| Rozhovor | interview | интервью
took part in an international mission whose aim was to save historic monuments in the area of Nubia. I suppose you mean the historic monuments that would have been flooded when the Aswan Dam was built? Yes. The Aswan Dam flooded many extremely valuable locations, including a site where two temples built by Ramesses II stood in Abu Simbel. In the end, the temples were taken apart and relocated sixty metres higher up as a result of an international rescue operation. At the time, our expedition was exploring the coast south of Aswan. Thousands of rock paintings and writings documenting the different eras of the Ancient Egyptian civilisation from prehistory through to the Middle Ages were discovered there. Today’s doyens of world Egyptology, Professor Miroslav Verner and Jaromír Málek, took part in those expeditions as students. To what extent is archaeology an adventure as opposed to being a science, a study field and a struggle to find financial funding for its pursuit? Most people come to archaeology through a romantic idea of what the field is like. Real archaeology, however, is mainly about very hard work. The difference with Egyptian archaeology is that the archaeologist must be a philologist at the same time. You can’t afford not to know languages, living ones as well as the dead ones. Languages are too closely linked to the study of the Ancient Egyptian civilisation. But hard work and never-ending study brings you back to the romantic aspect of the job. If you are lucky enough to make a significant discovery, it is not the end but the beginning of a new adventure, a road to new discoveries and theories – about history but also about the present day and the future. The idea of archaeology as a field that looks forward into the future is quite unusual... I like to compare it to astronomy. In astronomy, scientists also study the faraway universe that has long ceased to exist and attempt to draw conclusions from their findings about what lies in store for us. The work of an archaeologist is very similar. An archaeologist studies civilisations that ceased to exist long ago and thus contemplates the future of our own civilisation. Unlike astronomers you have the advantage that you can access the places of your discoveries. Good examples are your discovery last year of a complex of tombs in Abusir. What conclusions can be drawn from that find? Our theory is that these are the tombs of important Egyptian dignitaries, one of whom married the Egyptian Princess Sheretnebty. This occurred in the 24th century B.C. The kings back then were seeking a way to ensure 20
the loyalty of important dignitaries from influential families who were gradually becoming less and less dependent on the state and the ruler. One of the options was to form alliances through marriage. This was also common practice in medieval Europe. The find was important particularly because Princess Sheretnebty, the high official Nefer and the other functionaries buried here were hitherto unknown historical figures. The discovery is even more important in the context of Ancient Egyptian civilisation because the preservation of a person’s name was considered a prerequisite to ensuring an afterlife. Why does the Ancient Egyptian civilisation in particular fascinate you so much? Ancient Egypt has a unique position among ancient civilisations because Ancient Egyptians were particularly concerned about the afterlife. To ensure an afterlife, they were obliged to fulfil a number of tasks. One of the tasks was to build a tomb, ideally made of stone, because for them stone was a symbol of eternity. They built their tombs in the desert in order not to take up agricultural land. The desert environment happens to be ideal for preserving monuments. My fascination with Ancient Egypt is therefore mainly based on the fact that many sites and artefacts from that time have been preserved for us and can give us a relatively exact and detailed picture about the functioning of society back then. What’s more, this civilisation lasted for several thousand years, so a huge legacy of their intellectual and cultural capacity has been left behind. You only have to realise that Greek and Roman mathematicians studied in Egyptian temple schools. Has some of the culture or customs from Ancient Egypt been preserved in today’s Egypt? This can be felt more in the less industrial countryside in the regions further south. Various customs, myths and linguistic features from the Ancient Egyptian language survive there. The inhabitants of those areas also visually resemble Ancient Egyptians. If you had to convince sceptics about the usefulness of studying ruins that are 4500 years old, what would you tell them? It is essential to realise that even though today we have the internet and fast cars, our brains still work the same way. This is how our civilisations work. The mechanisms are almost identical across history. They come into existence, they achieve their zenith and then they decline. For us to be able to study these mechanisms we need social sciences. Without them, we would not have a tool enabling us to understand the world we live in. What are the causes of conflicts in today’s world? Religious differ▶