| Description
and map made by Penny Wilson, 2002. Click here to go to the map Qabritmap
This small tell is
situated in Kafr esh-Sheikh province, north-west of Tell Farain (Buto)
and to the east of the small village of Qabrit. There is no concentrated
modern settlement around the site, but it is bordered on the south by the
road and on the other sides by fields. Some of the border areas are more
like wasteland and may have been unsuccessfully reclaimed from the tell.
The tell has no cover except for small patches of brush and the soil is
either red coloured or in places grey. There is a reasonable amount of
degraded pottery , glass and red brick on the surface, but the tell is
not densely covered. The dry surface dust forms a covering of about 2Ocm
and can be scraped away to the damper, more compact soil. In the early
morning (and possibly after rain) building patterns can be seen on the
surface, mostly occurring in the form of small square structures. The tell
is quite low, in total from its lowest to highest point about 5.5m, but
it stands no more than 4.1m up from the ground level at the site. The tell
is 875m (east-west) by 757m (north-south). The eastern to southern sides
of the tell are relatively level on top running down to the edges in a
gentle slope. There are some larger rain gullies running from the top to
the edges and a track running through the site from east to west. The northern
and west sides of Tell Qabrit are more uneven and undulate in a series
of small hillocks and mounds. A few of the mounds towards the centre of
the site form the highest points of the tell and one was used to fix the
siting point for the survey (X=O, Y=O). This 0,0 point is now marked with
a permanent survey marker. The shape of the tell may be due, in part, to
wind erosion with the wind blowing from north to south creating the smoother
southern tail-back of the tell. It was difficult to discern any pattern
to the hills, though some of the modern tracks may indicate more substantial
walls beneath the surface. Some excavations have been carried out at the
site by the SCA including a series of Late Antique buildings to the south
(2000) and a red brick church building in the central area (2001). Judging
by the surrounding topography it would have been difficult to be sure that
these buildings were here from the hills alone. The more pitted areas suggest
that there has been some sebakh digging on the site and the flatter area
to the north-east may be the remnants of a light railway embankment perhaps
suggesting that sebakh was once mined here on a larger scale. A number
of large granite grinding stones are visible on the surface, probably having
been uncovered during the sebakh digging and left as they were too heavy
to easily take away. One limestone block was also noted. The church building
was associated with pottery of the 4th- 7th centuries. The surviving walls
measure 26.5m from east to west and 12.1m from north to south and were
about 1.05 thick. They are preserved to a height of 65cm. The church is
made from at least two consignments of different sized red brick and had
a rectangular outline oriented east-west. It had a font in the centre (possibly
marble faced and lined), but the apse end had been completely robbed out.
The building had limestone paving at the west end and possibly marble paving
at the east end, though this had largely been removed. The walls of the
church were originally plastered and founded upon layers of crushed limestone
chips and earlier pottery . Among the debris a block with a few hieroglyphs
in raised relief was found, suggesting that a Pharaonic site nearby may
have provided much of the stone building material, or indeed, that there
was a Pharaonic part of this site.
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Photographs
taken in 1990 by Patricia & Jeffrey Spencer
Above and below: Views across the mound
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