Almost everyone who falls in love with ancient Egyptian history can trace it back to a single moment. I was 10 years old and I read a Scholastic book about Egypt that taught me that obelisks are actually representative of the rays of the Sun coming down to the ground, rather than reaching for the sky like I had assumed.

A picture in a book.
A lecture that landed just right.
A museum visit that stopped us in our tracks.

That spark is universal—and, to me it was, and still very much is, absolutely beautiful.

But after that first moment of wonder, something interesting happens. We join a massive, global community of people all staring at the same fragments: statues, tomb walls, reliefs, texts, temples. We are all trying to decipher messages left behind more than 4,000 years ago by people who are long gone, in a world that no longer exists.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth:

We have knowledge, but we often lack context.

What We Know—and What We Don’t

Thanks to the Rosetta Stone, hieroglyphs are no longer mysterious symbols floating free of meaning. The language itself has been decoded. We can translate names, titles, prayers, offerings, official decrees. In that sense, the words are remarkably exact.

But words alone are not meaning.

Meaning lives in why something was carved, where it was placed, who was meant to see it, and what assumptions the original audience brought with them—assumptions we can never fully recover.

Art, placement, scale, repetition, symbolism, absence—this is where interpretation begins. And interpretation is where certainty becomes slippery.

A Lesson From an Unexpected Place

Years ago, when I was in college, I was asked to judge a debate tournament.

This raised more than a few eyebrows.

I wasn’t a debater. I had never competed in debate. My background was interpretive literature—poetry, drama, prose. Performance. Meaning. Human connection.

“Rick Long judging a debate?” someone joked. “That’s like a basketball player judging figure skating.”

They weren’t wrong.

So I was honest with the competitors. Before the debate I told them plainly:
I do not understand the technical context of what you’re arguing. I can’t evaluate your strategy or your case construction. But I can evaluate how clearly, persuasively, and responsibly you present your ideas.

I judged from a place of humility—and transparency.

And oddly enough, that made me a better judge. And they ended up respecting me and my somewhat naive comments on their round.

Egyptology Has the Same Problem

Egyptology often begins as an intellectual pursuit—and for some, it stays there.

Facts are learned. Dates memorized. Dynasties stacked neatly in order. The temptation then becomes to perform that knowledge: to show the world how much one knows, how deeply one sees, how confidently one can declare what something “means.”

But meaning is not ownership.

When interpretation hardens into certainty—especially certainty built on limited context—opinions quietly become facts in the mind of the speaker. And that is dangerous territory.

We are asking questions that were posed thousands of years ago using evidence that is fragmentary, symbolic, and incomplete. That doesn’t make the work meaningless—it makes it sacred.

This Isn’t About Being Right

Ancient Egyptians were not abstractions. They were real people who loved, feared, worshipped, celebrated, mourned, worked, failed, hoped, and believed.

Studying them is not about intellectual dominance.
It is not about winning arguments.
It is not about proving how clever we are.

It is about listening carefully—to stone, to art, to silence—and admitting when the honest answer is “we don’t yet know.”

Knowledge gives us tools.
Context gives us wisdom.
Humility keeps the two in balance.

If we allow ancient Egypt to teach us how to live rather than simply what to know, then perhaps we are finally honoring the people who left these messages behind—not as puzzles to be solved, but as lives to be understood.

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