Today was the last day of the week for us, and it’s a good
thing, too- we’re all a little loopy and in need of some rest. Jonathan and I
started matching the blocks on site with what’s in our database. There are
many, many more on site that will need to be added, but we’re starting to get a
good handle on things. It’s pretty clear that all the epigraphic work for a
future publication won’t be getting done this season, but we do think that we
have several blocks that form part of the Greco-Roman mammisi structure* that
already exists in front of the temple, as well as several blocks that might
form a whole new Saite chapel! There’s not nearly enough to rebuild the whole
thing, but we can learn a lot of interesting information from them. Greg (the
co-director, married to my advisor Nadine) has done most of the math for us and
figured out how many bricks we need and what size the mastaba benches should
be. It sounds like we’ll be getting something like 20,000 bricks for 4 very
large mastabas.
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| A block from the mammisi structure. |
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| One of our blocks that might come from the mammisi. |
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| One of our blocks that comes from a Saite chapel. |
Life is getting a little hectic around the house. The guy
who owns the building is letting us use the large downstairs room and kitchen
for free. It’s a nice place where we can all eat together and a much crappier
kitchen than what’s in our apartments so that our workers don’t screw anything
up upstairs where we have to pay for it. We also can store a lot of our work
gear down there. But starting today, the owner’s family is coming into town for
a week and we’re forced to move upstairs to our apartments. We can still eat in
the big room, but all of our work gear and the cooking have to be moved up to
our tiny apartments. On top of that, we’ll be having a team member joining us
tomorrow who is married to Eslam, our reis (chief Egyptian in charge of the
workers), so both she and the reis will be moving in with us... somewhere. It’s
going to get a little crowded around here and poor Lindsey has to start
sleeping in the unfinished kitchen in our apartment (we have 2 apartments, I
know it’s confusing- I’ll post a big thing about it once everything calms down
and I can get some pictures).
I’m not sure what’s on the agenda for tomorrow, but I’m
guessing sleeping in will be high on everyone’s list! We get up at 5am every
morning and spend all day in the sun working, so having Fridays to sleep in is
very nice. We also have TVs in our apartments this year (crazy!!) and they get
the Arabic music video channel, which is always super entertaining, so we might
watch some of that.
*A mammisi is a chapel that became popular in the Greco-Roman
period. It was dedicated to the baby god. It literally means “birth house” and
typically has scenes showing goddesses (usually Isis or Hathor) suckling the
baby god.
