El Kab

It was on Mr. Somers Clarke’s proposition that El Kab was selected for last winter’s work of the Research Account. Mr. Clarke has for some years been interested in this site, and has published some of the XVIIIth dynasty tombs there. He wished to see the smaller tombs excavated, and the great area inside the town examined, so, with his colleague, Mr. J. J. Tylor, he offered a considerable subscription to the funds, on condition that El Kab should be the selected site. To Mr. Jesse Howarth, equally with these gentlemen, we are indebted for that support without which the excavations could not have been carried out. We arrived at El Kab on the 1st of December, and within four days had cleared out several of the uninscribed tombs in the famous hill, and had made them into a most comfortable house. Nothing in Egypt makes so pleasant a dwelling as a rock-tomb. In a house in which window and door are one, and three sides and the roof are of solid rock, there can be no draughts, and the range of temperature night and day is very small. We had a room each, another for a dining-room, and in two more I packed away my forty workmen. These were nearly all men known in previous years at Kuft and Naqada, for the natives of El Kab are few in number and of inferior physical strength, so that their labour at two piastres a day was dearer than that of the picked Kuftis at four. All the conditions of work were very pleasant, much better than I have known in Egypt before. No crowd of loiterers and dealers’ spies haunted the work as at Kuft, no robbery by workmen threatened us as at Thebes. Surveying poles were left out for weeks together; at most villages they would have been stolen the first night for firewood.