Sarah Parcak: Uncovering Tanis, a tale from Indiana Jones

Sarah Parcak tells Chris Smith about one of her biggest contributions to her field, mapping the ancient site of Tanis, as featured in Raiders of the Lost Ark...

Chris - How did Raiders of the Lost Ark and Tanis come into this then?

Sarah - So, you know, like every child of the 80s, every Friday night my parents would get a movie for my brother and me and pizza. It was a big deal in those days. And we'd rotate through: it was either The Princess Bride, The Dark Crystal, The NeverEnding Story, or Raiders of the Lost Ark. I love that movie. It's still one of my favourite films. Yes, I know he's problematic, but also he is a movie character. There are a lot more problematic academics in the real world I think we should be worried about. Anyway, I heard about Tanis, and then, of course, I studied it as an undergraduate and then in graduate school.

Chris - So it was one of those places known about, as in it was documented, but not known where?

Sarah - Right. So we knew Tanis has been worked on as a site for well over a hundred years. What's interesting about Tanis is there was an amazing discovery made just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. So at Tanis, it was Egypt's capital in Dynasties 21 and 22, so about 3,000 years ago. All these kings who ruled from Tanis were buried in and around this very large temple complex that's in the northern part of the site. And when they were excavated, they uncovered beautiful tombs that were full of gorgeous jewellery and silver sarcophagi and coffins. So these pharaohs are known as the silver pharaohs because, unlike later sarcophagi and coffins, which you see made of gold, theirs were made of silver. And because of the outbreak of the war, it's just not a discovery that is as well known as Tut. But if you go to the Cairo Museum today, they have a whole room filled with the finery from Tanis.

The temples have been excavated for a long time by the French team, and we knew roughly where the settlement was, but no extensive work had ever been done on it. So I was drawn there. We got very high-resolution satellite imagery of the settlement of Tanis, processed it, and we were able to see the outlines of almost the entire settlement in different phases of its construction. You can see barracks, streets, houses. It has a very similar layout in many ways to Amarna, and even a place where there could be potential palaces. So I collaborated with a French Egyptologist named Philippe Rousseau. He excavated one of the houses again as a ground test, and it was a pretty close match to what we'd seen from the imagery. So yeah, I was definitely drawn there by Indiana Jones, but did not expect that we would find this whole outline of the settlement. That was really exciting, and I hope a genuine contribution to the field of Egyptology.

Chris - A lot of this is now desert, isn't it? So how would it have been different back in the day? And was it desertification that did for those civilisations, or did these settlements just get abandoned and then the desert encroached later? Do we know?

Sarah - Sites were abandoned for lots of different reasons. In some instances, the climate would change, but I think many sites in Egypt were abandoned, at least for a time, because of the Nile River. The Nile – it's hard to get a sense of this today because of the Aswan High Dam – doesn't shift like it did in antiquity, but it did. It was every bit like the Mississippi. It would have meandered and had oxbows. If a city was located next to the Nile, it would have thrived, right? It’s the epicentre of trade, information, goods coming into the city, goods going out from the city, and then the Nile shifts – and that’s it, right? There's no port.

The city can't function particularly well, and so maybe over time it gets abandoned. I think in Egypt, we definitely see periods where climate change has a pretty serious impact on settlements. One of the periods of time that I've studied and written about, starting with my PhD, is around 2200 BC, so the end of the Old Kingdom. What happens around this time is something called the 4.2k BP event, or the 4,200 years ago event. It's suggested that, potentially because of a series of solar flares or solar radiation, the weather around the world was pretty seriously impacted – sort of like a mass El Niño effect. What happened is that the monsoon rainfall that filled up the Blue and White Nile basins and caused the Nile to flood every year just didn’t arrive at the same levels as before. What you see, starting around the end of the Old Kingdom, are a series of droughts.

Chris - Are these the biblical droughts? Is this what Joseph and his family, when they had seven lean years – is this what he foresaw?

Sarah - Maybe. It's debated. This happened before his time. Because every year, the Egyptians relied so heavily on the floods, it had to be like Goldilocks. It couldn't be too much, it couldn't be too little – it had to be just right. That's the role the king served. The king preserved Maat, this sense of balance. His job was to ensure that the Nile flooded every year, and that's why offerings were made at temples. Anyway, you had a series of disastrously low Nile floods. There were no crops or greatly reduced crops. People started abandoning these villages and moving into cities, which is something I saw as part of my PhD thesis. Pyramid construction stops, foreign expeditions stop.

We see this degradation of art and great social strife going on. This changes when the monsoons pick up again and there's regular flooding. We see this in the New Kingdom, which is about 2000 BC, so a couple of hundred years later. Egypt goes through this great period of upheaval, which is interesting now because the world is very similar to what's happening today. To your question, these are the things we study. We look at why sites were abandoned in certain periods of time and for what reasons. It wasn't all climate change – there were social, political and economic reasons too. Most sites in Egypt were fairly continuously occupied going back thousands of years. Even today, most well-known sites have people living on them or next to them.