You won’t find any Egyptophiles claiming to be the nearly forgotten Tausert - at least not yet. “Except that the exact same thing had happened the day before” - with a different woman. “I would have been excited,” Wilkinson deadpans. One time when he gave a lecture in Los Angeles, a fan came up afterward and announced that she was the reincarnation of Nefertiti. But he also is a consultant to popular television shows and he’s a hero to the many laypeople entranced by Ancient Egypt. Wilkinson is a leading light in Egyptology, a distinguished scholar who regularly pens journal articles, wins grants, and delivers lectures around the world - last winter break he presented his most recent findings on Tausert at an international conference in Luxor. “It’s odd that I can’t even read some of them,” he laughs.īut fans around the world can and do read them. In his office, he points to bookshelves stuffed with volumes in Danish and in Japanese. They’ve been translated into so many languages - 19 - that even the multilingual Wilkinson can’t decipher them all. Wilkinson has written no fewer than eight books on his findings - including the best-selling Complete Valley of the Kings: Tombs and Treasures of Egypt’s Greatest Pharaohs. Now a World-Heritage site, for about 500 years, from the 16th to the 11th centuries B.C., the arid valley was the final resting place of nobles and pharaohs, including the boy king Tutankhamun. “Most of my work career has been in the Valley of the Kings,” he says. For more than two decades, he’s spent winter breaks and scorching summers digging in the valley, across the Nile River from Luxor, known as Thebes in ancient days. Wilkinson is known as a charismatic teacher - his classics colleague and fellow Regents’ Professor David Soren calls him a Pied Piper - and ever since he arrived at the UA in 1989, he’s led his students on his excavations in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. He also has an affiliation with the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Named a Regents’ professor in 2008, the renowned Egyptologist has been at the UA for 21 years, first in the former humanities program, then in classics, and now in the new School of Anthropology. “It’s important we bring her back from oblivion. “We’re bringing the queen back,” Wilkinson says animatedly in his office in the UA Department of Classics.
Knowledge of her largely disappeared after her death, and her story has long been buried in the Egyptian sands. It was extremely rare for a woman to rule in Ancient Egypt - only a handful reigned during the 4,000 years the civilization lasted - but Tausert was king in the 19th dynasty, around 1200 B.C. Unlike Nefertiti, who was the queen consort of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, Tausert was herself a pharaoh. If Richard Wilkinson has his way, one day the Egyptian Queen Tausert will be as well-known as Nefertiti.įor the last six years, Wilkinson and the other archaeologists in his University of Arizona Egyptian expedition have been excavating Tausert’s mortuary temple in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.