Like so many of Ancient Egypt’s illustrious places, into an oblivion from which it seemed there would be no recall. It was an oblivion only confirmed by the activities of generations of tomb robbers, sabbakhin, and stone thieves, whose work of destruction started as early as the end of the second millennium BCE and gradually turned the once noble pyramids into heaps of unlovely ruins. Desert and sand have done no more than mercifully conceal the damage inflicted by man. Nevertheless it seems that the casing of the Abusir pyramids was still largely preserved and the monuments were standing, more or less, in the fullness of their majesty as late as the first century CE. We can judge this by one of the rare written pieces of information about Abusir to come down to us from the ancient world, Pliny’s allusion (Hist. 36, 16) to the village of Busiris, whose inhabitants used to climb up the pyramids despite their smooth walls. There is scarcely room for error in the identification of Pliny’s Busiris with modern Abusir. Even if we put to one side the etymology of the word Abusir, which is convincing enough by itself, Pliny could not have been referring to any other place with pyramids on the route from Memphis to Giza that he described. The Abusir pyramids did not, indeed, pass entirely unnoticed even in the Arab Middle Ages, but interest in them did not go further than mere mention of their existence in the works of contemporary historians such as Abd al-Latif and Abu Djaafar al-Idrisi.
Interest in the cemetery at Abusir, as in other antiquities of Ancient Egypt, was to be aroused only with Napoleon’s campaign at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It was only from that time, and hand in hand with the emergence and gradual development of Egyptology, that efforts were increasingly made to investigate and study Abusir. Scholars from the scientific commission of Napoleon’s campaign, unfortunately without much precision, recorded three “ruined pyramids” near the village of “Abusyr.” What especially interested them were the visible remains of the causeways leading to the pyramids from the east and up from the Nile Valley. One remark in their monumental work. Description de l’Egypte (vol. 10, p. 455) is, however, very confused. It suggests that one of the Abusir pyramids was made of brick, and this clearly does not correspond to the facts. The error can only be explained by some mistake in the documentation or faulty interpretation of the field records during compilation and editing of the work.
Richard Lepsius.
The Englishman John Shae Perring was originally an engineer by profession but Egyptian antiquities, especially pyramids, so captivated him that he devoted the greater part of life to investigating them. It is to him that we owe the first archaeological survey of the Abusir pyramids, which was carried out in 1838. Perring even set himself the dangerous task of unblocking the access routes to the underground sections of the pyramids, and his explorations were not without their dramatic moments. He was given invaluable assistance by the experienced native foreman Abd al-Azdi. Perring was unable to identify the owners of the pyramids with any certainty and so he used “substitute terms” to designate the monuments. The Northern (Sahure’s), the Central (Niuserre’s), and the Great Pyramid (Neferirkare’s). The so-called ‘Small Pyramid’ represented an error on Perring’s part. As was later to be shown, it was not a pyramid but a large mastaba. The plan of the Abusir cemetery which Perring drew up was already much better than the map produced by the scholars of Napoleon’s campaign. His first plan of the Abusir pyramids, including basic survey data, was particularly valuable.
Ludwig Borchardt.
Perring’s pioneering researches became a solid basis on which the next expedition to arrive in Abusir could rest its work. In 1842, a German-Prussian expedition led by Richard Lepsius, the founder of German Egyptology, came to Abusir, but only stayed there for a very short period; nevertheless, it managed to obtain remarkable results. The archaeological map of the locality prepared by the expedition’s surveyors and drafted by Gustav Erbkam became a very valuable and relatively precise aid for subsequent work at Abusir. It contains some inaccuracies, especially in the identification of some ruins as pyramids when in fact they were not and vice versa, but on the other hand, it records some features that have since vanished for ever, such as the Lake of Abusir. The expedition’s observations and conclusions relating to the largest of the Abusir pyramids—that of Neferirkare, were to exert a long-term influence on Egyptologists and their ideas about how these monuments, still in many respects mysterious, were constructed. The Lepsius expedition did not carry out large-scale excavations at Abusir, although even the little that its members uncovered here became an important part of Egyptological source material, for example Fetekti’s tomb with its wonderful wall paintings.
The British MP, Henry Windsor Villiers Stuart, a British parliamentary special envoy to Egypt and an enthusiastic admirer of Egyptian antiquities, conducted work in the Abusir area for a short time during the winter of 1882/83. It is to him that we are indebted for such discoveries as the alabaster altar and alabaster basins in Niuserre’s sun temple at Abu Ghurab.
”Soldiers, forty centuries are watching you!”
In the early 1850s, Auguste Mariette Pasha, one of the founders of Egyptian archaeology, began his excavations in North Saqqara, in and around the Serapeum. Rather than the Egvptian pyramids, it was the private tombs, the mastabas that attracted his attention—as explicitly emphasized in his fundamental work, Les mastabas de l’Ancien empire (Paris, 1883). No wonder, therefore, that he showed little interest in the Abusir pyramids. However, when working in North Saqqara, he extended his excavations further to the north and unearthed several tombs in South Abusir.
In 1893—by coincidence at about the same time as the tomb robbers were making the priceless discovery of the papyri from the archive of Neferirkare’s mortuary temple—excavations were started again in Abusir, this time by Jacques de Morgan. French in origin, de Morgan was at that time employed as the head of the Antiquities Inspectorate at Saqqara. After opening the access to the pyramid of Sahure, he decided to excavate the pyramid designated no. XIX on the Lepsius expedition map although later, finding that this was “only” the mastaba of the Vizier Ptahshepses, he curtailed his excavations after a few weeks. De Morgan also devoted attention to surveying the whole cemetery and then brought together his observations, measurements, and conclusions in his archaeological map of the Memphite necropolis—which naturally included Abusir. One is obliged to add that the older archaeological map drawn up by the Lepsius expedition, which at that time had been available for a half-century and which de Morgan undoubtedly used, is more complete and precise that de Morgan’s own.
There are very few archaeologists whose work has won them a name etched deeply into the history of Egyptian archaeology—pioneers who early and accurately anticipated the priorities of archaeological research in their time, and who pushed through new methods of fieldwork, and of studying, cataloguing, and making public the knowledge gathered. Ludwig Borchardt, however, is indisputably one of these. In a way it was a piece of archaeological luck that nobody except Perring with his short-term research had shown any interest in the Abusir pyramids. This meant that an expert of Borchardt’s stature could, at the very beginning of the last century, embark on the investigation of pyramids that were relatively untouched by modern excavations. He chose outstanding contemporary German Egyptologists as his colleagues, both for fieldwork and for the study, cataloguing, and publishing of the archaeological finds and information. They included, for example, Georg Möller, Heinrich Schafer, and Kurth Sethe. The organizational arrangements for the excavations were also on a very generous scale. The Deutsche Orientgesellschaft provided financial resources at a level that no German excavations in Egypt had previously enjoyed. Moreover, in Abusir and the surrounding villages, adequate labor resources were at that time easily available and very cheap. Borchardt could therefore hire what is by today’s standards an unbelievably large number of workmen—in several seasons totaling more than 500 people. The experienced foreman reis Mohammed Ahmad al-Senoussi was employed at the head of the workforce.
Borchardt started excavations immediately on finishing his archaeological work in Niuserre’s sun temple at Abu Ghurab in September 1901. Information obtained from the research at Abu Ghurab led him to regard excavations in Niuserre’s mortuary temple at Abusir as the most urgent priority. His decision was influenced by his Christmas visits to Abusir in 1896 and 1898 and the architectonically and archaeologically unique surface finds that he had made on the site of Niuserre’s temple. Another factor was, of course, the discovery of the papyri at the Abusir pyramids, since 1893 the subject of very lively debate in Egyptological circles and one which strongly attracted Borchardt’s attention. His excavations in Niuserre’s pyramid complex took place over a period from the beginning of January 1902 to roughly the middle of April 1904, always in the winter and spring months. Then Borchardt transferred his attentions to the immediately neighboring pyramid complex of Neferirkare. Here, if we leave aside the two small trial diggings of 1900 and 1903 which were influenced by his efforts to identify the place where the sabbakhin had found the papyri in 1893, he carried out excavations in the winter and spring months of 1904 and 1907. Borchardt concluded his research at Abusir with unbroken work in Sahure’s pyramid complex from the end of March 1907 to the end of March 1908. Particularly during these concluding phases, he also undertook several smaller trial diggings in other places in the cemetery, such as at the Unfinished Pyramid (Neferefre’s) and on the edge of the desert south of Niuserre’s valley temple.
Plan of the pyramid cemetery drawn up at the end of Borchardt’s archaeological excavations at Abusir.
Borchardt would give immediate reports on his excavations in provisional form in Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orientgesellschaft He also did not put off, as is unfortunately so often the case in Egyptian archaeology, overall evaluation of his archaeological discoveries and publication of the final excavation reports. These he published in a series of monographs devoted to the three largest Abusir pyramid complexes.
The overall contribution of Borchardt’s work to the study of pyramids at Abusir cannot be expressed in a few sentences. One can only, perhaps, emphasize the aspects of his achievement that far transcended the limits of his period and today still represent a standard which many excavations at the beginning of the twenty-first century are a long way from reaching. Borchardt’s fieldwork and archaeological publications are pervaded by his ability, so rare, yet so essential in an Egyptologist, to orient himself quickly and surely in the face of a large number of the most diverse archaeological finds and to distinguish between the significant and the inessential in the tangled web of their wider historical contexts. To this day, the imaginative powers that enabled Borchardt to reconstruct the original form of a column, wall or even the plan of a whole pyramid complex from a few fragments arouse admiration. It is no wonder that Ludwig Borchardt, founder of the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut—Abteilung Kairo, and later also of the Schweizerisches Institut fur Ägyptische Bauforschung und Altertumskunde in Kairo, represents a model for the future generations of Egyptologists and field archaeologists.
Vito Maragioglio (photo: Milan Zemina).
During his work in the Abusir pyramids, Borchardt was contacted by local people and offered some stone vessels dating from the Early Dynastic Period, which allegedly had been found close to the village of Abusir. The archaeological importance of the vessels gave impetus to the commencement of an excavation at the northern foot of the escarpment, the place where the antiquities were found, where the royal Early Dynastic tombs had been established in North Saqqara. The excavation, begun in 1910 and directed by Hans Bonnet, resulted in the discovery of a large cemetery in which were buried members of the Early Dynastic middle class, socially less important than the elite buried on the top of the escarpment. Both Bonnet’s and Makramallah’s excavations brought a number of important archaeological materials pertaining not only to the elite, but also to people of the lower social strata in the Abusir necropolis.
After Borchardt’s excavations, Abusir again found itself on the periphery of Egyptological interest. Leaving aside a brief excavation conducted perhaps by Ludwig Keimer in South Abusir in the early 1940s (from this excavation carried out near the tomb of Fetekti no report has survived except for few remarks in the Journal d’entrée of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo), it was almost fifty years before archaeologists returned to the Abusir pyramids once more. Then, between 1954 and 1957, a joint German-Swiss expedition spent three archaeological seasons in the ruins of Userkaf’s sun temple on the northern edge of the Abusir cemetery. This monument had already been known for a long time and had even been entered on the Lepsius expedition archaeological map of Abusir. The excavations were headed by Hans Stock, at that time the director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, and by Herbert Ricke, the then director of the Swiss Institute for Research into Egyptian Architecture and Antiquities. They worked alongside several other outstanding Egyptologists: Elmar Edel, Gerhard Haeny, Werner Kaiser, Peter Kaplony, Wolfgang Helck and Siegfried Schott. The results of the excavations were something of a disappointment for the German-Swiss expedition, since the whole great building complex of Userkaf’s sun temple had been almost completely destroyed in the course of the centuries. Nevertheless, thanks to the outstanding professional qualities of all its Herbert Ricke. members, the joint expedition managed to reconstruct from the scanty remains both the original plan of the sun temple and the plans of its later reconstructions.
Herbert Ricke.
Though not connected with any excavation, invaluable information on the Abusir necropolis and, especially, on its dominant monuments, the pyramids, resulted from a survey conducted by two Italian scholars, Vito Maragioglio and Celeste Rinaldi. The survey, carried out in the 1960s, resulted in improved plans of the Abusir pyramids and a number of inspiring observations on the Abusir necropolis itself.
In the late 1980s, the archaeological expedition of the Cairo university directed by Ali Radwan began to explore the area to the east of the sun temple of Userkaf and to the northeast of the sun temple of Niuserre in Abu Ghurab. In the former area, a large Fifth and Sixth Dynasty cemetery with mud brick tombs of the members of the lower middle class were revealed. However, in the latter area, near Niuserre’s sun temple, the important discovery of an Early Dynastic burial ground with large mastabas, including dummy graves, ritual burials of donkeys, and so on, was made. The very existence of this cemetery, whose future excavation seems to be very promising, clearly indicated that there had been a chain of rich cemeteries stretching towards the outskirts of the desert. They lay between Saqqara and Giza as early as the dawn of Egyptian history, thus anticipating the importance of the area to encompass a few centuries the pyramid fields.
Behind the arrival of a Czech expedition in Abusir at the very beginning of the 1960s lay an interesting and somewhat tangled story that had really begun twenty years earlier. The outbreak of the Second World War had caught the Czech Egyptologist, Jaroslav Černý, in Egypt, where he was taking part in French excavations at Deir al-Medina. He could not return to his occupied homeland and so he lived out the war in Egypt. There was one very important bright side to Černý’s involuntary years of exile. They allowed him to devote himself, in the relative calm of the Institut Francais d’Aréhéologie Orientale du Caire, and of Egypt, to a thorough study of Ancient Egyptian antiquities, both in museums and depositaries and at both famous and lesser-known archaeological sites. Černý visited Abusir as well as other sites and in Ptashepses’s mastaba he copied down the inscriptions that he considered interesting and important. During his work he realized how historically significant a person Ptahshepses had been and that de Morgan had only uncovered a small part of a monument that must originally have been much larger. Two decades later he remembered this information in connection with the launch of the activities of the Cairo branch of the Czech (then Czechoslovak) Institute of Egyptology at Prague’s Charles University.
In the first years of its existence, the main task of the newly-founded institute was to make a scientific contribution to the international UNESCO rescue projects in Nubia. Although this was urgent and important work, however, it represented only a short-term episode in the institute’s planned activity in Egypt. The basic aim was to conduct long-term Egyptological research on chosen archaeological locations in Egypt. On Černý’s recommendation, the choice ultimately fell on Abusir. Zbynĕk Žába, who had taken on the leadership of research as the deputy of the then already elderly director of the Institute, Frantisek Lexa, had taken various additional circumstances into account. Above all there was the fact that Abusir was part of the great and immeasurably historically valuable necropolis of ancient Memphis. It was also not unimportant that Abusir was near Cairo, since economic considerations were also factors in the decision.
Jaroslav Černý and Zbyněk Žába by a portrait of the founder of Czech Egyptology František Lexa (The Czech Institute of Egyptology at Charles University in Prague, April 1967) (photo: Milan Zemina).
The circumstances in which Žába started excavations in Ptahshepses’ tomb were not easy. This was because the work of the Czech Egyptological expedition in Egypt began in two places, Abusir and Nubia, at once. Each of the two research projects was very demanding in organizational terms, each had its own specific scientific character and required a completely different methodological approach. Yet another complication arose from the fact that the team that Žába had assembled was distinctly heterogeneous and he was the only Egyptologist among them. Regardless of all these difficulties, Žába managed to consolidate the position of the Institute in Egypt, to fulfill the scientific tasks allocated to it in the framework of the UNESCO international rescue project in Nubia and to develop systematic archaeological research in the mastaba of Ptahshepses at Abusir.
A page from Žába’s diary (photo: Milan Zemina).
Reis Mohammad Talaal al-Qereti (photo: Kamil Voděra).
After Žába’s untimely death in 1971 the position of the Czech Institute of Egyptology became ever more complex and difficult, both in Prague and in Cairo. The works at Abusir were suspended for several years and it was only in the first half of 1974 that excavations in the mastaba of Ptahshepses could be restarted. Unfortunately, sudden death had caught Žába just as he was putting together the great stacks of documentation from the excavations and preparing them for publication. It may seem surprising to some that he did not publish interim preliminary reports on his excavations in Czech or international archaeological and Egyptological journals; to those who knew Žába even slightly, however, it is not so difficult to understand. His passion for detail, precision, exhaustive analysis of problems and as far as possible incontestable conclusions were at odds with the requirements of a preliminary archaeological report.
The man appointed to lead the work was František Váhala, a distinguished linguist who had studied Egyptology with František Lexa before the war. Under his direction, the Czech team completed the excavation in the Ptahshepses mastaba in 1974. Unfortunately, however, shortly after his return from Egypt, Váhala died.
Since 1976, the author of this book has continued the work as director of the Czech archaeological excavations in Abusir.
In the mid-1970s, with the end of excavations in the mastaba of Ptahshepses, the Czech Institute managed to obtain the consent of the authorities of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization to transfer research to the southern, archaeologically under-investigated area of the Abusir cemetery. This new archaeological concession is geographically defined in the north by a line linking Neferirkare’s pyramid with Niuserre’s valley temple and, in the south, by the shallow valley of Wadi Abusiri which divides South Abusir from North Saqqara.
So far, work has been carried out over eighteen excavation seasons in the new concession in South Abusir. The excavations have been led by the author of this book with the long-term assistance of Ladislav Bareš and Břetislav Vachala, and, in more recent time, by Miroslav Bárta, Jaromir Krejči, and Kvĕta Smoláriková. Experts in other fields, such as geophysics, anthropology, geodetics, restoration, have joined in the expedition according to need and the specific tasks involved, and students of Egyptology from the Charles University have also participated. In recent years the Czech expedition has also enjoyed close co-operation during excavations with a number of foreign Egyptologists, including the late Paule Posener-Kriéger, Peter Jánosi, Vivienne G. Callender, and others. The foremen of the workmen at the excavations are the sons of reis Abdu al-Qereti, the experienced and energetic reisin Muhammad Talal al-Qereti and his brother Ahmad al-Qereti. The Czech expedition’s archaeological concession in South Abusir, so remarkable in its location and extent, is enabling us to develop broadly conceived and long-term research aimed at providing knowledge and understanding of a number of key questions in Egyptian history. Such questions as the transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Dynasty, the methods used in building the Fifth Dynasty pyramids, the social and economic development of Egypt in the Old Kingdom, and the complex questions concerning the history of Egypt at the time of the Persian domination. It is for the reader to judge how far we are succeeding in this aim. This book is offered as one account which may help the reader to form an opinion.
Reis Ahmad al-Qereti (photo: Milan Zemina).
Detail of a lion head
from the decoration
of one of the alabaster
embalming tables of
the sacred Apis bulls
in Mit Rahina (photo:
Milan Zemina).
