Music to dig by: Josh Ritter, 'The Curse'

A love story between an archaeologist and the mummy she discovers in Egypt. Music by Josh Ritter, from his new album "So Runs the World Away". Film by Liam Hurley (the band's drummer, also a puppeteer!).

For once I have nothing high-falutin' to say about this one, I'm just enjoying wallowing in the poignancy. If you want more, NPR's All Songs Considered covers the making of the film and its great puppets.

Thanks to Terry for the tip!

"Cave Complex Allegedly Found Under Giza Pyramids"; or, Why We Should Be Skeptical of the News Media

The Discovery Channel's website has recently posted an article about a series of caves that may exist underneath the Giza pyramids. It's hard to know where to begin with this one; it's semi-sensationalist articles like these that lead so many people to assume that the pyramid complexes contain untold mysteries and phenomena that the academic establishment is unwilling to reveal.

First, the individual who claims to have found the caves is cited as a "British explorer" - i.e., an interested amateur who may very well have fresh ideas about the nature of the Giza plateau, but who has no actual credentials for excavating there. But it's hard to determine what, exactly, he was doing on the plateau; Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities has very strict rules about who can excavate within Egypt, and rightly so. Long gone are the days when European adventurers ran unchecked in Egypt, sometimes dynamiting the entrance to a tomb if they so chose (something that did, in fact, happen in the 1830s). So how, exactly, did Andrew Collins manage to discover and explore these alleged subterranean caves, given that he is not a professional Egyptologist with an affiliation to an academic institution (as per SCA requirements)? The article does not ask this question; perhaps we have to wait for the inevitable tv special.

The article does state, however, that Mr. Collins was aided in his discovery by "British Egyptologist Nigel Skinner-Simpson". By his own admission, on his website, Mr. Skinner-Simpson is not an Egyptologist. He is a computer software developer who practices as an amateur in Egyptology and maintains a membership to the Egypt Exploration Society (membership is open to anyone who can pay £42 per year). This is not a trivial point that I argue: when the news media throws around the term "Egyptologist", assigning it to anyone who has a theory about Egypt, it is a gross misleading of the public. [Update: I have been kindly informed by Mr. Skinner-Simpson that the attribution to him of the title "Egyptologist" was an editorial error that they were unable to correct for publication.]

The article was relatively brief, but here are my first impressions regarding Mr. Collins' claims about his discovery. He allegedly found a massive natural cave under the Giza plateau. The pyramids were built on limestone bedrock and even incorporated some outcroppings of that bedrock into the lower body of the pyramid. I am not a geologist, but the fact that the bedrock might contain some natural caves does not strike me as necessarily problematic (though I would welcome some insight on this point from a geologist). However, this is where the article gets fuzzy; it's unclear whether Mr. Collins thinks he's found man-made tunnels and "catacombs" cut into the bedrock, or whether the alleged discovery remains simply that of natural caves. He does make clear that he believes these natural caves inspired the ancient Egyptians' beliefs in an underworld, and this is the point at which his claims become sheer speculation.

The Egyptian concept of the afterlife, and the journey to it, was exceedingly complex. The afterlife had a celestial sphere as well as a subterranean element, and it is often difficult to separate the concepts into distinct topographies; Egyptian religious and mythological concepts had a tendency to blur and blend together, built up as they were over thousands of years from disparate sources. Mr. Collins claims that the ancient name of the Giza and Memphis cemeteries, Rosetjau (meaning "entrance of the passages") is "unquestionably a reference to the entrance to a subterranean cave world, one long rumored to exist beneath the [Giza] plateau." In fact, the use of the word Rosetjau in funerary texts was not limited to referencing only the Giza necropolis specifically. According to Egyptologist John Taylor - who is the Assistant Keeper of Egyptian Antiquites at the British Museum - "The term Rosetjau denoted any hole or shaft in the ground (principally tomb shafts but also natural features) which was believed to be an entrance to the netherworld" (italics added).

In other words, Mr. Collins' speculation is interesting but so far is supported only by circumstantial evidence. And how did he obtain that evidence? You'll have to wait for his forthcoming book, apparently.

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.

Michael Jackson in Egypt

NBC Chicago strikes a blow for serious journalism by pointing out that this statue in the Field Museum looks just like Michael (in his later years). It's dated to the New Kingdom (1550-1050), and is (of course!) a bust of a woman. (Thanks to Lindsay for the tip!)

Which brings us to Michael's foray into archaeology, a classic co-starring Eddie Murphy and Iman as Ramesses and his wife. Legends live.


Michael Jackson - Remember The Time
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