By Maurice Chammah
In one of the photographs presented by Christopher Naunton in his lecture at the British Council on Monday evening, clouds of dust hang over dozens of Egyptian laborers, digging in the brutal heat to excavate artifacts left behind by their ancestors thousands of years before.
Their bosses, of course, were not Egyptian, and much of what they dug up went to London and Oxford, home of the Egypt Exploration Society (EES), founded in 1882.
Much of the papyrus material went to Oxford, the statues to British and Egyptian museums, and few people know how or why they got there. The EES, Naunton explained, has been collecting, assessing, and organizing old letters, photographs and records that shed light on the history of how these objects moved around and ended up where they are and the circumstances surrounding their excavation.
Naunton, the deputy director of the EES is tall and lanky, with red hair and a short, fashionable beard, and he is excited about what we can learn from these materials.
We learn from one letter, for example, between an archaeologist and an official with the EES, how often excavations would proceed “hand to mouth,” continuing day by day and artifact by artifact “until they simply ran out of money.
“The more fabulous the objects, the more money the dig would attract,” Naunton told us, “So there was a pressure to produce beautiful artifacts and get them out of the country.”
The archives include original notebooks and excavation diaries from the numerous digs that took place in Egypt during this “golden age” of archaeology, in the early 20th century. In some cases, the EES has the only record of a given dig. The records also show that a specific object, a small statue, for example, moved from its excavation in Egypt to researchers in the UK and finally distribution to museums and collections around the world.
There are photographs of “iconic individuals” like Howard Carter, as well as pictures of the digs, which give a feel for how things were done with meager resources. In one photo, a man stands at the top of three ladders, tied hastily together, in order to reach a high wall in an ancient structure. He looks like at any moment he could fall and break an arm, or perhaps more.
“Obviously, health and safety wasn’t enforced,” Naunton joked.
Many researchers use the archives of the EES to figure out the story behind the objects they have, in one way or another, come to possess. “The single commonest research inquiry at the EES goes something like ‘I’ve got a box of objects’ and they want to know what the objects are and how they’ve moved around,” Naunton explained. “These are incredibly valuable in giving provenance to objects that have lost it.”
Naunton sees a large part of the EES’ work, both in its early days and now, to make the work of archaeologists accessible to a wide audience. “If archaeology is to become a mumbo-jumbo of esoteric mysteries,” wrote archaeologist J.D.S. Pendlebury in 1932, “then the sooner it stops the better.”
Naunton explained that the EES today, like Pendlebury years ago, believes that greater public awareness will bring in funds to support further work. In the 1930s, Pendlebury published pictures of his excavations in newspapers like the New York Times. Today, Naunton and the EES are digitizing old reels taken at excavations and uploading them to YouTube.
Naunton concluded with a short video, available on the EES’s YouTube channel, from the early 1930s, showing Egyptian workmen by the hundreds laboring in endless rows, their hammers swinging against the tough ground. In one video, 20 workmen crouch under a giant crate, nearly buckling under its weight as the two British overseers follow casually in their formalwear.
The film reels show just how much Egyptian labor went into bringing these artifacts to the light of day. Although much of the EES’ materials, lovingly amassed on their website, will be inaccessible to most Egyptians because they continue to be exclusively in English, it is likely that the videos and pictures will have a greater impact in the country from where they originally came.
Photo courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.
