Okasha el-Daly

London-based Egyptologist El-Daly has recently been teaching themes of kingship at Birkbeck College’s Centre for Extramural Studies, where he has been a tutor since moving to the UK from his native Egypt four years ago. However, kingship is not his main focus. “I look at the king as a member of society rather than as a god”, he says. “Ancient Egyptian society - individuals like you or me, and also the family - is my own area of interest.”

El-Daly’s involvement in the subject goes back to his childhood, and a background which would be the envy of many Egyptologists and enthusiasts. Born in 1957 at Badreshein, he spent his earliest years with the ancient remains of Memphis almost literally on his doorstep. “Our family house is actually at the edge of Badreshein, facing Memphis, so as a child I could go out for a walk and see scattered pieces of Ramesses II monuments, inscriptions and all sorts of things just lying around.”

After secondary school El-Daly decided to embark on a university course to study Egyptology. “My father was not too happy about that. He wanted his son to become an architect rather than a ‘useless Egyptologist’, as he saw it at the time. He is not disappointed any more.”

Graduating from Cairo University in 1980, El-Daly immediately began studying for his MA. At the same time, under the supervision of Dr Zahi Hawass and in company with Mark Lehner, he worked on excavations in the vicinity of the Sphinx at Giza. The search for a harbour in the area adjacent to Khafre’s valley temple was fruitless:  “The underground water level has always been very high, and all we found were rotten Græco-Roman objects which we were not interested in”, he says. Evidence suggesting boat slipways has been found at the site in more recent years.

“I suppose I wanted to teach straight away at a university,” says El-Daly, “but then I got excited about guiding.” Having studied and gained his licence as a guide, El-Daly concentrated for a decade on showing Egypt’s monuments to visitors, travelling widely. Then, in 1992, he moved to London with his wife Diana (who is Scottish), to teach Egyptology and also to carry out postgraduate research at Liverpool University on social mobility in Ancient Egypt. He has lectured in Britain, Holland, Sweden and the USA, and organises his own study tours to Egypt. Most recently El-Daly has been enjoying a year’s sabbatical from teaching, “specifically to go to Egypt”, travelling there regularly as a guide with British Museum and other tours as well as his own.

While most of his time and effort is dedicated to direct communication of his knowledge and enthusiasm via teaching, lecturing and guiding, El-Daly has also been translating Egyptological books for the benefit of Arab readers. An Arabic edition of Morris Bierbrier’s Tomb Builders of the Pharaohs appeared in 1994 and quickly went out of print - as El-Daly says, “it is the only study in Arabic on Deir el-Medina” - and he has recently been translating Jeffrey Spencer’s Early Egypt. “The joy”, he says, “comes from the fact that you are making these available to your own native people in their own language”. Also, he says, “I am currently involved in my own book on the family in Ancient Egypt”.

Teaching, however, remains central to El-Daly, whose work on the Certificate and Diploma in Egyptology courses at Birkbeck have been well received. Despite “a terrible problem with lack of funding, which really gets to you”, he says, “formal teaching is the highlight of my career; therefore I’m not going to give it up”.