Overview: Romer's Egypt

The series was produced by Paul Watson; it is based on the book, Romer's Egypt, which was published in the US under the title People of the Nile: Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt. The book itself is fabulous; it gives much more background information and features Romer's own photographs. The series features the wonderful cinematography that is typical of Romer's documentaries, and some very quirky music. Here we see Romer in his thinner days, and when he had much more of the curly hair of his youth. Many peculiar and intriguing things take place in this series, but they are all educational in intent. Throughout, Romer and Watson take pains to show similar locales or events happening in modern Egypt � not just to demonstrate the continuity of life there, but also to give the viewer a better idea of how it happened in the real life of the past.

All the links on this page will open in new windows, so that you won't have to reload this page. Quotes directly from Romer, which I find either very informative or funny (!), are in bolded and quoted text. Parenthetical references are usually mine. The bolded headers except for the "Introductions" and "Outros" are the program's divisions, each dealing with a different era, location, time, and topic.

First Program: Romer's Egypt, 5000-2215 BC

Introduction: Scenes of Egypt, in real life and print

Recitation of Shelley's poem, Ozymandias, and the prints of David Roberts R.A. (1796-1864). Romer walks through the same locations as the prints show.

Ramesseum, Thebes: Versions of ancient Egypt. Romer scrambles over the Ramesseum while lecturing. The imperialistic view of ancient Egypt and Ramesses II (Ozymandias). Ramesses and how his reputation has fared over the years, from romanticism, to good honest patriotic imperialism, to totalitarianism, up to when Lord Kenneth Clark called him a megalomaniac. We know nothing of the personalities of the ancient kings — they had no personality cult going on at all. Romer's work with American, British, and German archaeologists has shown him that each nationality projects their world view into their subject and gives us three completely different ancient worlds.

"I once worked with a bloke who once excavated on the Mount of Olives outside Jerusalem. He said, 'We were working on a cemetery of the first century, mainly crucified people, it was fascinating.' I said, 'Oh, yeah? You must've learned a lot about crucifixion, eh?' 'Yeah,' he said, 'funny thing . . . . We found a coffin, and on the lid it said "Jesus bar Joseph" — Jesus son of Joseph.' 'Good lord, that must've been interesting,' I said; 'Did you publish it?' 'No,' he said, 'we found hundreds and hundreds of graves, we just gave a general description of the site.' I said, 'But you couldn't have found that many of Jesus bar Joseph — I mean, blimey, it could've been the Jesus!' And he looked at me and said, 'Naw, it couldn't have been the Jesus, he went to Heaven.'"

In this series, Romer is going "plum-picking" — looking at places for which he has a particular passion. Egyptologists are often drawn to places that fulfill their interpretations — and their prejudices.

The Egyptian Dawn: 5000 BC — The Spiritual Beginnings: Abydos

Abydos is one of the most sacred places in all of Egypt, where the spirits of the ancient dead gathered one night a year. The dead come through the crack at the end of the valley like the roaring of the wind. One can't really photograph it; it's like grabbing hold of spirits. It may seem to be better seen in books, but one must go there to see it and feel it. The ancient Egyptians always picked a special landscape; always picked a special place.

The Egyptian desert — will preserve almost anything, but one can't grow much in it. The ancient people came to the desert to bury their dead and quarry stone; they lived down by the river. Romer takes what looks like a perilous ride in a small wooden boat over some Nile rapids. Herodotus called Egypt the gift of the Nile; very true. The river is the soul of the country — created the land, the people, and the gods. Egyptian ideas about the creation of their world. All of them started with water — the primaeval waters of chaos. A mound of earth arose from the waters, like the land did from the yearly inundation; this was the stage for all the creation dramas. Each temple has a sacred lake beside it; the Egyptians multiplied and magnified their sacred sites all the time. Each lake was thought to be the original lake of creation, and each temple was the first building on earth.

Pre-Dynastic Period, 5000-3050 BC — The First Communities: Nagada

"Stories of the ancient Egyptians coming from the primaeval waters of chaos might have been okay in the old days, but archaeologists want something more concrete — they want to see the hole from which the rabbit came. And these are some of the holes!" (referring to the excavated holes of the graves at Nagada)

The Neolithic cemetery at Nagada which was excavated by William Matthew Flinders Petrie in 1895. Romer collects some ceramic fragments, including part of a wavy-handled pot and a black-topped red pot, and discusses them. The village of Nagada, between the cemetery and the river, has existed since ancient times; it grew and prospered until it became one of the first towns in Egyptian prehistory. The people changed from mobile tribes to settled communities of people. A larger village meant that people began to specialize their occupations, creating the class system and the foundation of Egyptian society. This section is fun to watch, although difficult to concentrate on; the scenes of the modern-day village of Nagada are fascinating — including watching a girl and her father herding goats into a pen, a woman cracking up a dried corn husk to feed a fire, and a pregnant woman taking water out for a donkey — and I always forget to listen to what Romer is saying at the time!

This doesn't explain how Pharaonic Egypt came into being with such magnificence and vigor. Petrie was looking for the answer in the cemetery. He thought that Egypt had been invaded by Mesopotamians, who brought their ruling culture with them. Petrie's idea was an imperialist notion for an imperialist age, and it is not one we subscribe to today.

Archaic Egypt, 3050-2700 BC — The State Invented: Sakkara

Individual towns were unified by conquest by the pharaohs. The Egyptians invented the idea of the state. The first capital in the world was at Memphis. Regionalism is a great curse to central government. Pharaohs solved this by making themselves the sole representative between the people and the gods. They also took over many of the gods' qualities; they became associated with the growing crops, the flooding river, the stars, and the sun going over every day. The king's tomb marked the spot where the sun set.

Funerary temples at Abydos, II Dyn. Their form was influenced by the royal residences — portable rectangular buildings with niches down the sides. The building had to have a distinctive style; it was a terrifying image of power for people who lived in little mud huts. The pharaoh was the element that bound the nation together; he was the lens that focused the attention of the gods on the land. The king was Egypt.

Djoser's Funerary Complex at Sakkara. The serdab with Djoser's statue inside and the step pyramid where he was buried. "Djoser's burial chamber was excavated by two English chaps. They found the royal foot and took it back to London. It was in a museum; unfortunately, it was hit by a bomb, and good King Djoser became a victim of the Second World War!" All societies fashion their images of death out of the landscapes they inhabit. The Egyptians had the desert, the river, and lying between them their fields and the riverside reeds. Death is a journey from the cultivation/river, through the reeds, and into the preserving desert. The reed-shaped columns at Djoser's complex, representing the pillars of reeds in the palaces and storehouses in Memphis, signify this same transition.

The earliest tombs were mastaba-shaped and built on the western bluff at Memphis, where they could be seen from across the river — dominating the horizon during sunset. By Djoser's time, the horizon was full of tombs. So Djoser's architects (including the famous Imhotep) designed a way for his tomb to be seen from further away, by stacking another and another mastaba on top of the original. This was how they developed the pyramid.

The Old Kingdom, 2700-2215 BC — The Pyramid Builders: Giza

The plateau of Giza as cosmic architecture. From about 2600 BC, the whole Egyptian nation struggled with the earth here for 100 years, imposing their order on the land. They were a celebration of Egypt's nationhood. "Old Cecil B. DeMille's whips and Victor Mature in chains could never have made anything so fine, so charged. This work takes great conviction, effort, and organization. As they built their monuments, so they proved their nation."

Romer climbs Khufu's Pyramid (with some difficulty)! "Here we are then, the biggest razor blade sharpener in the world! Well, that's what the pyramidiots say. They've taken all the power and mystery of the place and shrunk it down, so that now it helps you do all sorts of things — it helps you grow carrots, it straightens your sex life out, does all sorts of things. Even sharpens razor blades!" It may look rough, but it is incredibly accurately cut. Blocks were taken from the nearby quarries; the priests who served the pharaoh took over the opened spots in the quarries and used them for their tombs. "I do most of my archaeology in holes in the ground, and now I know why!" The pyramids were not built just as some security device; Romer thinks that they stem from a sense of agoraphobia for the royal dead — the body was bound up, put in a coffin, and jammed into a sarcophagus. "If we could lift the lid off of this, you could see what I meant." Visits the interior of another tomb and tries on a sarcophagus for size. Referring to a sarcophagus with its lid intact: "I think that would be a bit difficult to raise . . . . Blimey, I think it fits! That's a bad sign." Later, on the exterior of the pyramid: "Actually, the entrance is down at the bottom. They all are, in the same place on every pyramid. So they wouldn't be much good for keeping robbers out, would they?" Nut, the goddess of the night sky, was painted on the underside of the sarcophagus lid; the pharaoh would lie there in union with her, and would recreate himself — a very complicated idea.

Inside the pyramid, the sarcophagus was dragged down the hall past the three granite portcullises that were a ritual form of protection for the king. The oldest religious book in the world is carved on the walls of the chamber. It was vital to establish the pharaoh as a king in heaven so that the power of the other world could be taken back into the land of Egypt. The king is the people's representative in the next world. That's what pyramid-building is all about.

Exterior of the pyramid, near the top. Look at the spaces between the pyramids, and you'll see that they are going up to the sky and the sky is coming down to meet them. Creates a unity of god and man, and a covenant between the state and the gods of the state. Khufu's Pyramid is the largest stone building in the world; it is called Khufu's Pyramid, the Pyramid at the Place of Sunrise and Sunset.

Outro: Romer and an anonymous man walking through the darkness with lanterns.

Second Program: Romer's Egypt, 2700-1070 BC

Introduction

The ancient Egyptians have deliberately left us with a cool image of themselves. Every once in a while we get a peek behind the mask of state, as in the story of Djadja-em-ankh and Sneferu. They were concerned with the control of an eternal state, where all had their place. These controlling dictates can also show us a very human face. Recitation of some of the wisdom texts of this period ("A man whose belly is empty is an accuser"; "Follow your heart as long as you may live, and do no more than is asked for"), while looking at the interior of the funeral chapel of Mereruka (VI Dyn., 2400 BC), the prime minister and brother-in-law of the king.

The Old Kingdom, 2700-2215 BC — The Age of Assurance: Sakkara

All the Egyptians depended on their relationship to the pharaoh for continuing power in the next world. When the artists kept their eyes fresh and their delight in the world, they were the best animal artists of all time. The tomb scenes may seem to be very formal and organized; but they still show something of everyday life. Mereruka would have established a foundation of priests to give him offerings after his death. "This is your absolutely standard Mark-One Ancient Egyptian Survival Kit . . . a thousand bread, a thousand beer, a thousand oxen, a thousand geese, and these signs at the bottom are thousands of special clothes that you would wear." Although the priests are gone, Mereruka is still receiving nourishment from the scenes in his tomb.

The interdependence of ancient society echoed the climate and landscape of the country. Life revolved around the agricultural year. Egypt was divided into a series of administrative complexes (nomes) that were controlled by the king and his nobles. One of the few systems in the world that used God to gather the taxes! The peasants had their taxes taken from them in food.

The Nile River was much higher before the construction of the Aswan Dam in the 1960s. On July 15, the ancient New Year's Day, the Egyptians watched the height of the rising river during the annual flood. They measured the height using nilometers. If the flood was too low, it meant drought, starvation, and no seed for the next year's planting. If it was too high, the dams around the towns were burst, there would be great destruction, and the crops would come in late — an equal disaster. "So you see that the order and regularity that is so typical of so many things from the Egyptian civilization isn't really the result of some boring old conservatism; but it's the knowledge that the odd is a disaster, that the typical, normal, average flood is what keeps Egypt prosperous and healthy."

The nobles and kings had trouble, because the people were dependent on them to produce the annual flood which they wanted. They had no control over the droughts that occurred at the end of the Old Kingdom. Recitation of some much later texts which reflect the chaos of this period.

First Intermediate Period, 2250-2040 BC — A Period of Chaos: Mo'Alla

Here one can see the knife-edge between the Nile and the desert. Droughts effected the king's power. The pyramids at Abusir are smaller and less precisely made. But the kings still had specialized gangs of masons, who went throughout the country to get the many types of hard stone which the kings used to make their monuments. Romer shows us the cartouche of Sahura and talks about the sculptors' techniques in working on the stone.

The collapse occurred around 2100 BC, from a combination of the bad Nile floods and the local barons who became so powerful that they started to take over the country. More recitations from the chaotic period texts. ("The high-born are full of lamentation and the low-born are full of joy. Every man saith, 'Let us drive out the powerful from our midst.' Every man saith, 'The storehouse is bare; we know not what hath happened throughout the land.' The man goeth to plow with the shield, plague stalketh through the land, and blood is everywhere.") "And that of course was completely true. The hinge had busted, Egypt was flapping around." There was no more central government, no monuments being created, and no law or order in the country. Some pockets were well-governed by barons, but the great age of pyramid-building was gone.

Ankhtifi's tomb chapel at Mo'Alla. A modern-day stick fight represents a stylized form of the combats that happened between Egyptian cities in the Intermediate Periods. Ankhtifi and his Valiant Band fought for order in his nome, and even distributed wheat to the starving. Ankhtifi's tomb chapel doesn't have a straight line in the place; it was decorated with more energy and enthusiasm than skill. That's what this period was like.

Romer goes to a post office in the middle of an ancient Egyptian cemetery. Besides mailing a chintzy postcard for Christmas to his mother, he discusses the invasion of Egypt by the Hyksos that happened around 1700 BC. The Hyksos, ill-educated Asiatic sheepfarmers, ruled Egypt for about 200 years. The modern and ancient invasion of Egypt by foreign religions and ideas; the Hyksos brought with them a new style of chariot, a new sword and shield, and a water irrigation system, which is what Egypt really needed. Later, the Egyptians took the tools with which they had been conquered and sent the Hyksos packing. But the invasion had filled the Egyptians with a great insecurity; they had never been invaded before, and the Nile Valley was shut off and quiet. Romer muses that perhaps most empires start from insecurity. The Egyptian empire was the greatest one that the world had seen up to that time. It's rather difficult to watch this scene; Romer has a fly on his face, and he doesn't adequately get rid of it. Quite a distraction!

New Kingdom, 1570-1070 BC — The Age of Empire: Deir el-Bahari

What did this empire mean to the ordinary Egyptian? We don't know, but the empire increased the size and opulence of the court. This gives us more personalities and, therefore, intrigues. Competition erupted between Queen Hatshepsut (ca. 1490-1463 BC) and Pharaoh Tuthmosis III (ca. 1490-1436 BC). Hatshepsut built her beautiful temple at Deir el-Bahari, while Tuthmosis waited for her to get off the throne and leave him in charge of the country. Tuthmosis cut her name out of the wall inscriptions of her temple (thereby "killing" part of her spirit); Romer briefly describes the ball that modern-day archaeologists have made of this complicated story.

While Hatshepsut built her temple, Tuthmosis's cronies went up the hill to an empty tomb to drink beer, talk, and think about things. Romer uses the "empties" to talk about how the Egyptians brewed beer. He states that they drew pictures on the walls, but an editing cut is made here — obviously something "dirty" was cut for the TV showing. The Egyptians could express their sexual feelings in a beautiful manner; curators and scholars have hidden the evidence of this in back storerooms. ("The sycamore slipped the letter into the hand of the maiden, the daughter of the chief gardener, and made her run to her lover. 'Come pass the afternoon in merriment and sit in my shadow . . . .'")

Sexuality and maternity join in Egyptian ideas of death. The mother-goddess of the pharaoh as a tree; she nurses him with her celestial milk, and a coffin made of her wood encloses his body in his womb-like tomb.

The Tomb of Tuthmosis III, Valley of the Kings. The geometry here is perfect; it is like a papyrus roll. The walls are decorated with the Amduat, That Which Is In the Other World — a guidebook for the king after his death. The Egyptian artists did more than just paint the underworld, they actually created the underworld. (The paintings are done in a minimalist "stick figure" technique that is truly amazing to see.) Romer details what happens as the dead king goes throught the night to be reborn at dawn. The journey through the underworld is a process about splitting up the personality of the dead person, and describing how these parts would be between death and rebirth. The Egyptians were ordering their understanding of the universe and making a point. "You know, the ancient Egyptians weren't as daft as to think that if they didn't make magic books that the sun wouldn't come up in the morning. They were a very intelligent people. But they thought that if it happened outside of the scheme which they put on it, that it would have no point. And if you ask any religious person what their life would be without religion, they would say just that — that it would have no point."

The dead king's power was fused out, focused, from part of his temple down in Thebes. The false door was one of the oldest elements of Egyptian religion. Although Tuthmosis's temple has long gone to dust, the false door from the back of the temple survives; Romer compares it to the Concorde — you make something for a purpose and you make it well, and it turns out to be beautiful, too.

Outro: The pottery workshop of Umm el Ga'ab.

Third Program: Romer's Egypt, 1570-30 BC

New Kingdom, 1570-1070 BC — The Age of Empire: Medinet Habu

The Window of the Royal Appearance at Medinet Habu — a copy of an Assyrian castle in the heart of Egypt. The Egyptian empire covered Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and beyond. The country was ruled from a series of administrative complexes; nation became more cosmopolitan. The glory of this new empire is shown on the complex's walls. The scenes in the reliefs are repetitive and highly ambiguous. "After all, history is only myth — stories trying to make sense of reality." Medinet Habu was a temple, the offices of administration, storehouses, horse stables, and a nilometer all in one. In the center of the complex stands a temple made of stone dedicated to Ramesses III and Amun-Re. On the temple's front, Ramesses recorded his battles: "and boy, was he a fighter!" After Egypt's earlier conquests, the country found itself in the position of having to protect its borders. Invaders were coming down from the north, bringing their families along; they meant to stay. (The Egyptians called them the Peleset; the Canaanites knew them as the Philistines.) His battles pushed Egypt's enemies back so well that the country was free of foreign influence for nearly 1,000 years.

While the empire continued on, the pharaohs were mortal; they were buried in this period in the Valley of the Kings, in chambers at the end of long corridors cut into the western mountains. The real substance of ancient Egyptian life was comprised by generations of people living normal family lives. These more humble folk made the tombs of the kings.

Deir el-Medina, the village where this special gang of artists and craftsmen lived for about 500 years, starting around 1500 BC. Paths run from the village to the valley. They were experts on death rituals and paraphenalia. Did a roaring trade with the people at Thebes who needed funerary goods, too.

The villagers' cemetery was very close to the village, so the dead were somewhat mixed with the living; there is some rare evidence of ancestor worship here. In ancient times, the cemetery was gardened; the villagers grew trees and flowers there. For the funeral, they dragged the sarcophagus up the ramp, took out the coffin, and stood it upright in front of the tomb chapel — some shaped like small pyramids. The rituals took place here, like the Opening of the Mouth ceremony; they had to reanimate the dead person and everything going into the tomb with them. The coffin was put back in the sarcophagus, then the sarcophagus was lowered into the tombs via shafts dug down into the burial vaults. Romer acts the part while scenes from the Tomb of Ramose (the funeral procession and the mourners) are shown, accompanied by some appropriately creepy music. "(As they took the coffin) the women would grab hold of it and scream and shout in a genuine expression of grief, because at the end of the day the ancient Egyptians didn't like the idea of dying any more than anyone else."

The Tomb of Sennedjem, Deir el-Medina. The villagers put what they wanted in their tombs; but it's important to remember that they were the best funerary artists in Egypt. They also created their paints and building materials from scratch. Religious scenes on the walls of Sennedjem's tomb — complicated by virtue of the mystery behind them. Sennedjem standing before his god. "There is one thing over here that is quite a lot of gas . . . ." The coffin of Sennedjem being attended to by the god Anubis. Finds of Anubis masks — people would dress up and play the part of the god during the funeral. End wall scenes of the villagers' idea of heaven — agricultural fields with bands of water running all around. Not surprising for someone who lived his whole life in the desert.

We know so much about the everyday life of the villagers because of a special skill that they had: most families had someone in it who could write. They left thousands of documents, written on bits of pot, stone, etc. Writing makes people different; they become moralistic, a bit pompous, thinkers.

This is a rare chance to see the lives of ordinary ancient people. Most sites like Deir el-Medina don't attract the attentions of Egyptologists. Here you may walk down the high street, where the houses are packed together like in modern villages, and pry into the lives of the ancient people. It was a bourgeois artists' community, mostly literate. Lawsuits, murder, adultery — it all happened here. Across the Nile was a market, which still meets in the same place and on the same day of the week as it has for thousands of years. There were no fixed prices for things; it was what you needed that day, and what you had spare that day. This barter system only works if your society is caring and if no one wishes to become rich. In the East there is a lack of envy; envy is, of course, what fuels the West. In ancient times, this system of ideal socialism spread and worked.

The features of the village houses. Front door and sill, shrine room with statuettes of the gods, behind it a family room with a bench for eating and sleeping, and in the center of the family room was a fine palm column. Families were smaller than the extended families we are accustomed to seeing in Africa today; in ancient times, it was Dad, Mom, and the kids, and perhaps an aged relative or two — plus servants. All the front rooms in the village have a shrine in the corner; these people as they lived and breathed were religious. Worshipped both the major gods and the "second grade" of gods, who gave such immediate comfort to people.

Village houses continued. "This is your Hampstead-bourgeois color-supplement kitchen, 3,000 years ago." Walls made of stone chunks, covered with mud (for a stucco-like appearance). "Primitive Kenwoods" — stone mortars used for pounding up wheat, to make bread. Egyptians ate bread a lot, and mixed many things with it — milk, fat, all sorts of things. Smaller mortars used to grind up spices, like dates. Large water jars; water was a precious commodity and was brought to the village daily. Cold, dark cellars run under the houses — very necessary for the storage of food, since the villagers grew nothing themselves. Egyptians were wine snobs like us; they had favorite areas from which the grapes came and favorite vintners like we do today. As far as food and drink go, the ancient Egyptians did as well as we do.

Stairs led up to the roof, where the family could store their things and sleep in the summertime. The valley where Deir el-Medina is located is bowl-shaped, and a real sun trap. Romer's home, in the Davis House in the Valley of the Kings, can get up to 140° or 150°. Mud brick is actually a very good insulator; in the wintertime, the house would heat up a bit during the day and the family would go into one of the interior rooms for a good night's sleep. One of the interesting and appalling things about these houses is that they are all so much alike, much like the trendy middle-class estates that are popping up everywhere.

There was one gateway to the village, and this was locked tight at night. The gate was guarded by Nubians brought in especially for the job. On approaching or leaving the village, one could have a drink from the large water jars that were next to the gate. A similar convenience at a modern village is shown.

"But life here wasn't all beer and skittles." The villagers were at the mercy of the national government; sometimes there were problems. Around 1100 BC, the Nile began to get lower and lower; in Turkey, iron was refined and there was an international price explosion. Once when the food supplies were late in coming, the tombmakers went on strike. Later they held strikes that were not about food, when scandalous things had happened. There was a tone of moral outrage in their protests; this is the birth of political morality.

The Granite Quarries at Aswan — an ancient Egyptian industrial wasteland. For thousands of years, this is where they came to get stone for their monuments. Pounded the rock with granite stones — " . . . and you can see when I hit it that it makes this awful dust; hard on the hands, awful for the complexion!" — then carved the fine details with soft copper chisels. The Unfinished Obelisk was being made for a Theban temple. It would have been the largest freestanding block of stone in the world — 1,100 tons, and 140 feet tall. It developed a crack while still in the quarry and was left there. It is a monument to the dedication and confidence of the ancient people. "It's this confidence, this extraordinarily assured aesthetic command that stamps Egyptian public art. No one today can make such effortlessly beautiful figurative sculpture on such an enormous scale."

Ptolemaic Period, 323-30 BC — The Last Rites: Kom Ombo

More prints of David Roberts, accompanied by the theme from Ben Hur, by Miklos Rosza. The Ptolemaic temple at Kom Ombo as the schoolboy's vision of ancient Egypt — something that fell off the set of Ben Hur. Not surprising, since the set designers for the movie used designs from temples like this for their ideas.

The Ptolemies were Macedonian Greeks, descendants from a general of Alexander the Great. They ruled Egypt for about 300 years; the country was prosperous, but it was a hard life for the native Egyptians — they were often rebelling. The Ptolemies sent in armies to smash the country up, destroying many temples. But they also built hundreds of new temples, and their staffs saw that these temples were complete records of the ancient Egyptian religion of the area. They guarded the old way of doing things.

The Ptolemaic artisans put new life into column capitals, and did the same for wall reliefs. The figures are now more elaborate and three-dimensional than before. It owes much to Greek sculpture; joy of life and sensuality that was not there before. Ancient Egyptians were rather shy, actually. Romer feels up a female wall relief sculpture!

Ptolemies were foreign pharaohs who joined Egypt onto the Mediterranean world for the first time. Egypt inevitably fell under the control of Rome — first as the private estate of the emperor Augustus, who ordered the killing of the last Ptolemy, and then under the rule of the Christian Roman Empire of Constantinople.

Last Ptolemy murdered — 30 BC.

Recitation of Cavafy's The god forsakes Antony.

Christianity came to Egypt with St. Mark shortly after Christ's death. It was persecuted until it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, ca. 390 AD. This is about the same time the last hieroglyphic inscriptions were carved. There were some points of similarity between the old Egyptian religion and the new Christian one. Isis and Hathor were identified with the Virgin Mary in the early period; but the new religion was basically hostile to the old Egyptian beliefs. The story of the Serapeum in Alexandria; the Christian mob went in not to obliterate the statues, but to kill the spirits inside them. They were still in terror of the power of the ancient gods.

We've covered 6,000 years — 300 generations of people. Romer back home in the Valley of the Kings, where he will keep photographing and conserving the tombs. Perhaps he will find more, like Herihor. Finding things in Egypt isn't difficult; they're everywhere. It's finding things that give you knowledge that's important. Romer's search for tombs will give him a picture of the whole sequence of royal tombs, and that will tell him many things about how the ancient architects felt and thought.

"There's something even more important than finding things, and that should be a great worry to archaeologists; and that is what the hell happens to it when it's dug up! People come and they see a plaster wall; they think, 'Eh, plaster wall. . . ." They don't realize that just one tap — poof! — it's gone. Some of it you can just wipe off with your finger. Some of the walls are like gossamer. We've really got to look after them and keep them. They're more important than scholars, these monuments — much, much more important than the people who come to study them. Because they are the past — that's all we have. We need the monuments more than we need the scholars. The scholars can only give us interpretations of the monuments. If you've got the monuments, you've got the milestones."

Outro: General views around Egypt.

Visitors: