My Mut Life

Dig House

Salaam aleekom! It’s been over a week already in the oasis! This time has been much less helter skelter than my first three days, so this blog post promises to be much less scattered than the previous one.

                Upon arriving at the dig house, I jumped into a routine rapidly; I wake up around 7:30 or 8 for an 8am breakfast. This is served in a relatively intimate space with three tables. We have jam, sun bread, various cheeses, tea, coffee, juice (which seems like Tang), and hard boiled eggs available every morning, with added options every once in a while. From there, I would go an exercise with some of the girls, still making sure that I’m covered appropriately, or I would go and read the assignments for the day’s class. At 11:30 we have our seminar about the Oasis and its history in relation to the Nile Valley.  We usually have daily readings for this class, but sometimes we replace the class with field trips to surrounding sites.

A tray that has to be reassembled

 After class is lunch at 1pm with a similarly large spread of food. Following lunch I go off and work with the conservators! The conservators (Sanchita and Bassem) are working on restoring bits and pieces of a large wall painting from a villa that had been excavated in 2004. This villa, from the 3^rd century CE was covered with figural paintings showing various figures and narratives from Greek mythology, like Orpheus in a music competition or Aphrodite being caught with Aries by Hephaestus. The team, upon excavating the building in 2004, was too excited and worked too quickly on the building, and did not call in a conservation team immediately. Because of this carelessness, much of the once intact wall painting is in shambles. I worked trying to piece back sections for the conservators to glue. It was like trying to reassemble a puzzle where you have no picture to work off of and no corner pieces.  Other days I would work on their inventory or take pictures of the pieces so that the conservators could put the pieces together on Photoshop.  I’ve learned a great deal from only about a week of working with them!

Artist with her reconstruction

All of this work was for the reconstructed villa. The archaeologists had an architect build a replica of the original villa using the extant remains and a lot of research. The conservators were trying to put back major sections so that an artist could paint a recreation of what the villa had looked like inside. However, so many sections of the paintings are simply gone, and so this dream may never be an accurate reality.

After I work with the conservators, I have Arabic class at 6pm. Here, I am realizing that much of the hordes of information that I had memorized in my Arabic class at Columbia is useless here. The colloquial is very different from what I had learned, but I’m steadily figuring it all out.

adventures with friends around the dig house

At 7pm dinner is served and we all just relax. The food is always absolutely delicious for every meal, and I’ve made a point to try everything.  There is always a lot of laughter at the table as we share stories and find out more about each other. I love everyone here on the program! We all get along, and are similarly minded. No one complains about our 3 minute showers or the sand that gets everywhere.  The nights before we have a field trip (meaning we don’t have reading homework) we all watch a movie on the dig house projector. We have watched The Gladiator and Weekend at Bernie’s. Good times.

Bedouin loom

Our first field trip was to see the site of Amheida itself (called Trimithis in its own time).  First, however we all stopped at a small side town where Bedouins practice weaving. It was incredible to see them making these beautiful rugs and bags and tapestries from balls of wool. The looms were enormous! Needless to say I got myself a bag and a small tapestry while we were there. From there we went to an elementary school that our maintenance man Gaber’s wife works at. The children were so cute, and very shy at first. Then as we sat and had lunch on their soccer field, they came around and sat and watched us. Then some of our girls went over to them and started to take their pictures. Once this happened, kids came out of the woodwork to get their pictures taken together. They could speak a little bit of English, as they take English classes from very young ages. The older women teachers proudly showed us the sewing work that the girls did in their home economics class. Overall it was amazing to be able to see this part of Egyptian life and to see how similar it is to our own elementary school system.

The old town

After this we stopped in the ‘old town’; the hundred year old abandoned section of this small town. Gaber told us that his grandfather used to live in this town, pointing to a large and beautiful, although crumbling house on the top of a hill. He said that because the area had been so dangerous and rough, people would go into their homes at 6pm and not come out again until it was light the next morning. We peeked into an old abandoned mosque, which was very cool. The floor was littered with empty unused coffins and the old tower which was used for the call to prayer still had steps to go up (although we didn’t try them).

Pottery shard land (Amheida)

Following this quick visit we finally arrived at Amheida. Here we saw the reconstructed villa which was very cool. The artist had recreated two rooms worth of decoration from pictures of the excavation. After our tour of the villa we tromped around the site.  The entire site of Amheida is literally COVERED with pottery shards. If I did not see it, I wouldn’t believe it. You cannot step through the site without stepping on ancient Old Kingdom to Middle Kingdom pottery pieces. At first we all walked through it gingerly, but once our guide said it was okay and unavoidable, we crunched over these thousands of historical artifacts with confidence. Occasionally I would pick one up and inspect it, but knowing I couldn’t take it home with me, I would toss it back into the rest.

Tomb of a governor

Knife found by Julianne

Our other trip we went to Ain Aseel, the most complete Old Kingdom site in Egypt. This was a town/palace complex with a cemetery about 5 miles away. We started at the cemetery, where a French team had excavated a governor’s tomb, which looked like an inverted step pyramid. The whole complex had been under a mastaba which had been removed by the team. Inside his tomb was a beautiful painted room where his body had lain. It was very cool to see the original wall paintings from so long ago. Unfortunately I was unable to get good pictures of them because it was rather dark.  From there we went to the main town and palace complex. This was not very easy though. We took a bus about 10 minutes into the desert. From there the bus could not make it any farther because it would have become stuck in the sand. So we walked across a mile of desert to reach the Ain Aseel site. This was a neat place, where my friend Julianne found an ancient knife on the ground and where more pottery shards roamed free. I found the tomb to be much more exciting however, because the palace had lost all of its paintings, and was just mud brick and an occasional column stub.  When walking through parts of the town, we saw some foxes scamper into some holes in the ancient walls and one of the boys (who was part of another team and had joined us that day) tried to go after them, to no avail.

Dig House seating area outside my room

Other than these large outings and major activities, life in the oasis is an adventure in itself. The sounds of daily life have changed a lot from New York. I hear the braying of donkeys, the sound of the locals playing soccer, and the beautiful hum of the entire town of Mut doing the call to prayer five times throughout the day. The smell of sulpher sometimes wafts over to us from the nearby hot spring, which I checked out recently with some friends, although have yet to soak in it. Despite the weather being in the 60s and coming from weather in the 30s, we all feel quite chilly most of the day. This is helped by two separate tea times in the day, a crucial ritual for the entire house. The first tea time is at 10:30am and the second is at 4:30pm. Everyone gathers around the table, preparing their tea and chatting about their day’s work, warming up, eating a few delicious chocolate cookies in the process.  Life in the oasis is very relaxing, even though the power occasionally goes out and cuts off our water. But no one cares too much about being clean, especially since you get dirty within minutes, or about being harassed by flies (which is constant), or about getting mosquito bites. Everyone is happy and chill.  In the Oasis, koloo tamam! (It’s all good)