Book Review: Dinner With King Tut by Sam Kean

A jaunt into the contemporary world of experimental archaeology, and how its scholars are attempting to recreate cultural practices from the ancient world.

I’ve always been a fan of hands-on work when it comes to education; though the budgeting is inevitably higher, having experiences outside the classroom often trumps anything that a student could read about in a book. For instance, even in college I was given the opportunity to throw clay pottery on a wheel to make my own authentic kylix, and it’s given me a deeper appreciation for the craft than any visit to a museum. The larger field of frontline research that makes these opportunities possible is called “experimental archeology.” Though some individual cultures have maintained ancient practices as ritual across the ages, an academic appreciation for this approach has only come into being over the last century or so. In Dinner with King Tut, Sam Kean has detailed a handful of ongoing research in the field taking place across many different continents to give the reader a fuller perspective into the state of the study as a whole.

For those who remember my review of Gareth Harney’s A History of Ancient Rome in Twelve Coins, the overall structure of this work will be familiar. Both books split their chapters into three parts: the first half acts as a narrativization of historical events, then a second half combines the scientific inquiry and personal experiences with those involved in the field in order to back up why that narrative reflects a truth about the ancient world. That book chiefly separated the fictional parts from the research in two different sections per chapter, but Kean intertwines new information about artifacts in the stories as they arise in his own discussions with experts. I made note of how much I enjoyed this framing in the earlier review, and this iteration only improved upon the formula. The stories are very cut-and-dry from beginning to end. The plots are simple, the characters are realistic, and the elements from the research are well-integrated into the world. Nothing feels forced or out of place at all, and jumping from reality to fiction more often gives the book its own kind of pace.

I was elated to find mention of Salima Ikram’s work in the chapters on mummification. Her advice was cited prominently in a YouTube video about recreating the process on a chicken I watched a few months ago, and being able to recognize an expert in the field in that fashion helped to build my trust with the author. Every chapter presents its theories as very promising hypotheses rather than a settled matter of scientific debate, so I never truly felt the urge to investigate any outlandish claims because there was no true effort to sway me into believing them. That being said, having this one connection to proper academia did bolster my trust in everything Kean wrote about.

Along that same line, this whole project acts as a decent rebuttal to Graham Hancock’s whole schtick whether or not the author recognizes it. That fraud claims that there’s no way to make a name for oneself in the archeological world without the express approval of the ivory towers of academia. True, some of the names featured in Kean’s book come from a scholarly background, but many others are happy to operate on the fringes. They face a somewhat uphill battle towards publication in proper academic journals, but they do research in order to find the truth and keep knowledge alive, not for some credit on a piece of paper. Some of the theories about cultural practices, like sleeping arrangements in caves, unfortunately do border on the unprovable even if they do reflect a truth about the ancient world, but that doesn’t mean there’s a vast conspiracy working against anyone going against the mainstream. It’s also worth pointing out how all these figures in experimental archeology operate on a budget much smaller than Hancock’s awful tv show and have made less than his trashy books, which begs the question why they’ve found so much more verifiable information than he has.

Fans of archeology will naturally enjoy this book on its own merits, but it may find a secondary audience in a strange place. As I came to the last chapters, the structure of the nonfiction sections further reminded me of Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. Both works are incredibly good at taking rather mundane scenarios about real-life experiences and injecting a dose of magical thinking into them so that they feel more like fiction. Those outside the field of the classics but who also enjoyed that book would certainly find their interest piqued by Kean’s work here. I give this book 2 stars. Pick up a copy when it releases on July 8th.