Tutankhamun – Page 2 – Christina Riggs

WARNING: PHOTOGRAPHS OF HUMAN REMAINS

Mary Beard is the best boss I’ve ever had. She was head of the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge when I worked there for a year. She welcomed me when I arrived, told people to read my then-new book (the first one, The Beautiful Burial in Roman Egypt), and let me get on with my job in the Museum of Classical Archaeology. Heaven.

So like any right-thinking person, I’ve been appalled by the vitriolic attacks made on her via Twitter the past week or two, after she expressed support for the way a BBC educational cartoon – yes, for children – showed a high-ranking Roman family in Britain that included a dark-skinned father and a literate mother. (Read about it in her own words here, plus lots of press coverage and some top-notch science journalism out there in response.) Both a Roman officer from Africa and a Roman woman who could read and write are unusual, but they are not unattested. Besides which, one aim was to show children today that there was diversity in the ancient world. To paint back in some of the people who have been painted out for a long time. Similar things have been done with educational material in the UK and US (maybe elsewhere, too) to ensure that ancient Egypt isn’t white-washed. Continue reading “Tutankhamun’s head” →

Photography and History

Photos in the marketplace

June 18, 2017December 31, 2022 Christina Riggs

I’m not the only photo historian who trawls online auction sites in the name of research, or who can’t pass up a box of old photographs or postcards at an antiques fair. I don’t buy things online very often (especially since discovering how right-wing the owner of one popular auction site is), but now and again, something seems too good to pass up.

This week, I bought a press photograph from 1924:

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The front bears the wax pencil marks for the printer to crop the photo to the left, showing just the face of Egypt’s King Fuad. Scrawled out on the right is the white-capped face of the country’s first elected prime minister, Sa’ad Zaghloul. On the back of the photo, a date stamp, more scrawls (‘Wed – City ed.’), and a suggested caption give us a more information about how the photograph was meant to be used:

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For about $23, including postage, I’m happy to have bought this piece of history – the history of Egypt, the history of Britain, and the history of the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb – even though Tutankhamun isn’t mentioned. Continue reading “Photos in the marketplace” →

Photography and History, The Tutankhamun Excavation, Writing

The machete stage

June 4, 2017December 31, 2022 Christina Riggs

I wrote to a colleague the other day, telling him that I was at the machete stage with the manuscript of my next book, Photographing Tutankhamun. He understood. It’s the stage where you go back through the manuscript you’ve been working on for (in my case) almost two years and realize that you’ve written too much, or put things in the wrong order, or come up with something that might sound nice, or be interesting, but that just doesn’t take your argument forward. So, the machete has to go through the jungle of words. In case there are any treasures among all the greenery I’ve cut back, I keep a file called ‘junked’ for each chapter (or article or story) that I’ve ever written, for as long as I can remember. But I confess, I rarely look at those files. They hang around on my laptop, probably a little relieved to be set free from my cutting and pasting, my deleting and ‘undo’-ing, or my staring at them until it’s time for a coffee break.

Sometimes I have to put the machete down for a day or two, when I reach an unexpected clearing in the manuscript: a place where I’ve failed to write the bit that is clearly needed for the sake of the argument, perhaps because I forgot what the argument was at that point, went for a coffee, and decided (ever the optimist) that it would sort it itself out while I got on with the rest of the chapter. Today was a day that mixed both: I had to take the machete to a few hundred words that trailed off into notes, leaving a big clearing where I could try out a different example and come at the problem from a different direction. A thousand words later, while the messy world went on around me, I think the new direction works. Continue reading “The machete stage” →

Photography and History, The Tutankhamun Excavation

Heat

February 10, 2017December 31, 2022 Christina Riggs

Let’s start with the photo below.‘Heat’ is everything in this image. Notice the short shadows: it was taken when the sun was near its zenith on May 14th, 1923. That day, from sunrise until 6 pm, dozens of Egyptian men moved 34 crates containing 89 boxes of objects that had been cleared out of the first room (the ‘antechamber’) of the tomb of Tutankhamun over the previous five months. The tomb lay more than five miles from the Nile, and the objects were due to sail down the river on an Egyptian government barge, destined for the antiquities museum in Ismailiya (now Tahrir) Square. There was only one way to get them there, and that was manpower. Continue reading “Heat” →