[MUSIC PLAYING]
PETER DER MANUELIAN: It's always good to know who's doing the digging.
So in this section, I will talk about George Andrew Reisner
short biographical sketch.
Reisner was born in 1867 in Indianapolis.
That makes him a Hooser.
He came to Harvard in the class of 1889.
And in the last few years of his studies,
he became interested in Semitic languages, ancient cultures
of the ancient Near East.
He'd first heard about this in some of his high school classes
back in Indianapolis.
He graduated in the class of 1889.
And you see a class photograph here in this picture.
Along the way, he studied under David Gordon Lyon.
Lyon was the one who founded the Harvard Semitic Museum, got this building built
in 1903 that you see here, and he was really
the father of what is now the Department of Near Eastern Languages
and Civilizations.
Reisner went home to Indianapolis after getting his BA degree
and worked in a law firm.
And then he came back to Harvard for his master's degree in 1891,
and his PhD in 1893.
Along the way, he took time out to go back home and marry the girl
next door, Mary Bronson.
David Gordon Lyon had studied in Leipzig,
and he felt it was important for Reisner to have
the experience of a German academic institution,
so he sent him off to Berlin.
And it's there that Reisner began his Egyptological career.
Remember at Harvard it was all about Semitic languages, so biblical, Hebrew,
Akkadian, cuneiform inscriptions, and the like.
It was at Berlin that he met the great Egyptologist,
Adolf Erman who had studied so many phases of the Egyptian language.
And his star pupil Kurt Sethe.
And in the Berlin museum, Reisner learned Egyptian -- all phases
of the language -- from Sethe.
He thought everything was said after spending three years at Berlin,
and he came back to Harvard and taught for a year, but to his great surprise,
there was no money to keep him.
And so all seemed lost until he got a letter from Berlin
from one of his colleagues Ludwig Borchardt,
inviting him to come to Cairo and be part of an international commission
to study and publish objects in the Egyptian Museum.
This was his first good paying job, and of course, he jumped at it.
So here is a photograph of the international commission
team members from several different countries
all working on different aspects of the Egyptian Museum collection.
It was here in Cairo that Reisner met Phoebe Apperson
Hearst, mother of the newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst.
She was looking for excavators to support projects
all over the world and Egypt too, for the University of California Berkeley.
So in 1899, Hearst and Reisner signed an agreement,
and he decided to change directions completely from Semitic philology
to Egyptian object publishing and become an archaeologist.
This was a whole right turn for him.
And the agreement called for him basically to learn on the job.
Not a bad understanding if you can get it.
And so he started in Upper Egypt southern parts
of the country working at quote-unquote, "less important sites" in order
to hone his craft, inventing survey techniques,
and record keeping for his excavations.
This map shows you some of the early sites that he worked at.
And there's a photograph of the camp at Naga Adair, which came
to be a very important site ultimately.
But it was later on in 1903 that the Giza necropolis became available.
There had been just too much illicit digging,
and Reisner was not the only one complaining to the Egyptian antiquities
authorities --
then, of course, under French control under Gaston Maspero battle.
Maspero allowed several different expeditions to come together
and amicably divide up the site.
And this is what happened.
So in this section, I'm just going to talk about Reisner's excavations.
In another module, you've seen how the site
was divided between the German, later German Austrian, the Italian
and the American concessions.
This plan shows the dates in red type how Reisner moved all
across the necropolis.
He began in 1904 at the far Western edge of the site
and moved gradually eastwards towards the Great Pyramid.
Along the way, he picked up a student from Harvard, Albert Morton Lythgoe,
who had transferred from Brown to come to Harvard
and had been trained at the American school in Athens and elsewhere.
Lythgoe would later leave to become the first curator
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Everything was going just fine until Phoebe Hearst ran
into financial trouble and she needed to pull out
from supporting the excavation.
This was in 1904 and 1905.
And this was a catastrophe.
So in the summer of 1905, Lythgoe came back to Harvard first,
and Reisner followed later.
And the idea was to try to get the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and
or Harvard University interested in picking up the excavation.
So this began what I call the intriguing summer of 1905.
And this photograph shows you many of the players.
We have Harvard's President Eliot looking after Harvard's interests.
David Gordon Lyon, Reisner's old professor,
trying to do right by everyone.
Albert Morton Lythgoe, Reisner supporter, and assistant,
but really had his own agenda along the way as well.
And then on the museum side, Gardner Martin Lane
was representing the interests of the museum.
So there was a lot of back and forth and eventually was
created by the Harvard University Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition.
Here's a photograph of the old Copley Square
building for the Museum of Fine Arts in those days.
In 1909, the building moved to Huntington Avenue, the site
that it still occupies today.
This was a one year contract and was meant to expire in 1906.
But it continued as a sort of gentlemen's agreement
between these institutions for the next 40 years,
all the way until Reisner death in 1942.
And so the objects started flowing in.
Here is a photograph of the MFA galleries.
And you'll see some of the Giza masterpieces set up in the room.
Crates were arriving, records, photographs, notes, publications.
Reisner was writing articles in the MFA bulletin and elsewhere.
And all of this took place from the headquarters
at what was known as Harvard camp.
Here you see it on this aerial photograph
the red arrow points to the location to the west of Khafre's pyramid.
This was just a simple collection of mud brick huts,
but it eventually grew over the years.
It had the engineers offices, the photo studio, Reisner's office, dining area,
and of course, sleeping quarters.
This photograph shows you the courtyard, which
was always choked with objects, fragments of pottery, stone vessels.
And from here, a lot of the colossal statues came together.
There's also a computer model we've made of this area.
And it's important to remember that Reisner was not
only famous for developing archeological method
and these great documentation systems at the Giza a pyramids,
but all up and down the Nile.
Here is a photograph of him working all the way down south in Nubia.
He was basically the father of Nubian archeology as well.
This image shows one of the class notebooks.
The class of 1889.
And you can see how Reisner is aging.
Eventually, by the 1930s he was the great eminence,
he was the sage up at Harvard camp, and everyone would come to consult him,
not only about matters archeological but political issues as well.
Remember, you have the British running the government,
you have the French controlling the antiquities service, and the Egyptians,
of course desiring their own independence along the way.
So this photograph from an Arabic newspaper shows him in advanced age.
Unfortunately, he's losing his sight by this time.
But again, he was the master, the expert whom so many came to consult.
And I couldn't help noticing recently on the internet
this photograph of some mirrored sunglasses that
show the pyramids reflecting.
And I got to chuckle because Reisner had done this already before.
We can compare this internet image to the photograph taken
from that Arabic newspaper, and you can see the pyramid
reflecting in Reisner glasses as well.
There was even a live broadcast the first time ever made by NBC
right from the pyramids on a cold winter evening in February 1938.
Reisner and the team assembled on the north face of the Khufu's pyramid,
and they broadcast live.
This would have been dinner time back home in the US,
but it was about 11:00 PM in Cairo.
And he narrated some of the excavation workloads, and some of his assistants
spoke as well.
And a famous radio personality inside the King's Chamber inside Khufu
also broadcast.
This required miles of cable going down to the Mena House Hotel
off the edge of the plateau.
And then briefly just some of his trusted assistance.
There was Dows Dunham, a Harvard student who had come out to Giza
and became Reiser's right-hand man.
Also working in Nubia and then eventually coming back
to the Museum of Fine Arts being, in all but name,
the chief curator as all the crates and the objects in the monuments came in.
There was another Harvard student named William Stevenson Smith.
He too eventually became a successor and curator in the Egyptian department
after Reisner's death.
Great art historian who published many important
works about the Old Kingdom and the pyramid age.
And then Reisner befriended a couple Joseph Lindon Smith
and his wife, Corinna.
Smith was a painter who had studied at the School of the Museum of Fine
Arts and elsewhere.
Turning from portrait painting, he found his true love coming out
to Egypt every year and painting scenes in Giza tombs, temples, Nubia, Egypt,
everywhere.
So he became great friends with Reisner, and they enjoyed their company
very much.
Reisner was not such a great fan of the burgeoning color photography process,
but he thought the oil paintings made by Smith were tremendously valuable.
And there are well over a hundred of them today.
And then finally we have Said Ahmed Said, one of his kuftis.
These are the Egyptian foreman from a town
in Upper Egypt who ran the show and Said Ahmed
was one of Reisner's most trusted individuals.
Took him on as a photographic helper and a boy,
and he spent decades with the expedition.
Unfortunately, he died in 1926 during the excavation of the Hetepheres tomb.
But Said's sons, Mohammed and Mahmoud went on to follow in this tradition,
and they ran everything at the expedition after that.
Keeping the accounts, keeping the men in line, doing the pay stubs for everyone.
One of them learned English and was typing up
a lot of the manuscripts as well.
Reisner was only able to come back to America four or five times
to teach at Harvard.
Remember World War I got in the way and delayed things.
And his very last trip was in 1939 when he got an honorary degree
at the Harvard commencement.
This was his 50th commencement anniversary.
After that, he returned to his beloved Harvard camp.
Remember he's pretty much blind by this time.
World War II breaks out.
He sends his wife and daughter home to America.
They had quite a circuitous route, but they finally made it.
And in 1942, unfortunately, after a long stroke and basically being bedridden,
Reisner died at Harvard camp behind the pyramids.
He's buried in the old part of Cairo in the American cemetery.
And his men and the Museum of Fine Arts team composed this text
that you see on the screen here.
And this is the inscription that you read
when you visit his tombstone today.
Back at Giza, you can still see vestiges of the great era of excavations:
some of these rusting debris carts and even railroad tracks --
Some of them still used today -- that were used to move the large mounds off
of the mastaba tombs during all those decades of excavation.