Pot Sherds and Bat Poop

Remember how I said Thursday was awesome? Well today was DOUBLY awesome! I spent the morning sorting pottery with Tasha. That was just kind of so-so, since I don’t really know what I’m doing and I feel kind of useless putting things into piles only to have her completely re-do them.

We had THREE cats this morning and the mom, Patches, was soooooo cuddly because she wanted way more food than I was willing to give her. I got to pet Kiri, the same cat I saw last year, but she gave up on getting another handful of food much sooner than her greedy momma. Another one of last year’s kittens came for food, but he was very skittish and only stuck around long enough to get his food. Oh, you’d like to see pictures of them? Well, I was going to do a whole post on them (and still probably will...several times), but here’s a sneak preview:

Pretty Kiri

Patches (she reminds me of Koda)

After second breakfast, Greg and Nadine took me to a part of the site that is on the complete other side of the tell. It’s a bakery installation and has tons and tons of bread moulds! I have a really awesome idea for a dissertation, it’s just going to mean a few more years of coming to Edfu, and maybe spending a week or two on another dig to look at their stuff. I’m really excited, but I need to talk to Dan to see how feasible something this big is going to be for our marriage...

Once I got done drooling over all the fun bread things, Tasha, Susan, Nadine and I braved the pylon to get some of our old pottery from pervious years. A pylon is kind of the huge entrance gate of the temple. When you google Egyptian temples, it’s pretty much that huge trapezoid that forms the front of the temple. There were tons of boxes in a hot, tiny room full of bat poop (though the bats that produced the poop were very adorable). We thought the boxes would have been stacked in a certain order, but it turns out that of the 150ish boxes in the room, the ones we needed were in the back corner, behind and order all of the others. Needless to say, it took a bit to get what we needed. Oh, and did I mention there was no light, so we were all holding up our cell phones to be able to see? I’ve pretty much decided that I like getting dirty when it’s not super hot and humid outside.

I spent the rest of the workday drawing a few sherds that Tasha wanted done. They were actually pretty good and I only had to re-do one of them when Tasha said it didn’t look quite right. See? I’m working hard!

It took even me a minute to realize who this was.

I’ll spend this afternoon reading, then it’s dinner time, bed, and up at 5am to do it all again tomorrow. Sunday-Thursday Tasha has permission to stay until 4 instead of the normal 1:30. I’ll probably stay with her most days, so posts might end up later.

- Bat poop Treader

PS. I’m learning quite a bit of Arabic, but unfortunately the only words I can remember are stupid ones: mosquito, teddy bear, cat, and okay.

Getting Dirty

Guys, today was AWESOME! The biggest reason was probably because I got 7 completely uninterrupted hours of sleep last night. Tasha actually had to shake me awake because I didn’t hear the alarm clock. I’m so glad I brought ear plugs to help drown out the noises of the city (prayer calls, dogs barking, random yelling, etc).

It was another fairly lazy day on site. I spent the morning writing up labels for Tasha’s “pottery town”. All of the labels from last year were eaten by dogs, so we needed to re-label all of the pottery mounds with their excavation position information. The great thing was that as we were writing labels, Susan whispers, “Turn around” and lo and behold, the same Edfu kitty that I got to pet at the temple last year had come to visit! I was able to coax her over and give her a handful of cat food, which she gladly inhaled. Of course, she wanted more, so cried and cried and cried, but I didn’t want to make her sick. Plus, there’s only 1 bag of cat food for the whole season. Because I gave her food, she eventually let me pet her. Well, I should say that she let me let her pet herself against me, if that makes any sense. I held out my hand and she rubbed against it for a while, which made me very happy.

After lunch Greg showed us around the site a little more. This was the best part. We have a place in the Old Kingdom area that has a whole door outline preserved! This may not sound very interesting, but you almost never get this kind of thing, and the fact that it’s Old Kingdom and in an area that’s easy to excavate means they might let me do it! We then went into the silo area and he showed us all of the stratigraphy layers in all the different places and where Susan would be excavating. The whole time we were standing on the ancient mud flooring. So cool. Plus, we got dirty! I’m sure I won’t be so excited about this fact in a few weeks, but the fact that I came home yesterday and only needed a shower because I was sweaty was a little disappointing.

I ended the day having Tasha show me the differences in some of the pottery I’ll be drawing. I’m not sure I completely understand it all yet, but I’ll get there.

Now that I’m clean, I’m going to do some laundry (by hand- this will also be another blog post in the future). I’ll probably skip the usual afternoon nap today since I want to be able to sleep tonight again. Last night we discovered the roof is actually pretty nice (aside from the owner’s dogs that live up there- I don’t want to talk about how depressing that is), so we might go up once the sun goes down.

We found out that Skype does work on our stick, though since the internet still isn’t great, Dan and I were kicked off after only about 10 mins. Sorry, babe. It was so nice to talk to him, but after no sleep and a long, tiring day on site, I got really home sick and started crying a bit. After today, I’m much better. I still miss Dan and the kitties a lot, but I am really loving it here... which appears to be a good thing, as Nadine mentioned today that I was now roped into coming back for the next few years... Interesting.

Well, that was today. Tomorrow is our free day, so I’ll probably post a theme blog. I’m thinking food. We start excavation for real on Saturday, so I’ll really be able to comment about excavations then.

- “Sleep makes a lot of things better” discoverer

PS. Since I spend most of my internet allotment checking email and posting blog posts, I don’t really get to keep up with the world, so PLEASE say hello occasionally on here or via email so that I know what you all are up to and what’s going on in the US (are the Cardinals winning?!?). Facebook and twitter posts are usually just quickly skimmed. And if there’s a theme blog you want me to do, let me know!