Competition over ancient Egyptian treasures consumed 19th-century scholars—and nations.
Print, 'The Great Temple of Abu Simbel, Nubia' by David Roberts (ca.1846). Photo: Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images
By Dominic Green
Oct. 23, 2020 11:44 am ET
In the 19th century, Egyptomania raged first across Europe, then the United States, eventually infecting the Egyptians themselves. Its symptoms included the development of comparative linguistics; delusions of imperial grandeur; the destructive application of dynamite, bribes and forced labor; and the rediscovery of the lost history of the pharaohs.
"A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology" is the dramatic, detailed and eccentric-packed story of the century between the decoding of the Rosetta Stone in 1822 and the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922. It was a golden age for grave robbers, but also for scholarship, for it was in Egypt that the methods of modern archaeology were developed. A golden age for empires, too: The British and French, and then the Germans and Americans, carted off Egypt's monuments to their capitals as the Greeks and Romans had done before them. But, as Toby Wilkinson shows, the discovery of lost monuments, grave goods and mummified corpses also stimulated the emergence of their true inheritors, the modern Egyptian nation.
A World Beneath the Sands
By Toby Wilkinson Norton, 510 pages, $30
As Napoleon's troops were defeating the Mamluk rulers of Egypt at the Battle of the Pyramids in 1798, his "army of experts" set about building a modern state. Though Napoleon rapidly lost the military advantage to Britain, his "savants" gave France an enduring cultural victory. Egypt's new ruler, the Albanian warlord Muhammad Ali, had imperial plans of his own, and used fragments of pharaonic stone as "bargaining chips" to set Britain and France against each other. Soon, two rival armies of native labor were ransacking ancient sites.
Enter the Italian weightlifter and amateur archaeologist Giovanni Belzoni, stage name "the French Hercules." Belzoni convinced one of Ali's advisers that his knowledge of theatrical hydraulics made him a suitable overseer of Egypt's irrigation networks. In 1816, Belzoni retrieved a colossal bust from the sands west of Thebes and sent it to the British Museum. Reports of the "Young Memnon," and the massive torso that was found nearby, inspired Shelley's "Ozymandias."
Then came Jean-François Champollion to defend the honor of France. In 1822, he deciphered the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone. At a stroke, Mr. Wilkinson tells us, Champollion lifted "the civilization of the pharaohs out of the shadows of mythology and into the light of history." But did Champollion lift it alone? The English amateur linguist Thomas Young had made similar deductions. But, being a gentleman, Young published anonymously. He did, however, make some ungentlemanly observations about Champollion.
The Louvre now held Europe's best Egyptian collection, organized by Champollion's pioneering chronology. Meanwhile, in Egypt, modernization wrecked the archaeological record. The Egyptians smashed monuments to feed lime kilns and used ancient mud bricks as fertilizer. Ali encouraged his engineers to use stones from the Giza pyramids to build dams across the Nile. Between 1810 and 1828, 13 temples were destroyed by what George Gliddon, the American consul in Cairo, called "avarice, wantonness, and negligence."
Many of the archaeologists were little better. In 1837, Maj. Richard Vyse of the British army, intent on proving the Bible, drilled a metal rod 27 feet into the rear of the Sphinx, then blasted his way into various pyramids with dynamite. But others were more conscientious—and none more so than Karl Richard Lepsius of Prussia.
Lepsius proved the existence of the Old Kingdom and its dynastic chronologies. He pushed back the origin date of Egyptian civilization by a millennium, locating its birth not in India or Ethiopia, as some contemporaries believed, but in the Nile Valley. He exposed the hiatus of the Amarna period, in which Egyptian religion, art and architecture changed under the "heretic pharaoh" Akhenaten, and clarified the epochs of Egyptian art by identifying each era with its rules of proportion.
Lepsius returned to Prussia in 1846 with 15,000 antiquities—Berlin's museum now challenged the British Museum and the Louvre—and the material for his 12-volume "Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien." Though Lepsius made "the last major expedition to Egypt before the advent of photography," Mr. Wilkinson relates, his data-driven methods marked the end of the heroic age. Egyptology was now "an independent, scientific discipline," distinct from classical antiquity and the Bible.
With the Prussians in Egypt and Napoleon's nephew Louis-Napoleon on his way to the throne in Paris, in 1850 Auguste Mariette of the Louvre set out to discover the Serapeum, the monument to the god Serapis. The Memphite necropolis covered 30 miles of desert and was dotted with pyramids and tombs, many submerged under sand dunes. Working secretly at night, Mariette dug the longest, deepest trench yet, pulled his needle from the dunes and smuggled 230 crates of antiquities out of Egypt. The Louvre was back on top.
Mr. Wilkinson, the author of "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt" and a professor of Egyptology at the University of Lincoln, calls the Serapeum "the first great archaeological discovery in the history of Egyptology." It sparked a further wave of Egyptomania. The 10th Duke of Hamilton decided that he would be mummified before joining his ancestors in the family crypt. The Prince of Pückler-Muskau created an earthen pyramid on his estate as his last resting place. The ordinary public bought tickets to see mummies unwrapped.
In 1875 Ali's heirs went bankrupt. Britain and France soon took over Egypt's finances. A nationalist revolt in 1882 led to a British invasion and a "veiled protectorate" under the supervision of Evelyn Baring, known for his imperious manner as "over-Baring." Mariette became director of Egypt's first national museum. The balance was beginning to shift from excavation and export to preserving and protecting Egypt's heritage, though traditionalist popularizers like E.A. Wallis Budge of the British Museum carried on bribing and smuggling.
When Baring abolished forced labor, he raised the cost of digging. The English ascetic Flinders Petrie, who in 1888 discovered the exquisite Greco-Egyptian portrait heads at Fayum, trimmed his budget. He lived on tinned food, was "as odiferous as a polecat," and reveled in the dirt and danger: "Working in the dark for much of the time, stripped naked, and in filthy brackish water," he wrote, "you collide with floating coffins or some skulls that go bobbing around." He also developed the academic method of stratigraphy, documentation and digging economically rather than making massive clearances.
The American James Henry Breasted, meanwhile, took advantage of the philanthropy of John D. Rockefeller. In 1906 Breasted created the "Chicago method," collating and correcting inscriptions from existing photographs. He also democratized museum holdings by copying and publishing all of the surviving "coffin texts," or inscriptions written on ancient Egyptian coffins, in the Egyptian Museum and in museums across Europe. His fellow American Theodore Davis may have done more to bring Egyptology into the modern age. After he discovered in 1905 the magnificent gold-rich sepulchre created by King Amenhotep III for his parents-in-law, Davis declined his share of the finds. The entire haul went to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Davis discovered 18 tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and by the mid-1900s was "the most famous Egyptologist in the world." But in November 1922, Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon, working a mere 6 feet from where Davis's excavation had stopped, came upon the greatest discovery ever made in the Nile Valley: the tomb of Tutankhamun. Above ground, modern Egypt had declared its independence earlier that year. The Egyptian Museum would continue to have a French director until the revolution of 1952, but Egypt's past now belonged to the Egyptians of the future.
—Mr. Green is deputy editor of the Spectator (U.S.).
Sorry, I can't include the instagram photos in this email, but you can go to instagram to see them, and you can follow the above link to view the "Egyptomania House Tour".
Glenn
How Academics, Egyptologists, and Even Melania Trump Benefit From Colonialist Cosplay
From khakis to pith hats, certain items of clothing have become enduring emblems of European colonialism and particular scholars who know these problematic histories choose to engage in the aesthetics of colonialism in their everyday lives.
First Lady Melania Trump visits an ivory burn site with Nelly Palmeris, Nairobi National Park Game Warden on Friday, Oct. 5, 2018, at the Nairobi National Park in Nairobi, Kenya (official White House photo by Andrea Hanks via Flickr).
From khakis to pith hats, certain items of clothing have become enduring emblems of British, French, and Dutch colonialism. Should their history as sartorial symbols of empire and oppression be considered when donned today? And what about those scholars who know their problematic histories and still choose to live, to recreate, and to engage in the aesthetics of colonialism in their everyday lives?
In her new book, Melania and Me, author Stephanie Winston Wolkoff remarks on the first lady's controversial choice of headgear when visiting Kenya in 2018: "October took Melania to Kenya, where she wore a pith helmet reminiscent of colonialists from Europe … She said her sartorial choice offended the 'liberal media.'" According to Winston Wolkoff, Mrs. Trump went on to explain how she'd landed on the helmet to begin with: "'I googled 'what to wear on safari,' saw the outfit, and liked it. So I bought it,' she said. 'I wasn't making a comment on colonialism.'"
Following Trump's visit to Kenya, her fashion choices were widely critiqued as insensitive —even though supporters claim they were born from ignorance. But what about those that dress in this garb on purpose? Among the western archaeologists working in Egypt a least a few have a particular taste for early 20th century, colonial-style attires, both in and out of the field. You thought pith helmets — one of the most easily recognizable symbols of British colonial might — and Crocodile Dundee-esque outfits were a thing of the pre-Nasser past? Well, you're wrong. Not only are such outfits still deemed unproblematic by many current archaeologists, but some of them also willingly advertise their "vintage" tastes on social media.
This is the case of the "Vintage Egyptologist" also known as Dr Colleen Manassa Darnell. According to her Academia page,
Dr Manassa Darnell taught at Yale University as the Marilyn M. and William K. Simpson Assistant Professor of Egyptology (2006–2010), and Associate Professor (2010–2015). She currently teaches art history at the University of Hartford and other colleges in Connecticut and is a curatorial affiliate at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
Her work also includes a substantial volume of public-facing scholarship, which she performs under the name "Vintage Egyptologist" (VE). Over the past few years, VE has gathered an impressive following on Instagram and Youtube. The oldest picture on Dr Manassa Darnell's Instagram account dates from January 2017. Her feed, which currently counts about 375 posts, has 153,000 followers. This is way more than all the Egyptologists we know. (By comparison, Zahi Hawass has 53,000 followers.) In February 2020, she was featured as a guest on YouTuber Rachel Maksy's "Watching 'The Mummy' with an Actual Egyptologist" video. The clip has over two million views.
More recently, VE created a Youtube channel, which now counts 35,000 followers. While the instagram account appears to be Dr Manassa Darnell's solo project, the Youtube page's profile picture features her with her husband, Yale Egyptology Professor John Coleman Darnell, and the page's "about" section reads: "We are Egyptologists with interests in archaeology, history, and vintage fashion".
VE does provide high quality, accurate historical content, and the Darnells are doing so — through Instagram captions, Youtube videos, and cruise tours — very eloquently. What interests us here is that this Egyptological content is delivered using a so-called "vintage" packaging, which transports us to the realm of The Great Gatsby meets The English Patient. The numerous hashtags added to the Instagram captions include #archaeology, #history, #egyptology, #explorers, #explorersclub, and #indianajones. Less than a handful of Egyptian workers (three of whom are referred to as "our Egyptian family" in one instance) appear in the pictures. The few archaeological workers who do appear (in subaltern roles) are named. Apart from a couple of early 20th-century hotels (whose presence seems to be warranted because they are remnants of a "glamorous past"), no modern Egyptian settlement is represented.
In a 2018 interview with Egypt Today, Dr Manassa Darnell explained that her "love for vintage fashion and the '20s began when she realized how liberating the era was for women":
As the First World War raged across Europe, women found themselves filling the roles of men. They began working, playing sports, taking part in excavations and finally they were given their right to vote. Jazz music came out of the shadows of New Orleans and started to become popular all around the world, and Hollywood's influence on the public was at its starting point. The Prohibition had forced communities into underground clubs as nightlife and crime were embraced by all classes. Everyone was dancing the Charleston, while the prevailing flapper lifestyle became the new cool with its own slang.
The "liberated women" Dr Manassa Darnell has in mind are European, American, and white of a particular socio-economic background. Elsewhere, she claims that it makes her feel "powerful to be able to channel the past". She then goes on to describe her approach to wearing vintage clothing in archaeological contexts:
Onsite during an excavation, I wear practical and more recent vintage, such as 1970s and 1980s khaki skirts, sometimes paired with a '40s or '50s jacket. For visits to tombs and temples, I often wear flapper dresses or jodhpur pants with boots. I hope that by combining Egyptology and vintage fashion — from a time when Egyptology and Egyptian designs, both ancient and modern, were popular throughout the world — I can encourage more people to be interested in all things Egyptian, and to travel to Egypt. By wearing the clothing of the early modern period and attempting to understand how it feels to wear and work in the clothes of 100 or so years ago, I also gain some feeling for understanding the different clothing and the lives of the ancient Egyptians.
Behind closed doors, many Egyptologists have been making fun of VE on the ground that its branding is narcissistic and ridiculously colonial. Yet public critiques by fellow academics, including Egyptologists, remain few, and those who have spoken up have generally been met with dismissive arguments from inside the field. Many academics suggest that what matters is the content, not the container; so criticism of this type amounts to nothing more than uncollegial gossiping.
We beg to differ. To us, Egyptologists and scholars in antiquity-related fields, the "vintage" part of VE is as meaningful as the "Egyptologist" part. Indeed, the highly curated, and professional, pictures and videos produced by VE are the result of conscientious, deliberate choices. These testify to a vision of Egyptology that is intimately tied to the reproduction of colonial imageries. In most cases the (white, American) body of Dr Manassa Darnell, who features at times with her (white, American) husband, is shown in Egypt, either in a monument, on a site, or aboard a "vintage" cruise boat.
The "Darnells," as the couple also call themselves, have also led "vintage cruises" aboard the SS Sudan steamboat. The tour is organized by the travel company Goodspeed & Bach inc. A 2020 advertising pamphlet describes the boat in those terms:
Built in the 1910's, she is the last authentic Belle Epoque paddle steamer in Africa. Her broad teak decks, brassware, and wood paneling are the stuff of romantic stories. The gangways exude a sweet aroma of beeswax; the woven rattan furniture on the deck provides the perfect place to daydream as you sip tea and watch the desert palms glide past.
An Instagram post commemorating the gala night of their 2018 tour at the Grand Cataract Hotel in Aswan gives us an idea of their audience. In addition to the Darnells, all the vintage dressed people featuring in the photographs are white.
Shortly after the cruise tour was over, the couple shot a video of themselves, dressed in jodhpur pants and Pith helmets, dancing in the Grand Tea Room at the Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor.
As we observed above, apart from its Pharaonic ruins, landscapes and, on rare occasions, galabeya-dressed men pictured in subaltern roles, today's Egypt is conspicuously absent. The focus is more particularly on the fashion in vogue in the 1920s. In a clip posted on Facebook, Dr Manassa Darnell explains her particular love for clothing of that period: "There's just something special about putting on clothing that's rooted in a particular time and, often, place."
What, then, was that particular time like in the "particular" places the Darnells work and live in?
In the 1920s, Egypt was ruled by the British. During that time, there was an acceleration of European archaeological missions in the country, and also a rise of international (essentially European and North American) tourism. (See for instance Malcolm Reid's Whose Pharaohs? and Contesting Antiquity in Egypt as well as Rachel Mairs's and Maya Muratov's Archaeologists, Tourists, Interpreters). More generally, as Timothy Mitchell and Jennifer Derr have shown, the period of British rule over Egypt, which VE celebrates as the "Golden Age" of fashion, Egyptology, and travel, was also a period of pervasive colonial violence. Back in the USA, the aftermaths of WWI had led to the "Great Migration," and ongoing racial segregation and violence towards Black Americans fueled the "New Negro Movement'." Unsurprisingly, VE does not engage with this type of "vintage," but promotes instead a sugar-coated, romantic, and Orientalist image of that time period.
The elitist, whitewashed version of vintage living promoted by VE appears to be an all-encompassing passion for the Darnells. This notably shows in their September 4 "Egyptomania House Tour" video, which offers a tour of their "Greek revival" home.
To be clear, we don't think that "vintage" fashion is an issue per se. In many ways, "vintage" objects and sartorial items can become creative, ecologically responsible ways to express oneself. And yes, vintage fashion is beautiful. Yet what happens when 1920s (European-inspired) hairdos, clothes, and accessories are purposefully featured on a white body in a way that celebrates colonial-era archaeology and travel? And what does it mean for two white, affluent American scholars to continue to produce such content now, in the age of Trump, Black Lives Matter, and Indigenous fights for decolonization? We argue that VE is very successful because it occludes: the colonial violence that, under British rule, made possible the ideas of Egypt and Egyptology they are celebrating; the complexity, multifaceted identity, and shifting nature of Egypt's land, peoples, and histories; and many (Egyptian, American) pasts, and presents. By doing so, it stages and celebrates a white-supremacist type of vintage Egyptology.
Take this passage from the 2020 Vintage Cruise pamphlet, which concerns "Day 14: Kom Ombo and Aswan":
This morning, SUDAN steams toward Aswan at the frontier of traditional Egypt, where ancient Nubia begins. The mighty desert slowly replaces cultivated land as we proceed up the Nile. It is easy to see that this is where pharaonic civilization once ended. The lands above the great cataracts nourished the Nile Valley with mineral-rich silt during the floods. Nubia also provided Egypt with gold, precious woods and ivory, as well as soldiers for its military machine." (our italics)
To whoever is acquainted with the deep, entangled histories of Egypt and Nubia — and this includes the audiences of the recent virtual talks by Stuart Tyson Smith and Solange Ashby — the simplistic, racially charged, and anti-Black subtext of this passage is striking.
For Dr Manassa Darnell and her husband, vintage living serves as a portal through which they — equipped with the intellectual capital brought about by their association with Yale University — can disseminate knowledge about Pharaonic Egypt to wider, non-academic audiences. What does the success of this strategy mean, about the broader reception of ancient Egypt, about Egyptology's ongoing colonial entanglements, and about the relationship of most of the members of our fields with public-facing scholarship?
VE's curatorial anchoring resides in the realm of the Orientalist fantasy, far, far away from anything written since Edward Said, and in disjunction with the historical experience and sensibilities of most inhabitants of modern and contemporary Egypt. The "Egypt" it portrays is reminiscent of the frontispiece of the 19th century French multivolume series Description de l'Égypte published after Napoleon's conquest. This fictive, deserted landscape was cut through by the Nile river and dotted with impressive pharaonic monuments covered in hieroglyphics, ready to be "explored" by white "experts," whose lavish and civilized lifestyle matches the long-gone sophistication of ancient Egypt's mystical grandeur. In this regard, the Classical-style frieze (which shows an Apollo-looking, Muses-leading Napoléon driving the Mamluks out) surrounding the Description's frontispiece's rendition of Egypt serves as a powerful statement of the power relationship at stake: Egypt is defined by and for the male, European conqueror's ability to penetrate, occupy, and, to paraphrase a now famous political slogan, "make her great again".
The erasure of post-642 AD Egypt and of the Egyptians themselves from the frontispiece of the Description de l'Égypte is a stunning Freudian slip, a powerful window into the enduring (sub)conscious relationship that links a large proportion of scholars, students, and non-academic crowds to Egypt. Such a zoomed-in, myopic image of Egypt belongs to a Eurocentric fantasy that is, as the public success of VE shows, still very much alive, both within and outside of academia.
While VE's audience seems to be mostly white and based in Europe or settler colonies, it is also important to acknowledge that the interiorization, performance, marketization, and consumption of colonial aesthetics is a more global phenomenon that is often introjected by colonial subjects. The recent petition for the return of a French mandate over Lebanon offers a striking example of how the civilizational discourses that accompanied European colonial rules remain alive in "postcolonial" countries.
It should not come as a surprise, then, that VE counts many Egyptians amongst its followers. The recent feature in Egypt Today quoted above attests to this phenomenon. We also ought to mention another, more artful example: For years, Egyptian Egyptologist Zahi Hawass has been carefully subverting a colonial-inspired dress code to foreign and local audiences. His appropriation of Indiana Jones's looks offers a compelling example of a colonizer's outfit being recuperated by a member of a historically colonized community for self-assertive purposes. More broadly, social media publications celebrating the "European fashion" and ways of living of pre-1952 Egypt (and notably Alexandria) abound, and the same trend is found in association with other western Asian countries: from Iran to Afghanistan to Syria and Iraq. For many locals and members of diasporic communities, such cultivated nostalgia for a lost "cosmopolitan" past is often rooted in personal experiences of loss, socio-economic hardship, suffering, and exile. Yet this romanticization of "lost golden ages" can also be, concomitantly or not, layered with (un)conscious subtexts that testify to modes of internalized coloniality.
It is too easy to mock the examples provided so far without questioning the mechanisms that allowed such public personae to fully manifest themselves in the first place. The large, expanding following of VE testifies to the ongoing popularity of and nostalgia for colonial imageries among large segments of western (especially North American) populations. As such, and whether it wants it or not, VE is eminently political. Indeed, the project is not disconnected from more open forms of apology of colonialism and imperialism, and this is where the problem lies. The public success of VE shows how the image of Egyptology remains largely Orientalist. While scholars are very prone to laugh at the many clichés and stereotypes that shape the way ancient civilizations are portrayed in mass media, we should not forget that these very stereotypes have been, for most of us, the starting point, the spark that ignited our passions, fueled our initial interest for Antiquity. They are also an important gateway to private funding, something which many archaeologists, including the Darnells, understand perfectly.
The past years have seen an increase in the use of ancient history by ideologically minded individuals and groups. One can think of the selective and tendentious recuperation of Greek and Roman imagery by extreme conservative, white supremacist groups; of the apology for western-style looting (including the defense of the British right to own the Elgin Marbles); of the Museum of the Bible debacle. In this context, it is as irresponsible from scholars working on the ancient world to deflect the question of the "decolonization" of the field by appealing to a white-washed, elitist nostalgia for the "good old days" as it is to contemptuously ridicule or ignore the proponents of such tropes. In the era of a resurgence of white supremacy and neo-fascism, and the onset of COVID-19, in an age, in other words, where the humanities are at the most relevant yet most threatening crossroad they've faced in decades, we, intersectionally minded antiquity scholars, cannot afford to look the other way anymore. It is time for us to occupy the arena of public discourse equipped with our scholarly insights more creatively and more loudly.
Chinese archeologists to continue joint project in Egypt
By Chen Xi Source: Global Times Published: 2020/10/21 19:03:40
Chinese and Egyptian archaeologists pose for a picture at the Montu Temple site in Luxor, Egypt. Photo: Courtesy of Jia Xiaobing
Egypt, an ancient country with a history going back thousands of years, seems like a mysterious destination for many people around the world. This was also true for the Chinese archaeological team that was sent there on a mission to help local teams with an excavation project.
When given the task of going to Egypt for the project, the mood of the head of the mission, Jia Xiaobing, was complicated. He told the Global Times that he was very excited at first.
"Having an opportunity to go to such an ancient country would be exciting for any archaeologist," he said.
But he also felt a bit worried and stressed since he had never been to Egypt and all his knowledge of the country came from books or online.
Since this was China's first archaeological mission to Egypt, how to carry out the work was another unknown for him.
The Montu Temple site in Luxor, Egypt Photo: Courtesy of Jia Xiaobing
Season for exploration
In November 2018, the Chinese team from the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences departed to Egypt for a joint archaeological project at the site of the Montu Temple in Luxor.
"Luxor is rich in many Egyptian antiquities," Jia said, explaining that the best season to carry out archaeological work in Egypt is from late November to April since the temperature in other months of the year can reach more than 40 C.
According to Jia, in the first-phase work, 2018-19 season, he and three other experts participated in the project, the goal of which was to clean up the site, covering about 2,000 square meters, as there were many weeds and some abandoned rubbish left by previous Western archaeologists.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology in Cairo first carried out systematic archaeological excavations at the Montu Temple site. However, the work was interrupted by World War II, so a lot of information could not be recorded and preserved at that time.
From the 1990s till the beginning of the 21st century, archaeologists continued to conduct surveys of the temple area, but they were all short-term studies of single buildings that did not take a comprehensive look at the temple site as a whole.
Jia said the work carried out during the second phase, 2019-20 season, involved two areas, the Osirian Chapels (Area 1) and the junction between the Montu Temple and the Maat Temple (Area 2).
They discovered a paved courtyard with four granite column bases in the area between the Chapel of Amenardis I, the second of three chapels in the temple, and its sandstone gate.
COVID-19 challenge
The COVID-19 pandemic posed a difficult challenge for the project.
According to Jia, before the coronavirus outbreak, they usually needed over 50 people to survey a single big building, but as the pandemic worsened, they had to reduce the number of on-site staff to 20.
"All staff were required to wear masks, and we tried our best to maintain social distancing on site," he said.
Although the pandemic did not impact their overall plan, it caused a lot of mental stress and pressure for each member of the project.
"No one knew how strong the virus was, and we tried our best to stay healthy," Jia said.
Their work was finished in late March, and they were scheduled to return in April. However, due to travel restrictions implemented after the outbreak, they were only able to return to China in May.
Cooperation and discussion
Since the area they explored was some 2,000 square meters in size, it was challenging to conduct the work efficiently as a joint team from two different countries.
According to Jia, they divided the Egyptian-Chinese team into two groups, and they would communicate with each other when someone came up with new ideas.
"We talked a lot during the cooperation, so both sides could get some ideas or suggestions from each other."
During the cooperation, Jia noticed that Egypt had one system in particular that his team could learn from.
For archaeological work in China, the project leader usually spends a lot of time and energy in coordinating administrative jobs such as the division of labor and managing each member. But in the Egyptian team, the administrative work is usually done by another member of the team, so the leader can have more time to focus on research.
Meanwhile, Jia said that the Chinese way of marking unearthed cultural relics was praised by the Egyptian team, as the Chinese way can quickly provide researchers with specific information about a relic such as its name and location of discovery.
The third phase of work, in the 2020-21 season, is scheduled to start in November. Although the plan has been approved by both countries, the decision on implementing the plan has yet to be confirmed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Jia pointed out that during the next season, they are going to continue to explore undiscovered parts of the temple site, and plan to put together a general layout of the whole area.
"Through the cooperation, both sides have gained a deeper understanding of each other's culture. We welcome more similar cultural projects in the future," Jia said. Newspaper headline: Spirit of cooperation
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