Visit to Saqqara

Above: Teti Pyramid (right) with the Step Pyramid

in the distance (left)

Since my professors were finishing up a season of excavation near the Teti Pyramid at Saqqara when I arrived in Cairo, a visit to the site was called for. After several days of troublesome communications, it was settled on that I would visit the site this past Monday. After a little bit of confusion about which entrance into Saqqara my driver and I should take, we found the local Taftish (SCA Office), and I was welcomed by the inspectors there and told I could move on to the site.

Left: Jean working on the photography while men work up on top of the wall in the background.

Below: Little A running down the hill/wall with the inspector's son.








With it being the day before the start of the Eid el-Adha, the small team was in a rush to complete their work. However, we got a chance to talk during their lunch break, after which Joe showed me around the site and explained what they had been doing. The most exciting part of the trip was getting to climb down a rope ladder into one of the shafts and crawl around through the ancient tunnels, following Joe as he gave me the full tour. I convinced Joe to take a couple of pictures of me underground with my camera.

The one of me next to the tunnel with a femur in it (below) is my favorite of the two. It wasn't as hot down there as I had feared it might be, but you can see that
I still broke a sweat


from all the crawling around and squeezing through holes.

After this, I got to climb back up via a different shaft and take a look around on the surface. I had not thought I would have a chance to slither around in the dirt while I was there, so I had dressed more appropriately for the city than an excavation. You can see the thick layer of dirt I accumulated. There was apparently some sort of soot on my cheek also, which I didn't know was there until I got home and looked in the mirror. Needless to say, I immediately threw my clothes in the washing machine and hopped in the shower upon arriving home.

Back in Egypt

I arrived in Cairo last week, narrowly missing an ice storm back home. Though the weather has been much more pleasant in Cairo, it has still been on the chilly side, with highs in the upper 60s and lows in the 40s and 50s. This sounds warmer than it is. It has always seemed to me that whenever the temperature gets below 80 in Egypt, it starts to feel colder than one associates with the same temperature at home. So, while I would love 70-degree weather at home and think it quite warm, here it feels chilly unless you're in direct sunlight.

The best part of my view at the ARCE residence

I settled into the ARCE residence, where I spent 3 nights while making arrangements and running errands during my days. By Thursday (2 days after arrival), I had my permissions from the SCA in-hand and an apartment to move into (though only temporarily). However, the head curator at the museum will not be in for another week and all of the libraries and other main institutions will be closed for the Eid el-Adha for the rest of the week. So, I'll be cooling my heels at home, working on my computer, and running errands at the places that will be open for the next several days.Nighttime, when the buildings and streets don't look so dirty, but the traffic never stops

A sad return

When the German team arrived at Abydos to take up residence in their house, the police rolled a tank out to their house and ran over our phone line, snapping it in two. So, we had no internet access for the last week at Abydos.

We departed Abydos Monday evening, October 22, arriving in Cairo the morning of October 23. At our first check of email, we discovered sad news had been waiting for us. We spent several hours crying before deciding to return to Philadelphia a day early in order to get to Boston in time for the memorial service in honor of our friend, Stine Rossel, who was an amazing light in every situation.

I will not recount the details of her tragic death here. For those who don't know about it already, there are many newspaper articles available online, one of which you can see here http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-102307-newlyweds,0,6074391.story

Luxor problems strike again...

A couple of hours after my previous post, we went out for a tasty and cheap dinner at the Amoun restaurant. On our way back to the hotel, I twisted my ankle on stairs leading down from the restaurant. It promptly swelled to the point of not looking like an ankle anymore. Antonio ran to a pharmacy for an ACE bandage and something to kill the pain while Jane and I managed to move me down to the ground floor.

We were up late icing my ankle and feeding me ibuprofen before going to bed and getting up early to catch the train back to Balyana. Hopping around train stations on one leg (where would one find crutches in Luxor?) is tiring work, but we made it back without more of an incident than being stared at a lot while hopping down the platform (I called this the "bouncing hawaga show"). Once back at the house, Hasan promptly made me some makeshift crutches from some wooden poles that were at the house.

Breakfast the next morning (ankle up, of course)

Getting around was pretty hard for a couple of days, but I'm back on my feet now with only a little pain and swelling remaining.

Update: after we returned to the States, I discovered that I actually had a fractured fibula, which I had walked around on for a couple of weeks before we came home. However, as of December it is all healed and doing very well.

Luxor...again

While I had pretty much sworn off of visiting other locations, especially Luxor, after having been out of commission for a day and a half after getting back from Luxor last week (I went over a month without any stomach problems before that!), we are back in Luxor again. With Ramadan ending this evening and the eid (feast/festival) going on for the next few days, we decided we needed to go somewhere and do some sight seeing, since there would be a long weekend during which we cannot work at the site.



We spent the day trekking all over the West Bank, from the Valley of the Kings to the Ramesseum and then back to the East Bank to visit Karnak Temple and walk around its sprawling monuments for a couple hours. Having now exhausted ourselves, we've retired to an internet cafe to check email, put out fires, and, in my case, make a blog post.


We will return to Abydos tomorrow, having not stopped for McD's food before getting on the train this time!

Luxor

We were pleasantly surprised to find the train from Balyana to Luxor on-time Thursday afternoon and arrived in Luxor by early evening. However, we were unpleasantly surprised to find that prices have gone up on many things in the city, especially on the residents’ price on hotel rooms. I was hoping to stay in my favorite hotel from 2004, but my teammates and I could not afford the nearly tripled price a room fetches from a resident (we have residence visas). Instead, we settled into a cheap, but clean place on a back street. It was much more affordable, at 90 LE per double room, per night (about $16 USD), including continental (in the barest sense) breakfast. The guys had a decent view, but Jane and I didn’t really care that our window looked out on other buildings or that the shower was cold (the latter wasn’t really any different than back at the house) because we were only interested in three things: air conditioning, soft pillows, and a lack of mosquitoes.

On Friday, we walked around town getting some shopping done and bargaining for many items in our combination of newly and long ago acquired Arabic. The ability to say and understand numbers, as well as to ask how much things are and remark “that’s expensive!” in Arabic seemed to help our case a lot, even though we were shopping in a very touristy market. Antonio was particularly impressed with the responses we got to “b’kem da?” (“how much is this?”) and got several hand-stitched pillow covers for his couch at home.

At the end of all that wheeling and dealing, which involved copious walking on paved streets, I was ready to have a shower and a nap, while Jane and Antonio ventured on to an internet café and some local sights.

We had hoped to evade tourist police detection on our train ride back Friday night, but did not manage to do so. When asked where we were going, Antonio spoke for the group and told the police we were going to Girga (they never want foreigners going to such an out-of-the-way place in Middle Egypt) for work. The police waffled back and forth among themselves with little being understood by us other than the word for “problem.” Eventually, they asked us some more questions, like where we are from, and Antonio told them that we are Spanish and that the police in Girga knew we were coming on the train and would be waiting for us. With such a persuasive argument, they seated us on the train (walked us to the particular seats they wanted us to occupy in first class – how could a foreigner ever travel in second, or god forbid, third class? They obviously couldn’t imagine such a situation). The rest of the journey went smoothly, though we were totally exhausted by the time we arrived home, and I ended up quite ill in the morning from some McDonald’s french fries we had had for dinner.

My Long Blog Absence

In continuation of our ongoing problems, equipment and otherwise, we were unable to make outgoing calls (including connecting to the internet) for the past week because the phone bill for the house was not paid! We were told it would be paid on three separate occasions before it finally happened and today our connection is back to normal. Of course, the expected DSL is still nowhere to be seen.

Team Picture

In the front row: Reis Ibrahim, David, Nagwin, Antonio, Rashad (one of the site guards), Melinda, Antoni.

Yesterday we took a few team pictures, so I thought I would share some of them.

Mostly the same people, but Jane appears in the middle of this one.

The Magnetic Poles

With our equipment problems, we scrambled to mark out an area for the Polish magnetometry team to start working in on Tuesday. Although there was a miscommunication about the desired size of squares, much was prepared by the time of their arrival on-site. They made quick work of it, finishing Cemetery C (with over a hectare of land being surveyed) by the end of Wednesday. We laid out Cemetery A on Wednesday, just in time for them to start it on Thursday.

The long-hoped-for cable arrived for the EDM. However, we quickly discovered that it did not solve our communications error issues. After troubleshooting over the phone to the States, we discovered that it is actually the port on the EDM itself (in addition to the original cable) that is bad. So, after a week and a half of waiting for what we thought would fix all of our problems, we are still stuck with manually crunching coordinates and zero-setting on a lamppost. We were quite disappointed that this was not figured out a week and a half earlier, when we might have had time to arrange renting or borrowing another machine, whereas now we’re so close to having to finish up at the site that it’s probably not worth trying. So, on with the number crunching!

El-Amra

We are continually amazed at the size of el-Amra and the variety of periods represented there. However, there have been multiple trials and tribulations in our work (some of which we will not mention here, following the idea that discretion is the better part of valor), not the least of which was our EDM (the major piece of equipment needed for surveying) malfunctioning.

Jane and Melinda contemplated kicking the machinery, but managed to keep themselves under control for the couple of days of troubleshooting which were required to find out that the problem was due to a faulty cable. A cable is on its way from the US to Cairo now, but in the meantime we’re manually crunching numbers in the field to make due. Since the Polish magnetometry team is arriving Saturday afternoon, we were in a bit of a panic about being able to lay out an area for them to start surveying. In the meantime, Antonio has been collecting and processing pottery, which has started to become overwhelming already, though we’ve only been collecting from one of the three cemeteries so far.

El-Amra is predominantly known for its predynastic activity, being a type site for a division of that period (originally called the “Amratian Period” after the name of the site, though most scholars now call it the Nagada I Period). However, it has some earlier activity and a lot of later activity too, including Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom use of the cemetery. The areas with later tombs have not been previously excavated (at least not officially), but we have already found evidence for these periods form surface collection.

Birthday 9/9/07

For my birthday, we had a cake, pastries, and ice cream cones. The three of us felt fairly sick after trying to eat some of each after having eaten a lot already. However, the house staff seems to have enjoyed the gorging and going into sugar shock afterwards, especially since the beginning of Ramadan (a month of daily fasting during daylight hours) was approaching in just a few days. I didn’t make a big deal of the day, trying to forget (at least for a time) that I was starting a new decade of my life. However, I named this the decade of finishing things.

Our site! 9/11/07

After our inspector arrived on Monday, we had lunch and then proceeded to the site… well, sort of… We had some trouble finding it at first, since we had not been allowed to visit it until we had permission to survey it. We wandered around in a quarry for some time before Reis (Arabic for foreman) Ibrahim (the head of the family from Guft who are our survey and excavation foremen/supervisors) found a local man who knew what site we were looking for.

When we found it, we were amazed at the size of it. Having seen the maps available (which are old and not at all detailed), we knew that the site was large, but that didn’t prepare us for seeing it in person. It is well over a square kilometer in size.

Tuesday, we had to head back to Qena with our inspector so that she could sign papers with the Qena inspectorate. We worked a few hours in the morning and then left for Qena straight from the site. Having gotten up early and the weather being hotter that day, Qena didn’t seem nearly as charming as it had two days before. However, we did get a chance to take a few pictures near Nag Hammadi this time.

(See my previous post on Qena for another picture)

Qena 9/9/07 (a.k.a The first trip to Qena)

Though we are staying at Abydos in Sohag Province, the site we are working at is a few kilometers away, just over the line into Qena Province. So, the Sunday after we arrived, we drove to Qena (city) to meet with the inspectors there and make sure we were ready to start work.

The drive to Qena was absolutely beautiful. Around Nag Hammadi, the Nile and the high desert cliffs become very close on either side of the road. We marveled at the sight. Arriving in Qena (and thence wandering around trying to find the office of the inspectorate), we were impressed with how clean and pretty the city seemed. However, upon finding the local inspectors, we discovered that they had no idea we were coming (apparently they didn’t send word from Cairo about our project at all, much less that it was approved), and our assigned inspector was already working at another site. Luckily, we had multiple copies of our permissions in-hand and the head inspector was very accommodating. It took some time (and a trip from one office to another), but he found another inspector to work with us, who would arrive at Abydos the following day. Though, the site is in Qena, they assigned an inspector from Sohag to our survey project, since one was not available from Qena.

The following afternoon, our inspector arrived, turning out to be a beautiful, young, Coptic woman in very western dress. She had some difficulty reaching the house because the local police at the check point in Abydos did not believe that she was Egyptian at first, and had to be convinced that she was indeed an inspector. Our inspector has been wonderful with us, though she continues to be mistaken for a foreigner along with the three of us (not that they are mistaken that we are foreigners, but they never seem to remember who we are and that we’re not tourists from day-to-day on our way to and from the site).

From Cairo to Abydos, 9/7/07

Last Friday, we set out at 6 AM for Abydos. The first 45 minutes or so went smoothly and speedily. However, once we hit the first check point at the northern end of Asyut Province, things slowed down considerably, since we had to drive with an escort most of the time and had to wait at each check point to switch to a new set of policemen in a different pickup truck. At one point, our escort ran out of gas, and we had to wait while they called for another truck to meet us down the road and they tied their pickup truck to a tractor-trailer in order to toe it to the nearest gas station (gas stations being, of course, few and far between out on the desert road).

Driving through Asyut, we were all looking forward to passing by the city of Asyut, near which there are ancient tombs and other monuments. However, we were continuously confused by the signs that said how far it was to Asyut and in which direction you were to go to get there. Every several minutes we would see signs, generally going in an order like this:

Assyut 8km →

a few minutes later…

↑ Assyut 150km

Then…

↑ Assyut 180km

And yet again…

← Assyut 2km

The signs continued on in this fashion throughout Asyut Province. There were even a few after we had passed by the city. We made two brief stops, one in Asyut to use the bathroom, which had a rather large fly colony, and once to get gas. Antonio opted for no bathroom break for himself, but still survived the nine-and-a-half-hour trip.

We finally made it to Abydos, took a deep breath of fresh air, and fell upon our food like a pack of dogs.

Update

We arrived at Abydos last Friday (September 7), but so far our DSL is not working, so we've started resorting to dial-up. I will attempt to catch up on posting to this blog over the dial-up connection until the DSL is fixed (hopefully very soon).

Bumps in the road, but hopefully smoothing out

We finally hit a snag today when it turned out there were no train tickets available for Friday or Saturday, no matter what time of day or class of train car (it's the end of the summer holidays and right before Ramadan, with many people moving around because of these). After much calling, negotiating, and drinking of tea in Mme. Amira's office, it was finally settled someone will drive us and our luggage to Abydos. All three of us are happy to have that settled now, after a long day of worrying.

Jane and Melinda slept much better last night now that they have working a/c unit in their room.

The weather was decent today, in the 90s again. However, the pollution is worse than I remember it having been 3 years ago, but this impression is probably because it's a lot hotter this time than last. We are looking forward to the clear air at Abydos and hope that it will not be too hot (the two closest major cities, Sohag and Luxor, have been about 95F and 105F, respectively; we're hoping for Sohag's weather!

Sept 5 Weather

The weather was remarkably pleasant (comparatively, at least) today, with a high of only 95 degrees (Fahrenheit; 35c). A very hazy morning turned into a sunny and mostly pleasant day, and we were very happy that it was not as hot as yesterday.

Arrived in Cairo

We arrived in Cairo as a rather sleepy group, but got through customs with only minor hassle over our survey equipment. Moving on to our hotel, we discovered that Jane and Melinda's room had a broken air conditioner, while Antonio was sitting pretty in a cool room all to himself.

The evening was spent wandering around downtown Cairo, jet-lagged and doe-eyed, in search of an old favorite restaurant, which we could not find. Eventually, we settled on Pizza Hut and took our pizzas back to Antonio's cooled room.

Jane and Melinda discovered that a shower without sufficient hot water isn't so bad when you don't have a/c, but ended up spending an uncomfortable night, sleeping only a few hours from a combination of the time difference, heat, and traffic noise. However, upon getting to the ARCE offices in the morning, we were happy to discover that the rest of our second day ran remarkably smoothly, with our permissions for work at El Amra now in-hand.

All-in-all, we are very pleased with our progress in Cairo so far and expect to depart for Abydos on Friday.

Last-minute prep.

This is my first post ever to this blog, but it must be brief, as I am still running around like crazy trying to get everything packed! We leave tomorrow afternoon. It's amazing how much stuff you discover you want to have with you for two months. More later...