Despite the fact that my wonky jet lag has had me up since 2:00 am, it has no bearing on how absolutely awesome today has been. Waking up at 2 did not thrill me by any means, but it also did not surprise me. I tried to fall back asleep for a while and then I just gave up. Quite randomly one of the movie channels was showing Halloween 2. I watched a little bit of that and did some reading. I’m nearly done with the Luxor Guide Book Richard got for me and I’m also finishing up Middlesex as my fiction fix, or fixion. That is all besides the point. Today I made it a point to wake up early and stay up! Even the staff has started calling me, “Girl who sleeps all day.” That’s pretty sad seeing as though the entire point of me being here is to see the sites. I mentioned yesterday that I was supposed to head over the the West Bank today with Mouhson, one of the excavators here. He was also going to see to it that I had a permission letter to get into the sites since my aniquities pass has not yet arrived. Unsure of what time that all would take place, I met Richard for breakfast at around 6:30 where I had coffee for the first time SINCE THURSDAY….rarely do I bust out the Jesus Christ…but Jesus Christ was that a beautiful thing…3 cups later and I was finally feeling fabulous and 100% Kelly. After breakfast, Richard gave me his cell phone so that Mouhson could call me when he was ready to go to the West Bank. So I stayed up the entire time only to wind up being too antsy by 10:00. At 10:00 I decided to walk to the office where the field school classes are taught to see if I could find Jessica, the osteologist specialist here whom is supposed to trade me my American cash for her Egyptian pounds. She wasn’t at her office so I walked with the librarian archivist, Mari back to the site to see what was going on with the West Bank excursion. When I get there Mouhson says that he is unsure if he can go anymore…which I had kind of figured at that point and in the event had already started replanning, thinking I would hit up Luxor Temple instead, it is afterall, a really close walk from the hotel. However, instead he tells me that the is going to have two of his friends drive me there and that they will take me to pick up a letter from the director to ensure that I get into all of the King’s Tombs in the Valley of the Kings for free. I look over at these men, both complete strangers to me. I had that nervous unease start to radiate from the pit of my stomach. He explains everything to me again, these men work on a site in the Valley of the Kings…they will drive me there, show me where they are working, get me my letter, and then I can walk around on my own…once I am done, I go back to their site and find them and they will take me home. I wont lie, I was not 100% comfortable with doing this. The men seemed to speak very little English, and if anything happened I did not have a phone, or a good understanding of the area I was going to, and again that ugly language barrier never makes any situation seem like a good one. However, I know that my team would never put me in harms way, so I got into the car. This was a pretty long car ride which took us deep into the small Luxor villages. One guy turns to me and says, “These are the local roads, not the main roads.” This begins what will continue throughout the rest of the day an onslaught of sarcasm, banter, and inside jokes. I respond with something along the lines of, “Oh you don’t say…not the main roads eh?” He laughs. I start asking questions since talking to him makes me feel more comfortable about the car ride. Later, he points to this building and says, “That is Carter’s House” (Carter is the archaeologist who discovered Tut’s Tomb). Pretending not to have heard what he said I say, “Ohh that’s YOUR house, how fancy.” We get closer and closer to the Mountaineous landscape beyond which lies the hidden tombs of New Kingdom Pharaohs known as the Valley of the Kings. By this time in Egyptian chronology, pharaohs no longer bury themselves in Pyramids. Pyramids, despite having many trick passage ways and chambers, continued to be unsuccessful in guarding the sarcophagus, mummy, and treasures of the dead kings. Preservation and protection of these things were essential to the maitenance of a life after death and so new tactics were adopted. The Moutain Peaks, still resembling the pyramid, and the primordial mound of creation, became symbolic aspects of the landscape that the kings could utilize for their tombs, however instead of being buried within huge mortuary constructions like pyramids, they would have their tombs cut into the rocks and hidden within the Valley. The pictures really do not do justice at all…even I, someone who has been studying Egypt for a bit, and even took a class just last semester, had no idea what to expect when my journey began.
Sure enough once we got in, winding through and through the steep limestone cliffs, they brought me to the site they were excavating. I was introduced to another man whose name I can pronounce but will probably make a fool of myself if I try and spell it (phonetically it's Al fifi). From what I gathered he was leading the excavations on the site but I am not allowed to discuss any of the things he told me. It was great though, he brought me up where no tourists are allowed to go explaining to me all of his ideas and why they chose to excavate there, what they are finding and I was able to have a dialogue with him about it, and ask him questions. After that convened, he introduced me to the director who woud give me the permission I needed to enter the various tombs (to enter tut’s tomb alone is 40 dollars/80 pounds). All that coffee this morning must have really put my on my game because I seemed to be hitting it off with everyone. I nearly felt like an archaeological celebrity, getting to walk around with the people who worked there, given personal tours of the tombs, and all while laughing and having a great time. I mean, yeah I went into Tut’s tomb, I saw king tut’s mummy, I went into Tutmose III tomb, probably one of the most successful military leaders within Pharaonic Egypt, and I went into Ramses the VI tomb (but even I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside so anything interior I stole from google- and so can you! ahh nevermind it's taking to long to load)…but nothing could really compare with the experience of talking to Egyptians, about their own history and being apart of their cohort in a way that we could make fun of other tourist and other americans haha! I didn’t even care about seeing the rest of the tombs, I just wanted to hang out. But I did learn an incredible amount, beyond what I had read and been taught so far. In Tut III tomb, you could see the grid that would be laid out before the inscriptions of heiroglyphs were placed. Most of the time though, as soon as I was being told something, I was finishing the sentences (both correctly and incorrectly that is). Upon leaving, the guy who had been taking me in everywhere says, “I didn’t get her to say ‘Wow’ not even once!” It’s kind of like playing hard to get…the less impressed I seemed, the more impressed they seemed! Eventually it was time to return to the East side. By the way, that the kings were buried on the West bank of the Nile is not an accident. The west is considered the land of the dead. Since much of Egyptian mythology follows the sun, Amun being the Sun god, fertility, birth, and renewal are associated with the east since that is where the sun rises, and the west is associated with death and the setting sun. Instead of driving all the way back, we were dropped off at the ferry and just took a straight shot across the Nile back to the East side, side of the living, where my hotel is, where the site is, and where Luxor and Karnak Temple are. Here are pictures of the from the Nile Ferry Ride. You can just barely see the Mountains outlined.
I went to the site after my trip was over, ate some lunch and talked some more to Mouhson (again I’m pretty sure I’m spelling this wrong, but that’s better than what I originally thought…I originally thought they were calling him Molsen, which strikes my memory as a type of beer, which also may be spelled differently). He said he may be able to set me up to talk to yet another person from UCLA, which would be so so awesome. I just sat back and turned to him and said, “You know, you just met me yesterday, and you’ve already done so much for me (arranging my trip to the Valley of the Kings, getting me a permission letter to the sites, UCLA, also seeing if we could get my room changed so that I could have a better view)…his response was, “You don’t meet people everyday that are this passionate about this kind of work.” I hope I never take for granted what it means to love what you get to do.
To top things off, I came back to my room and this is what the housekeeping women had done:
The past two days I have been not letting them clean my room because I’ve been sleeping when they came by…finally today I let them have at it, and they made me a swan out of my blanket haha and a flower out of my towel, leaving other flowers on my bed.
Tomorrow is Tuesday! I am going to wake up bright an early and go visit Luxor Temple. Afterwards, I will make my way down to Karnak. Wednesday or Thursday, I will return to the West Bank and see more things that I was unable to see (Deir el Bahri, Queen Hatepshuts Mortuary Temple, Tombs of the Nobles etc). Then Friday I head back to Giza! I am so excited to begin excavating. It is a really weird thing…I love archaeology, I love my work, I love my research, but at the same time…all throughout I have had this HUGE piece of it missing…that being I was completely unaware and unfamiliar with the methods and techniques that give rise to archaeology in the first place…mapping, surveying, digging, flotation, identifying features and I’m sure those are only the token words that I know right now…the adventure’s only beginning…these shoes are still too clean for this nomad’s liking.
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