Archeologists recently found a new pharaoh’s tomb near Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, where King Tutankhamun’s burial chamber was discovered just over a century ago. What does this find mean for Egyptology?
Any new tomb discovery in Egypt means a lot for us, since a tomb also speaks about the life and worldview of its owner(s) and their community. Between Tut’s tomb and the new tomb of Thutmose II, there have been many other tomb discoveries, but the discovery of royal tombs makes the news much more readily than those of less wealthy people. I believe we should stop thinking about ancient Egypt as a land of kings and queens only and look instead to any new find, including the less stunning ones, as an important addition to our knowledge of this incredible ancient culture.
King Tut’s discovery in 1922 sent shockwaves through popular culture and the arts for decades. Are we likely to see a resurgence of Egyptomania with this new discovery?
Egyptomania was very much alive even before 1922, and it has continued to flourish independently from new discoveries. The fascination for ancient Egypt goes back to the time of the ancient Romans, and it never stopped in the West.
You co-edited The Oxford Handbook of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and also launched the online Book of the Dead project, featuring 3D visualizations. How can these digital tools advance or complement traditional scholarship on ancient cultures?
Digital humanities and 3D visualizations have advanced enormously our understanding of the ancient heritage since they allow us to access the artifacts remotely and to share those digital copies widely. For this reason, I believe digital humanities should be included in any Egyptological curriculum nowadays. Ancient Egypt has so many amazing monuments and artifacts that can be digitized and made accessible to communities whose members cannot travel to Egypt or visit museums with Egyptian collections. At the same time, museums with Egyptian collections highly benefit from 3D visualizations to contextualize or complement the view of the original object.
Berkeley’s Bancroft Library is home to a very large collection of papyri, including many that were found stuffed in crocodile mummies. What is the significance of that collection? Has it been fully studied or are researchers still actively working to learn new details?
The Center for the Tebtunis Papyri’s collection of papyri is very important for our knowledge of ancient Egyptian written culture, especially for the later periods of ancient Egyptian history, when the Greeks and Romans were ruling the country. Many papyri are still being studied and published by our Berkeley students, as well as by scholars from around the world. The crocodile mummies are an important part of this collection as well, including the ones housed at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.
In addition to teaching Cal students, you also teach Egyptology in San Quentin prison. What has that experience been like?
Teaching Egyptology in prison has been a great and inspiring experience, and I am proud of and grateful to my San Quentin students for their passion in challenging their own beliefs and ideas about ancient Egypt (often based on the Bible or on other secondary sources) and confronting themselves with historical sources. Several of my students are artists who worked these Egyptian themes into their art. Black students especially (who constitute a high percentage of incarcerated people at San Quentin) find
a sense of identity in the idea that ancient Egypt was a
great African culture, when generations of Black Americans have been told that there were no great African cultures. I am really proud to say that San Quentin is currently the only prison in the U.S. (and I think in the world!) to include a course on ancient Egyptian history and art in their higher education program, officially called Mount Tamalpais College.
