I'm Going To Find the Lost Loot of KV 55 and Then Join King Tut's Death Cult

visiting a mummy in the Yale Peabody Museum, 2013

Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt by Chris Naunton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the kind of book that I would love to see a large-format, sumptuously illustrated and thoroughly annotated edition of. To be fair, there ARE some illustrations and some annotations, some maps and some diagrams, but in order to fully appreciate the information and process it I would have needed a lot, lot, LOT more. And maybe I’m just a dummy and this book is meant for experts who already know where the Valley of the King is compared to where the Theban necropolis is and where the Great Pyramids are in relation to all that, but I don’t think it is. The cover is too cute to be solely for experts!

Even having to look a lot of stuff up and just wonder about other stuff when I was too lazy to look it up, though, I did get a lot from the book. I thought it was interesting that all the regular folks who buried their loved ones in shallow graves at the edge of the desert were the ones who got it right, because the temperature and the lack of humidity naturally mummify corpses buried in that manner. It’s only because the royalty wanted to put themselves somewhere special that they had to go through all that work to do manually what the elements would have otherwise done for them perfectly well. Like, even in the ancient times people were showing off their wealth by making other people work harder!

At first, I also wanted to feel sorry for the long-ago deceased royalty. Having all that stuff/symbolic stuff around their corpses was super important to them, right, because then that’s the nice stuff they’d have around them in their afterlife? So imagine that you’ve done your nice burial and you have all your nice, sumptuous things around you and you’re having an absolutely awesome afterlife, but then all of a sudden your shit just starts disappearing, because back on earthside some grave robbers have discovered your tomb!

Tutankhamun, who in this book is hilariously described as the Benjamin Harrison of pharaohs, probably thought he had it MADE in the afterlife. For thousands of years the bigger, better pharaohs were just walking around naked, all their nice stuff having been stolen or excavated already, while he had ALL his nice stuff. Every single piece! I bet all the other pharaohs laughed their asses off when one day his chariot just disappeared--poof!--out from under him, followed by all his servants, and his cool clothes, and everything else that made the afterlife worth living.

And then he never got any of it back, because his stuff is in a museum and he’s back on display in his tomb!

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Honestly, it all made me kind of wonder if the entire concept of archaeology, excavating these people’s tombs that they deliberately had hidden on purpose, then removing all their nice stuff and displaying it in museums all over the place when their religious practice was to keep it all with their bodies, is actually unethical. I mean, wouldn’t respect for the religious beliefs of these fellow humans require that you NOT unearth and fish out and display all their stuff? How far back in time do you have to go before it’s definitely okay to put a full-on person’s corpse in a museum?

It reminds me of one of my other favorite excavations, Spiro Mounds, and how one of my pet peeves is that we can’t get a good exhibit going of most of the properly acquired stuff (we can still see the looted stuff, of course--there are goods looted from Ancient Native American mounds in the British Museum!) because they’re Native American grave goods and so need permission from the people who make up their descendants, but we don’t know who the descendants of the Spiro Mounds people are so there’s nobody to give permission so we can’t display it. What’s the ethical difference between people whose goods we’re not allowed to display and people whose goods we are? Coolness factor? The fact that one indigenous group was a genocided minority, maybe, and therefore we should be a lot more careful with them now since we were so careless with them previously?

Speaking of unethical acquisition... here's a mummy I visited in the British Museum in 2023!

Ethical or not, I’m super fascinated by the stories of tombs of Egyptian royalty that we know should be around somewhere, but that still have not been found. And Naunton keeps ending chapters by talking about how such and such a place and such and such another place were thought to be likely spots for excavation, but then the archaeologist died or lost their funding or spent the rest of their career working on something else and those spots never did get excavated. Dude, just buy me a plane ticket and book me a guide who speaks the language and *I’LL* go excavating for these lost tombs!

My favorite extracurricular deep dive comes from Naunton’s chapter on “The Missing Amarna Royals.” In it, Naunton tells the story of the excavation of KV 55, including this VERY “intriguing note:”

“The coffin found in KV 55 was lined with several sheets of gold foil, which had become detached from the badly decayed wooden case, and were subsequently kept in storage separately in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum. These subsequently disappeared, but resurfaced on the art market in the 1980s, and were then purchased by two German museums. Those sheets that were part of the original coffin base--by now perished--were restored to a plexiglass substitute, which was repatriated to Egypt in 2001, along with the fragments that had once been attached to the lid.”

First of all: what the HELL, Germany?!? I thought we’d all agreed that you needed to be on your best behavior until the end of time! How does your museums purchasing stolen antiquities accomplish that?

Anyway, I thought that was such a weird thing to have happened, and such a weirdly neutral way to have put it--like, what are you saying by *not* saying it, Naunton?--that obviously I had to dive deeper. And the deeper you dive, the more interesting and weirder KV 55 gets!

 As in, there were a LOT of shenanigans involving its excavation. A LOT of shenanigans, and a lot of those shenanigans were perpetrated by the archaeologist in charge, who should have known better. So I guess much of the mystery surrounding who KV 55 could be, because we still don’t know, is because the archaeologists did such a piss-poor job excavating that they lost and destroyed a lot of important evidence. And then someone(s) on the team stole a bunch of stuff and sold it and that ended up in all kinds of places, and then even stuff in the museum got stolen and sold and ended up in all kinds of places? If you’re looking for your next obsession, there are a LOT of KV 55 conspiracy theories to invest yourself in.

So that’s going to be my next conspiracy theory obsession, I guess. And when I get bored with that, I heard that King Tut might have had a death cult!

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I Read The Writing of the Gods Because I'm Secretary of the Rosetta Stone Fan Club

My 2023 adventure with the Rosetta Stone!

The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I mentally added this book to my TBR stack while standing in the British Museum gift shop two years ago, and it’s possible that I finally picked it up and dove in exactly two years to the day that I saw the Rosetta Stone in person.

I can’t believe that I waited so long, because it was such a wild and fun ride!

So first, of course, you have to decide if you’re rooting for Young or Champollion. Young is the brilliant child phenom whose mental gifts make him good at everything he sets his mind to, but who cannot seem to set his mind fully to anything. He studied, and then revolutionized, apparently every topic that interested him. He discovered, for instance, how the eyeball sees color, but then buried that information in a boring academic article and promptly moved on to a completely new topic, never following up or progressing it or even really bothering to market it. Some other dude sometime later who was interested in the same subject did a literature review and just happened upon the article in which Young had solved his research problem.

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So sure, Young did discover how to decode some pharaohs’ names in cartouches, but he moved on before he made another single connection. Hell, he didn’t even clock the connection that he’d literally already made--he thought that “reading” the hieroglyphs that way was just a gimmick they’d made up to enable them to transcribe Greek words!

And then you’ve got Champollion. Champollion was still bright, of course, but he wasn’t bright the way that Young was. Young’s brain could have powered the entirety of France if he’d just harnessed it correctly. Champollion, on the other hand, was dedicated. Devoted. This dude PERSEVERED. As a young man, he put his mind to hieroglyphs, and that’s where his mind stayed until the minute he died. The very minute, too, because he was still working on his dictionary on his deathbed. Champollion had a hunch that the Coptic language might not be simply an iteration of Egyptian, but an actual descendent of the Ancient Egyptian language, so he learned the absolute snot out of Coptic. He studied it SO hard and SO long, and this was back when there weren’t a ton of resources. Once upon a time, a visitor to the Vatican Library noted that someone had been marking up a book in Coptic with a pencil, making marginal notes and such. So they did some more digging and discovered that ALL their books in Coptic were similarly marked up! Come to find out that when Napoleon briefly conquered Italy he’d had the Vatican Library transferred to France for a time, and while it was there Champollion had sniffed out all the Coptic language books and read them, and nobody had noticed because nobody else was interested in Coptic.

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So. Are you rooting for the brilliant but flighty phenom or the dogged academic?

As for me, I’m a Champollion gal.

Dolnick’s description of this race is a really fun part of the book, because who doesn’t love niche drama, but my favorite part of the book is how he makes us understand what it actually is to read hieroglyphs. You’re obviously not going to go off from here and start reading tomb walls, but you do understand how to do it, and the idea of a pictorial language is just so neat.

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Okay, so you’ve got a hieroglyph, and let’s pretend it’s of a cat. The way hieroglyphs work is that yes, a picture of a cat could mean “cat.” OR it could mean a word that’s a homophone of “cat,” as in, “You’ve been out catting around.” OR it could mean a phoneme that’s part of the word for “cat,” like “C is for Cat,” which will then be followed by hieroglyphs that spell the rest of the word. This makes it a really hard language to learn, because you have to learn so many things that could be “cat,” but after you know the language, it’s a really easy language to read, because there are so many ways to read “cat!” It’s like how red means stop, and an octagon means stop, and “STOP” means stop. It took you longer to learn that each of those things meant stop than it would have to learn that just one thing meant stop, but now it’s so easy to know when you’re supposed to stop. And hieroglyphs will stack that meaning, too, by adding an additional hieroglyph that works as a determinative at the end of some words to specify an interpretation, like the silent “e” determinative that tells you the difference between “mop” and “mope.” You have to learn all those hieroglyphs and what they do to any given word, but then once you know them it’s much easier to read that word.

Everything that Dolnick explains is equally vivid. The Napoleonic Wars are fascinating under his pen, with Napoleon sneaking out of Egypt, the soldiers he left in the dust struggling to rebuild and maintain old forts, one of the workers finding a cool engraved stone in one of those forts, the general in charge falling in love with that engraved stone and sleeping with it under his bed, and that same general pitching an absolute fit at having to give it up to the British after their defeat because he considered it his own personal engraved stone, not France’s.

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The time of Ptolemy is equally fascinating. The rulers were Greek because of Alexander the Great--did y’all know that?!? I did not know that. The good part is that pharaohs stopped marrying their sisters for a while (but not forever!), but the bad part is that none of them even knew the Egyptian language, just Greek, which is why they eventually had to send out an engraved stone to tell the populace that they were nevertheless doing the proper Egyptian stuff even though they weren’t properly Egyptian… and they had to put the message in Greek, too, so they could read it.

What I really need to do next is find a good, accessible, super interesting overall history of Ancient Egypt, because the parts of the book that were a deep dive into the history of Ancient Egypt would have made a lot more sense if I’d gone into it understanding how far, for instance, Cleopatra actually was from proper Ancient Egypt: about 3000 years! That’s longer than Cleopatra to US!

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Also? Champollion wins.

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I Have Reached the Pinnacle of Summer Achievement, for Wilbear Wright is Mine

Oh, Happy Day, for I have achieved the dream that I have dreamed since March 14.

Wilbear Wright is MINE!

To earn Wilbear Wright, you have to visit at least eight sites on the Dayton Aviation Trail.

For me, Sites 1 and 2 were the Wright-Dunbar Interpretive Center and Paul Laurence Dunbar's house.

Site 3 was the graves of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

Sites 4 and 5 were the National Museum of the United States Air Force and the Aviation Hall of Fame.

Sites 6 and 7 were the Butler County Warbirds and the Wright "B" Flyer, Inc.

And Site 8 is Carillon Historical Park, home of an excellent museum about the Wright brothers, including an actual 1905 Wright Flyer in a display that was partly designed by Orville Wright himself!

Also this unrestored part of a 1905 Wright Flyer, which is actually outside the paid part of the park, so you can just go see it whenever you want:

I had to rely on my shitty cell phone camera because the flash on my Canon is even worse, but still, there's so much fascinating detail to see:

The fabric looks like a linen or a cotton--if there was proper signage that said, then I missed it--which is interesting, because the earliest glider that the Wright brothers tested at Kitty Hawk was sateen. Wilbur had to alter it on a local woman's hand-cranked treadle sewing machine because he wasn't able to find the lengths of wood on-site that he needed, and when the brothers were finished with that year's experiments they abandoned their glider, so that same woman scavenged the sateen to sew dresses for her two daughters. 

The stitching was certainly done by machine, probably another hand-operated treadle, and the stitches are VERY tidy--that's what sewing slowly will do for you!

We had come to the park specifically to see the Wright brothers stuff, so were a little baffled at first by the other historical displays. I don't know much about Ohio history other than the Mississippians and the Wright brothers, so we just sort of wandered into old buildings and absorbed random content.

This place had so many animatronics! Well, to my knowledge it actually has TWO animatronics, but two feels like a lot. One of them is this guy, and spoiler alert, yes, he IS related to Ichabod Crane, lol!

We wandered through this old wooden two-story building--

--while learning fun facts like the community's first jail was a literal pit in the ground. I would not want to await trial in a pit!

The buildings were moved to this site, though, so that boarded up well there isn't the pit, I don't think.

You know I have to snoop around every historical vegetable garden I see!

There was a whole building to display a CRAZY flood that the town had on Easter 1913, including this adorable old-timey Weather Channel report:

And there was another whole building full of Wright brothers merch!

The mock-up of the Wright Cycle Company and the print shop was a little weird, since you can see the real versions of both for free about a five-minute drive from here, but I never get tired of looking at these old-timey bicycles with cork hand grips:

Way back at the Wright "B" Flyer, Inc., we overheard a random guy trying to bait the docent into a "gotcha" moment by informing her that in Brazil, they lauded a Brazilian guy for having invented the airplane first. This museum had a whole wall for various pioneers of aviation, including their specific accomplishments, and I'm guessing that guy was talking about this dude:

To be fair, the wording on that display *does* sound a little defensive, so there might be more to the controversy than they're stating. Interesting!

I was genuinely surprised/impressed by how many cool artifacts Carillon Historical Park has scored. Check out some actual fragments of the Wright Flyer II!

AND they've got the camera, THE camera that took the historic photo of the first successful sustained flight:

This guy is my favorite brother. He used to get easily overstimulated and lash out at people, and SAME!

The Wright Flyer III has a terrific gallery all to itself, in which you can walk all the way around the plane and see it at a level that Orville Wright himself specified as the best level to see all the details:

As my older kid and I were standing at the barrier and discussing some detail or other--I will not be convinced that the Wright Flyers do not look backwards, but my kid refuses to agree--all of a sudden out of absolutely nowhere a man started speaking to me from just beside my other shoulder, where there had been literally nobody a second before, and I was so startled that I screamed. 

I turned to him and tried to apologize and tell him he'd just startled me because I hadn't known he was there, but he WOULD NOT STOP INTERRUPTING ME or acknowledge my apology and explanation and instead insisted on talking over me to tell me that if I stood up on the bench at the back of the gallery I could take a picture of the whole plane at once.

For Pete's sake, Dude! But also, he was correct, and I love my photo of the whole plane all at once:

Huzzah to probably our 300th image/recreation of a Wright Flyer at this point! We're earning those Wilbears!

Also, Wilbur Wright's favorite satchel that he apparently took everywhere. I'm obsessed and I want one just like it:

There was an excellent #womensupportingwomen moment in this gallery. My partner and I were sitting on a bench watching early footage of the design and construction of Carillon Park, and in the footage was a video of Orville Wright walking arm-in-arm with Edith Deeds, the wealthy woman who once saw a really cool carillon while she was on vacation and decided that Dayton, Ohio, needed a really cool carillon, too, and if she was going to the trouble to have a carillon built she might as well go to some more trouble and build a whole entire park about it.

ME: "Huh. I wonder when that video was taken?"
PARTNER: "In the early 1950s."

ME: "I thought Orville Wright died in 1948?"

And before my partner could even respond to that--and it would have been in a reasonable manner, because he's not a mansplainer!--a completely random woman looking at a display to our left said, "Orville Wright did die in 1948."

Thank you, Anonymous Woman! She was NOT going to settle for even the smallest chance that my man might double down or act like an ass in the face of my objective correctness. It's also super baller, because whenever I hear a man being vocally incorrect in a museum I just rant about it to my companions while they attempt to get me to rant a little more quietly. 

Should I be confronting more incorrect men?

Anyway, the timeline *is* kind of unclear, because in the Wright Flyer display they make a big deal about the fact that Orville Wright helped with the restoration of the plane for display and then they show him walking with the founder of the park through what looks like some kind of opening ceremony-type festival and THEN they tell you that the museum part of the park opened in 1950 but they kind of elide the fact that by 1950 both Orville Wright and Edith Deeds were dead.

Tangent, but check out this game that Orville Wright patented and sold. It looks bananas, and I want to see it in action. 

On our way out of the park we stopped at the gift shop to collect our very last Dayton Aviation Trail stamp, then have our stamps tallied, and finally receive our very own Wilbear Wright for each of us.

I LOVE HIM. He is ready for adventure, with his little aviation jacket and goggles, and he's the perfect size to pop in my backpack without taking up too much room, so from now on, I'm taking him with me on all my travels. 

Just me and my little old Wilbear, traveling the world and having adventures and counting every Wright Flyer recreation we see!

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P.P.S. I'm currently reading this excellent biography of the Wright brothers, so be prepared for a summer FULL of Wright brothers fun facts!

Five More Sites To Go Until I Win Wilbear Wright

Because it's not a road trip to pick the kids up from college if I'm not detouring to a different tourist site every 20 miles!

All the sites on the Dayton Aviation Trail have different and odd hours--seriously, I'm talking hours like "Wed-Thurs 9:30-4" or "Tues, Sat 10-12:30", for Pete's sake--so you will be unsurprised to learn that I literally sat down one day, looked up every site's open hours, and noted it on my official Dayton Aviation Trail brochure.

And that's how I learned that although the Woodland Cemetery and Arboretum's grounds are open during daylight hours, the office where the Dayton Aviation Trail stamp lives is only open during business hours on weekdays, so if I wanted my stamp from there--and I did!--then we needed to swing by on this road trip.

So we did!

The Wright family plot is lovely, and since it's in a typical American city you can park very near it and then just hop out of the car and walk over, making it the perfect quick stop when you're actually supposed to be going somewhere else that day, ahem.

I always like to see the mementos that people put on famous graves:

Can you see the broken shell there? This article says that there are visitors who particularly like to leave North Carolina shells on the Wright brothers' graves. 

Nearby, we found the grave of Paul Laurence Dunbar:

The poem chosen for his marker reads, in part, "Lay me down beneaf de willers in de grass." We had the big kid with us for this leg, so she obligingly leaned over Dunbar's marker so that he could, for a moment, lay down beneath at least one "willer."

And then back in the car we hopped, because college move-out appointments wait for neither poets nor pilots!

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