Coolest Job EVER.

I had an appointment today at the Supreme Council of Antiquities. You know, the one where Zahi Hawass works. Yep, THE Zahi Hawass. I got to hang out in the ante-Zahi-office office, which is to say, the office of Dr. Janice Kamren--an egyptologist not nearly as widely known as Zahi, but probably at least as important (she's his lackey, and lackeys do all the dirty work, right?).

The reason for this appointment (there were maybe 10 other people there too, so unfortunately I'm not that special) was because thanks to my Theories and Methods of Archaeology class with the famed Dr. Salima Ikram, I have an opportunity to become her lackey and volunteer to grub around in the Egyptian Museum catalogues.

It won't be glorious work, clearly, since they're trying to finally build an actual database for the items they have there, and the grubbing will mostly consist of data entry and cross checking the data between the several current cataloguing systems to make note of any anomalies. This will be especially challenging because there are over 120,000 objects in the museum, fewer than 10k of which have been catalogued properly. This 120k also represents a mere fraction of what exists in the museum's basement, most of which is of unknown origin and type.

Heck, the museum itself is not in all that great shape. Though, on the plus side, Janice says this means that if we're extra good little minions (meaning we basically give over our entire lives and school time to data entry) and she decides she trusts our English, she'll let us help write some of the labels for the museum exhibits! Yay.

If Scripps doesn't let me count this Theories and Methods of Archaeology class as one of my upper-level HEP anthro classes (i.e. in lieu of, ahem, "Theory and Method in Archaeology"), I will be sad. But I don't think this is much of a risk. The head of the department is Sheryl, after all. A jollier woman never lived. :D

More later. I get the database software from the curator's office tomorrow!

P.S. The photos are from the Egyptian Museum. The Supreme Council of Antiquities building is more of a drab rectangle. A rectangle with a fence.