The Khentkawes Town (KKT) - Ancient Egypt Research Associates

www.aeraweb.org
ruins that must have badly eroded since they were first
exposed in 1932. A mapping of the KKT much later than the
conclusion of its 1932 excavation might also explain why
the buried building, while probed and certainly known,
never made it into the map. Drift sand had rapidly filled
the probe trenches by the time the RAF photos were taken,
and maybe by the time ground survey was done for the
map that Selim Hassan published. We should note that
the plaster and wood survey markers comprise a grid that
does not match that of Selim Hassan’s map of the Central
Field (see large color fold-out in Hassan 1943).
Stairway to Heaven
Once Olchowska worked through the spoil heaps,
patches, and pits from previous digging, and after we
excavated all the brown crusty sand deposited after 1932,
the team moved deeper along the steeply sloping face of
the mudmass directly east of the Khentkawes causeway
by removing sand with mud spots that had no doubt been
cast back into a trench that workers dug previously in the
same place and for the same purpose (fig. 37). This bank
contained articulated mudbricks, tumbled mudbrick,
and crushed limestone debris that extended out 2.25 m
from the bedrock face and descended from 18.44 m asl at
the end of the causeway threshold to 17.18 m. Whatever
structure was embedded in this material had eroded into
a steep slope of about 30°.
That structure began to announce itself as we descended.
A roughly vertical marl plaster line against articulated (as
opposed to tumbled out of place) mudbricks appeared to
be the northern wall of a structure (fig. 38). The plastered
bricks lean in to the south with a pronounced slope or
batter like a retaining wall. The western wall of the buried
building that Yeomans found in 2007 butted up against
the battered face. At first we began to think of a steep
stairway straight up from east to west to the threshold of
the causeway, a stairway to the “Doors of Heaven,” as the
pyramid valley temples might have been known according
to an article by Egyptologist Edward Brovarski (1977). But
if this battered wall on the north framed a stairway up to
the causeway we could not find the corresponding framewall
on the south.
Instead we could see a nearly continuous band of
white limestone debris on a gradual slope down to the
south through the dark bank of the mudmass (figs. 38–39).
Our Eureka moment came when we realized this whitish
Figure 37. Kasia Olchowska points to the section of a
deep pit that she cleared of post-1932 fill. Selim Hassan’s
workers dug the pit to find the bottom of the bedrock
edge and floor of the lower terrace on which the buried
building was founded. The workers remove clean sand
with mud spots from in front of the causeway threshold.
View to the south.
40
Giza Plateau Mapping Project Season 2008 Preliminary Report