El Kab - Walls of El Kab

Walls of El Kab

One of the discoveries at the site that Quibell questioned the most during his dig was the walls that surrounded the Serdab. However, much more research has been done since then, and according to a journal article published by the “British Museum of Ancient Egypt and Sudan,” the walls date to about the 30th Dynasty, or about the 4th century BC. In 1921, an article titled “El-Kab and the Great Wall” was published in “The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology,” and it explained further the three different sets of walls and what they were used for. The first set of walls (the word set being used to describe a double range of walls) “encloses part of the ancient town, second a double range the temple group, and lastly, most conspicuous of the three, the great and massive wall across the site of the ancient town.”7 This last wall mentioned surrounds a plot of land that had never actually been inhabited. After some time, because the movement of the Nile River towards the city had threatened to destroy the construction, the original wall around the city could no longer be useful. The Egyptians had to construct a new wall, farther from the Nile, so that the people could continue to build their houses and live in an area safe from destruction. James Breasted also mentions these walls in an account he wrote of the site in 1897. In his article he states with admiration that, “it is the only city of remote antiquity the walls of which still stand almost intact. From the cliffs back of the town one may look down upon it, stretched out beneath one's feet, and almost see the majestic temple, surrounded by the beautiful villas of the feudal lords, whose soldiery once manned the now silent walls.”8 He then goes on to describe these walls as sun baked brick that are laid thirty-eight feet thick, and surround an enclosure two thousand feet long and fifteen hundred feet wide.