The future of archaeology
When he first stumbled on the field that would become his life’s work, Peter Der Manuelian was a fourth-grader in suburban Boston. The object of his attention was 5,000 years old. He was transfixed by ancient Egypt. “It was the first time a subject grabbed me,” said Manuelian ’81, who is Harvard’s first Egyptologist since 1942, and who realizes that a childhood fascination with pyramids usually goes the way of dinosaurs and superheroes. “Most people grow out of it. I never did.” It was the vast scale of things he fell in love with — the huge pyramids, and the three millennia that Egypt was an unwavering civilization of pharaohs and deities and social systems as stable as salt beds. Of course there were the mummies too, and the gorgeous art, and the puzzle of the language written in hieroglyphs. Sustaining his interest through the years was the incomparable collection of Egyptian artifacts...