Kom el-Hisn

Excavation history

Flinders Petrie first uncovered the site in 1881 during his work at Naukratis. Francis Llewellyn Griffith surveyed it from 1885 to 1887, recording a mudbrick temple, an enclosure wall, and four statues of Ramesses II; two of these bore inscriptions dedicating them to Sekhmet-Hathor, “Mistress of Imu.” The temple and enclosure wall have since been destroyed. Two of the statues remain at the site, and one was moved to the Cairo Museum.

In 1902 Georges Daressy found two broken colossi of Amenemhat III later usurped by Ramesses II, and four blocks originally inscribed for Ramesses II but later usurped by Shoshenq II and reused for a chapel. The Tomb of Khesuwer, a priest of Hathor, was excavated in 1910 by Campbell Cowan Edgar; it contained a stone head of a 12th Dynasty Pharaoh wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt and a damaged statue group of Amenemhat III. In the early 1940s, mudbrick tombs were exposed after heavy rainfall.

From 1943 to 1949, El-Amir, Farad, and Hamada excavated a large necropolis of over one thousand graves, ranging from lower- to upper-class burials. Most were simple sand-pit burials; some contained blades and were labeled the “warrior group.” The 1946 and 1948 excavations revealed many “pot-burials” with children’s remains, as well as family tombs or mass graves. The majority of graves date to the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom. The excavation was not fully published, and no maps or field notes survive.

Yamu

Yamu, also called Imu, was the capital of the 3rd Nome of Lower Egypt and appears in texts from the 5th Dynasty onward, though its exact location is unknown. Inscriptions on statues found at Kom el-Hisn, including an offering table to Sekhmet reading “the mistress of Yamu, Sekhmet,” have led to the theory that Kom el-Hisn is the site of Yamu. However, no concrete evidence proves the identification.