Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - November/December 2010 - (Page 6)

in my own words bringing back the dead KARA COONEY, PhD Dr. Kara Cooney has rummaged through storage attics at the Vatican by ﬂashlight. She has scoured the basement of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in search of a misplaced ancient coﬃn. As an Egyptologist, her work has taken her to many interesting places, including in front of the camera as host of Out Of Egypt, a comparative archaeology television series on the Discovery Channel. Here, she explains why her favorite place to go is deep into the past. time traveler When i was seven or eight, my mother brought home children’s books from the British museum in London. they were books about the ancient egyptians, the Vikings, medieval europe, and other ancient civilizations. i loved these books. they had pictures of an egyptian house with a pond and the servants and all these little details of ancient life. When you read these books at that age, you don’t think you can actually study this as a profession. i suppose i just never outgrew my interest in it. as i went through school, history was always my favorite subject. i wanted to access it as much as possible. so i read historical novels and watched historical films on tV. When i liked something, it was generally old and dead. i don’t know why. i just always wanted to go back in time. Assistant Professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture, UCLA the languages of the Past i was an exchange student in germany for an entire year when i was 16 years old, so i learned german before i knew it was a requirement for my field. Unfortunately, egyptology is still a colonial discipline, which means that while modern-day egyptians study ancient egypt, most of the scholarly work is being done by europeans and americans, and most of the research is published in german, french, and english. Very little is published in arabic. an egyptologist needs to be able to read german and french, and that’s all before hieroglyphics, which is a whole other complication in itself. An obsession with death egypt is often known as the culture that is obsessed with death. some egyptologists say that ancient egyptians weren’t obsessed with death, but with life and continuing life. But i don’t think they thought the afterlife was going to be just like this life. they knew it was going to be cold and lonely and far from one’s family and that they would have different things to face. in contrast to us americans, who utterly ignore death and pretend it doesn’t exist, the ancient egyptians were aggressive and systematic in the way that they faced death and the hereafter. that’s one reason that i think people today are so interested in ancient egypt. When they go to an exhibition on King tut or mummies or coffins or things like that, they want to come closer to death than their modern culture allows them to. Children especially will go into a museum where there’s a mummy, and they’ll mash their faces up against the glass trying to get as close to that dead body as they possibly can because they’ve probably never seen one. even if one of their relatives died, they probably wouldn’t be allowed 6 imagine nov/dec 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - November/December 2010

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - November/December 2010
Contents
Big Questions
In My Own Words
Inside the Ropes
Get Your Hands Dirty!
The Bone Reader
The Science of Archaeology
A Window to the Past
History and Archaeology in the News
National History Day
Dig This!
Selected Opportunities & Resources
Taking the Leap
Off the Shelf
Word Wise
Exploring Career Options
One Step Ahead
Planning Ahead for College
Students Review
Mark Your Calendar
Knossos Games

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - November/December 2010