Transcript
Jennifer Berglund 00:04
Welcome to HMSC Connects!, where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the exhibits team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and I’ll be your host. It’s a big year for Egyptology. It’s the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and perhaps more importantly, the 200th anniversary of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. So to understand the significance of these landmark discoveries, I’m speaking once more with Peter Der Manuelian, a professor of Egyptology and the Director of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. Peter recently published a book called “Walking Among Pharaohs: George Reisner and the Dawn of Modern Egyptology,” a 15 year project that documents the work and life of George Reisner, a Harvard Egyptologist who worked in Egypt during Egyptology’s golden age, the era in which Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered. Here he is. Peter Der Manuelian, welcome to the show.
Peter Der Manuelian 01:31
Happy to be with you.
Jennifer Berglund 01:36
So this year marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, but perhaps less people know that it’s actually the 200th anniversary of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. So this is a pretty big year for Egyptology. As an Egyptologist a general Ancient Egypt fanatic, what is the significance of these celebrations to you and to the field?
Peter Der Manuelian 02:09
Well, that’s exactly right. 2022 is a big year for Egyptologists for both of those anniversaries. If we go back to the 200th year one, that’s the decipherment of hieroglyphs by the Frenchman Champollion. Many people regard that as sort of the birthday of Egyptology as a discipline, as a field in and of itself. That means we could finally start to read what the Egyptians themselves had to say: historical texts, poetry, hymns, biographical inscriptions, rituals, religious text, letters, tomb robbery accounts, all kinds of things in the ancient language. So of course, we have to blend that with archaeological ground truth and material culture and try to put it all together into a coherent whole, but that was huge to be able to now read the Egyptian inscriptions on their own. So that’s 200 years ago, and then 100 years ago for Tutankhamun that really set the world on fire and burned to the concept of ancient Egyptian culture into the popular consciousness around the world. So you can’t overemphasize that one, too. Put them both together, and 2022 is a big one for us.
Jennifer Berglund 03:12
What was learned between the period of the decipherment, and the discovery of the tomb? Was there some sort of build up to the discovery of the tomb that made it even more significant?
Peter Der Manuelian 03:25
That was a pretty crucial 100 years between 1822 and 1922. An awful lot of the Egyptian monuments were not in the greatest condition and not receiving the attention that perhaps they deserved in the 19th century. And then as you get to the turn, and the 1900s begin, you start to see the birth of more responsible, modern archaeological method. And so by the time we get to 1900 to 1922, we have much more responsible archaeological expeditions documenting their work, cataloging there finds making responsible divisions, and you had an antiquities policy, as well. In 1858, that’s when the Egyptian Antiquities Service was originally created, so we also have a milestone there as well. But generally, it’s been a progression of positive developments in terms of treating the monuments and documenting them and excavating them with evermore responsible methods.
Jennifer Berglund 04:19
And we may not have even known the name of Tutankhamun if we hadn’t have known how to decipher the hieroglyphs.
Peter Der Manuelian 04:26
Not being able to read the original inscriptions, it was very tough to make historical chronologies. So you had many Egyptologist working on that, as well as translating some of the great stories, and fables, and historical documents, and military inscriptions. All of that was building up by the time you got to the early 20th century, and Egyptology was well on its way. So by 1922 we had collaborations with photographic documentation, and diaries, and journals, and measurements, and surveying, and a much more responsible approach to tomb excavations. The age of plunder was mercifully coming to an end.
Jennifer Berglund 05:05
You mentioned that it sort of “set the world on fire”? Can you explain what you mean by that? And what was the significance in the zeitgeist in that era?
Peter Der Manuelian 05:14
Well, royalty always gets people’s attention. So first of all, Tutankhamun is a king. This is the new kingdom or the Imperialist Age of Egyptian history, Dynasty 18, so that the New Kingdom runs about 1500 to 1080 BCE, something like that, and Tutankhamun comes right in the middle of a religious kind of schism or revolution. His famous father, Akhenaten, ushered in a solar religion, real focus on the sun’s disc as the primary God and even pushing some of the other deities of the Egyptian pantheon aside. So he was closing temples and building a new capital city, and even representing himself and others in a revolutionary new artistic style. He disappears after about 17 years and Tutankhamun is a boy king. And there’s also confusion about who else might have temporarily gained the throne for short periods, but eventually Tutankhamun is on the throne and reigns for less than a decade or so, and there may have been more powerful forces really calling the shots behind him because we find a return to orthodoxy from the Aten, the sun’s disc, promoted by his father back to the state God, Amun, whose temple that Karnak and modern Luxor is so huge and so famous. And Tutankhamun even has restoration inscriptions, where he talks about restoring the old temples and bringing things back to a normal state and orthodoxy. Did he really believe all of this stuff or was he being manipulated, really difficult to know. How he died is also another mystery. But so many objects between five and 6000 objects were found in his tomb, and with the exception of a couple of attempts at tomb robbery, it’s really about the most intact tomb that we found anywhere in Egypt. So that really captured the imagination, all of the spectacular objects that were gathered up from this particular period in Egyptian history and buried with him.
Jennifer Berglund 06:58
Well, I’m glad you brought up the artifacts, because, in fact, we’ve just installed a magnificent reproduction of Tutankhamun’s throne in the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. Tell me the story of how you came upon it and why it’s significant, because it turns out there are a number of reproductions out there, but why is this one significant?
Peter Der Manuelian 07:18
This is true. Well, the throne of Tutankhamun, it’s gilded, it has glass and precious stone inlays in it. It’s a very famous piece. And historically, it’s important too because it has the earlier religious form of Tutankhamen’s name and the later form as well. So Tutankhaten, the living image of the solar god, his father’s gone Aten, is inscribed in one part of the chair, and in another part, after the return to the state God, Amun, we have Tutankhamun also inscribed. So this one chair sort of bridges the gap and shows these two gods on a single piece of furniture where you really wouldn’t expect to see them together. Anyway, that’s the major throne, and that’s in the Cairo Museum today and moving to the new grand Egyptian Museum near the Giza Pyramids, and that will open some time in the new year. What we have is a reproduction but it’s a reproduction from 1929, so it’s got a bit of history behind it as well. And this was a bit of serendipity. It was this discovery that my wife actually made in a gallery up in Maine, and it was commissioned by an American traveler, actually, two chairs were commissioned at the shop of Elias Hatoun. That was an Egyptian furniture maker and art dealer. This is 1929, so seven years after the tomb was discovered. And it’s true, there are other more modern reproductions of this throne, but they tend to look rather plasticky and tchotchke-like and not particularly accurate, and they leave out some of the more difficult details. Well, Hatoun really went to town on this and he went after every little detail; the hieroglyphs are there — they’re mostly right — the beautiful carving, the inlays. In this case, he didn’t use gilding, but it’s in teak wood with mother of pearl and ivory inlays, and it’s just absolutely exquisite. So this is a combination of Egyptology and Egyptomania. So Egyptology is the academic study of ancient Egypt, and Egyptomania is the popular culture reception. So Tutankhamun really burned his way into the popular culture into the Egyptomania side, although, of course, he’s a serious academic topic as well. But this chair really bridges both sides, and so we’re very happy to have it. We’re happy to be able to acquire it and of course, not worry about some of the ethical issues involved in acquiring antiquities. That’s a subject for another discussion, but this is something we’re very proud to show and we hope to use it as an educational tool as well.
Jennifer Berglund 09:35
You recently published a book on an Egyptologist named George Andrew Reisner, who was working in Egypt at the same time as Carter, who was the discoverer of Tutankhamun’s tomb. The two Egyptologists were to a certain degree rivals.
Peter Der Manuelian 09:53
Well, this is a fascinating comparison and you could take the pros and cons, the positives and negatives, in your perspectives on both men I think. Reisner was an American from Indianapolis. He lived from 1867 to 1942, and after studying Semitic languages, he eventually took a right turn in his career to Egyptology and then to archaeology. And his big contribution was really in modern scientific responsibly conducted archeology. That means all of the documentation that goes along with it. Howard Carter did a very good job. He was a Brit, of course, not an American like Reisner. Did a very good job with Tutankhamun’s tomb, but he came out of a very different tradition. He was an artist and illustrator, he worked as an inspector in Egypt. Was a difficult personality and got into trouble from time to time and was even fired at one point and had to make do earning a living. But then he was able to do excavations on behalf of some of the more wealthy patrons from England. This was a tradition that was slowly dying out, when only institutions would be allowed to excavate, not wealthy patrons who wanted to dig here in there, but he worked on behalf of Lord Carnarvon, who is famous to most people for the connection to Downton Abbey. That’s Highclere Castle. So Carter was also very active in the antiquities trade and advising others and purchasing objects, and advising people what to add to their collections or not. This was anathema to Reisner, and he eventually gave up any kind of involvement that way. So for him, it was about excavations, anything sanctioned through the government authorities, that was all legitimate, but purchasing on the art market and building collections that way was a big no-no. So the two were at loggerheads that way, and I think in terms of archaeological method, Reisner didn’t have all that much respect for Carter. You can sense a little bit of jealousy on Reisner’s behalf towards the Tutankhamun discovery, something he called the “Tutan-Carter Tomb.” He was actually quite upset with Carter, because Carter being a difficult personality was not getting along with the government authorities at this point. And 1922, you have to remember is a period of great nationalist emotion, passionate emotion. World War I had come to an end, but the British were still in control of the country in Egypt, the French were in control of the antiquity service. And ostensibly there was a kind of independence in 1922, but it really wasn’t complete. And so Tutankhamun was at the focal point of so many political agendas at the time, and Carter and Carnarvon made the huge mistake of granting exclusive coverage rights to the tomb of Tutankhamun to The Times of London. And you can imagine how this would affect the Egyptian press at the time. Here they are in their own country with their own great discovery of their own Pharaoh, and it’s a foreign mission that sort of taking all of the scoop and the press coverage away. This made it just more difficult for other archaeologists in the country, and Reisner realized this and he just thought that Carter was needlessly fanning the fire and making things more difficult for other excavators.
Jennifer Berglund 12:52
Are there any records at the time of the Egyptian perspective of this massive finding?
Peter Der Manuelian 12:57
At one point, there was such a problem that Carter was locked out of the tomb, and he stormed off in a huff and each side really had their own complaints. There was one sort of fabricated problem where Carter wasn’t allowed to bring the spouses of some of the excavators into the tomb, and this really sent him around the bend. And at one point, the tomb was closed for a year with one of the coffins suspended by ropes and sort of hanging precariously. Eventually, they were able to smooth things over and the French antiquities department chief stepped in and they were kind of able to negotiate some détente, and eventually Carter was able to get back into the tomb. But yes, there were all kinds of tensions at the time.
Jennifer Berglund 13:36
How might have Reisner approached the situation had he discovered the tomb?
Peter Der Manuelian 13:42
Well, there is actually a comparison. So Tutankhamun is 1922. Three years later, Reisner made his own amazing discovery at Giza, the site of the pyramids from the Old Kingdom, so much, much older, we’re talking about 2500 BCE or so. And this was a shaft tomb, 100 feet, almost 100 feet underground, where the objects had mostly deteriorated, but there were tremendous things that could be restored and rescued. This was a small unfinished burial chamber of the mother of the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh who built the Great Pyramids. So the mother of Khufu by the name of Queen Hetepheres, and this was a sensational discovery, as well. And in terms of Egyptian history, Reisner considered this a much more important one. Yes, there were glitzy objects in Tutankhamun’s tomb, but he didn’t see any historical inscriptions and that was really his main focus. So he kind of poo-pooed the great Tutankhamun find, and Hetepheres was, in his book, much more important. He spent two years with his staff down at the bottom of that burial shaft where they lay on mattresses, they took 1000s of photographs, they gave every tiny, little deteriorated fragment a number, made sketches, made numbers took them out one by one, they didn’t hurry, because they realized that all of this royal furniture and other wonderful objects could only be restored and put back together if you pay paid attention to how everything had collapsed. When the wood had deteriorated or had been affected by moisture or insects or whatever, all of these gilded pieces that still had the shape of furniture legs or arms or other types of inlays and things, they had to be really picked up one by one and noted very carefully, and the result of that is this spectacular group of Old Kingdom Royal furniture of Queen Hetepheres, which is in the Cairo Museum today, and a reproduction set is in the Museum of Fine Arts, as well. And in fact, we really need to credit Reisner’s Egyptian foreman with saving the day because Reisner was back at Harvard teaching that semester in 1925. And it was his team that made the discovery, and the British working for him just wanted to race on in and clear the tomb, and it was his Egyptian foreman who realized that only Reisner had the skill to deal with this. And he pretty much blew the whistle and put a stop to this and sent the cables back and forth across the Atlantic, and fortunately, they were able to close the tomb until Rosner could get back there and take over himself.
Jennifer Berglund 16:03
Let’s talk again about the book that you just published. It’s called “Walking Among Pharaohs: George Reisner and The Dawn of Modern Egyptology.” This was a 15 year endeavor for you. Let’s just recognize what an accomplishment that is. Tell me, how did the idea for the book come about? And why did you decide to write it in the first place?
Peter Der Manuelian 16:25
Well, this goes back to around 2000 or 2003 or so. I was working as a Curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. And for the last 10 years or so of my work there, I was the director of what we called the Giza Archives Project. This was something funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation in New York and turned out to be about a 10 year project over there and more than $3 million in funding. The goal was to scan, digitize, database, type, transcribe all the archaeological records of risers work at the Giza Pyramids, and intelligently crosslink all this material and put them online for the world community. And I was blessed with a small army of helpers from students, I was teaching at Tufts at that time, and also a little bit at Harvard, so there were students helping. There were the museum volunteers, what were called the museum associates. I had a small staff that was paid from the Mellon funds, and so by the time we were done, the last 10 or 20 years, we’ve had over 1000 people contributing to this project, and it was a tremendous gift. And along the way, I realized there was a lot of documentation here that wasn’t properly speaking archaeological that wasn’t going to find a home in our databases or get online or, or be linked to Tomb 2010 or something like that, but it was really important stuff. It was all of the excavation correspondence, from Reisner to Reisner, dealings with Harvard University, dealings with the Museum of Fine Arts because he was directing the Harvard MFA Expedition, Harvard University Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition, and that ran from 1905 until even beyond his death in 1942. So this was a tremendous opportunity to try to revisit the entire story of the expedition, not just what’s in this tomb, or that tomb, or where did that statue end up, but the whole story — the people involved, how things got set up, the funding, the politics, the world wars that tried to interrupt the work and didn’t, that’s how persistent he was. And so I thought that was a story that really needed to be told. Reisner is famous in our field as an archaeologist, but he’s completely unknown as a person. And the more I delved into this, the more archives I discovered, both at the MFA and at Harvard, and all over the world, Oxford, Cairo, you name it. And so we started collecting, and that’s part of what took so many years, and I have a lot of help with the team as well. So that was a great gift to be running alongside the Giza Project was to be collecting all of this wonderful material, and also getting to know his family, and his staff, and his MFA curatorial assistants, and Harvard’s President Elliot, and his mentor who founded the Harvard Semitic Museum, which is now the Harvard Museum of the ancient Near East, and to see all the correspondence back and forth. Some of these people kept diaries, so it was like opening a window on their lives as well. Before you knew it, I was writing and writing and writing, and the book took quite a while and was too long. Believe it or not, I cut out 200,000 words, and it’s still 1000 pages. Hopefully, it’s readable.
Jennifer Berglund 19:18
How was he able to continue his work throughout two World Wars? That’s pretty impressive.
Peter Der Manuelian 19:24
It certainly was. He had great ups and downs in his career, mostly funding related, and people look at his expedition as the sort of mainstay up on the Giza plateau. And I should add that although that was headquarters, the Giza Pyramids, and he had a group of mudbrick huts that was called Harvard camp, and everybody came by to consult him, not just to see the great discoveries, but he had his finger on the pulse of Egyptian politics. He knew Arabic fluently, so he was reading the newspapers, and meeting with politicians and diplomats and of course, visiting royalty to come see the pyramids and all of that, but I should mention that Giza, the pyramids site, was just one of 23 different archaeological sites that he worked at, not just in Egypt, but further south in the Sudan, as well. In fact, his other great accomplishment is really putting Nubian archaeology and Sudanese archaeology on the map, and working out hundreds and hundreds of successive kings and queens, and really making a Nubian chronological series that we still follow in our historical research today. So 23 different sites over 40 years, this really expanded beyond just the Giza Project work that we were doing, and that’s why the biography had to be a separate kind of project to try to tell the full story. And he made a very difficult decision, because as a postdoc, he had worked and lived for three years in Berlin. So that’s really where he learned Egyptology. Remember, at the beginning of his career at Harvard, it was all about Semitic languages. So a Acadian, and Biblical Hebrew, and things like that. So he had great loyalties to Germany, and when the war broke out, he really had to think about who’s in the right who’s in the wrong here, and it took him many days looking through white papers and considering everything and then coming down on the side of the Americans. That was that it, and it was time to get back to work. And then while all the other expeditions were shutting down, his was the only one that kept going, because he had a loyalty to his Egyptian workmen. And he thought “If I shut down, how are they going to feed their families? And where will they find employment?” And it’s a greater service to the country he thought to keep on going, so the excavations continued both in Egypt and to the south in Sudan in ancient Nubia right through World War I. And then unfortunately, by the time World War II came along, his health was not so great. He had been suffering from terrible cataract problems and eventually was blind in the last years of his career. So by, this was even in the early to mid 1930s, so by 1939, the expedition was chugging along as best it could, but it was really about writing things up and publishing, and not doing massive new excavations at that point. And he actually died in 1942 in the middle of the war. He was pretty much bedridden for the last year of his life and had suffered from strokes, and was certainly not able to lead things as he used to.
Jennifer Berglund 22:03
Did he have any protegees that took the baton?
Peter Der Manuelian 22:06
He had plenty. He could have had more if he’d come back to Harvard to teach more often, but his passion and his heart lay really in the field. And so living at Harvard camp was right where he wanted to be. He came back to teach semesters in 1911, 1921, 1925, 29, and then his final trip back to the US was 1939 to get an honorary degree at Harvard commencement, which also happened to be the 50th year anniversary of his class of 1889. So occasionally, students would be brought out from his classes at Harvard, and then he also had a small group at the Museum of Fine Arts. And there were a couple in particular who succeeded him. One was Dows Dunham, who became the next curator at the MFA and really ran the curatorial department back in Boston in all but name while Rosner was running the show from Egypt. And another one was named William Stevenson Smith. He was younger, and he was more of an art historian. And Smith took over the curator ship after Dunham retired early so that Dunham could concentrate on the backlog of publishing that Reisner hadn’t gotten to. So both of those men were terrific successors, and they they carried the ball forward.
Jennifer Berglund 23:17
Having access to this incredible record, and the personal letters of this man, and over many, many years, how did you come to appreciate him as a human being?
Peter Der Manuelian 23:29
Trying to climb inside his head was part of the goal. I’m not sure I was that successful, not being much of a psychologist, but he was certainly a workaholic and driven. A bit of a slave driver at times, and there were there were not a few grumbles from some of his staff that could have benefited from more time off, but the work was where he was happiest. The challenging part about the personality is he was a product of his time as well. And it’s tough to say that these days, but he certainly saw the Western races and Western way of doing things as the superior one. And it even got in the way of some of his historical interpretations. So we can talk about issues of ancient racism or modern racism. In some ways, he was quite progressive in other ways, quite backward. So for example, with ancient Nubian civilizations, he could never quite wrap his head around the fact that there could be these great Nubian indigenous civilizations. They must have been Libyans who wandered south or Egyptians who went down south or something. And so he saw when the civilization started to fall, it must have been a decadence or some other explanation.
Jennifer Berglund 24:32
And yet, at this time, he began Egyptology in the Sudan. There’s also that.
Peter Der Manuelian 24:37
He certainly did. And thanks to his meticulous excavations, it’s much easier for us to see where’s the documentation, where is his interpretation, what do we need to set aside today that just doesn’t make any sense. So, that’s on the ancient side. On the modern side, I would actually call him quite progressive. He was a supporter of British control of Egypt. That’s not the progressive part, but the reason he felt that way is because of the law and order aspect of it. And that means he was on the side of his Egyptian workmen. And he feared that they would come under repeated oppression, if the more literate elite classes of Cairo would take over again. And so he seemed to think that the rule of law had its best chance of survival under British control. Now, you can argue with the justification of that, but he was taking, I think, the side of the larger part of the Egyptian population at the time. And he was also quite progressive in training and teaching his Egyptian staff in the skilled positions of the dig. So these people weren’t just moving baskets of Earth from one spot to another, they were taking the photography on glass plate negatives, they were keeping the accounts, they were writing Arabic diary books, that’s something that no other expedition was doing. And we have 73 of these Arabic expedition diaries today that we’re just beginning to study and interpret and understand better the excavation through Egyptian eyes. That’s absolutely unique. So he was quite progressive that way, not so much to the point of saying that these Egyptians should be taking over their own expeditions that lay some ways off in the future, but he certainly supported them. And when Egyptians finally got to be in control of their own archaeological destiny, he didn’t stand in the way either. What is Reisner’s legacy within the field of Egyptology? Great question. So archaeologically, that’s what comes first. So forwarding responsible scientific archaeological method, and all of the documentation that goes with it. In fact, you could perhaps even claim that during his time, Egyptian archaeology was foremost of world archaeology anywhere. Now, maybe that argument is a little bit tougher to make since there’s so many great expeditions all over the world. But he was a real pioneer in the use of glass plate negatives, and photography, and diaries, and numbering systems, and object register logbooks, and plans, and sections. So he really wanted the excavation to be re-livable, really, or studiable in generations to come. So he probably had an inkling that he was leaving a tremendous backlog, even though he was incredibly prolific and put out many, many books and lots and lots of articles, but he wanted it to be there for future generations to continue to study the finds. It was the time to dig, you know, there would be a time to study later on. And he saw the handwriting on the wall that the Egyptians would eventually be in charge of their own antiquities service, which is the way it should be, and it is now and that’s all to the good. But in those days, there was a portage system, a 50-50 division of the finds between the Cairo Museum or the museum in Khartoum and the institution that supported the excavations. So back then, it was mostly museums hoping to enrich their collections and contribute to knowledge. Nowadays, it’s universities who sponsor a lot of the digs because it’s about information and knowledge building and not so much a hunt for statues or gold or any of that. Even though Reisner was pleased to find all of these incredible finds that are in places like Cairo and Boston and even Cambridge at the Peabody Museum to some extent, and Khartoum, his focus was always historical researc. Everything else was a byproduct. He was after history.
Jennifer Berglund 28:13
What about his context within the field of archaeology as a whole?
Peter Der Manuelian 28:19
Right, well, I think he had a tremendous impact to one extent known and to another extent unknown. And by that, I mean, he trained an awful lot of people, Americans and Europeans, many British assistants on his digs, who, and they often went on to run other excavations. And some of the students actually went on to new world excavations. So some were in charge of museums in the United States, some are the American Museum of Natural History, others became quite famous, such as Alfred Kidder, who worked at Pecos, and so directly or indirectly, Reisner even had an impact on New World archaeology as well as Old World. And then what’s less well known, though, is his system of “Rais.” That’s the Arabic word for foreman, and that’s the Egyptian who’s in charge of the the rest of the staff and the excavation in addition to the Egyptian teams. So over the years, there was one particular family of “Rais”, or foreman, and the baton was passed from fathers to sons. And there was really quite a large group of them, and many of them were farmed out to other expeditions, not just in Egypt and Sudan, such as, for example, Sir Henry Wellcome down at a site called Jebel Moya in the Sudan. He made use of some of Reisner’s people, but also in the Levant, in Mesopotamia as well, and so these Egyptians trained in archaeological method ended up as the “Rais” or the foreman for many, many other digs as well. And that’s an impact that goes right back to Reisner. And that’s something that most people are not familiar with. We’re only starting to get a handle on these people now and trying to right the wrongs of past generations and give them the credit that they deserve. Since so often they are not more than names, you know, they’re not listed in photo captions and we have pay sheets, and things like that, but we don’t have an awful lot of biographical information on them. So there are many people out there now who are trying to rectify that situation and learn more about the careers of these incredibly gifted Egyptians.
Jennifer Berglund 30:15
What do you think Reisner, after this experience of writing this book and following in his footsteps at Harvard and MFA, what has Reisner inspired in you as an Egyptologist?
Peter Der Manuelian 30:27
Well, it’s certainly an inspiration to see his his perseverance, often in the face of financial doom, making do as best he could. It’s no fun being in the middle of World Wars, either. I’m very grateful that I haven’t experienced that, and I hope I never do. I’ve also learned from his obstinacy, I think, too. He was absolutely convinced of a lot of his interpretations. And I think in some ways, he kind of bullied the field to follow it, in his interpretations with his forceful documentation and his way of writing. And it took a long time for people to take a second look at this and say, “Hey, wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense. That’s an indigenous Nubian civilization there. That’s not an Egyptian outpost with Egyptian officials sent to the south to manage things.” And so we’re rectifying what we need to rectify, but the contribution that he made is undeniable, all over the place. As I mentioned, over 40 years, 23 different archaeological sites. And I think it’s a tribute to him that almost all of those sites are still in the works today. People are returning to them because they were so important because they have new research questions. So just about every one that is still accessible, that isn’t underwater, for example from the Aswan Dam is still being worked and reinvestigated today, and that’s quite a legacy as well. There’s quite a gap between his time at Harvard and my time. He died in ’42. This particular professorship that I was lucky enough to get started in 2010. So it’s quite a number of decades. But it’s a privilege to be able to look back at this legacy, and I think that’s something unique that the Egyptology program has to offer at Harvard, this amazing legacy of archaeological exploration. And in partnership with my friends and colleagues at the Museum of Fine Arts, where a lot of the records are housed today, we’re trying to bring that work forward, and there’s plenty to do, plenty of lifetimes of work for scholars.
Jennifer Berglund 32:14
Where do you hope to see it go?
Peter Der Manuelian 32:15
Well, I’d love to see more attention paid to all of the other sites in the way that we tried to tackle Giza. So, Giza is never done. You know, there’s past, present, and future Giza. There’s even excavations going on at the site, as I say this right now as I speak, so we’re never quite up to date. But I’ve come to believe in the sort of central clearing houses for archaeological information. It’s just too vast over the world and over so much time and different types of documentation, so getting it online, getting it cross referenced intelligently, is so important. And now of course, we move into 3D modeling and visualizations, and other types of immersive teaching and things, which I’m happy to do at Harvard, as well. So that’s one thing. To see that happen to some of the other sites would be a wonderful contribution, whether we could go into that much detail for all of the other excavations, I don’t know if I would live long enough to see that happen, or could raise enough money, but it certainly would be a great gift. I see the Reisner biography as a small step in that direction, trying to tell the whole story. You know, year by year, side by side, and make some order out of the chaos. This whole project has taught me the value of nuance. We’re in such a difficult time right now where so many people view others as all good or all bad. And Reisner’s been an interesting example for that. When I started this project long ago, he was more thought of as an archeological hero, and now in the current atmosphere in this country where we’re reassessing everything from the names on buildings to statues in the southern part of the country, and things like that, there’s an assessment that is long overdue, and that applies to archaeologists, as well. So archaeology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and there’s definitely a colonialist, imperialist, and often racist access to all of this from previous generations, and so I think most of my colleagues now are working very hard to overcome that and write the wrongs and state the record more clearly, and understand what is ground truth and what is interpretation. None of us can completely escape our own biases from where we come from, but I’ve come to have a respect I think for nuance where on a case by case basis, you judge what you can, you try not to condemn without reservations, you try to take the larger context into the picture. I’ve certainly learned an awful lot from that, and I hope people don’t jump to the conclusions, right or wrong, good or bad, of some of these earlier archaeological figures, as well. I hope we can take them in the fuller context that they’ve come to deserve.
Jennifer Berglund 34:43
Peter Der Manuelian, thank you so much for being here. This has been fascinating.
Peter Der Manuelian 34:48
Pleasure to speak with you, Jennie. Thanks for great questions. I really enjoyed it.
Jennifer Berglund 34:57
Today’s HMSC Connects! podcast was edited by Eden Piacitelli, and produced by me Jennifer Berglund and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Special thanks to the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, and to Peter Der Manuelian, for his wisdom and expertise. And thank you so much for listening. If you like today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you in a couple of weeks.