I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the state of modern Egyptology, and specifically Dr. Zahi Hawass.
First off, you can’t have this conversation without acknowledging that the man is a legend. He effectively put Egyptology on the pop culture map for the last 30 years. We owe him for that, but I’m starting to wonder if that same protective instinct of his has morphed into something that’s actually hurting the field.
It kinda feels like we’ve reached a point where mainstream academia (led by people like him) is more concerned with defending their old textbooks than investigating new anomalies. We see it constantly with the Old Kingdom. We get told, “we don't know" or, “there is no evidence,” regarding things as massive as Sneferu’s lineage, yet there seems to be zero desire to investigate why.
I did a deep dive into this specific idea in a video I just put together, but I’m curious what this sub thinks. Do you think Zahi’s stubbornness is justified, or is his ego holding back the next generation of discovery?
by ThisIsFireAndStone
6 Comments
I mean, I kinda get it. If you spend your entire life working on ONE THING, and you’re pretty much considered the best at it, it becomes really hard to admit a mistake. Depending on what it is, it might feel like admitting that you’re wrong may nullify your life’s work
Both!
“Do I perhaps not see much effort on particular lines of inquiry because I’m an outsider looking in on a massively underfunded field and don’t know what is given priority or is discussed between professionals? No, it’s Academia who’s unwilling to take baseless speculation as evidence that’s the problem.”
> we don’t know who this guy’s father was. Oh well, you know, there weren’t any references to it. There weren’t any inscriptions. We didn’t find it. Did you not find it or did they not want you to find it? Do you think about that?
Is it so shocking that we often have limited evidence for what happened 4,500 years ago? There are entire buildings on the Giza plateau that we know existed but have only fragmentary remains of. You’re not going to have access to the full set of inscriptions from those, let alone entire cities in the floodplain that are either not preserved or buried entirely under sediment and modern settlements.
Specifically in the context of Khufu here, the valley temple, causeway, and pyramid temple associated with the Great Pyramid are all in a poor state of preservation. It’s not a “lazy excuse in 2026” to say that our picture of those buildings, where there might have been relevant inscriptions, is very limited. We can see clearly why evidence is lacking – there’s not much nuance in whether or not these buildings are preserved.
> We have extensive histories on far less significant things.
Not in any arbitrary context during the same period.
This is what Max Planck was talking about, unfortunately. We will need to wait for him not being around anymore and to a new generation to take the reins.
He had all of his schooling paid for by the Smithsonian and has been charged with selling and stealing artifacts from Egypt.