Quad Cities Business News

Prescott, Prescott Valley, Chino Valley, & Dewey/Humboldt

You are here: Home / Archives for Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition

Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition

Exploring the Gilded World of Pharaohs, Mummies, Pyramids and ‘the Afterlife that Built Egypt’

By Leave a Comment

Famed Egyptologist Zahi Hawass shares secrets from the sand.

Zahi Hawass calls himself a simple man, but the world’s foremost Egyptologist spends much of his time with ancient royalty, gods and goddesses. In fact, Dr. Hawass is revered as a legend in his own right, charmed by Aphrodite herself, inspired by the Great Pyramid builder Khufu and driven by the “magic of Egypt” to coax the desert sand into giving up secrets of what he calls “the world’s greatest civilization.” This fall, with the help of CT scans and DNA technology, Hawass expects to reveal the answer to the yet unsolved mystery: how King Tutankhamun died.

“Today, I opened a shaft and found a sarcophagus with a mummy covered with gold,” said this larger-than-life and fantastically theatrical archaeologist last December during an ordinary Zoom call. And that’s what most have come to expect from an encounter with Hawass, anything but ordinary.

“This was in an area that was in the shadow of the Step Pyramid, the oldest pyramid in Egypt, with beautiful statues and a sealed sarcophagus of a lady covered with gold,” he explained. “We are in the process of discovering a new pyramid in the site. A month ago, we found the brother of King Tutankhamun. I found intact tombs that I did not open yet. We expect to be excavating in the Saqqara necropolis in September and hope to open these tombs.”

Likely coming straight from the site with news of great findings, Hawass will share his adventures, passion for discovery, and advocacy for conservation with audiences at two events: the first, Friday, Sept. 23 at the Flagstaff Festival of Science W. L. Gore & Associates Keynote Presentation at Northern Arizona University; the second, Sunday, Sept. 25, at the Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition’s destination event at Arizona Nordic Village.

With discoveries in the global spotlight for more than three decades, Hawass is credited with bringing Ancient Egypt into our homes and hearts. The passion began in the 1980s. As the inspector of antiquities at the time, he was sent out to an excavation site. “I was unhappy to leave Cairo and go into the desert, but one day I found a tomb with the statue of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love. While cleaning the statue, I found my love.”

In 1990, as director of Giza and Saqqara, he made a breakthrough discovery that determined the Pyramids were built by workers, not slaves. His findings uncovered an ancient cemetery near the Sphinx containing 600 graves and 50 larger tombs belonging to the builders of the pyramids and their families. His discoveries also include the Valley of the Golden Mummies at Bahariya Oasis.

Through years of excavating tombs of spectacular treasures and temples to the gods, following hidden passageways, carefully transferring mummies and decoding ancient writings, he says “the afterlife built Egypt,” a place that begins with nightfall for the deceased, filled with gods, strange creatures, gatekeepers and riddles solved through the Book of the Dead.

He has become comfortable with being lowered into deep, dark, tight shafts, squeezing between massive slabs of granite, coming into contact with deadly cobras and facing superstitions surrounding the fabled “curse” of the pharaohs. He recalls looking through the slit of a hidden door and peering straight into the gleaming crystal eyes of a statue that had been sealed in a tomb for thousands of years. “I cannot describe what this is like. You can only know by experiencing it.”

Since 2011, Hawass has served twice as Egypt’s Minister of Antiquities, arguably the most powerful archaeology job in the world. He has taught students in universitas and educated the public through many film and television programs and news reports.

Today, he is leading teams of archaeologists on expeditions in search of the tomb of Imhotep, believed to be the builder of the Step Pyramid, in Saqqara, and Queen Nefertiti’s tomb in Luxor. She is often referred to as King Tut’s mother, however she was actually his stepmother. “We have tombs of queens with names and tombs of queens with no names,” he said, explaining that advanced technology will help identify royal family members as well as more private ancient Egyptian citizens.

In 2020, Hawass announced the discovery of the Lost City of Luxor, a network of mud brick walls, neighborhoods, a cemetery and work spaces for preparing food, making bricks and crafting jewelry, offering a glimpse of what life was like 3,500 years ago. The lost city, used by the boy ruler King Tut, is considered to be the most important discovery about Ancient Egypt since the young pharaoh’s tomb was found by British archaeologist Howard Carter on Nov. 4, 1922.

To honor the centennial of this landmark moment in Egypt’s long history, Hawass will headline a conference on Nov. 4, with hundreds of scholars at the Grand Egyptian Museum on the Giza Plateau outside of Cairo, where he serves on the Board of Trustees. This is where he hopes to announce the truth behind King Tut’s death at age 18.

Marking the 200th anniversary of the discovery of the ancient Egyptian language, the Grand Egyptian Museum is expected to open to the public next year, said Hawass, the world’s leading expert in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

“A big statue of Ramesses II will receive everyone. The staircase with 100 kings of Egypt will lead to two galleries and a children’s museum. It’s going to be a big thing. The Egyptian government is really keen on preserving Egyptian monuments, opening the museum and implementing the big important conservation plan happening in Egypt now, starting with the excavation of the Valley of the Kings, the search for the tomb of Queen Nefertiti, and continuing the excavation of the golden city.” he said. “You can now walk between the Pyramid site and the Grand Museum. We are also opening an airport 20 miles from Giza to make travel for visitors more convenient.”

Hawass says global interest in Ancient Egypt has exploded with news of recent discoveries. “Modern technology, like CT scans, 3D LiDAR and DNA testing, has been really important to upgrade our knowledge. Without this, we would not be able to continue the excavation in the Valley of the Kings and discover answers about the 18th dynasty buried somewhere in the Valley.”

King Tut was part of the 18th dynasty and also used the city of Luxor. “We know in our work that we did with the Egyptian Mummy Project in 2005 and 2010, that King Tut had a flat foot, the blood didn’t go to his fingers and he suffered from malaria. In his left leg, there’s a fracture, it shows an accident happened to him two days before he died. We are using a new machine with DNA now to find out more about this infliction on his left leg.”

Hawass expects many more secrets from the sand to be unveiled in this land where both life and afterlife were celebrated. “About 30% of the discoveries have been found; 70% are still buried,” he said.

Hawass is preparing for a world tour in 2023, with stops in 23 U.S. cities. Currently, he is involved in programs with National Geographic, Discover+ and Netflix. Flagstaff residents and visitors can catch up with this modern ruler of the netherworld at two events:

Flagstaff Festival of Science 

  • L. Gore & Associates Keynote Presentation  Featuring famed Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass Mummies, Monuments and Mysteries
  • 7 p.m., Friday, Sept. 23
  • Northern Arizona University
  • This FREE event requires a ticket. Find out more at www.scifest.org 

Flagstaff Dark Skies: An Evening of Awareness, Appreciation & Awe with Legendary Archaeologist Dr. Zahi Hawass:

  • A Night Journey into Ancient Egypt’s Afterlife
  • 5-9 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 25
  • Arizona Nordic Village

Tickets are available at FlagstaffDarkSkies.org Sponsored by Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition, Arizona Office of Tourism and Arizona Nordic Village. QCBN

By Bonnie Stevens, QCBN

From Earth to Space and into NightVisions

By Leave a Comment

Prescott sculptor Joseph McShane finds inspiration in the night sky and beyond.

Prescott sculptor Joseph McShane’s style might be considered other worldly. He has engaged outer space and the sun to co-create with him and is the first artist to have his work leave this planet and travel with astronauts on board the space shuttle to be created in the vacuum and weightlessness of the space environment. A photograph of his sculpture titled S.P.A.C.E. will be part of NightVisions: Cultural Interpretations of the Night Sky, an exhibition running May 21 through Aug. 27, at the Coconino Center for the Arts in Flagstaff.

In 1984, McShane worked with NASA’s Small Self-Contained Payload Program to conduct a Space Shuttle experiment. Nine glass spheres were placed in the cargo bay of the Challenger. As he explains it, small coils in the smaller bubbles were coated with gold, platinum and other elements, and when, at the direction of the payload computer, the coils heated in the vacuum of space, it caused the material to vaporize and flash out to coat the inside of the spheres and change the clear glass to a wide spectrum of color, “in much the same way that a pair of mirrored sunglasses would be coated in a vacuum chamber,” he said.

McShane could have created the same experiment in his own vacuum chamber without leaving Earth, but the shuttle program provided him with the only way to create art in space, which he was excited about. Unfortunately, the project became more complex than he ever imagined, taking seven years from conception to completion. “After all the years of technical work, at times, I wanted to use a sledgehammer on it,” he joked, recalling his frustration with what seemed like an endless process.

Nonetheless, as the shuttle lifted, a valve on the larger sphere opened and remained open for the seven days of the 3.3-million-mile mission. “Earth’s atmosphere escaped from inside all nine spheres and they became one with the vacuum of outer space,” he said. “The valve closed on the largest sphere before the shuttle re-entered the  atmosphere, capturing the vacuum of space and returning it to Earth.”

McShane observes that the largest sphere, the sculpture S.P.A.C.E., “is an anomaly of our common experience of Earth’s atmosphere surrounded by the vacuum of space. It is a sculpture to observe and stimulate wonder about the nature and meaning of space; a sphere to touch and know that only an eighth of an inch of glass separates the viewer from the vacuum that is the sculpture S.P.A.C.E.”

McShane is used to having his artwork receive a lot of attention. His sculptures are often large and at times affected by the elements. For example, his heavy copper and brass piece, The Good Adventure, glistens in the sunlight at the Richard Marcusen Sculpture Garden at Yavapai College. It was created to evoke images of the Industrial Revolution and early mining and railroading in Yavapai County, he says, a time when large metal objects were joined together with mechanical fasteners like rivets, nuts and bolts. Over time, the sculpture’s interaction with the arid high desert environment is turning The Good Adventure’s brightly polished finish to a dark patina.

Another example of his work, Spectrum, can be seen at the Arizona Science Center in Phoenix, both inside and outside the building. The huge sculpture, beginning with the light emanating from the sun, transforms visible sunlight into the colors of the spectrum to dance across the Dorrance Planetarium’s exterior walls.

An Eclectic Exhibit

For the spring/summer NightVisions exhibition, McShane served as one of three jurors to help select art pieces from around the world. “It’s an eclectic exhibition, very different in some regards from any show I’ve juried in the past,” he said. “It was enjoyable and brought a certain diversity. One really interesting piece is a video submitted by a park ranger, who is a dark-sky advocate, from the Grand Canyon National Park.”

“We are thrilled to have Joseph’s participation,” said Julie Comnick, exhibitions and programs director for Coconino Center for the Arts. “NightVisions is an elegant synthesis of contemporary artworks and astronomical artifacts that brings the vastness of the night skies into contemplative reach.”

“The exhibit will offer a better understanding of how artists view the night sky,” said McShane.

Honoring Astronomer Carolyn Shoemaker

This eighth iteration of NightVisions, presented by Creative Flagstaff and the Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition, features astronomer Carolyn Shoemaker, one of the greatest comet hunters of all time. She found a total of 32 comets and, according to the IAU Minor Planet Center, 377 asteroids, of which 160 were her sole discoveries.

“We are excited to showcase Carolyn’s legacy as a dedicated Flagstaff astronomer, along with her collaborations with her husband, geologist Eugene Shoemaker, with the inclusion of archival astronomical elements alongside the work of contemporary artists,” said Chris Luginbuhl, president of the Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition, a non-profit organization that created NightVisions in 2001.

Carolyn, who became an astronomer at 51, is best known as part of the team that discovered the comet that crashed into Jupiter. “I do not know what I have, but it looks like a squashed comet,” she said about the fragmented comet pulled apart by Jupiter’s gravitational pull, which she discovered with her husband, Gene, known as the Father of Astrogeology, and astronomer David Levy in 1993. Sixteen months later, the Shoemaker-Levy Comet dominated the news with the cosmic collision viewed around the world through telescopes and on television as it slammed into Jupiter.

Along with Levy, Carolyn and Gene’s children, Patrick Shoemaker and Christine Abanto, are part of the NightVisions planning team. “Our parents were always close – she was not the wife who stayed at home – and they’d take us along on their adventures,” said Patrick. “I remember being out there camping with my parents before I was old enough to remember much of anything.”

Levy will be presenting during the opening public reception, scheduled for 6-8 p.m., Saturday, May 21. “We never really worked – it was so much fun!” said Levy of his time observing the night sky with Carolyn. “We were kidding each other constantly!”

Carolyn died last August at 92. “I don’t know of anyone more passionate about the night sky,” he said. QCBN

By Bonnie Stevens, QCBN

For more information, visit https://www.ccaflagstaff.org/nightvisions-2022 or

https://FlagstaffDarkSkies.org