Gendering God
One of the things I’ve struggled with in The Boat Children, is how to honor Judaism’s history of Goddess worship….
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Straighten Your Tongue! Ancient Egyptian Insults
When two very different cultures come together, your mind might go to food or clothing or maybe wondering what their…
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Genders in Judaism
Our modern world is so focused on male and female as the standard division that it seems to many that…
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Senet and Other Games
Senet (aka the game of passing through) may not be the very oldest of board games, but it was deeply…
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Proofreading Jewish Texts
As I finish up the editing for my third draft, I’m getting into some of the picky bits. Many of…
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Magical Birth Bricks
Looking into how Ancient Egyptians gave birth, I wasn’t expecting to run into magical birth bricks. But here we are….
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Nile Grass & Rushes
Reeds are a fairly generic type of plants. Tall, grasslike, grown in wetlands. They are found in a variety of…
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How to Make a Hut
We know a lot about making Egyptian pyramids and palaces, and a bit about where skilled workers lived, but what…
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The Mother Tongue
What languages might the participants of the Exodus spoken and written? This is really a fantasy question because, to answer…
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A Daily Kitchen Schedule
The background calculations for this post comes from The Rhythms of Bread. In my New Kingdom Egyptian village kitchen, for…
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Making Sourdough Bread
The bread of Ancient Egypt isn’t easy to figure out. Though there are models and illustrations of bakeries from that…
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The Heart of the Kitchen
Ovens and stoves. The heart (and hearth) of any kitchen, ancient or modern. Ovens were small and brick or clay…
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How to Make Things Hot
I talk about cooking in How to Eat in Pharaoh Days, but this post is about the fuel. No electricity,…
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Ancient Metalwork Tidbits
I discussed a fair bit of metalwork in Ancient Egypt in the post Goldwork for the Golden Calf. In this…
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Ancient Egyptian Carpentry
Wagons & Carts In addition to using the Nile and its distributaries for transportation over water, the Egyptians created packed…
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Water Everywhere, Except Right Here
I did boatloads (pun intended) of research while writing the first draft of the novel but here and there I…
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Sewing & Other Fabric Arts
Despite their clothing being rather straightforward (mostly lengths of undyed linen tied in various ways or sewn into simple shapes),…
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Soap & Cleaning Materials of Ancient Egypt
Now soap is something I know well, being a soapmaker when I’m not a writer. But using a digital scale…
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The Lights of the Exodus
So what sort of lighting did folks use in Egypt during the New Kingdom? Oddly, most sources say there are…
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