Photo Booth

History Underground: Egyptian Archeology

  • A boy looks up at the ceiling of the temple of Seti I in Abydos. Its the most intact Bronze Age temple in Egypt dating...
  • A German archeologist takes notes inside an excavated tomb in Abydos.
  • Local laborers at a Germansponsored dig. Some men specialize in digging out sand. Boys carry it away in buckets while...
1 / 11
A boy looks up at the ceiling of the temple of Seti I, in Abydos. It’s the most intact Bronze Age temple in Egypt, dating to the fourteenth century B.C.

“From Cairo, it’s only about three hundred miles to Abydos, in Upper Egypt,” begins Peter Hessler’s article about the current state of Egyptian archeology, “The Buried,” in this week’s issue of the magazine. Hessler goes on to explain that Abydos>

was the cradle of Egyptian civilization, and the earliest known hieroglyphics, dating to around 3200 B.C., were discovered inscribed into relics that had been buried near those Abydos cliffs …. Locals call it al-Madfuna: the Buried. For more than five millennia, this ground was used as a cemetery, and it’s been the focus of intensive archeological work since the mid-eighteen-hundreds. It’s also attracted looters during times of political instability. In February of 2011, as the revolution gathered strength in Tahrir Square, all across the country the police disappeared, and in the Buried teams of looters opened more than two hundred pits. As Egypt roiled with revolution and uprising, and the police that formerly guarded the site disappeared, looters opened more than two hundred pits across Abydos.

In January of this year, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University sent a team, led by the field director Matthew Adams, to assess what had been stolen. The photographer Moises Saman joined them, in March, to document their operation.

“Visiting the archeological excavations of Abydos felt like a breath of fresh air,” Saman, who had been living in Cairo, said. “The scale of the tombs and the variety of artifacts in this ancient burial site are a testament to the splendor a bygone time in Egyptian civilization, far removed from the current state of affairs.”

Abydos “remains frozen in time,” Saman said. “The biggest structure is the Temple of Seti I, built in the fourteenth century B.C., and villagers still prefer the donkey as the main form of transportation. The only reminder of modernity was the almost nightly sound of automatic gunfire coming from a nearby party; a new form of celebratory expression that has taken hold in this rural part of Egypt since the fall of Mubarak’s regime.”

Photographs by Moises Saman/Magnum.