Zahi Hawass launches fashion line

If archaeology is a brand, Zahi Hawass is a master marketer. Egypt's Minister of Antiquities Affairs has taken a page from Bono's book and launched a 'adventurous' fashion line named after... himself. Designed by Lora Flaugh of branding firm Art Zulu, ZAHI HAWASS will have a shop at Harrod's sometime later this year. The press release is hilarious:

ZAHI HAWASS is a novel fashion line not just for the traveling man, but the man who values self-discovery, historicism and adventure. Rich khakis, deep blues and soft, weathered leathers give off a look that hearkens back to Egypt’s golden age of discovery in the early 20th century. Natural dyes, vegetable dyes and organic cottons were thoroughly researched to come up with the most premium and environmentally friendly fabrics for the versatile shirting, shorts and pants that comprise the collection. Ample time was spent developing the hardware and finery to make it feel extraordinary. 

The ZAHI HAWASS vision can only be fully realized in an environment that matches the grandeur and classicism of Egypt. Combined with an elegantly themed in-store shop at Harrods, ZAHI HAWASS clothing will promote a look that is both trendy and casual, conservative and cool. More than anything else, the proposed ZAHI HAWASS collection and shop will be a retail experience that evokes the beauty of Egypt through its décor, and invites consumers to pack their suitcases and journey to the exotic locale.

Trendy, casual, conservative AND cool?! Pimping orientalist nostalgia? I'm speechless, probably from laughing so hard. As blogger 3arabawy said:

I strongly recommend Zahi Hawass leave our antiquities alone, and stick to his “eponymous menswear line.”

Archaeololz: Egypt is in Arabia?

In case you didn't know this already, Egypt is in Arabia. Clearly. Look at this marquee!

I believe that's Tutankhamun up there doing PR for this nightclub/bar in Thessaloniki, which of course also features bellydancing. Sort of a one-stop shop for orientalist tropes! Spotted a couple weeks back on a frappé-fueled day trip to get my Turkish visa.

Music to Dig By: Sisters of Mercy, 'Dominion'

I've liked this song forever, but never watched the video until this morning. I had a suspicion, based on all those quotes from Ozymandias in the lyrics, that they might go for an archaeological theme. I was right!



That's Andrew Eldritch looking incredibly dapper in white suit and shades while threatening us with his sword-cane. The impossibly beautiful goth girl is Patricia Morrison, formerly of the awesome LA band The Gun Club and later of The Damned. They're being dramatic in the ruins of Petra, in Jordan.

I'm not going to say anything about the adventure-in-the-desert-with-mysterious-Arabs plotline except that it's "very '80s" and "whatever they're doing, I so want to join".*

Bonus fun fact from Wikipedia: the "Dominion/Mother Russia" medley off of Floodland made it into the Grand Theft Auto IV soundtrack.

*You'll eventually get more from me about the connection between romanticism and antiquity in pop music, but the deep thoughts ain't ready yet.d

Vintage dig film: excavations at Jebel Moya, 1912-1913

This film of Henry Wellcome's excavations at the Meroitic-era site of Gebel Moya in Nubia (Sudan) might be the oldest excavation footage on the internet. Taken during the 1912-1913 season, this 13-minute film is a fascinating combination of Orientalist fantasy, colonialist paternalism, and excavation in action.

Part One:



Part Two:



(Also available here with description at the Wellcome Library).

Digging scenes start at 1:54 in the first clip and 2:49 in the second. In both clips the digs seem like enormous operations, with a sea of bodies working and piles of backdirt. In the first clip, workers are pouring sacks of dirt into some kind of enormous hopper - is it a kind of screen or sifter?

Clip 1 has shots of camels at the watering hole, camels carrying people, footraces among workmen genially supervised by white men on campstools wearing pith helmets (at 5:30) - and Henry Wellcome riding around on his bicycle, presumably an uncommon site in the Sudan in 1912. Clip 2 has more footage of herdsmen and landscapes, and concludes with a view of the excavation site and a village from high atop a local mountain.

A fragment of barbotine ware from Jebel Moya (UCL).

These videos were put up by the Wellcome Library, which curates the vast collections - mostly medical - of Henry Wellcome. Wellcome was an entrepreneur and founder of pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome, now part of GlaxoSmithKline, but he took an interest in archaeology. The excavations at Gebel Moya from 1909 to 1914 uncovered over 3000 tombs (!) The town flourished from ca. 500 to 100 BC, with most objects imported from Meroë. (See this page at UCL for more on the site, including artifact photos, or the Wikipedia page for bibliography [in German]).


Sir Henry Wellcome, born in a log cabin in Wisconsin (Wellcome Images).

The Wellcome library page suggests that the excavations were undertaken as a "public works project", and the Wikipedia entry for Wellcome says baldy that he "hired 4,000 people to excavate", a mind-boggling number that I could not confirm elsewhere. The closing shot in Clip 2 shows the site, a small village, and a pastoral landscape. Where did the 4,000 people come from? In what sense (beyond generating some local economic activity) was this excavation "public works"?

As usual with such things, you have to wonder what in the world the residents of the area made of the Europeans in their white suits, pith helmets, and bushy mustaches showing up in the neighborhood, with bicycles and movie cameras, and putting thousands of men to work in the ruins. In today's terms, expeditions like this were probably more like trips to outer space than anything else: a chance to show off high technology in a remote environment, for the entertainment of the folks back home. Though the excavations produced lots of artifacts, the theatricality of the work is evident, and you have to wonder to what extent the digging scenes were staged for the benefit of the camera.

There's a nice trend of putting old industrial and incidental films on line (most notably at the Library of Congress' Internet Archive). Archive.org has a lot of cool anthropological and archaeological films from the University of Pennsylvania's expeditions (Seneferu's Pyramid, 1929-1930; Fara-Tepe Hissar, Iran, 1931; Tell Billa, Iraq, 1935). The Oriental Institute's history blog also links to some footage from Nippur, Iraq, (1948-1950). All in the public domain! I'll try to review more of these soon.

p.s. I know that I found these clips via some blog, but I cannot for the life of me remember where. Feel free to refresh my memory so credit can go where it's due!

Monday Not-Quite-News Roundup

2012 Shocker
This just in from the LA Times: apocalyptic disaster movie 2012 might not be based in sound archaeological evidence!

Canadian archaeologist Kathryn Reese-Taylor... says the translation of the text essentially says that something will occur on Dec. 21, 2012 and that it will be similar to something that occurred on another date in the past. "At no point do any of the Maya texts actually prophesize the end of the world," she said.

But what's this picture about then?




Shelby rules, but facts are like, so hard!
There’s a new exhibition of Neolithic artifacts at the NYU Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, sponsored by the famous/infamous Shelby White. The Baltimore Sun is on the scene with a reporter who fawns over White (just ‘Shelby’ to her friends), who with her late husband Leon Levy came to be known as much for their naked enthusiasm for stolen antiquities as much as for their philanthropy. The author also freely insults one of her sources as “long-winded” and “pontificating” because her descriptions of the exhibit actually include some information about its historical context. Moral of the article: old stuff is pretty, but facts are hard and boring!

The White Man's burden
While we’re the in comedy section, let’s check out the latest defense of James Cuno’s proposal to bring back partage, from John Tierney in the New York Times.

Tierney starts out complaining about Zahi Hawass’ belief that the Rosetta Stone is Egyptian (!?), and recycles the old orientalist argument that the Egyptians don’t really deserve to own it because they weren’t sufficiently interested in antiquity back in 1799. He derides governments like Turkey, Egypt, or Italy as and incompetent and ‘protectionist’, and veers headlong into the old stereotypes of the ignorant, grasping, swarthy Oriental, who doesn’t know how to appreciate the past like the White Man does.

Can I get a ride home? (Victor Koen/NYT)

As usual, all the fuss about ‘openness’ is really the collector and curator's veiled resentment about having to ask nicely to borrow the treasures of the ancient world, instead of being able just to take what they want, whenever they want it. If Tierney or Cuno really cared about the free exchange of ideas, they’d get behind efforts to expand artifact loans, as Italy has done recently. I wish these guys would just focus on bringing back the fun parts of colonialist archaeology, like gin tonics, pith helmets, and khaki shorts with spats.

A kinder, gentler Orientalism (villagehatshop.com).

An Insult to Archaeologists and Stamp Collectors Everywhere

Apparently the Egyptomania that took the news media by storm following the discovery of king Tut's tomb in 1922 didn't quite reach into every journalist's cubicle. In 1935, a rather dour individual wrote a review for the New York Times of James Henry Breasted's "The Human Adventure" - a short documentary about the excavation and research activities of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. Though it is ultimately a favorable review, it is only dubiously so. The review opens with the following statement: "Barring stamp collecting, archaeology would seem to be about the least likely subject matter for a motion picture. It is all the more suprising, then, to discover that even this science can be made into an entertaining film" (italics added). He digs himself even further into his hole when he describes the activities of Orientalists as "mole-like". Though this reviewer was obviously not gifted with a prescience for future motion picture trends in the vein of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, he was also puzzlingly oblivious to both past and contemporary popular culture of his own time. Tut's tomb had precipitated a media firestorm just a decade earlier, and the original The Mummy - with Boris Karloff in the title role - had been released in 1932, just two years before this review (not to mention the four Mummy sequels that would appear between 1940-44).

Despite his apparently negative attitude toward archaeology (perhaps it was still a thorn in the side of American newspapermen that the exclusive media rights to Tut's tomb went to the London Times?), the reviewer is forced to admit that "it would be a person with little imagination who could sit unmoved as loose-robed workmen's picks force back the earthy leaves of history and turn up the precious relics of long-dead civilizations - weapons made by men of the Stone Age, grains of Egyptian wheat that were sold in Joseph's time, the stables of King Solomon, the harem of Darius, the great obelisk of Persepolis, its lofty towers, the tablet of King Sargon on which was imprinted the impertinent footprints of a lowly mongrel."

Whoah. Another one succumbs to the Biblico-Orientalist fetishizing in which one can fantasize about swarthy cave men, remember the ingenuity of Joseph, praise the Persians and denegrate the Neo-Assyrians - all in one breath! And all of this is brought to you courtesy of native manual laborers in that oh-so-curious garb!

But perhaps I'm being a little harsh. It is those same basic elements of field archaeology that fascinated the reviewer which continue to fascinate people today and drive blockbusters like the 1999 remake of The Mummy. And if that movie is any indication, the tendency to portray Arabs as unscrupulous and slow-witted is still very much with us. (I did consider that the remade Mummy was entirely tongue-in-cheek, and then decided that that was attributing too much cleverness to Stephen Sommers.)

I'm left with just one final comment: why the unnecessary insult to stamp collectors? I'm not a collector myself, but anyone who still thinks it bereft of glamor and sexiness should see the 2006 movie Black Book. One look at Carice van Houten's smoldering offer of stamps (yes, stamps!) to Sebastian Koch, and you'll never look at stamp collecting the same way again.

p.s. Here's the link to the NYTimes 1935 review, but you'll have to sign in to see it.

Archaeology in Fiction: H.P. Lovecraft, “Imprisoned With the Pharaohs”

"Far over the city towered the great Roman dome of the new museum; and beyond it - across the cryptic yellow Nile that is the mother of eons and dynasties - lurked the menacing sands of the Libyan Desert, undulant and iridescent and evil with older arcana.

The red sun sank low, bringing the relentless chill of Egyptian dusk; and as it stood poised on the world's rim like that ancient god of Heliopolis - Re-Harakhte, the Horizon-Sun - we saw silhouetted against its vermeil holocaust the black outlines of the Pyramids of Gizeh - the palaeogean tombs that were hoary with a thousand years when Tut-Ankh-Amen mounted his golden throne in distant Thebes. Then we knew that we were done with Saracen Cairo, and that we must taste the deeper mysteries of primal Egypt - the black Kem of Re and Amen, Isis and Osiris.

‘Imprisoned With the Pharaohs’ is a Egyptological horror yarn starring Harry Houdini, and loosely based on one of his tall tales from his tour of Egypt. Ghostwritten by H.P. Lovecraft, it was first published under Houdini’s byline in the summer 1924 number of Weird Tales.

In the story (Lovecraft's only one with an archaeological setting) Houdini gets the sense that archaeologists might be hiding something about the Giza plateau:

Such fascinating things were whispered about lower pyramid passages not in the guide books; passages whose entrances had been hastily blocked up and concealed by certain uncommunicative archaeologists who had found and begun to explore them.

Of course, this whispering was largely baseless on the face of it; but it was curious to reflect how persistently visitors were forbidden to enter the Pyramids at night...

Houdini hires a dragoman, Abdul, as his guide to Giza, and duly makes the rounds of the monuments. But atop the great pyramid, the escape artist is set upon:

Without warning, and doubtless in answer to some subtle sign from Abdul, the entire band of Bedouins precipitated itself upon me; and having produced heavy ropes, soon had me bound as securly as I was ever bound in the course of my life, either on stage or off...

Setting me down on a surface which I recognized as sand rather than rock, my captors passed a rope around my chest and dragged me a few feet to a ragged opening in the ground, into which they presently lowered me with much rough handling. For apparent eons I bumped against the stony irregular sides of a narrow hewn well which I took to be one of the numerous burial-shafts of the plateau until the prodigious, almost incredible depth of it robbed me of all bases of conjecture.

Houdini, of course, escapes from his bonds. But I’m not going to ruin the story by telling you all the creepiness that happens next. (Read the story here online, or pick up the paperback for cheap.)

'Imprisoned With the Pharaohs' is a mix of sound 1920s-vintage archaeological data and pure fantasy. Lovecraft never went to Egypt; the story is wholly based on books from the public library, visits to New England museums, and Houdini’s own yarn-spinning. The story trades in antiquated stereotypes - the untrustworthy Arab, the fantastic origin of the Sphinx, Egypt as degenerate from its Pharaonic golden age - yet has a surprisingly modern air, since all of these stereotypes are still quite current in popular culture. (At times, it seems like you're reading an early script for The Mummy.)

Lovecraft... Smiling? (h/t Accelerating Future)

Lovecraft’s fiction is all about the past and its secrets. Though he was a deep lover of antiquity, he was also afraid of it: in his stories, aberrant things lurk in dark attics and ancient texts. Looking too closely into the past leads to terror, madness, and death.

The man himself is still a towering figure in horror, science fiction, and fantasy. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was the epitomy of the crusty Yankee: cynical, reserved, and suspicious. He detested foreigners, technology, and modernity - and famously dated his letters 200 years in the past. At the same time, he was a starry romantic, a crafter of science fiction, and a mentor and friend to dozens of pulp fiction writers including Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. An avowed anti-Semite, he was nonetheless a big fan of Houdini (the son of a rabbi), and married a Ukranian Jew, Sonia Greene (thereby incurring the deep displeasure of his aristocratic maiden aunts). I have a great affection for the man: his bizarre and contradictory personality is totally all-American, and his hallucinatory evocations of the cosmic horrors lurking behind the veils of history have shaped me as a writer and a reader more than I care to contemplate. This site has much more about him.