EGYPT OASES Qasr Labekha Qasr Labekha is located in a wadi and was one of the largest settlements in the Kharga oasis in the Roman period. The large fortress housed a garrison and guarded the Darb „Ain Amur, the main route to Dakhla. The site also contains two temples, aqueducts, remains of the settlement and a necropolis. It was in use from at least the Ptolemaic period until the 4th century AD. The mudbrick fortress has door posts and a lintel of limestone and each corner is fortified by a round tower. Some of the walls are still preserved to a height of 12 meters. Inside are the remains of vaulted rooms and cells now filled with sand. Around the fortress are the remains of mudbrick houses, some once built up to three stories high and with domed roofs. The now silted well, located to the south of the fortress, provided the settlement with much needed water for drinking as well as for the irrigation of the surrounding cultivation, which was made possible by the digging of qanats (underground aqueducts). To the north of the fortress is a mudbrick temple from the 3rd century AD. Inside is a great hall leading to an antechamber and a sanctuary in the western end. The doorway between the hall and the antechamber still has a cornice painted in red, blue, green and black. Few traces of decoration remains otherwise, but during clearance of the temple, a number of limestone fragments inscribed with the title Caesar and referring to Amun were found. There is an altar in the western part of the hall and a gate outside the temple leads to an underground chamber. A staircase may have given access to the roof. About 250 m to the south is a rock sanctuary that may have originally been the tomb of a local man called Piyiris who was deified after his death. The tomb consists of two pits with two connected antechambers. The main sanctuary is excavated into the rock next to the tomb and is preceded by two halls built of mudbrick against the cliff. Another sanctuary is partly hewn out of the rock and partly constructed of mudbrick, and also preceded by two halls. To the south of the halls is a large complex of service rooms built in mudbrick in front of the cliff. On the plastered walls are painted figures of deities such as Bes and geometrical patterns. The temple was completed in the reign of Antoninus Pius (AD 138-161) and may have been dedicated to Hercules before it became the shrine of the deified Piyiris in the 3rd century AD. Coins of Antoninus Pius, Licinius, Septemus Severus and Constantin II have been found in the temple, as well as a limestone hawk. A large mudbrick building, possibly another temple, located to the north of the fortress contained more than one hundred Demotic ostraca, as well as one in Greek, a large bronze coin hoard and statues of Osiris, also of bronze. In the necropolis west of the fortress are tombs from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. They contained wooden statues, jewelry, faience amulets and fragments of funerary masks and some of them had decorated chambers. In addition to this, there is another necropolis located west of the northern temple and in general, Roman tombs from the 1st to the 5th centuries are found all over the area. Anthropoligical studies conducted on the remains found in these tombs suggest the population was homogenous and the remains were similar to those found in Al-Dush and Al-Deir See the oasis by oases people eyes EGYPT OASES Savor the beauty of nature and live Safari in the heart of the EL kahrga OASIS created Affiliate us oasisdesert.weebly/ https://facebook/safridesert oaseslodge@yahoo Tel 02 01123249211 Tel 02 01211024061
Posted on: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 19:57:59 +0000
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