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Slovak Egyptologists made important discoveries at the Egyptian site of Tell el-Retábí. The research of the Slovak part of the mission enriched the knowledge of fortress architecture of the 20th dynasty, a settlement from the 18th dynasty and a burial ground from the Second Transitional Period. To follow up on the work that began during the past seasons, they dug the burial pit of a large Hyksos grave discovered in 2012. The deceased, who was more than 50 years old at the time of his death, had a donkey buried east of his brick tomb.

"Donkeys were buried in Egypt more than five thousand years ago and were also found near the tombs of the oldest Egyptian pharaohs in Abydos. In our case, however, the donkey was more than a thousand years younger than its Abydosian predecessors. They could have placed it in the grave sometime between the 18th and 16th centuries BC. The discovery of a buried donkey placed Tell el-Retábí among the important burial sites from the Second Transitional Period, such as Tell el-Dabaa or Tell el-Kua, where these types of graves were also found," explains Jozef Hudec of the Institute of Oriental Studies SAS.

Approximately 10 to 15 meters from the donkey, the expedition discovered two cattle skeletons. They probably also come from the Second Transitional Period because they were covered by construction from the early 18th dynasty. It remains questionable whether the infection raged in the locality or the wider area or whether the inhabitants at that time had some other, perhaps ritual, reasons for their actions. According to Egyptologists, the surprise was a small child's grave in a brick chamber, near the donkey grave.

"We also investigated defensive structures from the end of the New Kingdom, from the 12th century BC. In addition to getting to know them better, we also learned about the demise of Pharaoh Ramesses III's fortress. An amulet of a snake deity named Nehebkau was discovered on the surface of the crumbled remnant of the wall of the pharaoh's fortress from the Late Period, 664 to 332 BC. The discovery of an amulet on the wall could indicate that it must have already been ruined and destroyed in the middle of the first millennium BC to the height we uncovered it," says the Egyptologist.

The research on the ditch, the edge of which Slovak experts came across already in 2023, showed that its layers above the level of the current groundwater are from the Late to Ptolemaic period. For instance, a fragment was found of a Greek wine amphora with the seal AΠIΣTO, probably from the island of Rhodes. This would mean that if the ditch was dug during the reign of Ramesses III, it was still about a meter deep in the last quarter of the 1st millennium BC, after more than 700 years.

"Our research has revealed several similarities between the fortified mortuary temple of Ramesses III in Luxor's Medinet Hab and the fortress at Tell el-Retabi.  If the ditches were similar, the original Ramesses ditch on Retábí could have been 6 meters wide and over 2 meters deep, with a flat bottom. However, if the ditch had been open for more than 700 years, it could have expanded up to the assumed 18 meters during the sliding of its gravel-sand slopes and their maintenance," adds Jozef Hudec.

The Slovak part of the Polish-Slovak Egyptological mission began its fourteenth season on September 14, 2024. During four weeks, a sixteen-member team took turns in multidisciplinary research in the northeast of Egypt. In addition to Egyptologists and archaeologists, a civil engineer, a pedologist, a geodesist, ceramologists, documentarians, and a photographer took part in it. The new team member was a Basque doctoral student from the University of Barcelona.

Edited by Monika Tináková