This year’s students, like last year, were chosen by Will
and me through an interview process in November, and once again it seems we
have a good team. Two of the students come from Inspectorates outside of Luxor:
Mohammed Abu el-Yazid (fondly referred to as Abu el-Yazid by one and all) from Sohag,
near the ancient site of Abydos, and Sayed el-Rekaby (who we have taken to
calling el-Rekaby to distinguish him from our Assistant Sayed Mamdouh), from
Kom Ombo near Aswan. The three other new students are all from Luxor: Nadia Abd el-Latef from Luxor Temple, and Mahmoud
Hussein and Abu el-Hagag from the West Bank. Also joining us are our
assistants: Hazem Helmy (Project Manager and Director’s Assistant), Sayed
Mamdouh (Epigraphy Assistant), and new this year Yaser Mahmoud (Drawing Assistant),
who is also a former student of Will’s. We are referred to by the students as
Mudira JJ, the Arabic word for “boss”, and Mr. Will.
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2016 Field School on the roof of ARCE.
Back row, left to right: Nadia, Sayed, Abu el-Yazid, Mr. Will, Mudira JJ, Hazem, Yaser.
Front row, left to right: el-Rekaby, Abu el-Hagag, Mahmoud |
The first full week of the field school started on Saturday,
with orientation to give the students a lot of background about the tomb and
epigraphy before we do any drawing. Through ARCE’s generosity, we again were
able to use their facilities for our lectures, but since their offices are
full, this year they created a “Wendy House” on the roof for us to use. We
ended up with an ideal setting complete with a tea and breakfast anteroom and
fully enclosed, via tents, lecture room. Much better really than last year when
we “borrowed” Afaf’s office for
this purpose and then had to give it back. And, unlike last year, the electricity
grid cooperated and allowed us to give all of our PowerPoint presentations
without any serious interruption. This meant that Mr. Will and I could go through
our entire lecture program: Mudira JJ talking about the landscape of the Theban
Necropolis in the 18
th Dynasty and on the second day (Sunday) a more
detailed analysis of the officials during the reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose
III and how our tomb owner Djhuty fits into this, and for Mr. Will a lecture on
the history of Epigraphy going back to the
Description
de l’Egypt, followed on Sunday by a discussion of the different methods of epigraphy
he has practiced and how it led to the system that we are teaching our
students. During Mr. Will’s lecture on Sunday we also learned that our
inspector had been changed and we were assigned our own inspector just for the
Field School, rather than sharing with the larger ARCE project at the tomb. The
new inspector, Ahmed Hagag Hussein, had previously worked in the Luxor Temple on the
East Bank, where he was a colleague of our student Nadia. Sunday evening we
also met with our two returning students, Peter Fady and Shaimaa Mandor, who along with Hazem will be learning object drawing this
season from Yaser Hussein. The meeting allowed all of us to sit down and better
describe the plan for how the object drawing and epigraphy program would be integrated
into the Field School, and to discuss in more detail the painted areas of the
tomb Peter, Shaimaa and Hazem will be drawing.
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| Mr. Will teaching in the "Wendy House" |
Monday we had the opportunity to bring our students to Luxor
Temple to see the work of Jay Heidel, an artist at Chicago House. This resulted
in the – only to be expected – confusion of arranging for all of us to meet in
a coffeeshop (yet again) prior to entering the temple. Sayed, Mahmoud, and
Mohamed Abu el-Yazid were late because they had been patiently waiting for Abu
el-Hagag, who however had left early, something Sayed swears was unheard of in
the past! Once we had all managed to gather inside the temple, we quickly
realized that Sayed el-Rekaby was lagging behind taking pictures because, not being
native to Luxor, this was his visit to the Luxor Temple, and he was appropriately
awestruck. We met up with Jay in the Amehotep III sun court where he gave the
students a brief introduction to Chicago House’s work in Luxor generally, and
then brought us out to his work area in the block yard. Rather than traditional
facsimile, Jay works with a Wacom graphic tablet to create precise digital
drawings of the reliefs. He explained the method to our students and then
graciously allowed each of them a turn with the tablet. For Nadia this was
familiar territory since she had been trained by Jay in this type of work when
she was his Inspector in the temple. Once we finished at Luxor Temple, we
walked along the Corniche (the road along the Nile River) to Chicago House in
order to introduce the students to the library. Like last year, the CH
Librarian, Marie Bryan, gave them a tour of the library, which was translated
into Arabic by Sayed, and then Ellie Smith introduced them to the photo
archive. We then assigned each student several items to find in the library – a
kind of book treasure hunt – and an exercise we devised last year that proved
to work very well.
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| Jay Heidel teaching our students how to use a Wacom drawing tablet |
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| Jay working with his former Inspector Nadia |
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Learning about the Chicago House library
On Tuesday it was back to the west and the tomb. Hazem had left at the crack of dawn to bring over all of our on-site camp supplies and get everything ready by the time we arrived at 8am. After we settled in and had tea and biscuits – a morning tradition that continues from last year – we quickly learned that Abu el-Yazid is addicted to the biscuits and they cannot be left anywhere near him without them disappearing completely! Clearly, expenditure on biscuits will increase this season. Saad Bakhit then gave the students and our new inspector Ahmed an in-depth site tour of the excavation work outside the tomb, which was followed by a presentation of the tomb excavation by Sayed. This was crucial for both the students and our inspector since he is as new to the site as the students, which is not usually the case. After second breakfast we went on a “walkabout” over the gebel which began with a visit to the Norman and Nina de Garis Davies House because we were kindly invited to have the opportunity to look inside. In some ways visiting the house was touching a piece of epigraphic history since the de Garis Davies’ had lived there for many years while they worked drawing the tombs in the early to mid-1900s and Mr. Will had mentioned them as well as showed some of their drawings to the students in his lectures. It is amazing to think that something so important to the history of Egyptology is still there to be seen and appreciated. All the more so since it was the Davies’ who drew and published our tomb in the 1930s. Starting from Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahari and continuing to the southern end of the Sheikh Abd el-Qurna hill, walking along the necropolis allowed the students to visualize within the actual landscape many of the points relating to the positioning of specific tombs and the general development of the necropolis that Mudira JJ had made during her lectures.
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| Setting up the on-site work space |
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| Mudira JJ and Hazem-happy now that the site is all set up |
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| Sayed and Mr. Will with Hatshepsut's Deir el-Bahari temple in the background |
Wednesday we continued on the West, collecting friend and
colleague Vincent Oeters, a Dutch Egyptologist who has been working with the
Polish mission at Gebelein, and was soon to return to the Netherlands and his
day job at Brill Publishers. He joined us initially for the visit to nearby
TT107, to see the work of Chicago House with Brett McClain, who kindly gave a
detailed explanation of the traditional Chicago House method, providing a nice
counterpoint to the use of technology in illustration work that Jay
demonstrated earlier in the week. Vincent ended up by staying with us for the
entire day, joining the students on their first visit into TT110 to learn about
the history and condition of the tomb. As is so often the case with Egypt, it
proved a small world in that Sayed and Vincent realized they shared a common
supervisor, and, though never having met, had heard a great deal about each
other. Although 1pm would normally be the end of the work day, we met the
students and Ahmed at 5pm to take advantage of the evening opening of the Luxor
Museum to discuss some of the objects in relation to what the students were
earning about epigraphy. As Mr. Will, Hazem, Sayed and Mudira JJ waited on the
East, we learned that this time Abu el-Hagag was actually late in catching the
boat from the West, meaning the other students nearly left without him. Once
inside, we spent nearly 2 hours discussing everything from interpreting the carved
bevel, to the intricate use of both raised and sunk relief within Egyptian
carving to indicate three dimensions on a 2-dimensional plane, to drawing a double
line for carving created by a chisel as opposed to a single line for inscription
created by scratching or incision. As with the students form last year, this
year’s group are already aware of many of the issues necessary for an
understanding of epigraphy and we are very impressed with their grasp of what
is, truthfully, a complicated discipline.
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| Mr. Will teaching the "5 steps" of epigraphy at the on-site tent |
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| Mr. Will demonstrating epigraphy in TT 110 |
