PLU professor's archaeology career spans back to ancient Egypt
CRAIG SAILOR; Staff Writer
Walk in to archaeologist Don Ryan’s home library and you’ll feel like you’ve stepped back in time to enter the parlor of a 19th century English scholar.
It’s an appropriate response. Ryan himself travels back in time on a regular basis. But for him the destination is much further: ancient Egypt.
The Pacific Lutheran University professor and alumnus has spent his career following in the footsteps of Egyptologist Howard Carter, working for his boyhood hero Thor Heyerdahl and blazing new paths in the world of archaeology.
Those stories and a lot more have just been published in “Beneath the Sands of Egypt: Adventures of an Unconventional Archaeologist” (William Morrow). It’s Ryan’s eighth book and his highest profile to date.
“This is actually the first time I’ve had a publicist,” he said.
The book is no dry desert dig. Mummies crawl from the pages along with harrowing accounts of bat-infested tombs and mountaineering adventures. It’s full of lively personal anecdotes and easy-to-digest academia. Interspersed are the archaeological gleanings, though Ryan spares us the jargon and boils it down to the salient features of his specialties.
“The fact is, the public loves archaeology and I like to share it,” Ryan says, defending against those who don’t think scientists should write popular accounts of their work. Some professionals feel such work panders to the public, Ryan says.
Ryan shares a modest Tacoma home with his wife, Sherry, their son Samuel, 17, and a couple of feline research assistants. The cats seem at home in Ryan’s library filled with books on the ancient world, an ice ax signed by Sir Edmund Hillary, and an Egyptian sarcophagus – stuffed with CDs. (It’s a reproduction.)
A Californian, Ryan came to PLU as an undergraduate student in the 1970s. But it was more than academics that drew him to the school. As a teen, Ryan had developed a love of mountaineering on the slopes of Rainier and he wanted a school close to the mountain. At PLU, he hoped to mix his college career with a life of adventure.
Shortly after graduation, he began teaching a mountaineering course for the university, a class he still teaches today, along with Civilizations of the Ancient Near East and Egyptology.
A LAND OF SURPRISES
Ryan respects the past for its power to inform and awe. He calls Egypt one of the most amazing archaeological areas in the world because of its unique culture, monuments built to last, drying climate and “shiny stuff”: gold.
“People were building things – big, amazing, complicated things,” he told an audience one July evening at Garfield Book Co. in Parkland. “The great pyramids are 4,500 years old ... and they built them without cell phones.”
The witticism isn’t unusual for Ryan. Part educator and part showman, his public book events are filled with facts, opinions and plenty of one-liners. But all of it comes back to one rhetorical question: “Why do we bother with this stuff?”
Ryan provides the answer: There are lessons to be learned from the voices of the past. Lessons that can be put to use here, today, now.
“I like to tell my students, ‘History did not begin the day you were born.’ ”
But spend more than a few minutes with Ryan and it becomes clear that there is still a little bit of 8-year-old boy in him – the one who dug up “dinosaur bones” – cow bones – in his Covina, Calif., backyard and became fascinated with Egypt in the pages of National Geographic.
Ryan views much of the popular stereotype of archaeologists with disdain. He blames so-called documentary television (“Most TV channels have gone alien and Bigfoot”) and Hollywood.
“The most famous archaeologist doesn’t even exist: Indiana Jones. I’ve never had a giant rolling ball chase me anywhere. I haven’t been drug behind a jeep by Nazis,” Ryan says. Then he reconsiders, “There are snakes and scorpions. ...”
Ryan’s book contains tales of spine-tingling creepiness: for example, fleeing a flea-infested pyramid in the Canary Islands – feral dogs had been using it as a den. It also tells tales of life-threatening peril: being injured by a falling rock while investigating a cliff-side tomb.
At least partly because of that drama, Egyptology is one of the few disciplines that has as many groupies as it does scholars. Many people who meet him will confess harboring a lifelong fantasy of doing what he does.
Ryan acknowledges the allure but says it’s a lot of work to get where he is and even then jobs are few and far between. A doctorate is a necessity to be taken seriously. Some fluency in German and French must be achieved. And it helps to have a working knowledge of Arabic, ancient Egyptian script and hieroglyphics. (“I like it because you get to draw little animals,” he says.)
After the bookstore event, some of the attendees bought his book – which he willingly signed in hieroglyphics. “Sue” is spelled phonetically with the symbols for a bolt of cloth, a quail and a snake, he explained as he handed one reader her book.
DISCOVERING A QUEEN
In 1989, Ryan rediscovered a tomb in the Valley of the Kings and in the process ignited a controversy that almost destroyed his career. Ryan seems to want to downplay the story in person, although it holds a prominent place in “Beneath the Sands.”
The story concerns Tomb 60, first opened by famed Egyptologist Howard Carter in 1903. He hadn’t been the first visitor since the internment – it had been plundered by ancient tomb raiders. Carter found a chamber with “two much-denuded mummies of women and some mummied geese.” He assumed the occupants were royal nurses, grabbed the geese and left the human remains behind.
A few of years after Carter’s discovery, another archaeologist entered the tomb, removed one of the mummies and sealed up the tomb again. Within a few years, the chamber’s location was forgotten under debris excavated from other tombs.
Fast forward to 1989. Ryan was about to go to work in the valley when a colleague suggested he look for the lost Tomb 60. The colleague, Elizabeth Thomas, theorized that one of the mummies found inside could be that of a female pharaoh: Queen Hatshepsut.
Hatshepsut’s prosperous reign (1502 to 1482 B.C.) was noted for large building projects and travel to foreign lands. After her death, her stepson Tuthmose III had her name erased from monuments. While theories abound, the reason is lost to history.
Ryan compares a tomb opening to opening a present, but admits that archaeology is a bit destructive. Still, it’s come a long way in the century since Carter first worked in the Valley of the Kings. Careful preservation of artifacts – no matter how seemingly mundane – and documentation are now as important as finding a golden treasure.
“When you open a tomb – that’s when the work begins,” Ryan says.
Using Carter’s notes, Ryan found the tomb on his very first field day in the valley, but it took a month to clear the entrance, which had been forgotten for more than 80 years. Where Carter had had his eye out for gold (which would be so richly rewarded by King Tut’s tomb in 1922), Ryan was looking for any artifacts that could shed light on royal burials.
“His lack of interest proved very interesting to myself,” Ryan says.
Inside, Ryan immediately noted some characteristics about the remaining mummy in Tomb 60. Her bent left arm and clenched fist were signs of an 18th Dynasty royal female. She had obviously been well cared for in life. Her fingernails still bore traces of red and black pigment – ancient Egyptian fingernail polish.
Ryan entertained the notion, as he puts it, that the mummy was Hatshepsut. But that was as far as he would go. Then a British newspaper ran a story making a more definite claim of the mummy’s identity and attributed it to Ryan. Reaction was swift. Egyptian antiquity officials don’t like to learn about discoveries in their own country from the foreign press.
Ryan feared he would never be allowed to work in Egypt again, but the controversy and feelings of offense eventually died down. However, the essential question of the mummy’s identity went unanswered.
Fifteen years after Ryan opened Tomb 60, the head of Egyptian archaeology, Zahi Hawass, took an interest in the mummy. Using a CT scanner and solving a complicated riddle that involved switched tombs, a missing then found tooth, and a canopic wooden box (used to hold body parts), Hawass finally confirmed her identity in 2007: Queen Hatshepsut.
In Tacoma, Ryan’s phone rang off the hook with the world press wanting comment.
Today, Ryan views Hawass’s puzzle-like identification as a unique event. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime scenario,” he says.
But it’s obvious that the controversy 20 years ago has left its scars. “I don’t think about it.”
THE FUTURE
At 53, Ryan has no plans to slow down. He likes spending time with his colleagues, both Western and Egyptian, and still enjoys the adventures.
“You can sit in a lab and measure flakes of flint. But I like to go out and explore,” he says.
Ryan is headed back to Egypt in October if the necessary permits are approved. He’s mum about just where he’s headed, but says it fits his lifelong approach to archaeology: Look where others don’t.
“Egypt has been keeping me busy for a long time.”
