Heritage Key talks to Dr John Gee on the Egyptological Colloquium 2009
Dr John Gee is the Assistant Research Professor of Egyptology at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Studies at Utah's Brigham Young University. He provided an emotive final speech at this year's Egyptological Colloquium, when he examined the Egyptian Book of the Dead as canon, effectively comparing it to contemporary liturgy like the Christian Bible. Yet despite its controversial subject matter, the lecture failed to illicit as incendiary response as Dr Gee may have hoped. Heritage Key caught up with the professor afterwards to talk about his own work, the colloquium as a whole and increasing interest in one of the ancient world's most stunning objects.
Heritage Key: First of all, are you not surprised there wasn't more of a reaction to your talk? It was quite an emotive issue.
John Gee: My speech was designed to provoke. And because people here are interested in the topic, they don't need as many reasons to study the text, whereas for many Egyptologists the Book of the Dead is not something they value, or take any time to study. And I think that at the end of two long days, the intensity had dropped and I noticed some people had to leave early to catch a train. I was hoping to get more of a reaction to this idea that the Book of the Dead takes a more central role in Egyptian culture and Egyptian religion. And I was hoping for some feedback, so I could refine my arguments or see what works and what doesn't. That's one of the reasons you present to a conference – and I've taken a little more of a provocative tact, to try to look at the issue of why do so many Egyptologists think this is something they can just gloss over.
HK: Are you surprised more Egyptologists don't see the Book of the Dead as a valid subject, when it seems such a central text?
JG: I think most non-Egyptologists that I've talked to, if you asked them to name what texts from Ancient Egypt they know, they'll probably come up with the Rosetta Stone and the Book of the Dead. And they're two texts that Egyptologists almost never read! And when I point that out to people who aren't experts in Egyptology, they're obviously surprised.
HK: The scope for research and interpretation seems huge; you'd think it was such an attractive proposition for scholars.
JG: Well, you can't entirely blame them. After all, Ancient Egypt covers more or less four thousand years of continually attested human history along the longest river in the world, the surrounding areas their culture contacted, and every facet of that civilization: the field is simply too wide for anyone to do all of it. So you might train as a generalist, and you may know there is this and that and whatever, but you might be interested in some particular speciality. And I have to constantly remind myself of that – they're not interested in the Book of the Dead, and I might not be interested in some other aspect of the civilization. But I'm grateful they're doing work in that area.
"If you ask most Egyptologists to name what ancient Egyptian texts they know, they'll probably come up with the Rosetta Stone and the Book of the Dead. And they're two texts that Egyptologists almost never read!"
HK: Do you think that the past few days have really pushed forward studies on the Book of the Dead?
JG: I think a lot of this research is simply ongoing, especially with the Totenbuch Project, where they're put out in about 14 years, at about the rate of two volumes a year. Then if you look at the people they've spurred on; the last time I looked the Swiss have put out two volumes; showing around eight. So they're busy putting out basic studies in the field. And what started out as a trickle twenty years ago is now coming along like a truck. These conferences provide an excellent opportunity to see what other people are doing, to draw attention to manuscripts. I think I've seen the manuscript at the Biblioteque Nationale before, but it was in a quick survey and I missed all of the unique details drawing attention to it. I'm able to wonder now, 'Have I seen anything like that before?' And when you look at individual manuscripts in the Book of the Dead files in Bonn, I had never seen anything like that before. And once you've been there and you've seen that then I can suddenly find other examples.
One of the nice things about seeing what other people are doing is that it tunes you to it in your own research, and allows you to see things there you may not have seen before, in documents you've been working with. I don't know how many times I've looked at (Papyrus) Ani but I'll never look at it the same way after seeing Richard Parkinson's talk. And nearly every presentation is like that. Sometimes it happens that you go to these conferences and you run into a paper that's a dud – I didn't see that here. Sometimes you run into an idea that which hadn't been thought out. Maybe my work will be invalidated, but I have been thinking about it a lot, and you can tell the other contributors have spent time studying and really thinking about the issues. And in many cases thinking about issues in ways that surprise us. Dr (Steven) Quirke's paper is a good example; looking at (the Book of the Dead) as an object and examining what happens when you have innovations. I hadn't thought about when Book of the Dead chapter 64, which is a chapter I used too, first appeared, but he had.
HK: So everyone's work blends in well together?
JG: It's interesting to see how in many cases you've been looking at certain chapters, and then find out someone else has been looking at them too, and so at this conference a number of the same lines appear, and the same chapters get mentioned over and over again. Many well known ones, but even minor ones like 137, are getting discussed in larger numbers over the last five years.
HK: So do you think that Book of the Dead studies are generally gathering pace quite dynamically?
JG: It's a small group that's gathering pace. Before I came here I surveyed my colleagues who live around me, and only one of them who had studied Egyptology had ever done a piece of coursework on the Book of the Dead – a clear example of how it has tended to be ignored.
HK: It always surprises me as someone who never formally studied Egyptology, because it seems like such a fantastically emotive text, and a beautiful object just to look at in itself.
JG: Then again, Egypt has an abundance of good artwork; I can see why some of my colleagues spend all of their time doing art. I don't, but they help me appreciate some of the things I see and I know the importance of looking at them. And that's one of the nice things about the conferences, that you can look at things through someone else's eyes to see if there's something of value they have to say.
HK: A lot of people have said it's very heartening to see so many young faces (Marcus Muller, Annik Wuthrich etc) among the speakers.
JG: I'm one of the old fogies around here, and I'm not all that old!
Images by Mark of Oz and Ann Wuyts.
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