At Edfu, we have lots of silos. And inside those silos, in their fill (the
materials deposited as trash after the silo fell out of use) we find all kinds
of interesting things. We have found
ostraca (pot sherds with writing on them), seal impressions, figurines,
furniture pieces and even two complete hippo skeletons. So we have learned to expect the unexpected
when excavating a silo. Today, one of
the workers called Nadine and I over to the silo he was working in, and when we
got there we saw ribs and a spine. We
both thought they looked like an infant, which is weird, because in ancient
Egypt generally infants who died were buried within a house or occasionally in
pots in a cemetery. Then we saw a long
bone that looked like an adult rib.
Which would be even weirder- did we have a death pit? Death pits make for really interesting, if
morbid, articles. Two hours of
painstaking excavation with tiny brushes and dental picks later, and this is
what we saw:
Definitely not a baby.
It’s a canine of some sort, and there appear to be more skeletons nearby
that will be excavated tomorrow. It looks like that, like always, the Edfu
silos were used for trash, and for some reason someone threw in some dead dogs
(poor puppies!).
Also, we did not see people chanting in the temple today.
*wink wink*
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