Betsy Bryan is a professor in the Near Eastern Studies Department as well as an Egyptologist. She is currently leading an excavation of the Precinct of Mut in Karnak, at Luxor in Upper Egypt. The News-Letter spoke with her about her achievements and experiences in the Egyptian realm.
News-Letter: What about the Near Eastern Studies Program at Hopkins initially interested you?
Betsy Bryan: Well, Hopkins is an unusual place because it has this feature of having had a full-fledged program in Near Eastern Studies since its founding. So it's really a remarkably great place to be if you're interested in Egyptology the way I am. You have a great library and a really great, small department - and we get really good students.
NL: Where were you working prior to Hopkins?
BB: I worked in a tomb on the other side of the [Nile] River, and also in Thebes, and we worked there from 1993 until 2001. But I've always done most of my fieldwork in the Luxor region, and I came to Hopkins in 1986, so working in the tomb was the first time doing fieldwork I could take students to.
NL: When you return to Egypt this May, what will you work on?
BB: It's really quite an interesting project: We're trying to do preservation and restoration of walls that have been crumbling. In Egypt, there's a problem with the ground water level, which has risen, and it tends to disintegrate the stone of these temples.
So we decided to save what's left of these temples, but in order to do it, you have to take the walls apart and rebuild them. When you do that, what you find is that the walls of the existing temple, which were built 2,700 years ago, were made from beautifully decorated walls that belonged to an earlier form of the temple that was 700 years older. So what we have done is removed all of the described earlier blocks from the building to be carefully consolidated, photographed and even drawn, and now have been put into an outdoor museum display. As we were doing that, we found that a whole other building existed and had been buried as a foundation. So this year, we will start rebuilding that temple.
NL: What was your first excavation like?
BB: Let's see, I was a graduate student, and about 25 years old the first time I went to Egypt. I worked very near here, near Karnak actually at the Temple of King Akhnaten, who was sort of famous for being a heretic, so I've been very lucky.
NL: Do you remember what the first artifact you found was?
BB: [Pauses] I really don't, because most of the time what we find is not very sexy at all. Little carved pieces of stone that you don't know what it is, and tons and tons of pottery. The only thing I really did find was the head of a colossal statue. It was in terrible condition and lots of them had been buried, but one hadn't been found in a long time.
NL: In one of your books, you mention that as a European and Asian History major at UVA, one of your professors had a large impact on your future in Egyptology.
BB: [Laughs] Yes, well to start off, when the Egyptians made statues, they would often times show these statues of people striding, and I remember what bugged me was that I could never figure out what they were holding, and it drove my crazy. So I was in a freshman class and I asked the professor what are they holding, and the teacher didn't know, and I never knew for a long time until I went to graduate school to study Egyptology and found an article that had been written exactly that year, wasn't written until 1972 or something, that the guy was able to show that they were holding pieces of cloth. It was a very stupid little thing, but still something you get fixated on.
NL: Why Egypt and not another ancient civilization?
BB: That's a funny one. I can't really tell you why Egypt, because I got hooked when I was 10 years old. I think most people who study ancient Egypt really got interested when they were children, when everybody loves mummies and that sort of thing.
I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and we had a small, but a really good Egyptian collection at the Virginia Museum and I used to really love to just go there and hang out and look at the stuff. And that's all I ever really wanted to do. I wanted to be able to read Egyptian hieroglyphs.
NL: So this has really been a lifelong passion.
BB: The funny part is that I love it as much now, if not more, than when I was a kid. I think also, now, I talk to undergrads and I think they're always bewildered at the fact that for me, the Egyptians are just real people. We think of them as being so bizarre, spending all this money on burials and coffins, but for me I just see them like they are anybody else. I think that's why I love it so much.
NL: It's like a humanization of these mythic people.
BB: Exactly, and Egyptians were weird in the sense that their small expressions of themselves were very different from the way we would express ourselves, but ultimately, they were always worrying about where their next meal would come from and whether their child would be healthy and looking for love and just like you and me [laughs].
NL: Did you experience any changes in the field after 9/11?
BB: I would say that 9/11 had very little impact on my work in Egypt. I worked there the January following 9/11 and the Egyptian people were woefully sad about what had happened at the World Trade Center. Unfortunately, the war on Iraq completely flipped that to the other side. I've never had people ever be rude or insulting to me in Egypt, but I will say strangers have been way less friendly in the years of the Iraq war.
NL: Is there any concern of American sites being taken by Egyptians as a result of the current conflicts?
BB: Not at the moment; there's no question that the Egyptian Antiquity Service is very properly moving to train more and more Egyptians to do the excavating to take care of monuments. Down the road, one can expect to see more of the work to be taken over. I think they're trying to limit the amount of excavating that goes on, because frankly its work they don't have to do and money they don't have to spend.
NL: For those who don't know, what exactly do the festivals of drunkenness entail?
BB: In the Temple of Nut, they would have a gathering in the courtyard of the Temple in the evening, and it would have been men and women, not necessarily priests there, but members of the local population, probably reasonably wealthy or well heeled. Then there would have been some musicians and kiosks with huge jars of beer. And frankly the idea was to drink as much as possible, very little eating, just drinking for hours, and at a certain point before midnight most everybody would have passed out from the consumption of alcohol. The beer was most likely laced with other things like water lily, which would induce sleep. Then after everyone is passed out, the musicians would come back and make a huge amount of noise with drums and flutes and wake everyone up deliberately and at that moment, they believed, there would be an epiphany where they would experience a true communication with the goddess Mut. And the priests would bring the statue of the goddess into the courtyard and the people would speak directly, as a community to the goddess and ask for usually something like good health for pharaoh, a high Nile with good crops, but done in a formal way, that at the time of this joining, they would be guaranteed she would listen. So it was regarded as a direct communication between people and the gods.
NL: There are still some unanswered questions about the festivals. We still don't understand why they only occurred under Hatshepsut's reign. Is that something you are looking to answer in your upcoming expedition?
BB: Well, it's very curious why the festivals were taken down and that's really my point of departure on the subject. Records show that Egyptians were celebrating the festival during the reign of Hatshepsut and then they stopped. And my main interest is why they would do that.
There are a lot of good reasons from a religious point of view, and it's really a scholarly aspect, but it has to do with who the goddess is in the temple. Goddess Mut is kind of scary, and is associated with the ending of mankind. However, she is also married off to the god Amon-Re, and hence loses that identification as that scary destructor for hundreds of years. Eventually it comes back again, which is why the festivals of drunkenness become popular in the Greco-Roman times.
So that's what I'm wondering: if the reason why the Egyptians stopped the festivals was because they wanted to clean up Mut's image as a housewife instead of her as the mean, nasty goddess that drinks too much ... I really and truly don't have answers at this point, it's still very much open.
NL: But there is no way you can really predict what you're going to find or where to find it?
BB: Not really, but we found this one beautiful statue once. She was 12 inches under the top soil, and on her nose. And you know, you find it and when you start to realize it's a statue - I refused to believe it was going to be intact, because I've found ton of stuff and its always totally broken - and it wasn't until they lifted it up form the soil that I said, "Oh there it is, it's so beautiful," It really is.
