My name is Alexandra, and I want to write popular history when I graduate.
Gosh, that feels odd to type. I've never confessed it outside my closest friends, family, and fewer than half of my lecturers. Strangely, it took a webinar of Egyptologists to give me the confidence I needed to own this scandalous ambition of mine.
Yesterday, I watched a webinar about Egyptology and public engagement (because if I see Salima Ikram, I click. I'm not a complicated woman.) I have interest in both topics, but also it gave me an excuse not to read about ancient political thought for an afternoon. Bonus. Having listened, rapt, I have to say I think the Egyptologists are a step ahead of the Classicists on this issue. That said, I haven't formally studied Egyptology and what I know is gleaned from general history books and documentaries. In short, I am the kind of person the Egyptologists were talking about reaching.
A bit of context here, for I feel that by explaining my own experiences with both Egyptology and 'pop' history, I may be able to provide what I hope to be a little insight. When I was little I devoured anything to do with the ancient world and I didn't much fuss over which region I read about. I loved it all for reasons I still can't quite articulate. Perhaps what drove me more toward the Graeco-Roman sphere was a family holiday at the age of eight; had my parents chosen Karnak over the Parthenon my life may have played out differently. For all my travelling, I still haven't made it over to Egypt. Yet I flirt with Egyptology when saturated with Greece and Rome, like a holiday from my day-to-day. I own great big books filled with gorgeous colour photos of monuments, I drink in every documentary I can find, I clumsily play AC:Origins and lose myself for hours at a time.
It may not just have been a holiday that pushed me toward Greece and Rome. Even before secondary school, 'Egyptologist' sounded as much of a fantasy as 'astronaut/Oscar winning actor/Prime Minister.' Even more unobtainable than classicist, perhaps because Rome has a recognisable alphabet and I was accustomed to neo-Classical architecture everywhere, whereas Egypt had shiny golden funeral masks, hieroglyphs and curses. Either way, with nobody around me who knew how to get to into formal study of either, I resigned myself to a life of autodidactism with a museum/tourguiding career that served as an acceptable consolation prize, then jumped into a Classical Studies degree in my early thirties. It's not the traditional route, but I think it's given me some interesting perspectives.
So, to the webinar. "A Popular Science: Communicating Egyptology Beyond the Academe" hosted by Interdisciplinary Egyptology. The speakers: Salima Ikram, Kara Cooney and Chris Naunton (who I'm familiar with,) and Fatma Keshk and Yasmin el Shazly (both of whom I'm pleased to know about now.) It was the kind of discussion that had me grabbing paper and scribbling a tonne of notes, and stayed with me long after I had planned on going to sleep hours later.
A quick summary of some (paraphrased) points made by panellists that stuck with me:
Ikram: re: academic jargon - The ancients are people, we should not complicate talking about people. Jargon distances us from those people. An academic should not obfuscate, but elucidate.
Keshk: The goal should be to create a narrative that speaks to different kinds of people without flaunting an air of academic superiority, modesty is key. A dialogue with the audience is important.
Cooney: What those in power chose to keep hidden and inaccessible in antiquity has left gaps for modern pseudo-scientists to jump into. It is not wise to ignore such pseudo science when it is presented to the public frequently without engaging; academics sharing their knowledge outside of academia is a great way to dispute what people are seeing in bad TV shows or clickbait articles.
el Shazly: Raising awareness of antiquities helps preserve them, therefore public engagement should be a duty for all scholars.
Naunton: Within the academy there is great resistance to 'non academic' ways; from the beginning students are taught to write in an academic format. Distaste for public engagement is seen as diluting academic credibility and therefore many academics are loathe to write accessibly for the public, which is a valuable skill in itself. And of course, a reminder that public engagement particularly via documentaries is the ONLY engagement many people see.
So, having thought a lot about this discussion, here are my own thoughts. Let's kick off with academic jargon, for you may have noticed that listening to the discussion in the first place was a pleasant way to put off doing the reading for my Political Thought in Antiquity class.
I have a complicated relationship with 'the reading.' On one hand, I am lucky enough to have a second chance at higher education, likely my last chance. Therefore with gratitude I will diligently read every damn word assigned to me. I am very aware of just how lucky I am, and higher education is a privilege. It would be nothing short of a travesty to waste it. On the other, have you *read* the reading? I am blessed with lecturers who make a concerted effort to give us engaging material, but good grief it can make for hard work sometimes. My classmates just often don't do it at all, and lecturers around the world sigh that students will get it if we Just. Do. The. Reading.
But the reading is so often dry as a desert, stuffy and dull, apparently on purpose. I am not inspired by writing which requires me to crack open a dictionary multiple times per page. And because for decades and maybe centuries scholars have tried to both prove their credentials and outdo their academic rivals, the academy is stuck in a cycle where with each new cohort, students are convinced that they have to write with increasing pretention the further up the academic ladder they go, until eventually we have another generation of professors producing writing that is practically impenetrable. Coming into all of this at my age, it blows my mind that some academics are even *proud* of this. Hoarding all of their knowledge like Smaug with his gold, spitting their ridiculous vocabularies instead of flames. Chris Naunton rightly said that writing plainly requires confidence, because you have to write as if you have nothing to prove. Personally, I cringed even using the phrase 'through the lens of' in an essay last year, so I doubt I will ever feel comfortable writing academically. I'd feel too much like Joey Tribbiani, writing a recommendation letter with a thesaurus. "They're humid, prepossessing Homo sapiens with full-sized aortic pumps..."
I'm not saying that academic writing should be abandoned. There is clearly as place for it and I think changing the system would require fully dismantling and rebuilding things like academic journals. My astonishment at how academic journals work, and that everyone is apparently fine with it, is perhaps a discussion for another day. What I do think is that it would be illuminating for many to put aside the writing styles that they view as elegant and sophisticated, because from the outside in the style looks unwelcoming and needlessly ostentatious. Accessible writing can be graceful, if only one would try.
I mentioned that I have worked as museum floor staff and as a tour guide, which I've done for two decades. As such, I don't have training in taking knowledge and tarting it up in sophisticated language; my role is to distill mounds of research across multiple disciplines into a concise and easily understood summary. I have to be able to explain the importance of the smallest or most seemingly inconsequential exhibit or feature, or sometimes explain entire wars, dynasties or buildings in five minutes or less. It's not easy and I'm not one to boast at all, but on this I will admit to some skill. Not only do I do this, I have to tailor my speech to all kinds of people. I can't afford to be pretentious or verbose. I have a tiny amount of time and opportunity to glean how much knowledge my present audience has, what will interest them without patronising them, and what I can point them towards afterwards. This ties in with what Fatma Keshk said about a dialogue. Nobody can gauge where to pitch their presentation without it.
The middle ground between a documentary and starting a degree is the not so humble general history book. For those whose favourite bookstore is a block away from campus, it might be a shock to see the difference in stock with a shop on a high street. Three bookcases of Nazis and Empire, half a shelf of Egyptology and maybe a full shelf of Greece and Rome if one is lucky. All of the Egyptology is about Tutankhamun. All of the Graeco-Roman stock is about the Peloponnesian War, Pompeii and Julius Caesar, along with whatever Mary Beard has most recently published. Needless to say, I have bought all of them. Before institutional access andmembership to ICS, they were all I had. They vary in quality in a way I sometimes found difficult to assess before I started my degree. I own books written about antiquity by (whisper it) journalists! Do you know why the only book I own about Catiline is by an economist? Because no academic has ever written an accessibly written, accessibly priced book about Catiline. They can't, or most likely won't, which is a shame because that whole saga reads like a soap opera and I *know* that people love that kind of thing. Publishers knew it would sell, but no academic would write it, but will happily criticise non-academics who *do.*
Floor staff in museums often joke that curators don't have a bloody clue what 'sells.' Even when we're not talking, we are watching what people look at, for how long. What catches whose attention. We hear the comments people make. I truly believe that if academics want to know what the public is truly interested in, and how much they really already know, they need to talk to gallery staff and tour guides. I think many would be surprised. It's also a great way to gauge just how much misinformation and pseudo science has been spread and how much is accepted as fact.
I nearly wrote a full blog post after the last Classics twitter kerfuffle that gave me a feeling of unease; is sharing every piece of accessible writing about the ancient world truly amplification of the subject or actually irresponsible? Big accounts with academic credibility sharing articles of dubious quality with no attached comment is a sore topic for some of the scholars I know who are working hard at pushing back against the wave of #badancient. Big shout outs to the ancient historians leading the charge on this one, including Owen Rees at badancient.com and Roel Konijnendijk at r/AskHistorians.
To paraphrase what I tweeted at the time, I'm really grateful for academics who make the effort, particularly online, to make knowledge accessible and smash common misconceptions. I came to formal study late, and I know exactly how much crap is out there being sold to casual enthusiasts. Now that I have access to journals and libraries once beyond my wildest autodidactic dreams, I'm going to try and keep in mind exactly how little quality material I was able to read before university. Casual enthusiasts get whatever little is shared with the public, so I'd devour anything I could get my hands on and had little guidance about what was dubious or outdated. And I get it, academics are busy, and I get that 'pop history' has a bad rep. It's less prestigious. It's often written by people with dubious training, not that audiences will ever know that. It's easy for us to forget how many enthusiasts have never had the benefit of formal training with amazing teachers. Kara Cooney mentioned the Big 3 or 4 channels that produce hours of history programming. All present showed polite reservations about some of the quality of that content. I am not a public figure so I have no qualms in saying that The History Channel et al are bloody dreadful, only occasionally offering up a decent hour of educational TV amongst hours of speculation, melodrama and sensationalism.
Through my career talking to the people that watch it, I know that this stuff is accepted at face value. Academics cannot scoff at this, the public receive no training in picking the wheat from the chaff. The channel logo lends far more credibility than we like to admit. Chris Naunton explained why the BBC has traditionally avoided such nonsense, a feat that is now being taken up by the streaming giants; a subscription or license fee allows broadcasters to make less sensationalist programming because they don't need bold claims and melodrama to secure advertisers buying up slots. A superb example is Netflix's recent tour de force 'Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb,' which incidentally featured Salima Ikram. I've watched it twice. My little daughter has watched it, eyes wide as dinnerplates when she saw a mummified lion. One of the panellists summarised its brilliance in a far better way than I could have - the documentary is 'quiet.' I'm glad it's proved so popular, not just for the archaeologists involved who should be proud of their work, but for the future of documentary filmmaking. Chris Naunton is right to feel optimistic about longform documentary programming in the Bingewatch Age of television, though again I would suggest that the Egyptologists have pipped classicists to the Netflix post on this as well, their docudrama series 'The Roman Empire' is a dumpster fire.
When Yasmin el Shazly said that raising awareness of antiquities helps preserve them, it resonated with me. I've seen how a documentary/movie/historical novel/video game can not only inspire the public to visit museums and sites, but that sense of an intangible connectedness with the past inspired by media also generates a reverence and respect for the artefacts and sites too, which is something we can all surely agree is a common goal. I often credit my father with fostering my love of history from an early age, as he would take me to Portchester Castle near where we lived and immerse me in the history of the place. We would playfight as centurions and then storm the keep as knights, with him weaving in facts and concepts to our play with a deftness that I was too young to appreciate then but admire greatly now and try to emulate with my own small daughter. She has 'escaped' Vesuvius at Pompeii and has 'raced' me in the stadium of Olympia (she won.) The magic spun in museums and sites is a lasting one, a magic that lures a person to library like a siren years after the spell is cast.
I'm glad that this panel has made me more resolute in chasing my own ambition of writing general history. I've heard the sneers, I've heard the disparaging remarks levelled at scholars who have dared to take this path. I am choosing not to listen, for I have also heard eminent scholars lament that they spent many years writing a weighty monograph so impenetrable that maybe seven other people will read the entire thing. For me, my love of antiquity comes with a desire to share it with others and that does not align with writing in a style that people struggle or don't enjoy reading. I want to shout my love from a mountaintop in paperback form.
I hope that the issues discussed by the panel are taken further not only in Egyptology but in Classics. In my ideal world, more scholars would climb down from ivory towers and venture outside their institutions, if only just for daytrips. I loved the suggestion that students and academics alike be trained in writing accessibly for formats other than paywalled journals and monographs that the average bookstore will never carry. No scholar started their career picking up an edited volume that costs a week's rent. They started with a documentary, or a movie, or a general history book purchased in a Waterstones 3 for 2. Something that set their imagination ablaze, and I can think of no nobler purpose than sparking a lifelong love in another person using my words.
There are a dozen books in my head to write down one day. I've joked on twitter that me and my classmate want to write a book tearing down the heroic modern narratives built around ancient figures who are actually pretty diabolical - "Your Idol is an Arsehole." The title is a joke but the premise is not. We want to disseminate some of the things we have learned in university that fly in the face of public perception. Smash a few myths, annoy some extremists. My current pet research project and perhaps potential dissertation was sparked by a particularly bad portion of a documentary. The unabashed subjectivity and lack of context and theatricality (I'm talking the actual shedding of tears,) displayed made me uneasy in a way I couldn't yet express. Maybe one day I will publish my rebuttal for the popular audience it was aimed at, and when I do, nobody will require a dictionary.