News

Successful Excavation season and News

On October 1st, 2019, we started our third season of excavation at Tuna el-Gebel. Cleaning the western area of GB 72, a large building of adobe bricks, we discovered not only a stone building, but also a so far untouched room! Inside the stone tomb we found a large quantity of pottery, like amphorae, cooking pots, flasks, oil lamps... According to our ceramologist Clementina Caputo they all belong to the Late Antiquity and formed a storage for a community.

Just back from Egypt this is our report of the autumn season! We have successfully accomplished the following tasks.

Sayed Abdel Malik and Katja Lembke with the new sign of the Roman necropolis

As we consider site management an important task at Tuna el-Gebel, we commissioned an Egyptian company in Cairo to produce four new signs according to our area of research. The four signs are: “Welcome at Tuna el-Gebel” at the entrance gate of the archaeological area, “The tomb of Petosiris” next to the famous tomb, and “The Roman necropolis” and “The tomb of Isidora” next to the tomb house of Isidora. They were placed at the site on October 29th, 2018 by Katja Lembke and Sayed Abdel Malik.

In March 2018 we started the first excavation and chose as the first site an area south of the tomb houses excavated by Sami Gabra. Here we discovered a building with a dome and a barrel vault.

Final report (english)
Final report (arabic)

In spring 2018 we held another field school as part of the “International Summer- and Field-School Program for Archaeology, Conservation and Restoration of Arts and Cultural Heritage” and is financially supported by the Volkswagen Stiftung, Germany. It is a cooperation project of the Ministry of Antiquities (MoA), Minya University, the State Museum of Lower Saxony Hanover/Germany and supported by the University of Applied Sciences HAWK in Hildesheim, Germany.

Final report (english)
Final report (arabic)