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September 26 - November 16, 2018 |
AUDITORIUM THEATRE 2018-19
| 7
MARISSA STEVENS
People often ask me how I decided on Egyptology. And I
have no idea how to answer why I do what I do. I say banal
things like “I didn’t choose it; it chose me,” which really means
absolutely nothing.
When I am hanging out with other specialists of the ancient
world, we would never fathom asking each other such
a question. But when we step out into the larger world,
people look upon us as strange, and with good reason not
necessarily as freaks, but as people who have rejected the
normal world, who have chosen to leave modern existence
behind in favor of reading esoteric and broken papyri or piecing
together the fragments of temple relief.
Here is the extraordinary truth:
We Egyptologists are indeed interested in real life, but only
if it happened thousands of years ago. We are driven, for
reasons that we ourselves do not even understand, to go
back in time in any way that we can, puzzling out how ancient
people lived, fought, survived, and died; what drove the
ancient Egyptians, what they cared about; what they thought.
Only these investigations into their ancient drama can make
our existence in this modern world bearable, it seems.
And so I, some girl from Houston, Texas with no genetic
connection to Egypt or any part of the Middle East, am
best able to understand my place in the modern, crazy,
complicated, globalized, unequal world through the lens
of a strange and ancient place quite far away from my own
existence in time and space, an oasis in Northeast Africa, the
first regional state on the globe, the land of countless gods
fed and clothed in their dark temple sanctuaries every day,
the home of golden pharaohs and millions of peasants who
couldn’t even look their human god-king in the eye.
In [my upcoming book]
When Women Ruled the World
, I focus
on six Ancient Egyptian queens MerNeith, Neferusobek,
Sobeknofru, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Tawosret, and Cleopatra
and I ask why the Egyptians allowed women to take power
more regularly and systematically than anywhere else on earth.
I also look at what our human hostility towards female power is
all about. This is the most political book I have ever written and
the most scientifically grounded one, because I am reading a lot
of evolutionary psychology and cognitive biology differences
between males and females and trying to understand our
human reaction to power. I am looking for patterns as I try to
understand what makes these women similar.
In many ways this book is a tragedy, because the women who
are successful, such as Hatshepsut, are forgotten, erased,
removed. It’s very much about why women in Ancient Egypt
were allowed to take positions of power so regularly and
systematically, as opposed to anywhere else in the world. And
given that, does that mean that the Ancient Egyptians were
more liberal towards female power than the rest of the world?
Or is there something else going on? Where does it come from
and how does it work?
— Dr. Kara Cooney
Learn more from Dr. Kara Cooney at the Auditorium Theatre on September 26, 2018,
as part of the three-part
National Geographic Live
speaker series.