First of all, thank you very much for the love and support regarding my dog's death. I knew it was coming and had time to prepare, but it's still hard, and the house is very quiet; your sympathy means a lot to me.
We're having a snow day in Bristol, since there is actual snow on the ground. This is the south. It makes more sense to us to occasionally shut down all schools and half the businesses than to invest a whole ton of money in snow removal equipment that we would use once every other year. Or so we tell ourselves. Sometimes I think most communities just calibrate themselves so that, whatever their typical weather is, they get a snow day once in awhile.
My sister in Wisconsin woke to a foot of snow and her kids didn't even have a delay. That may be the only reason to avoid Wisconsin--I love cheese and their summers are lovely--but it's a big one.
Anyway, it's a full-on snow day, with both my yoga class and Bristol Faith in Action closed. I got up early with my husband (it's one of his surgery days) so I could write before yoga and BFIA, and now it's 9:30 and I've pretty much written myself out for the day. Which is fine--I have lots of work to do.
The other day I was excited to receive a book I had to search for--it's called The Modern Neighbors of Tutankhamun, it's published by the American University of Cairo, and it's all about Qurna, the village near the Valley of the Kings.
On Monday, full of grief, I found it impossible to read this book. Yesterday I made some headway, but not much, and here's why. A sample quote:
"Rather than infer certain economic practices inside the Theban Necropolis from ethnically situated psychological characteristics, here we seek to describe Qurnawi behavior in non-racially conceived terms, instead looking at their relationship with the surrounding archaeological landscape as a formative element in the specific characteristics of Qurnawi agency and action."
In other words, we're not going to assume that all the people who live in Qurna are tomb-robbers, just because they're probably descended from Bedouins. They lived near all these tombs and sometimes found stuff, and they were poor, can you blame them if they sold grave goods?
Really. Taken in context, that's what they mean.
The book is 499 pages long.
We're having a snow day in Bristol, since there is actual snow on the ground. This is the south. It makes more sense to us to occasionally shut down all schools and half the businesses than to invest a whole ton of money in snow removal equipment that we would use once every other year. Or so we tell ourselves. Sometimes I think most communities just calibrate themselves so that, whatever their typical weather is, they get a snow day once in awhile.
My sister in Wisconsin woke to a foot of snow and her kids didn't even have a delay. That may be the only reason to avoid Wisconsin--I love cheese and their summers are lovely--but it's a big one.
Anyway, it's a full-on snow day, with both my yoga class and Bristol Faith in Action closed. I got up early with my husband (it's one of his surgery days) so I could write before yoga and BFIA, and now it's 9:30 and I've pretty much written myself out for the day. Which is fine--I have lots of work to do.
The other day I was excited to receive a book I had to search for--it's called The Modern Neighbors of Tutankhamun, it's published by the American University of Cairo, and it's all about Qurna, the village near the Valley of the Kings.
On Monday, full of grief, I found it impossible to read this book. Yesterday I made some headway, but not much, and here's why. A sample quote:
"Rather than infer certain economic practices inside the Theban Necropolis from ethnically situated psychological characteristics, here we seek to describe Qurnawi behavior in non-racially conceived terms, instead looking at their relationship with the surrounding archaeological landscape as a formative element in the specific characteristics of Qurnawi agency and action."
In other words, we're not going to assume that all the people who live in Qurna are tomb-robbers, just because they're probably descended from Bedouins. They lived near all these tombs and sometimes found stuff, and they were poor, can you blame them if they sold grave goods?
Really. Taken in context, that's what they mean.
The book is 499 pages long.
No comments:
Post a Comment
The comments on this blog are now moderated. Yours will appear provided it's not hateful, crass, or annoying--and the definition of those terms is left solely to me.