Fifteen Questions: Gaia Bencini on Egyptology, Hieroglyphics, and ‘Dreaming the Sphinx’

Gaia Bencini is a Ph.D. candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations studying Egyptology. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: What were you interested in while you were growing up? And how did you first get into Egyptology?

GB: I come originally from Rome, and this is actually the reason why I got interested in Egyptology in the first place, because Rome is, first of all, a city with such deep history.

When you’re a kid, you see ruins and you’re playing close to them, and don’t ask yourself questions. I was passing by these things going to school every day, both Roman classical artifacts and ruins, and Egyptian ones. When I grew up, I was differentiating these things.

I was like, wait a minute — this has hieroglyphs on it. It looks very different from the architecture of the classical world. And why are these here? How are they different? And, especially, can I read them?

FM: Were you able to study this in school?

GB: I developed this passion a little bit against the current.

I was frustrated because, in Italy, everything had to revolve around classics.

But Egyptology is totally marginalized, as assyriology is. All the Near East is considered something fascinating to look at, but not really to study.

So I actually started learning hieroglyphs at university. I was going to graduate-level courses because the undergraduate did not teach.

So I was sneaking in these classes. I was going during the afternoons to the Egyptian Academy in Rome.

I applied to Oxford for my master’s, and that was when I started actually doing serious language.

FM: When you were at Oxford, tell me about the experience of actually being able to seriously pursue this realm of inquiry. Were there things that were surprisingly difficult, or did it feel like you were exactly in the right place?

GB: I felt exactly in the right place. I was so happy.

There is a professor called Professor Parkinson, who’s the major expert in literature. Not many people know that Ancient Egypt has an incredible depth of literature. We have love songs and stories, both fictional narratives, but also administrative accounts that can tell us anything from the legal aspects to laundry lists or little notes, letters, all types of things.

FM: How do you bring the artifacts of the museum into your teaching?

GB: We always go to two museum visits, one at the Harvard Art Museum and one at the MFA in Boston, which ties beautifully together with the collection we have here in house, because they are different aspects of the same history.

The goal for the course is for people to walk confidently in an Egyptian gallery anywhere in the world and know what is being talked about.

FM: With that, might you lead me towards some of these objects?

GB: So we have a beautiful first intermediate period piece.

I want to start by saying a basic 101, hieroglyphic introduction. So hieroglyph is not a language — it’s a script. It’s a script of a language, which is divided into many phases, because Ancient Egypt is an incredibly long span of time. It’s from 2000 or 3000 before Christ.

The last inscription written in hieroglyphs was around 400 after Christ.

As Egyptologists, we have conventionally divided this very long language in three main phases, which is old Egyptian, middle Egyptian and late Egyptian. Then we have a phase called demotic, which is kind of a later phase. And then Coptic, which is the last phase of the language, which is still a language used nowadays in the Coptic Church, which is a Christian church in Egypt, which makes up 10 percent of the Egyptian population nowadays.

We usually teach here middle Egyptian. Both old and middle and late Egyptian have corresponding scripts, which is hieroglyphic and hieratic.

We can think of hieroglyphics as a monumental script, which you would find in big temples. Probably our most important artifact is actually this, which comes from the Temple of Karnak.

On the other hand, hieratic is a more cursive form of the writing. Probably scribes in ancient Egypt would have learned that first because it’s like our cursive handwriting versus Times New Roman.

Now, Ancient Egyptian is a little bit tricky because it does not have voweling. So we have two or three semi-consonants, semi-vowels, but we don’t have the full voweling system. We don’t really know how things were pronounced. We can know a little bit from Coptic.

As Egyptologists, we decided that we would put a “schwa” sound in between all the consonants. So for example, we have, that’s a triliteral HTP, which spells the word for offering, and we pronounce it ‘he-tep.’ So we put the 2 e’s in between to make it pronounceable.

FM: Can you tell me more about how you go about interpreting this stela?

GB: It has “registers.” You can read Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in all directions, which is a little bit tricky.

The only direction you cannot go is bottom to top.

Ancient Egyptians love symmetry, and it’s very iconographic in nature. Before Champollion, before the deciphering and before the Rosetta Stone, people thought that these were little images. But in truth, we know that these are letters.

So for this stela specifically, we have two right to left registers, and then you go from top to bottom, always right to left.

So it’s “an offering which the king can give, and Anubis gives.” And then we have epithets of Anubis. So Anubis — “He is on top of his mountain. He is the Lord of embalment. He is the Lord of the sacred land.” And then it starts the offering formula itself. So a voice offering, sort of like bread and beer. And then this is the caption for his wife.

FM: When you bring your students here, how do you bring them into this?

GB: We read it together. This is what we train for. We learn all the grammar behind this sort of thing. For example, in English, we use a subject, a verb, and an object. In Egyptian, it’s a verb, subject, object. So if it’s a verbal sentence, we search for the verb first.

FM: Might you show me another artifact or two that you’re interested in?

GB: It’s interesting to circle back to Thutmose the Fourth.

We have developed this app called Dreaming the Sphinx, and the curators of the museum have made a cast of this incredible artifact, which is one of the stelae. So stelae are commemorative slabs of stone which have usually a narrative. They can be privately owned as the one that we have just seen. Or they can be kind of propaganda pieces, set up in strategic locations by the rulers to signal different things.

This is an incredible piece, because it’s the stela of a king of a new kingdom, called Thutmose the Fourth around 1400 BCE. He was sleeping in the Giza plateau at a time in which the Sphinx and the pyramids were already ancient. So the Sphinx and the pyramid date to the Fourth Dynasty, 2000 around 2500 BCE.

The Sphinx was covered in sand at the time. So he falls asleep, and he dreams the Sphinx itself coming to him, appearing in this dream, and asking him to free her from the sands of time. If he would do this, the Sphinx would make him the greatest king that ever lived in Egypt. So he restores the Sphinx, brings it to a new kind of life, takes away all the sand.

He decides to commemorate this amazing dream by placing a stela between the paws of the Sphinx, and this is supposed to have been in the first year of his reign.

Of course, we know that maybe it’s more of a propaganda piece than anything else. However, the beauty of this is that our students can experience being there without having to travel to Egypt.

FM: Can you tell me a little bit more about what one part of this translates to?

GB: You start with the regnal years. In Egypt, conceptions of times were very similar to ours. So you had 365 days of the year, because they did astronomical observations. With a little bit of difference, because they had the problem with leap years, of course.

So they used to divide the year in three main seasons, according to the inundation of the Nile. This is something which we cannot experience anymore due to the Aswan High Dam.

So they would divide their year in the inundation season, the season of growth and the season of kind of like drought.

So it starts with the regnal year according to its season. It continues with, “under him, under the majesty of,” and then his names, as we were saying, the names of the King are very important. He would have a kind of personal name and a coronation name too.

Then he continues telling us about his sleep and his dream and how he wanted to restore the artifact, the Sphinx.

And you can find the full translation, with the hieroglyphic segments as well, in the app.

FM: If you had to choose one, who do you think is the most underrated figure in Egyptian history?

GB: There’s so many!

A very funny one is Rawer. So another guy that has a stela in the Giza necropolis itself, in which he trips on the staff of the king. He’s in the sacred procession, in a setting which is highly official. And he panics, of course, because he’s like, “Oh my god, I tripped on the staff of the king.” And then he looks up, and the king is very magnanimous to him. And he was like, “Oh no, don’t worry. Actually, you can put this episode on your tomb.” So he commemorates being so close to the king that he actually tripped on his staff.

FM: So that leads me to another question, which is, what do you think are the biggest misconceptions around Egyptology?

GB: The fact that the pyramids were built by aliens, this type of thing. There are lots of conspiracy theories that circle around ancient Egyptians.

Historically, since it’s such an ancient civilization, it was seen as this place of knowledge. And the fact that the capability of reading hieroglyphs and middle Egyptian and all the phases of the language was lost for such a long time, it created this kind of aura of inaccessibility, and therefore stimulated the imagination in this realm.

FM: How do you think the study of Egypt bears out on contemporary day?

GB: I think that it is necessary to study the past.

Looking into the deep past is a little bit like looking into the future. It’s so distant in time that we have lost so many connections to it that it’s like a rediscovery of how humans can be.

It is fascinating to see humans so far in time. For example, in the papyrus, the more touching aspect for me is to see the fingerprints of the scribe that actually made that thing, or to touch a pot and feel the hands of the potter that actually was throwing that on a wheel. There is a lot still to connect to as humans of this century.

I feel that as a science, Egyptology has a lot to do, in contemporary times, to decolonialize itself. It was born as a colonial discipline. More and more efforts have been made to justify the presence of these objects outside of Egypt, and to engage with local communities and to make it a more fair experience and to give it the importance it should have.

FM: Here at Harvard, are there efforts in that vein?

GB: Absolutely.

You know, the objects are here now, so the best we can do is to honor that and teach in the best way possible, trying to be informative about our collection. Try to encourage everyone that is here to come to the museum.

FM: What do you get up to in your free time?

GB: I love traveling. I travel a lot to Egypt.

I love art as well. My partner is a painter, so I’m constantly trying to engage with the art world in general — and Egypt has an incredibly vital art scene.

— Associate Magazine Editor Sam E. Weil can be reached at sam.weil@thecrimson.com.