Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

I’ve been back on site for a week now and am happy to rejoin the team for my second season. It’s great to see Richard, Mary, Bill, Elsie, Jaap and Ben again, and there are many familiar faces among our Egyptian colleagues this year including the conservator Khaled Mohamed Wassel, and the head mason Mohamed Gharib and his crew. I also had the pleasure of meeting for the first time our SCA inspector Osama Saadalla Hamdoun and Herman te Velde, a specialist in Ptolemaic religious texts.

My first few days here were spent recovering from the two day journey and seven hour time change, as well as organizing the conservation supplies and hunting down a few things in the souq (the market) that I didn’t bring with me. I also walked around the site to view a month’s worth of excavations, and then staked my claim to one of the tables under the tent shown in the photo on the left where I began to treat small finds (coins, ceramic sherds, and faience objects). Shown in the photo on the right is a small faience object broken into three pieces that I repaired with Paraloid B-72, an acrylic resin widely used in conservation because of it’s stability and reversibility. The object is actually a crouching male figure holding a rather large appendage between his legs that extends over his shoulder. Yes, the ancient Egyptians did have a sense of humor!

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The month on the traditional Egyptian calendar known as “Imsheer” (mid-February to mid-March) began this week and so far is living up to its reputation for unpredictable weather and high winds. Monday was incredibly hot. Tuesday the site was scoured all day by clouds of dust borne on the blustery Imsheer winds that continued to kick up on Wednesday. No treat for people or digital cameras. (more…)

This week we were able to start putting the north wing of the Taharqa Gate back together, restoring fallen blocks to their original position. We hope to finish the north wing next week and begin work on the south wing. As you look at this sequence of photos, remember that all the work is done by hand with little mechanical assistance. (more…)

We are so happy that William and Elsie Peck could join us again this year. After a look around the site first thing Saturday morning (their first day), they had a chance to catch up with Jay van Rensselaer, the Johns Hopkins University Expedition’s photographer.

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At the end of last season we covered the baked brick building north of the Sacred Lake with plastic and sand to protect it and its plastered surfaces while we were gone. Our first job on January 17, our first day of work, was to uncover the building again. (more…)