I won't bore you with excuses about why I haven't been writing here because I only have enough Monday brain power to write this and thinking up excuses would hurt my head.

I'm about to take another trip to Egypt. This time for only a week but I'm looking forward to it nonetheless. Only a few of the archaeologists are there but it will be fun to spend some time with them. The Director and I will be escorting some donors on their first visit to Egypt.

Egypt, by the way, is neither an Egyptian nor an Arabic word. "Egypt" comes from the ancient Greek word for the country along the Nile, "Aegyptos." The ancient Egyptians called it "kmt," or "the black land" for the fertile Nile silt deposited every year by the annual innudation.

The modern Egyptians call Egypt "misr," which they also apply to Cairo. "Cairo," by the way, is an anglicization of "al qahira," the original Arabic name for Cairo. It seems nothing is called what it should be in Egypt.