Jacob's Egypt Diaries By mollie  [89 more lists]

Got on a plane in Los Angeles, got off in Cairo. It was roughly a twenty hour trip, LA to JFK, JFK to CAI, faceless airports and cattlecar mentality. However, flying in above modern Egypt, an oxymoron in of itself as nothing in Egypt is truly removed from antiquity, made it all worthwhile.

The city emerges out of the desert, shaking off the accumulated weight of centuries of sand and dusty wind. Large swaths of brown, hues of white and red and orange and even a little burnt sienna, lay siege to the somewhat dilapidated white sandstone buildings that rise out of the desert like small oases of clustered tenement style habitation. From above, it looks as if the buildings sag into the rich desert sand, perpetually in battle with the desert environment.

Tomorrow it’s outside bags packed and ready to leave by 6:45, apparently archaeology does not suffer the petty idiosyncrasies of jet lag. On the i is the pyramids of Giza and the Egyptian Museum, but who really knows what may come with tomorrows first light? After all, that is the beauty of adventure.

Waking up at 6 wasn’t so bad after all. The breakfast here is very interesting, not only are the foods different and unique from the typical American breakfast but the common sense necessity to steer clear of certain dairy and meat products suddenly made breakfast a far more dangerous and potentially exciting meal than in the States. That being said I have not, as of yet, felt the pangs of Tutenkhamen's revenge although the threat hangs high over all of our heads like the fabled sword of Damascus.

After breakfast, we ambled onto our tour bus, which is inconspicuously bright green and far larger than pretty much anything else on the road, and drove through the hectic, that being a severe understatement, streets of Cairo to the Pyramids of Giza overlooking the city. The city of Cairo seems misplaced amongst its desolate abode, almost an afterthought of time and resource, as if it were simply plopped down along the Nile as a buffer between the life giving waters and the death that stalks the desert. The traffic in Cairo follows no observable set rules and is an any thing goes atmosphere; hapless pedestrian beware.

The drivers here make the streets of New York look like a well ordered and polite town, being closer in attitude and temperament to kids in bumper cars and they certainly do not begrudge the use of the car horn, which is probably the most valuable driving tool a citizen of Cairo may have, aside from a bumper like those on bumper cars. Thus, the city of Cairo resounds with an incessant cacophony of honking car horns that give a pulse like beat to the bustling desert metropolis.

The Pyramids of Giza rest on a plateau overlooking the city of Cairo. In all there are three large pyramids, with three smaller ones, as well as various clustered mudabta, a precursor to the legendary pyramids. In Egypt, even the archaeology has its own archaeology. Outside the cramped claustrophobia of Cairo, the pyramids slowly emerge from the smoggy haze, guardians of the deserted wastes beyond and bastions of the Pharaohs.

From a distance the pyramids seems small and sluggish, more a tourist attraction akin to Vegas than an architectural miracle of the desert resplendent as a trophy to human endeavor and ingenuity. However, this belies the true impact of the pyramids. To stand beneath the great pyramid and stare up, eyes squinted shut by the already harsh round sun, at the precipice set atop thousands, if not millions of roughly hewn sandstone blocks, quarried nearby and carried one by one to be set each in it rightful place, is an experience of profound religious and philosophical implications, the least of which being it really makes a human being feel small and insignificant. Which, from a Pharaonic point of view, is exactly the intended purpose.

If you pay extra, everything in Egypt is rife with paying extra for this or that and don’t forget the ubiquitous baksheesh, you can actually crawl up into the belly of the Great Pyramid and ascend to the main chamber where the sarcophagus of the Pharaoh Khufu was found. Outside it is a dry and dusty day, there is a slight breeze, but nevertheless its was a welcome feeling to enter into the shadowy recess of the pyramid, hidden behind its sandstone facade. However, this feeling was quickly supplanted by one of almost claustrophobic dread as the pathway becomes narrower and the ascent steeper. At one point it almost seems to defy the laws of nature that enough oxygen exist in the subterranean passageway for all the tourists ( of which there seemed an endless supply) to scramble up the pyramid, hunched over, one by one. The room in which the physical remains of the king laid while his spiritual self navigated the afterlife, is minimalist now, smooth dark walls with sharp angles, the only object in the room besides the now empty sarcophagus is a small air conditioner that no longer works. The chamber is a stark contrast to its former glory, when there would have been a plethora of gold and treasure, the benefits of dying a king of Egypt and veritable god among men.

Emerging into the sun drenched world outside, one almost welcomes the heat and lightly faded blue skies because they represent freedom and life, at least for the time being in the desert. Adjacent to the Great Pyramid, are four massive pits in which archaeologists uncovered the solar boats of King Khufu. Behind the pyramid there is a small museum erected over one such pit where we saw a fully reconstructed solar boat. A massive testament to nautical ingenuity these boast were made of cedar from Lebanon and were built out of interlocking series of planks stitched together with rope and twine, a technique I recognized from the famous thousand year old boat in Galilee. Continuing on, we walked along a dusty long road skirting the piles of camel and horse dung, past the Great Pyramid, and the higher capped pyramid, and finally beyond even the third pyramid to a point overlooking the plateau.

From this vantage the pyramids seem far more congruent with the desert than Cairo, rising up from its sandy depths to achieve their great heights, their power and grandeur is only enhanced by the desert that surrounds them, as they only increase the sense of desolation within the slowly undulating desert dunes. On a good day one can stand by the pyramids, looking up to the tops where in antiquity they would have been whitewashed, a blinding beacon of Pharaonic prestige, and then look out to the desert and spot a long black line snaking through the various shades of brown, a bedouin caravan traveling through the interior. Nothing changes and everything changes.

Our first day in the small village of Timai el Amdid. The village takes its name from the ancient city that we will be excavating: Tell Timai. The house we are liv-ing in is an average four story domicile, no different from others in the village. There is running water, sometimes, electricity and even limited internet access. It is not at all a savage lifestyle, however one cannot help but feel far removed from civilization, here in the vast and verdant rice fields of the Nile delta.

Wake up was at 6 am again, it honestly isnʼt even a big deal anymore. It actually makes a whole lot of sense, as the sun reaches its shining apex quickly here and thus the early morning and late afternoons are the best times to work without suffering the burden of heavy heat and a merciless sun beating down upon your back. After a small breakfast we traveled down the road a few minutes and were introduced to our real home for the next few weeks, the clustered, pottery laced and undulating dirt mounds that comprise Tell Timai.

Nestled between green rice fields to the North, and the small villages of Timai and Khafre on both sides, Timai is an ancient anomaly in an otherwise bustling rural town-scape. The area itself has been in continues habitation for centuries and bears witness to the various groups and peoples who have passed through and held sway throughout the ages. A walk of just a few yards reveals limestone blocks that form a platform reach-ing back in history to the new kingdom period. Further on, there is a red brick lined kiln, a vestige of the roman influence in the area. The entire site is littered with pottery, it is a veritable treasure trove of ceramic pots and amphorae, almost as if an ancient version of a Pottery Barn had exploded there. In the brief few hours we spent touring the site, I was struck with the enormity of the place. A casual observer might see dirty and dusty mounds with small piles of cast-aside pottery articles, but upon further inspection the essence of archaeology is revealed.

Mud-brick houses are scattered across the site. An ancient street runs between tow-ering pillars that offer centuries of stratified history. In some places there are round rosy red granite blocks, all that remains of ancient towering columns imported up the Nile from Aswan. It was easy to become fully emerged in the fantasy and history of the place, to imagine yourself walking briskly down the broad, colonnaded street, trying to escape the harsh midday sun.

As the sun rose higher and consequently the heat exponentially worse, we gathered ourselves up and returned to the house, and the reality of modern life. We ate a small brunch and then were given a short lecture on the importance of recording and the nature of excavation. Archaeology is ultimately a destructive process, once a dig site has been worked that history is gone forever. That stark reality makes recording, mapping, and analysis all the more imperative to an archaeological methodology and even more so to us fledgling archaeologists.

The ultimate goal is to find exciting and new discoveries, analyze this radical information, and disseminate it to the world. We are to be simultaneously the guardians of the past speaking on behalf of those who have long since gone before us, and at the same time must perform our duty as their messengers to the future, passing on the knowledge of forgotten generations. It is a hefty responsibility to bear and makes my blood run cold, even under the overbearing desert sun, to think that this is my task.

During high noon in Egypt there is a siesta of sorts. It is far too sweltering outside to do work, so the intrepid archaeologist must retreat inside to the shade and perhaps an iced tea. Yesterday in Cairo my roommate Grant and I bought keffiyehs, the Bedouin headscarfs that one sees so often in Arab society, as well as hookahs. We used the kef-fiyehs on the dig site this morning and I can definitely understand why they are so popular, if not an invaluable necessity, in this region. They are both protective and cooling at the same time, while also being a fashion statement that may help a callow archaeology student from America to fit in with the locals and the desert just a little better.

The hookahs are more of a personal enjoyment. I had smoked hookah back home before so I was familiar with the practice, which is the popular equivalent of drinking caffeinated coffee here. It is a practically ubiquitous sight to glimpse an Egyptian man sitting outside his home or a small roadside cafe smoking his hookah, timeless and apathetic to the modern issues around him.

Grant and I were eager to try our hookah out, so we asked one of the Egyptian house staff Ahmed to help us out. Ahmed does not speak a word of English, and likewise Grant and I donʼt know a lick of Arabic between us. Yet, somehow, we managed to come to an understanding and very soon Ahmed, Grant, and I sat down in the house kitchen area to a hookah session of the local sheesah. Passing the hose around the small smoking circle I was struck with the simplistic beauty of the situation. There I sat, completely at a loss to understand Ahmedʼs confusing Arabic sentences sprinkled variously with random English words, while he too could not decipher our garbled attempts at Arabic, but we were bridging the gap. In a timeless tradition of unreserved hospitality and open friendship, Ahmed, John and I became fast friends over a bowl of sheesah, it was the kind of experience one never forgets.

Tomorrow we begin to dig, I am both excited and apprehensive, but that is the duality of adventure and ultimately archaeology, boundless excitement and enthusiasm for the ages measured by apprehension and the starkness of reality. At the end of the day archaeology is a quest, a holy grail for truth, and while absolute success will ultimately always be fleeting, if not unattainable, we must endeavor on because we cannot help not to, as my favorite quote from Thoreau puts it, “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

Archaeology is a dirty business. Woke up at 6 am again, I see an unfortunate theme developing there, ate a small breakfast and headed out to the dig site again.

However, today was not like yesterday, today we were not tourists, merely observing and walking around Tell Timai. Today we were true archaeologists, in the trenches, wallowing in the early morning dew saturated desert mud, sweating in the soon to follow late morning sweltering desert sun, in a word we were filthy. By the end of the work day, which went from 6 am to 4 in the afternoon, I was dirty, sweaty, sunburnt, damn tired, and probably pretty stinky as well, but I had a shit-eating grin from ear to ear. The great Israeli archaeologist Avner Goren put it best when he said, “Archaeologists are like kids who play in sandboxes and imagine fantastic and creative things, they have just never grown up.” A sentiment I can now fully appreciate after todayʼs activities.

My boots were caked with dried desert mud, my pants and shirt looked like they were made of more dirt than cloth, and somehow the desert sandy silt had invaded all that I owned. I had spent the day working in a five meter by five meter already excavated pit. However, before we could begin excavating we spent at least a half hour clearing away weeds and vegetation from the small test pit that was to become our antiquated and mud-caked home for the next few hours. I found it highly ironic that I had traveled half way across the world and gone through so much so that I could do some-thing I had already become all too familiar with as a weekly chore at home. Who knew my mom was training me for archaeology all those years? On an interesting side-note washing dishes after dinner and cleaning diagnostic pieces of pottery so the ceramist can identify and analyze them are remarkably similar tasks.

On our dig there are local Egyptians known as the Khufti that are employed as the manual labor. They are all from the same small village in Upper Egypt, and are a highly skilled contingent, that have passed down the expertise of archaeological work and supervision from generation to generation, father to son, since the famous archaeologist Flinders Petrie first visited their small village back around 1886 in desperate need of hired help and trained them in the art of excavation.

Today, they are a well paid and highly respected class of Egyptians and a helpful addition to our dig, however they were occupied elsewhere within the dig site, so I was the Khufti for the day. On our dig area we spent the majority of time and effort cleaning up after previous archaeological work, assessing what they had done, and what they had damaged, and trying to be thorough, methodical, and not disruptive ourselves.

The incredible thing about archaeological work, especially in a site that has been in continuous habitation for so long like Tell Timai, is that within the various layers of stratigraphy, there is not one or two great finds but a myriad. In a singular five meters of the earthen Egyptian site we come across an ancient kiln used to fire ancient pottery, and yet above this we had already found more recent pottery deposits and mud-bricks suggesting a wall or building. I know I am partial, but archaeology is really a great science, it is at once adventurous, intriguing, dynamic and always relevant, each day here I feel increasingly lucky to be a part of something so much larger and more daunting than myself.

As the day rolled on, it was an awesome experience to use the skills and techniques I had learned in class this past semester and put them into practice; before they were just knowledge, now they are understanding. I learned to use a trowel and brush to clean “the loose” off a feature so that we could identify and plan it. In the span of just a few hours today I learned the methodology behind the science, how to use a plumb line and level to map a feature on mylar and place it within a 3-D geographic context and how to record and record and record again, because without literature and published work, the history we have uncovered is lost to time and the elements, a story that will never be told.

As we finished up excavation for the day, one of the Khufti workers in another area found something interesting and called out “Shouf, Shouf, Come see! Come see!” He gingerly stepped out of the shallow pit they had been digging, no more than a few milli-meters below the surface layer, and handed a small dirt encrusted object to the dig supervisor in that area. As she examined the curious object it became startlingly obvious that this was no ordinary find. Soon, the entire dig crew mobbed the small area, every-one expectantly crowding around; a collective sense of exuberant excitement shared by all, from the venerated Dig leader Dr. Littman, or the Big L as some the dig crew have begun calling him, to even the youngest crew member, me.

The Khufti had uncovered an ancient effigy. Only the first day of digging, and we had discovered an incredible relic of history, an intriguing and unique piece that galvanized everyone and served as a catalyst for our growing archaeological thirst, or perhaps I was just a little dehydrated at the end of the day.

Upon further inspection back at the dig house, it was revealed that beneath the centuries of accumulated dirt and grime the find was a remarkably well-tooled and preserved ivory effigy of an ancient Egyptian fertility goddess. Archaeology is like that, you may go an entire season without a really great find, or you may just stumble onto something significant within the last few minutes of your first day. In archaeology, as in life, you never really know what hand you will be dealt.

I find it poetically fitting for us to find such an outstanding fertility effigy on our first day, it is Inshallah as the locals would say, a blessing upon us and hearkens well for a productive and inspiring season ahead. We may find nothing else of interest, or we may make a discovery that will dynamically alter history and the global consciousness, for that is the nature of archaeology. It is the imperfect science, and yet I see beauty in its imperfections, and its rare moments of clarity.

When the effigy was first pulled out of its shallow grave in the Egyptian mud slowly baking under a heavy sun and resurrected, it was first handed to Dr. Littman. He looked at it carefully, turned it over in his weathered hands slowly examining the bottom and sides, and then paused as if to reflect and per-haps savor the moment, he then announced with absolute certainty born only from unique and diverse lifelong experience, “This piece will end up in a museum.” This is archaeology, and a h**l of a first day.

Mornings have begun to take on a distinct routine. Wake up at 6, get dressed and ready for the day, scarf down a quick breakfast, and then head out to the dig. At the dig site we are broken up into groups of about three or four and then work under a supervisor, who is usually in the midst of postgraduate studies. I have been working in the British bloc, we are two groups somewhat set a part from the rest, work¬ing under two Brit supervisors. It is quite fun to work with them as they have great atti¬tudes and are always very positive, which makes the hard work much easier. Also, since we have amongst our group one Aussie, four Americanos, and two Brits there is much cross cultural sharing going on, particularly slang words. My repertoire now includes: gʼday mate, bullocks, cheeky fellow, pikey b*****d, cheers, fannying around, bloody h**l and god knows what else.

Our dig crew is a large and diverse group, yet it is still so easy for us all to get along. We are brought together by a common passion for archaeology. Last night, we all sat on the roof and watched the sun, large oblong and vividly orange, slowly settle beneath the horizon, as we smoked hookah. Someone remarked that they felt more comfortable with this group of people than at home, because here, amongst kindred spirits, they could truly be themselves. We often have long and winding conversations about arcane areas of archaeology and history. Here, in a small corner, of a dusty desert country, amongst the rice and wheat fields, we have managed to cultivate an atmosphere of learning and enlightenment, we support, challenge, and help to discover each other. It is truly a for¬mative experience.

Today I cleaned a five meter section of wall in my unit. We used our trowels to scrape away the dirt, sand, silt, and clay on the surface so that we could see a full pro¬file of the section. Stepping back it was amazing to look at the five meter span of wall which was about five meters deep. For many a time machine is an elusive concept, merely a fevered dream of the mad scientist, yet there I was looking back at centuries of time, and with a little imagination, I was off. Here was a pottery deposit, perhaps a junk pile from an ancient kiln? There was a large swath of charcoal, dark and inky black, set a part from the silty cool brown Egyptian soil. Was this the last vestige of an ancient fire that raged when the Arabs had conquered this area, burning everything in their path to the ground?

At this point it is all just conjecture, the flimsiest of science, yet from these inauspi¬cious beginnings, hypotheses are made, theses written, ideas published, and hopefully the world is changed somewhat for the better, if even just a little bit. Honestly, archae¬ology is hard work, it is digging, scarping and hauling dirt. It is muddy, it is wet, it is hot, it is dry, you get dehydrated and feel sick, then you drink to much water and vomit, and thats just one day. What keeps me going is the idea that I am part of something greater. I view archaeology as the light in a dark world, imagine perhaps the fabled lighthouse of antiquity in Alexandria. It was a beacon of learning and scholarship, a shining light of hope for a troubled and scared world. And I see archaeologists as the lighthouse keep¬ers, it is we who must see to it that the beacon continues to burn, the flame to flicker.

At the end of the work day I sat under the shade of a small umbrella, desperately try¬ing to escape the har or heat, but failing miserably. In the shade it was probably only 100 degrees, maybe more. As the working day came to an end, and the dig began to wind down, I was joined under the shade with some of the local boys working on the dig who I had become friendly with. I shared my water with them, while they asked me questions about where I was from and how old I was and if I liked Egypt. Soon there was quite a crowd growing, and we had an impromptu cultural exchange going.

Although I knew little Arabic and they little English, we communicated with hand gestures and simple smiles. One of the boys was particularly young, the same age as my little brother back home and we sat there and shared a bottle of water, a precious commodity in the unforgiving desert and simply enjoyed the brief respite from the work and heat. I taught him how to make a shaka with his hand like on my dirty black trucker hat where it says, “Hangloose Hawaii” below a picture of one and we talked about futbol and the world cup (heʼs rooting for Espana and Messi). It suddenly occurred to me that this was as much archaeology as the strenuous work I had been doing all that day, be¬cause ultimately archaeology is about bringing people together, bridging the cultural di¬vide, and sharing aloha. Before the crew left for the day we took a picture with the boys, there I was dirty as a pig wallowing in mud, with my filthy black trucker hat backwards, my blue and white keffiyeh now stained a muddy brown in some places around my neck, smiling through the dirt and grime, as my new friend, Hamet, sat next to me smil¬ing with his thumb and pinky finger of his hand out, the rest down, throwing up the shaka, completely stoked. It was a transcendent moment.