What was the first artefact or discovery that really stayed with you? When I first worked in Egypt properly, I joined an American excavation project at Abydos, a remote site about three hours north of Luxor. Abydos was one of the great pilgrimage sites of ancient Egypt and also an important royal cemetery. The main monument there is the extraordinary temple built by Seti I, one of the most beautiful surviving temples in Egypt.
In those days tourists could only spend a very short amount of time there because of security restrictions, but I got to live there in the desert for five weeks while working on the excavation. The project was excavating an ancient settlement, including houses and everyday objects, which is actually quite rare in Egypt because so few ancient towns survive.
My own job was mostly drawing pottery, which if I’m honest was fairly boring, but just being there was extraordinary. Interestingly, the day before I arrived the team had discovered what’s known as a magical birth brick. In ancient Egypt, women gave birth while positioned on decorated
mud bricks covered in protective
magical imagery linked to gods and goddesses. Very few survive, so finding one was incredibly exciting.
How did the broadcasting and writing side of your career happen? Honestly, I was just incredibly lucky. Before I even started my PhD, I applied for lots of jobs with no real expectation of getting any of them. One of those jobs was a fairly junior role at the Egypt Exploration Society, the UK’s main organisation connected to archaeological fieldwork in Egypt.
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The job itself wasn’t academic, but in Egyptology there are so few positions available that anything remotely connected to the field is valuable. I absolutely loved it. I was 22 years old and suddenly surrounded by Egyptologists, books, archives and even paintings by Howard Carter leaning against the walls.
Over time I started giving lectures, writing articles and joining
archaeological projects. Part of my role involved managing the library, and TV companies regularly visited to use it, so I often became the person they spoke to.
Then, about ten years later, the BBC were making a major
documentary and asked if I’d like to appear in it. At the time there was growing interest in using genuine experts rather than traditional presenters. Obviously the answer was yes.
I did a screen test, which thankfully went well enough that they asked me back. Once you appear on television once, other opportunities begin to follow. Publishers got in touch, more documentaries happened, and eventually I became Director of the Egypt Exploration Society.
More recently you’ve been involved with immersive exhibitions involving Tutankhamun and Cleopatra. Were those figures you’d always been interested in? Yes and no. - It might surprise people, but you can actually get all the way through a PhD in Egyptology without specialising in either Tutankhamun or Cleopatra. In academia there’s sometimes a tendency to avoid the most famous subjects because everyone already talks about them.
But television changes that, because broadcasters naturally focus on the biggest and most compelling stories. Tutankhamun and Cleopatra are famous for a reason, they’re simply fantastic stories.
By the time these exhibitions came along, I’d already researched both figures extensively through books and documentaries, particularly while exploring themes like lost tombs and royal history.
What was your contribution to the exhibitions? My involvement really began once the exhibitions came to the UK. The main curator is a Spanish Egyptologist called Nacho Ares, who I’ve known for many years, and I helped refine some of the interpretation and contextual material for UK audiences.
I think exhibitions like these are incredibly important. Egyptology survives because people remain interested in it, so we can’t afford to be complacent. Traditional lectures, books and museum displays will always matter, but we also need to embrace new technologies and new ways of storytelling. Why do you think Tutankhamun and Cleopatra continue to capture people’s imaginations more than anyone else from ancient Egypt?
Because they both have extraordinary stories that feel almost too dramatic to be real.
With Tutankhamun, you have this boy king who came to the
throne as a child, died as a teenager, and was buried with the most spectacular treasure ever discovered. Then there’s the gold death mask, one of the most recognisable images in the world, which gives us this incredibly human connection to someone who lived more than 3,000 years ago. Add in the mystery surrounding his death and the incredible discovery of his tomb, and it becomes an irresistible story.
Cleopatra fascinates people for completely different reasons. She was one of the most powerful women of the ancient world, a ruler who stood at the centre of the struggle between Egypt and Rome. Her relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony combine politics, romance and ambition in a way that still feels cinematic today. Then there’s the legendary ending — betrayal, war, tragedy and ultimately suicide, a story so dramatic Shakespeare turned it into one of his greatest plays.
What makes both of them so enduring is that these aren’t myths or fictional characters. They were real. We can still see their tombs, statues, jewellery and inscriptions. That combination of history, mystery, spectacle and real human drama is incredibly powerful, and it’s difficult to think of many stories from the ancient world that rival them.
TUTANKHAMUN: THE IMMERSIVE EXHIBITION The NEC Campus in Birmingham, 19 June - 13 September
tutankhamunexperience.com
LIVE24-SEVEN.COM
ENTERTAINMENT CHRIS NAUNTON
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