Despite a late night, we still managed to put in a, somewhat
shortened, working day at Chicago House on Friday, and enjoyed a lunch with friends
and colleagues in the Chicago House courtyard which, amazingly, bore no signs
from the goings on of the night before. JJ restrained herself and resisted the
call of the famed Chicago House koshari in order to save her appetite for the meal
at Sayed’s home, to which we had been invited earlier in the week. Expecting to
be the only guests, we were pleasantly surprised to find both Hassan and Hazem
invited as well, so we travelled together across the Nile by moonlight. One of
those evenings when you have to pinch yourself and are reminded of the
extraordinary beauty we take for granted in Egypt.
Yet again, a lavish meal was prepared by Sayed’s wife.
Seeing as we had requested no red meat, we were taken aback to realize that
option had been replaced by an entire duck, an entire roasted chicken, and a
selection of Egyptian “fried” chicken in its own “secret recipe”. Sayed's young
daughter Jena flirted outrageously with Hazem, as only a 3 and-a-half year old can do,
in light of the fact that he ate the last kofta at the last dinner he had at
their house, and she will never let him forget it! We also met the newest addition
to the family, a lovely 2nd daughter named Malak, who at only 8 months
old happily fell asleep in JJ’s arms. It was a lovely evening for everyone.
On Saturday, Hassan continued teaching the students how to
master Illustrator and the tablets at the Karnak Lab. Hazem’s uncle, Reis
Mahmoud, surprised us all with an amazing second breakfast, that rivalled what
we had been eating on the west. It also gave our worker Mostafa a better idea
of what we’d like every day!
The location of Karnak Lab, tucked behind the Khonsu Temple
Reis Mahmoud and Mostafa display the breakfast spread
After breakfast, but before returning to the digital
teaching, our students Nadia and Shaimaa who had completed 4 months of training
at Chicago House as artist trainees, displayed their portfolios, including
many of their practice pieces and explained the Chicago House “method” to their
fellow students. Will confirmed that he had learned in exactly the same way
when he was working at Chicago House in the early 2000s and had very similar
practice pieces framed to put on his walls at home. As Abu el-Yazid said, “he
never expected to see fellow Egyptian colleagues succeed in mastering the
extremely difficult, but highly respected, Chicago House style of epigraphy.”
We are very proud that they just happen to be our own students!
Nadia and Shymaa presenting their Chicago House portfolios
At the end of the workday we
surprised the students with an invitation to celebrate Sayed el-Rekaby’s
birthday with drinks on the roof of the Sharm el-Sheikh coffeeshop. A place that is
fast becoming our preferred post-Karnak Lab retreat. Abu el-Yazid took over the
role of Master of Ceremonies, and praised Sayed for his recent work at
re-writing Egyptological history at Kom Ombo. Stay tuned for the official announcement,
but here’s a hint – it has to do with Hatshepsut and Thutmose III! After the
coffeeshop, Will and JJ headed off for lunch at the Oasis, where we normally
dine in solitary isolation. But on Saturday we found we were sharing the green
dining room with another diner enjoying the quietude. As we were leaving she
enquired of JJ about the location of reliable ATM machines, and in the course
of the conversation we explained something of our work, and learned that she
herself was from New York and working temporarily in the Unicef office in
Cairo. An hour later, after a fascinating and insightful conversation with the
woman, whose name we learned was Kay, we made our way home, discovering that the
later departure from Oasis meant that we had a cool evening breeze coming off
the Nile as we walked the pedestrian Corniche. It had taken us two-and-a-half years to realize that this was the preferable walk home, as opposed to the 4-lane highway we had ordinarily used. And we wondered why we did not
do this sooner!
Celebrating Sayed el-Rekaby's birthday with selfies
Sunday proceeded much as Saturday had, with Hassan teaching the
students in Arabic, while JJ had an “office workday” at the back of the lab and
Will tried to remember his Illustrator skills and master his own tablet, failing miserably at the tablet and incapable of remembering Illustrator. At the
breakfast break we were pleased to see that Mostafa had taken our request to heart
and brought a spread similar to what Hazem’s uncle had provided the previous
day. Although we love having fuul and tamayya every day, it appears our students
are not quite as fond of it when working in a darkened lab at computer screens.
Instead, they requested a “light” breakfast of fruit, bread, and cheese; tamayya
and fuul makes them too sleepy for all the concentration required for digital epigraphy (we only discovered later that Abu el-Yazid considered chicken to be fruit - so much for “light lunch”)!
During the week of planning, there was a lot of discussion about why it was
never a good idea to have to cut a variety of acetate sheet sizes from a 60”
wide roll. So, we felt it necessary to show the students exactly how easily the
acetate can be torn, and at the end of the day, before we let the students
escape, Will demonstrated the ins-and-outs of cutting the acetate used for traditional
epigraphy; how to do it properly, and how doing it badly can cause it to tear,
repeatedly. There was many a gasp of astonishment at how easily a straight edge
can turn into a complete disaster! All-in-all it was a successful working day,
which Will and JJ celebrated by going to Pizza Roma for pizza and cold beer.
Will trying very hard to enter the 21st century
Will demonstrating the difficulties of cutting the acetate
On Monday, after coffees and teas at Karnak, Will and JJ
bade a fond farewell to their students to head back to the west and TT110. While
our students continued in Karnak Lab under Hassan’s instruction, we spent the
morning taking detailed photographs in TT110 of all the cartouches and areas of
the tomb that had been intentionally hacked. This would give Will a clear
photographic reference to accompany the notes we had made last week when he
re-worked the inked drawings back home. Mission accomplished, we ended our
workday by visiting the wonderful tomb of the Huy, the viceroy of Kush during
the reign of Tutankhamun.
A scene from TT 40, the tomb of Tutankhamun's viceroy of Kush, Huy
(from ancient-origins.net)
We headed back east towards Karnak for a brief meeting over
coffees with Hazem and Sayed at the lovely Sharm el-Sheikh café, catching up on all the days events and
generally discussing how the field school is going, which, by all accounts, is
great! We ended the day by having dinner at Hazem’s sister Ahlam’s new home, along
with the entire family. Ahlam showed off not only the beautiful new apartment
that she and her husband Abdullah have, which is located just across from Hazem’s
family home, but also her cooking skills. Everyone agreed that she is quite the
cook, and Abdullah makes a mean tahini. Having had so many wonderful meals
prepared by the wives and sisters of our team, we have decided to create a “TT110
Cookbook”, with each of our students as well as our teaching team and staff,
contributing recipes. It will fit in quite nicely with Djhuty’s title as royal butler,
seeing as part of this job was overseeing the foodstuffs that came into the
palace!
On Tuesday a new member of the team joined us, having
arrived the night before from Italy, Marco Repole, a student at the university
in Florence who is here to investigate the possibilities of pursuing a PhD
research topic involving 3D modeling of ancient remains. It is his first time
in Egypt and he came into Karnak amazed to actually be arriving in a place he
had known only from photos. Every time we turned around we realized he was
heading the opposite direction taking pictures, and we had to drag him back
with promises that he would get time to properly visit and photograph the
temple, but as far as we were concerned it was just a shortcut to the lab! He
had no sooner met the students and other members of the team, and drunk his first
cup of heavily sugared Egyptian tea, before we dragged him back out of Karnak
to take the boat across the river to the west so that he could visit the tomb.
With eyes wide with wonder, Marco was amazed to find that our commute took him
the length and breadth of the Nile with vistas of Luxor and Luxor Temple to the
east and the Qurn rising, pyramid-like, over the tombs of the west. Quickly
completely the prerequisite paperwork and collecting Amany at the teftish, we
reached TT110 in time for, guess what, breakfast! Marco was introduced to yet another
Egyptian tradition, with Abu Hamada providing a mini-buffet of tamayya, fuul, batates,
sliced vegetables, and eggs, along with aish balady. As he was to find out
throughout the course of the day, we need to eat every 3-4 hours! We spent the morning
giving Marco a crash course in Egyptology 101 with TT 110 proving the ideal
time capsule to explain something of ancient Egyptian funerary beliefs,
architecture, and decoration, as well as a brief history lesson. Before we knew
it, 1pm and our car had arrived, meaning it was time for lunch. Today it was a
working lunch at the Oasis, bringing together all the disparate members of the
team, in that the last two additions, Owen Murray and Hilary McDonald, had just
arrived in Luxor. Working as freelance photographers for many projects, we had
asked them to advise our students about the use of photography in digital
epigraphy, so the meeting allowed all the older and newer members to meet and
begin to thrash out a teaching syllabus for the remaining 10 days of the
school. Ayman reorganized the furniture and set aside the entire green room as
our boardroom, allowing all 9 of us (JJ, Will, Marco, Owen, Hilary, Hassan,
Sayed, Yaser, and Hazem) to sit together and talk whilst having giant fresh
lemon drinks and eating the Oasis’s delicious food. Two-and-a-half hours later
we staggered out, fed and watered, as well as having a teaching program sorted involving
work for the students both back in the tomb and the lab.
Wednesday the students continued on their merry way with
Hassan’s teaching, and we introduced Hilary and Owen to TT110. The purpose of
their visit was to sort out how best to instruct our students in “quick and
dirty” photography in order to prepare digital images for epigraphy, but they
also advised as to how to potentially photograph the tomb for additional
digital epigraphy as well as utilizing ImageJ and D-stretch enhancement, which
might allow us to include drawings of the walls that were too fragile for the
conservators from which to remove the soot and oils. After talking it all though,
and enjoying a lovely second breakfast spread thanks to, guess who, Abu Hamada,
Will and JJ spent a working morning under the tent going through applications
for next year’s field school while Hilary, Owen, and Marco returned to TT 110
take test shots using 3 different camera types – proper camera, iPhone camera,
and ordinary cell phone camera. The goal was to see what kind of rectified images
could be obtained from the three different camera types so they could better present
the possibilities to the students on Thursday. Seeing as it was Marco’s birthday
(happy 28!), and he has not been in Egypt before, we decided to treat him to
birthday drinks at the open terrace bar of the Old Winter Palace, and time it
in order to watch the sunset over the Nile. Sayed, Hassan, and Hazem all joined
us, and a lovely evening drink was had.
After drinks, Will and JJ left to have dinner with Jen Kimpton
and Keli Alberts (both from Chicago House) at The Lantern, our other favorite
Luxor restaurant. It gave us all a chance to catch up while eating wonderful British home cooking very much out of context in Luxor, which is part of its
surreal charm. Particularly the desserts – sticky toffee pudding and apple
crumble with custard. While we were indulging in a calorie binge, who knows what
the boys were getting up to. Hazem had promised at the Winter Palace to show
Marco an “Egyptian evening,” and as we left them they were discussing which
Egyptian restaurant would be the best at which to have dinner, the evening almost
certainly concluding with shisha at Om Kalthoum café in the souk. This had led
to an explanation to Marco as to who Om Kalthoum was, with everyone explaining
her role as an Egyptian cultural icon from the 40s and 50s, one of the greatest
vocalists ever produced in the Arab world. An impression sorely compromised by Hazem’s vocal
rendition of Om Kalthoum’s most famous songs!
Still digesting the night’s dinner, Will and JJ finished off
the week conducting interviews for potential students for the next year’s field
school, facilitated by Hazem and Yaser at the Luxor Museum. Yaser, acting on behalf of the Scientific Centre, represented the Ministry, as had been done in previous years by Ms. Hamsa
Dwidar and Mr. Shabaan Abdelgawad. Traditionally, we always ask the Ministry
representative as to where they would like to have lunch, and in the past it had ranged from McDonald’s to the Oasis. This year, Yaser suggested a local
Egyptian café called Om Hashem, within easy reach of the Luxor Museum. It offered
some of the best local Egyptian food, including a rare delicacy – pigeon soup!
Meanwhile the students headed west with Owen and Hilary, who
spent the day with them at TT110 giving instruction as to how to take photos that
would be suitable for digital epigraphy. Marco joined them in this process,
adding his own digital expertise and experience to the mix. By all reports it
was a successful morning, and the students came away with a solid sense of how
to use any camera available to them to take pictures that they could then use
for epigraphy purposes.
Photographic training on site at TT110
Rather than end the day at the tomb, the students headed back to Karnak Lab to round out the photography instruction by learning to create rectified images from the photos they had each taken in TT110. However, they also apparently took a 3-hour lunch featuring an all-you-could-eat buffet of shwarma sandwiches, a traditional Middle Eastern sandwich of chicken or lamb that is shaved off a spit. And this after we were told that eating meat in the middle of the day made them sleepy and unable to concentrate on their digital epigraphy. More fool us! The lengthy lunch meant that they were working right up until the bitter end, only leaving the temple precinct around 5, upon threat of being locked in for the night!
Will, JJ, Hazem, and Yaser joined the students at Karnak Lab,
finishing off the day by announcing the location of the fieldtrip tomorrow (Friday).
We had managed to keep it a secret for nearly 2 weeks, and the suspense was
driving everyone crazy!
Stay tuned to find out where we went …
