 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Hello, Han. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Pauline Schuchmachin, your host for Outside In. Mummies, pyramids and hieroglyphs will be the focus of our discussion today with my guest Professor Robert Litman, Chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Good afternoon, Robert. Good afternoon. Wonderful. So you are a claimed local Egyptologist and archaeologist. Yes, I think I'm the only one. That's good. I must therefore be the best in Hawaii. That's right. It's like me. I'm one of the few who lecture on Freemasonry, so I must be the best one at what I do. So, no. Now, you're with the University of Hawaii in the Department of Classics, where you teach several subjects. Yes, I teach Greek and Latin, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek and Roman mythology, anything to do with the ancient world. And also, you're a trustee, one of the trustees of the Archaeological Institute of America, which has a local branch here in Hawaii. Yes, I'm the president of the local branch, AIA Hawaii, and a former trustee of the National Archaeological Institute of America. We have a very active local branch, lots of lectures on archaeology, and we bring in the top archaeologists from all over the world to come and lecture here. And you usually hold a monthly event, is that right? Usually, during the winter, about once a month, once every other month. Okay, and if people who are watching this are interested in going to one of the events, how can they do that? The best way is just email me, litman, L-I-T-T-M-A-N, at hawaii.edu, and I'll put you on our mailing list. Okay, now, your main focus is the Near East, particularly Egypt, and there are too many Egyptian things in Hawaii. The only one I can think of, because I talk about Freemasonry as one of my subjects, apart from the Japanese subject, is we have the Masonic Temple, and it's got Egyptian motifs decorating the entrance, because Egyptian symbols were incorporated into some aspects of Freemasonic rituals, mainly on the continent, because Napoleon went to Egypt towards the latter half of the 18th century. So anything Egyptian was very fashionable at that time. So that's the only thing I can think of, apart from the Tel-Temai excavation, that you take your students to Egypt. Well, yes, I have an ongoing excavation. We bring a few students every year, but we've been working at this site since 2007, and it's actually an enormous site. It's a city about the size of UH campus, about 250 acres, and it was settled from about the 5th century BC to about the 5th century AD, and it has a particular mixture of Egyptian culture, of Greek culture, and Roman culture. So we excavate the mixture. We have Greek vases that have an Egyptian motif. Egyptian material has Greek motifs, and we're learning an enormous amount about life and the acculturation and the mixture of different cultures at this period. And why was this particular excavation site chosen by the University of Hawaii, or what was the relationship with the Egyptian government? Well, I chose the site. A colleague of mine had been working at the site to the north of this called Mendiz, which had been a capital at one point of Upper Egypt. And it was such an enormous site that the excavator there kept begging me to take over this site, because it was too much for him. So I reluctantly did it because it's a terrible task to run an excavation, and it's a very burdensome and enormous responsibility. Now I have the concession at this site, so I'm the only one allowed to excavate at it. And we maintain guards there, and we go back once or twice a year to run excavations. Where is it located along the Nile? It's about 90 miles northeast of Cairo, on the Mendizian branch of the Nile, near the city of Almanzura. Okay. And how many students come along with you every year? Well, usually we have about 30 to 35 people, and there are about 8 to 10 students, and then about 20 staff. And an excavation is not like the old days where all you needed was a spade and a notebook. You need someone to run your computers, someone to run your total station, your surveying equipment. You need a faunal expert. You need a ceramic expert. You need a metal expert. So it's really a combination of a lot of different people, a lot of different skills. And then we hire about 100 local workers at the site. My foreman and the sort of creme de la creme of the workers are from a village called Kluft in Upper Egypt. And these, the people of this village, were actually trained by the great Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie, in the 19th century. And I bring about four or five of them up to really direct the workers. And of course we've got the Petrie Museum in London attached to the University of London. And actually my foreman now, my rice, his grandfather worked for Howard Carter for the excavation of King Tut's tomb. So this village has a long, long tradition. That's fantastic. And like most archaeological sites, you're always going to find pottery shards and things of this nature. What do people find the most and what's been the most interesting find? Well, with pottery, pottery is the garbage, the detritus of ancient civilization. In an average six week session of excavating, we take out about two and a half tons of pottery. And because pottery was used for everything. It was used for lighting. It was used for burial. It was used for cooking. And pottery doesn't deteriorate. It's almost like plastic. You throw it away and it lasts. So at this site, we find a lot of small figurines of gods and goddesses. One of the interesting things we found two seasons ago was a nylometer, which is a well that's used to measure the nyl. Because Herodotus, the Greek historian, called the nyl the lifeblood of Egypt. And really the whole of Egypt is the Sahara Desert. And when the river floods, the silt is taken and spreads for miles off the river. And so the flooding of the Nile then was measured by this nylometer. And then they would base the taxation on how much, how good the flood was and how rich the harvest would be. And while the students are with you, do they have an opportunity to go to the other sites that are famous in Egypt? Because it'd be kind of a little bit silly if they went all the way there and they didn't get to go inside one of the pyramids. And so we work six days a week. And in the seventh day we travel. So for example, we take all the students and we make sure that they walk up the inside of Khufu's pyramid in Cairo, in Giza. People are no longer allowed to walk up on the outside of the pyramid since a couple of tourists fell to their death. Were they taking selfies or something? Probably, yes. But now you can walk up inside the pyramids and walk up hundreds of feet into the burial chamber in the center with this massive sarcophagus. We also go to Tannis, which was the site of Raiders of the Lost Ark. We take them to Alexandria. And if there's time, we take them down to the Valley of the Kings in Luxor. Oh, yes. Now I remember when I went to Egypt, it's one of the policies of the Egyptian government. We decide on the day which pyramid to open because it's a preventative measure against terrorism. So on the occasion I was there, we got to go inside the red pyramid, which is Sinefru's creation. It's near the Bent pyramid. Those are both under the Pharaoh Sinefru. So I imagine you mentioned there are about 120 of these. Well, we know about 120 pyramids. There are probably about a dozen that are worth that actually are standing and you can go into. There are actually three in Giza that you can go into. There are some smaller ones that you can't. And then there are a couple like Sinefru and the Red Pyramid, the Bent Pyramid that you can go into. But many of the other pyramids were just simply destroyed over time because the blocks are limestone blocks and everyone grabbed the blocks off to rebuild. So if you look during the Arab period in Egypt, they would take the blocks from different pyramids and take them into Cairo and Fustan and build up the city. I have to say of the ones we saw, we did the standard historical tour where we started in Cairo and ended up in Abu Simbel. But of the ones I saw, I think the most attractive one to me seemed to be Joseph's the Step Pyramid. I'm wondering if you have a favorite pyramid yourself? I really like Joseph's as well because I like the Bent Pyramid. The Bent Pyramid was an experiment because they were trying to figure out how to do the pyramids without them collapsing. The Bent Pyramid actually was an attempt to work out the mathematics of the stress and the engineering and it wasn't entirely successful. The pyramid started out is that they would put a trapezoid and then they put another trapezoid on top and another on top and really the Egyptians were enormously important in human history for developing our mathematics, particularly geometry because they developed geometry to figure out where your land was after the flooding of the Nile and if you knew a couple of points in the distance you could then triangulate and figure out where the land was and actually the first measurement of the circumnavigation of the size of the earth was done by a Greek in Egypt in the third century BC who calculated a little over 25,000 miles of the circumference of the earth. And the three main ones in Cairo, of course, the gigantic Birkes-Keops, Kefren and Mysorenes. And these, we're talking about the History Channel in a second which is highly amusing for us, but these are said to align with the belt in Orion's belt in the star constellation of Orion. So I'm wondering, because you're a professional in this area of Egyptology and archaeology, what your thoughts are on things like the ancient alien series in the History Channel? Do you just laugh at it or do you get angry by this? No, no, first I laugh at it and then I say the pyramids were built by aliens. Yes, they were. Not from space. Aliens from Nubia, aliens from Libya, slaves captured in the Middle East. Actually, it's really interesting. The pyramids were the, the Kufu's pyramid was the highest building on earth from the time it was built about 25 or 600 BC till the Eiffel Tower was built. And people saw it. There are several million blocks there of a couple of tons each. And they just couldn't imagine how humans could do that. But the Egyptians were very clever. They used ramps. They used pulleys. They may have used a type of sand ramp and then pulled the sand away to move the blocks. And I've even had one of my colleagues took about 20 people and wood and logs and showed how you can move a two-ton block with about 20 to 30 people. Okay, so aliens but not extraterrestrials. Exactly, yes. Okay, brilliant, Robert. We're just going to take a quick break and we'll be right back to discuss about the mummies. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I love music. So do it. Hello, everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. Join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha and welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. We are discussing Egyptology and Archaeology with Professor Robert Lickman. And we were just talking about the Tel Tamai excavation where you take the students from the U of H to do some digging, mostly for garbage, but hopefully you find some things now and then. And we haven't found any mummies there. We found skelts there. Mummies have been found, skelts remains. But part of the problem of mummies in our location is it's very wet. So by the time we get the bodies, usually there's nothing left but the skeleton. But we have found some very important skelts or remains there. Now, what's particularly interesting about you, Robert, is that you delve into a lot of ancient medicine as well. So this is one of besides the languages and the history and the civilization of the Near East, the regions of Egypt, Turkey, all this area, Hebrew and Greek history, ancient Egyptian civilization. Why do you have this interest in medicine? Well, I started out as a pre-med in school. I was from a family of physicians. Same as me, yes. I was expected to follow the course. And you didn't. I didn't. Like me. But I actually wrote one of the early articles I wrote was a joint with my father on the plague of Athens. He was a microbiologist and a MD, PhD, and we did some writing together. But I've always been fascinated by mummies and also what you can glean from mummies about health and disease in ancient Egypt. Let me just talk a little about why and how the practice of mummification arose. First, it's really dry in Egypt. So if you take a normal burial and you bury someone in the sand 5,000 years later, 6,000 years later, you still find the skin on the person. So the bodies are preserved. And what happened, and you find these earlier burials with grave goods, with bowls, with food. So what happened? Mummification became a part of Egyptian religion. So it was believed that if either your name, your image, or your body survived, you would then have immortality. So mummification then was an expensive process, and it started with the pharaohs and the nobles. Later on, in later Egyptian history, by the Roman period, by 100, 200 AD, it had spread to the general population. But in the early period, 3,000 to about 1,000 BC, it was just pharaohs and the nobility. And so it's almost as soon as everyone had a house, you got married, you have a house, then you got to start building your tomb because the tomb was called the Pair Nehech, your house of eternity. And also you would take things with you to eternity. So for example, in a typical noble tomb, you needed slaves to help you. So you would take these little statues, we call them shwabti, shwabti. You'd take about 400 of them with you, and you'd have one to serve you each day of the year, about 360, 365. Then you'd have the foreman and then the ones who directed it. If you look, for example, the grave goods of King Tut's tomb, you find you have his walking sticks, his shoes, his chariots, everything that he would need in the next life. So mummification then became very important. So the idea was that if you could take this natural desiccation and you can improve on it, the bodies would last indefinitely, which is in fact what they do. So what they did was they first removed the internal organs and they put them in four jars. And these are referred to as kanopik jars. Kanopik jars, kanops means dog in Greek. Kanopis, like the star constellation. Exactly. And the jackal Anubis was the god of taking you to the underworld, mummification. And you needed your internal organs for the next life. And the four internal organs that are typically removed are is the stomach, the small intestines, the lungs and the kidneys. Yes. Because the heart was kept intact because that was considered the seat of the soul. So usually the heart and the brain, sometimes it was removed and sometimes it wasn't. But it was usually discarded, it wasn't considered. It was drained out of the nasal cavity. Well, there are two ways. One through the nasal cavity and one through insertion in the back of the skull. Is there any indication that points to what the Egyptians thought the brain was for? They didn't really know. Did they really think it was just something useless? They pretty much so. I suppose they were on to something considering most people. But it's really interesting because one of the things that mummification and then to sort of segue into some of the medical aspects, one of the things that they learned from a mummification was cutting up bodies. So they learned an enormous amount about anatomy. Physiology. And then what happened when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 B.C. and then his general Ptolemy took over after Alexander's death and made himself Pharaoh of Egypt and imported tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Greeks. And what they did then was to create, he Ptolemy, his son Ptolemy II, created the Library of Alexandria. And when he created the Library of Alexandria, it wasn't just a library, it was a research institute. Which they've redone recently, beautifully. Yes, I was there for the opening. Oh, you're lucky. I think it was 2003. And one of the things that they did, and the Greeks had developed a great deal of knowledge about medicine through Hippocrates. They had taken the gods and the goddesses out of medicine. They looked at observation as causation. But they didn't do dissection. And then when Greek medicine came into contact with Egyptian medicine, it just, the quality and knowledge just exploded. So you had people like Herophilus in the 3rd century B.C. at the library who almost discovered the circulation of the heart. And it wasn't, you know, it was just 1800, 1500 years, 1600 years later that Vesalius actually did it. And Herophilus actually went to Ptolemy and said, I need some condemned prisoners to work on. So he gave him condemned prisoners. And then he doped them up with, knocked them out and then cut them open while they were still alive and looked at the movement of the heart and the lungs and really developed an enormous knowledge of anatomy. So from about the 3rd century B.C. to about the 5th century, 4th century A.D. Alexandria was the center of medicine and the understanding of medicine and most of our knowledge of anatomy, ophthalmology, gynecology, all developed in Egypt. So if you look what our modern medical practice and theory is, it really has its origins in Greek medicine but with, that bloomed under the influence of Egyptian medicine. That's interesting when you mention they used prisoners and their hearts because if the heart is considered the seat of the soul because Anubis, when you meet Anubis, he weighs your heart. He has kind of minions that weigh your heart against the feather to see if you are a moral person in the life that you led on Earth. But was there no respect for the prisoner? They thought they were dispensable, is that why? Yeah, well they were going to kill them anyway. Oh right, so you might as well make use of it. So you may as well make use of it. Can't do that now, can you? That's right, yes. Yeah, those are the good old days. What we've got is a hall of mummies. So it's always advisable when you go to the Cairo Museum, there's lots to see there like the exquisite Golden Mask of Tutankhamen is kept there. However, you have to pay an additional fee to go in something called the Tomb of Mummies or the Royal Hall of Mummies. And it's worth it. I think it's only about $20 more or something. And it really is worth it because what we're talking about, it brings it to life. Well these are the mummies of the Barrows of the New Kingdom. It's really an interesting story of what happened. Somewhere around 1000 BC, there were tomb robbers that were robbing the tombs of the pharaohs. We have actually an account from about 1000 BC of a trial of someone who was robbing the tombs. It was one of the guards. It's usually the guards that do it, the inside job. And this guard got caught and impaled. And then a bunch of the priests thought that these mummies of the pharaohs would get destroyed. So they took all the mummies of the great pharaohs, of Ramses, of Tutmos III, Tutmos I, II, and Chepsut. And they hid them in a priest's tomb. And they stayed there hidden behind a hidden wall until about the 1870s, when some tomb robbers were a group called the Rasul brothers, who were also guards at the pyramids, found them and started selling some of the treasures on the antiquities market. And then they got caught. And then, so the Egyptian, it was actually under the French, then, Maspero came and found all the mummies and then took them and they put them then in the, and then they built the Cairo Museum and put them in the Cairo Museum. So you have Ramses the Great, who was probably the greatest of the Egyptian pharaohs, lived to 90, had over 120 children, sons, built everywhere in Egypt, Abu Simbel. The colossal statue. The colossal statue at Karnak. And his mummy is there. And so you can see all these mummies. Now, just an aside, why they're called mummies, it's from a Persian word, mea, which means bitumen. Now, I started to say before about the natural process. It would dry out, but to enhance the natural process, they took out the intestines. They also covered, they used something called natron, from the Wadi Natron, which is a mixture of salt and baking soda. And they soaked the mummies in this. It was about a 40-day process. So when you really deal with mummy flesh, I've handled mummy flesh, it's like beef jerky. It's really, really hard. It's like leather. It's like dried leather now, the skin. And that's the combination of the natron and other purifications that they use on it. And humans weren't the only things that were mummified. They also have examples in the Chiromuseum of animals. Oh, yes. My favorite is a 32-foot crocodile. Yes, that's right. And by the way, crocodile mummies are very important, not just because they mummified them. Is it because of Sobek? Well, they had a god, Sobek. But one of the things that happened in the Ptolemaic period is that they needed to stuff the crocodile mummies to give them some substance, otherwise they'd just collapse because there's not much of a skeleton. So they took old papyri and stuffed it in the bellies of these crocodiles. So now we're still finding ancient papyri, sometimes with fragments of ancient Greek writers, stuffed in the bellies of crocodiles. Oh, right. Okay. Now, speaking of writing, you wanted to briefly, in just a couple of minutes we have left in the show, talk about the Rosetta Stone. So this has to do, this is very important for deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. Yes, this was discovered at the end of the 18th beginning of the 19th century by one of Napoleon's soldiers at Rosetta. And it's a decree written from about 196 B.C. in three languages, or scripts, Greek, hieratic, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. And we were able, the early decipherers were able to figure out the name of Ptolemy, which was in what was called a cartouche, see it in Greek, and then to start to figure out how Egyptian was written. Because Egyptian is idiographic, alphabetic, and syllabic. Yes, very complicated. So people, if they go to the British Museum, you can see the Rosetta Stone there. Yes, and the British have everything, don't they? Well, yes, they liberated it. Be careful, Robert. They stole it fair and square. The French stole it, the British stole it from the French. It's an inside job thing. It always takes one to catch one. Exactly. So, lovely speaking with you, Professor Litman. We encourage everybody to go to Egypt at some point in their life. This is the last show for Outside In for this year. However, I'll be back next year for more shows in Outside In every Wednesday at 2 p.m. Until then, safe travels and aloha!