Wittenberg in Egypt

Well, now that we’ve been here a week and a half and have gotten a chance to adapt to life here, we thought we’d share with you what it’s been like living in egypt.

We are staying at a retreat center which has a cluster of maybe seven or eight buildings, and they look really cool–there are domed ceilings, marble floors, arched doorways and cross-shaped windows. The outside would remind you have stucco, and looking out your window and seeing all the buildings against the green of the fields here is a really amazing view. This residence is self-reliant; they grow some fruits and vegetables, especially olives, and even make their own yogurt. There is also a reflection pool here that winds all throughout the complex, and it was rather startling to walk to the pool and pass cows that roam freely and a pigeon house. Everything is really beautiful and relaxing here, and our room is really comfortable, even though we sleep under mosquito nets.

Another really interesting thing about our room is the bathroom. There is no shower in the bathroom, but rather a nozzle on the wall between the toilet and the sink (kind of like how they are on a train). Because the whole bathroom is tile and at a slight slope, the drain is just in the corner and after you shower you have to squeegie the floor so the next person who comes in doesnt slip and fall. The water pressure isn’t very good, but if you shower in the afternoon, you can get really hot water. Another thing we had to get used to was that you don’t flush toilet paper here, but rather throw it away, so it was a real challenge to adjust to that our first few days here.

Because we are staying in an Egyptian residence, we do have to be careful about the way we dress. On the dig site, we have to be completely covered, with long sleeves and long pants. This is not just to prevent sunburn, but also because we work with work teams of men who belong to a very different culture than we are used to. At our residence, we can be slightly more relaxed in our dress code, but we still do not wear tank tops, and we have to wear capri pants or long skirts (below the knee). We thought before we came that having to cover up so much would be unbearable in the heat, but it really has not been too bad at all. It seems you can get used to almost anything.

Speaking of getting used to things, the food here has been another adjustment. Everything is really organic, and the fresh fruits and vegetables (like carrots, cucumber, tomato, melon, apples, and bananas) have been fantastic. Some of the other dishes, however, have taken some getting used to. Kusheri is an example of this…it is a very heavy combination of rice, lentils, noodles, tomato sauce, beans, and onions…it is rather hard on our digestive systems to say the least. There are also many other dishes involving rice, potatoes, and bread, which are very good but also very different than what we are used to eating. The staff here have been really great at accomadating to western style foods: we even had french fries for lunch one day! The EDMAP team has also treated us to ice cream and soda, so don’t worry, we are not lacking in any vital food groups! : )

We are still working hard at the dig site, and looking forward to seeing the Pyramids at Giza this weekend…look for another update soon

Erin, Nikki, and Trinity

hello everyone!

We’re sorry it’s been awhile, but we’ve been very busy the last few days. We get one day a week off, and we took advantage of the break this weekend and headed into Cairo for a night. The first thing about Cairo that took us aback right away was the driving. We are pretty sure lanes exist on these roads, and we THINK there is a speed limit, but so far, we have not seen any proof of either. Basically, it seems that you can drive wherever you want and however fast you want, regardless if there are cars around you or innocent pedestrians trying to cross the 8 lane thick flow of traffic. We decided that if we don’t get into a car accident in Cairo, we probably will never get into one for the rest of our lives.

Erin’s guidebook says that if you can cross the street in Cairo, you can do anything in Cairo, and luckily we managed to make it through the weekend unscathed.

Cairo is a huge, sprawling metropolis sprouting straight out of the desert. It is crowded (about 8 million people), vibrant, and exciting. Everywhere you look, modern skyscrapers intersect with mudbrick and terra cotta buildings, giving a feel of the ancient and present worlds colliding. Our hotel was in a district of Cairo called Zamalek, which is basically an island in the middle of the Nile. After we checked in and dropped our things off, we did what any three American girls would do in a foreign city: shopping! Shopping in Cairo is really fun; not only are the shops colorful and inviting, but there is always the aspect of haggling and trying to get the best price possible. We had a good time experimenting with our feeble arabic until it was time for dinner.

On Sunday we went to the Egyptian Museum. We spent several hours wandering around ancient statues, paintings, and sarcophagi. We looked at ancient jewellry, the treasure of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, and even the actual mummified bodies of famous pharoahs like Seti I, Ramses II, and Amenhotep II. One really cool room we looked at was one of mummified animals. Some animals, like the hippo, crododile, cat, and baboon were sacred to the ancient Egyptians, or at least served as votive offerings to the dead or various dieties. It was really cool to see how the mummification process worked in a different way other than humans. After the museum, we spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the city and hanging out in a coffeehouse so we could work on our weekly reports for EDMAP, because, after all, we are here for work, not pleasure.

That being said, we really need to get back to our reports! We’ll update again soon! And pictures from the weekend/last week are also coming!

Erin and Nikki

Hey everyone! I’m sorry that it’s been so long but it took a while to get the internet connection set up here. So, we’ve been very busy this week! After we arrived in Cairo on Sunday, we headed out to our residence where we are living…Nikki will tell you more about that later.

We are currently excavating a Coptic (Eastern Christians in Egypt) monastery from the 6th century AD located in Wadi Naturn (about a half hour from where we stay). Every morning we wake up at 4:15 because we have to load our things and get on the road by 4:45. Even though that is incredibly early, it turns out that the desert does not get too unbearably hot until around 10 am, so we can get in a good four and half to five hours of work before the heat makes us collapse (HAHA nobody collapsed yet, dont worry). But really, the desert is actually pretty pleasant in the morning, and we are always surprised how awake we feel by the time we get off the bus and take a short three-quarter mile hike to where we are excavating. We spend about an hour reviewing our narratives from the day before and starting a new one for that day. An archaeologist’s narrative is a running commentary of what is happening in our unit (we each have our own 5 x 5 meter unit within the larger site). We take notes about the texture of the sand and mudbrick, as well as its color and measurements and dimensions. We also note if anything has changed from day to day. Sometimes in the morning, the presence of moisture on the sand helps define formations underneath and we are able to see things that we couldnt see the afternoon before.

After we describe our unit, we begin work for the day. Each of us is assigned a team of Egyptian workers who help us with surface scrapes. We are currently digging down 10cm at a time and we do this across our entire unit so everything stays level. In archaeology, the layers (or stratigraphy) is very important because the way artifacts fall in relation to each other paints a picture for us of what happened at our site. We have a ceramicist who catalogues our finds (such as plaster, pottery, glass, or organic materials) and is able to identify diagnostic pieces–those that help us assign dates to our finds. In our last blog, we talked about some arabic words we learned, but now we have had to learn words that help us communicate with our workers on site. We have a complex system of cataloguing in place, so knowing which finds come from which layers or areas of the unit is really important. Thus, we’ve learned the arabic words for “pottery”, “glass”, “level”, “here”, “there”, “plaster”, “five centimeters” and “please go slowly”. It’s really strange, but interesting, to learn a language in this way–not by things you want to say, but by things you have to say in order to accomplish anything.

Besides the actual supervising of the dig in our unit, we are also responsible for creating a top plan of what is happening in our unit. These are done on a 1:50 scale, meaning they are pretty generic in detail but still give us room to do accurate measurements and indicate where we have found things. These top plans are turned in every evening so Dr. Brooks Hedstrom and the other supervisors can create a master plan of the entire excavation site by piecing all of our top plans together. Therefore, we have to be really careful to take good measurements and good notes in our narratives so that the other people on the team will understand what happened in our unit each day.

We work until the afternoon, where it gets so hot that it is dangerous for us to be outside any longer. We have a few hours after lunch to rest, and then the remainder of each day is spent processing our data and updating our written narratives into the computer database. This takes A LOT longer than you would think…no matter how early we start, we still are working on things until 8 or 9 usually…which is kind of late when you have to wake up at four!

That being said…I need to get to bed! But everything is going really well and we are having a much better time than we anticipated. Even the hard work is fun because you get to uncover artifacts that haven’t been touched for over a thousand years! We will update again soon, it wont be as long of a lapse as last time!

Ma’as Salaama!
Erin