Like everyone, my year didn’t quite go as planned. I was scheduled to spend this summer in Luxor working at the South Asasif on Karakhamun’s ceiling reconstruction. Instead, I spent the summer in Canada desperately missing the Egyptian sunshine, my fieldwork colleagues, and the regular cups of hot black tea on an even hotter day. This year, the best that most of us can do to scratch our ‘Egyptian itch’ is to travel there through our televisions. Luckily, a new documentary allows us to do just that.
A new Netflix documentary Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb, released last month, chronicles the discoveries made at Saqqara in 2018. Supplemented by stunning drone footage over the plateau and colorful animations, Saqqara Tomb is a two-hour documentary that encapsulates a single season of fieldwork. It allows you to peer over the shoulders of the various members of an all-Egyptian team as they work to excavate and document the tombs of the Bubasteion necropolis on Saqqara’s eastern cliffs.
“To be the first one to hold something in your hand after thousands of years – millions of people dream to do this work.” – Mohammad Mohammad Yousef
The ‘secrets’ of the Saqqara tomb are not really secrets at all – the world has known about the painted reliefs in the Fifth Dynasty tomb of Wahtye and the mummified lion cubs since they were announced last year. But the documentary takes viewers back to before we knew and lets you share in the excitement (and disappointments) of the team members on the cusp of those discoveries.
…But Is There Anything Left to Find?
The discoveries in the documentary are so exciting, in fact, that skeptical viewers even suspected the documentary of being faked. The reality is that more lies still buried beneath the surface of the Egyptian deserts than has yet been uncovered. Particularly at Saqqara, a site used continuously for over three thousand years, “One would,” according to Dr. Salima Ikram, “be hard pressed to dig and not find something.” (1)
Egyptian History in Egyptian Voices
Over the last half-century, hundreds of documentaries about ancient Egypt have been produced by the western world for western audiences. Saqqara Tomb stands out from among them, rejecting the colonial and elitist lenses that have relentlessly plagued media productions about ancient Egypt. (Just watch the trailer for the upcoming film Death on the Nile to see what I mean.) It recognizes the members of an all-Egyptian team as authorities in their own right with opinions and perspectives that are not presented as subordinate to those of western scholars.
Interviews with the Saqqara excavation team (many conducted in Arabic) attest to the intense connection that exists between the modern Egyptians and their ancient counterparts. Many of them see their own lives mirrored in the tomb scenes that are thousands of years old and express the great honor it is to ‘reintroduce’ those ancient lives and stories to the modern world.
Perhaps even more remarkably, the interviews that shape the story of the documentary are not restricted to the scholars spearheading the project, like Drs. Mohammad Mohammad Yousef and Amira Shaheen, but also include the reis (foreman) and some of the workmen. Egyptian workmen, like Ghareeb, often inherit the profession from their fathers and grandfathers, learning the arduous work at a young age. These interviews put names and faces to the centuries-old legacy of Egyptian families who have been proudly working to uncover the masterpieces we enjoy in museums around the world, but whose contributions are often overlooked.
Final Thoughts
The result is a documentary that an Arabic-speaking, Egyptian audience could watch almost entirely without subtitles, long overdue in a discipline with a history of actively excluding the voices of people of color. If Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb is any indication, we are indeed getting closer to the days when white archaeologists in pith helmets will no longer dominate the narrative of African scholarship.
Few archaeological documentaries ever manage to truly capture the feeling of discovery that for centuries has lured explorers and scholars to toil in remote locations, adverse weather conditions, and acute isolation for months at a time. This documentary is both an ideological breath of fresh air and a grand adventure. Watch it!
All photos courtesy of Netflix.
Our Rating:
Notes:
(1) Quote from Archaeologists Are Just Beginning to Unearth the Mummies and Secrets of Saqqara on Smithsonianmag.com (November 12, 2020)
Taylor Bryanne Woodcock is an Egyptology Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto, where she also teaches Middle Egyptian. She currently works in Egypt at the South Asasif and in Sudan at Gebel Barkal.
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