A decorated photo I took!

As you may or may not know it is officially my Egyptian weekend. Yesterday I only worked a half day. At around 4:30 I met up with my roommate, Rebecca, and one of the site girls, Delphine, to hail a cab and head to zamalek to see the lecture by Barry Kemp. It was very very interesting. It was all about work being done at a population cemetery site at Amarna. Amarna is an amazing site because it was only briefly occupied during the reign of Ahkenaten which was roughtl 15 years. Therefore, the archaeological material can be pinpointed to a specific point in time and with that certain variables can be accounted for which normally cannot be. The cemetery work is representative of the everyday population at Amarna and the study of the human remains from the cemetery have outlined this paradox for the conditions of the community that worked and lived there. There was a documentary done which only has aired in Europe but part of the lecture confronted the ways in which the documentary omitted some important aspects of the research in the editting. However, the professors remarked that overall the documentary was actually pretty well done, just some things were misinterpretted. For example, the skeletal remains show that any individuals experienced trauma and injuries to the spinal chord and other joint breaks and fractures. Many of these kind of injuries would be typical of individuals engaged in construction labor, which makes sense since the city of amarna was completely built up only with the 15 year span of time. The conclusions were that they were engaged in a lot of hard work- but that is to say they were working long hours on large scale construction. This was miscontrued as brutal slave labor under the crack of a whip. More or less they aimed to answer questions and draw out some of the important information not included after the editting process in the documentary. The film is called The Pharoah’s Lost City, but I don’t think it will be coming to the states any time soon.

The questions that came after the lecture were mindboggling….selective hearing is an obnoxious thing. One of the topics discussed is the fact that the cemetery population was short stature (men were 157 cm, women 153 cm) and the relationship of short stature to nutritional deficiency and anemia. One of the questions they are trying to address is whether or not these deficiencies are a representation of poor living conditions at Amarna itself, or if given the fact that these effects would have been a result of malnourishment from adolescence, and therefore happened to the people moved to Amarna. The latter would perhaps account for some of the motivations Ahkenaten had for instituting a new ideological system and moving the capital in Egypt. One person asked how we know that the short heights of the population was a result of nutritional deficiencies as opposed to it just being a non-egyptian race of very short people…I dubbed this the Oompa Loompa hypothesis. Questions generally bordered on this line of ridiculosity.

After the lecture we headed over to a colleague’s place to order food and have some drinks. I myself am a vodka tonic girl, but the brits are gin drinkers. I thought I hated gin, but it turns out I do enjoy gin and tonics as well….of course that is with enough lemon and enough tonic to overpower the pine tree taste. I also ate way too much sushi, but was oh so delighted. Again this was down in Zamalek, the more upscale area of Cairo which caters to the tourists and to those with more money. It’s where the alpha market is and where a lot of the really nice hotels are. I know it may be weird to believe that there is a sushi place in Egypt, but there is! And I made sure this was a trustworthy one.

Our cab ride was pretty fun on the way back, we had a super social driver. I was with my 3 flatmates and they kept commenting on how much arabic I know and how quickly I learned it. I now know more than two of the girs who have been here for 3 or 4 seasons. And im starting to learn some French from Delphine too!


Also arriving last night was Farrah and her baby. I was the first person to wake up this morning and meet said baby. So far he seems like a pretty happy baby and does not cry, just smiles big. Okay I will even admit that he is pretty cute for a baby. But we’ll see how cute and happy he is once the temperature spikes and once we are trying to sleep through the night. I do feel very terrible though, they managed to lose all of Farrah’s luggage which has absolutely everything she needed for her and her baby. They don’t even have a change of clothes. What a way to start the season…


I did decide to not change my flight around. Instead, once I am done with everything for Khentkawes, I am going to take on a new learning project. So far I have my bearings in fauna, and now with excavation and mapping, and afterwards I can look into learning new specializations. Perhaps I will pair up with the lithics or botany specialists, maybe ceramics, or get more intensive training from the professional drawer who is due to come in at the end of April. Oh my god I’m so obsessed with learning it’s gross…


At 11:00 today Mark gave a tour of the Sphinx. In 1979 Mark did a complete 1:100 scale drawing of every stone that makes up the sphinx, as well ast the two temples before it. The sphinx took him over 2 years..it's absolutely insane.





He did his dissertation on the Sphinx and knows more information than I ever thought possible. It was a wonderful opportunity though. A select group of us was able to walk around and get closer than the general public. Though I work near the sphinx everyday and I have taken pictures of it, this was a new experience for even me. Here are some pictures I took of the sphinx and of the valley temples. Some of the images you can see clearly the levy holes in the limestone from where they were quarried.







Towards the end of the tour we were greeted by the first sand storm of the season. It got really bad by the time we were in the car and it was quite the adventure walking home form the villa. Here you can see it beginning, but when it picked up the pyramids vanished completely from view.










What a bummer to have a sand storm on our day off….this means no pool. Also the pressure from all the air and the wind has caused a wicked headache….in bed with a book for me for the rest of the day. Andddd no proof reading of this