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Meet the Team
Mark Lehner, Archaeologist
NOVA: Can you describe what your every day work is
like, when you're not called off to Egypt to help raise an
obelisk?
LEHNER: I'm an archaeologist and I study ancient Egypt.
I work at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago
and the Harvard Semitic Museum. When I'm not doing field work
or lecturing, I prepare the maps and drawings of all the
excavations we've done. I'm working on a database of all the
different kinds of ancient material that we
excavate—ancient bones, animal bones, ancient plant
remains, pottery, artifacts, mud sealings. And I'm working on
a complex topographical model of the Sphinx and the pyramids
on the Giza plateau.
I'm looking into many other research reports on excavations of
other sites in Egypt—some close in time to when we're
digging, and some of periods that are far later—for
parallel structures. If we find a bakery, what do other
bakeries look like? If we find a copper working shop, what do
other copper working shops look like?
I'm also doing very general reading about Egyptologists'
interpretations of Egyptian society, how they organize
themselves for big projects, whether it's the pyramid age or
thousands of years later, say in Tutankhamun's time. I'm
trying to understand what their society was like; it helps me
think about the material that we're finding.
NOVA: Have you had any previous experience on a project
like this one?
LEHNER: I was part of the NOVA team that successfully
built a small-scale pyramid, using tools that would have been
available to the ancient Egyptians, and I was also part of the
NOVA team that unsuccessfully tried to raise an obelisk back
in 1994. This is our second chance.
During the 1994 attempt to raise an obelisk, Mark
Lehner demonstrated one possible way the ancient
Egyptians carved hieroglyphs.
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NOVA: How important do you think your understanding of
ancient Egypt is to the outcome of this new attempt?
LEHNER: I think it's pretty important, in the way of
putting the brakes on the other experts. Just one example of
that is diamonds. One of the questions we're going to be
looking at is, how did they cut granite? Diamonds are used in
modern saws for cutting granite. So, some experts have
concluded, even those who have worked in Egypt, that they had
to have used diamond. The archaeologist immediately thinks
along the following lines: All right, how much granite were
they cutting? How many hieroglyphs were they cutting? How many
obelisks and statues? And how many diamonds would they have
required? Where would they get diamond? Where is diamond
located as a natural resource? What does it take to get it?
Was there any word for diamond? And is there any evidence that
Egyptians went that far?
We also look at representations of ships, of the pharaoh
Hatshepsuts' ship, in particular, carrying an obelisk on a big
barge. What do art historians who are also Egyptologists say
about the extent that we can trust the way Egyptians show
things as being realistic depictions of the way they actually
did things?
NOVA: Can you give us an example?
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This modern depiction of the pharaoh Hatshepsut's
obelisk barge, drawn from a faded painting on her
mortuary temple in Luxor, offers one of the few clues
left by the ancients as to how they transported their
obelisks.
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LEHNER: Yes.
Owain Roberts
wants the obelisks to have been shipped on what is essentially
a gigantic catamaran—two ships parallel—with the
obelisk across it. In Hatshepsut's mortuary temple, they don't
show that; they show one huge barge, sitting very high off the
water, and the obelisks are up on the deck, end to end. Can we
just ignore that? Can we say, in fact, that there are other
examples where the Egyptians show something, but we know for a
fact that they did it a totally different way? Or, from years
of studying these kinds of depictions, do we say, "Well, they
don't just show something, if they did it an entirely
different way. There's a certain amount of truth in what
they're showing." Those are the kinds of questions that an
Egyptologist or an archaeologist brings to a project like
this.
NOVA: What about the actual raising of the obelisk? Are
there depictions of that?
LEHNER: This is something that lay people ask all the
time, not just about obelisks but about the pyramids: Why
don't they show them building it? And somehow, Egyptologists
are so used to this that they would be totally amazed if
Egyptians did show themselves building something. Egyptians
didn't choose to show these things as structures of their
creation. They always emphasized that it was done according to
a divine plan. It's my interpretation that they didn't show
these things because they didn't want it to be the work of
humans. They wanted it to be a thing that was divine.
They also liked the idea that once something was created, it
was instantly old, because divine things, in a sense, are very
hoary and old. They'll say of a temple that it was laid out
according to a plan that was devised in the time of the gods,
so to speak. That's my take on it.
NOVA: What about your understanding of how people were
organized? How will that help in the actual raising of the
obelisk?
LEHNER: Well, there's some issue there. I have some
questions in my mind, because there's a model of coercive
forced labor, on a military scale, and there's a model of
households turning out—as in the NOVA program about
building the Incan bridge—where it's kind of a festival.
I think it gets a bit ambiguous. In the age of the pyramids
I'm really curious as to how much natural communities were
turning out labor for it, rather than it being a huge
Stalinist kind of cooperative forced-labor situation. The
massiveness and difficulty of the project make us think
coercion, but the care with which it's finished, and that
includes obelisks, makes us think conscientiousness, or
conscience. Therein lies the paradox.
Mark Lehner hefts a dolorite stone that the ancients
used to quarry granite.
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NOVA: How will this year's attempt to raise the obelisk
be different from the one in 1994?
LEHNER: I think we have some really good people this
year. I think Owain Roberts is enormously insightful. He will
look at the knots tied in rope that once held the Khufu ship
together, and he will say things like, "there's a whole range
of thinking in those knots." So, he looks at knots and, almost
like a clairvoyant, he's reading a way of thinking. And I
think rope was the linchpin of just about all of
this—obelisks, pyramids, and so on. Engineers
Mark Whitby
and Henry Woodlock, they're the ones you've got to hold in
check. They want to get very clever, in an engineering way.
But if you hold them in check and say, "Well, hold on there,"
I think they're very insightful—they're trained
engineers. They know where the center of gravity is. They know
why you don't actually tip the obelisk on its center of
gravity; you tip it a little ahead of its center of gravity so
that the center of gravity acts as a brake, and that kind of
thing.
NOVA: But you say to the engineers, "Hold on, the
Egyptians wouldn't have done it this way, because of...."
LEHNER: Well, because engineers want to get clever, and
they want to gain advantage. That's the engineer's whole
thing. So, for example, Mark Whitby was very keen on raising
the obelisk up and having a big heavy block on it that slides
to the end and tips the obelisk down, like the old scales when
the doctor weighed you and he tipped the little weight
over?
NOVA: Like the method Mark Whitby used to raise the
stone in the NOVA Stonehenge project?
LEHNER: Exactly. And I'm saying that that seems just a
little too tricky. First of all, you've got to get this
ten-ton block up on top of a 400-ton obelisk, or however many
tons the block was. Why can't you just pull the nose of the
obelisk down with ropes on the butt end? And in the
conversation, Mark actually said, "Well, because you can't do
this with ropes," Owain said, "No, wait a minute, sure you
can, they do it in boats all the time." So that's how the
whole technique that we're going to use evolved.
NOVA: It sounds like a really great team.
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Mark Lehner shares a laugh with stonemason Roger
Hopkins.
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LEHNER: It is a great team. And then there's Roger
Hopkins, who brings an uncanny kind of insight that keeps
everybody honest. And everybody else keeps Roger honest.
Roger's like that stone: he's a whole counterweight just on
his own.
NOVA: What do you think is the most difficult aspect of
this whole project?
LEHNER: Well, one of the most difficult aspects is
actually getting a big obelisk—that's no easy thing. And
it's just a wonder that they were able to get such huge pieces
without fissures and cracks, because we're being challenged to
do it with modern quarrymen, with modern flame jets and
pneumatic drills.
The other most difficult aspect is actually tipping the
obelisk without losing control, using some kind of a
mechanical advantage—whether it's a height and a pivot.
And then, in our day and age, a very difficult thing is the
safety of everyone involved. I think maybe the priorities
would have been different in ancient times. Finally, a
difficult thing is doing it within the film production
schedule. I don't think that would have been a priority in
ancient times either.
NOVA: Do you think that the way you're going to try to
raise the obelisk this time was the way the Egyptians did
it?
LEHNER: Well, you know, it's very hard to know, because
you can only go so far in the evidence—the positions of
the obelisks that are standing, the bases, the turning
grooves—and then you're sort of out in the realm of, "It
could have been done this way."
I think it's very possible, however, because one of the
insights that's come to me is that they probably wouldn't have
gone too far out ahead of the most complex technological
ensemble that they had in their everyday life, and that would
have been in nautical technology—in their boats and in
their seagoing ships, where they were using something like an
A-frame for a mast—and using a lot of the mechanical
advantages of rope and windlasses and so on. It's the kind of
knowledge that Owain Roberts brings to the project.
NOVA: What do you expect to learn from this
experience?
LEHNER: All kinds of things. I expect to learn a lot
from Owain Roberts about the mechanical advantage you get from
rope. Obviously, what we're doing is very audacious, to go out
and actually carve these things and try to do these things. I
know a lot of experts think it's popularizing and therefore
not really a scholastic endeavour. In fact, it is; I think
we're learning a lot from it. I think it's a learning
experience for everybody. And that's the neat thing about
these NOVA ancient technology films. They really are a
learning experience, even for the experts involved, as they
are for the audience.
NOVA: What odds do you give the project of succeeding
this time?
LEHNER: If we actually get a big obelisk out, or even
replicate one in cement, if necessary, I'd give the project
pretty good odds of raising it, with the combined expertise.
But it also makes you wonder how many times the Egyptians
experimented and tried and failed, before they got it right.
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| Updated November 2000
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