Archaeology from Space Read online

  Coring is like taking on a layer cake with an apple corer—a narrow round auger is rotated down, allowing archaeologists to see layers of earth without having to excavate. It’s simple, but very valuable, keyhole archaeology. Magnetometry is slightly higher tech. Passing a portable magnetometer over a site’s surface reads differences in the magnetic properties of buried walls or other features, building up a glimpse of their shape below ground. Both techniques help to target where to dig.

  Once Larry generated a detailed map of the highest part of the mound—the “Tell” in Arabic—we selected key areas for excavation.

  Our team formed a motley, United Nations–like crew, with members from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Egypt. We stayed in nearby Mansoura, a beautiful city famous for its riverside walkways and its handsome women. The Marshal Hotel was our home away from home and the source of the mango buffalo-milk ice cream that we craved after a day beneath the harsh sun. We confounded its guests by tramping through the lobby in our filthy dig clothing and, on one occasion, carrying a purpose-built wooden toilet for our on-site outhouse, complete with an antique toilet-paper holder.

  To beat the heat of the day, we’d rise at 4:30 a.m. for quiet cups of instant coffee and cookies in the lobby, cursing ourselves for having decided to work in archaeology. It’s an ungodly hour to be conscious, yet it is de rigueur for those of us who work in the Middle East in summer months. For the commute, two 1960s Peugeots—one with an exposed propane tank in the back—was how we rolled in the Egyptian Delta. On-site by 6 a.m., we’d drive to the top of the Tell to catch the first pink light snaking through the morning fog. Our local work crew would meet us and shake hands, decidedly more awake than we were.

  That summer, we worked hard dispelling the long-held myth that Delta sites, being moister than those in Upper Egypt, have poorer preservation of organic materials. Every Egyptologist knows desert sites—so dry that nothing decomposes—have it all in comparison. Well, that’s not entirely true.

  In one excavation area, we dug down more than 7 meters, revealing a 2,600-year-old three-story house that had been reused by later Egyptians as a mausoleum. A precarious climb down two sets of ladders, each 4 meters tall, took us to the bottom; the record of 500 years of occupation and abandonment unrolled on our graph paper as we planned the earthen section.

  And the finds! The site yielded Greek pottery from the Mediterranean, carnelian from Egypt’s Eastern Desert, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, and gold from Nubia—all evidence of a thriving international port. Based on the coring data and the landscape reconstructions, we knew that water surrounded Tebilla for nine months of the year in antiquity; this, with its location along the edge of Lake Manzala, made it a prime spot for importing and exporting luxury goods from home and abroad.

  It would be unusual for a port town in Egypt’s Late Period not to have a wealthy temple with a powerful priestly class. It’s an era we hardly hear about on TV or in major archaeological announcements; but if you’re looking for ancient examples of cosmopolitan and diverse places that mirror modern times, the Late Period is a good time to start. The arts and technology flourished, with innovations in the use of iron, cavalry, and triremes, and a new form of Egyptian writing, Demotic. Numerous new temples appeared throughout Egypt, including the temple at Tebilla.

  Some Historical Context

  A brief spin through history helps put this in perspective: after international expansion during the New Kingdom and the rise of the priesthood during the Third Intermediate Period (1069–525 BC), the Late Period began with a Libyan takeover from the west in 945 BC. Then the Nubians of Dynasty 25 came from the south, between 760 and 656 BC.24 Founded around 664 BC, Dynasty 26 represented the last gasp of Pharaonic Egypt as we know it.

  Psamtik, the first ruler of Dynasty 26, threw off Assyrian occupation using Greek mercenaries, stabilized the country, and moved the capital to Sais in the western Delta, only 75 kilometers from Tell Tebilla.25

  For a time, Egypt had stability and foreign alliances across the Mediterranean and eastern Africa.26 But for all the international diplomacy, the Late Period eventually brought multiple players to the poker table and left Egypt with a diminishing hand and nothing in the pot.

  In 525 BC, the Persians took the country. Egypt kicked them out in 404 BC, and spent the next 60 years resisting a Persian comeback from power bases in the Delta.27

  This served Tebilla well. In 398 BC, Egypt’s capital moved from Sais to Mendes, the large city to Tebilla’s southwest. Tebilla likely expanded its influence and wealth over the next 19 years during Mendes’s tenure as capital, and merchants flocked to the city to trade in the goods flowing across the fluctuating empires. The temple’s riches surely must have grown by the time the capital shifted once again to the central Delta. Four more dynasties had come and gone, but who at Tebilla cared, when the port stood stacked high with goods? They would not have known what hit them that misty morning, some 2,400 years ago.

  Tebilla’s Downfall

  Herodotus called Artaxerxes III “a great warrior,” and he was certainly tenacious. He attacked Egypt again and again, first as head of the army and heir to the throne in 359 BC, and then as king of Persia, having knocked off 80 of his nearest and dearest at home to maintain control.28

  In 343 BC, having had enough of Egypt’s refusal to be defeated, Artaxerxes brought more than 300,000 men. He engaged Nectanebo II, the last Indigenous ruler, and his navy along the branches of the Nile in the Delta.29 Nectanebo ran away to Memphis, crook and flail between his legs, leaving garrison towns and ports like Tebilla to fend for themselves.

  The battle did not end well for Tebilla’s inhabitants. One humid July day in 2003, our team made a discovery that encapsulated Artaxerxes’s triumph—a discovery made possible by 40-year-old photographs taken from space.

  These came from a covert program in the United States spurred by the Cold War. The CORONA program gathered thousands of images of countries in the 1960s and early 1970s, freezing them in time prior to large-scale landscape changes caused by the construction of dams, urbanization, population increases, and climate change. Luckily, cameras pointed toward North Africa and the Middle East recorded sites that are now damaged or no longer there—and had so much to say about the archaeology of Egypt’s demise.

  When I examined the 1972 CORONA imagery for Tebilla, corners of a large rectilinear feature appeared in the north-central and south-central parts of the site. Could this be the temple enclosure wall we had hoped to find?30

  Magnetometry and associated excavations had given us an idea of the town’s layout,31 but locating the edge of the wall on the ground would not be an easy task. Typically, remote-sensing specialists take aerial photographs and georeference them—which means we connect the photographs to current satellite imagery and give each pixel an x and y coordinate on the map. You need a minimum of six recognizable and unchanged points in the aerial photograph for this process to work. Older, smaller, nondigital images can be stretched to match up with modern imagery, to achieve the same pins-in-the-map effect. This process—and I am not making this up—is called “rubber sheeting.”

  CORONA image of temple enclosure wall at Tell Tebilla [IMAGE COURTESY OF THE US GEOLOGICAL SURVEY]

  But georeferencing older images is an imprecise activity where so much of the modern landscape has changed. Although I tried with the 1972 CORONA image, there just was not enough of a match, likely due to distortion caused by the rubber sheeting. Finding the wall on the ground with that image alone was impossible.

  The initial magnetometry work covered several 20-by-20-meter grids, highlighting buried mud-brick architecture. But this data did not show a large enclosure, either. We knew the temple walls would be several meters thick and more than 100 meters long. Locating it in the remaining month of the dig season suddenly seemed like a major challenge.

  Greg had a brilliant idea: scraping away 10 centimeters of the site’s surface to reach the top of the mud-brick level bur
ied below the silt. But scraping down the entire site would have taken weeks. Instead, where the imagery gave the wall’s broad location on the mound, he divided the ground into a grid of 10-by-10-meter squares. We then scraped a small window between each. It was like probing between paving slabs to see what was underneath, rather than taking up the whole patio.

  Photograph of excavated enclosure wall at Tell Tebilla [PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR]

  Outlines of the buried structures emerged at set intervals. A temple enclosure wall should appear as dense mud brick, with no structural breaks. When we hit an area that fit this description, we just kept scraping until we found two wall edges, some 8 meters apart. Aha! Massive mud-brick wall here, and it matched the wall thickness observed in the CORONA satellite imagery. Bingo.

  What the Walls Saw

  We continued almost 100 meters to the south, until we hit a 90-degree turn to the west. All sorts of interesting things happen in the corners of ancient buildings: foundation deposits, datable material—and we didn’t have anywhere to go but down. So, down we went.

  Which crew member gets assigned to what excavation unit is always a roll of the dice. This one became my responsibility. I gridded out a 2-by-2-meter unit in the southeast corner and started digging through the dense silt. Surprisingly, the silt did not change in consistency or color as I went down 10 centimeters, 20 centimeters, 30 centimeters. Neither did it contain objects or pottery.

  Just as I was giving up on the unit as a bad bet, I struck a strange, crumbling red brick. And another. And another. Instead of forming part of a wall, the bricks sloped downward at a sharp angle. As more of the feature emerged, it seemed as if someone had dumped several dozen mud bricks in the corner and set them on fire.

  After planning, mapping, and photographing it, I started to remove the brick layer. But a glint of gold stopped me in my tracks—gold is as rare as hen’s teeth in a settlement context. Then a bronze piece about 5 centimeters long came up. As my workmen sieved each bucket of earth, more gold foil appeared, stuck to what looked and felt like charcoal. The trickle of objects turned into a fire-hose stream: bronze, lapis lazuli, beads, carnelian, and almost a quarter of a sandwich bag of gold foil from the sieve. It had our team puzzling over the burning, and this confused scatter of precious objects, going down more than 80 centimeters.

  Across the Tell in our tented recording area, while cleaning the objects so that she could draw them, our dig artist-registrar Shakira Christodoulou teased out their meaning. From the encrusted dirt, beautifully cast bronze appeared—crowns of various kinds, plaited beards, ram’s horns—all with tenons, projecting pieces for attachment to wooden statuettes.

  But not just any statuettes: the gold foil and bronze were all that remained of divine figures. Tebilla’s gods had gone up in flames. Gold was the flesh of the gods, and the bronze symbols of their power were made to last forever; these figures embodied the deities, more than represented them. Artisans fitted their eyebrows and eyes in semiprecious stones to imbue them with life. Each day, the priests bathed, anointed, and dressed the statues, not unlike the ritual surrounding temple figures in India today.

  It’s very hard for us to imagine what their destruction would have felt like to the people of Ro-nefer.

  When Artaxerxes and his soldiers swarmed from the river quays to raze the town, the destruction of the temple sent a terrible message. Armed with brutal iron short swords against sleepy civilians, the soldiers burst through the temple’s huge double doors. Perhaps the priests on duty tried to fight or hide, but their own walls now trapped them. Down the stone pavement through the temple’s center, deep into its heart, the soldiers swept toward the holy of holies and found Osiris, Amun, and other deities defenseless inside their shrines.

  Seizing the statues, maybe the soldiers wrenched out semiprecious stones for themselves. Then they ran and set the gods ablaze. Perhaps they committed their iconoclasm on top of the wall, in sight of the citizens, and pushed the fragments over: we know someone in antiquity tossed the statues to the ground, since we discovered the wall’s foundation trench just below the find spot. The conflagration fired the mud bricks red and brought them down over the remains, covering them for more than 2,000 years.

  What might have taken place in the temple and the town disappeared beneath later occupation; the carnage that day passes from one frame of the filmstrip to the next. The temple was not just a religious center, but an economic engine, a political machine, and an impressive target, perhaps with walls 10 meters tall or more, if it bore any likeness to examples at Luxor. Its destruction was one of many similar topplings as Artaxerxes III wrested away control of Egypt.

  How a River Doomed a City

  The Egyptians should have been better prepared for a river-borne invasion. But they’d thought they were safe for too long.

  The reason why lies with the rhythms of the very river on whose annual inundation they depended. Hundreds of miles upstream, the monsoon rains caused the tributary Blue Nile and White Nile to swell, flooding the Nile proper, which deposited rich, nurturing silt onto the fields for several months each summer. Egypt became a nation-state of islands, on which its towns and people waited for the waters to recede.

  On average, the Nile deposited a millimeter of silt across the entire floodplain per year—some years more, some years less—adding up to 1 meter every 1,000 years.32 Close to the ancient capital of Memphis, near the apex of the Delta, the river split into seven branches with innumerable canals that fed into the Mediterranean. Here, the Nile dumped any silt not deposited along the floodplain, slowly adding landmass.

  In time, the virtually impassable swampy landscape of the eastern Delta became livable, and small towns like Tebilla, inhabited since the Old Kingdom, could prosper and grow. If the swamps had remained, so would have Egypt’s impenetrability, and Artaxerxes would have failed. However, when the Persian king sailed for Egypt, the country had been opened up to river transport. Ultimately, time and silt, gathering imperceptibly, allowed its conquest.

  This story ends where it started: in space. Staring down at the Delta today, satellites reveal that only two of the seven Nile branches remain. Tell Tebilla is more than 60 kilometers inland from the Mediterranean, making it almost impossible to imagine the site along a large river connected to the Mediterranean. In fact, little of Tebilla is left, with more and more of the site being lost to modern encroachment and looting each year. So many other Delta sites face the same fate. Early visitors commented on mounds in the Delta as far as the eye could see, like anthills. Now, it is a half-hour drive or more between the remaining Tells.

  Luck favored us when history recorded Artaxerxes III’s destruction of Ro-nefer and when the CORONA imagery picked up a major feature on that site that later satellite data could not. Excavation added to the puzzle pieces, though our knowledge of Artaxerxes III’s campaign will always be hazy.

  With the destruction of sites around the world by climate change and urbanization, we must wonder how many puzzles have been lost entirely.

  The good news is, with so many developments in satellite technologies, discoveries are being made more rapidly, across larger areas, and in places we never thought possible. Thousands of hidden stories are out there, about how past civilizations thrived, crashed, and were then reborn. To learn more about them, we first need to delve into how this field came into existence.

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  Space Archaeology

  When first encountered, this may seem like a ludicrous, science-fictionalized name for a subfield of archaeology. It sounds like we hope to find evidence of an alien homestead on Mars, extraterrestrial arrowheads, or the mummies of little green men. While this would undoubtedly interest astrobiologists, the gaze of the space archaeologist turns back to Earth, via satellites.

  The ground is an appropriate place to start, after all. Visions of gleaming white tents in the desert and scruffy teams kicking up the sand of millennia dance in the popular imagination. Modern archaeological fieldwork now requires
pipettes and laser-scanning tools alongside the more traditional trowels and dustpans, but the romantic notion of archaeologists in the field is what first ignited my passion.

  Excavating ancient sites is the best part of my job. My inner five-year-old screams with glee whenever I have the chance to use my Marshalltown, a brand of trowel. Every scrape on the ground carries the possibility of discovery. Think of the thrill of a lottery scratch-off game: there is a moment of anticipation, a quickening of the heart, and maybe a letdown. Now repeat 10,000 times a day. You never forget how you felt the first time you found something intact.

  Digging for the First Time

  In the summer of 1999, after my second year of university, I worked my first excavation at a site called Mendes, the ancient Per-Banebdjedet,1 in Egypt’s Delta three hours northeast of Cairo.2 We spent most days toiling beneath a hazy ball of heat, exposing 3,000 years of history intermixed beneath an undulating expanse of earth. One moment we’d turn up burnished Predynastic sherds from 3000 BC, and Roman Period ceramics from 100 AD the next.3 The unit where I worked dated to approximately 2200 BC, Dynasty 8, at the end of Egypt’s first great Pyramid Age, the Old Kingdom.

  Laboring in the stickiness of a Delta July, my Egyptian team and I had found the edge of a mud-brick mastaba, a classic rectangular tomb. Digging down, a reddish ceramic circle slowly emerged, hints of an ancient vessel. Every second I wondered if what I’d found was going to be intact. As I dug around the pot, the struggle was to temper that enthusiasm, to measure, map, draw, and photograph the object in its original location before I moved it.