Walking Among Pharaohs

Pyramids with hidden burial chambers. Colossal royal statues and minuscule gold jewelry. Decorated tomb chapels, temples, settlements, fortresses, ceramics, furniture, stone vessels--and hieroglyphic inscriptions everywhere. This is the legacy of forty-three years of breathtakingly successful excavations at twenty-three different archaeological sites in Egypt and Sudan (ancient Nubia). George Reisner (1867-1942) discovered all this and more during a remarkable career that revolutionized archaeological method in both the Old World and the New. Leading the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition, Reisner put American--and particularly Boston--Egyptology on the world stage. His uniquely American success story unfolded despite British control of Egyptian politics, French control of Egyptian antiquities, and an Egyptian yearning for independence, all while his Egyptian teams achieved the fieldwork results and mastered the arts of recording and documentation. Reisner's lifespan covers the birth of modern archaeology; aspects of colonialism, racism, and nationalism; the history of Harvard and of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA); and the issues of repatriation and cultural patrimony long before they became the “hot topics” they are today. This new biography gathers unpublished documents from all over the world to present the untold story of one of the founding fathers of excavation methodology and restore his place in the history of world archaeology, while not overlooking some of his cultural interpretations that we can easily reject today.