For those regular readers, do you remember the temple site Medinet Madi we were trying to find last July?? We ended up getting caught in a market day traffic jam plus we were completely lost....an interesting day but no temple. Well, Steve and Sara said they were game so we tried again. This time armed with a better map, plus personal directions and Arabic spellings of towns from those Egyptians we know who live in the Fayoum area. We still got lost but this time my Arabic was a bit better and we were at least able to ask for help. Two guys on a motorcycle took us to the site. This was good bc, as it turns out, we would have been hard-pressed to find it on our own!
We were expecting to find the site completely abandoned and was completely surprised to find about twenty guys busily at work, clearing out piles of sand and rocks as well as reconstructing walls and restoring monuments. No one could communicate with us in English so it wasn't until we got home that I looked online to discover that this is part of a UN development program. The Egyptian government and the UNDP along with the Italian government (Pisa University has been excavating here for years) have agreed on a management program for Medinet Madi which will include a visitors' center among other things. I was reading their objectives and one was to track visitor traffic to the site and I thought Good Luck. :)
Anyway, it was nice for us because so much of the site had been unburied from the piles of sand we had seen in photos. Medinet Madi was a temple built in the 12th dynasty by Amenemhat III dedicated, of course, to Sobek the crocodile god as well as Renenutet, a cobra goddess. The Greeks came along, always amenable to new gods to add to their pantheon, and added their own temple, statues, and bas-reliefs. They have evidence that this site housed a Roman military camp and there was a Coptic community here too. It appears that Medinet Madi had been in use for at least 2500 years.
An avenue of sphinxes leading to the entrance of the old temple.
There were several of these lion statues too. They don't look particularly Egyptian or Greek, do they?
A gate to the entrance of the temple with a giant foot, probably of Sobek. You can imagine how big the original gate must have been!
Another Sobek relief on the back wall of the old temple.
David and Steve looking at the hieroglyphics on a papyriform column in the old temple.
We weren't sure what this was. Our guidebooks had told us that recent excavations had uncovered a crocodile nursery and pool along with crocodile eggs but it appeared to be located somewhere else on the site. Adjacent to this, the Pisa team has uncovered some impressive hydraulic engineering built by the Roman military unit stationed here so maybe this is connected with that.
An extremely interesting site. I wish we would have taken more photos, which just means we'll have to go back!! Maybe this time we'll be able to find it on our own. :)
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