The planned erection of the colossus of Queen Merit Amun, wife of Ramses II at Tel Basta is unlikely to do much to attract visitors to the site, says Jill Kamil, who looks to the records for the greatness that was Sometimes an archaeological site is more interesting for what is not there than for what is. The small open-air museum at Tel Basta near Zagazig, where a large statue of Ramses II's consort (discovered some years ago) is soon to be erected, contains no more than a dozen or so objects; even a century ago the area was so ruined that guide books -- including Baedeker's -- wrote that it was a waste of time to go there when there were so many more worthwhile places to visit. The fact is that the history of the devastation of Tel Basta -- ancient Basta, classical Bubastis -- situated where the Pelusiac and Tannic branches of the Nile join the Wadi Tumilat in the eastern Delta -- is more interesting than its surviving objects. But let us first recall the greatness that was. Bubastis was the capital of a major Delta city where the animal sacred to the goddess Bastet was a cat. It was strategically important; trading missions branched out to Sinai for turquoise and copper, and it was also a departure point for military missions to Asia by land or sea. Its political influence peaked during the 22nd Dynasty, between 945 and 715 BC. When Herodotus visited the site in the mid-fifth century BC he was still able to write: "No other temples may be larger and more costly, none is more pleasing to look at than this." Herodotus gave a lively account of the annual festival -- believed to have been a bean feast. He described how large numbers of men, women and children were conveyed to the sacred complex by boat and that, throughout the journey, they sang, clapped hands, shouted and teased one another. "The women," he added, "danced in a bawdy and unseemly manner." Herodotus estimated the number of pilgrims at 700,000 which, if no exaggeration, would imply that this was one of the greatest national events in the whole country. When the crowds disembarked they set up temporary camps around the temple, offered sacrifices and, according to Herodotus, "drank more wine than at any other time of the year." He described the huge size of the "magnificent portico" that stood in the centre of a sunken area in the middle of the city, "so that one could look down on it wherever you were." He wrote at length about the walls sculpted with figures of kings and gods, and of the sacred precincts so situated that two canals extended to it from the River Nile, each flowing to the entrance of the temple "but not there mingling". Each was 30 metres broad, and he described how, shaded by trees of enormous height, each of them flowed round the temple in opposite directions. The ancient site was visited by the learned scholars who accompanied Napoleon's military mission to Egypt in 1798, and they too described the temple in glowing terms. Whether from personal observation or a perusal of the records, they repeated that the annual festival held there was the greatest in the land, and mentioned thousands of pilgrims in joyous and orgiastic celebration and the quantity of food and wine consumed. This picture of a brilliant ancient capital was repeated by British Egyptologist and traveller John Gardner Wilkinson, who visited Tel Basta in 1840. He added, however, that the rambling ancient city, which covered an area of about 150 feddans (acres), was largely in ruin. Slightly more than 40 years later Swiss Egyptologist Henri Edouard Naville carried out an archaeological survey of Tel Basta. Between 1887 and 1889, he traced various stages of the main temple's development and was able to confirm earlier descriptions of its size and magnificence. He recorded that the edifice was 180 metres long, and he described a court built by the Libyan ruler Osorkon II, a sed -festival gateway, and various other shrines. Most of the structures, he noted, had been built in the Libyan (i.e. 22nd) dynasty, and mentioned that blocks in the structure bore the names of Fourth- Dynasty kings, which attested to its early development. Naville unearthed fine pieces of statuary which were sent to the British Museum, and he discovered, to the north of sacred enclosure, an enormous cat cemetery containing mummified animals in their thousands along with beautiful bronze statuettes of the sacred cat. This being an age of uncontrolled plunder, these treasures passed to museums around the world and into the collections of the curio-hungry. Tel Basta subsequently suffered the fate of so many ancient Delta cities; its great monuments were used as convenient quarries, stripped of limestone for the construction of modern buildings and, as attested by the number of chips that dotted the landscape, for millstones. It was plundered by robbers in the pay of antiquities dealers, by sebakhin (farm labourers) in their search for fertiliser, and by local traders who openly sold antiquities at Zagazig railway station. British chemist Alfred Lucas, who worked for the Antiquities Service from the mid-1920s to the 1940s, wrote that dealers in antiquities were always present to meet passengers at the railway station and show them objects for sale from Tel Basta. Rumours were rife in Zagazig about people who became rich through a discovery, or discoveries, made in the ruins. There was some truth to this. The decision in 1904 to establish a railway link between Cairo, Mansoura and Belbeis meant a large section to the west of Tel Basta was to be cut off. Two years after work began -- the exact date, 22 September 1906, is on record -- workmen engaged by the Egyptian State Railways found two hoards of gold and silver about 160 metres west of the main temple. The workmen hid the treasure until nightfall when they were able to divide it among themselves. By the time news reached them, the Antiquities Service was able to recover only part of the horde, including a silver jug with a gold goat handle which is now in the Egyptian Museum (No. 53262). A month later a second hoard was discovered some metres from the first. This time the authorities were ready, and these coins are now in the Egyptian Museum. The area was carefully examined by C Edgar, chief inspector of Lower Egypt, but he could locate no building from which they came and concluded that the hoards had been buried in a secret place for safety and later retrieval. Other gold and silver objects continued to be found, most dating from the Saite (26th) Dynasty although some were from the earlier reign of Ramses II. In 1925, when the State Railway company was still extending the tracks, it was reported that three chambers filled with treasure had been discovered some 220 metres south-east of the Coptic cemetery that lay to the east of the cat cemetery. News of the discovery was either late in reaching the Antiquities Service, or they were tardy in reacting to it, because one of the rooms was found empty and all that remained in the other two were granite sarcophagi. One was broken and left in situ ; the other, which dated from the Ramasside period and bore some interesting representations, was taken to the Egyptian Museum. It seems incredible to us today that such an important archaeological site should have been so neglected for so long. In 1943, when French Egyptologist Etienne Drioton was director-general of the Antiquities Service, news reached him that workmen were actively engaged in levelling the land to build a military road across the tell. Drioton sent the then antiquities inspector Labib Habashi to check the report. Habashi described the site as "as disaster". He found that a military road to connect Port Said with Alexandria via Mit Ghamr was well underway and already traversed about three feddans of the site. He described the once beautiful temple as a mass of broken papyrus bud columns, pillars and lintels. Blocks of stone with inscribed texts, he wrote in his report, were impacted into the earth, and he confirmed that the tell was still being systematically depleted both for raw material to make bricks for houses in the ever-expanding urban area surrounding it, and by the sebakhin. Antiquities, he wrote, were totally disregarded, "unless they were gold and silver". Habashi studied the main temple recorded by Naville in order to re- establish its ground plan and describe some of the blocks not adequately recorded by the Swiss Egyptologist. Outside the temple walls he found some statues and traces of a Roman temple, as well as a 20th-Dynasty mound. He studied the names of the deities and localities on blocks, which revealed that they were re-used blocks from other sides. Moving away from the main temple, Habashi found, as a disagreeable surprise, that about 37 feddans of the archaeological site identified by Naville had been handed over to the municipality of Zagazig for agricultural development and to serve as the site of a drainage installation for a farm. He also learnt that a further eight feddans had been earmarked for the transfer of a Muslim cemetery. His report to the Antiquities Service resulted in the first serious steps being taken to protect the site. The Muslim cemetery project was abandoned, and he was granted funds to excavate and document the surviving ruins. From his notes a decision would be made for the protection and conservation of Tel Basta. Habashi focussed his attention on an area about 140 metres west of the Bastet temple, across the Port Said-Alexandria track. The reason for his choice was that he noticed there a large block of limestone measuring about 60 metres by 160cms by 100cms, which the farmers told him had been unearthed by road workers. The blocks were unpolished but with the sides more or less regular, and they were clearly in situ. When he cleared the surrounding area a beautiful relief was revealed of the Old Kingdom ruler Pepi I with some deities. This was a remarkable find, since little was known in those days about Old or Middle Kingdom temples apart from funerary monuments attached to royal burials. Encouraged to survey the surrounding area, Habashi found, about 60 metres to the north and on almost the same axis, four- sided pillars of the same material that were still standing. Some bore vertical lines of inscription and also the cartouche of Pepi, from which he deduced that they formed part of a large building dating from the Sixth Dynasty. His report resulted in an additional grant to continue excavations, and Habashi recruited a team comprising Abdel- Fattah Eid to take photographs of the site, Ahmed Sidqi and Maurice Farid to take tracings of visible inscriptions (and record others as they came to light), and Fawzi Ibrahim to make a map of the area and plans of the monuments in 1944. Studies over the next seven months confirmed that Tel Basta had been an important city as early as the Old Kingdom, and Pepi's monument proved to be a soul or ka - temple. Such monuments were known from later periods, but none as early as this, so the discovery of this large and apparently independent temple -- which is to say it was not annexed to another -- was important. It warranted proper clearance and further study, but this was not possible owing to lack of funds. The ancient city of Bubastis provides an example of how an important ancient Egyptian Delta city was slowly and systematically destroyed in modern times until little remained amidst Zagazig's urban expansion apart from miscellaneous architectural elements, broken stelae and statues. In the 1970s, when the University of Zagazig undertook excavation of the surviving remains and a cat cemetery was found to the north, the idea of developing a museum compound was considered, but proved to be words on paper. And with the passage of time agricultural development and urban expansion further infringed on the much-depleted archaeological site. The importance of Tel Basta cannot be underestimated. Recent excavations by German Egyptologist Gunther Dryer reveal settlement much earlier than hitherto realised. It was an important settlement at the end of the pre-dynastic period, before the unification of the Two Lands. But up to now it is still not clear if -- or when -- Bubastis lost its importance or was destroyed during one of the recurring invasions of the Delta. What we do know is that it did decline and by the Roman period was no more than a small town; when Bilheis (about 20kms to the south) became an important town, stone was usurped from the remaining ruins of Bubastis.
