The Pound Tower of Babylon

I spent a day at the Roman Tower excavations, done by Pete Sheehan in the Old Cairo area, drawing the kiln they found a while ago and doing quick recordings of the colonnade blocks seen in the photo. 

The sign to the entrance of the Tower is only a year or so old but already it's missing parts. Well, missing, they've been eroded away. So the Round Tower of the Fortress of Babylon became the Pound Tower.

The tower is one of two (the other is now incorporated into the Church of St. George, the Mari Girgi) and was heavily under threat of rising groundwater. Pete did amazing things digging and recording and managing the water problem. All to published at some point or other. For the reconstruction a plan of what the (multi-storied) colonnade might have looked like needs to be made. That's where I come in. We only had a day or so to take measurements of the fragments. Apparently that was enough cos I even had time to draw the section/elevation of the kiln that Alison and Pete worked on the last week and a half. 

A nice diversion from the daily inking I've been doing until now. Just my luck that we had a sandstormey kind of day on the one day I worked there. 

It is supposed to be opened to the public at one point or another and for that reason a contractor was brought in to restore the tower. The unsubtle white blocks in the walls and the amount of crud on the floor is the result of that. That's why conservators spend such a long time studying stuff and why it takes them forever to finish their reconstructions. Quality instead quantity....