Alternative name | Wah-sut-Khakaure-maa-kheru-em-Abdju[1] |
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Location | Egypt, South of Abydos |
Region | Upper Egypt |
Coordinates | 26°10′38″N 31°55′53″E / 26.17722°N 31.93139°E |
Type | Government planned Settlement and Mortuary Temple Complex |
Part of | Abydos |
History | |
Founded | Twelfth Dynasty |
Abandoned | possibly at the end of the Thirteenth Dynasty or after the Eighteenth Dynasty |
Periods | late Middle Kingdom Twelfth Dynasty to Thirteenth Dynasty |
Site notes | |
Archaeologists | Charles Trick Currelly and Arthur Weigall (1901-1903) Josef W. Wegner 1994-present |
Wah-Sut (Ancient Egyptian: Wah-sut-Khakaure-maa-kheru-em-Abdju,[1] meaning Enduring are the places of Khakaure justified in Abydos)[clarification needed] is a town located south of Abydos in Middle Egypt. The name of the town indicates that it was originally built as an outlying part of Abydos, set up by the Egyptian state as housing for the people working in and around the funerary complex of pharaoh Senusret III (fl. c. 1850 BCE) of the Twelfth Dynasty, at the peak of the Middle Kingdom.
This complex consists of the mortuary temple, the town of Wah-Sut, and a tomb dug into the bed-rock beneath the Mountain of Anubis, a nearby hill with a pyramidal shape. The town continued to exist for at least another 150 years, well into the Thirteenth Dynasty, when it was close to a royal necropolis of the tombs of Neferhotep I and Sobekhotep IV (fl. c. 1730 BCE). A document attests to its existence during the much later New Kingdom.