More than monuments: Christian Langer uncovers the Egypt that time forgot
Christian Langer has been fascinated with ancient Egypt since he was 3 years old. His parents read to him all manner of books cultural and scientific, and as time went on, he became captivated by stories of millennia-old pharaohs and mummies.
So when he decided to study Egyptology in college, it was a shock for him to learn there was much more to the Land of Pyramids than, well, pyramids.
“I think people don’t have an understanding that all these topics like Tutankhamun, gold, tombs, temples, pyramids, etc.—that is only a tiny fraction of what Egyptologists are doing,” said Langer, an assistant professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences Department of Classics. “It’s less about the consumption or discussion of these grand discoveries and grand monuments and, really, largely painstakingly learning how to translate Egyptian sources.”
Langer’s research focuses on the effects of forced migration and deportation in ancient Egypt during the late Bronze Age, expanding beyond monuments and the elite to focus instead on the lives of people history often leaves out.
A stereotypical introduction
Langer grew up in Germany, where much of the history taught in schools focused on some of the darker parts of the country’s history: World War II, the Cold War, and the like.
He had a great interest in global history, however, particularly stories of ancient people who built societies and structures that still stand today.
“My voyage starts pretty much in the stereotypical way. As a kid, I had an early exposure to ancient Egyptian themes or ancient Egyptian contents in pop culture and animated series, like ‘DuckTales,’ for instance, which frequently visited ancient Egyptian aesthetics in one way or another,” he said.
When Langer went to college, he set out to be a lawyer, but that didn’t satisfy him intellectually. So, he began to look back at what drew his interest when he was in school.
“The University of Marburg in central Germany just so happened to still have an Egyptological institute, and that’s how it all started,” Langer said. “I started studying Egyptology, and I stuck with it.”
One of the first things Langer learned was that the field is less about exploring ancient ruins and more about learning a new language and writing system. The Egyptians kept very detailed records, so knowledge of ancient language and writing systems is vital to study. The complexity of the language, Langer reasoned, is why many students are intimidated by the field.
As his studies continued, Langer was surprised to learn how much of ancient Egypt was still unknown.
“There is very little we know for certain,” he said. “And so much left to explore.”
Uncovering lost voices
One of Langer’s central projects examines a side of ancient Egypt that rarely appears in popular imagination: the state’s use of forced migration, and the role deported people played in building Egyptian power.
When Langer entered the field, little research had been done on Egypt’s forced migration practices during the Late Bronze Age, which coincided with Egypt’s New Kingdom. Between the years 1500 and 1000 B.C.E., Egypt expanded southward into a region then known as Nubia, as well as along the Mediterranean coast toward the Levant.
“This expansion is accompanied by the forced removal or deportation of people from these locations back into Egypt,” he said. “These people were put in service of Egyptian temples, where they worked in agriculture, crafts, textile production, cattle herding, and other physically demanding labor.”
Some also became slaves to Egypt’s elite, who put them to work on their private estates or sold them. Langer emphasizes that this was not incidental, but structurally important to Egypt’s growing empire. The neighboring societies were weakened by these expansions and deportations, while Egypt became wealthier and even more powerful.
This project was especially important to Langer for two reasons. First, few scholars had examined forced migration in ancient history beyond the Assyrian Empire’s deportations after 1000 B.C.E. In fact, Langer’s research proved that the systematic practice of forced migration was much older than that.
His other goal was to recover the voices of these forced migrants, three millennia later.
“These are people largely left out of the story,” he said. “The affected people, the deportees, servants, slaves, however you want to call them, are invisible. They have no voice of their own, and you need to reconstruct it indirectly.”
This reflects Langer’s broader argument that most popular understandings of ancient Egypt focus only on elites. Imperial records and other documents tended to be kept for the elite; because of this, only the perspective of Egypt’s ruling class has endured.
“These temples had vast landholdings where deportees and other workers were cultivating the fields, harvesting orchards, taking care of cattle, or preparing textiles,” he said. “A papyrus dated around 1150 B.C.E. listed temple landholdings and donations across the country that added up to a workforce of more than 100,000.”
A global research perspective
Langer frames himself as a researcher shaped by four different academic systems.
He earned his doctorate from Freie Universität Berlin but spent a year studying at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology.
Later, he moved to Beijing, China, to work as a postdoctoral fellow at Peking University’s School of Arts. In 2024, Langer found a new home in Franklin College’s classics department.
“Your perspective on a research subject depends on your point of view,” he said. “Your approach might also differ depending on the academic system you’re moving in. Not every academic system is equally interested in the same research problems.”
These international experiences have given Langer a more “global understanding of research questions,” he said. While studying in London, he found many of the researchers there approached Egyptology with a more theoretical perspective, while Germany let the “source material speak for itself.” In China, scholars often approached the material through questions about China’s own history.
Langer would like to broaden the field of Egyptology, examining ancient Egypt through a more global lens. One advantage of the U.S. academic system, he said, is that Egyptology is already embedded in fields like history and classics.
To this end, his latest research project revolves around the adoption of the originally Egyptian form of the obelisk in modern China. Rather than treating the obelisk as a static ancient symbol, Langer is interested in how it has been adapted and transformed in modern China, while also comparing it to how it is viewed in more Western cultures.
“If you look at Washington D.C., you have the Washington Monument. It’s a modern obelisk, the biggest obelisk on earth, and serves as a memorial for George Washington,” he said. “While in China, these obelisks take on a different role as martyrs’ monuments, where they are tied to darker subject matter, such as war and violence. They became especially popular in the 19th and 20th centuries to signify the collapse of the monarchy in China, civil war, or Japanese invasion during World War II.
“What keeps me going,” he said, “is this untapped potential to develop new perspectives and branch out, to make things, I hope, more meaningful in a way that helps create an Egyptology that reflects the very global nature of the early 21st century.”
-- Sent from my Linux system.
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