At the south-eastern edge of the Giza plateau, not exactly
in the shadow of the pyramids but certainly close enough for the sky to be
dominated by their impossibly massive forms, are the remains of the city that
once housed the 60,000 odd workers who built the pyramids stone by stone.
The current excavation site is wedged between a modern
village and a soccer field, and covers only an estimated 10 percent of the
city's original boundaries. This weekend is the 20th anniversary of
excavations, years that have seen the removal of thousands of cubic metres of
sand and rubbish, and the slow accumulation of information on the physical and
administrative functions of the city.
I visited the site on Thursday and Saturday. Will Schenk
from AERA conducts a field school to train
Egyptian archaeological illustrators and was keen for me to meet his students.
They are currently notating the tomb of a king's daughter, tracing the outlines
of carvings onto sheets of plastic. These sheets will later be reduced in size
and copied with pen and ink or on computer. It may be the ancient world, but
technology is never far away.
The tomb was first recorded in the 1930s by a German team.
At the end of the project Will intends to compare the two sets of drawings –
historical and modern – to show how the standards of illustration have changed
over time, and how those standards were first established by pioneers in the
field.
The students, Inspectors with the Supreme Council of
Antiquities, have come from sites all over Egypt. Their enthusiasm is enormous.
It was a pleasure to watch them work and talk about their projects and studies,
and also about the overlaps between their practices and mine, about the drawing
of things and the precise gathering of information for future use.
