I saw this tweet from a colleague, Maarten Horn, yesterday. I began thinking of replying and then realised I had a lot more to say than I could fit into a few tweets.

Read the conversation on Twitter, here.

What follows refers specifically to the granting of rights to look at, describe, draw, photograph and reproduce images of ancient and archival material, drawing on my experiences in Egyptology. I realise much of what I have to say here would not apply to intellectual property of many other kinds.

Over the years I’ve come across lots of situations in which rights are asserted or assumed, and rules or even laws assumed and apparently broken. As an author I have requested and been granted permission to use material, and I have also acted on behalf of a publisher and institution granting permission for the reproduction of images of ancient and archival material in its possession (The EES).

In general, the situation – the rules and how they are applied (if they even exist) – is very unclear, and there’s rather a lot to consider, including:

• The difference between what is law, and what is simply a commonly accepted standard of practice or a rule particular to an individual or institution.
• The way such laws / standards / rules might differ from one context to the next or in different countries etc.
• The consequences. Breaking the law is very serious, obviously; falling short of standards or flaunting the rules of an organisation with which you may wish to collaborate again may be less serious but it is discourteous, and as such may harm your working relationships.
• The rationale behind rules. I have encountered situations in which rights have been asserted or rules imposed when there was no sound basis for it, preventing material from being used which in the end was in no-one’s interests, and by extension was detrimental to scholarship (it seemed to me).
• Who owns the rights? The author? The artist? The photographer? The publisher? The individual or institution that owns the thing being described, drawn or photographed? All of them??

Before going into this in any more detail, how should I reply to Maarten?

First of all it seems to me at best discourteous if nobody was asked for permission in this case (or perhaps just clumsy if the author is inexperienced and really has no idea how such things work, but in that case the publisher could have advised them). The author using the images that appeared in Maarten’s work (hereafter ‘author X’) could have tracked Maarten down online or contacted the publisher to ask. Despite this, it seems to me possible that no rules were broken, especially if author X had secured permission from whoever owns the objects as Dr Will Carruthers has already suggested:

In that case author X (or his publisher) might well have felt no further permissions were required. Still, whatever the rules, it’s just good manners to ask and such things do matter, particularly in a small field like Egyptology where everyone knows everyone else, and we all have to work together.

Another consideration would be what rights were asserted by the rights owner and how this was expressed in Maarten’s publication. Presumably it was something like ‘image courtesy of <<name of institution>>, all rights reserved’. In that case it would be unambiguous: permission would have to be sought. There are other kinds of rights however such as ‘creative commons’ which allow rights holders to “pick and choose which rights they want to control and which they want to grant to others.”¹ Author X may have known that the rights holder in this case universally grants permission for its material to be used in certain contexts.

When I worked for the EES I was, for a while, in charge of dealing with requests for permission to reproduce images in the Society’s copyright, generally either photographs from the archive or images of papyri in the Oxyrhynchus collection. I can’t remember ever refusing permission. Usually, the only question would be whether the image was to be used for a scholarly i.e. non-commercial venture – most commonly a scholarly article – or a commercial project such as a book or television programme. In the latter case there would be a fee to pay, but for scholarly use permission would be granted free of charge. The fees we did receive were a nice little source of pocket money but not really significant. It seemed to me that the bigger picture for the Society was that that we had a responsibility to make our material available for scholarly / educational purposes, not to discourage or prevent it from being used by charging fees scholars could not afford, and that we would benefit from the heightened awareness of the Society that we hoped circulation of our material would bring. Permission was, of course, only granted on condition that the Society be acknowledged (‘Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society’).

Had I ever come across an instance in which a scholar made use of one of our images in an article without having asked for permission I would probably have been a little bit annoyed, but provided they acknowledged the Society’s copyright I would probably have concluded that it wasn’t worth doing anything about it, and that in fact, the author had perhaps done the right thing in saving themselves, and me, the time as I would only have granted permission anyway.

In 2007 thousands of images in the Society’s archives were digitised thanks to a generous donation. This was a great boon for us – it made browsing and searching the collection, and providing high quality images to researchers, much easier. We were quite guarded about circulating them to begin with however: what if people started using them without our permission? Well, after a while we realised that people probably weren’t going to do that, that they would generally follow our rules and acknowledge the Society’s ownership of the images, or even pay a fee if required. In recent years the Society has made the majority of these images available for free online (here) – a fantastic initiative which no doubt has been a great boon for scholars, saved the Society’s staff a great deal of time in tracking images down and sending them off, and helped raise awareness of its history and work.

Time and effort

One of the advantages of creative commons licences is that they provide for exactly this kind of situation i.e. for material to be used in certain ways without the need for the time-consuming process of permission being requested and granted. The reality is that many institutions granting permissions are understaffed and cannot always deal with such requests as quickly as authors etc. might like. In a worst-case scenario this could prevent material from being included in published work which is in no-one’s interests. At the EES I always felt that the important thing was that the material be used. As I’ve already said, I can’t recall coming across a situation in which there was any reason not to grant permission, the only question was whether or not we should charge a fee, and I would never have wanted to deter anyone from using an EES image because it was too expensive – I would much rather have offered a discount or waived the fee entirely and had our image be the one chosen for the documentary or the front cover of the book, than stick doggedly to the rules and end up with no fees and someone else’s image used instead. In reality such situations hardly ever arose – commercial publishers and production companies were generally happy to pay our fees – but I appreciate that other institutions might take a different approach if reproduction fees are more significant to them than they were to the EES when I was there (2001-16 incidentally).

In practical terms…

If anyone had really wanted to use one of our images in such a way that we would have refused permission, or without paying a fee when we would have requested one, then there would have been very little we could have done to stop it.

In practice, in situations such as the ones discussed here, if someone had wanted to break the EES’ rules, there wouldn’t have been much we could have done about it. It might be impolite, and might spoil what would otherwise be a good working relationship, but otherwise there’s little that can really be done.

I learned this in my first couple of years there in fact, albeit in a slightly different circumstances. The Society was – and still is – a publisher of books and periodicals (a journal and a magazine). As far as the Society was concerned its excavation and other scientific reports were in its copyright, and always had been. On one or two occasions we found that old site reports had been reproduced without our permission for sale at a profit. We would have wanted to assert the sole right to reproduce these volumes, to help raise awareness of the Society and its work and to generate revenue. On one occasion I contacted a publisher in America to draw their attention to our claim and was simply told that according to US law the copyright had expired a certain number of years after the death of the author, and that we therefore had no rights. I knew of laws like this of course but hadn’t thought that different ones might apply in the US, and in any case felt he was missing the point that rights lay not with the author but the EES. I had to admit, however, that I was no lawyer and, moreover, even if I had felt we had a case would the Society have wanted to pursue it? Of course not. We wouldn’t have had the resources, and there was nothing stopping us from republishing the volumes ourselves (except that we didn’t really have the resources!). Eventually I would have to concede that if anything these other publishers were providing a service that the Society itself could not in making long out-of-print volumes available again. These days I am a huge fan of initiatives such as Google Books and archive.org which have made thousands of volumes – including many older EES reports (e.g. this one) – freely available online.

When rights are wrong(ly asserted)

Considering that:

• In my experience at least there is rarely any reason not to grant permission;
• That frameworks exist to allow material to be reproduced without permission being actively sought / granted (e.g. creative commons licenses);
• That dealing with permissions requests can be very time consuming, sometimes to the extent that institutions are unable to handle the workload;
• That in many instances no-one really loses out if material is re-used without permission;
• That there is something to be lost if permission is not or cannot be granted i.e. because it’s in everyone’s interests that the material can be circulated – scholarship in Egyptology depends on knowledge – descriptions, drawings photos etc – being circulated as comprehensively and widely as possible. An article about an object or site suffers if it does not include a good image(s) of that object or site;

…I have often found myself wondering if rights have been asserted when it would be better all round if they were not.

A few case studies that raise similar issues:

Up until recently it was against the Ministry of Antiquities’ rules to take photographs in any ancient tomb or archaeological museum in Egypt. I suspect the reasoning, initially, was that the Ministry would be able to generate much-needed revenue though the purchase of postcards and books at its sites, and through reproduction fees, and this may have worked. However, it must also have meant that many tourists were left disappointed that they were unable to take photos of the amazing things they were seeing – or simply paid the guardian on duty a little tip and went ahead anyway. And it meant that scholars like me fell back, for their lectures etc., on very old photos of their own or better ones scanned from books, or simply didn’t have photos to show. In recent years the rules have been almost completely relaxed, presumably because the Ministry concluded that the benefits of allowing photographs to be taken and posted to social media outweighed the potential gift shop sales and photography fees. And perhaps because it had become clear that policing a no-photo policy in an age when everyone carries a camera with them and expects to be able to take photos at all times had become unworkable. In this case the assertion of rights and granting of permission only by request probably proved unworkable and counter-productive. I congratulate them on the new policy!

While requesting images to be included in a book of mine a few years ago the publisher and I contacted several colleagues to ask for permission to reproduce their images. Two cases stood out:

In the first, I asked a colleague for permission to use a photo of some fragments discovered during an excavation they had directed. The image had been published in a specialist magazine. I mentioned the fragments in my text and felt it was important that my readers could see what had been found. My colleague granted permission but only after hesitating, explaining that academics are sometimes a little ‘paranoid’ about such things. I was puzzled by this: the image had already been published, and my text was uncontentious. What could anyone stand to lose from the image being published again? If anything, I hoped that my colleague and their excavations would benefit from my helping to circulate information about the material found to a wider audience. I was of course pleased and relieved to receive permission, and also grateful for the explanation, not least as the notion of paranoia seemed an admission that the hesitation was not entirely rational, which helped explained why I found the hesitation so puzzling.

In the second instance, I asked the director of a project I had worked for myself for permission to reproduce a photo I had taken of a tomb wall. As far as the publisher was concerned, as the photo was mine there should be no need to ask for permission but I felt it would be courteous to ask, and that not doing so would risk spoiling relations with a good friend and colleague. In this case the answer was (paraphrasing) ‘yes, but please don’t use your photo because it’s not very good. Here’s a better one taken by the team photographer.’ Moreover, my colleague asked to read my text to make sure I wasn’t saying anything inappropriate. Again, I felt this was not something I ought to feel obliged to do but, not wanting to spoil a good relationship, I agreed. Fortunately, my colleague agreed that there was no problem and that we could go ahead. The explanation was that in the past, other members of the same project had claimed to have discovered the tomb themselves. I was somewhat alarmed that anyone would do this – this particular tomb wasn’t really discovered by anyone having been visible since antiquity and appeared frequently in literature from the time of the earliest European travellers onwards, so any such claims would, transparently, have been ludicrous – and even more so that my colleague would think I would make such a claim…

In both cases it seemed to me that my colleagues were not being entirely reasonable. In these cases permission was granted eventually, but it makes me wonder how often that’s not the case.

And indeed, there have been other occasions when I have failed to secure permission. In one case, a museum holding an object I wanted to illustrate simply failed to reply to my messages. In this instance I assume the museum in question simply didn’t have the resources to reply deal with such enquiries. Fortunately in this case I was able to find an alternative image and secure permission via other means.

On another occasion I was prevented from even mentioning the existence of a particular monument on the basis that it hadn’t yet been fully published. I had thought there would be no issue with this as I had been careful not to include any information that hadn’t already been published but this briefly got me into a little bit of trouble. In this case, no laws were broken and the denial of permission was, to my mind, unreasonable and in fact counter-productive, and I felt the book, its readers and even the institution denying permission(!) were worse off as a result. But the maintenance of good working relations with my colleagues took precedence and were, thankfully, restored in short order.

Conclusion

Over the years I’ve accumulated quite a bit of experience of permissions requests in various different situations. It seems to me that there’s a lack of clarity and consistency in what the rules should be, and how they should be applied. It also seems to me that there is a tendency on the part of some individuals and institutions to assert rights or require permissions when perhaps there is no need, or even to deny permissions when there is no good reason to do so. I’m no lawyer but it seems to me that the principles of intellectual property law are there to protect creatives and other individuals / institutions who invest in works created – their property – to afford them a degree of control over how it is used and to allow them to generate the income they need to carry on their work. I have encountered situations in which creative work has been used without permission or acknowledgement, denying the creator the opportunity to control how their work is used, and the credit they deserve. Clearly this is wrong. But I have also encountered situations in which permissions processes have been imposed unnecessarily and counter-productively, and, worse, others in which permissions has not been granted without good reason, to the detriment of all concerned. It’s just a personal view but I think it would be very helpful if there were greater clarity as to what standards or practice or rules we should all aim to uphold, and probably greater understanding and application of creative commons licensing.

Thoughts?

 

Notes

1. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons. Accessed 10 January  2023.

I’m as relieved as anyone that we seem now to have left the period of COVID lockdowns behind us, but, as hard as 2020 and 2021 were, there were a few silver linings. For me, one of the most fun – and unexpected – things to have happened during those gloomy and uncertain times was that I found myself spending hours and hours playing video games for more or less the first time in my adult life. In fact, it was mainly just one game: the ancient Egypt-themed Assassin’s Creed Origins. Not only did I buy the game and a console to play it on, after a while I found myself a part of a university-funded public engagement project exploring the use of such games as a way of sharing expertise in, in fact teaching, Egyptology.

The Step Pyramid enclosure at Saqqara as depicted in Assassin’s Creed Origins.

The project was called Playing in the Past (PITP). It’s two years now since I first got interested in the game, and around a year since our final public session. Since then, the game has frequently been mentioned to me by people who knew about the project and my involvement, and by others who didn’t. ‘Have you ever heard of Assassin’s Creed Origins? I think you’d love it…’. Well now I can say, ‘Yes, I have and in fact, since you ask…’

It occurred to me that it would be good to be able to gather together some of the resources we produced and other stuff that arose from the project so that anyone interested can find them easily enough, and as a way of capturing something I thoroughly enjoyed working on, and am proud to have been associated with.

So how did this come about?

In summer 2020 I was finalising the text for a book about Cleopatra for children (which was published earlier this year in fact – Cleopatra Tells All!) and was looking for visualizations of the Ptolemaic city for the illustrator, Guilherme Karsten.

One of Jean-Claude Golvin’s superb reconstruction drawings of ancient Alexandria. Taken from https://jeanclaudegolvin.com/en/project/egypt/ JEAN-CLAUDE GOLVIN COPYRIGHT © 2018

I was familiar with the brilliant reconstructions drawn by Jean-Claude Golvin (many examples are available via his superb website, and in his books, including Voyage en Égypte ancienne), but otherwise what kept coming up when I searched for images online were screen shots from Assassin’s Creed. Initially, I was inclined to ignore them – because I’m not a gamer, I don’t have access to the game and it’s just not for me. But then I kept seeing them, and they seemed to be quite good… And in fact I do like my gadgets and as I started reading about the game I became aware that it incorporated a ‘Discovery Tour’ in which you could just walk around the virtual ancient landscapes without having to play the game. I was always terrible at video games when I was young, which perhaps explains why I had then avoided them in my adult life, but if I could just walk around without having to worry about being virtually shot or killed, then well, I would certainly be interested in walking around a virtual Ptolemaic Alexandria, especially if it was done well.

So I posted this tweet:

One of the people who saw my tweet was Egyptologist and gamer, Gemma Renshaw and to cut a long story short Gemma offered to show me round AC Origins’ virtual Alexandria via a livestream – she would play the game and share her screen via a video call so she could also talk me through what she was doing and I could ask questions or yelp with excitement when a recognisable ancient monument came into view (The lighthouse!! The Heptastadion!!). We were also joined by my very good friend Dr Kate Sheppard of Missouri University of Science and Technology. In fact by the time of the virtual tour I had spent so much time eyeing up games consoles online that I had decide to buy my own – an Xbox One – so I could play the game myself, and had been stumbling my way through the game for a few days by the time Gemma, who is very good at these things, stepped in to show how it should be done.

Both Kate and I were completely blown away by the game: by how rich the virtual world was, and by the attention to detail: the virtual Alexandria had clearly been designed according to the textual and archaeological evidence, with all the gaps in the evidence filled in with what seemed like very reasonable conjecture.

Looking out across the harbour at Alexandria towards the famous lighthouse on the island of Pharos.

The textures were astoundingly realistic – the stone of the roadways and grander buildings, the mud brick of the ordinary houses, the fabric of the flags, carpets and drapes, the green of the grasses and scrub, the waters of the harbour and ocean beyond, the way the shadows play on the pavement as the palm leaves blow in the wind… I could go on – there is just so much to look at and enjoy in the game, just by walking around. Paving stones and walls didn’t look too perfect or brand new – an ideal the designers could have realised but avoided in favour of a city showing signs of wear and tear, a little crumbling stonework here and there, or tufts of grass emerging from cracks in the pavements – probably much closer to the reality of late Ptolemaic Alexandria, a city almost three centuries old by this point.

Exploring the streets of Alexandria in the AC Origins Discovery Tour.

Your avatar (a dastardly-looking Ptolemy XIII in the above two images, but there are lots of others to choose from) could walk, run or gallop around on horseback, apparently without ever finding the edge of this virtual world, and you could summon up an eagle to fly you around should you want a bird’s eye view. As time went by the daylight changed and night eventually fell – the cycle of night and day went round far quicker than it would in real life but still gradually enough to feel natural, and the changes gave the city a different feel with shadows coming and going, and torches lighting the streets after dark.

My friendly eagle, Senu, flying over the main east-west street in ancient Alexandria, the Canopic Way, after dark in AC Origins.

Both Kate and I found the whole thing utterly engrossing, and I loved exploring on my own with my new toy.

Jean Claude Golvin’s reconstructions were well-known to me partly through his books but also because they are so frequently used by Egyptologists in their books and lectures to show what ancient sites would have looked like (in fact a large-scale bird’s eye view of the centre of Alexandria by Golvin is on display in the National Museum of Antiquities in Alexandria). AC Origins seemed to take the idea of reconstructing an ancient place to the next level however, by presenting it on a far grander scale, and allowing you to move through the landscape, which you can hear as well as see, and which the designers of the game have populated with the ancient inhabitants for you to interact with (or bump into as I do – they’re not shy in telling you what they think of that).

The Project

By this point, I’d got all the visual material I could ever have wanted for the book I was working on, and I was enjoying my experience of playing video games in almost 30 years. This was more than I could ever have hoped for but Gemma already had bigger plans. She suggested that we host a live tour of the game for an audience online which we did in September 2020 (which was very much the year for hosting events online of course). Gemma took us around Alexandria, but also Giza and Saqqara both of which look incredible in the game. Kate and I chipped in here and there with non-gamer comments about how Egypt was presented, and quite a few ‘oohs’ and ‘wows’ along the way too. The session was recorded so rather than describe it at length I’ll just let you watch – a few highlights are here:

Spurred on by the success of this first event, and having long been interested in the use of history-based video games as a way helping people to learn about the past, Gemma proposed that we do something on a grander scale. In the weeks that followed, she devised a project to be called ‘Playing in the Past’, and applied for funding made available by Southampton University (where she’s doing a PhD on the archive of the pioneer early 19^th century Egyptologist, Robert Hay) for public engagement in archaeology. And much to our excitement, she succeeded.

An advert for the first official PITP session.

During the first half of 2021, Gemma organised six ‘Playing in the Past’ sessions, based on the model established by our first event. Each took the form of a virtual tour, of a particular part of the landscape in the game that would allow a specially invited expert to discuss a particular aspect of Egypt in the ancient past and the way the game represents it.

By this point Gemma had also brought very considerable technical expertise to the project: the sessions were broadcast online via her channel on the Twitch platform, and viewers would be able to see the game being played, and a little thumbnail image of Gemma, me and/or Kate as co-hosts, and our expert. Our experts also began the sessions with a short presentation before the gameplay began.

Although Gemma, as the expert gamer, was usually the one to take the controls of the game, she allowed me to take the reins during the first session – ‘A Visit to Ptolemaic Thebes’ – which was very kind and trusting of her, and if nothing else probably added an element of humour to the proceedings as I bashed into the people and temples of the ancient city… A recording of this session is here:

And in case it’s of any interest, the slides – which include a few images of sites as they appear in real life today, and as they appear in the game for comparison – from my presentation at the start are here.

Slide from my presentation showing the temples of Deir el-Bahri as they appear in real life in the 21st century…

…and the temples as they appear in AC Origins.

The other sessions in the series, which in all cases were hosted by Gemma, were as follows:

‘How to live forever. Death and the afterlife in ancient Egypt’ with Dr Carrie Arbuckle MacLeod
‘From Potter’s Wheel to Baker’s Oven’ with Dr Sarah K Doherty
‘Who Lived in Ptolemaic Egypt?’ with Heba Abd El Gawad
‘Visions of Ancient Egypt in the 19th Century: Boats and Travel on the Nile’ with Ziad Morsy. Kate also gave a presentation at the start of this one.
‘Visualising a Living and Immersive Ancient World’ with Professor Stephanie Moser (University of Southampton) and Maxime Durand (Ubisoft)

Publicity

It just so happened that during 2020 I had been introduced online to Kelly Evans, an Egyptophile who works in media relations. Kelly had offered to help with anything that I wanted to publicise so when I mentioned that ‘Playing in the Past’ was now a university-funded public engagement project Kelly set to work looking for interest from the press. And being great at what she does, she succeeded. The project was covered in Games Radar (‘New Twitch series will teach you about ancient Egypt by exploring Assassin’s Creed: Origins‘), Video Game Almanac, the Southern Daily Echo (‘Southampton student exploring ancient Egypt using video game‘) and, most excitingly of all, by Ubisoft, the French company that designed the game. The three of us were interviewed by Youssef Maguid, who by happy coincidence is Egyptian himself, for a piece entitled ‘Why Three Egyptologists Are Teaching History Through Assassin’s Creed Origins’ which was published on Ubisoft’s website in March 2021.

By this point we were of course convinced ourselves of the value of the game as a means of engaging with an audience and sharing our Egyptological expertise, in ‘teaching’ in other words. We were huge fans of the game and utterly inspired by the obvious lengths to which Ubisoft had gone to ensure the world inside the game was as accurate as it could be, and wherever possible based on good solid evidence and expertise, calling on a number of expert colleagues of ours. (For more on the development of the game see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin’s_Creed_Origins). The game’s ‘discovery tour’ was a clear attempt to use the game for educational purposes, so it was obvious that Ubisoft had hoped the game might be used for such purposes. Still it was a great thrill that they would want to share our project with their (massive) audience; I certainly felt that their interest helped to validate what we were doing, and perhaps they felt that we had provided a little extra validation for that aspect of what they were trying to achieve too.

Gemma cannily capitalised on the relationship by inviting Maxime Durand, World-Design Director at Ubisoft, who worked on AC Origins to join the panel for the final session in the PITP series. Gemma, Kate, Maxime and I were also joined by Professor Stephanie Moser of the University of Southampton, one of the world’s leading scholars in the reception of ancient Egypt. It was the perfect panel and the perfect way to end the series, and you can watch it back here:

Thank yous

As I said at the start my aim in posting this piece is mainly just to capture what was a really fun project and a very memorable part of the strange period of the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, and to gather together all the related material that now exists online, especially the recorded versions of the PITP sessions and the interview we did with Ubisoft. And very importantly, this also gives me an opportunity to say a few thank yous:

To Gemma, for offering to run the first virtual tour, which led to me buying my first games console since Christmas 1992(!) and spending hours and hours in the incredible world of AC Origins, and most importantly, for having the idea for the much grander project and the determination and expertise to make it happen. Thank you Gemma and very well done!
To Kate, for a tonne of expertise, for joining in, thereby making me not the only non-gamer on the team, and just generally for helping to make the whole thing so much fun.
It’s not really my place to do the thank yous for the project but I can’t help but mention all the expert contributors, Carrie, Sarah, Heba, Ziad, Maxime and Stephanie for giving up their time and sharing such a wide variety of insights into various aspects of ancient Egypt, and the way it is portrayed in modern times, especially in the game.
And to everyone who came along to the sessions and contributed questions, comments and encouraging noises. We wouldn’t have got anywhere if we hadn’t known there was interest out there online in what we were doing. Thank you!

I should also acknowledge that while it’s true that PITP attracted a bit of attention for using a video game as an educational tool we were by no means the first or only ones to have done anything like this, and indeed there is a growing body of academic discourse and literature about the intersection between archaeology and ancient history and gaming. I am by no means the expert but to learn more you could do worse than to search for the hashtags #archaeogaming and, of course, #playinginthepast on Twitter.

Now back to real life! (Or perhaps to the game…).

It seems a very long time now since I first wrote something about how the pandemic had affected my situation as a freelancer (see below). We’re still not out of the woods but as I write this I have just finished my first visit to Egypt with a group of tourists since the pandemic began and life seems to be returning to something like normal. So, the piece I wrote in April 2020 certainly needs updating, and now that I have finally been able to resume this aspect of my work, along with most others, now seems a good moment to reflect.

Me – with mask on! – inside the tomb of Ramose (TT 55) in Luxor last week (Feb 2022). Thanks to Marie Best for the photo!

It’s almost two years since it became clear that COVID was going to be a blight on our lives. By the time of my first piece, I had had one trip to Egypt postponed and it seemed fairly clear that any others that were on the cards weren’t going to happen (they didn’t). Any lectures I was due to give in various places around the UK and beyond were also postponed indefinitely.

Opening slide from my very first talk online – seems a long time ago now!

However, lecturing online suddenly became something which I, and lots of others like me, could do to keep ourselves occupied when so many other things weren’t possible, and for which there was suddenly a substantial and enthusiastic audience. It quickly took over my life in fact, and it was very exciting. The audiences I could reach online were generally much bigger than any I would normally speak to in person. My second talk – ‘After Akhenaten’ – sold out three sessions and was attended by around 700 in total. Attendees included regulars on the Egyptology circuit, many of them friends I have known for years, but also many I was ‘meeting’ for the first time. And they came from far and wide including places where Egyptology lectures were simply never available in person – it was really great to hear from all those who were able to listen in to talks like this for the first time as no such thing would be available for them locally.

‘After Akhenaten’ in progress

In some ways though it was harder to see and to know my audience. Not being able to see anyone I couldn’t recognise any faces that might have been familiar, and I knew that, potentially, anyone could be watching including colleagues who might well know more about that day’s subject than I did… The pressure not to make any crashing mistakes and to give a good account of myself really motivated me to raise my game: I made sure I was on top of my material and paid more attention to my presentations, making sure I included captions and image credits where necessary. Although the talks were always based on subjects I knew to some extent, putting together the material for the presentations almost always gave me the excuse to look at certain things in more detail, allowing me to learn a lot as I went along. I also created guides to ‘further reading’ after each talk, partly so that the entertainment didn’t have to stop at the end of the lecture but also partly as a way of covering any themes or details I had to leave out, and to provide my audience with all the information on which my interpretations were based and alternative explanations so that they could make up their own minds.

It gave me a huge lift to have so many people joining the talks and to feel the huge wave of enthusiasm for all this Egyptology that was suddenly available at a time when we all sorely needed distractions.

Opening slide from my talk on Imhotep, the first for which I charged a small fee

The next step for me – which seemed like a big risk at the time – was to see if the lectures would still be of interest if I were to charge a small fee. It was enormously rewarding to find that the numbers held up and that many people even said that I should be charging more! Since I first charged for one of my talks in June 2020 this has become my main source of income, and I really feel as though it saved me both financially and psychologically thanks to the good feelings that came with it.

There is another advantage to this which I hope will endure, pandemic or not: hosting my own lectures has not only allowed me to generate a little income but to my schedule too. One of the hardest things about the kind of freelance work I do it is that it’s mostly intermittent and unpredictable. I have periods when there’s loads of work and others when there is very little. But now, if I have the time and am a bit short of funds I can put a lecture in the diary and know I’ll have something to work on and a with any luck a bit of money to show for it.

Two years on I now have a mass of material in much better shape than my presentations were ever in before and have made recordings of several my talks available on YouTube – more content which I hope will be of value in its own right while also perhaps introducing more people to my work.

Recorded lectures waiting to be watched on YouTube!

Other Adventures

In addition to my own lectures I’ve been very fortunate to have been invited to give talks online for various other groups in the UK and overseas. I’m very grateful that all involved were able to make the transition to online events helping those of us for whom public speaking is an important part of our work to carry on, albeit in a new way.

I also feel very lucky that when the pandemic began I had just finished working on a book – Egyptologists’ Notebooks – and despite COVID it was published on schedule in October 2020. So I had a new book to promote and lots of new material to use as the focus for new lectures. I also published a book for children – King Tutankhamun Tells All –  in June 2021. Those also have helped to keep me busy.

The postponement of a Nile Cruise that was due to set sail in April 2020 gave me the idea for a ‘Virtual Nile Cruise’ – a daily photo series on social media taking in sites and monuments as one might encounter them on a journey up the Nile, which eventually took in 80 sites / days in the Nile Valley, Delta, Western Desert and Sudan. Aside from providing a bit more content and an excellent opportunity to keep in touch with my audience it gave me a great excuse to go back over all the thousands of photos I have taken in Egypt in over 40 visits since 1998, and having pulled out the best ones I now have a definitive and well-organised set. I can find things quickly at last!

A felucca on the Nile – the image Dr Kate Sheppard and I used to promote the Nile Cruise Then & Now podcast

Other projects have come my way too, including the ‘Nile Cruise Then & Now’ podcast with Dr Kate Sheppard, and the ‘Playing in the Past Project’ with Kate and Gemma Renshaw which explored the ways in which the video game Assassins Creed: Origins could be used as an educational tool.

Visiting a Theban temple of the late Ptolemaic Period in Assassin’s Creed: Origins

THANK YOU

Throughout the two years I have been incredibly fortunate to have the support an encouragement of so many people who have joined the talks, watched something I’ve been in on TV, read one of my books, or seen the photos I’ve posted online and responded with positive comments.

It’s been lovely to know that there is an audience out there for what I do. Getting offers of work enables me to earn a living but it also helps remind me that there is a point to what I do, that there’s value in what I have to offer. I’m really grateful for all the supportive messages I’ve received in the last couple of years, and extra specially thankful to all those of you who have gone above and beyond by sending contributions of money to support what I do, and also books. Putting together so many lectures in the last year or so has meant making more use of my own small library than I have ever needed to do before and being able to augment it with exactly the things I needed thanks to your generosity has been of great practical benefit but, again, just helped give me such a lift. Thank you!

What comes next?

False dawns and dashed hopes have been a feature of this pandemic but dare I say it 2022 is shaping up to be better year than the previous two. In fact I managed to get back to Egypt – for two days’ filming – in October 2021, and In January 2022 I spent a week in London making a documentary for HistoryHit.

DoP Milo after hours in the Egyptian sculpture gallery at the British Museum while filming for HistoryHit

Following two weeks of visits to sites in the Luxor area with groups from Ancient World Tours (details here) I will be back at home now for another week or so before flying out again to join another group. Altogether I have three more tours coming up in the next few weeks and have work on three more films lined up as well. And I have another book for children coming out in May (watch this space!). I also have a number of talks in the diary, both in person and online. The summer is likely to be quieter and at that point I plan to give a couple new talks of my own, and perhaps to make a few more recordings available too.

Thanks for sticking with me, it’s really nice to think that I still have a freelance career despite the last two years and I’m not sure I could have done it without your help. Again, THANK YOU!

—–

ORIGINAL ‘Support My Work’ text:

UPDATE 20 May 2020: I’ve been incredibly touched by the response to this page since I first posted it at the end of April. You’ve sent donations of money and books, and messages of support, advice and encouragement. It’s helped keep my spirits up, and off-set the loss of earnings; I have now heard from the government that I will be eligible for a grant from the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme so that will help further still. It has all been enormously helpful and moreover, encouraging. Thank you to all of you  who responded however you’ve been able to, it’s all been very much appreciated.

At the start of the lockdown I was thinking that these online activities – lectures, #virtualnilecruise etc – would help keep us all going for a few weeks until things got back to normal, but it now seems likely ‘normal’ is still a long way away, and may never return completely, and that ‘lockdown lectures’ like these might be a part of a ‘new normal’. It’s for this reason that I’m beginning to experiment with charging for online talks; I will need to bring money in if I’m going to continue – as I’d really like to – and it’s your thoughtful and generous responses that have persuaded me that it might be possible. Thank you!

I’ve written a little more about my plans and how I got to this point here.

ORIGINAL POST:

Lockdown, lost earnings

I’ve been self-employed for 3 and a half years now and I earn my living from writing, TV, lecturing and leading tours to Egypt and elsewhere. I also earn an honorarium from my work for the Robert Anderson Trust. The lockdown has changed things for me as it has for everyone. I’ve lost some paid work – a tour to Egypt, a few lectures and a TV project. This has meant I’ve had a bit of extra time to work on making the best of the situation, and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to give a few lectures online, to lead a ‘virtual Nile cruise’, and in general to share more via social media than I would have done otherwise, knowing that there are probably more people out there with the time and inclination to indulge their interests in Egyptology than there would be normally. This has been great fun, but so far I haven’t taken any steps towards trying to recover any of my lost income, and I couldn’t carry on working like this without earning any money for very long.

Online lectures – details here

Being very English I don’t like to ask, but it’s been suggested to me that anyone who appreciates the lectures etc might like to support their friendly neighbourhood Egyptologist…

I’m by no means the worst affected by the current crisis: I’m healthy, safe, I’m with my loved ones, and certainly have plenty to occupy me. There are plenty of people who need support much more than I do, those in the NHS (to support NHS Charities Together go here), those who are homeless (go here) or struggling to feed themselves or their families (here) , and those working at historic sites and monuments for whom a lack of income from visitors threatens their ability to protect these vital parts of our shared heritage (see the campaign here) – to name but four that have been in my mind.

But in case you were wondering if or how you could help a freelance Egyptologist, here are a few suggestions.

Books

My first book, Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt is available now in print and e-book form (via Amazon, or your local bookshop), and my next one Egyptologists’ Notebooks will be out in September 2020 and is available now for pre-order (Amazon.co.uk and Blackwells in the UK, Amazon.com in the US). Buying copies for yourself or your friends and family really helps, as does pre-ordering – this encourages sellers to buy in more stock from the publisher, and to do more to promote the book to readers. Leaving a review – on Amazon, GoodReads and elsewhere – can really help encourage people to buy books as well (unless you really didn’t enjoy what you read I which case I imagine you probably wouldn’t be here…).

A small contribution

If you’d like to show your support by making a small financial contribution you can do so via PayPal.Me. So far I have avoided charging any fee for online lectures but putting together and giving talks takes time, and I now pay for a Zoom subscription for hosting webinars; ordinarily I would be paid a small lecturer’s fee, and I often take the opportunity to sell books afterwards – neither of these things are available to me at the moment. I’d rather keep the lectures free for now, but if you’d like to show your support by making a small contribution, I‘d be really grateful. If the lectures weren’t free I’d probably charge somewhere between £2 and £5 (I think?).

Egyptological Library

In order to do my work, I need books! I’m very lucky that in 20 years of studying and working in Egyptology I’ve amassed a decent collection of my own, and I also have access to the collection of the late Dr Robert Anderson, former honorary Secretary of the EES. But I don’t have everything I need and ordinarily I would need to supplement what I have at home with visits to the British Library, EES and elsewhere. If you’d like to help add to the collection a list of titles on my ‘wish list’ is here.

UPDATE JULY 2021: Thank you so much to all of you who have sent books for my library in the last few months – it’s been so helpful with my work prepping lectures, writing and answering questions. I have tried to thank everyone concerned but parcels occasionally arrive without any information about the sender so if you haven’t had a reply please accept my apologies and feel free to drop me a line to let me know what you sent! I have been updating my wish list on Amazon.co.uk – it’s a great way to make a note of books that I think will be useful! – and I have also now added a list of Amazon.fr (here) as I’ve been coming across quite a few titles lately that are only listed on the French version of the site. You should find this works in the same way as the UK – version you can log-in with your usual account etc and pay using the same methods. Thank you again for your support!

Thank you!

Thanks for reading this. As I said above, I don’t like asking, and I’m not expecting to get anything from this. Any and every response to the above will be very, very welcome. If you have any questions or thoughts, please let me know via this page. Thank you!

I am very sorry to report that the geologist and Egyptologist Steve Cross – a good friend and colleague of mine – passed away last week.

Steve Cross in the Valley of Kings, a few metres away from the tomb of Tutankhamun, in 2012.

Steve was a geologist by training, a very knowledgeable self-taught Egyptologist, and a coastguard by profession. He was also a scouser, and a lovely bloke: shy I think, humble, passionate, full of enthusiasm, and devoid of ego. I liked him from the moment I first got to know him around twenty years ago. In the years that followed he made a name for himself by combining his knowledge of geology and Egyptology to publish a new theory that revealed how Tutankhamun’s tomb came to remain untouched from the late Eighteenth Dynasty until Howard Carter’s team rediscovered it in 1922. I can’t think of a better example of someone without any formal training in Egyptology making such an impact on the subject, and although his work was published in scientific journals and featured in television documentaries, I somehow feel that he was never appreciated to the extent that he should have been.

Steve in the Theban hills in 2014. Photo courtesy of Janet Shepherd.

I first got to know Steve when I joined the staff of the Egypt Exploration Society in January 2001. I was in charge of the library and took over the running of a brilliant service whereby members who couldn’t visit in person could pay to have library books and photocopied articles sent to them by post. Steve was one of a handful of members who had an ‘account’. He would send £10 or so every so often with his latest requests and I would deduct the copying charges and postage costs from the account before sending off the things he needed. We exchanged letters regularly – mine typed on headed paper – I was very proud of my new job! – his scribbled in biro. He was always very pleasant and never late in returning the books he borrowed. I could tell a little of his interests from the things he asked for: mostly things to do with the Valley of Kings, the wider Theban cemeteries, and the late Eighteenth Dynasty including the Amarna Period. The Society’s copy of A J Peden’s The Graffiti of Pharaonic Egypt became especially dog-eared from all the posting backwards and forwards! After a couple of years he said he was writing up the results of his work and asked if I would read a draft. I was flattered but felt he had overestimated my expertise – I didn’t feel I could really help but his writing seemed serious and thorough and I encouraged him to submit it for publication in the Society’s learned periodical, the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology (JEA). Most articles published in JEA are written by professional Egyptologists and archaeologists but there’s no requirement that submissions should come from people with any particular qualifications – each submission is judged on its own merits regardless of the author and I felt Steve had nothing to lose: in the worst case his submission would be rejected but only, I hoped, with comments explaining what was lacking and how it could be improved; and in the best case it would be accepted, improved by independent reviewers, and published, providing the work and also Steve himself with serious credibility.

Steve explaining his ideas for the TV cameras in the Valley of Kings in 2012.

To my delight, he followed my suggestion and his short article on ‘The hydrology of the Valley of the Kings’ was published in volume 94 of the JEA in 2008. Steve had studied the records of historic excavations, including those relating to Howard Carter’s work in the Valley, and records of more recent flash floods including one in 1994, and carried out his own field survey of the Valley. This led him to produce a model that showed that on one particular occasion in the late Eighteenth Dynasty, very shortly after Tutankhamun was buried, the natural shape of the Valley with its various branches led to several streams of flash-flood waters and huge quantities of dust and limestone chips rushing into the area as a result of rains in the mountains. These streams collided with one another, causing the waters and the debris to stop dead in the central part of the Valley, burying several tombs – including Tutankhamun’s – under a thick layer which, when it dried, was rock solid, like cement. That’s why Tutankhamun’s tomb was never robbed, why his mummy was never removed from the tomb by the authorities to the secret ‘caches’ along with the rest of the New Kingdom kings’ bodies, and why the tomb remained intact until Carter’s great discovery. Carter’s own documentation – particularly the photos of the stratigraphy overlying the tomb – provided the crucial evidence but this explanation had eluded Egyptologists until Steve came along. I made sure I gave due prominence to his work in the relevant chapter of my book Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt, and the passage concerned appears below.

The Valley of Kings.

In the years that followed Steve was invited to speak about his work by numerous Egyptology societies around the UK and he continued to develop his research, publishing another article – on ‘The Workmen’s Huts and Stratigraphy in the Valley of the Kings’ – in JEA 100 (2014), and a series of further articles in various other publications (available via Steve’s Academia page here.). He featured in a documentary made by Blink Films which was shown around the world in 2013 under various names including ‘Ultimate Tut’ in North America and ‘Tutankhamun: mystery of the burnt mummy’ in the UK (Channel 4). I was also in that film and got to spend a very enjoyable couple of days’ filming in Luxor with Steve, chatting and swapping stories.

Steve, explaining how the tomb of Tutankhamun came to be concealed during the making of ‘Tutankhamun: mystery of the burnt mummy’ (Channel 4, 2013)

His theory suggested that the flash flood may also have covered areas of the Valley that were still unexcavated, leading to the question of whether or not there might yet be further tombs to find, and he was involved in excavations in the centre of the Valley around 2009. For many years he tried to obtain support for a new field project to search for tombs in the Valley but sadly it never came to anything, I suspect in part because he was treated by some in Egyptology as an outsider, but also because the Valley is such a sensitive site and subject to so much interest from so many scholars of various kinds, not all of them entirely credible.

Steve (far right) leading a group on a geological tour of the Theban wadis in 2014. Photo courtesy of Janet Shepherd.

His lectures were always well-received and he was very well-liked – an ‘ordinary’ guy who had taught himself Egyptology and ended up making a contribution to science of equal if not greater importance than that of many others in the field. That importance was confirmed by an invitation to contribute to The Oxford Handbook of the Valley of the Kings for which he wrote the chapter on ‘The Search for Other Tombs’. He never lost his humility and sense of ordinariness. He led tours to Egypt guiding fellow enthusiasts around the Theban hills day after day examining the geology and helping them to understand how the natural environment had affected the ancient past.* I often find myself wishing I could ask him questions when I’m in Egypt, and I wish I could have been on one those trips. It never dawned on me that I might never get the chance to ask my questions but I’ll have to wait to join him in the next life now. To Steve: Life! Prosperity! Health!

Steve by the Nile at sundown in 2012, with the Theban mountains across the other side of the river in the distance.

*Thanks to Janet Shepherd of Ancient World Tours for this happy memory.

The following excerpt is taken from Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt (London, Thames and Hudson, 2018), 132-4.

“Given what we already know about the use, reuse, removal and reburial of equipment like this in the Valley of the Kings, one might ask how we know that material that was made in the late 18th Dynasty was also deposited at that time. Thanks to some brilliant detective work undertaken in recent years by Stephen Cross, we can now be almost certain that this was the case. Cross knows his Egyptology very well but his formal training is in geology, an expertise that most Egyptologists do not have. Cross carefully reviewed the reports of Ayrton, Davis, Carter and others who carried out their excavations in this area, and embarked on field-walking the Valley itself to build up a picture of the way the Valley evolved in terms of the original natural landscape, and the man-made and natural events that have occurred since it first came into use. He came up with a fascinating hypothesis that has great relevance for the period under study here. KV 55, KV 62 (Tutankhamun’s) and KV 63 were all cut into the bedrock floor in the central area of the Valley, and are among the earliest known tombs in that part of the cemetery. They also lie at a point of confluence of several side wadis leading down from the higher ground in the mountains. We have known for a long time that the Valley is, from time to time, hit by devastating flash floods, formed of rainwater that gathers volume and momentum as it starts its journey from the mountains in the west towards the lower ground of the Nile Valley floor. The floodwaters carry with them limestone chippings and other debris. These deposits have occasionally come rushing into the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, wreaking havoc inside. The ancient Egyptians were aware of this and put in place various measures to ensure that the kings’ burials could withstand such events. This debris, destructive though it is, can also be useful: when it dries it forms a distinctive archaeological layer in the stratigraphy of the Valley, a tell-tale sign, very obvious to a geologist like Cross, that a flood event happened at a particular point in the sequence of events in the Valley.

It is of course very well known that the tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered undisturbed since antiquity, whereas most of the other tombs in the Valley had been comprehensively robbed, and some of them had even lain open since ancient times, available for anyone venturing into the area to enter them at will. Cross noted that just such a flood event seemed to have taken place after KV 62 had been sealed, but before the construction of a series of workmen’s huts, built over the top of the flood deposit, a relatively short time later, during the Ramesside Period. Furthermore, the absence of a layer of wind-blown sand deposits, which accumulate very quickly in this part of the world, above the entrance to the tomb but beneath the flood layer suggests that very little time elapsed between the sealing of the tomb and the flood. This event deposited an approximately 1-m (3-ft) depth of alluvium across the central area of the Valley and concealed completely not only KV 62 but also KVs 55 and 63 under a thick and impenetrable layer of what was effectively cement. It would have made it extremely difficult for anyone to find them afterwards, not least enter them. This explains why Tutankhamun’s tomb and KV 63 were never plundered; perhaps even more interestingly, it makes it very likely that the disturbances evident in KV 55, which was sealed, then re- entered and sealed again, took place before this flood episode, not long after the death of Tutankhamun. What is most interesting perhaps for our investigation is that this part of the Valley, which we know was used for the construction of tombs at the end of the 18th Dynasty, and we now also know was completely concealed by the flash flood identified by Cross, has never been completely excavated.”

UPDATE 16 April 2021: I’ve been reminded by Sharon Hague of this interview which she conducted with Steve in 2020. It’s nice to ‘hear his voice’ and to see that he was still so enthusiastically working on various aspects of his research, but at the same time very sad to think that he won’t have been able to bring them all to a conclusion.

Yesterday, I heard the very sad news that the Egyptologist George Hart had died. It’s always hard to lose a colleague but George was one of the nicest I have ever come across. I had no idea he was unwell, and I gather that he only received his diagnosis – of cancer, sadly – at the beginning of this month (Feb 2021). It’s a comfort to know that he wasn’t ill for long, but I am sure that he will be much missed by many people.

George Hart during a reception in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, The British Museum in 2011.

George had degrees in Egyptology but his contribution to the field was less to do with academic work and more with sharing his expertise with the wider public. I can hardly think of anyone who has contributed more to the subject in this way in the entire time I have been involved.

He was something of a hero of mine in fact. While I was still a student at the University of Birmingham (1996-2000) there was relatively little Egyptology online, and the few pages that existed were very usefully gathered together by the ‘Egyptology Resources on the Internet’ site. This included a short list of personal websites and George was among the very small number of Egyptologists with their own pages. Here I learned that he had a BA and MPhil – the degree I was studying for at the time – and worked at the British Museum, not in the Egyptian department however, but in Education. He was the Museum’s resident specialist in teaching Egyptology to the public, and having already had an inkling that this might where I might find my own niche, I decided his was a career path to aspire to!

Shortly after finishing that degree I got my first job, at the Egypt Exploration Society (EES), where I met George for the first time, and where I would encounter him on many occasions over the course of the next two decades. As EES librarian I came to know George’s books well and as I got to know ‘the scene’ I learnt that of all the enthusiasts I came across who had studied Egyptology – members of the EES or other groups around the country – many had been given their introduction to the subject by George, particularly those who had studied the ancient language – his hieroglyphs classes were eternally popular.

The EES staff, Trustees and Field Directors outside the Society’s offices on Doughty Mews in 2012. George is seventh from right in a light-coloured suit and blue-striped shirt.

I often attended meetings with George. He was a Trustee of the EES for many years and had been a member of the editorial board of the Society’s colour magazine Egyptian Archaeology from its inception (the first issue was published in 1990). He was editor of the book reviews section and in fact wrote most of the reviews himself for the first ten years or so of the magazine’s existence.

It was a pleasure to see George arriving at the Society’s offices on Doughty Mews. He always had a smile and was interested to know how we all were. He was generally a very friendly character, quiet, modest and apparently without any ego, but highly intelligent and sensible. He was certainly not someone who always felt he had to say something, but, equally, he wasn’t shy in speaking up when he thought he could say something useful, even if it meant going against the mood in the room. He was always positive and encouraging – now I think of it he barely had a bad word to say about anyone or anything – and a natural diplomat. I can well remember the sensitive way he handled a review of a well-known colleague’s autobiography, something none of the rest of us would write for fear of saying what we really thought!

He was principled too. I will never forget George taking a stand when he felt procedures in one particular meeting had fallen short of best practice, even though it meant going against the grain and potentially losing a few friends (although I doubt that happened in the event, George was too likeable).

In 2009 I asked him to teach hieroglyphs on weekday evenings at the Society which he did with typical enthusiasm even though by this time he surely had no need of such work. In more recent years I often bumped into him either in the airport or on the plane to Cairo, usually when we were both travelling out with groups of enthusiastic tourists. The last time I saw him was in mid-flight, when he came over to say ‘hello’ to Janet Shepherd of Ancient World Tours and me. He was charming as usual and asked about my next book which was to be Egyptologists’ Notebooks. He said he thought it was a great idea and that he was sure it would be excellent, but didn’t think the title was quite right(!).

I had asked him to read a draft of my previous book, Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt, which he did, refusing the expert reviewer’s fee, but providing umpteen useful comments and corrections, all delivered with sensitivity and all the usual (for him) encouragement. He wrote: “Of course I would be very happy to read the chapters of your forthcoming book – although I am sure that with your scholarship and talent any constructive input from me is likely to be minimal.” Of course, in the event, he provided many, extremely helpful notes. I wrote this for the acknowledgements:

“Very special thanks to George Hart who read a draft of the book when I was hurtling towards what turned out to be the final deadline, when much of it was still in a rather scruffy and unfinished state. He never complained, found gentle ways to point out all my silly mistakes, and always had something positive to say about each of the chapters as he went along. There are few people with George’s depth of knowledge, or his gift for communicating it to public audiences. This book is infinitely the better for both. Thanks George.”

He came to the launch of the book when it appeared in October 2018 and, delighted to see him but also full of nerves, I gave him a big hug. I’m glad I had the chance to do that but I’m really sorry I won’t get to see more of him. He was great.

RIP George.

UPDATE 20 May 2021: George’s contribution to education and Egyptology has, fittingly, been recognised in The Guardian, here.

I spent most of 2019 and a little bit of 2020 on the research and writing for Egyptologists’ Notebooks. In many cases this meant going through the papers of the thirty or so travellers, scholars and artists whose stories form the basis of the book, and more importantly the writings, sketches, maps and plans they made of sites and monuments in Egypt including some built by one of the greatest figures from the ancient world: Cleopatra.

Cleopatra and her son Caesarion, Temple of Hathor, Dendera

These archives included, for example, the papers of Robert Hay, James Burton, Edward William Lane, and Joseph Hekekyan which are kept in the British Library. The size of some of these collections is staggering. The Hay archive alone comprises approximately fifty folios, each of which might contain as many as 150 individual drawings. I quickly realised I was going to be seeing far more images than could ever be included in the book – agonisingly – and so began prioritising those that really stood out for some reason: many were just very beautiful or evocative, but the most interesting were the ones that showed a site or a view that has dramatically altered in the intervening years, or a monument that has since been moved or even disappeared completely…

In most instances I knew straight away what I was looking at. The artists were, naturally, drawn to the most striking sights, many of which are now famous as must-see places for visitors to Egypt: the pyramids of Giza, Karnak and Luxor temples, the colossi of Memnon, the Ramesseum, the Valley of Kings. These are places with which I’m very familiar of course, and had no trouble recognising in the drawings. In other cases I needed to look a little more closely to identify what I was looking at. The drawings weren’t always labelled and even when they were, the labels didn’t necessarily help. The names given to sites and monuments have changed over time; and while those we use today have, to some extent become standardised, that wasn’t the case to the same extent two centuries ago. With a bit of digging, however, I was usually able to establish what I was looking at. But in one or two instances I couldn’t, and one such monument, which appeared in more than one archive really caught my attention: the ‘Baths of Cleopatra’.

The ‘Baths of Cleopatra’

Before, I go any further, I should say now, for anyone getting too excited, that I never imagined that these ‘baths’ had anything to do with Cleopatra herself; it seemed much more likely that this was simply a colloquial name for a monument that was nonetheless probably ancient, and apparently quite spectacular.

The ‘baths’ were apparently somewhere in Alexandria and they appeared in drawings made by several of the individuals who appear in my book, including James Burton, Pascal Coste, and Hector Horeau. Burton and Coste had drawn plans of this monument, which appeared to comprise an elaborate series of chambers cut into the bedrock a short distance from the coastline, the largest incorporating a number of square-based pillars and opening, via a smaller, rectangular room, onto a circular chamber with smaller rooms, each identical in plan, leading off to the left, right and straight ahead. Large rock-cut monuments in Egypt are very often tombs and as I have an interest in the ‘lost tombs’ of Alexander the Great and Cleopatra – both of which were in Alexandria – I was keen to know more.

Burton and Coste’s plans differed slightly e.g. in the number and arrangement of pillars but were sufficiently similar in their main features – which seemed quite distinctive to me – for it to seem clear that they showed the same thing.

Burton’s drawing. © British Library Board, add ms 25634 f.4

Burton’s archive in fact included two versions of the same plan (add ms 25634 f.4 and f. 5), one – the more finished looking of the two – with the heading ‘EXCAVATION in the ROCK on the COAST of ALEXANDRIA’, both annotated with the phrase ‘(The) Catacombs Alexandria’. To this Burton had added the following note:

“Most of the rooms so full of sand that a man cannot stand upright in them
Square holes in the ceilings of several rooms through which the sand has accumulated
In several places the wall has been cut through
All about this part of the coast are remains of baths and catacombs
The whole has been plastered and probably painted from the remains of red lines in [illegible] places and in the room A the ceiling is divided by radiating lines and in the center there appears to have been a stucco [illegible]”

Coste’s added to his drawing this label:

“alexandrie 1819
Plan genèral du catacomb et du bains de cléopâtre”

Coste’s drawing of the ‘catacomb’ and ‘bains’ (‘baths’) of Cleopatra. From Pascal Coste Toutes les Égypte (Marseilles, Éditions Parenthèses / Bibliothèque Municipale de Marseille, 1998)

Horeau’s drawing is a view showing the interior of the monument and is simply labelled (on the mount) ‘Bain de Cléopâtre’. Horeau included two human figures for scale in his sketch which appears to show a large and impressive room with a pediment above a large doorway, leading into another room, which the drawing seems to show has a domed roof. The latter is presumably the circular room in Burton and Coste’s plans, and indeed Horeau’s drawing also seems to show further rooms leading off it.

Horeau’s painting which is labelled ‘Bain de Cléopâtre’. © Griffith Institute, University of Oxford. The image, and catalogue entry are available via the Griffith Institute website, here.

This looked like a very impressive monument, and yet it was clearly quite different from anything I knew of in Alexandria, and I had never even heard of these ‘baths’ before. So what was this monument, and what happened to it?

The Griffith Institute catalogue entry suggested that the site was “Alexandria. Kom el-Shuqafa. Underground tombs of the Graeco-Roman Period.” Although I was already beginning to think that ‘Baths of Cleopatra’ might well have been a name that had long since fallen out of use, and there were certainly catacombs at Kom es-Shoqafa, I had been to visit them on several occasions recently and was confident that these ‘baths’ were something different. The idea that my esteemed colleagues at the Griffith might have got this wrong only served to deepen the mystery.

E M Forster and the ‘baths’ in Scotland

Not knowing what they were, and with plenty of other wonderful material to use in my book, I tried not to get too distracted by this and put the question to one side.

Then in February this year, when I had almost completely finished my work on Notebooks and was taking a short holiday in Scotland, I visited the country’s largest second-hand bookshop, Leakey’s, in Inverness. If you like books, and the thrill of discovering lost treasures, this cavernous, converted church, brimming with piles of unsorted books, is the place to be. Suzanna, my fiancée, and I spent a couple of hours combing the seemingly endless shelves and could have stayed longer, but in fact I had made my great discovery within a few minutes’ of arriving. I saw a copy of E. M. Forster’s Alexandria: A History and Guide, and, to my delight, quickly found a reference in the index to the ‘Baths of Cleopatra’ and even a map showing where they were. This I had to have!

Mine was a copy of the third edition of Forster’s book, published in 1961, so apparently the ‘baths’ had survived and continued to be known by that name at least down to that time. His map would allow me to try to locate them in the modern maps and even satellite images provided by Google, to see if I could tell whether not there was anything left to see of them, and if it might even be possible to visit.

Forster had this to say (pp. 197-8):

“About quarter mile S. W. of Fort Ramleh, and close to a small modern pumping tower, are the so-called Baths of Cleopatra. She had nothing to do with them, but they are worth seeing. The western outer wall, of limestone blocks, is well preserved. Steps lead up through it. Within are pavements of pebble mosaic, fragments of stucco, a stone with a drain groove, &c. In a chamber to the left, is an oblong bath nearly six feet deep; steps lead down to it and in the centre of its pebbled floor is a little depression; in the edge of the brim and on the wall opposite are niches, as if to support beams, and provision for the entrance and exit of the water can also be seen. Further on, past a small stucco cistern, is an entrance to a small room which contains an oblong bath to lie down in, quite modern and suburban in appearance; close to it, under a niche, is a footbath – the bather sat on a seat which has disappeared but whose supports can be seen. – These baths are all in the western part of the enclosure; the rest contains other and larger chambers but is in worse preservation. It is much to be wished that these baths, which have recently been excavated, could be protected properly; otherwise they will share the fate of the other antiquities within the military zone.¹

Forster’s map of ‘Aboukir and District’ with the ‘Baths of Cleopatra’ shown a little way inland. After Forster, E. M. Alexandria: A History and Guide (Gloucester, Mass., Peter Smith, 1968), 189.

So, apparently, the ‘baths’ were to be found a little outside Alexandria itself, around 20km along the coast around the western edge of the Bay of Aboukir. This was a surprise, as everything I had seen up to this point suggested the ‘baths’ were in Alexandria proper. I supposed that for Burton, Coste et al, they might nonetheless have considered this to have been the general area of Alexandria. And it would help to explain perhaps why I had never come across the ‘baths’ before – they were beyond the limits of the city, to which most visitors like me would confine themselves, and moreover, according to Forster, they lay in what was, by his time, a military zone. It’s a shame that Forster included no plan of the ‘baths’; his description made no mention of the circular room with a domed roof, but nothing he had written made me think he had not visited the very same monument drawn by Burton, Coste and Horeau. Perhaps the circular room and/or its dome had fallen into ruin and were no longer visible? As Forster wrote, “the rest contains other and larger chambers but is in worse preservation.”

Significantly, perhaps, Forster’s map seems to place the ‘baths’ a little way inland from the coast itself, apparently in keeping with Burton and Coste’s plans which show the greater part of the monument lying just inland from the shore.

At this point, I decided to ask a friend, Dr Daniele Salvoldi, who knows Alexandria very well, if he knew of the ‘baths’ and whether or not it would be possible to go and see them. This turned out to be a very long and productive exchange, and eventually led to the solution to the mystery. But before I reveal what that was…

Daniele knew of the ‘baths’ and had tried to locate them on a modern map, placing them in the area of the Ramleh Fort, in keeping with Forster’s description. One of his first thoughts was that there would be no way we could go and see them because of the military presence in the area.

He also pointed me to an article on the fortresses in the Aboukir area, which mentions the ‘baths’ as part of a description of El Tawfekeya Fort:

“It was once known by “El Shaheeneya” Fort. The fort … is currently used as Military Area and this is the reason that it’s not listed as a monument yet. It lies in the western part of Abu Qir, it is located on fortified hill very near to canope Remains (Cleopatra baths) & Omar Toson Island inside a military site. It was constructed in the period of Ismail pasha & was completed by Tawfeek pasha in the same style of Mohamed Ali’s forts.”²

The article describes how the area became the focus of the construction of coastal defensive buildings during the reign of Mohamed Aly (ruler of Egypt c. 1805-1848) – twenty-five fortresses had been built in the area by the end of his life – and notes that although these buildings are now of historical importance they are relatively little known and inaccessible due to the area retaining its military importance. It seemed to me that this might well help to explain the relative obscurity of the ‘baths’ today, despite their apparent grandeur and having been an important part of the itinerary for visitors in the early Nineteenth Century, and it struck me that the phenomenon of archaeological remains and historic buildings disappearing from view, creating a kind of archaeological ‘blind-spot’, due to the military concerns taking priority, is an interesting phenomenon in itself. In any case, it seems this would prevent me from making any investigations of my own on the ground, which would certainly have been in the planning for my next trip to Alexandria otherwise.

Misled by E. M. Forster

But then I got another message from Daniele with some surprising news.

He had been checking a copy of Monumental Tombs of Ancient Alexandria. The Theatre of the Dead (Cambridge University Press, 2002) by Marjorie Venit, and came across the plan of a tomb complex that appeared to match the ‘baths’ more or less exactly. According to this, what Burton, Coste and others had seen was a monumental tomb-complex now known as the ‘Grand Catacomb’ in the Wardian district of Alexandria (sometimes also known as ‘Mex’). Daniele kindly sent me some snapshots of the relevant pages and it was clear he was right. But this was confusing, because Wardian is a long way – around 25km – from Aboukir, on the coast in the area of the old port.

‘What?’ I was left wondering… Had I misunderstood: are the ‘baths’ and the catacombs different things?  Maybe I have… Burton’s drawing makes no mention of any baths… And in fact Coste’s drawing is labelled ‘Plan genèral du catacomb et du bains de cléopâtre’ – ‘general plan of the catacombs and the baths of Cleopatra’ (my emphasis), but at the same time his map seemed to show them as being right next to one another. And Horeau’s drawing – labelled ‘Bain de Cléopâtre’ – seemed clearly to show the catacombs. So, it seemed there were both catacombs and baths in Wardian, separate from one another, but close enough to have become confused, at least by Horeau, and others (see below). And as for the ‘baths’ that were known to Forster and to the authors of the article on the Aboukir forts, these must have been something different entirely. In other words the name ‘baths of Cleopatra’ had, it seemed, been attached to at least two different sites. It’s not difficult to imagine the famous queen’s name being associated with various sites and monuments in Alexandria, and given she is celebrated for bathing (albeit in milk), it should be no surprise that certain places associated with such an activity would come to take her name. There were plenty of such places in Alexandria it seems, and there are even baths in Turkey that go by a similar name: ‘Cleopatra’s Bath’.

Necropolis and the Grand Catacomb

In any case though, the spectacular monument that Burton, Coste and Horeau had visited in the first half of the 19th century was indeed the Grand Catacomb at Wardian.

This was a part of the ‘Necropolis’ area of Alexandria, as described by Strabo (writing shortly after the end of the Ptolemaic Period which ended with the defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra by Octavian – Augustus Caesar – and the absorption of Egypt into the Roman Empire):

“Next, after the Heptastadium, one comes to the Harbour of Eunostus, and, above this, to the artificial harbour, which is also called Cibotus; it too has ship-houses. Farther in there is a navigable canal, which extends to Lake Mareotis. Now outside the canal there is still left only a small part of the city; and then one comes to the suburb Necropolis, in which are many gardens and groves and halting-places fitted up for the embalming of corpses”³

This is the area in which the spectacular discovery of the Gabbari necropolis was made in the 1990s during the construction of a road. The site was excavated by the Centre d’Études Alexandrines, led by Jean-Yves Empereur, and after just two seasons of rescue excavation had cleared forty-three collective tombs of the Hellenistic style, the largest containing 250 loculi, niches designed to house the remains of the deceased some of whom were cremated in the Macedonian tradition while others were mummified, as Egyptian custom required. These were tombs for the middle classes and were used over and over for generations; the excavators sometimes found the remains of as many twelve individuals in a single loculus, older remains simply being moved aside to make room for each new entrant.

Front cover of issue 15 of the Egyptian Archaeology: The Bulletin of the Egypt Exploration Society (1999) showing the loculi at Gabbari during the rescue excavations.

The ‘Grand Catacomb’ seems to have been built, or rather cut out of the living rock, for one or more individuals of higher status. The main axis of the tomb leads the visitor from a peristyle (i.e. surrounded with columns) court into the circular room with a domed rood from which leads to three triclinia – rooms with benches on three sides on which people would recline while dining – each containing undecorated sarcophagi. The discovery of a mosaic floor on the surface suggests there may at one point have been a funerary chapel above the hypogeum (underground part of the tomb). According to Venit, the prevailing view is that tomb should be dated to the Roman Period, probably the first two centuries CE (too late to be anything to do with Cleopatra!).

Venit’s brief notes on the tomb are based on the information published by Achille Adriani, the third of three great Italian archaeologists to hold the post of Keeper of the Graeco-Roman Museum at Alexandria – and by extension, archaeologist-in-chief in the city – following Giuseppe Botti and Evaristo Breccia. Adriani excavated the ‘Grand Catacomb’ in 1952 and was, according to Venit, ‘the only modern scholar in the first half of the twentieth century who actually saw the tomb’.⁴

Lost now, or found?

This last part, in particular, intrigued me. If Adriani was the only one to have seen the tomb in the first half of the 20^th century, why was this, when it had apparently been so visible to travellers in earlier times? Perhaps it had been damaged, or surrounded by more modern buildings to the extent that visiting became far less appealing, and it lost some of its allure. In any case, more to the point, had anyone seen it since Adriani? Venit, whose book was published in 2002, says it is “Extant: partially preserved; at the north end of Bergouin Street among the lumber storehouses (fenced).”⁵

Could it still be there even now? Looking at the satellite view in Google Maps it was clear that the area had become heavily industrialised. Just inland from the Eunostos Harbour / Old Port where the tomb should have been I could see container ships, a canal, the circular buildings of industrial refineries, large dusty open spaces, a grid of streets with residential(?) buildings built very close to one another in between. Along the shore where I thought I might have found the ‘baths’ themselves, I could see only modern industrial buildings, and some vague outlines beneath the surface of the ocean that could have been anything. Could the catacomb have survived? It seemed unlikely.

I’d been gathering material for this piece for a few months, returning to it every now and again and found myself caught up in staring at the satellite images again not long ago. This time I looked again at Venit’s map first. She placed the ‘Grand Catacomb’ at one end of the middle of three distinctive diagonal shapes. I had no idea what these might be but decided to see if I could see any similar shapes in the satellite view and to my amazement I could. I zoomed in, and at the end of one of them, surrounded on one side by a busy road and on the others by a dusty area filled with cars and lorries, I could see what looked like a fenced area, apparently unencumbered by any buildings or vehicles, and exhibiting signs even of some vegetation, as if it was protected. Could this be it? I think it is. Is there anything really to see from the ground? I’ll have to wait till I can next get to Alexandria.

Map of the Necropolis area in modern times, showing the coastline and location of ‘Grand Catacomb’ in the Wardian district. After Venit, Monumental Tombs of Ancient Alexandria. The Theatre of the Dead (Cambridge University Press, 2002),  fig. I, p. 2.

Satellite image from Google Earth showing the same part of Alexandria, with the probable location of the Grand Catacomb marked with a red pin.

The same location zoomed in a little…

…and a little bit more…

In the meantime, I was still dying to know what if anything could still be seen of this monument. I had seen no image of it made later than the 19th century and not a single photograph.  The major publication of the tomb appeared to be Adriani’s Repertorio d’Arte dell’Egitto Greco-Romano Series C (Rome, 1966) but this was not a volume I was familiar with; there was no copy in the EES library, visiting the British library was proving very difficult owing to the COVID-related restrictions and second-hand copies were few and far between, and expensive. But, dying to see if the tomb was illustrated inside, and sensing that such a rare but important book would be a valuable addition to my library (an occupational hazard) I cycled over to a second hand bookshop in Finchley which appeared to have the only copy available for sale in the UK. And of course I bought it. I was very pleased to find that it includes a number of photographs of the interior of the Grand Catacomb, one of which I have taken the liberty of including here.

A view along the central axis of the Grand Catacomb following restoration, with the circular, domed room beyond the monumental doorway directly in front of the viewer. After Adriani, Repertorio d’Arte dell’Egitto Greco-Romano Series C (Rome, 1966), pl. 91.

I have subsequently gathered a number of other historic descriptions and images of the tomb – see the appendix below.

So what? (concluding remarks)

So what do we learn from all this? Maybe not that much. There’s nothing that’s really new to scholarship; Professor Venit and others familiar with the Grand Catacomb would have been able to tell me straight away what Burton’s drawing shows. And yet, her bibliography suggests she was unaware of that particular drawing, and perhaps also those of Coste and Horeau, so perhaps that’s something. And if the Griffith Institute can make a mistake about what and where the ‘Baths of Cleopatra’ were then at least I know I’m not alone in my confusion.

I think there are a few wider points worth making too.

Confusion over the name. First, there’s the conflation of the baths i.e. the rock cut pools at the edge of the ocean, and the tomb complex, both in the Wardian district, which, together, were commonly and repeatedly referred to as the ‘Baths of Cleopatra’ in nineteenth century drawings and literature. Second, there’s the fact that the name ‘Baths of Cleopatra’ seems to have been used subsequently, in the 20^th century, to refer to a different place, in Aboukir. Third, while the Wardian site was referred to as the ‘Baths of Cleopatra’ in the 19^th Century, in modern literature the tomb complex is referred to as the ‘Grand Catacomb’ only – Venit makes no mention of the name ‘baths’ at all. This shouldn’t be so surprising as many sites are now given different names to those used two centuries ago – Belzoni believed he had discovered the ‘tomb of Psammuthis’ and not that of Sety I; the tomb of Ramesses III, also in the Valley of Kings, was known to many as the ‘Harper’s Tomb’ or ‘Bruce’s Tomb’ until the hieroglyphs decorating it could be read and the original owner identified. The temple known to many early visitors as the ‘Memnonium’ is nothing to do with legendary Memnon, king of the Aethiopians, but rather a temple of Ramesses II which we now call ‘The Ramesseum’. Memnon’s name still sticks to the famous Colossi however, even though we know the statues really represent Amenhotep III.

Disappearance of the site. By contrast with, for example, the famous Theban monuments which still (COVID-19 notwithstanding) attract thousands of visitors every year, the ‘Grand Catacomb’ seems to have disappeared from view almost entirely. For this reason, knowledge and memory of it has been lost almost entirely, and exists only in the pages of one or two obscure publications, and in the minds of a handful (I suspect) of specialists.

It seems very likely that there would not have been so much confusion had the ‘Baths’ been more visible over the years – they would have been visited, documented, and would have become more familiar.

I’m yet to have the opportunity to see whether anything can still be seen on the ground (I’ll let you know when I get a chance), but even the two Ministry of Antiquities inspectors I contacted in Alexandria were unable to tell me what or where this obscure but evidently spectacular monument was.

For a long time I have felt as though Alexandria has been somehow out of reach, a blindspot, for me at least. I only went myself for the first time in 2015 by which time I had been to Egypt dozens of times over almost twenty years and indeed it seems many frequent visitors to Egypt rarely go or are yet to make the trip. Why? Is it because its archaeological sites are perhaps not as spectacular as elsewhere? Or is it, moreover, that they relate to a period of Egyptian history that somehow doesn’t pique the interest of so many? Too Hellenistic / Roman, or late to be as appealing as the New Kingdom monuments in Luxor perhaps. I was delighted to read this passage in Venit’s book  which articulates the thought far better than I could and shows that I wasn’t the only one to have had it:

“three major reasons conspire to keep Alexandrian monumental tombs almost entirely unknown beyond the few scholars who excavate in Alexandria or those who take particular interest in its monuments. First, now, as in the nineteenth century, Egyptian archaeology primarily focusses on the splendor of Egypt’s more easily visible and more exotic pharaonic past. Second, most tourists and the great majority of scholars arriving by air directly in Cairo find it even more convenient to avoid the city than did their nineteenth-century sea-dependent counterparts. Third, despite recent archaeological activity, the greatest number of Alexandrian tombs were excavated before World War II and, aside from the tombs at Chatby published by Breccia, those at Kom el-Shoqafa that comprise Schreiber’s monumental work, and those excavated in the 1930s at Moustapha Pasha published by Adriani, they exist only in difficult-to-access preliminary reports.”⁶

Venit herself, clearly felt that monuments such as the Grand Catacomb were in danger of being lost, stating that one of the purposes of her book was:

“to preserve precious monuments that can no longer speak for themselves. Despite relatively few remaining tombs, most exist only in the pages of mouldering journals and antiquarian tomes, the greatest number of which are published in Alexandria and the others in Europe during the past century and a half. Few libraries in the United States own any of these volumes, and none owns all of them. Crucial volumes are not held in any library. For this reason, description that might otherwise be considered superfluous may be given at detailed length because, aside from the fact that many of the tombs are lost, the volumes in which they were published during the last half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth may very soon have joined them in demise.”⁷

What’s interesting, to me at least, is that what was clearly a very interesting and apparently spectacular monument, visited by the kind of people who were trying to make comprehensive records of the country’s monuments, have disappeared from view, not only physically, but also from the records, and from memory (is that important?)?

Venit’s reference to the obscurity of the literature shows that even when things are published something else is required for knowledge of them to be maintained. People need to have access to those books, to read them, to discuss them in their own writing and conversations.

We tend to assume that ancient sites and monuments became lost in the distant past and are then revealed by archaeologists in more modern times, and that those that survived since antiquity will now survive for good. The story of the ‘baths’ show how easily such things can be lost again.

NOTES:

1. Extract from Forster, E. M. Alexandria: A History and Guide (Gloucester, Mass., Peter Smith, 1968), 197-8.
2. Shahira Sharaf Eldin, Fatima Fekry, and Adel El Menchawy, ‘Abu Qir fortresses as vital assets for tourism motivation and community development’ Journal of Heritage Conservation 34 (2013), 48. Accessed online (here) April 2020.
3. Strabo. Geography, Volume VIII: Book 17. General Index. Translated by Horace Leonard Jones. Loeb Classical Library 267. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932. Pp. 39-41. Reproduced here.
4. Venit, M. S. Monumental Tombs of Ancient Alexandria, 132
5. Venit, M. S. Monumental Tombs of Ancient Alexandria, 198
6. Venit, M. S. Monumental Tombs of Ancient Alexandria, 5.
7. Venit, M. S. Monumental Tombs of Ancient Alexandria, 5-6.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Big thank yous to Dr Daniele Salvoldi for solving the problem and showing me what the ‘baths’ really were; to Dr Kate Sheppard for pointing me in the direction of the Kellogg, Gardner Wilkinson and Baedecker sources below; and to Dr Chris Elliott for directing me to Mayer’s drawings and to several other sources. Also to the British Library and Griffith Institute, Oxford for permission to reproduce the Burton and Horeau drawings respectively. Thank you all!

APPENDIX:

Historical Sources for the ‘Baths of Cleopatra’ or ‘Grand Catacomb’ of Wardian.

The following is by no means an exhaustive list of sources but these seem to be among the most interesting. Authors who feature in Egyptologists’ Notebooks are marked with an asterisk.*

Richard Dalton (1715-1791)

Antiquities and Views and Greece and Egypt (London, 1751-1752).

‘A Temple in the Catacombs at Alexandria’. Accessed online (here) December 2020.

‘Plan of the Temple in the Catacombs at Alexandria’. Accessed online (here) December 2020.

Frederik Ludwig Norden (1708–1742)*

Travels in Egypt and Nubia (London, Printed for Lockyer Davis and Charles Reymers, 1757), pp. p. 21-2. Accessed online (here) December 2020.

“The sepulchral grots begin from the place, where the ruins of the old city terminate, and they run to a great distance along the border of the sea. They are all dug in the rock-, sometimes one over another, sometimes one aside of another, according as the situation of the ground has permitted. Avarice, or the hope of finding something there, has caused them all to be opened. I have net feen a single one shut up ; and have absolutely found nothing within them. It is easy to judge, by their shape, and by their great number, of the use, for which they were designed. We may fay, that in general they have only a sufficient breadth to contain two dead bodies, one lying by another. Their length exceeds but very little that of a man, and they have more or less height, according to the disposition of the rock. The greatest part have been opened by violence; and that which remains of them intire is not ornamented either with sculpture or painting.”

Voyage d’Égypte et de Nubie Volume 1 (Paris, Pierre Didot l’ainé, 1795), pl. XIII. Accessed online (here) December 2020.

Richard Pococke (1704–1765)*

A Description of the East and Some Other Countries: Volume 1 (London, Printed for the author by W. Bowyer, 1745), p. 9. Accessed online (here) December 2020.

“To the west, beyond the canal of Canopus, and near a Sheik’s burial place, are some Catacombs ; they consist of several apartments cut in the rock , on each side of an open gallery: On both sides of these apartments are three stories of holes, big enough to deposite the bodies in. Here we may suppose the suburbs began, in which were gardens, sepulchres, and places to prepare the bodies for interment; as the quarter call’d Necropolis, or city of the dead, was to the west of the city. The Catacombs extended above a mile to the west, and there are a great number all along by the sea; many of them have been wash’d away by the water, which in such a long tract of time has gain’d on the freestone rock, as appears by the remains of them seen in the sea. I was in some grottos cut out of the rock, in long narrow galleries running parallel to one another, and some also crossing them at right angles. These I conjectured were those magazines in which they embalmed the bodies. The most extraordinary Catacombs are towards the further end, and may be reckon’d among the finest that have been discover’d; being beautiful rooms cut out of a rock, and niches in many of them, so as to deposite the bodies in, adorn’d with a sort of Doric pilasters on each side. The round room, and that leading to it are very beautiful, and so are the four rooms drawn in the plan with niches.”

Luigi Mayer (1755–1803)

Views in Egypt, from the original drawings in the possession of Sir Robert Ainslie, taken during his embassy to Constantinople (London, Printed by Thomas Bensley, for R. Bowyer, 1801), 26-7. Accessed online (here) December 2020.

“The catacombs of Alexandria, of which we have given a representation, are on the south of the old port, their present entrance being a small irregular hole, a few paces from the edge of a basin, that communicates with it. This hole is so narrow, that you are obliged to creep in feet foremost. Having passed it, you find yourself in a chamber of moderate size, but so filled with earth, that a man can hardly stand upright in it. Three sides of this chamber have each another cut out of it only eight feet square, and in three sides of each of these are square recesses, the fronts of which are ornamented with a kind of Tuscan pilasters, supporting a segment of an arch. From the first chamber you pass into various others. One is a parallelogram, about fifteen feet wide, the ceiling of which is a very flat segment of an arch; and at the farther end of it are two Tuscan pilasters, supporting an architrave, cornice and pediment, forming a large door, on each side of which is a small door, on each side of which is a small door ornamented in the same manner, only without the pediment. These three doors lead into a circular chamber of the same width, its roof a very flat dome resting on an architrave; and from this chamber you enter three smaller square chambers, with three recesses in each, exactly as in the first chamber. All these chambers are cut out of the solid rock, very neatly worked, stuccoed over. Some of them had square openings in the roof, to admit light, but these are now stopped up. They are all extremely dry, and similar in style; but how far they extend is impossible to say, they are now so filled, and the original entrance to them is now equally unknown.”

Mayer was clear that that and ‘baths’ were separate from the ‘catacombs’, his descriptions and drawings appearing separately from one another in his published account:

p. 33. Accessed online (here) December 2020.

“THE BATH OF CLEOPATRA As it is vulgarly called, is a large basin, a little to the west of the old port, on one side of which are three small square rooms, hollowed out of the solid rock.”

Description de l’Égypte. 2^nd Ed. Antiquities, Volume V (Plates) (1823), pl. 42. Accessed online (here) December 2020.

Edward Daniel Clarke (1769-1822)

Travels in various countries of Europe Asia and Africa. Part the Second Greece Egypt and the Holy Land (London, R. Watts for Cadell and Davies, 1813), 286-9. Accessed online (here) December 2020.

“The Alexandrian guides to the Catacombs will not be persuaded to enter them without using the precaution of a clue of thread, in order to secure their retreat. We were therefore provided with a ball of twine to answer this purpose; and also with a quantity of wax tapers, to light us in our passage through these dark chambers. They are situated about half a league along the shore, to the westward of the present city. The whole coast exhibits the remains of other sepulchres, that have been violated, and are now in ruins. The name of Cleopatra’s Bath has been given to an artificial reservoir, into which the sea has now access; but for what reason it has been so called, cannot be ascertained: it is a bason hewn out of the rock ; and if it ever was intended for a bath, it was, in all probability, a place where they washed the bodies of the dead before they were embalmed. Shaw maintained that the Crypt a of Necropolis were not intended for the reception of mummies, or embalmed bodies; in which he is decidedly contradicted by the text of Strabo. Perhaps he was one of those who had been induced to adopt an erroneous opinion that mummies were placed upright upon their feet in Egyptian sepulchres, and therefore was at a loss to reconcile the horizontal position of the Thecce with his preconceived notions. We shall presently have very satisfactory evidence as to the manner in which embalmed bodies were laid, when deposited within these tombs by the inhabitants of Egypt, before the foundation of Alexandria. The original entrance to them is now closed, and it is externally concealed from observation. The only place whereby admittance to the interior is practicable, may be found facing the sea, near an angle towards the north: it is a small aperture, made through the soft and sandy rock, either by burrowing animals, or by men for the purpose of ransacking the cemetery. This aperture is barely large enough to admit a person upon his hands and knees. Here it is not unusual to encounter jackals, escaping from the interior, when alarmed by any person approaching: on this account the guides recommend the practice of discharging a gun, or pistol, to prevent any sally of this kind. Having passed this aperture with lighted tapers, we arrived, by a gradual descent, in a square chamber, almost filled with earth: to the right and left of this are smaller apartments, chiseled in the rock: each of these contains on either side of it, except that of the entrance, a Soros for the reception of a mummy; but owing to the accumulation of sand in all of them, this part of the Catacombs cannot be examined without great difficulty. Leaving the first chamber, we found a second of still larger dimensions, having four Crypta with Soroi, two on either side, and a fifth at its extremity towards the south-east. From hence, penetrating towards the west, we passed through another forced aperture, which conducted us into a square chamber without any receptacles for dead bodies; thence, pursuing a south-western course, we persevered in effecting a passage, over heaps of sand, from one chamber to another, admiring everywhere the same extraordinary effects of labour and ingenuity, until we found ourselves bewildered with so many passages, that our clue of thread became of more importance than we at first believed it would prove to be. At last we reached the stately antechamber of the principal sepulchre, which had every appearance of being intended for a regal repository. It was of a circular form, surmounted by a beautiful dome, hewn out of the rock, with exquisite perfection, and the purest simplicity of workmanship. In a few of the chambers we observed pilasters, resembling, in their style of architecture, the Doric, with architraves, as in some of the most antient sepulchres near Jerusalem; but they were all integral parts of the solid rock. The dome covering the circular chamber was without ornament; the entrance to it being from the north-west. Opposite to this entrance was chap, vii. a handsome square Crypt with three Soroi; and to the right and left were other Cryptae, similarly surrounded with places for the dead.”

Image via Wikimedia Commons (here).

Miner Kilbourne Kellogg (1814-1889)

Kellogg drew this pencil sketch of the ‘baths’ (compare with Mayer’s drawing above) in 1843:

Accessed online (here) December 2020. © Smithsonian American Art Museum

John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875)*

A Handbook for Travellers in Egypt (A new edition, with corrections and additions, London, 1867), p. 88. Accessed online (here) December 2020.

“Nothing which remains of Alexandria attest its greatness more than the catacombs upon the coast to the westward. The entrance to them is close to a spot once covered with the habitations and gardens of the town, or suburb of the city, which, from the neighbouring tombs, was called the Necropolis. The extent of these catacombs is remarkable; but the principal inducement to visit them is the elegance and symmetry of the architecture in one of the chambers, having a Doric entablature and mouldings, in good Greek taste, which is not to be met with in any other part of Egypt.

Tapers, a basket of provisions, and, if the traveller intends to penetrate far into them, a rope, are necessary; and if he wishes to take measurements of the mouldings, a ladder. He may go either by land or water. The distance from the Frank quarter is about 2¾ miles. On the way he will pass several tombs at the water’s edge, some of which are below the level of the sea, and having been mistaken for baths have received the name of “Bagni di Cleopatra” If he happens to be remaining on board a yacht in the harbour, he will do well to take advantage of that time to visit them, as it will save a portion of the distance.

There are other catacombs to the east, which I shall mention presently (Rte. 2).”

Karl Baedeker (Firm)

Egypt: handbook for travellers. PART FIRST: LOWER EGYPT, WITH THE FAYUM AND THE PENINSULA OF SINAI (Leipzig, KARL BAEDEKER, 1878), p.220. Accessed online (here) December 2020.

In the friable limestone of the coast-hills are a number of tomb-chambers, the ceilings of which are borne by pillars of the rock left for the purpose ; but most of them have been destroyed by the inroads of the sea, and are now covered up. These chambers, which contain nothing interesting, have been styled the Baths of Cleopatra.

George Ebers (1837-1898)

Egypt: Descriptive, Historical, and Picturesque. Volume 1 (New  York, Cassell & Company, Limited, 1878).

Image via Wikimedia Commons (here).

*I’m not 100% certain that this is the Grand Catacomb at Wardian but I think it probably is, and I include it as it shows the situation at a rather later date than most of the sources given here.

Detroit Publishing Company, 1905: “Egypt. Alexandria. The Catacombs of Meks”.

Image via Wikimedia Commons (here).

‘Meks’ (or ‘Mex’) was another name for the Wardian area. This coloured photograph doesn’t show the ‘Grand Catacomb’ specifically but is nonetheless of interest for its date and general view of the coastline (compare with Mayer and Kellogg, above).

“The dirty little secret is that some disciplines don’t need to be decolonized, they just need to be shut down entirely”

“Here’s looking at you, Egyptology…”

I saw these lines posted to Twitter recently.

I describe myself as an ‘Egyptologist’ – see the banner of my website and the short description at the top of all my social media accounts etc. I make a living from the subject, and have been doing so for the best part of twenty years. So, I have a vested interest in the discipline not being shut down entirely. Still, I recognise that these tweets are a response to the ways in which Egyptology is, undeniably, problematic. Shutting it down entirely might seem dramatic, but this is perhaps exactly the kind of message that is needed if we are all to wake up to the ways in which it is problematic and to try to change things for the better.

It’s worth saying that in addition to what I do now – writing, lecturing, media work – from 2001 to 2016 I was employed by The Egypt Exploration Society,¹ a British organisation founded in 1882, the year Britain bombarded Egypt in order to put down a revolt and protect its own economic and other interests, taking effective control of the country in the process. The organisation is responsible for the excavation of thousands of ancient artefacts, many of which were subsequently removed from Egypt and distributed to museums around the world in exchange for financial support for the continuation of its work.² It is very much a part of the establishment of Egyptology internationally. So for this reason in particular, you might think that, as regards the debate about decolonising Egyptology, I would be something of a dinosaur, with views that are the very opposite of progressive. I hope this isn’t the case however – even if it’s what the hardliners think, and even if what’s below makes it seem as though I still don’t get it. Even though I do have a vested interest in Egyptology, it’s clear that there is a problem to be faced – in Egyptology as with cricket, something else I’m rather partial to, but can see is problematic for similar reasons, and in which I don’t have any vested interest (“You can’t understand the history of cricket without understanding the history of empire. You can’t appreciate the rivalries between these, and other, teams, without appreciating the relationship between our countries, what’s been given, and what’s been taken.” as I read here recently).

When I saw the tweets above I wondered if there was an accessible and concise explanation as to why (some might say) Egyptology should be shut down. And I started scribbling some notes on why this might be the case. I have subsequently seen it suggested that Dr William Carruthers (author of the second of the tweets and with whom, by the way, I’ve been on friendly terms for years now)’ introduction to the Histories of Egyptology volume which he also edited, provides such an explanation. And since I first drafted this piece Will has very helpfully posted further concise thoughts in this thread.

What follows are my own thoughts. I hope those closer to the cutting edge of the debate will forgive me; I’m posting this in the hope of bringing the debate to a wider audience, and of learning more myself, and absolutely welcome comments, criticisms, additions etc. in the comments below. Thanks!

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” (James Baldwin)

How is the study of the ancient past in Egypt to continue in the future?

1. Should the name (‘Egyptology’) be changed?
2. Should Egyptology be practiced in different way(s)?
3. Should it be shut down entirely?

I imagine that for those writing the tweets at the top of this post, #1 would not be enough and in any case it would be quite difficult to think of another label that would provide an effective substitute, at least one that would supplant the existing term quickly enough. Much as #3 might be a nice idea for some it would be too much for many others – would anyone really wish for the study of a few millennia of years of history to be completely closed down? I hope that would seem unnecessarily counter-productive even to the hard-liners. Which leaves option #2.

I think #1 and #2 probably both merit a bit more explanation but before we get to that, it’s probably more important to try to explain…

Why is Egyptology problematic?

Here’s a starter for ten…

Egyptology is a product of colonialism, the process by which certain countries, mostly European / ‘western’, including Britain, exploited certain other countries for political, territorial and economic gain. These countries, including Egypt, are generally located in Africa and Asia, and many of them happen to have long and rich histories, and are often very rich in archaeological remains.

Colonialism created and compounded inequalities, to the benefit of the colonialists, and the detriment of the colonised. Colonial countries got richer from the resources of the colonised countries, and maintained control of these resources – material and intellectual – ensuring that that situation continued.

Even after the colonised countries gained political independence to some degree the advantages the colonisers had gained, allowed them to maintain their advantages.

The end result is the creation and exacerbation of political, social and economic inequalities and injustices across the world, which continue to exist to this day in various forms. The Black Lives Matter movement, for example, is a response to problems that have their roots in colonialism. As Egyptology does.

Knowledge. Egyptology, the acquisition of knowledge about Egypt’s ancient past (see below for more on the definition), was formalised by the colonialist nations. It has spread and promoted knowledge of ancient Egypt to western audiences but was developed in ways that ensured it would always be largely inaccessible to the people of Egypt and other countries outside the west.

Academic exclusivity. Egyptology is an academic pursuit which finds its principal expression in written form, mainly, to this day, in three European languages: English, French and German. The necessary literacy in these languages is more easily accessible outside Egypt. Egyptian scholars wishing to succeed in the study of their own country’s ancient past have to learn the Europeans’ language(s), not the other way around. Even for those students who are competent with the languages, access to the necessary literature is not easy: libraries in Egypt are not necessarily accessible to all and often not very well-stocked, and books are more expensive and harder to come by for Egyptians. Some scholarship is published in other languages including in Arabic, but realistically, any scholar wishing for their work to gain acceptance in international circles must publish in one of the three dominant languages, and ideally through an established journal or publishing house, almost all of which are also based in colonial countries.

Looted material remains. The excavation of the physical remains of Egypt’s past – the sites and monuments – particularly in the nineteenth century, was undertaken by colonialists eager to remove what they could for display in their own countries. Even though this process gradually slowed over time with the creation of a national antiquities service and institution of laws governing the removal of objects (it was halted completely in 1983), thousands of objects left the country and would never return. More importantly, perhaps, even those which remained in Egypt were kept in institutions controlled by colonialists, i.e. by the Antiquities Service, in the national museum collection. And even after the Service passed out of the hands of Europeans into the hands of Egyptians (1950s) it was still run according to the rules of a discipline – Egyptology – which continued to be practiced and led primarily outside Egypt.

Operating comfortably and securely in someone else’s country. Egyptology has, for more than a century, given many in colonialist nations a reason to be interested in, and to travel to, Egypt. Egyptologists, in sharing what they have learned about Egypt – through an ever-growing body of literature – have provided others in their countries with the skills to navigate the foreign country and culture of Egypt that has allowed thousands to contribute – however unwittingly – to the process of maintaining an undue influence there. In other words, the colonialist nations were able to take control of countries like Egypt initially perhaps by military force, but that control was subsequently strengthened in much subtler ways. By the late 19th century, British people, collectively, were generally richer than their Egyptian counterparts, more knowledgeable of other countries, languages and cultures, and able to enjoy the benefits of their countrymen having established institutions around the world that would provide them with the support and protection that would allow them to travel and experience others’ countries safely, comfortably and with confidence – providing further opportunities for their exploitation.

Egyptologists’ experiences and the accounts they shared – some of which might, if only in the incidental details, have prepared others to study or visit Egypt, while others were much more explicit in assisting potential visitors (see e.g. the guidebooks published by John Murray or Baedecker in the later nineteenth century, or those of John Gardner Wilkinson a few decades earlier) – did nothing to redress the injustices of colonialism, and everything to allow the injustices it created to be extended.

A familiarity with foreign countries and culture, acquired through an interest in archaeology etc, has often been used for advantage in other ways. For example, in the Second World War, many archaeologists and ancient historians were recruited by military intelligence because of their knowledge of the language, customs and geography of particular regions. On occasion, archaeological work has sometimes provided the cover for military reconnaissance work. And even today, archaeological expeditions remain a part of the ‘soft power’ efforts of former colonial countries wishing to retain influence even long after political control has long been formally relinquished. Was the British Academy’s sponsorship of foreign archaeological missions in the decades following the second world war a matter purely of interest in archaeology, or were their other purposes? These are important issues that we, as archaeologists and historians, should give more time to investigating critically.

So, back to my original question: How is the study of the ancient past in Egypt to continue in the future?

1. Should the name (Egyptology) be changed?

The word ‘Egyptology’ or at least ‘Egyptologist’ (‘Égyptologue’ in French) was coined in the nineteenth century to mean someone pursuing the study of Egypt, but specifically ancient Egypt. ‘Egyptologist’ is a somewhat nebulous term which can be applied to specialists with a variety of different skills; what they have in common is the application of their skills to the study of ancient Egypt, usually defined as the people and cultures of the territory of Egypt from the very earliest times to the Arab conquest, but usually no later. The discipline is therefore an ‘area specialism’ in keeping with other disciplines focussing on other ancient cultures from specific parts of the world, and is also limited by chronology. I’m struggling to think of any other discipline whose name implies no chronological boundaries when the reality is different. ‘Assyriology’ is the study of people and culture from a particular region, at a particular time in history, but the name derives from the ancient culture and bears no direct relation to any modern culture. Similarly, specialists in the ancient past of other places or cultures are referred to by descriptors which make it clear that it’s the ancient culture that’s under study. ‘Nubiology’ – the study of ancient Nubia – could perhaps be criticised on the same grounds as Egyptology (and perhaps therefore also falls into the category of disciplines that some argue need to be shut down entirely), but it is a much smaller and less-well known or celebrated field and its influence has been much less widespread. Egyptology, by contrast, as I wrote here recently, “has succeeded in spreading and promoting knowledge of this one aspect of Egypt’s past around the world, to the exclusion of the others. This has been highly successful, to the extent that there is now very widespread interest in pharaonic Egypt, to the detriment of the other parts of the country’s heritage.”

What alternative names might there be for the study specifically of Egypt’s ancient past? ‘Egyptian archaeology’ perhaps? It would perhaps be easier if we did not use the same names for the place and its people (Egypt / Egyptians) at all points in history, by contrast with other ancient cultures whose names are not those used in modern times (Assyria, Babylon, Inca). Perhaps this in itself is problematic. The word ‘Egypt’ come from the Greek ‘Aigyptos’ and was passed down to us through ancient Greek texts. It probably derives from the ancient Egyptian ‘hut-ka-Ptah’ – the name for the temple of Ptah, the major religious institution within the capital city of Memphis, a name which came to be used for the entire country. In any case it is not the name used by the people of the modern country. The name the modern Egyptian people use is ‘Misr’ which is the classical Arabic form of the older ‘Mizraim’, the name used in Hebrew, and Aramaic, a version of which was also used in earlier times in Neo-Babylonian, Assyrian and Ugaritic. There isn’t really an ancient name for the country and its people which could be used to distinguish those studying ancient Egypt from those studying any other aspect of the country.

But we’re digressing here, none of this is going to solve the problem here.

2. Should Egyptology be practiced in different way(s)?

I’m sure many Egyptologists would agree that study of the past in Egypt should be approached differently. But in what ways might any changes help address the challenge of decolonisation?

A different name? See above.

Do away with unhelpful chronological divisions (i.e. ‘pharaonic’, ‘Coptic’, ‘Islamic’)?

As I wrote in my earlier post on ‘Questions of National Identity’ “It is true that there has been an inappropriate / awkward / unhealthy divide between various different parts of Egyptian history, the divisions being chronological but also relating to a certain dynamic between indigenous Egyptian people and influence from outside: ‘pharaonic’ (pagan) = ‘Egyptian’; Ptolemaic (Graeco) -Roman, Coptic (Christian), Islamic = something different.”

The difficulty here is that there is simply too much to learn so it makes sense for the study of Egypt’s past to be divided into specialisms, and, interestingly, if you ignored the current divisions and started again I suspect you might end up splitting the subject along the same lines, as the divisions are not only chronological; they also involve religious beliefs, language, script, iconography, art and architecture – the study of each of which requires specific expertise / skills.

Nonetheless, providing more modern context for the study of ancient Egypt would probably be very helpful. It’s always seemed to me that historical topics are best explained and understood against the backdrop of the relevant chronology and geography (and associated terminology); perhaps the study of Egypt’s past should always at least begin with an overview of Egyptian history from the Predynastic to the modern day. Of course the later history of Egypt would inevitably allow for the teaching of the colonialism of Britain and other countries, and for the history of the discipline, and why it is problematic in its current form.

Return ancient Egyptian objects currently in museums and other collections outside Egypt?

Monuments remain in museums, the vast majority having left during the colonial era or decades following it.

Is this OK or not? The apologist’s thoughts on such things might include the following:

• They were bought out of Egypt a long time ago and there is no point in trying to reverse what is now history
• The biggest and best collections of Egyptian objects remain in Egypt, those outside act as ‘ambassadors’ advertising the glories of ancient Egypt
• Museums outside Egypt are better equipped to look after ancient objects than those in Egypt.

The last of these is particularly offensive – it’s plain incorrect, aside from being a massive generalisation – I only include it here in order to dismiss it, as this is a view one still occasionally hears.

Those who think it’s problematic that there are so many Egyptian objects in museums outside Egypt might argue the following:

• The objects were removed at a time when Egypt and the Egyptian people had no agency in the process; they were taken for the benefit of those taking them and their countries, to the detriment of Egypt, whose people had no recourse to prevent it from happening.

• The objects symbolise the domination of the countries in which they are displayed over Egypt;³ that they continue to be displayed suggests the domination continues (especially when there are accompanied by no information explaining the circumstances of their departure from Egypt⁴).

• The return of such objects to Egypt, even if only of a representative sample, would be a powerful symbol of the colonialist nations’ acceptance of the ills of colonialism, and that the problems it has caused continue to be very relevant today, and that positive action is required if the problems are going to be solved.

Stop doing archaeology

Those who have worked in the field in Egypt (myself included) will know that it is a curiously nationalistic pursuit even to this day. There are many archaeological projects run entirely by Egyptian archaeologists, most under the auspices of the government Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (MoTA), but some by universities. Other projects are referred to as ‘foreign missions’. Most are ‘international’ and involve the participation of, at the very least, the mandatory MoTA inspector, and very often Egyptian excavators, facilitators and others as well. In many cases though, teams are predominantly composed, at least in terms of the specialist, academically qualified members – archaeologists etc. – of participants from one particular country, leading to the team being described with reference to that particular country – ‘the British’, ‘the French’, ‘the German’, ‘the American’ and so on. Many such projects are sponsored by and/or operate under branches of the government of those countries, some of which have substantial permanent bases in Egypt, whose work in large part is to support such projects. The ‘foreign institutes’ include the French (IFAO), Germans (DAIK), Americans (ARCE), and so on. Some of these have their roots in the colonial era. Funding for these projects often comes directly from the governments concerned, and they are no doubt seen as symbols of national prestige and pride, and thus play an important part in the ‘soft power’ efforts of the foreign countries concerned, efforts designed to ensure the maintenance of the influence that, though diminished since the colonial era, remains in existence, and therefore, arguably, remains a part of the problematic legacy that needs to be addressed.

Return control of Egyptology to Egypt

The antiquities service – now the MoA – has been in the hands of Egyptian officials since the revolution of the 1950s finally ended British control of the country. As mentioned above, antiquities law has prevented any objects from leaving the country since 1983. The ministry has for many years now required foreign expeditions to include increasing numbers of Egyptian specialists as trainees and, increasingly, fully-fledged team members. Many expeditions and institutions have also provided training opportunities in Egypt, and opportunities to travel to Europe and elsewhere for study and research. I was grateful to have been able to a play a small part in this kind of thing while I was at the EES and subsequently, with The Robert Anderson Trust. The long term aim of all of this is to bring about a situation in which the greater part of the work in Egyptology is undertaken and led by Egyptian specialists.

—–

No doubt there are other aspects of Egyptology and practices employed by Egyptologists past or present, which could be considered problematic. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers. This is a very complex debate, but it’s one we’ve got to have and I hope there are at least a few ideas here that might get people thinking. Do let me know via the comments below.

*Many thanks to Dr Will Carruthers (@w_carruthers) for inspiring this piece, and to Dr Kate Sheppard (@k8shep) for reading a draft and providing many useful comments and criticisms.

UPDATE 24 July:

I have now removed the word ‘Maya’ from the above list of “ancient cultures whose names are not those used in modern times” as the Maya language and other aspects of Maya culture continue to be practiced today.

I’d also like to add that a number of comments on the above have been posted to Twitter – to follow the discussion please see here.

UPDATE 6 September 2022:

Contrary to my assertion above it’s been pointed out to me (thanks Raed – see comment below) that there are people in modern times who identify as ‘Assyrian’ and claim descent from the people of the empire of Esarhaddon, Ashurbanipal and co.

NOTES:

1. The Society has recently taken very laudable steps to begin confronting its problematic past – see here.

2. This has recently been the subject of an important study, ‘Artefacts of Excavation’ led by Dr Alice Stevenson.

3. See Moser, S, Wondrous Curiosities. Ancient Egypt at the British Museum (London and Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006)

4. See Colla, E, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2008), especially his chapter on ‘Artefaction’.

Yesterday (12 June) I listened to a very interesting discussion hosted by the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) on the subject of “Good Archaeology, Bad Archaeologists?” (for discussion online see #EESUnpackingColonialism).

The talk began with a very frank and honest re-assessment, by the Society’s Director, Dr Carl Graves, of the EES’ work and place in history, focussing on the colonial context in which it began and has been operating, arguably, ever since. The EES is part of the wider problems that are part of the legacy of colonialism. So how should this be addressed?

An image of Swiss Egyptologist, Edouard Naville, excavating the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri in in 1890s. Dr Carl Graves used the image in the webinar to illustrate the colonialist aspects of the EES’ work. Image ©EES and available via Flickr here.

Carl emphasised that in attempting to redress the situation the lead should be taken not by the anyone from the colonialist nations – to avoid compounding the problem of European / western domination and control – but by those from the colonised nations, in this case Egypt. And so, the audience was then treated to an excellent and very thought-provoking discussion led by Heba Abd el Gawad, an Egyptian Egyptologist (follow Heba and the discussion on Twitter, here).

Heba posed some very interesting questions about what should constitute Egyptian heritage. Carl had noted the view that ancient Egypt was seen by the west as part of its own heritage, whereas more modern (Arab, Muslim) Egypt was seen as being something different, ‘eastern’ and therefore ‘the other’.

It is true that there has been an inappropriate / awkward / unhealthy divide between various different parts of Egyptian history, the divisions being chronological but also relating to a certain dynamic between indigenous Egyptian people and influence from outside: ‘pharaonic’ (pagan) = ‘Egyptian’; Ptolemaic (Graeco) -Roman, Coptic (Christian), Islamic = something different.

Egyptology – a discipline spawned, practiced and mastered by the west (a situation that largely obtains to this day) – focusses mainly (albeit not exclusively) on the first of these, and has succeeded in spreading and promoting knowledge of this one aspect of Egypt’s past around the world, to the exclusion of the others. This has been highly successful, to the extent that there is now very widespread interest in pharaonic Egypt, to the detriment of the other parts of the country’s heritage.

As an example, as noted in the discussion, the ‘Egyptian collection’ in most archeological museums focusses only on pharaonic objects, and few contain much if anything from later periods. Similarly, organised tours to Egypt focus on ancient monuments but pay little attention to other aspects of the country’s heritage or more modern identity.

(Incidentally, as someone who has often worked in the tourist industry in Egypt, it seems to me that Egypt may be inadvertently complicit in this. Most tourism is industrial in scale with large numbers accommodated in large, luxurious hotels, conveyed around the country in big air-conditioned buses, and shepherded around the sites in large groups. Tourists are otherwise encouraged to stay in their hotels including in the evenings when they might otherwise take the opportunity to explore the streets and find a local restaurant or shops, and not to explore the cities and towns they might be staying in. Some attending the webinar commented that when they had had the opportunity to explore the streets in Egypt they had enjoyed it very much. The authorities may feel that large groups provide the best return financially, and/or are easier to control when they can be kept within hotels and buses in their groups. But this encourages a separation from the real, modern day Egypt – which has very much to offer of course – and the fantasy that the country is all about ancient sites with perhaps a waiter in a tarbush to reinforce a few colonial ideals.)

Heba set out to confront this issue, showing a series of images of Egypt which challenge the stereotypes. Are images of sparkling white laundry, shop-window displays of lingerie, or an ancient figure carrying a gas cylinder, representative of Egypt? Yes.

The question here seems to be one of national identity. How should Egypt present itself? This is not a question for me to answer, except to say that history and heritage, of course, have a significant role to play.

(On the identity that Egypt may wish to construct, however, I note that several large sculptures (an obelisk from Tanis and series of sphinxes from Karnak) have recently been erected in Tahrir Square, the location of the current national collection of antiquities (until the Grand Egyptian Museum takes its place when it opens next year), but also the focus of the protests that led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and numerous expressions of protest in the years that followed.)

Meanwhile, in the UK…

Questions of national identity are also relevant to my own country of course. The news here is currently dominated by stories of the protests connected to the #blacklivesmatter movement, and the demand for a fairer and more tolerant society in which everyone is treated equally, regardless of their ethnicity or any other aspect of their personal history and heritage. As part of the protest, a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, which had stood in the centre of Bristol since 1895 was pulled down by activists and thrown in the river Avon. Sadly, the suggestion of local artist, Banksy, that the statue be re-erected but only as part of a lasting image of its toppling, is not to be taken up, I gather.

There has been a backlash against this, most notably from the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who argues that removing statues is tantamount to trying to alter or censor history (see his tweets, here). His argument is crashingly naïve. The existence of statues, and their erection, placement and maintenance, is not an unbiased record of historical events. They reflect a story which someone has chosen to tell. Someone chose to celebrate these individuals and their actions (and not those of others). The choice to create, erect and find a place (usually somewhere suitably prominent of course) was made in the past, but keeping them there is a choice also. It says, ‘this was the story we wanted to tell then, and it remains the story we want to tell now.’

The question for us, then, as it is in Egypt, is, ‘what are the stories we want to tell?’. The story of someone like Edward Colston is very important in 2020 but not because he is someone we should celebrate, but someone whose activities we now consider despicable and a lesson for all humankind in how not to do things. That story is not best told by exhibiting a statue of him in a prominent public position – such images are intended, and understood, to depict people whose achievements should be celebrated, or events that have changed history in a positive way.

Knowledge and understanding of the past could not be more important in this, and it is incumbent on those of us who have some expertise in the field to try to ensure that we take the opportunity to help move society forwards. Subject specialisms might not necessarily be directly relevant to the issues of the day, but Egyptology is, as noted above, essentially a colonialist pursuit in its origins at least, and I was pleased to see that John P Cooper (someone who may be familiar to anyone reading this page from his work on the Nile and navigation in the medieval period, and the recipient of an EES Centenary Award a few years ago), had contributed powerfully to the debate on the urgent need for colonialism and empire – warts and all – to be taught to all children in British schools, in a letter to The Guardian recently (here).

What aspects of our history might inform our national identity now? One that is more inclusive, fair, tolerant, aware of the failures of the past, of our part in some of the ills of the world, and how we have profited from the kind of actions what we could never now, in good conscience, repeat?

A big thank you to the EES, Carl Graves, Stephanie Boonstra and Heba Abd el Gawad for such a thought-provoking discussion and for bravely tackling such difficult and sometimes divisive issues. There’s a lot for us all to learn and this fascinating and important conversation will no doubt continue for a long time. Be sure to be a part of it via #EESUnpackingColonialism, @GawadHeba, @excavatedegypt and
Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage – آثارنا المتغربة.

I began giving lectures online shortly after the current lockdown began, initially as part of the wonderful EES series, and have been doing so independently since.

Title slide for the second of my online talks, on the period ‘After Akhenaten’. almost 700 people registered for the three performances of this one.

I had initially thought they would provide a welcome distraction for me, and perhaps a few others if anyone was interested in listening in, but they’ve proven to be much more successful than I could have imagined. Lots of people have been in touch to say how much they have enjoyed them, and to ask if they will continue after the lockdown. I hadn’t thought that far ahead… One benefit of doing things online is that they’re accessible to anyone with an internet connection, regardless of where in the world they are, which is far more people than could ordinarily travel to lectures on ancient Egypt. So I can reach more people online than I could via traditional lectures. I can also direct people straight to other resources online – things they can read if they want to take their interest further etc. (see, for example, the page of links relating to my talk on ‘People at Amarna’) Ironically, despite the fact that participants in an online lecture are separated from one another, sometimes by thousands of miles – I have been amazed at the number of countries and cities represented by people joining in! – there is a strong sense of togetherness and even community beginning to form, now that attending such talks has become regular event for many. It had never occurred to me how enjoyable it would be to be in touch with some many people in so many places, some near to me in London, some very far away, some familiar to me, others not. To be able to chat to people all of whom share a passion for Egyptology, before and after the lectures, whether it’s about the weather where they are are or where I am, or on the true identity of pharaoh Neferneferuaten, it’s been a joy, and I see no reason why it would not continue to be as enjoyable even after we are all allowed out again.

So, I’m now hoping to be able to carry on with the lectures, and a few other activities online, whether we’re in lockdown or not. In order to ensure I can cover the costs of my Zoom subscription (and my time!) there will be a small charge to attend some of the lectures in future. I’m not doing this to make a fortune, I just want to be able to carry on doing what I’m doing. I hope charging won’t put too many people off and that some of you at least will still want to join me for the next few talks. The details are here; I’ll be updating the page regularly as I’m ready to add new topics and dates.

Next online lecture: SEARCHING FOR IMHOTEP (3 and 8 June)

Thanks for reading this, thanks to all of you who have joined the talks so far, and an especially big thank you to those who have made contributions via the ‘Support my work’ page – I’ve been really touched and encouraged by the response to this, and determined to find a way of carrying on my online activities. I hope to see you at another talk soon, or elsewhere online!

Very best wishes, stay safe and well,
Chris

I’m absolutely delighted to announce that I’ll be visiting the ancient sites of Ethiopia with Ancient World Tours (AWT) in 2021. Further information including the itinerary are available here.

I’ve always been fascinated by ancient Egypt’s relationship to other cultures and it was my interest in Egypt’s 25th Dynasty – the period when Egypt was ruled by the kings of Kush and on which my PhD was based – that led me to their visit the remains of their great kingdom in Sudan with AWT in 2018 and again in 2019.

The pyramids of the Northern Cemetery, Meroë, Sudan.

‘Discover Ethiopia‘ is intended as a continuation of AWT’s exploration of the lands to the south of Egypt. Ethiopia takes its name from the Greek ‘Aethiopia’ meaning ‘burnt face’ and was the name given in ancient times to various groups living in the territories to the south of Egypt, including the Kushites.

Kushite kings. The cache of statues discovered at Kerma in 2003.

Over the course of more than a thousand years, while Egypt suffered repeated invasions and was taken over not only by the Kushites but groups of Libyans, Assyrians, Persians and ultimately Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies and the Romans, Kush remained independent. It was eventually supplanted by another great African power, Axum, whose capital lies in modern Ethiopia.

The throne hall of the Kings of Makuria at the site of their capital, Old Dongola, Sudan.

The Kushite kingdom came to be divided between three successor states, Nobadia, Makuria and Alodia, all of which eventually converted to Christianity, as did Axum. Having seen a little of the ancient Christian kingdoms of Sudan, I’m curious to know more about Axum and also how it and the land we now call Ethiopia, the mark Christianity left in the archaeological record at sites like Lalibela and in the place reputed to be the location of the Ark of the Covenant…

If you think you might be interested in coming along please read on here!