Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb is a two-hour 2020 documentary available on Netflix. It provides an interesting glimpse into Egyptian archaeology and highlights interesting finds made in the shadow of Zoser's famous step-pyramid, the first pyramidal structure erected in ancient Egypt. The movie is beautifully shot with many huge, luminous close-ups. (In a way, the film's big close-ups and image-selection, featuring several scenes in which artifacts are discovered on-screen, brushed off and, then, carefully lifted from the immemorial sands while workers chatter excitedly in Arabic and applaud resembles the experimental works of the Harvard Sensory Ethnology Lab -- particularly, the films Sweetwater and Leviathan.). The location of the dig has real presence, a hillside with complex tiers of stone half-buried in golden sand -- the excavations are dark sockets cut into the rock and there are always tiny avalanches of honey-amber sand slithering down the sides of the hill. The demarcation between the desert necropolis and the nearby city is stark -- Saqqara is lush with fields of brilliantly green reeds and enormous date palms; the desert is histrionically barren, treeless, without a shred of grass or weed. The remarkable feature of the landscape is that you can stroll from the absolutely barren sand and stone quarries of the necropolis into the verdant green oasis in the course of a walk of about 100 yards. The large crew of "diggers", a profession passed down from grandfather to father to son, come from the nearby village, some of them driving up to the site on motorbikes. Unlike almost every other archaeological film that I have seen, this dig is led by Egyptians and entirely staffed by Egyptian workers. In Egypt, it seems that professional archaeology is a decidedly blue collar task -- there's none of the elaborate grids and laser-equipped geographic-locating devises that characterize European and American archaeology. In fact, the people working on the site don't even seem to use sifting technology -- they just hack out buckets and wicker baskets of pebbles and sand from the site, haul it to a dump and, then, repeat the process. It's all very low-tech and to my eyes looks a lot like looting, although the Egyptians, I suppose, are free to treat their archaeological sites in any way they want. In any event, it looks fabulous on-screen, like out-takes from an Indiana Jones movie - hordes of extras in turbans and pale tunics digging on a terraced hillside under the looming shadow of the great step-pyramid while in the distance muezzins in the village call the faithful to prayer. The Egyptian scholars have a funky, down-to-earth appearance and seem to be poorly dressed. The women all wear modest headscarves and everyone praises God all the time. The osteology expert, a middle-aged woman, sorts through bones seated on a small stool in the tomb where they were found -- she seems fantastically accomplished. She introduces herself to the skeletons and gives them a cheery greeting "as if the person were right across from me."
The film advertises itself as about a particular well-preserved tomb, the grave of a priest named Wayte. But there are three other strands of narrative woven into the film. Somewhere else in the necropolis, there's huge cemetery of mummified animals, that dig curated by an enthusiastic and attractive middle-aged lady. From time to time, graves from the so-called Rammesid period (between Rameses and Cheops) are found -- these graves feature elaborate wooden coffins, some of which are cautiously opened on-screen. A third additional element in the narrative is the need for the diggers to discover something important before the work shuts down for the season at the start of Ramadan -- thus, there's an element of suspense in the picture. If an important find is not made before Ramadan, the government will likely curtail funds to the project, an outcome that will be devastating to the archaeologists on the team but also economically calamitous for the local economy -- it seems like half the population is employed in these digs. Ultimately, the film's ending is cautiously happy -- another well-preserved tomb is found just before the work on the site has to cease for Ramadan. A lion cub is found embalmed among the animal mummies, the first artifact of this kind discovered in Egypt. (The discovery suggests that the Saqqqara priests who raised animals for sacrifice and mummification may have been "farming" lion cubs.)
The film has an interesting emotional component. Wayte's tomb is full of large life-size statues of the priest and shows the man happily entering paradise with his wife and four children. There are four burial shafts sunk in the middle of the tomb's upper chambers, the walls of which are replete with beautiful carvings and hieroglyphs. At first, the archaeologists interpret the tomb inscriptions and imagery as showing that Wayte was uniquely happy, well-respected, and had an exemplary family life -- the "ancient Egyptians loved life so much that they wanted it to continue just as it was in the afterlife." But the tomb has various oddities -- the name of Wayte is mentioned much too often and some of the inscriptions and sculptures apparently are intentionally defaced. It turns out that Wayte may have "stolen" the tomb from his brother, a shadowy figure mentioned in places in the inscriptions. And, then, it appears that the burials in the place were made in panicked haste. Three females are found jumbled together in one shaft, a grandmother, mother, and daughter. In the other shaft all of Wayte's three sons are found, also poorly mummified and heaped up in a pile of bones. Finally, Wayte himself is discovered, his skull fairly well preserved. "He was a fine man who did fine work," the woman bone-anthropologist says. (This is a mistranslation: by "fine", she means "delicate.") Wayte and his family seem to have been wiped out by malaria -- if this is true, this is the first recorded archaeological find showing death by malaria, a full thousand years before other examples of this sort of pathology.) The anthropologist sadly says that Wayte's cheerful tomb with its optimistic, colorful images was not an accurate depiction of his life, an existence that seems to have involved fratricidal rivalry with his brother and mass death by disease. "He created an image of a happy afterlife that was very different from what he experienced while alive," the woman tells us. The encounter with dead priest causes the workers to reflect on their own lives. One archaeologist takes his small daughter out for ice-cream noting that he wouldn't be able to bear the kind of tragedy that Wayte experienced.
Archaeologists like the unusual. The great Southwestern archaeologist Stephen Lekson once described a Chaco site as being as full of funky items as "a Santa Fe fleamarket." Obviously, Saqqara has that characteristic. Interestingly, World Archaeology featured an article on Saqqara also called "The Secrets of Saqqara" (Vol. 103 - October/November 2020). This article reports on a Dutch dig and never mentions the sites central to the Netflix documentary -- obviously, the place is big and has many mansions.
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