Category Archives: Egypt

Beasts

Party pain

The hop-step-point familiar from Morris dancing

I had a dream last night that I was lying in my grave and someone was trying to bash my head in with the butt of a levelling rod. Then I woke up with the most appalling hangover. We had a bit of a party here at the dig house last night for a special anniversary and some of us got a little carried away. Or in fact, literally carried away.

We had a famous band down from Cairo for some traditional dance music. They used to play for President Mubarak when that was an acceptable thing to do, but now they’re reduced to playing in the middle of nowhere for drunk archaeologists. Vive la revolution. We also invited our workmen, and a fearsome number of antiquities inspectors invited themselves, forcing me to consume most of my alcohol covertly in the office.

And then there was the dancing; oh dear. I have a powerful memory of dancing the Egyptian stick dance using a ranging rod from the equipment store while wearing a cardboard Nefertiti hat. My grace and elegance, honed through careful practice on the floors of low-end clubs and my six month experiment with morris dancing, was of course captured for posterity on the mobile phones of numerous Egyptian men. I’m sure a productive day was spent in the village swapping files and laughing.

Pimp my dervish: dancing at the next level

In consequence, I’ve spent today on a diet of water, ibuprofen and shame. I’ve watched a lot of DVDs and done a fair amount of shaking, punctuated by ignominiously vomiting out of the living room window half way through Howl’s Moving Castle.

I’ve learned several things in the last twenty-four hours: 1) all traditional Egyptian tunes sound exactly the same, 2) foreign women trying to dance is a class of saleable pornography here, 3) gin – there are attainable limits, 4) Egyptian sparkling wine is not fit for human consumption.

I am going back to bed, it seems I may live after all.

A hard rain

2 Replies

Wet Egypt

I’m writing this post at 7am as we are stuck in the dig house waiting for it to stop raining. If this was what I was after I would have stuck with British archaeology. I estimate we’re about an hour from someone suggesting we play charades.

Archaeology is best done either completely wet or completely dry, but it can go particularly horrible when moisture is introduced to something which has been very dry for the last three thousand years (I am painfully aware that the sheet I put over my new burial yesterday afternoon did not reach the feet). In many ways, the same principle is true at a larger scale in that the entire Middle East becomes unpleasant when it gets wet, as large quantities of rubbish which were relatively benign in their desiccated forms regain their vitality. Often you can smell rain coming in the desert as a faint odour of landfill and wet sheep.

All you need is a cardboard box, some sticky-backed plastic and a sufficient lack of sense. You too can have a Nerfertiti crown.

In the meantime we are employing ourselves usefully in the construction of Nefertiti hats out of cardboard boxes.

An ill wind

You are what you eat (and sometimes vice versa)

2 Replies

With dinner just a short hour away, I thought I’d describe some of the culinary delights of the this excavation. Breakfast here has descended into farce since the arrival of extra team members from another site, none of whom know where anything is or how to fine more if something has run out. If one takes an early seat, there is an entertaining procession of tired people arriving, trying to pour themselves coffee from the empty pot and then looking mournfully at everyone else in the hope that someone will make them more. This is good entertainment while I finish my coffee. I generally have bread covered in ‘feta’ cheese, which is in fact about 70% palm oil.

yum

On site I mainly eat the dead people. This is especially true today when I was removing a pair of semi mummified legs and their coffin soaked in body fluids. The disturbance of the coffin sticks causes clouds of thick, dark brown dust to erupt into the air, which is impossible to avoid inhaling even with a scarf round nose and mouth. There then follows a process of intense coughing and swallowing over the next hour or so, today meaning that by the time second breakfast came around I was feeling pretty full.

Egg fantasies

Second breakfast is my favourite meal of the day; it is eaten on site in a small reed hut. The main reason I like it is that it tastes less like Egypt than the other meals, as it consists mostly of crisps and instant noodles, the monosodium glutamate in which makes me feel a bit funny. Of course, there is no escaping the ubiquitous cold, hard-boiled eggs, which tend to make up the bulk of calorie consumption in Middle Eastern archaeology. I used to dream of an end to the endless eggs, but now my imagination has been worn down to the point where I can only dream of hot hard boiled eggs, or hard boiled eggs made into entertaining food models. I can no longer conceive of a world where I don’t have to eat them.

Today’s lunch: Dr Atkin’s doom

Lunch is usually deep-fried or last night’s dinner with added tinned tomatoes. Today’s lunch is an excellent example of a general problem with Middle Eastern excavation cuisine, which is an unhealthy obsession with carbohydrates. This afternoon’s offering was pasta, spaghetti with rice, chips and bread. I spend the afternoon feeling very heavy. In general, however, the food here is pretty good and has vastly improved over the years I’ve been coming. Only 85% of dishes now involve tinned tomatoes and it is almost always possible to tell the dessert course from the soup. There are still some things which just can’t be replaced, and I have a large Sainsbury’s chorizo hidden in the fridge for the dark days ahead. And a great deal of alcohol.

Pork and gin: Egypt travel essentials

I must leave this here as dinner is about to be called (or at least I profoundly hope it is as one of my new colleagues from the other site is playing Celine Dion on the flute and this seems the only (non-violent) way to stop her), I must go and see what delights await this evening…

Digging up old stuff in hot places

broken things and dead people's rubbish