Archaeologists have begun to piece together the story of a mysterious massacre more than 4 000 years ago in the former royal city of Mendes, which flourished for 20 centuries on a low mound overlooking the green fields and papyrus marshes of the Nile delta north of Cairo.
Donald Redford of Pennsylvania State University had begun to excavate the foundations of a huge temple linked to Rameses II, the pharaoh traditionally linked to the biblical story of Moses, when he found an earlier structure destroyed by fire, and evidence of a grisly episode of death on the Nile, he told a Bloomsbury Academy conference in London on Saturday.
”We were under the misapprehension that it was a new temple on a new site,” he said. ”But in fact I sunk a trench below the existing temple and was really surprised beyond belief by what I found. There was a late Old Kingdom structure of some sort, a great mud brick platform 40m wide, on which a temple had once stood.”
Under the fire-scorched rubble, the scientists discovered the first of at least 36 bodies, victims of some brutal event 40 centuries ago. ”We thought they had died where they were. But it has now become apparent that they were killed elsewhere and thrown in front of the podium. The mud brick of the burning temple cascaded over them. They were covered up and never retrieved. So there is a certain amount of foul play here.”
They found old and young, men and women, tumbled in disordered heaps. In a civilisation that made a cult of death, such discoveries are rare: even the poorest were interred formally, and with some provision for the afterlife.
The arid, baking climate of Egypt helps in preservation. But the discovery of human remains in one of the cities of the delta — annually flooded by the Nile, and in some parts inundated for 10 months of the year — astonished the researchers.
”The bones were in very bad condition. It was a wonder that the bioanthropologist discovered them at all. It would have been so easy to trowel through, and not recognise them. They are virtual powder in the mud. But once you do detect them, and are very careful, out comes the outline of a body,” he said.
There is no obvious indicator of how the victims died. They may have been knifed, or poisoned, or smothered. There are no bludgeon marks on the surviving skeletons. The bodies were casually thrown in, one on top of another. The temple had been rebuilt somewhere between 2150 and 1950BC. The implication is that the mysterious murders must date from the collapse of the Old Kingdom, or the turbulence between 2250BC and 2150BC.
The fortunes of Mendes rose and fell for 25 centuries. The city was a centre of two cults, of the ram god and a fish goddess. It thrived as a trade centre, and early names suggest that semitic herdsmen must have frequently crossed the Sinai desert to visit the region. Scientists have slowly unearthed evidence of factory-scale brewing and baking, of a busy harbour, of a flourishing perfume industry in the Graeco-Roman years and of hasty burials, perhaps during an epidemic of plague.
Mendes reached its heyday during the ancient Greek era. It became a centre of resistance to Persian conquerors who held Egypt for 120 years — a freedom fighter called Neferites I founded a dynasty there — and Ataxerxes the Persian sacked the city in a punitive expedition in 343BC. The settlement survived into the early Christian era, but the Mendesian branch of the Nile meandered away altogether, leaving an enigmatic pattern of granite obelisks, limestone ruins and poor mud graves on a mound of dense sand above the water table in what is now a vast agricultural plain.
In about AD1 000, an Arab traveller reported that he had seen the temple enlarged by Rameses II still standing. The first European travellers during the Renaissance found it much as it is today. ”It must have been during the middle ages that it was finally swept away,” Redford said. – Guardian Unlimited Â