A Conversation with Professor Jeremy Pope
Professor Jeremy Pope has captured the attention of hundreds of students with his ancient Egyptian courses — last year, his course Deciphering Ancient Egypt had a waitlist of over 200. I sat down with Professor Pope over Zoom for a discussion about his courses, unique teaching methods, path to Egyptology and the College of William and Mary, as well as the importance of studying both the language and history of ancient Egypt. The following discussion has been edited for conciseness and clarity.
COURTESY IMAGE // JEREMY POPE
Georgia Thoms: What courses do you teach here at William and Mary?
Jeremy Pope: I teach a four course sequence of Egyptian language courses — they’re a combination of Egyptian language and Egyptian cultural history braided together, and the proportion is about 50/50. The first one is called Deciphering Ancient Egypt, and it has a sequel in the spring semester [Deciphering Ancient Egypt, Part II]. And then I also teach a summer seminar online [Ancient Egyptian Inscriptions], where students who took the previous two courses can continue to read Egyptian texts together over the summer. In the fall semester, I teach a course called Middle Egyptian Texts; students don’t have to take the summer course in order to take the fall course, but they do need to take the two sections of Deciphering Ancient Egypt because that’s where they learn the language. And then you just have fun reading texts together in the next two courses. Those are my favourite courses to teach — I love teaching about ancient Egypt, and I love the language. When I teach the Egyptian [lecture] courses, in order to make sure that everybody stays engaged and doesn’t get bored, I never lecture for longer than 15 minutes at a time. I’ll talk for maybe ten minutes, sometimes as much as 15, and then I’ll give them some kind of hieroglyphic puzzle to solve, some inscription that’s particularly crucial to what we’re studying that day. And then they break into teams assigned at the beginning of the semester.
They build up a community in those teams — they automatically have about four or five other students in the class whom they know really well and are used to working with. The teams have authentic ancient Egyptian team names because it just so happens that we know the names of regiments in the ancient Egyptian army — the “Regiment of Amun” was one. We also know the names of the teams who built the Pyramids at Giza, so some of the teams will have the name of one of those, like “The Friends of Khufu,” or “The Drunkards of Menkaure.” They talk trash to each other across the classroom about who’s in the lead. And every day before class, I show them a leaderboard like you would in a golf tournament showing which team is currently in the lead. They get competitive and try to be quick, and they’ll sort of prepare before class if they get really competitive with trying to anticipate what the puzzles are going to be. Not only do I get to know the students more than I would in another course where I only meet them for one semester, but they know each other. We’re currently in the fourth course in this sequence, and they all know each other’s names; they all know each other. The first round of students that I taught beginning in Fall 2018 still keep in touch — they’ve all graduated, but they still keep in touch online in the same sort of community. After they graduated, they actually contacted me to ask if we could just read an Egyptian excerpt over the summer on Zoom. They’re all in different places in the country but were like, “During my lunch break, I want to Zoom in and read Egyptian with everybody else and see everybody again.”
COURTESY IMAGE // JEREMY POPE
Another course I teach is called The African Diaspora Before 1492, which is basically about all the Africans who left the continent before the beginning of the Transatlantic slave trade — everybody who left in ancient history and in the Middle Ages. And I teach a course called Nubia Americana about American perceptions of and uses of the history of ancient Nubia, the country immediately south of Egypt. It’s a historiography course about how Americans have interpreted this place and the cultural significance it has had. I also teach a freshman seminar called Bible & History about the question of “How do we use the Bible as historians?” Those are the main courses that I teach, but you can see essentially half of them are the Egyptian course sequence.
GT: You mentioned that kind of uncharacteristic type of teaching — did you come up with that yourself? Or did someone inspire you to do that?
JP: I guess I must have because I never had a class like that. I started off with the idea to teach the Egyptian course sequence because I took a course that was this fourth course in the sequence, and it was the best course I’d ever taken — I think the reason why was that it turned out to be a better simulation of how research is actually done. We basically were doing research in the class because we all had a rare set of skills that we acquired. The professor didn’t prepare lectures — he would just give us the text to read and then we’d come in and read it together. We’d run into confusing passages in the text and talk about how to interpret it, and then we’d get out all these reference materials. I could sort of see how, as a professor, he would go about researching something — how he would formulate a question when he was reading a primary source and how he would strategically decide to approach it. And it wasn’t just seeing how he would do it; we were all doing that with him in the class. I really wanted to be able to bring that experience to my students. That’s my endpoint that I wanted to get to. I thought if I really want people in the seminar course at the end to be directly engaged with coming up with their own ideas, why don’t we start the course sequence that way? Even [throughout] lecture courses, it should be possible to have people generating their own ideas. I thought the way to do this was to come up with puzzles for them to solve based on the current state of their knowledge. The idea of doing it as a team competition came to me when I was reading about how the ancient Egyptians constructed the Pyramids.
GT: How do you keep your passion for the subject alive? It seems teaching is a large part of it for you.
JP: I get really excited at imagining what the experience would be like, as a student, to be presented with something that I find kind of mind- blowing. There are some historical details that sort of blew my mind the first time I learned about them, and there are a lot of those for ancient Egypt. It’s exciting to me to craft a puzzle that will allow students to reach that mind-blowing moment, but do it not simply by listening to me, but by solving the puzzle themselves, and then realizing, “Oh, my gosh, this is linked to that.” Without giving anything away, I’ll say there are certain moments in the course where I like to kind of trick students. I set them up with a particular problem, and it’s not what they expected it to be, and I always really enjoy watching that moment of realization; it never gets old. When I teach the seminar courses, those are just inherently energizing courses to teach because we read new texts all the time, and I usually try to choose texts that I haven’t read before. All of that is as new to me as it is to them, and that way they can feel my excitement when I’m reading something and realizing what it means. But I think it’s important for us to read things that I haven’t read before so that they can see me thinking through the process the same way that my professor in Middle Egyptian Texts did, and then [we] solve it together. Also, when you get a different group of students, they have different ideas. So there’s this constant freshness to it. In many cases, they come up with ideas about a text that no one has come up with before, which is quite remarkable when you consider that some of these pieces of ancient Egyptian literature have been known for 150 years — scholars have been reading them and translating them. Then a group of undergraduate students at William and Mary who read it together realise something new and fundamental about the text that no one has ever realised before because that’s just what happens when you put a bunch of smart people together in a room. Magic happens. Students have a way of finding a new angle on it because they don’t come in with the same preconceptions that an earlier generation would.
COURTESY IMAGE // JEREMY POPE
GT: So you mentioned the Middle Egyptian Texts course you took — what got you interested initially in that course?
JP: People ask me how I got into Egyptology, and I think my answer is very different than most Egyptologists because a lot of other Egyptologist with whom I’ve spoken say, “Well, I was always interested in ancient Egypt, and I went there when I was a kid,” that sort of thing. I didn’t do that at all. They did not teach anything about ancient Egypt when I was in high school, and when I was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, courses on ancient Egypt were relatively rare. I kind of stumbled into Egyptology. I went to graduate school at Johns Hopkins, and my intention was to study African history; I had studied that as an undergraduate. The chronological scope of what I was intending to study was honestly pretty narrow — it was the past few centuries, and I really didn’t realise how much interesting history there was before that. I certainly knew ancient Egypt existed, but I think as an undergraduate student (since I was never able to take a course on ancient Egypt), my image of ancient Egypt was kind of cartoonish — it was sort of pyramids, mummies, tombs. It just so happens that in my first year in graduate school in the History department, several of the faculty with whom I wanted to take courses were on sabbatical all in the same year, and so I was looking for something I could take that would still be history on the African continent but almost all the African courses were gone. Then one of them suggested to me, “Well, we do have Egyptology courses, so you could do that.” I’d never really thought about Egypt as being in Africa before — it wasn’t included in my African history courses that I took as an undergraduate. So I said, “Okay, well, I’ve got to take something this year when everyone’s on sabbatical,” and so I took an Egyptian history course in the Department of Near Eastern Studies.
I found that there was much greater global significance to ancient Egypt than I had ever realised before — it was so linked to everything else that I learned about, and it was so influential in ways that I never thought about. I realised in taking that course that learning the language was actually really crucial to being able to access the evidence and interpret it on your own. I didn’t have a concept of that coming in as an undergraduate because in the History department, it’s a little different than in Classics, where it’s just understood that most students should learn Greek and Latin. In the history department, it wasn’t as much in the forefront because there were many different histories of the modern world that you could study using English, or French, or something you could have taken in high school. I started to realise, “Wow, they keep referencing these ancient Egyptian words and passages and apparently, there’s debate about the meaning of these passages — the words they chose really matter, and you really can’t understand what the argument is unless you know some of the language yourself.” At that point, I realised I probably should take some ancient Egyptian language courses. What I ended up doing was, even though I was in a doctoral program in the History Department, I got all the way to the stage where I finished taking classes, and then instead of going on to my dissertation on modern African history, I was like, “No, I want to do ancient African history — I want to do ancient Egypt and ancient Nubia.” I actually stopped and restarted in the Egyptology doctoral program, which was kind of a crazy thing to do, but I really didn’t have much hesitation doing it because by the time I made it that far, I realised this was absolutely fascinating material. It wasn’t even so much a choice since once I had been exposed to the material, it was like, “I can’t do something else.” So I changed lanes.
GT: What brought you to William and Mary after graduate school?
JP: I almost feel like I was rushed to William and Mary during graduate school, and the reason why I say that is that when I was working on my dissertation, I was planning on taking a while on it. I was only about 30 pages into my dissertation in September of 2009 when I saw a job ad for William and Mary — I saw they were hiring in African history, and unlike most universities, William and Mary did not narrow the job ad, like saying we want somebody who does Central Africa during the late 19th century — a lot of universities will do that. It was open-ended — any part of the continent, any period. The minute that I saw there was a job available at William and Mary, I started to get really nervous because I knew that I wanted that job. William and Mary was a local school to me when I was growing up, so I knew the kinds of students who chose William and Mary. I knew that they were students who were really into their studies and got excited about it in a fun way. You know, sort of the acronym students always use, like a “twamp” personality. So, the minute I saw that job ad, I said to myself, “Oh, my gosh, I have to get this job because I never imagined that a job would be available at William and Mary; I have to find some way to finish my dissertation this year so I’ll be eligible for the job.” I really reorganised my life that year to make sure I would be eligible. I started off with 30 pages, and then I churned out another 600 within the next year.
GT: I’m sure you know this, but there is a very long waiting list to get into your class. Why do you think the chance to learn about Egypt is so enticing to students today?
JP: Egypt is really just so well preserved for such an ancient culture that it’s like time travel. I think that it’s the time distance combined with how well-preserved it is — it’s often shocking to people to realise that we can go back and read a piece of literature from 4,500 years ago — it’s just so much earlier than the preserved evidence that we get from most corners of the globe. And I don’t know if the students know that’s why they’re drawn to the course, but I think there’s some sort of vague awareness that there’s something special about this place. And the preservation is not a sign of the superiority of ancient Egyptian culture; it’s a random coincidence of nature that this particular culture happened to have been located in a very arid environment where a lot of things are really well preserved and local building materials were stone.
I really wasn’t surprised when the course filled up quickly and developed a long waiting list because I’ve seen how people react to ancient Egypt — it’s pretty much universal. It’s not every single individual — for some, they’re just like, “I have no idea why you’d want to study that.” When I first proposed to teach it, a colleague said to me, “Oh, I wonder how many students you’ll get — I think you’ll get, like, five.” That first year I opened it up to 50 people, it filled up, and then it was a long waiting list after them. I maintain what I call an advance waiting list because I figure if there are students who are interested in this course not simply because it will fill a slot in their schedule one semester, but they’ve always wanted to take a course on ancient Egypt, I want those students to be able to get sort of first dibs on the course, and the best way to do that is to hold aside a certain proportion of the seats.
GT: How did we learn to read hieroglyphs?
JP: The way that we actually figured out how to read ancient Egyptian is part of the story of the first semester — there’s a reason I decided to title the course Deciphering Ancient Egypt, not only because I have students constantly deciphering puzzles in class but also because early in the course when we ourselves are learning how to read the Egyptian alphabet and learning how the language works, we do that by looking at how Jean-François Champollion figured it out. And this is one of those moments that I really enjoy, watching students realise what he realised because I basically set it up so that students get to have that same discovery themselves in their groups. People were really confused about how it worked for a long time because they imagined that these were literally pictures of what the text was talking about. And for most hieroglyphs, that’s not the case; most of them have phonetic value. In a distant way, many of those hieroglyphs are actually the origin for our letters — it’s a long story how you get there. It’s really exciting because students realise, “Oh wow, I’ve kind of been writing in hieroglyphs all along, in a weird sort of way.”
GT: That’s really cool. Are there dialects in Egyptian?
JP: I actually have a student right now who’s doing an Honors Thesis on dialects in ancient Egyptian. There’s a scholarly discussion about whether we should use the word ‘dialect,’ but at the very least, there is significant regional variation in how they pronounced and spelled words. The nice thing about learning Middle Egyptian, the classical form that you learn in Deciphering Ancient Egypt, is that it was always regarded as the canonical form of the language. So even 2,000 years after Middle Egyptian was the spoken language, if they were writing something really important, they still liked to write it in Middle Egyptian, even if nobody spoke like that anymore.
This is a good example of how students arrive at original conclusions in my seminar class — in the Middle Egyptian Texts course two years ago, we were reading a text talking about Lower Egypt and Upper Egypt, and [in the text] they kept going back and forth like they were referencing two audiences. At some point in the text, they say something and repeat it using a different letter. Every scholar who ever studied the text before just assumed it was an error, like, “Well, they were writing and then they forgot that they’d written that and wrote it again.” And we were sitting there talking about it in class, and one of the students in the class said, “Well, couldn’t this just be a different dialect? They’re addressing two audiences, so they said it in one dialect, and then they said it in another dialect.” We started to look at the text and realised that was the theme of the text. That text has been translated for a little over 100 years now; nobody noticed it before until a group of William and Mary students started studying it together. It’s kind of amazing how when you get students who haven’t already been told what the text is supposed to be, they see something different, something that, in this case, is probably much closer to the truth than what everybody who studied the text before thought.
I should mention that this four course sequence now counts for the foreign language proficiency requirement. The only thing that needs to happen for that foreign language proficiency to become permanent in future years is for it to be approved by the Dean’s office, and I’m pretty confident there will be no problem there because if you think about it, ancient Egyptian has been and probably will be for the foreseeable future the only African language taught at William and Mary. I’m pretty confident that the Dean’s office will recognise the significance of that — they’ve been pretty proactive in trying to serve underrepresented histories. It’s a rare opportunity that we have to be able to offer that as a foreign language because there aren’t many institutions that even have an Egyptologist on their faculty. If they do, it’s usually the Ivy schools.
GT: Do you think the tendency to mystify the language of Egypt could affect how people interpret it?
JP: Oh, for sure. The funny thing is that the Egyptian mirage is very much an Egyptian creation, and the reason why I say this is that in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, the Egyptians were starting to lose some of their social status in their own country because they were being ruled by foreigners. And the one thing that they could really hold onto was that many of those foreigners, the Greeks and Romans, venerated their religion. Egyptian priests kind of played into the stereotype that they had secret knowledge, and they started to make the hieroglyphic system way more mysterious than it had previously been, like, “Oh, you think I have secret knowledge? Let me show you how secret it is.”
There’s a really infamous example of a text from the Late Period where some priests wrote an entire hieroglyphic text consisting only of crocodiles, and they actually encoded some hymn in there. So, if you knew all the hieroglyphs and all the possible different puns that they could be using, you would be able to read the hymn, but nobody could figure that out except for the priests who were in the temple. You can imagine a Greek or Roman who looks at that, and it’s just like, “Okay, so you’re telling me that is a hymn?” It created the impression that the language was actually like that when in reality, even the average literate ancient Egyptian wouldn’t have been able to read the Crocodile Text. It’s really unfortunate, especially in the modern West, that there’s this kind of reflex to treat ancient Egypt as if it’s just inherently unapproachable. It’s like any other ancient culture; if you learn the language and get really into it, you can know it to the same degree, if not more so, given that they wrote so much and it’s so well preserved.
COURTESY IMAGE // JEREMY POPE
GT: Yeah, definitely. I have another question to ask you — do you run any research here? And what is it about?
JP: Most of my research has to do with the 25th Dynasty, the dynasty of ancient Egyptian history where Egypt was ruled by Nubians, otherwise known as Kushites, people to the South. I published the only English language book about Taharqo, a famous Nubian king who ruled Egypt. My own research right now is actually a bunch of different articles, almost all of them related to the 25th Dynasty since that’s my specialty, but my larger book project is actually connected to Nubia Americana — I’m writing a history of how Americans have invoked Nubia over the past 400 years, and not just people in the United States, but people in the Americas, broadly speaking. It seems like every year I add a little bit to the scope of that project, and now I’m basically back to Columbus.
I have several students engaged in different research projects — all of them stem from the Egyptian course sequence. I have one student who is doing a research project on a text known as The Book of the Heavenly Cow, and she actually has a brand new reading of that text even though it’s been known for more than a century. She has a new — and I think more accurate — rendering of what that text is actually saying. I have another student who’s currently doing an Honors Thesis about dialectical variation in ancient Egyptian. And then I have a third student — he has actually taken all the Egyptian courses, but he’s working on what’s called the Meroitic language of ancient Nubia. It’s never been fully deciphered, so it’s kind of like what ancient Egyptian was for us 200 years ago. The research project that he’s doing is really interesting because it combines his ability to read ancient languages that he’s picked up in the Egyptian courses with his knowledge of computer science. He’s figured out ways to use computer science to analyze the texts and figure out the meanings of words based on the frequency of their appearance and what other words they appear in correlation with.
In the spring, we’re going to have an inaugural Virginia Egyptology student conference where students who are working on their own independent projects will present little 20 minute PowerPoints. It’s really exciting to me because it’s an opportunity for students to not only do their own research but actually discuss it with other students who are doing their own research. That’s a little bit more of a friendlier environment in which to do your first presentations of your research because you’re just presenting it to people who are at the same stage of their careers. And then we’ll have these open- ended discussions of bigger issues, issues of race, representation, and colonial baggage, those sorts of things that students tend to really want to talk about.
GT: That sounds really interesting. I’ll definitely want to see if I can attend. For my final question, it’s probably going to be a little bit of a doozy, but what do you think is the most important thing that we, as modern historians, can take away from the ancient Egyptians?
JP: Most fundamentally I would say that studying ancient Egypt forces one to realise that the way we do things is not the only way to do things or think about things or conceptualise things. You start to realise when studying ancient Egypt that the ways in which we’ve been taught to approach issues like gender, time, and faith are by no means the only ways to think about the world. They are by no means the only ways that human beings have thought about the world.
And it’s not like Egypt is some small aberration. This was a tremendously influential civilization that lasted for over 3,000 years. If you’re thinking in terms of linear time — the way we’re taught to think about time — you realise that the pharaohs who built the Pyramids of Giza were further away in time to Cleopatra than she is to us. It kind of changes your perspective on time in general, even thinking of time linearly, when you look at ancient Egypt. The ancient Egyptians didn’t see it that way at all. They had one conception of time where anything that happens is subsequently eternal in what they call Dt time. And so when they think about death, the idea that someone is lost because they’ve passed away is in some ways foreign to that way of thinking because the things they did and the moments that you shared with them don’t cease to exist; they’re always there. I just found it really personally comforting to realise that there was a less nihilistic way of thinking about human life.
I think that’s a tremendous benefit that you can get from studying another culture, and especially another language, because you have to understand something about their language to understand these concepts — otherwise, you’re forced to translate them into English terms, and there’s not always an English term. What’s the English term for the Dt concept of time? We don’t have that concept. That’s a long way of saying that when you study ancient Egypt, you get a sense that the way we do it is not the only way to do it, whatever it is.