleared the bases of the first 3 columns of the colonnade, working from west to east. The blocks of the bases are large: 70 cm by 125 cm and almost 100 cm thick.
We are also planning on restoring 2 fallen columns in the colonnaded porches in front of the Mut Temple. The one in the East Porch is shown here as it was found in 1979. Work hasn’t started on these yet; there will be more about the restoration next week.
One of our favorite birds is the tiny, bright bee eater, so called because it catches insects in mid-air. This is the first we’ve seen this season.
An unusual cloud formation seen at sunset one night. Angels? Extraterrestrials?
Politicians on both sides of the aisle and the Biden administration have fallen for carbon offsetting’s simplistic appeal to fund carbon-smart farming practices without new regulations or government programs. But without a mandate to cut climate-warming pollution, buying unregulated carbon credits amounts to little more than misleading green marketing as companies maintain the status quo.
Soil carbon is hard to commodify, and offset sales lack basic market mechanisms. For one, naturally high variations in soil carbon concentration make it hard to generalize how certain practices, like no-till or planting cover crops, increase soil carbon sequestration. Soil carbon offsets also sell a claim to something that’s naturally impermanent – just one major disturbance or change in management practices can quickly release years of accumulated soil carbon.
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Major agribusiness companies like Cargill, Bayer, Corteva, and Nutrien have all launched private programs that purport to pay farmers for sequestering carbon. These projects let agrichemical companies define “climate-smart” agriculture in their image.
Biodiverse, agroecological, and perennial farming methods have far greater climate and environmental benefits than implementing isolated practices like cover-cropping or no-till agriculture on conventional, monocrop farms. For instance, even by conservative estimates, agroforestry can sequester 10 to 20 times more carbon per acre than no-till or cover-cropping.
Yet virtually all agribusiness-led carbon payment programs only reward farmers for a limited set of practices that can be integrated into the conventional industrial approach to farming: reducing fertilizer use, reducing tillage, or planting cover crops. Bayer has a particular incentive to reward no-till and cover crop practices because most large-scale farms rely on glyphosate, the main ingredient in Bayer’s Roundup, to “knock down” cover crops and control weeds in lieu of tillage. We found that Bayer promotes using glyphosate to support no-till and cover crops.
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Corporate-run carbon contracts also aren’t a fair deal for farmers. While some programs tie payments to carbon-credit sales value, Bayer and Cargill unilaterally set the prices they pay per practice per acre or per ton of carbon sequestered. Carbon contracts are also long-term commitments. Farmers in Bayer’s Carbon Program must sign 10-year contracts with an additional 10-year “retention period,” during which farmers must maintain their new practices to ensure long-term carbon sequestration. This effectively commits farmers to 20 years of new fixed costs with only 10 years of guaranteed pay, at a price set by Bayer.
According to the Victims of Communism team, all Nazis killed by Soviets are victims of communism, as are all deaths resulting from Covid-19. Inside the museum, Mao Zedong figures as a “mass murderer,” but Adolf Hitler is nowhere to be found. Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, too, are portrayed as running authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes, yet British colonialism and American imperialism garner nary a mention. Hardly anywhere in the foundation’s documents, or in the museum, are Nazis, fascists, royals, colonizers, or capitalists portrayed as aggressors. In fact, World War II isn’t even included in the museum’s timeline.
Is now a good time to mention that the Victims of Communism Foundation’s original co-chairman, Yaroslav Stetsko, once led the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists to ally with Nazi Germany alongside Stepan Bandera, who is now a national hero of Ukraine? Not only does the foundation count Nazi sympathizers among its scant few donors, but many other immortalized “victims” were involved in the deportation and extermination of Jews, Poles, Roma, Serbs, Belarusians, and Ukrainians on behalf of Nazi puppet regimes across Europe. I went into the museum expecting to see the usual suspects among the victims—from Holocaust perpetrators Ante Pavelić and Roman Shukhevych to the kulaks and Cuban plantation owners—but was surprised to find the vaunted list has gotten a facelift. Perhaps they hope to attract a new generation of culture warriors, or just far-right trolls with Turning Point USA aspirations.
“We must be involved in nothing less than the discovery and creation of a world worthy of the human spirit to inhabit. As well as the discovery and creation of a human spirit worthy of the world.” - Scott Warren
“The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many.”
-Michael Parenti
