Oh, The People You'll Meet

Aside from just our group from UofC, we have a lot of Egyptians that are instrumental in this excavation. Here are 3 of them:

This is Eslam, our reis. He’s basically the Egyptian head honcho, watching over all of the workmen. He brought a small team of specialists with him from Luxor that have worked with us before and are trained in finding small details (they are also SUPER protective of us and make sure that none of the locals so much as bat an eye funny at us). Eslam also acts as our Egyptian liaison. Anything we need in the town, from cell phones to workmen to car drivers to refrigerators (seriously), Eslam coordinates them all.

Meet Ossama, our site inspector. Ossama is assigned by the SCA to make sure we are following all the rules and don’t damage the site. He’s really nice and very funny. I feel a little bad for him, though, because he really has nothing to do all day, so he kind of wanders from our area down drawing pottery to up where the digging is going on at the tell.

This last guy doesn’t have a name. Well, I’m sure he does, but I don’t know it. This poor dude has the sole job of carrying water from the bathrooms to the tell site about ¼ mile away for the 70 workmen (!! this number is insane. Last year during the first week, we could only get 15. It shows you how bad the economy here is that less than $10/day doing hard manual labor is actually desired). He must make the trip 20 times per day. It’s all in the sun and he has these really crappy flip-flops. Every time he passes, I feel so bad for him.

- People person

PS. Have I explained what a tell is? Probably not. Basically, it’s a big giant mound where layers and layers of habitation have built up into a mini-mountain. The ancients would kind of just fill in old houses and build on top, so tells build up fairly quickly and can be quite high. Ours is only preserved to about half of what it would have been originally, and it is probably 15 meters high (perhaps more? It’s hard to guess). I’ll try to throw up another photo at some point that has some men on it for scale.

PPS. You thought I forgot about the pigeon, didn’t you? Never fear! I even have a picture:

The pigeon actually wasn’t bad. Our cook marinated it in some sauce that was very flavorful and filled the whole body with some kind of hearty rice. It tasted a lot like dark meat turkey. My biggest complaint was that there was hardly any meat on it, and what was there was impossible to find/get at. In total, there was probably the same amount of meat on the whole bird that you’d find on a large chicken wing. I’d eat it again if we’re served it, but I’d rather have a nice juicy steak... or hamburger... or fried chicken... or ice cream... it’s going to be a long season. A more detailed food blog is to come.