HYPERPYRUS - Noreen Doyle's Blog

Noreen Doyle

Egyptology Nautical Archaeology Fiction

Home

Fiction

Short Stories in Print

Anthologies

Scholarship

Scholarly Publications

Nonfiction

Nonfiction for Kids

Photography
(coming soon!)

HYPERPYRUS:
Noreen Doyle's Blog

Recent posts

10 November 2007
Saturday
Sometimes Neglect Leads to Interesting Things
Subject: Photography, Writing

WARNING: photograph by Noreen Doyle @2007

Story ideas are sometimes like this. You know you have something that could be interesting but you can't make anything of it yet. It seems flat, dull, ordinary. So you put it off into the back of your mind and forget about it for a while. And then, when you come to it again, maybe now enough dust and spider silk have gathered about it and you see it in just the right light. . . .

COMMENTS? Would you like to buy a print or lease rights? E-mail me.

9 November 2007
Friday
UPDATE: A Private Audience with the King
Subject: Egyptology, Mummymania

The mummy of Tutankhamun has been put on view. The one time I turned the TV on in the hotel room at the (highly recommended) Carriage House Inn in Saratoga Springs, just before leaving the World Fantasy Convention, was just in time to catch live video of the installation. News stories abound. A selection:

Al-Ahram Weekly
National Geographic
The Associated Press
The New York Times
The Independent (Ireland) (an op-ed piece regarding the ethics of displaying mummies; Philip Hesner's views on the subject are not entirely mine, but I do respect what he writes and believe that all should give due consideration to the issue and decide not only what their own opinion is but why)

COMMENTS? E-mail me.

24 October 2007
Wednesday
A Private Audience with the King
Subject: Egyptology, Mummymania

September 11, 2002, while most of my fellow Americans were commemorating the first anniversary of that most awful day, I was walking in the nearly deserted Valley of the Kings. Other tourists were there, to be sure, but in no great numbers. Americans were scarce on the ground, and Egyptians tended to be shocked (and pleased, once they recovered) to be encountering an American. I had traveled from England to Egypt as part of a mixed group of tourists, mostly British, but the Netherlands and South Africa were also represented among us. In the hotels and on the sites we passed Germans, French, Italians, and Japanese, but encountered no Americans until a few days later, when I ran into one filming the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. But all tourists, it seemed, were not as thick on the ground as they might have been -- certainly compared to January of this year.

Under other circumstances, I expect that my visit to the tomb of Tutankhamun would have been very different.

September 11, 2002: Valley of the Kings

Entrance to the tomb of Tutankhamun, 2002
©2002 Noreen Doyle

Entrance to the tomb of Tutankhamun, 1920s-30s
Keystone stereoview card (9864T)

Even before the current ban on photography in tombs and museums, cameras of any kind were not permitted in KV62, as Tutankhamun's tomb is officially known. With some trepidation I surrendered my F100 to the attendant. And with Rosemary, one of my fellow tourists, we stepped down into what is perhaps the most famous final resting place on earth, ready to jam elbow-to-elbow with whatever tour group had preceded us.

The corridor leads to the Antechamber, empty now of the "wonderful things" Howard Carter glimpsed by candlelight on November 27, 1922. When we entered, it was empty of anything. No crowds stood with us. None at all. We two were alone, almost.

The door to the Treasury, formerly guarded by lithe Anubis reclining atop a gilded chest, is walled off. But another wall has been taken down to give a view to the Burial Chamber, which once would have seemed a solid wall of gold. Found occupied by a series of nested, gilded shrines nearly too big for the space, the Burial Chamber, like the other rooms, has given up almost all its treasures to the Luxor Museum and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The king himself remains, as he was ever meant to. Oh, yes, Tutankhamun's intended tomb was never finished and was used to bury his successor (and, as some would have it, murderer), Ay. And yes, Carter's team broke apart Tutankhamun's body so that it is hardly in the condition that his embalmers (or himself) could have wished. But in KV62, for a while, were just the three of us: the king, Rosemary, and I.

Only a few yards, a dusty Plexiglas laid atop the otherwise open sarcophagus, and a solid gold coffin separated us from Nebkheprure Tutankhamun. We three stood (and lay) in contemplative silence, watched over by the few figures that decorate the wall. The simplicity of these paintings provides stark contrast to the opulence of many of the objects once crammed into the chambers.

They record events of the last day Tutankhamun spent in the world of the living, but the king himself is already dead. "The great officials of the palace" drag his mummy to the tomb. Ay, Tutankhamun's vizier and successor, raises an adze to Tutankhamun's lips in a key act of the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, restoring to the dead king the ability to hear, see, smell, and to breathe, like the living.

The breaths of the living have taken a heavy toll on Egypt's monuments. Into the close air of the tombs they introduce heat, moisture, and carbon dioxide, which eat away at the paint, the plaster, even the surface of the stone. And, although he lies within a coffin of solid, incorruptible gold, the mummy of Tutankhamun likewise suffers. Carter is not alone responsible for the king's current state of decay.

Beginning later in November, tourists who pay the extra price of admission to enter KV62 will see something that Rosemary and I could not. The Supreme Council of Antiquities will have the king himself on display. Not his broken, mangled body. That will remain decently shrouded. But those who enter will find his face--the gaze of the royal Presence--staring back at them.

When you see him, take a deep breath. And when you let it out again, be sure to say "I'm sorry."

Al Ahram Weekly reports on the upcoming display of Tutankahmun's mummy

COMMENTS? E-mail me.

23 September 2007
Sunday
Nautical Archaeologists "Wood" Do It Better
Subject: Nautical Archaeology, Egyptology

It's one of those age-old material debates, like "cotton or polyester" and "paper or plastic." The question? Egyptian ships: "wood or reed?" Why is it that when anybody outside of the mainstream archaeological community replies to this question, the answer seems all too often to be "reed"? Have these people not seen the magnificent Khufu boat, all 142 cedar-planked feet of it? Are the Dahshur boats--one in Chicago, one in Pittsburgh, two in Cairo--not worth their attention? Have they completely overlooked the ancient iconography, showing boatbuilders assembling wooden boats, plank by plank? No, not at all.

Pharanic woodworking: boatbuilders and carpenters, tomb of Khnumhotep III at Beni Hasan, c. 1897-1877 BCE.
©2002 Noreen Doyle

Much, if not all, of the blame falls on the shoulders of that late giant of maritime exploration, Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002). His efforts to recreate the voyages of early peoples were pioneering and media magnets, but his "Egyptian" Ra I and the more famous (and successful) Ra II, launched in 1969 and 1970, were also grossly misguided and ill conceived.

Heyerdahl began with a premise "based as much on intuition as on concrete facts," as the man himself admitted [The Ra Expeditions, p. 4]. Much of its roots lay in his earlier work with the Kon Tiki, another reed boat with which he tried to demonstrate that the ancient Peruvians had reached Polynesia. (His hypothesis has since been disproved with evidence other than nautical.)

If the Peruvians sailed so far, could the Egyptians--credited by some as having founded or influenced the great American civilizations--have reached the New World by boat? Heyerdahl dismissed the possibility that they had done so aboard their wooden vessels, which he called "vulnerable in a heavy sea" [The Ra Expeditions, p. 5]. The answer, therefore, to the (hypothetical) technological challenge of a pharaonic transatlantic crossing? Reeds.

(Let me take a moment here to make an important point: I do not believe that the dynastic or predynastic Egyptians reached the Americas by wood, papyrus, fiberglass, extraterrestrial nanotechnology, divine intervention, or any other other real or imagined means. My purpose here isn't to debunk the diffusionist or "early global trade" hypotheses, which do not withstand proper scrutiny, but instead to point out some problems in the "reconstructed" boats associated with these viewpoints.)

Heyerdahl knew--correctly--that the ancient Egyptians constructed watercraft from reeds. Despite the lack of remains of reed watercraft from an archaeological context in Egypt, reliefs and models provide ample evidence. But the Ra II was an anachronistic chimera of nautical technology.

The Fourth Dynasty funerary barque of King Khufu (c. 2606-2584 BCE) inspired its arrangement of six enormous oars or paddles mounted forward of the mast: Heyerdahl fixed them in place as leeboards to improve sailing performance. Stepped aboard its reed hull was a bipod mast modeled most closely after images from the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2513-2374 BCE), though it persisted into the Sixth Dynasty (c. 2374-2191 BCE) as the pole mast eclipsed it. The style of the steering gear--a pair of quarter rudders supported by stanchions and a beam--appear in scenes and models no earlier than the Sixth Dynasty (c. 2374-2191 BCE) and are more characteristic of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2061-1665 BCE) and later. The Ra II's free-footed sail was unknown in Egypt until around the time of Tutankhamun (c. 1355-1346 BCE)--and even then it wasn't high aspect (tall) like Ra II's, but low aspect (wide).

Heyerdahl and his associates (including yachtsman and artist Björn Landström, who, having just completed The Ships of the Pharaohs, should have known better) derived all of these details from images of obviously woodenboats. No images of identifiably or even reasonably suspect reed watercraft have rudders. If they have steering gear at all, it is a steering oar (or steering paddle), which, unlike the pharaonic rudder, is not supported by a stanchion. But of course, if Egyptian wooden hulls were part of the transatlantic equation, that would beg the question of why this technology had not also transferred to the wood-rich Americas along with pyramid building. So reed boats are more than a convenience for diffusionists of this sort: they are a necessity. The diffisionists must deny the utility of Egyptian wooden boat construction, never mind--or perhaps mind indeed!--that Egyptian hulls would not have survived such a crossing except by freak chance. Papyrus hulls require similar freak chances and the aid of modern adaptations.

So all right, this was almost 40 years ago. Why the fuss now?

The son of Ra II.

Called the Abora III, it was (note the past tense) the reed-hulled brainchild of Dominique Görlitz, who, like Heyerdahl, wanted to demonstrate the feasibility of transoceanic contact in antiquity. Attempting to explain the presence of New World commodities in ancient Old World contexts (such as traces of tobacco and cocaine purportedly found on ancient Egyptian mummies), Görlitz charted a course from New York to the Iberian Peninsula, via the Azores.

The Abora III differed somewhat from its predecessor. Its reed hull seemed more massive, its sail was squarer, and it employed 14 rectangular leeboards, a development unknown in ancient times. (Steering oars and/or rudders served this purpose; not inconceivably, oars or paddles could have been used as well.) And, unlike the Ra II, the Abora III failed to reach its destination before succumbing to the elements.

Yes, the Abora III is now very past tense, having fallen victim to a storm early this month some 550 miles (900km) short of the Azores. The crew survived, which is, of course, most important. But will Görlitz invest resources--human and financial--in an Abora IV, risking life and limb in another attempt to prove a fantasy?

Such undertakings are costly. How much more would we learn if these resources--including the undeniable intrepidness of people like Heyerdahl and Görlitz--could be directed toward the construction of credible "floating hypotheses," and sailing them in waters archaeologists know or reasonably suspect the Egyptians did ply?

My nautical colleague, Cheryl Ward of Florida State University, is involved in such an attempt for (if my memory does not fail me) a French TV documentary. To recreate the form of a vessel Hatshepsut dispatched down the Red Sea coast to the land of Punt, they are relying on the reliefs of this pharaoh's expedition and Prof. Ward's knowledge of pharaonic hull construction. Some of this evidence now comes from the pharaonic harbor at Mersa Gawasis. Here a team led by Kathryn Bard of Boston University and Rodolfo Fattovich of the University of Naples "l'Orientale" has uncovered ship timbers from not only the New Kingdom (c. 1569-1081 BCE) but also the Middle Kingdom, a period from which we have no known images of Egyptian seafaring vessels. My colleagues Claire Calcagno and Chiara Zazzaro have the enviable task of publishing these remains.

These projects will reveal answers about Egyptian nautical technology and, just as importantly, raise many more questions.

I write fiction, but when it comes to archaeological exploration and scholarship, I insist on facts, not fantasy.

On Thor Heyerdahl:
Kon Tiki Museum

On the end of the Abora III:
Spiegel Online

On the Abora III Project:
Abora III web site

My colleagues and their projects:
Cheryl Ward
Mersa/Wadi Gawasis 2005/2006 report
Mersa/Wadi Gawasis 2006/2007 report

COMMENTS? E-mail me.

Archives & Notes

I am a writer, editor, and consultant with graduate degrees in Egyptology and nautical archaeology. As you'll discover when you learn more about my fiction, Egyptology deeply informs the stories I write, and the use of ancient Egypt as a source of inspiration in modern times--whether for novelists, architects, decorative arists, poets, or philosophers--is a particular interest of mine.

Archives

Egyptomania
Mummymania
Egyptology
Nautical Archaeology (not yet!)
Writing
Photography (not yet!)
Everything Else (not yet!)