The Khentkawes Town (KKT) - Ancient Egypt Research Associates

www.aeraweb.org
Causeway threshold
Slope up
West wall
of building
Floor level of building
North end
of ramp
Figure 38. The ramp in the mud bank. The nearly vertical line of plastered mudbricks on the north (right), leans slightly south (left),
marking the end of the ramp, which rises on a bed of limestone debris (left) sloping to a high point at the threshold of the causeway.
The western wall of the lower building abuts the northern end of the ramp. A patch of marl plaster marks the floor level of the
building, which was mostly removed when some force cut down through the mud foundation. View to the west.
debris was the fill of a ramp that ascended to the causeway
threshold from the south against the bedrock face. Now,
in the shallow cuts that Hassan’s workers made along
the bedrock ledge, we could see the top of this limestone
debris fill. One entered the causeway by ascending from
south to north on this ramp, then turning west 90° to
cross the causeway threshold.
There might be in this sloped, deteriorated mass, the
possibility of a straight-on stairway to the causeway. If
so, it is very steep, but steep stairways are not usual in
ancient Egyptian architecture. At the base of the northern
retaining wall—the battered line of plastered mudbrick—
we came upon a patch of marl floor, only 40 cm wide,
which appears to be the bottom of the ramp, and possibly
the floor of the buried building. The elevation of this patch
is 17.18 m asl. We know from the 1932 trenches that the
lower bedrock terrace is at elevation 16.60 m asl. The 58 cm
difference is taken up by a layer of dense silt with toppled
mudbrick, which has been cut through. It looks as though
the floor was robbed and this, a foundation layer, was cut
through. If this is a foundation layer, the buried building
was a rebuild of some earlier structure, indicated by the
toppled bricks.
We mapped articulated bricks for some distance to
the south along the lower, outer, eastern edge of the bank
of mud and limestone debris (figs. 39–40). These brick
courses must belong to the base of an outside wall that
retained the limestone debris fill of the ascending ramp.
The outside wall probably rose some distance above the
sloping floor of the ramp. When erosion made a 30° cut
through the rectilinear cross-section of the ramp, it left
the limestone debris showing on its rise through the core
of the ramp.
We did not continue clearing the sand east of the
stairway-ramp down to expose the bedrock terrace
because we were at the end of our season. We were
intrigued to find, just where we stopped, a common bread
pot of a style quite different than the thousands of bread
pots from the HeG settlement and bakeries south of the
Wall of the Crow, but very common at the end of the Old
Kingdom, some 300 years after the 4 th Dynasty (fig. 41).
Giza Occasional Papers 4 41