Hatnub was the location of Egyptian alabaster quarries and an associated seasonally occupied workers’ settlement in the Eastern Desert, about 65 km (40 mi) from el-Minya, southeast of el-Amarna. The pottery, hieroglyph inscriptions and hieratic graffiti at the site show that it was in use intermittently from at least as early as the reign of Khufu until the Roman period (c. 2589 BC-AD 300). The Hatnub quarry settlement, associated with three principal quarries, like those associated with gold mines in the Wadi Hammamat and elsewhere, is characterized by drystone windbreaks, roads, causeways, cairns and stone alignments.
Hatnub was first described in modern times by Percy Newberry and Howard Carter in 1891. There are many inscriptions on the rocks, and these were first described by George Willoughby Fraser and Marcus Worsley Blackden, members of this same expedition. For nearly a hundred years, archaeologists concentrated on finding and translating these inscriptions, illuminating much of ancient Egypt’s ordinary life. The two integrated only when Ian Shaw and his team began studying the material remains to give a fuller picture.
For example, no New Kingdom inscriptions were found, and it was thought that the quarries were not used during that period. Shaw and his team found New Kingdom pottery fragments showing that workers from this period must have used the quarries.
Ramp
In 2018, researchers from the University of Liverpool’s Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology (ACE) and the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale (IFAO) announced the discovery of an ancient ramp at the site. The well-preserved ramp, which dates to the reign of Khufu, may shed light on how his Great Pyramid was constructed.
Project co-director Yannis Gourdon from the IFAO says, “The system is composed of a central ramp flanked by two staircases with numerous post holes. Using a sledge that carried a stone block and was attached with ropes to these wooden posts, ancient Egyptians could pull up the alabaster blocks out of the quarry on steep slopes of 20 per cent or more.
Excavation
The first Egyptologists to visit Hatnub were Newberry and Carter in 1891, but Möller undertook the most recent work on the inscriptions (before our own) in 1907. The broader archaeological landscape was surveyed by Petrie (1894) and Timme (1917) and, more recently, by Ian Shaw and his team (1986-1988, fully published by the EES in 2010). The EES-funded work undertaken on and at Hatnub since 2016 forms part of the more significant Hatnub Project (a joint Franco-British venture co-directed by Yannis Gourdon and Roland Enmarch). The project aims to fully record the Hatnub alabaster quarries’ surviving inscriptions and better understand the broader industrial landscape in which the quarries sit.
Much of our work has focused on the most extensive open cast in the region, Quarry P, from which the most significant number of texts survive. Our EES project had two initial goals: first, to clear the interior south wall of Quarry P, where other unpublished texts were likely to be found under the current rubble level. The second part focused on recording unsurveyed archaeological features between Quarry P and the Nile Valley using high-resolution satellite imagery to precisely plan surviving remains and differential GPS survey to ‘ground truth’ and enhance those plans where the remains merit additional investigation.
Before the 2017 season, high-resolution satellite imagery was used to remotely record the archaeological features within a 100km square study area between Hatnub and the Nile Valley. During our fieldwork 810, 000m2 of the ‘remote-survey’ area was covered by Dr Hannah Pethen in a walkover survey, and the results were recorded in the field with a GPS-enabled tablet computer. Five hundred twelve discrete structures (such as huts, cairns, and shrines) and 62 linear features (including paths, tracks, trails and the Quarry road) were surveyed. This ‘ground-truthing’ demonstrated that the remote survey process was reliable and accurate, with a 93% success rate in identifying archaeological features.
In 2017, we cleared the interior south wall of Quarry P and recovered numerous fragments of detritus from Möller’s 1907 expedition to the site, including pieces of his epigraphic tracing paper. Five small stelae (and one rough stone basin) were recovered from the trench fill, three with text/image in red, and one carved and painted in red. In addition, we undertook a further epigraphic investigation in the area of the access ramp to Quarry P, revealing a red-painted image of two seated men with traces of badly damaged text. Dr Hannah Pethen also recorded a number of the incised and relief texts using RTI.
In addition to revealing new texts, work on clearing the access ramp to Quarry P has also announced a series of post-holes from the time of Khufu, suggesting a rudimentary pulley system was used for stone haulage. This is almost 2000 years earlier than the next oldest known pulleys and offers potential insights into creating the Giza Pyramids. Next season (September 2019), we will continue clearing the access ramp of the debris that still partially encumbers it better to understand the traces of the ancient stone haulage system. This clearance will also likely reveal further previously unknown rock inscriptions and perhaps further stone stelae. The teamwork hopes to establish that the double staircase at the current opposite ends of the entryway continues along the entryway. We hope to demonstrate that the post-hole pattern indicative of the pulley-based ancient stone haulage system also continues along the entrance.
