Sources & Scholars

John Romer reads Khufu's pyramid less as a tomb than as a vast piece of state-organisation made visible — a single, unified geometry that required a bureaucracy, a survey, and a logistical empire to produce. The casing, he argues, is the real monument; the rubble core was always meant to be hidden.

— Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Vol. II (2017)

John Romer reads Karnak as evidence that 'ancient Egyptian religion' was never static — each generation of priests and kings actively re-negotiated which gods mattered, which festivals were performed, and which earlier monuments were dismantled for fill. The Third Pylon, when excavated, was found stuffed with blocks from Senwosret I's White Chapel and Hatshepsut's Red Chapel — both now reassembled in the Open-Air Museum on site.

— Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Vol. III (2024)

Chris Naughton has emphasised how much of what visitors see at Karnak is the work of restorers as much as pharaohs — the Hypostyle Hall's standing columns were re-erected in the early twentieth century after a catastrophic collapse in 1899, and the project to reconstruct it accurately is ongoing.

— Naughton, Egyptologists' Notebooks (2020)

Saqqara is, in Chris Naughton's words, the site that 'keeps rewriting itself'. The current Bubasteion concession, led by Mohamed Mostafa Waziri's team and the Saqqara Saite Tombs Project, has opened more than a hundred coffined burials and several intact tombs since 2018 — including the painted shaft of Wahtye, the priest who appears in the Netflix documentary Naughton himself helped narrate the field for.

— Naughton, Egyptologists' Notebooks (2020); ongoing MoTA reports

Chris Naughton has noted that GEM also resolves a long-running conservation crisis: many of Tutankhamun's organic objects — textiles, leather, the ceremonial chariots — were deteriorating in Tahrir's uncontrolled environment. The Grand Egyptian Museum Conservation Centre, attached to the galleries, has been quietly stabilising the collection since 2010 and is the largest archaeological conservation lab in the world.

— Naughton, Egyptologists' Notebooks (2020); GEM-CC reports

Piers Litherland's work in the Theban Western Wadis is reframing how we read royal burial site selection in the early Eighteenth Dynasty, and his methodology — slow, patient survey of overlooked side wadis — is the same logic that has just produced Saqqara's recent harvest. The lesson is that Egypt's 'famous' sites are still largely unexcavated.

— Litherland, The Western Wadis of the Theban Necropolis (2014)

Pierre Tallet's discovery of the Wadi el-Jarf papyri — the oldest written papyri ever found — gives us the diary of a man named Merer, a middle-ranking inspector who shipped Tura limestone across the Nile for Khufu's casing. For the first time we can name a person who helped build the Great Pyramid.

— Tallet & Lehner, The Red Sea Scrolls (2021)

Pierre Tallet's discovery of the Wadi el-Jarf papyri — the oldest written papyri ever found — gives us the diary of a man named Merer, a middle-ranking inspector who shipped Tura limestone across the Nile for Khufu's casing. For the first time we can name a person who helped build the Great Pyramid.

— Tallet & Lehner, The Red Sea Scrolls (2021)

Salima Ikram, Distinguished University Professor at the American University in Cairo, has spent decades studying the funerary archaeology of the Memphite necropolis. Her work on animal mummies — including the sacred bulls of the Serapeum — and her on-camera role in Netflix's Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb make her the clearest contemporary voice on what the site's ongoing excavations mean. She reads Saqqara not as a single-period cemetery but as a living landscape of burial that adapted across three millennia.

— Ikram, The Tomb in Ancient Egypt (Thames & Hudson, 2017); Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb (Netflix, 2020)

Ramadan Hussein, the late director of the Saqqara Saite Tombs Project (Tübingen), led the team that opened the embalming workshop and shaft complex at the Bubasteion in 2018 — the discovery that reframed Saqqara as a continuing 26th-Dynasty industrial mortuary site, not just an Old Kingdom relic. His protocol of in-situ recording before removal is now the template for the Bubasteion concession.

— Hussein, Saqqara Saite Tombs Project preliminary reports (Tübingen, 2018–2022); Netflix, Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb (2020)

Miroslav Bárta and the Czech Institute of Egyptology have worked the Abusir–Saqqara plateau for five decades. Bárta argues that the Fifth- and Sixth-Dynasty mastaba clusters around the southern pyramids record a measurable shift in elite power — provincial governors building tombs that rival the king's. His 'collapse' model for the end of the Old Kingdom is built from the Saqqara/Abusir evidence.

— Bárta, Analyzing Collapse: The Rise and Fall of the Old Kingdom (AUC Press, 2019)

Zahi Hawass — first as Director of the Giza Plateau, then as Minister of Antiquities — re-excavated the cemetery west of the Step Pyramid and reopened the burial chamber of Djoser after the 2011–2020 restoration. His public framing of Saqqara as 'Egypt's most active dig' has driven the funding behind every recent discovery; whatever one makes of the showmanship, the access he won for foreign missions is real.

— Hawass, Mountains of the Pharaohs (2006); Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb (Netflix, 2020)