Egyptologist talks cultural origins at Hierakonpolis

“It sounds like a bad joke. Eight Dogs, six cats and a baboon walk into a bar….”

These are the words of Egyptologist Renee Friedman, describing her experience excavating a burial site in Hierakonopolis, Egypt, containing multiple animals that some believed served as guardians and protectors of the site.

Friedman gave a lecture last night in the Smith Memorial Student Union to talk about the most recent discoveries in Hierakonopolis–a city about 400 miles south of Cairo that is often associated with the origins of Egyptian society.

The city is the site of the first pharaohs, as well as the development of structures which the Egyptian pyramids were deliberately modeled after.

Friedman is not your typical Egyptologist, however during the presentation she cracked some jokes, and called Hierakonpolis “the Milwaukie of upper Egypt.”

Friedman and a team of archaeologists spent the last 25 years investigating the site, which before 3100 B.C. (what is known as the Predynastic period in Egyptian history) was called Nekhen.

One point of emphasis Friedman made at the event, which was co-sponsored by the Oregon Chapter of the American Research Center, and the Middle East Studies Center and PSU, was how old some of the relics in the city are.

Some of wooden structures in Hierakonpolis, which were still standing and being utilized a thousand years after being built, date back to 3700 B.C., she said.

“These objects were old even as Egyptian civilization was being formed,” Friedman said.

Because of their extreme age, Friedman said, most artifacts found are incomplete in one way or another.

“Most statues found are missing a nose or their ears…we only had the nose and the ears and needed the statue,” she said, describing an ancient funerary mask found at the site.

In recent years, Friedman’s main mission has been the restoration of a mud-brick fort–the oldest in the world–which has been defaced and looted for thousands of years, and then further damaged by clumsy archeologists who sped up the structure’s deterioration by destroying it’s foundation in the early 20th century.

“It’s hard to investigate a building that is falling down,” Friedman said. “It doesn’t matter how high the wall is when there’s no ground there.”

Waking before the sun rises too avoid working in temperatures reaching 110 degrees at 10 a.m., Friedman and a group of dedicated locals recreated mud bricks in the structure in the same way that it was built thousands of years ago, she said.

Afterwards, they raised ground levels to help structure the walls by taking buckets of sand, one-by-one, and relocating it at the site.

This past season, when her team had only eight days left to work, Friedman said one of the walls was quickly beginning to crumble and that they couldn’t wait a moment longer to reinforce it.

Without the time or means to reconstruct it properly, Friedman and her team created columns to hold up the structure and placed their own pillows against the columns to keep the ancient brick, in place.

“Nobody had a pillow to sleep on for the last eight days,” Friedman said. “Maybe this way, if it feels like falling, it can just take a nap instead,” she laughed, relating to a joke she had made at the time.

Another discovery was that of an ancient brewery where native people once made wheat-based beer, Friedman said. Next year she plans to bring the same wheat they would have used back to the site and experiment with recreating the same exact beverage, she said.

Friedman studied Egyptian archaeology and graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1994, and has been working at many different sites across Egypt since 1980. In 1996, Friedman became the director of the Hierakonpolis Expedition, the name of the investigation.

To close the event Friedman asked the audience to remember the historical significance of her discoveries.

“Although their names may have been forgotten over time, the memory of their accomplishments never was lost,” she said.