Mummies Best Friend
This Egyptologist is lowered into dark tombs...and cracks jokes on late-night talk shows.
A version of this story appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of Johns Hopkins’ alumni magazine here.
Someone gave Egyptologist Kara Cooney ’02 a hand. It happened when she found herself perched on the rim of a 20-foot burial shaft at Theban Tomb 92 high on a dusty hillside at Sheikh Abd el-Qurn. Near the Valley of Kings, this necropolis (City of the Dead) holds Egypt’s largest concentration of private tombs.
She looked into the pit at the fellahin, local peasant laborers dressed in blue robes, and watched as they uncovered figurines, beads, mummy wrappings, and coffin scraps and passed them to her for inspection.
Bare windswept hills sprawled around her at the edge of the Great Western Desert on the west bank of the Nile. For weeks Cooney and other Johns Hopkins graduate students had trekked up a narrow cliffside trail to the burial site 300 feet above the valley floor.
Although Cooney now chairs the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA, on this dig in the late 1990s she was studying under her thesis advisor Betsy Bryan, John Hopkins professor emerita of Egyptian Art & Archaeology.
The raven-haired Cooney has a formidable presence. At six-foot one-and-one-half inches tall—not including work boots and sun hat—she towered over the workers. She is not easily rattled. In fact, she has spent her career carving a distinctive path, refusing to be intimidated, and drawing unsettling parallels between ancient times and our own.
Now, one at a time, bits of shredded antiquity, all preserved by the desert near Luxor, came up for Cooney’s quick initial examination. Pen and notebook in hand, she logged in every item given to her, no matter how tiny, for future research.
On one occasion at Theban Tomb 92 she reached down to receive a skull. All of its flesh was intact. Sensing the person’s features, she felt disgust. With a shudder, she thought to herself, ‘Oh, that’s not what we look like—we, humans.’
But now when she bent over, a worker gave her something else—a dry, brittle human hand with flesh, skin, and fingernails. Holding the withered body part sent Cooney into a reverie.
‘Oh, my goodness. I’m working with ancient humanity. I have to remember this,’ thought the fledgling Egyptologist.
In her mind’s eye she saw her mother's hand. Then she saw her father’s hands. She had a revelation. ‘Human hands are like faces,’ she thought. ‘They're a way to the soul. The hand can make food for you. It can hit you. It can rub you on the head. It can gesticulate wildly. It can do all kinds of things.”
The moment made confront her mortality. ‘I remember being very struck by the fact that I was dealing with somebody from 3,000 years in the past. You’re only on this planet for a brief moment,’ she thought. ‘And someday you will become like these people.’
**
American Egyptologists number about 500, though one scholar off-the-record thinks only 150 have paid positions. Perhaps half or more are women, and none of them—male or female—are remotely like Cooney.
Today there are so many versions of her that it is difficult to take the full measure of them. There is sarcophagus dust-under-her-fingernails professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture, an expert on 21st Dynasty funerary practice, especially coffin use and reuse, who, under her formal name Kathlyn M. Cooney, writes eldritch and arcane tomes such as “The Cost of Death: Social and Economic Value of Ancient Egyptian Funerary Art in the Ramesside Period”; Coffin Commerce”; and the forthcoming “Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches.”
Then there is the firebrand Kara Cooney, author of popular books on ancient Egypt such as “The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World”; “When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt”; and “The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt.”
She says the ironically titled “Good Kings” upset many of her colleagues. “They’re rather slavish to authoritarian systems. Instead of criticizing the ancient Egyptian system at all, they celebrate it and work too easily with the Egyptian government. As the place where we study becomes more authoritarian, to get access people are willing to make deals with the devil that I reject.
“I am a scholar with two heads, if you like,” she says. “When I’m being funny, I might say I’m a schizophrenic scholar, one who has two sides to her work.”
In “Recycling for Death,” one comes up against sentences as detailed as a pathologist’s autopsy report like this one that describes the coffin of Thutmose III—“Daressy (1909, 19) notes a hieratic text on the foot-end of the case, which is not a docket of reuse but rather a miter inscription with a protective spell, possibly painted onto a red painted join.”
Her eye-popping mainstream works reveal a different Cooney. Chapter names like ‘Khufu: Size Matters’, ‘Akhenaten: Drinking the Kool-Aid’, ‘Merneith: Queen of Blood’, ‘Why Women Should Rule the World’, and ‘Smashing the Patriarchy’ give a foretaste of their contents.
She romps through history to make rapid-fire parallels to modern America ala George Carlin or Robin Williams. Her nitro-powered souped up scholarly side has her tossing pop culture riffs like Tom Wolfe and peppery zingers reminiscent of feminist scholar Camille Paglia, the author of “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.”
Here is Cooney on “the tax-and-spend creator of pyramid propaganda” Khufu, better known today as Cheops, the builder of the Great Pyramid: “The intent of Khufu’s pyramid of phallic proportions is akin to Joseph Stalin and his military-industrial complex of collective toxic masculinity, mass repression, ethnic cleanings, famine, and work camps, all of which set up the very reasons for the Soviet Union’s eventual downfall.”
Of Senwosret III who ruled from 1870 BC to 1831 BC and erected statues of himself all over Egypt, she writes “Each figure was carved with both hands outstretched over his kilt, piously praying—an image not unlike that of Donald Trump holding a Bible in front of a church on a street that had just been cleared of protestors through the use of tear gas.”
As for the grasshopper-faced, slit-eyed Akhenaten who reigned at the peak of Egypt’s power from 1352 BC to 1336 BC and left evidence of forced labor camps, she says, “No authoritarian leader ever looked like Amenhotep IV [a title Akhenaten took], though, at least none I can think of. And maybe that’s because he was more of a cultural icon, a kind of Iggy Pop or Andy Warhol, whose images were suffused with unprecedented and shocking power.”
“The needy populist” Ramses II? “Imagine his heroic escapades on a temple pylon in a public space, where crowds of people gathered to celebrate being Egyptian, having a strong king and an empire of wealth to rally around. The colorful images were like a movie from “Captain America” comics—a brilliant tale from which you could not look away.” And, of course, Cooney lets rip another inevitable modern-day comparison—“Ramses II, our jobs creator par excellence, is a builder of his own narcissism—the most obvious Donald Trump-like character, had he held the reins of power for decades.”
What about Egypt’s queens Merneith, Neferusobek, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Tawosret, and Cleopatra? (Only six of the 170 pharaohs were female.) Cooney hails them as role models for the ages. “The Egyptians were light-years ahead of us in their trust of female power....Ancient Egyptian monarchs proved that women do rule differently. They didn’t demand hundreds of lovers to sexually service them, like Harvey Weinstein or a king in his harem. They ruled on behalf of family members, not just for themselves. For the most part, they avoided war, rather than jumping into the melee. And they were called upon precisely when their people were at their most vulnerable.”
Yet elsewhere in the book Cooney sticks it to her ancient sisterhood: “But viewed through another lens, they were utterly powerless, mere pawns of a patriarchal system over which they had no control and could never hope to alter in the long term.”
Then there is the Kara Cooney who produced, wrote, and hosted the Discovery Channel documentary “Out of Egypt,” who helped curate exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who is developing a fictional TV show based on her popular books, and who teaches online courses for 800 students like ‘Women in Power in the Ancient World’ and graduate seminars for sight-reading hieroglyphic tales such as the Shabaka Stone that tells how the god Ptah created the world by speaking.
Her leggy appearances between 2007 and 2014 on “The Late, Late Show” with Craig Ferguson exposed her to a wide audience. As his gorgeous guest expert on Egypt attired in low-cut, shimmery dresses, the pharaonic femme fatale drove men in the audience mad.
“Some of the gentlemen are barking and barking in a rather sophisticated fashion,” Ferguson once observed when she came onstage. When she remarked that she wasn’t in her khaki work clothes, the host leered at her plunging neckline and said “bending over with a little trowel would work for me.”
Looking back, Cooney professes not to have been bothered. “That was part of the schtick,” she says. Though now in the aftermath of MeToo she believes “I probably would have reacted differently today, but then it was de rigueur.” Says the body positive Cooney, “One of my goals is to be a sexy old lady. Is that anti-feminist? I don’t think so.”
“She’s broken the mold for Egyptologists by blending hardcore scholarly pursuits with pursuits that are more in the general public sphere. She’s done a great service to the field by getting people more excited about ancient Egypt,” says Eleanor Hartwig, a curator of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian, and Near Eastern Art at Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum.
Ask Cooney what people think of her, and she replies with a laugh, “If you go to a conference of Egyptologists and ask, ‘What is Kara Cooney known for?’ you might find out I’m known for stirring things up.”
What does she think of Indiana Jones and his new female sidekick? “It’s archaeology before male fragility. He’s the masculine patriarchal academic. Putting a woman into his role to me is not feminism. When women act within a patriarchy, they act like patriarchs.”
She dismisses the Netflix series “Queen Cleopatra” as “a horrible show.” Its casting of a Black lead drew protest in Egypt. She believes its producers were in a bind. American Blacks want “a piece of Egypt, the greatest and best that antiquity could produce,” yet modern Egyptians identify more as Arabs and are European facing. “What we're talking about is power, and it makes sense that power seen through the lens of identity and race will be very emotional, hotly debated, and fiercely claimed,” she says.
Her mentor Bryan has closely followed her career and believes “I don’t know of anybody else who sees ancient Egypt the way she sees it. I think there are plenty of other outspoken people, and she knows what she wants to be outspoken about. She knows that it costs her as well as in terms of what she can and can’t accomplish inside of Egypt.”
--
Cooney has made dozens of trips to Egypt, most recently in 2022, but has not been on a dig since 1999. An object specialist, she spends most of her scholarly time on her knees in dirty old jeans crawling around coffins with an iPad in the basements of the Louvre, the Vatican Museum, the Museo Egizio in Turin, and the British Museum.
Rarely given more than a day or two for her inspections, she moves quickly (often “murmuring” to herself, she says), always under a curator’s watchful eye. She and her team of seven had only three hours to scrutinize the coffin of Ramses II in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum. “It was, like, you shoot this. You shoot that. You do the lid. You do the trunk. I'm gonna do the reuse study. Somebody else is gonna get the magnifying light. The microscopic analysis? Somebody else will do that,” she recalls.
Over the years she has inspected about 450 coffins unearthed at Abd el-Qurn and further north at Assyut and the necropolis at Saqqara. “A whole helluva lot of coffins,” Cooney muses. “I graded them like you would if you looked at a nice sweater or a nice set of sheets. There are some where I’m able to prove ‘Oh, my God, I can see from the stratigraphy [layers of paint, plaster, and varnish] this was reused four to five times.’ Those are exciting days.”
Cooney has inspected so many coffins she often can tell almost at a glance how old one is. Her value of her expertise has been challenged. “I was in a dissertation committee for a grad student working on coffins, and a professor said, ‘Oh, my God, another study on coffins! Please, can we stop this?’ ”
The feisty Cooney shot back, “That would be like saying, ‘Oh, another study on Attic [ancient Greek] vases! Can we please stop with this?’ Each of these objects is representative of a range of social questions and issues.”
When she began her coffin research 25 years ago, few Egyptologists had delved into them, and Cooney was the first to explore their social, political, and economic meanings. Today this field is so crowded a student told her he’s staying away from it, because it is “saturated” with researchers.
When she was a young scholar others dismissed her work. After she delivered a paper at a conference in Heidelberg, a colleague sniffed, “Kara, what a very imaginative paper.”
“Which part do you think I imagined?” Cooney replied.
Most coffins are in like-new condition, thanks to Egypt’s climate, and most were made bespoke for elite Egyptians during the 19th and 20th Dynasties during the Ramsesside Period from Ramses I to Ramses XI from 1295 BC to 1069 BC.
They typically come to her separate from their mummies. “They smell like something’s gone very off, like a month-old dead mouse in a house,” says Cooney who avoids handling them. “A touch could make a body part fall off.”
Almost all show signs of reuse as a result of wood shortages. This rare commodity was likely diverted for military purposes due to invasions by the Sea Peoples, a confederation of naval raiders who left little historical record.
Cooney’s research has been aided by the existence of thousands of bills, contracts, and letters left by coffin artisans of the village Deir el-Medina near the Valley of the Kings. In her book “Coffin Commerce,” Cooney likens her time traveling research to an archaeologist in the year 5000 CE “trying to reconstruct the economic system of a small Texas town of 2000 CE—thousands of years after the United States has ceased to exist, thousands of years after people had stopped using American English—using only the archaeological site of a big-box store called Walmart, in an industrial area meant for petrochemical operations with a few offices and homes intact, accompanied by millions of scraps of paper that managed to survive because the town was in a vary arid location.”
Countless generations of Egyptian lords made pilgrimages to places like Sheikh Abd el-Qurn to bury mummified loved ones. They used anthropoid (human-shaped) coffins to magically transmogrify them into God-like forms who would live for eternity. With their features painted on coffin, eyelids open, smiling in defiance of death, these Bronze Age immortals, cozy in their capsules, were as suited up and as ready for the great beyond as astronauts.
Cooney’s Theban Tomb 92 had originally been carved into the rock for Suemniut, the w’ba (royal butler) of Amenhotep II, the seventh pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt. He ruled with absolute authority from 1427 BC to 1401 BC. His reign came near the midpoint of an empire that lasted three millennia from 3150 BC to 31 BC., an expanse that dwarfs America’s 247 years.
Two hundred years after Suemniut last tasted his master’s food and guarded his royal person, Egypt fell on hard times. Wracked for decades by invaders, wood grew scarce, and his descendants reused the tomb and its coffins many times.
Hundreds of years later thieves came. They ripped open coffins, peeled away their gold leaf embellishments, and smashed them. They tore through mummy wrappings to snatch amulets, stone and ceramic shabti (tiny funerary figurines), and other treasures, leaving a whirlwind of wreckage.
Coffin reuse was a loving act, not a desecration, according to Cooney The dead were left in tombs, rituals were conducted to appease their spirits, and artisans refurbished their coffins for new users.
Cooney compares it to brides preserving their wedding dresses and giving them to daughters and granddaughters. “Because they were in the desert, Egyptians had to confront death by putting their dead away and keeping them at the same time. They had to make friends with them in a way we don’t have to,” she says.
(Befriending mummies was something Cooney had to when as a grad student she was lowered down a 20-foot shaft to spend days alone a low-ceilinged burial chamber with only a headlamp. “The first time I went there, I saw all these dead people waiting for me to record them, and I had to reach out and say, ‘Hi, dead people. It’s me.’ That was a fun memory.”)
Coffin reuse was also a way of showing other communities, society, and families how important one’s family was, according to her. She believes it was the only moral solution, because the person who had been transformed no longer needed the coffin as a vehicle for that purpose.
Her quick wit and political sensibility leads her draw 21st-century comparisons to this ancient recycling. She dubs the system “the mortuary industrial complex,” likening Deir el-Medina’s craftsmen to Lockheed Martin engineers working under Department of Defense contracts. “[The artisans] could not talk to anyone about the iconography and texts they were inscribing onto the tomb walls [of royals]....They knew too much. They were, in a sense, “the deep state” that the king needed to keep happy,” she writes.
Cooney, who calls herself “an antipatriarchal socialist historian,” views coffin reuse as a means of economic exploitation, deeming them “wedges of society” to keep the wealthy wealthy and “ideological veils” elites used to prove their affluence was God-given.
“We need to start looking at all this stuff and go, ‘Wait a minute, who owns it? Who’s got to have it? Who was hurt by somebody else taking that tree to make that coffin? Was that a tree they got shade from in their village and then some rich dude cut it down, because they're, like, this is my dad's tree or whatever? Those are questions we need to ask,” she says.
As much as she loves her field, she feels many of her colleagues are too worshipful of pharaohs to see them as the tyrants they were. “Egyptology is the white man’s treasure hunting, and that post-colonial or colonial endeavor must change,” she says. Egyptology, according to her, draws scorn from scholars in other fields, because “We’re the pharaoh’s groupies. We’re, like, ‘Oh, my God, these finds are so awesome!’ We’re so uncritical of what we’re studying that it becomes rather laughable.”
Her friend Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, smiles when she hears some of Cooney’s charges. “Kara makes grandiose statements for the sake of drama. I’m sure some very stuffy Egyptologists turn their noses, but I think most people realize what she’s doing is making Egyptology more popular.”
Whether mummies should be publicly displayed divides scholars. Many Western museums have removed them from viewing. The issue is less divisive in Egypt. Downtown Cairo witnessed in 2021 the “Pharaoh’s Golden Parade,” a five-mile regal procession of 22 mummies being relocated to a new museum. The evening extravaganza came complete with live TV coverage, a 21-gun salute, a military band, and celebrity attendees.
When the Egyptian Museum in 2019 hosted a mummy exhibition, it polled Egyptians (both Muslim and Coptic Christians) about its appropriateness. Seventy-two percent approved. They said it respected their ancient ancestors’ desire to live forever and be remembered. It also let modern Egyptians visit their ancestors and bond with them.
Cooney agrees the display of mummies is “a difficult problem,” but she has no qualms about it. “If some rich dude tricks out his body, makes a beautiful, nested coffin set, and puts it into a decorated tomb, I don't understand how you can be butthurt or surprised if somebody's coming to take your stuff, see it, or display it. If that rich person 1,000s of years ago put all of this amazing materiality with his remains, then displaying them goes with the territory.”
--
“An emotional calling.” That’s how Cooney describes her passion for Egyptology. Beyond that she says she can’t explain its fascination, though she admits her affluent childhood in Houston (“big hair, big cars, expensive things”) had something to do with it. “Those were things I rejected, and in so rejecting them, my academic interests came to the fore. That I was able to take that part of myself that was already very skeptical about this late capitalist world and put it into academic study was very useful,” she says.
The world stands at “the precipice a new human revolution,” according to her, a cataclysm that will create a post-patriarchal system. “Every crisis is the same, and every crisis is different. Senwosret III’s crisis is the same as our anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism. Akhenaten's crisis is a crisis of religious tolerance. Ramses II is a crisis of populism. Taharqa’s is a crisis of post-colonialism and imperialism, and we have all of these crises. They're all coming together.
“There is no modern exceptionalism. We think we are so different, so unique we have it figured out, but we know nothing, and Egyptians show us that. We're the same. They thought they were modern and exceptional, too, and they thought they would never go down. For 3,000 years they kind of proved it right, yet here we find ourselves,” she says. “In every single case, the patriarchy sows the seeds for its own destruction.”
Conditions in Egypt which is ruled by former Defense Minister Abel Fattah el-Sisi who came to power in a 2013 military coup distress her. She is heartbroken by the destruction of part of Cairo’s medieval City of the Dead for the construction of a new freeway as well as the loss of the grounds at the Pyramid of Djedefre near Cairo for another road. Meanwhile, the life-giving Nile’s flow has been reduced by new dams in Ethiopia and Sudan, and inflation has made it harder for Egypt’s middle class and its millions of poor people to buy everything from bread to computers and drugs.
“The people of Egypt are beloved by me. They’re stuck in a system that is not of their choosing, nor within their control. I’ll continue to go to Egypt as long as I can, but it’s not an easy time when a country goes hard nationalist,” says Cooney.
“The Egyptian population, in my opinion, is a wolf held by the ears, and it won't be long before that population decides they're too hungry to care anymore about what happens to them if they rise up. It's another destabilizing elements that a historian can see. The signs are all there.”
MORAL: Dig what you do.
For stories similar to this one, buy my book Courage 101: True Tales of Grit & Glory.