Bell professor of Egyptology Peter Der Manuelian has been teaching and researching at Harvard since 2010, when he became the University’s first full-time Egyptologist since 1942 (read more in our 2011 Portrait here). He also serves as the director of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (HMANE). For more than four decades, Manuelian’s work has focused on the pyramids of Giza, built in the third millennium B.C.E.
In addition to his archaeological research, Manuelian is deeply engaged in the digital humanities (read more in “A Queen’s Seat,” July-August 2016, and “The Humanities, Digitized,” May-June 2012), spearheading initiatives to make ancient Egyptian materials more accessible online. Notably, he has contributed significant work to the Giza Project.
In 2020, Manuelian and his lab team were engaged in efforts to reconstruct two coffins and one mummy case held at HMANE, dating to between 945–712 B.C.E. Although the global pandemic briefly derailed the project, the work is now back on track for publication. Readers can explore high-resolution three-dimensional models of the coffins of Pa-di-mut, Mut-iy-y, and Ankh-Khonsu here.
Manuelian contributed a Vita to Harvard Magazine in 2022 on George Reisner, A.B. 1889, Ph.D. 1893, Litt.D. 1939, one of Harvard’s first and most accomplished archaeologists.
What drew you to studying Egyptology?
“I often say that, as kids, everyone falls in love with ancient Egypt, and most people grow out of it, but I never did. There’s something about the monumentality, the longevity (our culture in this country has yet to make it to one millennium, let alone three or four!), the unique style of artistic representation, and the magnificent language that uses Egyptian hieroglyphs. Then there’s the process of archaeological discovery, of course…and finally, you can’t beat the weather over there.”
What’s one mystery from any period of Egyptian history, either solved or unsolved?
“In 1925, the HU-MFA Expedition discovered a hidden burial chamber nearly 100 feet underground, just east of the Great Pyramid at Giza. It seemed to belong to Queen Hetepheres, the mother of King Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid (about 2551–2528 B.C.E). It took more than a year for the excavators to remove and document the contents of the tomb, but when it was time to lift the lid of the beautiful stone sarcophagus, it turned out to be empty! What happened to the queen? The last word on this mysterious find has yet to be written.”
What’s the craziest or most interesting fact about ancient Egypt that most people don’t know?
“The theory that aliens built the Pyramids. It starts as a joke, but is actually quite insulting to the ancient—and modern—Egyptians, robbing them of credit, ingenuity, and pride (read more in our 2003 feature, “Who Built the Pyramids”). Secondly, many people are unaware that, beyond the three famous pyramids at Giza, there are something like seventy more elsewhere in the country, and even more than that further south in ancient Nubia, modern Sudan. And finally, the hieroglyphs: you look at images of birds, buildings, and people, and it’s easy to forget that you’re also seeing nouns, adjectives, and verbs. There’s a fully developed grammar to the language, and it changes over the centuries; after all, we don’t speak in Shakespearean English today.”
If you could recommend one aspect of the Egyptian lifestyle from any period of history to someone today (i.e., live a bit more like an Egyptian in this way), what would that be?
“Well, many of us have already picked up on this wisdom tip already, but: love of cats! Look under the chair or in the lap of the seated Egyptian’s figure painted on his tomb chapel wall and you may well find a cat enjoying his company.”
What’s the most beautiful work of art or architecture (in your opinion) from ancient Egyptian history?
“Oh, there’s so much to choose from. But one image has stuck with me since my youth is the seated couple shown on the tomb wall of a high official named Ramose, at Thebes (modern Luxor), around 1350 B.C.E. Something about this raised relief carving style, the faces, the elaborate wigs, the serene expressions, moved me. My high school required each graduating senior to carve a wood panel, to decorate the school’s hallways, and I tried to recreate this scene–with limited success, but it gave me an appreciation for ancient Egyptian craftsmanship.”
