The Expedition produced “the greatest assemblage of archaeological materials and archives up until that point by any expedition,” says Manuelian.

Back in the Classroom

Manuelian teaches seven classes, including Egyptian Aa: The Language of the Pharaohs, Egyptian 150: Voices from the Nile: Ancient Egyptian Literature in Translation, and Anthropology 1250: The Pyramids of Giza. He also teaches a General Education course titled Societies of the World 38: Pyramid Schemes: The Archaeological History of Ancient Egypt.

Maggie E. Geoga ’12 has taken Pyramid Schemes, Egyptian Ab, and Egyptian 150 under Manuelian’s instruction. “I loved Pyramid Schemes because the lectures were really engaging and enjoyable, but my favorites are Middle Egyptian and Egyptian Literature because both classes are very small ... and discussion-based, which allows us to delve deeper into certain issues,” Geoga says.

Geoga is excited about the revival of Egyptology in Harvard academia.

“It’s really great to see Egyptology classes in the course catalog,” she says. “If Harvard had had them two years ago, I might have chosen a different concentration.”

In addition, Manuelian has shown no hesitation in integrating the world’s oldest subject matter with the world’s newest technology. To help his students visualize Egyptian life and architecture, Geoga says Manuelian gives his students “3-D tours” of the Giza Pyramids, using computer graphics and images in the Geological Museum’s Visualization Center, across the street from the Semitic Museum.

“Professor Manuelian is a very engaging lecturer because his enthusiasm for the subject is contagious,” Geoga says. “His use of technology ... gives his students a unique understanding of the material and makes the class more fun.”

Bringing Egypt to the World

The bulk of Manuelian’s career has focused on the Giza site, which he describes as a “treasure trove” of relics from one of the longest-living civilizations in human history. For the last decade, he has been working on assembling thousands of dig photographs, diaries, object register books, glass plate negative photographs, and unpublished manuscripts.

“We try to correlate a lot of that older material with the state of the site now; we try to update things so we can do a new excavation where we need to,” Manuelian says.

For Manuelian, the rewards of his archaeological labors come to fruition in the classroom, where Manuelian’s computer modeling is more than just a teaching tool for a seminar class. Manuelian has combined the data from all his years of work at Giza into a massive computer simulation recreating the entire Giza site and its history.

When Manuelian opens his MacBook and navigates to gizapyramids.org, the interwebs bring up a virtually unlimited reservoir of archaeological resources: 3,841 files on tombs, 22,076 on artifacts, and 9,909 on plans and drawing of building design, to name a few.

The second phase of Manuelian’s online opus, which will be available later this year, is an expanded version of the three-dimensional models he uses in class. Watching the projector screen in Manuelian’s office, one sees a sky-view of the Pyramid landscape. The view then zooms down to ground view and a recreation of Egyptian burial ceremony begins, complete with computer-generated avatars of Egyptian priests, laborers, and artisans in the ceremonial square.

As Manuelian explains the site, his face lights up. “Bit by bit we’re trying to build the entire site of Giza,” he says. “My fantasy is that every single tomb, every single pyramid, every burial shaft, every statue will be back in place ... These things allow you to pose new questions about how ritual took place, where it took place, what time of day it was, who was present, who was absent.”