The Desert Sovereign and the Byzantine Dead

Pierre Tallet and a joint team of researchers have unearthed the remains of an 18th-century city at Al-Araki in Upper Egypt. The discovery reveals a rare physical layer of urban life built directly atop a Byzantine-era Coptic necropolis containing 23 men, women, and children.

The upper layer of the site belongs to the era of Hammam ibn Yusuf, the leader of the Hawwara tribes who carved out a semi-autonomous state in Upper Egypt. Known as the Sheikh al-Arab, Hammam ruled a vast stretch of the Nile, commanding the trade of grain and sugarcane from a seat of power that rivaled the Mamluk authorities in Cairo. In the village of Al-Araki, his people built their homes with mud bricks, unknowingly resting their hearths upon the burial grounds of a society that had vanished a thousand years before their arrival.

Beneath these 18th-century floors, the team led by Pierre Tallet, director of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, discovered a Coptic cemetery from the Byzantine period. The excavation has yielded a striking proximity between the two eras: the rough texture of Coptic flax fragments remains pressed into the same dark earth that supports the later Ottoman-era walls. This stratigraphic overlap provides a compressed history of Upper Egyptian life, where the living and the dead were separated by only a few inches of packed soil.

The focus of the mission now turns to the 23 skeletons recovered from the lower level. These remains, which include men, women, and children, show evidence of partial mummification—a transition in burial practice where traditional natron salts and careful wrapping in linen were used with simpler, humbler intent than in the pharaonic past. By examining the chemical signatures in their bones, Tallet’s team intends to reconstruct the daily reality of these Byzantine-era families: what they ate, the diseases they weathered, and the patterns of marriage that bound their community together.

While the forces of Ali Bey al-Kabir eventually dismantled Hammam’s political entity in the late 1760s, the physical remains of his city offer a domestic counterpoint to the grand military history of the period. In the presence of stone coffin lids and discarded textile fragments, the archaeological record moves beyond the rise and fall of tribal leaders to touch the persistent, quiet continuity of those who lived and died along the banks of the Nile.