I went shopping for lightbulbs today, as the light fixture in the dining room kind of “exploded” this morning, and I thought I needed to replace the lightbulbs. I thought wrong. Little flames now come out of the light bulb holes if I try to reset the fuse, and the on/off switch feels a bit, um, molten into the on position. Most likely cause: Old Kingdom era electrical wiring. This means no light in the dining room for now, and also the den, until an electrician comes and fixes it. Today being Friday, it is the weekend, so no fixing of fixtures until Sunday at the earliest. Luckily the two women I share the apartment with speak Arabic, so I’m sure they’ll be able to explain all.

Anyway, the place where I found lightbulbs — a nearby Alpha Market (sellers of Scrabble sets) — also has a section with educational books. I thought this particular juxtaposition was striking:

Not sure if that reflects badly on the book series, Alpha Market, or the state of computing here in Egypt.

Yesterday I had dinner with a What is the correct collective noun here?trove of archaeologists, among them: An expert in It used to be common wisdom that the Sumerians were the first to have developed writing, but now the ancient Egyptians have the best claim, or so says my flatmate. More about this primacy battle in the NYT.early hieroglyphics (who also happens to be my flatmate), an expert in demotic script, an archaeologist excavating Not to be confused with my alma mater.Saïs in the Nile delta, and two German archaeologists excavating Elephantine, and island in the middle of the Nile near Aswan.

I plied them with ignorant questions about archaeology, but learned a great deal. One fascinating historical figure is Akhenaten, To his credit, he insisted we all worship the Sun, which has the advantage of correctly identifying where the real source of life was on Earth.inventor of monotheism. I wondered whether Moses might have picked up on that idea before he was exiled. It turns out that some people even think <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten#Moses_and_Akhenaten" title="Moses was Akhenaten”>Moses was Akhenaten; Freud thought he was one of Akhenaten’s priests, forced to flee when the monotheistic experiment went awry after Akhenaten’s death. The archaeologists dismissed all this as crackpot speculation, but it sure beats the story about receiving tablets on Mount Sinai and fending off burning bushes, no? At least in terms of likelihood.

This past week has also seen new Cairo bars explored. The Google Earth layer has been updated.