Welcome to Ask a Professor, our series that offers an insider’s view of life in academia. This month we interviewed Margaret Geoga, Assistant Professor of Egyptology at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures and the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. Geoga is also a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.
Margaret Geoga focuses on ancient Egyptian literature, especially “wisdom instructions”—rulers advising their successors, parents giving their children advice (an age-old practice!)—as well as scribal culture, textual transmission, and reception, both in ancient Egypt itself and in later periods. In an article published in Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur in 2018, Geoga analyzed funerary texts and tomb decorations to provide evidence for a reconciliation of recently introduced—and controversial—solar theology with Egypt’s more traditional constellative theology under the late 18th Dynasty ruler Horemheb. She’s currently at work on a book chronicling the complicated life of the poem The Teaching of Amenemhat. Set during the reign of King Amenemhat I (12th Dynasty Middle Kingdom), The Teaching of Amenemhat was studied and shared for about a millennium, during which its interpretation and reception shifted to reflect its changing socio-cultural and even physical context as it traveled from the capital to the provinces and beyond.
What’s something most people don’t know about your field?
That we’re finding new and exciting things all the time! I think there’s a popular conception that all the important and “sexy” things—tombs, temples, cities—were found long ago and that there’s very little left undiscovered now. But in fact we still regularly find really consequential things. Those can include more arcane things that mostly matter to other Egyptologists, such as an inscription that shows Nefertiti didn’t mysteriously disappear as we long thought she had, but they also include really glamorous things, such as entire cemeteries belonging to a dynasty of kings that we weren’t sure existed until these discoveries, first about ten years ago with another major find just this year. Finds like these royal necropolises, or the recent discovery of the tomb of King Thutmose II, or the archaeological remains of a fortress previously only attested in literary texts, can have major implications for our understanding of ancient Egyptian history, to the point that history and archaeology textbooks can quickly become outdated. The popular idea of “eternal Egypt”—according to which Egyptian culture remained largely static over the three millennia of the pharaonic era, and perhaps even longer—is wrong not only for ancient Egypt, a highly dynamic civilization, but also for Egyptology, a highly dynamic discipline. That dynamism is due in part to constant discoveries of new evidence, but also to the discipline’s inherent interdisciplinarity—Egyptologists undergo training in history, archaeology, art history, literary studies, religious studies, and many languages ancient and modern—which facilitates dialogue and collaboration with other fields, which in turn illuminate new ways of approaching our evidence and new questions we can ask about ancient Egypt.
What’s the best discovery you’ve made in your research?
For the past few years, I’ve been working on a book about an ancient Egyptian poem called The Teaching of Amenemhat, in which King Amenemhat I is assassinated by his own bodyguards and then appears to his son from beyond the grave to give him advice about the dangers and loneliness of kingship. My book investigates how this text, which was extremely popular with the ancient Egyptians and passed down for about 1,000 years, changed over time—which I explore, for example, in my article “New Insights into Papyrus Millingen and the Reception History of The Teaching of Amenemhat” and various book chapters—and especially how ancient readers interpreted the poem over time. Those readers included a wide variety of people, from bureaucrats in the capital, to scribal students in the provinces, to kings in Nubia (modern Sudan).
I think the coolest discovery I’ve made in this project is about those kings in Nubia. One of them, Taharqo (who ruled 690–664 BCE), quoted from The Teaching of Amenemhat in his new temple in the city of Kawa, almost 1,000 years after our earliest copy of the poem and hundreds of miles away from Egypt. By placing the quotations in dialogue with Taharqo’s other texts from this part of the temple, I’ve found evidence that Taharqo didn’t read this poem as describing a murder—he seems to have read it as describing a failed assassination attempt, which Amenemhat I overcame. This is so cool to find because it’s actually an unsolvable debate among Egyptologists—does the poem describe a murder, or a failed attempt? Although this seems like the most fundamental issue of the poem, it never says explicitly one way or the other (which seems to be the point, not an oversight). So it’s very exciting to find that ancient readers also had this same debate and that the poem’s ambiguity isn’t just a result of modern readers having lost some important piece of context but rather an inherent feature of the ancient text. I think this is a major reason why the poem was so popular for so long—its ambiguities make it malleable and able to be interpreted in various ways, depending on the reader’s context.
More to Explore
Making Egypt’s Museums
Do you have a favorite classroom moment?
I work at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, which includes a museum (Chicago’s best-kept secret!). I love taking my beginning Middle Egyptian students to the museum’s storage area, where they get to read texts directly from some objects that aren’t on display, usually a group of stone scarabs. The scarabs are about the size of the palm of your hand. The top is carved to look like a dung beetle, while the bottom is flat and inscribed with hieroglyphic text. During the reign of the pharaoh Amenhotep III (ca. 1350 BCE), scarabs were used almost like press releases—he sent them all over the ancient Mediterranean world to announce things like his latest marriage and his great success hunting various dangerous wild animals. ISAC has several of Amenhotep’s lion hunt scarabs. I love watching my students work through the text on these scarabs—written in hieroglyphs that look very different from the digital font they’re used to seeing in their textbook, some of them damaged from the long journey through time and space that these objects underwent to arrive to us today—and eventually get to the end to find Amenhotep’s grandiose claim that he killed 102 fierce lions all by himself. As a teacher, it’s really gratifying to watch them push through their first panicked reaction to this strange-looking text and come to realize they are in fact able to read real hieroglyphic inscriptions. There’s just something really special about being able to interact directly with ancient objects, to see them up close and personal, to touch something that an ancient Egyptian made thousands of years ago. There’s no better way to bring ancient Egypt to life. These kinds of encounters are still magical for me, even though I’ve seen these scarabs many times now, and I hope they’re magical for my students as well.
Weekly Newsletter
What’s the next big thing in your field?
In my corner of Egyptology—I do philology, or more specifically literary studies—the big thing right now is scribal culture and examining what the material features of ancient Egyptian manuscripts can tell us about how they were made, by whom, and why, and how the copyists and readers of those manuscripts experienced them. Material features can include things like ink density—there’s a theory that how often the ancient scribe dipped his brush in his inkwell and whether those dips tend to correspond with meaningful textual units can tell us how closely the copyist was engaging with the text he was writing. Material features can also include things like colophons—formulas at the end of a text that attest to its completeness and fidelity and often also include the name of the copyist—doodles in the margins, mistakes and corrections, even handwriting style. All of these qualities of a manuscript can provide insight into the person who made it. This is a big part of the book I’m working on right now, and I also recently edited a collected volume on this topic with some colleagues (Looking Beyond the Text: New Approaches to Scribal Culture and Practices in Ancient Egypt), with papers that explore new ways of accessing the experiences of the ancient scribes through the manuscripts they left behind.
What’s on your bedside table? What’s your next read?
Lamp, alarm clock, and The Count of Monte Cristo. I’ve had to institute some strict bedside table rules—no phone, no Egyptology books—to make sure I can carve out time to read for pleasure and not only for work. (We’ll see how long I can keep it up as the stack of work books waiting to be read gets taller and taller.) The Count of Monte Cristo is so long, it might still be another month (or even two!) before I’m done. As for what’s next, I’m not sure! Maybe Stoner, maybe My Cousin Rachel, maybe The Cairo Trilogy—I have a long list and will just have to see what mood strikes me.
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