Sarah Parcak: Discovering Ancient Egypt

Sarah Parcak discusses the early influences which inspired her fascination with archaeology and the Ancient Egyptians...

Sarah - I've been interested in archaeology and ancient Egypt ever since I was a small child, growing up in Bangor, Maine in the 1980s. It's not like we had the internet and endless YouTube videos, and certainly not cable, but we lived across the street from the Bangor Public Library, which I celebrate whenever I can. The librarians there helped to find me books on ancient Egypt.

I think having a grandparent who was an academic got me interested in the field generally as well. My grandfather was a forestry professor at the University of Maine in Orono. And as a result, every weekend we lived close to them and we would go visit them often.

We would spend as much time as we could outdoors. So I developed a love of being outside from a very young age and exploring. My grandparents certainly encouraged that. My parents to this day don't know where my interest in Egypt came from. They said one day I just started talking about it. And when I was five or six years old, whenever I lost my first tooth, the Tooth Fairy brought me what even now I think is a really good book on ancient Egyptian history.

And that just got me started. And then I had the chance to study Egyptology and archaeology. There's a gentleman sort of like Barry Kemp in the US. His name was William Kelly Simpson, an eminent Egyptologist who studied language and religion and culture. And I had the chance to work very closely with him. I was his research student all the years of my time at Yale. He was extraordinary. So yes, I was very blessed to be able to work with Kelly and then Barry in graduate school.

Chris - But when did you first set foot in Egypt then? And did that crystallise all that interest you'd had from what you'd learned at university? We all know it's a bit like driving a car.
You never really learn to drive and know that it's for you or not for you until you actually get behind the wheel and hit the open road. When did you first go to Egypt and then say, this is definitely my thing?

Sarah - So I had the chance to go in the summer of 1999. So almost exactly 26 years ago. It's weird saying that number. That feels like a long time and yet it was yesterday. And so I was joining this field school that was run by Dr Redford and his wife Sue Redford out of Pennsylvania State University. So I went about two and a half weeks early, figuring, oh, I'll just travel around by myself. And the 46-year-old me is looking back at 28-year-old me and going, you are out of your mind. What are you doing travelling around Egypt by yourself at that age? And I just went and did it.

I think the world maybe was a little safer. Maybe I was just a little more naive. And when I was down in Aswan, I was on the island of Philae and I met this lovely couple, a woman from Taiwan and her husband who was German. And they were leading a tour of what seemed like very wealthy Taiwanese women. They said, oh, you're a student travelling around by yourself. You should come travel with us. We're taking a cruise down the Nile. And I said, look, I've counted every last penny or pound. I'm staying at roach motels. There is absolutely no way I can afford five days on the Nile and flying to Abu Simbel. And they said, no, no, come meet everyone. We want everyone to meet you.

And so I went over and they spoke to all these Taiwanese tourists and Chinese, and all at once they all went, "Hello, Sarah." And they later on invited me to come join them on their boat. And I went and it was a floating five-star hotel. And I said to them, look, I can't afford this. The budget for one night on here is the budget for my whole trip. And they said, look, there's already a younger woman who's here. We're worried because she's on her own and she's a little older than you, not much. Why don't you be her roommate and give us a couple of hundred dollars to cover basic expenses. And so it was this magical, otherworldly, coincidental adventure. And it felt like a door. And it felt like these winds from thousands of years ago appeared and sort of blew me through it. And I thought, there's something about this country that's different, that it felt so welcoming and warm.

I've actually never shared that story before publicly. And I just said, this is the place I need to be. And I asked them afterwards, why did you do this incredibly generous, wonderful thing for me, the stranger that you meet, the student you meet on an island? And they said, we just had a sense about you. We thought you would take this ahead and you would spend the rest of your life sharing your love of Egypt with everyone.

Chris - Do you think then that you might have ended up not being an Egyptologist? You could have been an archaeologist, but working somewhere else entirely if it hadn't got hold of you the way that that experience did?

Sarah - You know, Egypt just always called to me. I remember being an undergraduate and Kelly was such a generous human. And every autumn he would invite all the first-year students in the residential college where he was a fellow and I was a student to his estate in Katonah, New York. Kelly had been married to one of the Rockefeller daughters. She'd passed away many, many years before. And then I got to go into his office and it was 20 feet tall, old leather chairs, heavy with pipe smoke, antiquities in different places where he clearly bought them over time. And I just thought, I'm done. This is it. This is the life I want.

There's something about this that speaks to a part of me and it feels like I've been waiting my whole life to get here. You never know, right? When you go into the field, sometimes people start digging and they hate it because it's rough, it's hot, you get sick.
You're far away from home. But I just always felt at home in Egypt and the people there are so wonderful and warm and gentle. So it's another home for me and it felt that way from the first time I went.