"Walk this way if you would like to stand on a 5000 year old floor"

The days here are always full, there is always something happening around the house or someone to bug if there isn't. The past week has been about settling into the house and the leisurely routine we get to enjoy until February (when we begin working on the site and are out of the house from 630 am to 7 pm with lots of work following). Most of my leisure time has been spent either walking around with a group of students in the amazingly beautiful fields around the house, or studying in the library.

It seems that I always gravitate toward libraries, even when I am in the middle of the Egyptian desert. I love the room because it is cozy and cool - two things that are absolutely necessary from 2 pm - 530 pm here in the oasis. We have each been assigned three presentations - 15 min, 25 min, and 45 min - that we will give at various points throughout the three months. They were assigned based on each students "skill set", apparently everyone has some sort of historical specialty that covers a different time period, and when brought together we create like an archaeological super team. Pretty nice.

My presentations are: The Romans in Egypt to the middle of the 2nd century, Christian Kharga (a nearby oasis), and the Red and White monasteries.

I've actually really gotten interested in the christian sites that I have been reading about, and so the research portion of the presentations has been very nice.

Today was our second field trip! An archaeologist whose work we have been reading in class agreed to give us a tour of an important oasis site, and so our motley crew piled in to the Mystery Bus and traveled about 30 minutes away to the most well preserved Old Kingdom settlement in Egypt - which is very impressive considering the oasis is in the middle of the Western Desert and would have been incredibly hard for the Egyptian's of the Nile Valley to reach. The site is called "Ain Asil" and consists of a cemetary with 5 of the most impressive mastabas found for governors of a district - in fact one of them was second in size only to the Pharaoh's mastaba. It seems that being in the middle of nowhere allowed the governor's of the oasis to flex their power in ways that would not have been permitted had the Pharaoh been made totally aware of what was going on.

The site was amazingly well preserved, it is currently being excavated by the French and apparently they are well known for restoring sites, and so we were actually able to go down into one of the mastabas and see our first Egyptian burial chamber up close and personal. It is absolutely amazing to stand in the little room lit up with a very distinct white light (it allows the paintings to be seen without destroying them) and be centimeters away from something that was drawn in 2500 BCE.

Our group is very interested in the Sheikh Muftah - the local Daklah oasis dwellers of the Old Kingdom - and the Nile Valley Egyptian's relationship, and the site was full of possible clues to their relationship. The settlement that was built near these impressive mastabas originally started out surrounded by MASSIVE fortified walls (almost 4 meters thick), and so clearly the Egyptians were living in fear of something - which the archaeologists suggest were the Sheikh Muftah people living nearby. Apparently the threat was not too great though, because soon after building the fortified walls the city expanded outside of them.

One of the great buildings that was outside the walls was a HUGE Governor's Palace where the men who were building the mastaba's lived. It was lavishly built and furnished, and we know this because it was violently burned to the ground at the end of the 6th Dynasty and was never reoccupied, and the fire was so intense that the wooden doors and columns of the palace fell over and left huge scorch marks on the stone floors, which you can still make out today. This allowed the French archaeologists to pretty accurately guess how tall the structure was, and then reconstruct parts of it nearby.

It has been unseasonably hot here which has thrown all the archaeologists into a panic because they worry if it is so hot now it will be unbearable in February when we start to dig. This heat was readily apparent today as we hiked from the bus about a mile and a half across the desert to the site and then back after wandering around for 3 hours. But there is a plus side to all this desert walking though - my legs feel like steel! I guess it really is true that walking in sand is an amazing workout.

"Remember you are over the edge of the wild now, and in for all sorts of fun wherever you go."
J.R.R. Tolkien