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A HOME AWAY FROM HOME. While studying the University of Chicago Oriental Institute’s reports of its 1920s and 1930s excavations at Medinet Habu, across from Luxor on the west bank of the Nile, Austrian archaeologist Manfred Bietak discovered the plan of a hut that closely resembles the well-known Israelite “four-room house” type—three long parallel rooms and one broad room. Bietak suggested that the 12th-century workers who inhabited this reed hut may have been early Israelites. Hawass says that he has no objection to this theory, but he prefers “absolute evidence,” instead of “maybe.”