Cognitive Labs

Today's archaeologists generally don't wear fedoras. However, that said Zahi Hawass, Supreme Director of Antiquities in Egypt and the usual frontman for Egyptological announcements, does wear one in media appearances.

A former U.C. Berkeley professor, Dr. Kent Weeks, has been known to wear one as well on those Discovery Channel specials, a little like Dr. Jones. At the end of the 80's, Weeks left Berkeley and went to Cairo full-time, making several notable discoveries, such as the tomb of Ramses' sons, heralded as the biggest discovery since Howard Carter, Lord Carnaveron and King Tut.

Weeks taught the upper division survey courses in the field, which were delivered in a classroom in the top levels of the insufferably hot and stuffy Wheeler Hall.

Hieroglyphics at that time was in Evans Hall, housing Math and CS. Generally those classes had a handful of people, at least half graduate students. There are only a few schools in the U.S. (or the world) that teach Egyptian, which generally requires fluency in German and French (at least reading knowledge) to master the codices and seminal interpretative works, generally written in those languages, plus you'll have to pick up some Arabic to get anywhere in Egypt. Now, with PC and Mac tools such as WinGlyph and MacScribe, it's easier to compose in Egyptian than ever before. There's also a new Linux-based open source hieroglyph project.

Some of the models for other characters of Raiders of the Lost Ark, include Dr. Kurt Sethe and Dr. Adolf Erman - Egyptologists in Berlin. Sethe was the editor of the all-important Urkunden des Ægyptischen Altertums. Sethe was the translator and the world's leading expert on the mystical and somewhat obscure pyramid texts.

References:

Univ. of Chicago Online version of Sethe, Kurt. Die Altaegyptischen Pyramidentexte nach den Papierabdrucken und Photographien des Berliner Museums Leipzig : J. C. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1908


Utterance 373 (Teti)


pyramid text of Unas

So, if that pair is a model for the 'villains,' who is the real Dr. Jones?

One of the names sometimes thrown out is Dr. Robert Braidwood of the University of Chicago, because his names sounds like Dr. Abner Ravenwood, ostensibly of the University of Chicago. Braidwood, however, was an expert on the Near Eastern Palaeolithic, not Egyptian nor Near Eastern high civilizations. There is also a street known as Ravenswood in Menlo Park, CA - where SRI is located. This might be a Lucas joke like the invention of the banking clan mogul San(d) Hill in the Star Wars saga.


Reisner is 2nd from left, on donkey

In terms of someone actually looking the part and working at the right time period, you could pick Harvard-trained Dr. George Reisner, professor of Egyptian Archaeology at Berkeley in the first decade of the 20th century, thereafter at Harvard. With funding from Phoebe Hearst, Reisner brought to Berkeley thousands of artifacts from his expeditions in Upper Egypt - more than enough to fill several standard museums. There are so many objects they are not displayed regularly. One of the best is the stela of WepemNofret.(below)

Labels: ark, braidwood, crystal, hearst, indiana, jones, lost, ravenwood, reisner