I
admit that I am having the best time during this pandemic. To have been offered
an up-close, ongoing, series of lectures by knowledgeable people, the
professionals, the top in their fields, and all the other people world-wide who
share my love in the study of Egyptology. To spend my Sunday nights, and some
Wednesday mornings, with others who are as interested in such diverse aspects
of Egyptology. I am very content and want these talks to never end.
I will start by saying that I was ‘today days old’ when I realized that Ken Griffin was NOT sitting in the main room of The Egypt Centre. In my mind, every session, Ken turns a key in the door, opening it, casting a small stream of light into the darkness, walking across the floor, footsteps echoing, and floor boards creaking in familiar ways—carrying a candle (just go with me here) to set up in the corner of a room, perched at a desk, with the presence of all these wonderful, silent, witnesses to history, and time, lurking up behind him (fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Ken's backdrop to the Zoom lectures in the House of Life gallery |
I am not a scholar nor have any formal training or knowledge of the study of
Egyptology. I am just a fan. A grownup whose imagination was first fired up, at
the age of 2 in 1971, when my Grandmother returned from a church group trip to
The Holy Land. My fingers discovering the bullet hole in her suitcase, covered
by a sticker to avoid my parents knowing about it, and the way her voice and
eyes lit up as she told me what she had seen. A photo of her sitting on a camel
remains and, now, a second photo taken 30 years later of my parents all those
years later on their own trip (fig. 2). I realize the camels are not the same.
Granted, while attitudes of camels are likely the same. My Grandmother’s
telling of going into a tomb, underground, the air, the dust disturbed by her
feet walking down the hallway. The colours, the coolness, the silence that
seemed filled with whispered echoes, and her wonder—her awe and delight to see
history and visit the past.
Fig. 2: Grandmother wanted the camel handler in photo and made sure to get his name. They wandered off from the group together, the three of them. Circa 1970s. |
As a school child I was part of a noisy, inattentive, sugared-up, gaggle of
children wandering around, shouting and laughing, echoing through the vast
rooms of the Egyptian Gallery, in the late 1970s, of The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM).
The child who ‘tends to dawdle and wander off from the group’* who peppered our
museum guide with endless questions and bursts of excitement [Ken and Sam
witness to this trait still present in me!]. Standing in front of the vast
carved wall of Hatshepsut’s “Expedition
to Punt” mural from her funerary temple, it overwhelmed me (fig. 3). To learn
that Canadians had gone and helped to discover such history and bring this
knowledge to my very doorstep. We were told of the Canadian pride in the care,
respect, co-operation with Egyptians and people from across the world who
worked to learn, restore, catalogue, and preserve such a vast body of
knowledge. In fact, I may have wandered off and ended up in the back workrooms,
empty corridors, where items were studied, cared for, recorded and stored, away
from the general population. And, I may be the reason that these doors are now
locked, with alarms, and signs forbidding such exploration. I was ultimately
discovered at the elbow of someone carefully working on the conservation of a
gold gilded panel. Almost sharing her magnifying glass and blocking her focused
clear light. Peppering her with questions. Sternly returned through the hands
of a student assistant, then administrative person to the sole museum security
guard who lead me back to my waiting class, bundled in coats, waiting so that
‘everyone’ was gathered up to return home.
Fig. 3: Inspiration from the Punt Expedition casts in the ROM |
Summarizing this knowledge are three books presented at the beginning of
lecture 2 of this series, Who’s Who at
Deir el-Medina, Village Life in Ancient Egypt: Laundry Lists and
Love Songs, and The Workmen at Thebes in the
Ramesside Period focused my attention to realize that my love of
Egypt is resoundingly based on the Everyday Person (fig. 4). Imagining myself living
their lives, using their tools, seeing the ruins in various stages of
ruination. To have been part of their creation, to have accepted their presence
as ‘part of life’. To take the awesome and consider it the mundane.
Fig. 4: Three highly recommended books |
For me, Egypt has always been the hand-sized tool of unknown use that have been
held by human hands over millennium. I think of the people who worked and lived
everyday lives. I resonate with them. I imagine holding rocks, wood, metal,
brushes, linens, as these far-off, long dead, people once did. My hand just like
their hand. Long fingers, or short stubby ones, hands soft or roughened by
worked, calloused and mis-shaped. Hands just like mine. Touch. The one sense
that all humans experience.
While the golden pieces are phenomenal, fashioned, memorializing, artifacts from hands of people who lived so long ago. Those preciously created, preserved and secreted away are wonderful, the stores of items tucked away, hidden from sight, to mark the wealth, status, celebration of life, that were shown to the very few. But speak of a desired life, a dream.
The people of Deir el- Medina lived lives and gave of themselves to create such objects, images, records of thoughts and ideas—for and about people who were primarily untouchable, unseen, and frequently unknown to them. To know that they have names, the people who crafted in this town or oversaw the work. I first wonder if the names we brazenly sound out Sennedjem, Paneb, and Ken, were they used everyday or for formal occasions—what names were called across the tomb’s interior as surrounded by coworkers who then walked home together (fig. 5). Day following day, season by season, year by year, and generation to generation.
Fig. 5: Painting from the tomb of Pashedu (TT 3) |
Over the years of work, a father who would bring their child into the
progressing tomb to point out their first season as a craftsman, places that
they remember creating jokes and the stories accumulated on the walls, records
of the lives being lived at those times, all the people who lived, contributed,
and now remain as memories affixed to the walls and items created. Not only the
stories and meanings attached to the murals and statues or objects, but the
stories behind those familiar and prescribed words and ideas. The place along
the wall that marks when a father met a woman who would become the child’s
mother, stories of relatives who all worked in that same room. Decades and
years after their voices rang out resonating off the walls. The words and
experiences of the people that were painted, carved, crafted into place as the
underlying real story of Egypt (fig. 6). A whole collective community, living and
working together to create a monument to last forever. Each brushstroke, paint,
cloth, or hand belonging to someone who lived. Then and there.
Fig. 6: Sennedjem and Iyneferti in the Fields of Reeds |
Then thousands of years later a story being told, the experience of those
rooms, paintings, statues, and walkways being seen and experienced again by my
Grandmother who came home to tell me not only the stories of the tombs, the
artistry, the history, the experiences she had but, too, that she was coming
back and telling me—the same way a father told his child—of their experience of
creation and being surrounded by objects that had existed for so long. Those
images as alive today to me as they were to everyone who worked, visited,
explored, and then view them up to this day. A rare experience of time travel!
*Actual Report Card quote
*Actual Report Card quote
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