It is barely 7:30 a.m. in the Valley of the Kings, and tourists are
already milling just beyond the yellow police tape like passers-by at a
traffic accident. I step over the tape and show my pass to a guard, who
motions for me to climb down a wooden ladder sticking out of a small,
nearly square hole in the ground. Eighteen feet down a vertical shaft,
the blazing Egyptian sun is gone, the crowd's hum is muted and the air
is cool. In a small chamber lit by fluorescent lamps, a half-dozen
archaeologists are measuring, drawing and gently probing relics in the
first tomb to be found in the Valley of the Kings, more than 400 miles
up the Nile from Cairo, since the resting place of King Tutankhamen was
discovered here 84 years ago.
A jumble of seven wooden coffins of various sizes fills one corner of
the room. Termites have turned parts of some of them into powder, while
others have suffered only a thin layer of dust. Edwin Brock, an
Egyptologist formerly at the American University of Cairo, is on his
knees, cataloguing the contents of a coffin filled with a strange
assortment of pottery, rocks, cloth and natron — the powdery
substance used to dry mummies. A couple of yards away, University of
Chicago archaeological artist Susan Osgood intently sketches the serene
yellow face painted on a partially intact coffin. It was likely built
for a woman; men's faces were typically rendered a sunburned red. Deeper
in the pile, a child-size casket is nestled between two full-sized ones.
Something resembling a pillow seems to bulge out of another casket. The
17-foot-long space, which has plain limestone walls, also holds a number
of knee-high ceramic storage jars, most still sealed.
Nervous about bumping into someone — or worse, something
— I make my way back out to the narrow shaft and climb to the
surface with Otto Schaden, the dig's director. Until this past February,
he had worked in obscurity, splitting his time between studying a minor
Pharaoh's tomb nearby and playing bass flugelhorn in a Chicago band.
Back up amid the heat and tourists, the 68-year-old archaeologist pulls
out tobacco and bread crumbs, thrusting the first into a pipe and
flinging the second onto the ground for some twittering finches. Just
yards away, visitors in shorts and hats are lining up to get into King
Tut's cramped tomb, named KV-62 because it was the 62nd tomb found in
the Valley of the Kings...
A Mystery Fit For A Pharaoh,
Andrew Lawler, Smithsonian Magazine, Smithsonian Institution, District
of Columbia, USA, July, 2006.
Interview with Andrew Lawler, Author of "A Mystery Fit for a
Pharaoh"
You described Otto Schaden as a 19th century British gentleman
explorer. You've written extensively about archaeology, and no doubt met
many different types of archaeologists. Do you find yourself more
attracted to this romantic aspect of archaeology, or do you tend to
think about archaeology like a 21st century scientist?
There are different kinds of romance in archaeology — there's
not an archaeologist alive who is in the business purely because they
like to collect scientific data. There is a passion and a romance that
goes along with understanding and studying ancient cultures. This goes
back to most people's childhoods. Otto is a fantasist, and in a way his
romance is with the 19th century as much as it is with ancient Egypt. He
is caught up in that age of Victorian times when you wore pith helmets
and you would go in and dig up exciting things, which is not something
I've found with most other archaeologists these days. Most of them tend
to be passionate about ancient cultures, but often they're very critical
of their predecessors, whose methods are considered quite crude. So I
think it's a question of what romance you're living in...
Interview with Andrew Lawler, Author of "A Mystery Fit
for a Pharaoh",
Amy Crawford, Smithsonian Magazine, Smithsonian Institution, District of
Columbia, USA, July, 2006.
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