If Richard Wilkinson has his way, one day the Egyptian Queen Tausert will be as well-known as Nefertiti.
For 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.
Unlike Nefertiti, who was the queen consort of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, Tausert was herself a pharaoh. 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. Knowledge of her largely disappeared after her death, and her story has long been buried in the Egyptian sands.
“We’re bringing the queen back,” Wilkinson says animatedly in his office in the UA Department of Classics. “It’s important we bring her back from oblivion. We’re bringing her back into history.”
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. He also has an affiliation with the Department of Near Eastern Studies.
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. 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.
