No statues, no obelisks, no temples, nothing to suggest this could once havebeen home to the ancient world's great lost capital.
"When I came first to this area and to this site, I was shocked. Nothing wasto be seen at the surface. No clue where to dig and where to excavate." Theregion around Qantir is one of the most fertile in Egypt, and it has been sointensively cultivated, all evidence of ancient worlds on the surface hasbeen obliterated. It is the archeological equivalent of a scorched earth.
"When we started to work in this area, every colleague told us, ''You won'tfind a thing''. Everything is destroyed, nothing is there." And yetsomewhere here, amongst these fields, so Pusch and Bietak proposed, lurkedthe Holy Grail of egyptology, Ramesses II's spectacular lost city ofPiramesse.
And so they began to excavate. They were after any clue, however small, thatmight prove them right. Miraculously , just three days into the dig and onlyten centimeters below the surface, Pusch's team found some tantalizingevidence.
These odd carved objects would ultimately turned out to be the first crucialpiece of evidence suggesting that Qantir, this unprepossessing place, mightjust be everything they were hoping for. But at the time, no one had a cluewhat they were. "We didn’t have the slightest idea what they could be. Sothey were called something like broken fragment of a vase, broken fragmentof a dagger, handle or something like this. ''
They kept digging and finding more and more of these mysterious objects, andthen they found something rather wonderful. Now this is a real surprisingfind, a complete set of horse bits, made from bronze, locally produced. Theonly one ever found in Egypt. It is in such a condition as that it lookslike it was made yesterday. |