Newsletter, Number 54 (JUNE, 1965)

: During three months spent in Egypt early this year, I had an opportunity to visit the sites at which the Center is sponsoring excavations: Fustat, Gebel Adda, and Mendes. It is hard unless one has seen them, to imagine three localities so widely different in character. Fustat is and has been for centuries, a vast city dump, a desert wasteland bordered by the slums of Old Cairo and haunted by scavengers, humans, and canines. It is a windy, dusty, and malodorous site, cold and sometimes wet in winter, hot and fly-ridden in spring, never a very pleasant place in which to dig. It was, however, the place in which the first Arab conquerors of Egypt established their capital, and the excavators feel rewarded for discomfort by the discoveries they are makîng concernîng the old city and the way of life followed by the people who lived in it. They are working against time, for Fustat is being engulfed by modern Cairo. The area is being reclaimed to provide housing for some of the millions who live in the modem capital of Egypt. One is always aware, at Fustat, of those crowding millions, avid of present needs, knowing and caring little, if anything, of the past.