When in 1988, pursuant to the encouragement of the late Professor Sayed Tawfik, erstwhile Director General of Antiquities, we accepted the offer to pursue additional archaeological work in the north of Egypt, many sites offered themselves. Our “shopping List” included Atfih, Meidum, Helwan, Heliopolis, Tel el-Yehudiya, Tel el-Maskhuta, and Abusir Bana; but it was when our vehicle skirted the vast mounds of Tel er-Rub’a that we realized the ideal site had presented itself. For this mound was ideally suited to address our research interests: choice of locale, state formation, disposition of water transit, distribution of economies throughout the site, interaction of domestic with cultic occupation, transit corridors and trade. The site has responded admirably to our probes, but always intermixing our research with the unexpected.

Mendes has attracted many scholars in the past, but not a few have been frustrated for no valid reason. The remote location and difficulty of access, coupled with some confusion over the correct identity of Tel er-Rub’a, discouraged many. It was not until the floruit of Bernard Bothmer, and the order and enthusiasm he introduced, that Mendesian studies made headway. Unfortunately the NYU expedition, which he organized and directed, coincided with unfortunate events in recent Middle Eastern history, and a hiatus ensued of nearly a decade in archaeological work at Mendes. This hiatus was brought to a close in 1990 when Robert Wenke and Douglas Brewer mounted a summer season of excavation at Tel er-Rub’a, examining stria as early as Naqada III. From 1991 for 23 seasons the Akhenaten Temple Project has conducted annual seasons of excavations, suspended in 2014 for undisclosed reasons. Nevertheless we now possess a store of information we could never have hoped for nor imagined. Archaeological results and textual discoveries are admirably interwoven, and numerous ideas and interpretations, heretofore taken to be fact, have been exploded.

The earliest settlement was located towards the northern end of the site on a levee of the Mendesian branch of the Nile and, like many settlements in the eastern Delta bore a West Semitic name (Chapter 3). In the Old Kingdom a sizeable city grew up around a large mud-brick podium on which, presumably a temple stood (partly destroyed much later by Amasis when he introduced his naos court). The interaction of the town with the Pharaonic administration is attested by sealings of First, Fifth and Sixth Dynasty date. The settlement suffered a spectacular conflagration and a massacre of some of its inhabitants, c. 4200 BP, and thereafter seems to have lain derelict. (The evidence uncovered by our excavations of the latter, along with the Old Kingdom temple podium will appear in the next volume).

The present configuration of the site owes everything to the Ramessides and the Saites. To the former goes the credit of “fronting” the temple, now turned into a processional shrine, by adding two pylons and a peristyle court. Foundation deposits provide a secure 19th Dynasty date for one (Chapter 6). These were to remain the temple façade until the abandonment of the site under the Christians. Moreover the approach to the temple was always from the north, and involved a dromos partly filled with water connecting with the marshes of the Daqahlieh plain. From the Saite period the Butic canal skirted the site on the north, connecting with the dromos (Chapter 10). Two ancillary shrines, possibly mammisis (designated as Temples T and S), were located along this dromos, at least one of which was constructed by Amasis (Chapters 7 & 8). When cultic activity ceased in the 1st Cent. AD, the mammisis appear to have been re-used as quarters for resident troops or legions in transit. Coins of Gaiseric and 5th Cent. emperors demonstrate that this military occupation of the buildings continued quite late.

Anyone contemplating excavations at a site such as Tel er-Rub’a faces unexpected exigencies. Construction in mud-brick – limestone was recycled in the Middle Ages – poses problems of conservation rarely encountered further south. Winter rains, on the increase of late, play havoc with exposed architecture, and simply defy solution. (Most proposals are laughable in the extreme). We must be content, it seems, with simply retrieving and interpreting the data, and leaving engineering to others. Further results of our excavations to appear in our next volume (Vol. III) will include: the area of the Sacred Lake; Temple S; the 2nd pylon and gate blocks.