Eygptology
(or why I never really got into it but am finding some of it more interesting now.)
Egyptology always seemed to me to be about wealthy people investigating other wealthy people from a long time ago, somewhere hot and sunny and with cheap labour. I could never see the attraction to studying long lines of aristocrats enslaving others and building big monuments to prove their divinity, as I understood it then. However, what experiences have I had that counter this?
Along time ago, as a child I saw the Tutankhamen exhibit in London. I remember buying a postcard. Then again in a museum in Dorset, there was a complete replica of all the objects and the tomb chamber, which I found strangely moving. More moving still was the Dorchester Museum exhibits of Maiden Castle. Archaeology was winning, but the prehistory of this country remained uppermost. My opinion of Egyptology altered little, toffs doing toffs, at least at the beginning, until I went to the Egyptology gender conference at Swansea University, where they discussed the New Kingdom tomb builders homes and lives, particularly women’s, at a place called Deir el -Medina. However, still a lot of obsessions with hieroglyphs and visuals i noticed. Understandable, when there is a lot of it about, I suppose, but as a British Prehistorian, I also want interpretations of artefacts and spatial relationships etc. (By the way Egpytologists seemed like lovely people).
Volunteering at the Egypt Centre at Swansea did nothing much to alter my views, somewhat based in ignorance perhaps, of a profession seemingly obsessed with the upper echelons and their artefacts. I am a British Prehistorian at heart and had studiously ignored Egyptology. I shared my opinions with an Egyptology Student at Cardiff, who said she had felt the same until she actually went to Egypt, and had an epiphany.
Recently, there has been a series about Egypt and the tombs on the BBC . It was made more apparent that the workers were well looked after, employed by the state. It is the story of these cogs in the wheel that continue to interest me. True, I am beginning to see the fascination with some of the spaces and beliefs created and maintained, the tomb rooms, the passages, but it is the ‘doing’ of them by the people that really engages me.
The female Egyptologist stood in the chamber with the empty tomb, and I got the feeling of being with the dead similar to my experience of finding skeletons on British sites. I was reminded of the past and figures who’d tended to the last rites of the person interred there. Quiet, quiet. Maybe instructions and the sound of effort, and then leaving, all quiet. Their presence was there.
I do not know if I will ever get to Egypt, the pyramids certainly seem impressive, mind boggling even, and that is quite a journey I have made to admit that. In the desert, beneath the sand are earlier tombs, not so big, and whole villages or towns perhaps, where once was supported populations from the richness of the Nile, and other water sources, until maybe the floods failed. When or if it is ever safe to go, perhaps I will, and be ‘converted’ fully.
http://www.tutankhamun-exhibition.co.uk/the-exhibition
Tutankhamen
Deir el Medina
Wiki, Mountenlearning,
Cullen Archaeology 