Meet the Museum: Gold of the Desert

Julien Cooper: Thank you to the WA museum and special thanks to Heather Tunmore and to Jim as well for inviting me, allowing me to speak here. I'm pretty psyched to speak about gold in WA of all places. Let's say in this lecture theater is probably the most distracting lecture as a tourist coming to Perth, so if I glance at the window I apologize. I also apologize to those high school teachers in the audience today who may have heard some of this before, but most of it will be new. What I'm going to talk about today is really two intertwined topics. In the first part of the presentation, I'm going to go through Egypt's history with gold, its fascination of gold, how it got gold. And then I'm going to weave that into my own projects from the Australian Research Council and Macquarie University, which is called the Atbai Survey project. You can see it in that logo at the end, which is investigating the gold mining region of eastern Sudan. But it's a lot more expensive than that, addressing issues of heritage, how we protect archeology, and also what we can do in the face of modern threats.

Egyptology. Most of you know about ancient Egypt in this audience I bet, to some degree, some more than others. It's got a very well known history. We always frame it from these periods, early dynastic, this is when Egypt forms as a unified country all the way to the current modern period. I'm not going to bore you with all these names and phases at the moment, but for this presentation, it's important to tell you that doesn't matter what period of Egyptian history we are from 3000 BC and onwards they were always mining gold, they were always using gold, they were always interested in gold. And the gold mines change, the techniques change, lots of things change from period to period, but they're always crossing this desert over long period of history. And the reason why that's important is from the origins of Egyptian history they seem to have a fascination with gold, it actually starts well before 3000 BC when they form. And the other question I want to address here is, is this actually a story of Egypt? What I'm going to show you today is that most of the gold mines are not within the political boundaries of what we would call ancient Egypt. They're well into the deserts. You all know Egypt as a civilization, the Nile, the Niles where everyone lives. 99% of the population back then and almost the same today. And in the ancient past roughly similar. So when they went into the deserts they weren't really going into the lands that we would say were politically within the territory of Egypt. It definitely is within the territory of the modern republic of Egypt. But areas that were occupied by other people, areas occupied by nomads. And the East Nubian deserts are where they got the majority of this gold from. And it doesn't matter if we're talking about Tutankhamun's golden mask, coins from the Umayyad or Abbasid Caliphate of Islamic times, or Kushite gold, which is this... if I can get my cursor, at the top here from the royal kingdoms of Nubia and Sudan. All of this gold came from the eastern deserts, and it was very difficult to get to the eastern deserts. It's very hard, there's lots of politics, of conflict, lots of difficult logistics. And what I want to do is talk about this story, how Egyptians got there, how Nubians got there, who was at the goldfields, who's doing the mining, who's receiving the gold and what they did with it.

Now most studies of gold in Egyptology focus on something like this. I think everyone's pretty chilled out and you can see why they would do that. This is gold jewelry. It's famous. Tutankhamun really signified the connection between ancient Egypt's jewelry, gold and all these things now popular imagination. So if you, you know, see anything from the Metropolitan Museum, British Museum, the Louvre, Berlin Museum, gold objects are always front and center. So it's always part of our popular imagination of Egyptology that we look at gold. There's been so many studies in Egyptology of the composition of gold jewelry, of how they construct gold jewelry, the metallurgical techniques, how they’re splicing gold with copper, silver to make different tinges, all these sorts of things. And I think this is fantastic. We know so much about the gold craftsmanship and manufacture, but when you compare that to the gold mining itself, going to the gold mines, excavating gold, the politics of gold, how does it go back to Egypt, how does it get circulated in Egyptian history, that's much less well known. And then the same thing could be said of the Kushites. This is the kingdom of ancient Sudan, the Kushites have a sort of more obscure history and most popular imagination, not front and center in museums, not front and center even in most history books. But Kushite history is important. These are the brothers and sisters of Egyptians on the Nile. They shared the Nile, and for most of the history they shared the gold fields of the Egyptians. So the gold fields weren't only accessed by ancient Egyptians, they were accessed by the Kushites. The Kushites even invaded Egypt in certain periods. So it's not like Egypt is always the big brother with the big pyramids and the big temples. The Kushites in what's called the 25th dynasty of Egyptian history even controlled all of Egypt. So sometimes the gold wasn't even accessed by Egypt, and there's a geopolitics to all this. And we know this very well today with things like oil, gold, gas, how there's always a geopolitics to these precious resources. And then we have gold mining today and none of these arguments, none of these things have changed really. In Africa today, there's a gold mining boom, especially in North East Africa, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, going into West Africa as well. And this has caused a quite detrimental effect on the local archeological sites. But for me going into eastern Sudan in my fieldwork, it's also very informative to see the sort of combinations and social effects that are happening in modern gold mining also would have happened in ancient gold mines.

The modern gold mines, this is what you can see on this image, is a large gold mining company mining an open pit mine. That wasn't really the technique in the past, but the modern Beja people, the indigenous nomads in eastern Sudan, still use traditional techniques to process gold. We call that artisanal gold mining. They're using sometimes even stone tools to crush gold, so that's not so different to the ancient past. So it's both informative for my work, but also in the same parts, destructive. Artisanal gold miners often don't know that where they’re mining there is an ancient mine, or it is an ancient mine. And some artisanal miners, some quite clever artisanal miners, read academic literature and use academic literature to fund modern mines, as in they find ancient gold mines and use that as a prospecting technique. They know where there's ancient gold mines, and then they open that up as a modern gold mine, because they know there will be gold there. And so part of my research is trying to document that as a resource for archeologists and heritage officials, which is going to be lost. We can't say it will be there forever, because there's so much gold mining taking place in this province that we will lose some of the ancient gold mines.

But this fascination of gold in ancient Egypt isn't just in our modern eyes. In fact, in the international world, it existed in what we call the Bronze Age of the East Mediterranean and Near East. Everyone else knew about Egyptian gold. I think this is quite a humorous sort of complaint. This is from the Amarna letters. This is a set of famous documents that tells us about the politics between kings in the Near East and in Egypt, and they write to each other, dear brother, can you send me some soldiers? Can you send me some nice palace furniture? Can you send me your harem? All this sort of stuff. And in this the king of Assyria writes to Akhenaten or Tutankhamen, we're not really sure who's the recipient. In the language of Akkadian, the gold is in your land like dust. You just go anywhere and find it. One simply gathers it up. Why are you so sparing in it? I'm engaged in building a new palace. Send me as much gold as needed for it's an adornment. There's not really much pleases and thank you’s here, it's more just give me, give me, give me. In a later letter, they complain the Egyptians send him a gold statue, but he says it's only gold leaf. I wanted a solid gold statue. So I think some of this has been possibly exaggerated through the grapevine, in the Near East, as to how much gold Egypt had. But Egypt was special in this case because it was so well integrated into international trade routes, and there is definitely not as much profit to be had from the gold fields as say, in Iran and Iraq. There is gold in those places, especially Turkey as well, but not the same sort of metric tons and not the same accessibility we have in the Eastern desert of Egypt.

And then Egyptians had a religious aspect to gold. It wasn't just something that they could make into jewelry, and as I said that's really nice. And everyone, I don't think I need to explain especially WA, why gold is special in its mineral properties. It doesn't waiver, it doesn't tarnish, doesn't shine, can be made into lots of objects. And so gold is something that we're always going to find special. And Egyptians, like a lot of ancient peoples, attached religious properties to those special things in nature.

So in this text, it’s a famous religious text The Destruction of Mankind, they talk about the sun god Ra, one of the most important gods especially in early Egypt. His bones are silver. I think most people can understand that, white silver. His flesh is gold. So that's what they imagined Ra’s flesh at. His hair true Lapis lazuli, this blue stone. So they imagined the gods as being comprised of gold. Sometimes the gods were the gold, sorry, gold was the flesh of the gods. And then you go from something like this. You know all about religion, all about ideology, or about what Egyptians imagined gold to be.

And then we need to get into the nitty gritty, how they're actually mining it. This is what an average gold mine looks like, an average ancient Egyptian gold mine. These are difficult places to access. These are difficult places to live at. These, at the bottom of the image, are just some simple gold miners huts where they're not only lived and probably slept, but also crushed to gold itself. There was no separation of work and home. And we know that this is a difficult place to access. And some scholars and economists wonder, not just for gold, but for other Egyptian minerals (They mine lots of stones and gemstones in the desert as well) Why are they doing this? Egypt doesn't have a monetary economy at this point. Egypt is not minting gold coins. Egypt is not collecting gold for stockpile, for trade surplus. Egypt is not collecting company tax like Australia from gold mines. How do they, why do they do get all this stuff?

We get some sort of indication, and there's a big debate in scholarship. Is this a rational economy? Is this something they're trying to do to make themselves rich, make more money? And a lot of this is to do with royalty and how they distribute gold. We think in most of Egyptian history that royalty has a monopoly on gold. They're not letting it distribute into what we'd call private circulation. If there is even such a sort of concept, they're not letting it go into the market economy. They're keeping it and stockpiling it in temples and the palace and that's what we have fantastic gold masks like Tutankhamen, but we don't get gold coinage like you might have in Greco-Roman history in later times. We get a little indication of this in this text. This is a text from a King of the New Kingdom, Seti I, who was very active in the gold mines. He’s so active he constructed a little temple in the desert called Kaniais. And he says, in this temple I was getting gold, not for general use but to gild all the statues. He specifically sends a gold mining expedition to gild statues. So this gives us an indication that they're not just getting gold willy nilly, they're not just getting gold randomly, they want gold for specific purposes. So that gets me into my questions. Where does the gold come from? Who mined it? How is it organized? and What issues did the miners face? And that'll bring me into this discussion about the nomads.

So this is an image here of the gold mining regions, the Arabian and Nubian Shield they're called in geological terms. This is basically, within this blue zone anywhere in it, it's possible to access gold. How accessible it is on the surface varies. Generally speaking, they mined gold out of wadi’s, alluvial gold. Wadi’s are, sorry, desert valleys. Sometimes they excavate quartz veins on the side of hills as well. This is the whole system, and these yellow dots are where modern / ancient mines have been found. So you can see scattered throughout this whole area are gold mines. And these are easily accessible on satellite photos today. So we can start seeing them. But what we've found for our research is that we're nowhere near a complete understanding of where they've gone to mine gold. In fact, if I colored in all the gold mines you probably couldn't see the landscape under the map, it's just everywhere. This all started, I should say we don't really know when it started, but one of the theories when it started was from this excavation. This is deep from the desert where I've worked at Eastern Sudan, but it was well before my time.

In 1997, an archeologist called Karim Sadr went to a place called Wadi Elei. And at Wadi Elei he found a Neolithic burial from roughly the fifth millennium BC, just on the cusp of when agriculture arrived in Sudan. And this is the pit here. The excavated. And in this pit he found gold objects. Now, unfortunately, some of these burials have been reused, so we can't quintessentially say if these gold objects hailed from that period. And this is a very isolated gold find in the sense of chronology, you'd have to go another, maybe 500 or 700 years before you have the next gold object. So this is quite out of place. Sadr’s idea was that these pits, which look identical to Neolithic burials, and may even have been Neolithic burials, was the beginning of gold workings.The Neolithic nomads of this region, you would argue, in making holes in the ground and probably just traversing up and down wadis, have spotted this metal. And gold is much easier to form, you can do a technique called cold hammering at some low heat, then say something like copper, tin, iron in later times.

In Egypt we need to go a little bit further in time to get some gold objects, and this is from the prehistoric or the pre dynastic Egyptian period. There's this beautiful mace head, from the borderlands of Egypt and Nubia, which is now lost unfortunately. It was in an Egyptian museum. And this is gilded with gold. There's no color photograph unfortunately, it was lost before colour photograph taken. A Polish expedition to a place called Tell el-Farkha, in the north of Egypt, found this figurine gilded in gold. So already in prehistoric times, they're playing around with gold in precious objects. All of that increases as Egypt increases its administrative talents, its strength of its empire, and its policy in state. By the Old Kingdom, you can probably figure out from the time of pyramids, Egypt had been strongly unified. Economically all the provinces now banded together, they could force a huge military. They had huge economic surpluses and with that came gold mining expeditions. As part of the same state apparatus that produced the pyramids they also produced mining ventures. In fact, some of the people that worked at the pyramids, the very people that would shift the blocks, were working in copper mining ventures in the Sinai, or they were getting other precious materials. So this is part of the same administrative apparatus. The state was already in control of gold mining. And we call this the expeditionary apparatus, because they're going so far into the desert. This is not like they walk out of the Nile Valley and their homes and then hop, skip and a jump to a gold mine. This is weeks or days of journey through a desert with little water, a donkey caravan, they did not yet have access to camels. Camels would come about 300 B.C. or later, so they still had millennia of desert travel without the hardy camel. And the donkey is much less useful in the desert due to its watering requirements. And we already get some indication of this, that they're trying to organize this gold supply, they're trying to map out this desert. And they have this text from the reign of the king called Djedkare into 2300 BC. He speaks about the tribute and the things that are coming to his temple, to Djedkare’s temple. Individual Egyptian kings had their own temples to themselves, it’s a bit arrogant I know, and they speak about the land of gold and electrum. Where that was in this text we're not really sure. Likely just means Nubia and the desert. And then there’s three places he mentions, Batj, Senseh, and Hezetj I have no idea where they are, but they must have been places where gold was mined.

This gets turbocharged by the Egyptian New Kingdom. The New Kingdom empire, the empire of Tutankhamen, of Amenhotep, of Ramses, was an expansive empire. It controlled foreign lands, it controlled the Levant, controlled portions of Libya, it controlled Sudan. And this, in this period, they needed to organize their gold into various provinces. And they did so, and we have officials who we know are in charge of various provinces, just like concessions you might have in WA or in other parts of the world. They organized all this very methodically. They had officials in charge of the whole gold supply, officials in charge of individual gold mining areas, all the way down to the lowly gold miners themselves, who often died on these expeditions. And they organize it by sort of the nearest city on the Nile. So east of Egypt itself was the gold of Coptos. Coptos was the main city for accessing the Eastern desert. Then gold of Wawat. Gold of Wawat is important, Wawat is what we call Lower Nubia. The regions just adjacent to Egypt. Kush, there was also some gold supply on the Nile. Kush is the heartland of Nubia, the agricultural heartland. That's where the center of the kingdom was. And there's some indications that they sailed down the Red Sea to get gold in a place called Amu and later Punt, which is somewhere in Eritrea and Sudan. Why this is amazing is because it just takes a long time to get to these places. With the technology they had in the day and the maritime skills on the Red Sea coast, this was not an easy voyage.

We get some idea of the weight of gold that they're getting from this same Pharaoh, Thutmose III. He was the Pharaoh responsible for expanding Egypt boundaries so far, and in these annals, in his sort of texts, he says what happens year by year. He's really obsessed with tribute, most Egyptian kings love talking about the tribute and things they get from afar. He talks about different gold supplies from different places. Some of that is foreign places in Palestine, the Levant. So he's conquered foreign states and they have their own gold, and he's taking it. Some of it is gold that's coming out of the ground, and he doesn't distinguish between the two. So it's a little bit confusing here where the gold is coming from. Usually the small amounts of gold are coming from conquest. So that's where he's taking gold from foreign people after conquering them. When you get the big amounts of gold, particularly what I put in bold from Wawat, that's indications he's mining gold. And his official expeditions have gone into this desert east of Sudan, east of Nubia, to mine gold from Wawat. And the biggest weights are this. Deben is the weight in Egyptian hieroglyphs for gold, copper, these sorts of things. Gold's deben, an individual Debenn was considered, argued by scholars as either 45g or 13g. So 2000 deben, you get the idea. They're not getting metric tons of gold out of the ground. A few scholars think possibly in Egyptian history they got a couple of tons. Some put it up as like 5 or 10 tons compared to, I guess, what they're finding in Kalgoorlie it's not that much. But for ancient technology, they can't build deep shaft mines and all these sorts of things, it's quite a lot of gold.

What did they do with all this gold? This is where it gets a bit fuzzy and difficult. So some of it comes from these mines in the desert and it'll get to the temple. And we know from gold receipts we have one text which actually talks about the journey of gold from the desert to a temple and then an official in the temple receives it. It's like a receipt that you would get if you were a new, sorry, Amazon delivery driver or something like that, you sign for it. And a temple official signed for the gold. And then temples in Egypt seem like an odd place, like why would you put gold in the temple? Temples in Egypt were like, I would say, like Amazon and Twitter, X combined, they were the biggest institutions in the country. They controlled everything. They controlled workshops, they controlled agricultural taxation, they controlled literally every sort of major economic output, and they controlled all the labour. And ostensibly the king was in control of this, but it needed to go through the temple. So the temple is controlling all this gold. And in this inscription of Ramses III in the New Kingdom, he's telling us on these temple reliefs where the golds come from, and these are the sort of bags of gold. He's not only talking about gold here, like up here, he's talking about incense. Just as important, just as wealthy for Egyptians. Here is the word for lapis lazuli, so they're always talking about this blue stone. But what sort of interest to me is he talks about gold, and not only talks about gold, he's talking about the origins of gold. So it shows you where the gold is coming from, individual cities, and sometimes even the weights. And here he just says gold of the foreign land. It's not quite certain what he means when he says gold of his hill country. We think ‘his’, the pronoun, refers to the god Amun, as if the god Amun is actually the person that owns the gold.

We have some indication, and this is a unique document, there's only one of its type and is the only one of its type for thousands of years almost. It's a geological papyrus. It's basically a map how to get to the gold fields, and only one set of gold fields out of all the like hundreds and hundreds of gold mines, this is the only one we have. The map was not made for gold miners, but it shows where the gold mines are. And we know this from the place names in this map that this is Wadi Hammamat. It's only a few days east of Coptos. This is probably one of the most easily accessible mines, for Egyptians to access. And it was also where they mined a stone called greywacke, which was used in statues and palettes and sarcophagus and things like that. So this map had multiple purposes. The main text at the top of it actually relates to mining greywacke, but it's almost like the map was made as an afterthought for gold miners. Like while you're here, and Egyptian miners did this, if they were going far away they didn't just take one object, one mineral, they’d say, well while you're here can you get some gold? While you mine gold can you get Galena? Galena is the lead eye paints they would use. While you're here can you set up an expedition on the Red Sea. They're very sort of multi-talented and multi resource.

So a closer look at the map, you see some of the labels here. For gold you can see up here, mountains of gold. They also constructed a shrine next to the gold mine. So there’s enough miners coming here regularly that they want to conduct their regular sort of religious rituals and social life, which meant giving small offerings to a God. And this is really important in mining situations, and it's not just the only place where we have temples and shrines in mining situations, probably because it's so dangerous. They needed to offer to the gods to make sure they could survive all this. So the circulation, they mined the gold, they refine it a little bit in the desert, possibly some refining is done in Egypt as well. We're not really sure how that works. Most of the major gold mines are at water sources, so we think all of the refining was done there, they purified it in other words. Then it comes back to what Egyptians called the treasury. Treasury could be in the palace or the temple or both. Mold could come, sorry, gold could come from the extraction from mines, it could come from the taxation of foreign countries, it could come from royal diplomatic exchange. Egypt usually lost out in that regard, Egypt needed to give more gold and it received. A lot of it was lost through this one, getting craft into gold objects. This answers one of our questions as Egyptologist, why we see so many royal tombs being robbed. That's not something that happens thousands of years later. That happens sometimes a generation or two later after a royal burial. We have evidence of many of the royal burials in the Valley of the Kings being robbed, maybe a generation after the royal burial sometimes less, and police even found people snooping around royal burials quite closely after. In general, Egyptian culture did not sanction this, and we have some texts which actually tell you about the punishments by death of what would happen if you robbed a royal burial. But what we know of Tutankhamun's tomb, there is a lot of gold in royal burials, and this is a problem for circulation because some of it became uncirculated. If it was staying within the temple workshops and so forth, you could refashion it, you could do something else with it. And there's no reason to think that this isn't what happened to most gold. You know, all of gold was refashioned and ended up becoming Roman gold coins and such because you can just remelt it just like you can of copper and iron and all these things. A very, very small amount went to private economy. But in general, we think most of it was facilitated through this treasury, in this palace temple. Some of it was exchanged for foreign goods, but we've only got a very small amount of texts that say that. This is still like an area of research and I don't think we're going to solve this new Egyptology unless we find new data.

And then we know that not everything was well in the gold industry. Just like in modern times, it's especially the case in Sudan, where some gold is taken through non-government channels and non-official channels. In Egypt, the officials in charge of gold circulation also nicked gold and stole gold. So in this text, which is the text of Seti from this rock in Sudan called Nauri, he says a warning. It's basically a big warning to Egyptian officials who are operating in Sudan, as to any overseer of the fortress, that's the people in charge of the fortresses that protects Egypt. Any scribe to the fortress, any inspector of the fortress who shall take gold, ivory, leopard skins, draft tails, other products I get from Sudan, punishment should be done to him with 100 blows and things will be taken from his as forfeit of the temple. This gold ritually, religiously, belongs to the temple. Anyone intervening in the gold supplies is to be punished.

Now how did they get it? When I went, first went to Goldfields, the understanding in Egyptology was because we have Egyptian pottery and Egyptian artifacts in the goldfields, the likelihood is just Egyptians going into the goldfields and mining it. And we do have some texts that showed exactly doing that. But then something like this crops up and that makes me change my mind about a lot of it. This middle Kingdom inscription from a guy called Sahathor, he says, I made a mine in my youth, he’s basically saying how good he is as an official, and I press the chiefs to watch gold. The chiefs, literally here, refers to rulers in Nubia. So he's pushing them to mine gold. Whether that means. They're pressing them in the sense of something like labor and pushing the laborers in Nubia to mine gold, or whether he's just taxing them in gold and saying, you guys in Nubia, I will invade you if you don't bring gold. We're not really sure.

But this seems to be the case when you look at New Kingdom tribute texts and tomb scenes. So this is from an official in the reign of Amenhotep III. His name is also Amenhotep, Amenhotep Huy. This is one of the biggest tribute scenes we have of Nubians bringing various things from the Southlands. And in that inscription, they bring different things, they bring giraffes, they bring cattle. And then at the end you can see on these plates at the ends they've got gold rings, and the Nubians themselves have gold earrings, everything is gold. And in the new kingdom Egypt controlled all of Sudan. So this tribute does not seem to be anything relating to Egyptians personally mining gold. The Egyptians are somehow taxing, exacting in tribute, we don't know the social mechanism. But what we do understand is whatever the politics be, that they demanded gold come from the Nubians. What that means is Nubians had their own gold industry well before the Egyptians showed up in Nubia, there were Nubians mining gold. And it's quite difficult to detect their gold mines, but we do have indications at various sites of the nomads mining gold. They leave much smaller traces than the Egyptians, probably smaller expeditions or something like this, and they may have even mined gold on the Nile itself. When you have alluvial gold coming down watercourses, it could end up in the main channel of the river. So you could literally go to the banks of the Nile, and especially in the region of the fourth cataract, and you can see gold specks, gold sand on the River Nile. So there's all these reasons to suspect that the Nubians were stockpiling and mining gold themselves. We just don't have as much archeology to go with it, especially in this period.

When it comes to working and looking for gold mines themselves in the gold fields, groundbreaking, sorry, groundbreaking expedition of Dietrich and Rosemarie Klemm, Germans, organized this large gold mining survey and is found in these black dots here, for example, gold mines all throughout eastern Sudan. This is basically the same area I work in. And this is some of the archeology you find at goldmines, these hammer stones, these millstones for crushing gold. And generally speaking, you would find something like this, a gold working settlement where lots and lots of gold was crushed, where the gold miners lived. And this is from Byzantine times, so Greco Roman times. But the gold mining settlements on the right are New Kingdom, they don't really change that much. They’re small houses where miners lived, crushed gold, and then processed it and took it onto the Nile. We only know that they're from a different date, from the artifacts we find within the settlements. Sometimes there’s other things like washing tables. You have these rotary millstones, that's where gold is really pulverized with like a milling action you would see and say like a flour mill. And the bread and butter of all what we do in archeology, we wouldn't be able to date all of these sites if it wasn't for the pottery. Each pottery style is distinctive enough to say, this is a Greek mine, this is an Arab mine, this is a New Kingdom mine. And often we find all of them at the same mine. And that's pretty obvious, because if you're an ancient prospector looking for a mine, the easiest thing to do is just copy your predecessor and find their mine and make it bigger, make it deeper, work in the next valley, all that sort of stuff.

So what we're finding, which is quite irritating for me as an archeologist, is you sort of publish in a work, and I've fell foul of this, and you say so this is definitely a New Kingdom mine. And then you find Greek pottery on the edge of it next year, and your like ahh it's Greek as well. And then next year, your like, Oh, I actually found some Arab pottery, too. And then it’s Arab. I've even found one where it's British China from the 1800s, and then it’s like, so it's used in every period, and that makes it a bit of a struggle. Gold mines are pretty expansive, so you can't survey the whole thing at once.

So the Egyptians getting there. We know some of the ways they got there. Actually, we know some of the exact routes. And this is Ramses II, famous pharaoh, talking about how great he is at supplying the gold miners with water. He’s not a modest pharaoh. He says there is much gold land in Akuyata. Akuyata is east of Lower Nubia, it’s a specific valley, but the road to it is extremely difficult because of the water problem. If even a few of the gold washing prospectors went there, it was only half of them ever arrived. So half of them are dying for dehydration. Then he says, he boasts, that King Manmaatre, King Manmaatre is his predecessor, Seti I his other name. In his time, he had them dig a well 120 cubits deep, that's 60m. That's incredible for an ancient well. Even modern wells in Sudan, made with modern techniques and instruments, power tools often don't get to that depth. They can, but they don't usually in the deserts I work in. But it was abandoned, unfinished as no water came out of it. And then he goes on to boast that I made even bigger well and it's great, everyone survived and game over, well done, allall come home for chips and beer.

This text is unique. It's the only one we have of its type, and it talks about the individual gold miners. And this is great for me because all of these royal texts give one image. This gives me a down to earth image of what's going on. It's written in hieratic, which is cursive hieroglyphs, talks about all these gold miners, and we have their names. One of them's called Kener, one of them's called Kissinet. One of them, I'll make you guys pronounce that third one. Anyone want to have a go? Patjauemdiamun is how you maybe say that. Kenamon, Panehesy, Pthahmose. A kite or a Kidet is one tenth of a deben, so one tenth of 13g. So that's the sort of small amounts of gold they're getting. But I showed this to colleagues in Sudan and other geologists, and that's actually pretty standard for what artisanal gold miners would still get in modern Africa. So if they didn't have access to modern refining techniques and that sort of thing. So they're getting something similar to what you would get in modern gold mining times and modern gold mining techniques if you had similar technology. And I think that's really amazing. But these guys are mining with pretty good techniques. They would have been good at their job. They are specialists like this guy, Kener, is called ‘Great one of the desert’ or ‘Great one of the hill country’. He knows what he's doing, he knows where the mines are. And not in this papyrus but in another copy of this, we actually see that Kener is getting consistently more gold than the rest of the crew. So he knows he's good at the stuff. And then after collecting all that gold together, after several expeditions, they register how much it is and then they say that the official who took it at the temple.

The gold miners weren't all low laborers, some of them were scribes. And in both these inscriptions we have scribes, and they’re not just called scribes, they’re called the counters of gold. These are literate Egyptians who were writing down what they found, and they were the ones producing these texts. And these literate Egyptians, the counters of gold, wrote their inscription in the desert near a gold mine. Not ever at the gold mine, which I still don't understand, but near a gold mine. If we look at all these together, and I tabulated this just recently, you get this pretty crazy map of where all the Egyptian prospectors scribes were going. This is only where literate people are going. Most Egyptians, something like 95%, are not literate so they wouldn't leave a rock inscription. But all these gold officials are going into desert, you can see this massive cluster just here. So this area here has 193, sorry, 93 inscriptional sites just in that place and the rest of it is 193. This also includes inscriptions related to other gemstones in the Sinai in the northern eastern desert, but all these inscriptions down here are basically related to gold mining.

If you map it a bit closer, you get something like this. You get the red lines, the channeling, major valleys and wadis, and inscriptions you can see a cluster along these valleys. Still with only 1 or 2 of them are actually at the physical gold goldmine. They're all on the way or on the way back and I still don't know whether these inscriptions were made on the way to a gold mine or on the way back. They're not narrative inscriptions, they don't tell me anything about like what they did at the gold mine or did they have a good time, or did they get lots of deben. They just say the name gatherer of gold, that's it. We do know things were pretty dicey at the gold mines though. These texts, also now lost. A hand copy was published by a German academic and I retranslated it recently. And this talks about the complexities of the expedition in the sense of mercenaries and escorts. The expeditions it seems like often got attacked or murdered. And you can see why when the expedition is so small, like that papyrus before is only six miners. So some of the desert activity was quite difficult.

In this text, it's a little bit complex, Ramessesnakht, an Egyptian, writes to what he calls the feathered Nubians. I think the feathered Nubians means Nubians on his side, on Egyptian side. They have some names, Anytna, Sisenut, Terebdidi. And they were going to this country called Akuyta to mine gold. And then they have a military escort, so these Nubians are not Nubians mining golds they're Nubians who are the military escort. And they seem to be literate because they're writing the letter directly to these Nubians. And he says, when my letter reaches you, you will establish yourselves in a gold working settlement. So just stay in the gold workers settlement, protect the gold miners until supplies which are sent to you under the responsibility of my scribe and retainer reach you. And you should look after the miners and gold washers, don't attack them, look after them. And make it so that the Shasu may not attack them. Now Shasu we know from other records are the nomads who live in the north. These are not Egyptians either, these are nomads in the northern desert, living all the way into Palestine, Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia, etc. and these nomads were attacking the Egyptians in the gold mines and murdering their parties. But these Nubian mercenaries weren't really all that helpful after all, because the Egyptian has to warn them in the last sentence here, this is the kicker, and “you must not come into the land of Egypt” yourselves. You're not allowed to come to Egypt. Apparently they weren't all that reliable, and from time to time when they didn't want to help the Egyptians they attacked the Egyptians.

So life wasn't all that easy in the mines. And this gets us into the topic of just who were these people in the mining region. Today I work in eastern Sudan, they are the Beja people. They speak a continuous language from the border of Egypt and Sudan, right down to the Eritrean border. That language is called Beja, from the Arabic, we call it that in English. In their own language they call it Bidhaawyeet. These people seem to be a continuum of historical people since ancient Egyptian times. And I've even published linguistic material that says it was the same language, like say 2000 BC. An Egyptian called them Medjay, in classical documents they called them Blemmyes. They're even depicted in churches in Europe as the head was Blemmyes. Shakespeare even talks about them. So they're kind of well known in the Christian world, usually for raiding Egypt and Sudan. The Arabs talk about them in much more detail, because the Arabs actually started traveling, living and making their own communities in these deserts. The Egyptians would just go to the desert mine and come back. The Arabs, when they invaded Egypt and Africa, they had a much more intimate relationship with eastern Sudan, the Beja. This historian, Al-Tabari, one of the well-known Arab geographers, says the Beja killed many Muslims who were working in the mines to extract stones and gold. He made prisoners from among the children and women, and had ostentatiously claimed that the mines belonged to them because they were in their own country. That sounds pretty familiar to us, doesn't it? I think when I when I say this in some countries, as in Australia, is like, yeah, that makes it. So that seems fairly reasonable right, that they all needed some profit sharing. One other scholar, Maqrizi and Yaqut even talk about the Beja taxing the Arab miners coming. So the Beja do want part of the profit of their mining lands.

So when I started my project, my project did become about Egyptology and Egyptian content in the mines, and Egyptian interaction to mines. But I needed, I think, front and center to put the Beja people in this image, not only historically, but the Beja today. This is an image of what the Beja looks like in their desert. This is a standard Beja nomadic camp that we visited in, say like, 2018. Mat tents, little stick fences for corralling goats. They now keep camels. They kept camels from about the birth of Christ onwards. And this is the Beja of the Hadendowa group in the southern deserts, and that's them keeping a mixed herd of cattle, goats and camel, which is quite exceptional. Usually they trade off camel and cattle. In the southern most environment of this desert you get maybe 150mm of rainfall, which is enough for them to keep cattle very low, very small cattle, in very low quantities. Most of the desert looks like this, where you can only keep goats and camel today, and they would have had donkeys as well.

So to sort of balance all this image, I started this project, the Atbai Survey Projects as a capitalizing on my previous work in Sudan. And it has a few goals. One is like say, textbook is what you'd expect an archeologist, an historian interested in Egypt is doing. We’ve got ten left, is that right? We're looking at the gold mines, we're looking at remote sensing, trying to analyze heritage sites, and we're engaging with the local Beja community through their own center. It's called the Beja Cultural Studies Center. The Beja haven’t always felt part of the main conversation in Sudan, they are minority groups. There are about 5 to 7% of the population, so they feel like they need a greater voice in the history of Sudan. Sudan, you might know, it's not just one ethnic group it's about 70 different ethnic linguistic groups. So there's a very complex dynamic, both playing out today and in the past relating to their heritage. And then we want to influence this through heritage protection through various NGOs and other authorities.

As part of this, we need to launch quite difficult archeological expeditions into the desert. This is of course isn't happening now due to the conflict in Sudan, but before the conflict and I hope as soon as the conflict is over, we fit out two Land Cruisers and Hilux’s with enough supplies for a month of archeological material, water, food, petrol. I got to say it's quite difficult compared to the archeology I did before, which was based on the Nile and in Egypt. But that's part of the fun for someone like me that enjoys hiking and mountaineering in my spare time, I sort of enjoy these sort of aspects to archeological life. You can see a route map of some of the places we go on, this is in the 2018 season, and the Atbai desert here is phenomenally different. If you've been to Egypt before, you may have seen the hyper arid deserts of Egypt where almost nothing grows, and there's very little in the way of nomadic archeology. In this desert, completely different. In the north and western deserts, you do get this hyper arid flat stuff where almost no one can live. There are goldmines. When you get into the Red Sea Hills, this rocky desert which is like a dividing range, basically at the bottom of every valley floor there are water sources, also gold mines as well. And this increases the density of nomadic sites exponentially.

And when we went to Sudan in the 2018 season, we identified a problem. Archeologists and heritage officials in Sudan already earmarked eastern Sudan as a problem because of modern gold mining. We knew this was happening, but until you physically go there it's sort of like you hear stories and you say, ‘oh yeah, it's bad, I don't know what's happening’. And then you see something like this. This is a major gold mine that through the architecture we can probably date to the Abbasid period. So when the caliphate was centered in Baghdad, about 1000 CE. And then we, before I went to the field I took a satellite photo and I had that on me in the field. And I was like, this is going to be great, we're going to survey this massive mine. It's like 200m across, that's huge. It'll be really phenomenal. And then just before I got to the field, we found this. So same site, same structure, by the time we got there you couldn't even see the structure anymore. So this is all artisanal gold mining that had destroyed the site. And this is what the site looks like when you're physically there. Now some gold mines are very easy to work in, modern gold mines, and some gold mines they have their own rights over or they prefer archeologists not working there. Our team always has Sudanese officials with us. We have permits. We have the right channels to go through to work at these places. But that doesn't mean it's always possible to work in these places. So this particular gold mine, it wasn't possible to stay there for weeks and do a proper survey, some gold mines it is. So this turned us, especially after the conflict, to a different approach of satellite mapping. This is using Google Earth basically, geographic information system software, a very common mining industry, town planning, etc. to map all this heritage. And we, Macquarie, work with some interns, undergraduate interns through what's called the PACE program. We luckily have one of them here today, Jessica, who's worked in the Atbai survey project. And basically each grid is given to one of the students about 20 by 20km, and they help us monitor the heritage in this place. Identifiy the heritage which we then send on to Sudanese officials so they can make decisions about management of this heritage. After one year of work this is where we're at with the satellite remote sensing, 66,000 Islamic, pre-Islamic burials, 38,000 medieval Islamic burials, 300 ancient gold mines, 17,000 settlement structures, 50 new gold mines. That's going up depending on how you define the limits of a gold mine. 450 monumental prehistoric burials. 200, more than 200 destroyed sites and that's keep rising. That's only after one year, we've covered maybe 20, 30% of the Atbai at the moment. So by the end of the projects that will get much better. And when I show this to my Egyptology colleagues who work on the Nile, and some of them they're like a little bit apprehensive about working the desert. Oh you're not going to find that much in the deserts. So I showed this statistic, oh yeah, there's nothing in the desert. And this is some of the things we find, the yellow areas are modern gold mines that have destroyed valley floors so we're not going to find anything under that. And this is particularly fascinating in our project, so far we’ve found 450 monumental, monumental neolithic burials. These are up to 50m wide. And that wasn't known before this. So it's not just about gold mines, it's about the whole heritage of a province that's more or less not been properly explored by officials and archeologists.

To show you one example of this, this is just a small region about 70km across. This is the Wadi Gabgaba, this is one of the largest desert valleys. The yellow areas are areas destroyed by modern mining, we will not find things under that desert. It could be artifacts, in remote sensing we can only see structures, we can't see artifacts of course. One day satellites will be able to find pottery sherds I'm sure. And in this area, each of these red dots is a gold mine. And some of my colleagues said there's only one gold mine in the Wadi Gabgaba. And then again, you show them this, and you're like, oh there's actually 18. Some of these we know are New kingdom. The one in the middle that was destroyed completely is a New Kingdom gold mine. The rest we probably think some New kingdom as well, but mainly Arab and Roman. And on top of that we recently discovered all these gray dots, they are Neolithic structures. So we have this line going through the desert of Neolithic structures.

In our walking surveys, I'll just go through this quickly, we find all this material, and this is mainly found by my colleague Vivian Davies, one of my mentors, who went into this desert in 2014 and is following the roots of Egyptian inscriptions. And on this route we found pottery, these inscriptions of Egyptians. When you map all this together you find a pretty cool map that lines up nicely with the gold mines. The Egyptian inscriptions, the pottery, gold mines all comes together. So you can see the main routes of the Egyptians going into the desert with. The other amazing thing we find as I said, these monumental Neolithic burials. From the north of the Atbai, across the Egyptian border, all the way into Eritrea. This is almost a new archeological culture that we didn't know about. The Neolithic people, fourth millennium BC were building these monumental burials. They put humans in there as well as cattle. So this is part of what's wider in Sahara archeology, this cattle caught.

The other thing we've been doing, part of this project, is giving this data to Sudanese officials and recommending sites for UNESCO World Heritage Protection. This is one area. It's quite large. It's about 80km across in the central Atbai that I'm hoping to recommend for what we call the tentative list. It's got so many of these burials in it. These are first millennium CE burials so roughly Roman period, early Arab periods. We call them technically circle burials. Yes, that's a great way to do it. But what's amazing about this region is how many of them, we have 27,000 of them just in this region alone. And then when people say you know in Egyptology we've got lots of burials at Giza, I'm like, yes, you do. But also the Sahara is not empty. And not just these burials, but in this one region alone, we have so much to offer. We have washing tables of goldmines. We have nomadic settlements here. Nomads don't usually build settlements but in this region they did, we have towns of up to 100 houses. We have Sudan's possibly oldest mosque, which is a different story if someone wants to ask me in question time. We also has lots of rock art sites. So all of this comes together to tell us an amazing landscape story that I hope will be worthy of world heritage accessioning. And then we have our fieldwork projects, mainly oriented to gold mines but we're always surprised at gold mines you don't just find the gold mines, you find lots of other stuff. So generally you have these dry stone houses. You have the excavation on the hillside, you see here. These are the huts of the gold miners. Pretty basic sometimes, that's all you're going to get. In the tailings themselves we're lucky enough to find things like basketry, textiles, sandals. In the future I hope to excavate much more of the tailings, because I think they're quite phenomenal. The refining space. You can see all these millstones, that's pretty textbook. This particular gold mine looks like it's New Kingdom from the millstones but all of the pottery was Roman and later. So what's happening there? I honestly don't know. I've had long arguments with Egyptology colleagues about its possible date, but everything of the artifacts is from like, say, 400 and later. But the millstones look identical to the ones you'd have in the rein of Tutankhamen. And then this is the pottery itself. We've got this one mine in this one area. So just next to those millstones, we have Nubian pottery, we have Egyptian pottery. You know, everyone here knows how important pottery is to archeologists. We have Roman amphorae, which is coming from the Mediterranean. And you have Islamic glazed wares, which is coming from Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, etc. and then you have pottery that I've never seen before. So this is quite difficult to make a story out of. But what we do think is this is very much something like what we'd have in the Australian goldfields a cosmopolitan, multicultural gold mine. Everyone's coming here. And then there's the story of the nomads of the mines. The nomads have their own cemetery and burials at the mines. So the nomads are obviously involved in this gold mine, even though we don't have much other indication of it, apart from the burials.

To end I just want to thank everyone that's joined me on these expeditions, even though they're not in the room. I think that's very important. Life is not very easy in the field in eastern Sudan, you can't shower for 30 or 40 days, there's not enough water. But I think it's pretty fun. We have a very good team of Sudanese officials and foreign collaborators working together. And as part of this, we're also extending our research training videos for heritage museums and archeologists in Sudan on anything from copper tools to glass to pottery. And we're running GIS workshops with Sudanese officials to spin this process off into something that's much more, how do I say, domestically run out of officials in Port Sudan, the provincial capital. And as part of that recently we had, I wasn't physically able to attend, obviously I can't as an Australian citizen traveled to Sudan during the conflict. But Sudanese colleagues through our own training videos and for our own software training online through zoom and through meeting in Qatar, we had a GIS mapping and field surveying session where they actually took their skills out into eastern Sudan to do their own mapping, completely separate to me, but using the training skills from our project. And last but not least, we had our social media outreach, which is in Arabic, and I think we are, I don't know for sure, but I think we're the first blog in the Beja language as well. So we have our colleagues translating our research results not only into Sudanese Arabic, but you see Beja language down there. This is the language of all these difficult vowels, I wish I spoke it better, and that will continue on throughout the project.

I want to say acknowledgments to everyone's who’s joined me. It's very important. It's not, definitely not just me, lots of people go into making this fieldwork possible, lots of people go into to making the GIS possible, and everyone, including yourselves. It's not very fun and it's not very sensible having a project like this, if I don't get to make audiences like yourself aware of it. And that's part of our desire, is to promote the awareness and the heritage of this region so it'll eventually be protected. And I’m a firm believer that heritage that is not promoted is heritage that won't be protected. It needs to be considered to be important by the public, and that provides a groundswell for protection itself. So thank you everyone, and happy to take questions.

AM: Wow. Thank you Julian. What a fascinating project. So many elements of that. Have we got some questions? Moya. Please bear with me if you're at the back and I’m at the front, I will get you eventually. Audience Question 1: Thank you. I was wondering, Julian, if you have local support for the potential world Heritage listing?

JC: Yes. So it's a complex discussion. This was given by me to UNESCO in March as a potential tentative list. And the governor of the Eastern Province had also had this come across his desk separately to me in the 1980s, I found out before I... So, you know, sometimes you think you're the new person to do something... Why we support it in Sudan, as you probably know, in various countries they have, what's the word, they have their first targets in the tentative list. So it's very difficult to get the paperwork ready to put something in the list. And there are sites in eastern Sudan which are many Islamic harbors, which are front and center in their support in the first instance. And then I think something like this could be proffered. NCAM, who's the official body managing heritage in situ in Sudan are supportive of this. There's a lot of work to be done before my suggestion of it, as you probably know, before it gets even to the tentative list, but I think it's the best contender. Sudan has a lot of World Heritage sites on the Nile River or the Islamic harbors on the Red sea coast. And what we need is support for heritage listed sites, not only in eastern Sudan, but western Sudan and Darfur because they have the same amount of heritage that is unfortunately lacking protection.

AM: Anyone else?

Audience Question 2: Thanks Arlene. Thank you, that was really fascinating. I just wondered about some of the gold artifacts from those different dynasties and eras and I'm completely out of my own area of expertise. You know how sometimes diamonds can be tracked to where they were mined by virtue of their chemistry or makeup matrix? Is it possible to track gold artifacts to where the gold was mined from?

JC: Yes. So short answer yes and no. This has been really successfully done for minerals in Egypt like copper and galena, where you do trace element analysis, particularly lead ratios of different isotopes. And then you can find, you can match that to individual mines. Same technique has been attempted for gold, but usually it hasn't come up with, how do I say like, homogenous results was was my understanding. And it's possibly because gold is mixed in the workshop itself. And we know the same with copper. So it's not, it's not so different in that sense. Like, it's not like they get copper from one mine and make it into an object without mixing it from copper from other sources. And my colleagues that do pottery have the same issue. It's like you get clay out of the river, but that doesn't mean they're not mixing the clay at the workshop site. There is some groundbreaking work that is being done on this and they do think most of the gold is say, how do I say, consistent with the Arabian Nubian Shield. But that's sort of what you would expect. We’re not at the level yet where it's going to individual gold mine. And I would argue that we probably shouldn't go there yet in some circumstances, because we actually haven't identified enough New Kingdom gold sources. So until we identify most of them that are separate to say, like Roman or Arab gold sources, we don't have the origin to check it to. So some of the mines in Coptos 100% New Kingdom. Some of the mines in Nubia, maybe yes, no, not sure. Until we sort that out we're going to be measuring the wrong thing in other words I think. Yeah. It's also difficult to get permits to do invasive analysis on gold objects for fairly obvious reasons I think. Pottery not so much.

Audience Question 3: Hi. I was just curious. When you go on these field trips, particularly in areas like East and West Sudan, do you ever have any main concerns with regards to safety of your team at all? There's, I don't know about the region, but I would presume there's a lot of tinpot dictators and warlords roaming the countryside. I've just curious who, yeah...

JC: I guess it can be a concern for archeologists doing fieldwork of course, but we always check with lots of contacts. It's quite, it's a central part of my job to make sure the OHS is good before I go. So we have local elders, we have officials in the capital, officials in the provinces who would all have to say yes to the security situation before we go, including my own university. Sudan has lots of archeological missions, and it's usually fine. And I don't know any archeological mission has ever had suffered from violence around safety. That being said, archeological missions have never usually gone to Darfur, and Darfur has been a region of Sudan that has had conflicts for quite some time. In eastern Sudan we've never had a problem. I do check with my local contacts and stakeholders, but we've... in no time I've asked have I been confronted with violence or anything difficult like that. And none of my contacts has ever say it's unsafe to go to the areas, and I wouldn't even get the chance to go on the plane, because they would know well before I showed up to Sudan, like, don't go here or something like that. They would, they would say that they know what's happening on the ground. And that's often the practice. So in archeology, in some of the regions of the Horn of Africa, there is low level conflicts in some countries. And at the moment of course a high level conflict. But archeologists don't deliberately go into danger. That's not what we do. Not what my family would let me do, at least.

AM: One more at the back.

Audience Question 4: I was wondering about the process of gilding. So the preparation of thin sheets of gold and then the application to statues.

JC: Yes. Yeah. So that is a really interesting question. I honestly am not the expert on the workshop process. So I know in different periods they perfected gilding, annealing, mixing with silver, mixing with copper, all this sort of thing. And we actually have in some Egyptian tomb scenes, the workshop process itself. That's not really, what's the word, perfected enough to know exactly how they were doing it. So we've actually never excavated a gold workshop specifically. So until that's done, we won't have the proper archeology of the instrumentation. The tomb scenes can only sort of take us so far. What we do know is it's happening in the temple workshops, palace workshops. They are experimenting in every reign. So in Tutankhamen and Akhenaten reign we have a little bit more rose gold, so they're putting copper and other additives in. For statues, gilding that also would have taken place, wooden statues, stone statues, gilding, gold leaf. They did it is tomb walls as well. Yeah, but I'm not the best expert to ask about the workshop end, I try to stick to the desert and, unfortunately.

Audience Question 5: Thank you. I'm just wondering if you could tell us more about the sort of items that they made. One of the photos, it looked like jewelry to me, like an earring. I have no idea if that's what it was, but yeah, I'm just wondering the sorts of objects or perhaps like smaller objects that they would make out of gold. And if you have any favorite.

JC: So in a way it hasn't changed to what we would regularly think. You know, you go to the jeweler and find gold rings, earrings, I guess exceptional in Egyptian cultures is the mask. They were very much into, at least royalty, into gold leaf. So putting gold leaf on furniture, even on inscriptions, we have some idea that they were nailing gold leaf into texts so the hieroglyphs would really pop. They're all gone now. But basically everything you could think of staffs, the full list of inventory of Tutankhamun's gold tomb has gold on like most different objects. Palace furniture, what else am I missing? We do know that gold was fashioned at some times into ingots because we have gold weights. So we actually have the stone that says like gold free deben and then we have the weight. So they would have at some point put it into some basic, melted it into some basic form, have golden chariots, not solid gold, gold leaf chariots, golden daggers, hilts, anything I think you can think of that a royal person might want to put gold on. They didn't go far away from trying it. Sorry?

Audience comment: Presidential...

JC: Exactly. So they didn't.... and that hasn't changed actually in Sudanese culture today, you often wear a lot of gold jewelry. And sometimes that gold jewelry is, how do I say this, it's not just gold as jewelry, it's also a display of wealth and it's part of the culture in the place. And they travel with it, and it's important to them. So there is a continuity, I think not just in Sudan, but the Horn of Africa of wearing wealth like that. Obviously in different social context, like weddings is more common than that sort of thing. But yeah, I don't think it's changed that much, although I'm sure someone will tell me otherwise.

Audience Question 6: Julien, firstly thank you for a fascinating presentation. I have two questions, if that's okay. Firstly, am I too old to become an Egyptologist?

JC: No.

Audience Question 6: No, fantastic.

JC: Easy

Audience Question 6: I’m retired now so I have more time on my hands. Early in the presentation, you talked about the gold being primarily for the royal household or the royal family. What would drive a gold digger or a Tomb Raider to steal gold when primarily gold would only have been available to the royal household? Because it's not as if they could wear it around their neck. They could present it to their friends because they would ultimately be, you know, deemed to be tomb robbers I assume. And could it be that the wealth or the gold was being arranged to be taken by other royal family members or other royal families?

JC: Yeah, So that's a really good question. We haven't figured it out definitively, but all the suspicions you had are probably correct. We do know a small amount of gold was going into private circulation, we have economic documents that say high officials. You couldn't use a gold deben to trade something because it'd be like buying a maserati with one gold deben, it'd be too expensive. A copper deben is what they used, or bread or flour, sacks of bread and flour is what they normally used to trade. So a gold deben is just too much. But what happens with a high official is if you did something good for the king, the king would give them a prize of gold. So gold fly, or they call it the gold of honor, which is sort of like a pictorial on a necklace, and some other gold jewelry. So some high officials or probably even middle officials, this is not a majority middle class society, so that's not much of society could get gold. And that puts it into private circulation. We're not really sure on how that works and how that, once you have it in your family what do you do with it? We know that it's very rare to exchange gold between people, and like, economic documents are quite well known in Egypt, there’s lots of them. We don't have that sort of data. From time to time we do see merchants using gold. Merchants aren’t very well known class in Egypt, but they did exist. They were attached to a temple. And in one text it seems to be that the Egyptians are trading gold for cedar in Lebanon. Cedar was a very prized wood, the Egyptians didn't have any hardwoods. So this is maybe an answer to some of the circulation problems where Egyptians realized they needed some exotic goods, foreign goods from overseas. Not so different to sort of like trade deficits in modern countries, and we need to trade gold for something or oil for something. So that's one possibility but that's also not very well understood. We've only got a few texts that say yes they’re trading gold for foreign goods.

We do think that there is some sort of royal sanctioning of, let's call it tomb recycling. If gold is going out of circulation, you're a new king, I need my own gold stuff, how's that working? We know that the Kings did sanction inspections of tombs. So it depends on how cynical you are. When they did the inspection, are they just checking it's not robbed or are they dot, dot, dot, doing something else while they're there? We have the texts in the tombs itself that say this tomb was opened year such and such, day such and such. We even know the exact day. So that's a possibility. We suspect with all the tombs that have been robbed that is gold is being circulated, circulated, recycled, recycled, so on into history, that you could really never know in a particular reign or time period what's happening to it. It is a problem for us because we don't really, maybe deceiving officials I talked about, maybe that is also an answer there. That there was a trickle down into what we'd call a bourgeois of Egypt, and they were able to use gold say to furnish a house or to, you know, buy an estate or to buy cattle. Cattle was sort of like a very nice thing to have, a sort of a moveable bank, because you can grow it and you use it for food, but you can trade it very easily, and not only in Egypt. In Sudan cattle was even still used in Sudan as sort of currency in some respects. So this might be an answer to what they do with it, is they trade it for something else that you can trade for. But, yeah, we haven't got a definitive answer to any of those questions, and I think we won't even by the time I’m dead.

AM: Any other questions? I think we can ley you go home, but not first before saying thank you so much...

JC: It’s a pleasure.

AM: for visiting us and making time to come and speak with us today at the museum. And I’m sure those kids had a great day today wherever you went at the schools today. I really enjoyed that, it made me think as these sessions often do, ‘Oh there’s so much I don’t know about, how am I going to find out about it all.’ Thanks for dipping into gold for us today. Can you please thank Julian. [applause] And in the mining state please have a great time at your mining conference.

JC: I will, thankyou.

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