Two Fascinating Ancient Egyptian Sites WAY OFF the Tourist Trail

Hello and welcome. In this video, we'll be delving through two fascinating yet incredibly mysterious archaeological sites in Egypt that hardly anyone knows about, despite the fact that what little is known about them suggests they still have yet to give up many wonderful things. First, we're going to explore a site very close to Cairo that we know once hosted a magnificent temple, thanks to the few pieces of it that have been found so far, but it's never been systematically excavated. Next, we're going to travel far down the Nile and visit an incredibly obscure cemetery just south of the very well-known ancient city of Thebes that was used by the area's inhabitants for over 3,000 years and has yielded really amazing works of art despite never being systematically excavated. But before we begin our tour, remember to subscribe and like the video if you want me to keep making content just like this. Ossim is a modern town situated on the western edge of the delta cultivation, a mere 12 or 13 kilometers northwest of Cairo, and it's near where the Rosetta and Demietta branches of the Nile diverge. It's also the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Khem, alternatively known as Sekhem, which was also referred to as Lytopolis in Graeco-Roman times, and that's what I'm going to refer to it as because I just like the name Lytopolis. It sort of bounces out of your mouth, eh? It was capital of the second lower Egyptian gnome, one of the 42 provinces ancient Egypt was divided into, and it also held the temple of the falcon god referred to as Horus-Khenti-Khem, which means foremost of Khem. The gnome was referenced in texts from as early as the fourth dynasty, and Horus-Khenti-Khem is mentioned in the building known as the south tomb in the step pyramid complex of the third dynasty pharaoh Djoser. But strangely enough, the few monuments that have already been found there only date to the late period, specifically the reigns of the 26th dynasty pharaohs Neko II and Psamtik II, the obscure 29th dynasty pharaoh Hakoris, and the 30th dynasty pharaoh Nektenebo II. I'm sure you can guess that these guys are pretty far removed from Djoser just based on which dynasties they were a part of. Various sources report that the city of Khem and the temple of Horus-Khenti-Khem have been entirely destroyed, but there are still tantalizing traces of the temple that I think indicate that there's far more this site has in store for us. So let's go through the frustratingly few objects that have been found at Awsim over time, shall we? The first person to document the ancient monuments they found at Awsim was the first Egyptian Egyptologist, Ahmed Kamal. In 1903, he published a short report in the scholarly journal of Egypt's antiquities service, the Annales du Service des Antiquités de l'Egypte, documenting what he had seen at Awsim one time he visited it. By the way, the reason the name of it is in French is because Egypt's antiquities service was being run by the French at the time, and as such, Kamal published his report in French. He describes how, in 1903, the site of Leutopolis was occupied by three villages with a combined population of 16,816, Awsim itself, Khafer Saidi Musa, and El Zaydieh, and it was in the alleyways of these three villages that Kamal found parts of the monuments that once stood in Leutopolis. In the village of Awsim itself, he encountered the lower part of a red granite statue of the aforementioned 26th dynasty Neko II, which had once stood in the temple of Leutopolis, and which was dedicated by his son, Psamtik II, according to the text at its back. Kamal copied it and wrote that it translated to, Psamtik establishes the name of the king who fathered him, Neko loved by the master of Sekem, i.e. Horus. This statue is actually an important piece of evidence disproving the notion that Psamtik tried to erase his father's memory after his passing. The statue depicted Neko kneeling in adoration, and dressed in a striped shenti, the royal kilt, but unfortunately Kamal didn't take any pictures of any of the monuments he saw at the site of Leutopolis, so were only left with the inscriptions on them which Kamal did copy down. The picture I'm showing you isn't of this exact statue, but it's of a similar statue that was found near Olsim. Moving on, Kamal also described a small grey granite fragment of a statue bearing the royal protocol of the 29th dynasty pharaoh Acherus from Olsim, which was in the Cairo museum at the time. He noted that it was inscribed with remarkably fine hieroglyphs. Kamal described Khafer Saidi as the most fruitful part of the huge location. There, he found various late period blocks bearing inscriptions in relief. He found one grey granite block featuring a depiction of a standing goddess wearing the Mehetweret address and offering the Ankh, the sign of life, to a king that was no longer there with her, but she was still accompanied by two lines of hieroglyphs to her back which was reproduced by Kamal here. He noted that this fragment connected to another that was reported as being at the Cairo museum by Ahmad Neguib in the same volume of the Annals du Service. It was associated with a peculiar large pink granite statue representing a tigress lying down and caressing its baby that was also from Olsim. In Khafer Saidi, Kamal also cited a block of grey granite bearing the remains of an inscription in the lower part of a depiction of an anonymous king who was identified as a king because a bit of the shanty in the royal bull's tale survived. Also in Khafer Saidi, Kamal spotted a small Corinthian-style column capital thrown into the ground in front of the door of a mill which might have borne this inscription, so I'm not sure if it was made in the Greco-Roman period or if it was earlier, I'm not sure. Around the third village, El Zeidye, he found a grey granite corniche decorated with a row of cobras probably like this. He dated it to the late period or the Ptolemaic dynasty and believed it was what remained of a naos, a type of shrine which contained the cult statue of a deity. Near where the corniche was, he noted two fragments bearing the name of Nectanebo II of the 30th dynasty, Egypt's last native pharaoh and one of its most prolific builders. He was actually shown a piece of granite inscribed with part of one of his cartouches nearby too. It was clear to Kamal that the pharaohs of the 26th, 29th, and 30th dynasties were very active at Latopolis, restoring its temples, possibly building brand new ones and erecting statues of themselves there. He also believed that seriously conducted excavations would provide monuments which would allow us to establish the history of the ancient city. And who wouldn't agree? He found so many amazing works of art just lying around. But even though he makes sure to let us know that the Cairo Museum had taken the necessary measures to incorporate these items into its collections at the end of his report, I found no evidence suggesting that the site of But a few other Egyptologists would document the things they'd seen around Awsim in the following years. In 1904, W. Spiegelberg documented five black granite and limestone blocks dating to the reign of Nectanebo II at Awsim, and Henry Gauthier inspected Awsim and documented three more grey-black granite blocks of Nectanebo II, including a fragment of a procession of personifications of geographical locations in Egypt. He found there in the 1923 volume of the Annales du Service. Nine years later, in 1932, a lucky accident led to the Antiquities Service getting their hands on four more grey-black blocks bearing the names of Nectanebo II. They were found when a road was being built in a place called Souk el-Salah, and they were given to Gauthier, who then brought them to the Cairo Museum. Based on their composition, they had to have come from Letopolis. Two of the blocks just bore the cartouches of Nectanebo, but two others happened to be part of the same geographical procession the same man, Gauthier, had encountered nine years earlier, at Awsim. These also happen to be the only objects from Letopolis published with photographs, so here they are. The depiction of Thoth is meant to represent the 15th lower Egyptian gnome, and the chubby guy on the right is meant to represent a subdivision of a gnome somewhere in the delta. I'd like to thank my good friend Wemel Nishimura for helping me translate this paper from French to English, it really means a lot to me. Believe it or not, this publication from 1932, the one done by Gauthier, is the latest publication of objects from Letopolis, which is shocking given Letopolis' potential, and I'm really surprised that it hasn't ever been excavated yet. Based on what we've seen here, how could you not wonder what other treasures lie underneath Awsim, just waiting to be uncovered? Now let's sail down the Nile to yet another mysterious little-known site in Egypt, El Rezekat. El Rezekat, also known as Rezegat, is in Upper Egypt, and it's on the west bank of the Nile. It's two kilometers from its namesake, the modern village of El Rezekat, and it's just 10 kilometers west of the much better known site of Armant, which itself is just south of the uber-famous ancient city of Thebes, which countless tourists flock to to see the Valley of the Kings and the Temple of Karnak. But El Rezekat, which I seriously doubt any tourists have ever deliberately visited, is important in its own unique ways, and has offered up truly wonderful things. It was used by the people who lived around it from the Pre-Dynastic period to Greco-Roman times, i.e. over 3,000 years, and it's yielded beautiful works of art that offer us small glimpses into nearly every period of Pharaonic Egypt's existence. El Rezekat extends along a north-south axis at the desert's edge. The southern part of the site, with its oldest Pre-Dynastic and Prehistoric remains, has been partly destroyed by modern cultivation, unfortunately. The central part of El Rezekat consists of small, simple tombs, partly covered by sand. These graves can form to standard types, like deep mudbrick-lined shafts, which lead to vaulted chambers and pits lined with mudbricks which are entered through stairways. The reason the tombs there are lined with bricks is that the soil there is very sandy, and the subsurface rock there is also weak and crumbly. These tombs were also likely surmounted by brick chapels containing funerary stelae, and would have been where food and drink were offered to the deceased by their families. In the northern part of the site, there are mudbrick walls of unknown date that are preserved up to a meter high, and trenches, which were made during some forgotten excavations, near a pile of earth containing some ancient pottery. The cemetery was used by the inhabitants of four different nearby settlements, Umeteru, Usut, Meniri, and Sumenu, which had one of the most epic Greek names I've ever heard, Crocodilopolis, given how it held a temple to the crocodile god Sobek. The oldest artifacts found at El Rezekat are from the Nakata II culture, which dominated Upper Egypt from 3650 to 3300 BC. So let's go through some of the intriguing pre-Dynastic objects found at El Rezekat. Several pre-Dynastic objects of uncertain date have come from El Rezekat, although the exact part of the site they were found in wasn't recorded, but let's just assume they came from the southern part of the site. They include remarkable stone vases, like the one in Green Serpentine, with handles carved into the shape of frogs on the left, and the one made of gneiss on the right. Both were unusable as actual containers, so they were probably status symbols. There's also this nice little Green Serpentine sculpture of a toad, likely Bufo regularis, the Egyptian toad which is widespread in northeastern Africa. Lots of polished stone pickaxes and other similar tools have also been found at El Rezekat, made of green and black serpentine diorite and pink granite from Aswan. This diorite bracelet found amidst the scree of ancient dwellings, according to the original excavators, might have been used as a weapon. The stone it was made from came from the shore of the Red Sea, and its highly polished inner surface suggests it was used for a very long time. Additionally, this strange boat-shaped object in reddish breccia was discovered. It has a roughly carved protrusion at one end that the excavators said resembled a mummy's head, and I sort of see what they mean, but either way it's very anomalous. Found besides this boat-shaped object was the perfectly polished section of cone that's sitting on it in the picture. Finally, two very interesting, almost surreal looking pre-Dynastic clay statuettes were found here at El Rezekat. The statuette on the left is just 21 centimeters tall. Her arms are brought into a semicircle above her head, and she bends forward a bit. She's mostly painted reddish brown and sports evenly plaited black hair, but her face is completely blank. The people who published it thought it represented a girl taking a dip in the Nile. The lower parts of both statuettes shown are white cones which may represent skirts. The second figure is pretty similar, but it has a triangular beak in lieu of a face, and it's 28 centimeters tall. They seem like other female figurines from the Nakata 2 period, so maybe they were made then. But surprisingly enough, nothing from the early Dynastic period or the Old Kingdom has been found at El Rezekat yet, although you have to keep in mind that it's hardly been excavated at all, so who knows what it's still hiding. But El Rezekat was certainly used in the tumultuous First Intermediate period, based on how many funerary stelae from the time are said to have come from El Rezekat, and which now reside in museums all over the place. This intensive use could have been the result of there being a dense population in the region, and it might have been due to the presence of Nubian mercenaries who were renowned for their archery skills. And we know that at least one of these mercenaries, a man named Nenu, was buried here because of this painted limestone stela, which is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, so let's take a closer look at it, shall we? He's identified as a Nubian warrior by his distinctive curly hair and leather sash, and right behind him is his Egyptian wife. His hounds and some of his Nubian family members face him from the bottom of the two registers to Nenu's right, and a servant offers libation from the top register, which was a common First Intermediate period motif. It does a good job at illustrating how local relief styles substituted the more refined Old Kingdom relief style. As you can see, the end product is somewhat awkward, and the people portrayed have abnormally big eyes and long limbs and seem to totally disregard physics, but I actually find it pretty charming. Also for a time, El Rezekat and its environs would have been near the northern limit of the domain of the powerful First Intermediate period warlord Angtifi. One painted tomb from the next period of Egyptian history, the Middle Kingdom, has been found at El Rezekat, which proves that it was used by the elite at the time. In addition, there are at least nine 13th Dynasty stelae that come from El Rezekat, which one author went out of his way to diss by calling them nine men whose insignificance as a just because they weren't associated with the royal court. Instead, they consisted of a soldier, a cemetery guard, a porter, a priest, and some peasants, but at least they left testaments of their existence that have lasted for nearly 4,000 years, you can't say that for most people. The remains of two small New Kingdom pyramidal tomb chapels like those at Deir el-Medina have also been found at El Rezekat, but there's one specific New Kingdom tomb from El Rezekat that I can't not mention. That would be the sandstone-lined tomb of a royal treasurer in office during the reign of the 18th Dynasty pharaoh Amenhotep III, and this man was named Sobekmos. In 1908, Sobekmos's entire burial chamber, measuring 3.17 meters in length and 2.2 meters in width, was sold by the Egyptian government to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York after a guy working for the Egyptian Antiquities Service named Emile Berez discovered and then subsequently dismantled it. The walls were composed of 85 blocks of brown sandstone from Gebel el-Silsila, and a roof of five similar stout slabs. The Met still has its south wall, parts of its east entrance, and the blocks from its ceiling, and you can still see them installed at the Met, but the Boston Museum of Fine Arts bought the rest of it from them in 1954. I'm sure you're wondering where Sobekmos's mummy and grave goods went during all this time, but alas, I have no idea. It's actually not very common for burial chambers of the period to be decorated. Instead, chapels were, since that was the part of the tomb meant to be accessible to the living. Additionally, scenes that would have otherwise been spread out along several rooms were condensed to fit into a single room in Sobekmos's tomb. The scene on the doorjamb from the chamber's entrance, which faced east, depicts Sobekmos undergoing a ritual purification before eating his daily funerary meal as a dead person. One little detail I love about this tomb is that the door turned out to be too narrow to fit Sobekmos's coffin, so it was widened at the last minute, which ended up clipping some of the scene on the southjamb. The wall that would have faced south shows a priest burning incense and pouring out a libation, and the same wall is also inscribed with prayers to numerous deities. The wall that would have faced north in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts depicts a funerary procession going west, which was probably made that way because the ancient Egyptians believed the underworld lay to the west, given that the sun sets in the west, and they believed the sun god died and traveled through the netherworld in a boat each night before being reborn every morning as the rising sun. The procession is led by two mourners mimicking the goddesses Isis and Nephthys, mourning the death of their brother, the king of the underworld Osiris. The seven men behind them are dressed as gods as they grasp the tow rope of a bark, and they represent gods dragging the sun bark through the netherworld, but in reality they were bringing Sobekmos to the very tomb this scene is in. But since the boat was being dragged over dry land, it was equipped with sledge runners. In the canopied bark, the mummy of Sobekmos is being tended to by the god of embalming, Anubis. The procession ends where some guys with tall hats are performing a ritual dance, and beyond that pallbearers are shown taking Sobekmos' mummy to a personification of the cemetery, welcoming him with open arms. In the register above the procession are depictions of seated deities who would pass judgment on Sobekmos in the afterlife, but surprisingly most of them have been deliberately hacked out, probably by local Christians in late antiquity, which indicates that even then Sobekmos' tomb was being plundered. But that begs the question, why weren't the other depictions of deities in the tombs hacked out, and additionally some of these seated judges weren't hacked out, so it's weird. On the west wall of the tomb, Sobekmos is shown being introduced to Anubis and Osiris. This tomb also reveals a surprising amount of information about Sobekmos' personal life. Based on the forms of the inscriptions and the style of the artwork in the tomb, which is also very similar to contemporary work from Thebes, this tomb was put together during the reign of the mighty 18th dynasty pharaoh Amenhotep III. He isn't explicitly referred to in this tomb, but a Sobekmos with the same title as El Rezekat Sobekmos is shown adoring Amenhotep III's prenomen cartouche in a graffito at Aswan, which is probably a testament to him visiting the area as part of a quarrying expedition one time. Sobekmos bore the title of overseer of the house of silver, which meant he was the head of a department of the national treasury at Thebes or the head of a local treasury at Sumenu, near El Rezekat, which he probably called home given that he was buried in El Rezekat and that his name incorporates the name of the crocodile god Sobek, who had a temple at Sumenu. Based on Stelae mentioning this Sobekmos, an entire family tree has been recreated for him, but unfortunately we can't really go through that here. However, it is likely that his father, Sobeknacht, was also buried at El Rezekat. Additionally, Sobekmos also bore the title of overseer of works in southern Opet, which suggests that he was one of the people who helped organize the construction of Amenhotep III's famous additions to the temple of Luxor, and that perhaps he was in charge of the quarrying and shipment of the sandstone intended to build it. This points to how he sourced the sandstone blocks in his own burial chamber, and also why he would have left his mark at Aswan, the site of an important granite quarry. The south wall of his burial chamber also explicitly mentions how he worked in the alabaster quarries of Hatnub and drew forth monuments for the king, monuments great and holy. The fact that this official Sobekmos was buried at El Rezekat in such splendor shows that it was still being used by the elite, as it was in the Middle Kingdom. Moving on from Sobekmos and the New Kingdom, some beads from so-called mummynets that come from El Rezekat suggest that the cemetery was used after the New Kingdom, as mummynets only existed between the 21st Dynasty and the Ptolemaic Dynasty, and El Rezekat was probably used as late as the Roman period, judging by Roman pottery and terracotta sarcophagi being found there. But how do we know all this? Well, as you can tell, this site has yielded far more than Al Sim, and it has been given slightly more attention. But like Al Sim, no systematic, well-published excavations have ever really been conducted there, and a lot of the objects that are thought to have come from El Rezekat wound up where they are now through the antiquities market, like the stela of Nenu. So now let's quickly go through how we know all this stuff. By the late 19th century, when Egyptologists first took notice of it, El Rezekat had been heavily looted. It was littered with thousands of beads in blue paste, carnelian, coloured glass, and above all, alabaster vases of all shapes and sizes for some reason. In addition, funerary cones used to decorate those little pyramids that are otherwise mainly known from Thebes and Saqqara were also strewn about, along with terracotta offering trays. El Rezekat seems to have first been described by the pioneering Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, head of Egypt's antiquities service, in 1882. The site was reportedly excavated by Louis Lortet and Claude Gaillard in 1907, and they published the aforementioned prehistoric stone and clay objects from it in volumes 4 and 5 of their book series, They commented that, by the time of their visit, the necropolis had been ravaged by the emissaries of the antiquities dealers of Luxor. That same year, El Rezekat was visited and briefly described by Henri de Morgan in the aforementioned annals du service. He said that he found it entirely ransacked, and that a local told him that the plundering had taken place 30 years before 1907, i.e. the 1870s. In 1908, Emile Berez of the Egyptian antiquities service dismantled the burial chamber of Sobekmos and extracted it from its original location so that the Egyptian government could sell it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as I mentioned before. Their reasoning for doing so was that the tomb had already been plundered, and in fact it had actually been partially destroyed because El Rezekat was left unguarded. The chamber would go on to become a principal exhibit in the Met's Egyptian galleries, which it still is today. Arthur Weigall, who famously discovered the tomb of Yuya and Tuya in the Valley of the Kings, also visited the place at some point prior to 1910, and estimated there were several hundred graves there that fit into standard types, which we've mentioned. In 1926, the only other known decorated tomb at El Rezekat besides the tomb of Sobekmos, a painted Middle Kingdom tomb, was reported on by George de Ressy in the 1926 volume of Annales du Service. He said that I saw only one tomb there containing paintings which are very much in the style of those of the Middle Kingdom, but it is so full of sand that it was impossible for me to see the name of the deceased. And it seems like this tomb that's presumably still just sitting there has never been investigated further. Isn't that amazing? Like there's still this painted tomb just sitting out there in the sand that no one's investigated. De Ressy also reported on the cones and the offering trays on the ground, and just sort of took one of those trays. W.C. Hayes of the Met published a rather lengthy paper on the tomb of Sobekmos in 1939, and it was very informative to me. His style of writing is also pretty entertaining since he's weirdly critical of, but also praises, the ancient Egyptians, so I recommend taking a look at it. But besides that, it seems like no one really paid much attention to the site until relatively recently, when in 2013 and 2016, the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw conducted some reconnaissance on it, which resulted in a modern assessment of the topography and state of preservation of the site. The rising water table and the rapid spread of wild vegetation at the site are currently its biggest threats. The most important source for came out of this, so I owe a lot to Wojciech Edgsmann, sorry for mispronouncing your name, for from the University of Warsaw for publishing it. And that's the end of the video. Originally, I was going to cover another obscure yet fascinating site in the delta called Kom El Hissen, but I sort of ran out of time for that. But I still made a lot of notes for it, so maybe I'll release a video on that one day. Thank you so much for watching, and stay tuned for more videos about fascinating aspects of ancient Egyptian history. Goodbye.