I can’t believe that I forgot to mention that I went in the
pylon yesterday! Tasha needed more boxes of pottery, so Aaron and I grabbed our
flashlights and headed inside. I’ve never been one of the first to enter the
pylon until this time, so I finally got to see all of the wat-wats (bats) and
chase them out of the rooms we needed. The bats are really cute, but the 2
inches of guano on everything is not so cute.
Today saw more epigraphy and bread mould stats. There were
lots of tourists at the temple today, so I had my picture taken a lot as I
worked. Today I tried my hand at a few blocks with pictures on them. Jonathan
and I had to go do a recon mission to the temple to figure out how in the world
the Ptolemies draw their lips. It’s weird. They only do the profile of the top
lip, letting the nose act as an upper boundary. Then they draw a fat oval for
the bottom lip. Very odd. I think I like doing the picture blocks more than the
glyph blocks. But I did do one of my best epigraphic drawings to date on a text
block today. Here’s the block in progress:
 |
| The light is actually not really good, but the block is really deeply carved. |
And me drawing it:
The sunshade is sort of helpful, but we really need the
block to sit in the sun so we can see the lines. It has to be tilted just
enough that there’s a bit of shadow so we can see the lines, and we have to be
careful about not getting out heads or hands in the way of the sun. Needless to
say, this leads to a lot of moving around the block, holding our hands at funny
angles, and cursing the sun when it moves before we can finish. I’ve never wanted
to be ambidextrous so much in my entire life. We must look like total goofs:
scooting to the other side of the block, then putting our hand down,
immediately picking the hand up and moving to another side of the block, only
to have a head in the way, so moving back to the first side we were at. The
worst is when we’re at the side of the block so your hand has nothing to rest
on, but you can’t do it upside down because then your hand forms a shadow. It
really is quite a game.
