Interview! Dr. Chris Naunton (Part 1)

Dr. Chris Naunton

Interview conducted via email between Sept. 5-7, 2020.

Chris Naunton is an Egyptologist, and has two books: Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt and Egyptologists’ Notebooks. He has also been featured on quite a few TV shows about Ancient Egypt, a list of which can be viewed on his website at this link. (A recent show, “Tut’s Treasures – Hidden Secrets” should be available on Disney+ in the UK, the US, and possibly other countries.)

Chris lives in Central London, but is hoping to move out to the suburbs soon. He lives with his partner, to whom his second book (Egyptologists’ Notebooks) is dedicated. She’s very interested and supportive of what Chris does. Some of his hobbies include cinema, music, cycling. In addition, when concerning sports, he says, “I’m a lapsed Arsenal fan but that sort of thing stays with you for life.” Chris also hopes to do some gardening if he gets the move out to the suburbs that he hopes for. He has three degrees: BA Ancient History and Archaeology, MPhil Egyptology, and PhD Egyptology.

Most of Chris’ work relates to Egyptology in some way. He writes books, which involves research and writing of course but also related things like giving talks and interviews. He is also pretty active online and on social media promoting books etc. Chris also does quite a lot of media work am in regular contact with production companies making documentaries about Egypt as a consultant; he often appears in them too which usually mean going to Egypt for filming. He also accompanies specialist of the country for enthusiasts of Egyptology. Lastly he helps run a small charity, The Robert Anderson Trust, which provides support to young scholars and students (often studying archaeology of Egyptology) in London, which includes managing a building and running the Trust’s programme of activities.

Chris can’t say he had a clear vision of exactly this way of doing Egyptology in mind at any point; it sort of grew organically. He wanted to study archaeology and specifically Egyptology at university as he thought it would be the most interesting way of getting a degree, but he wasn’t really thinking beyond that at the time. Chris says how he “was more interested in football and rock music at that point!” He hadn’t been a particularly good student up to that time, but once he started my university studies he realized very quickly that he had found something he loved. Ever since then he’s been trying to find a way to keep doing it. First of all that meant carrying on his studies, but subsequently it meant trying to find a job. Chris was lucky enough to get a fairly lowly administrative position at the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) shortly after finishing his Master’s degree; lowly though it was, he loved it and stayed for almost 16 years, ending up as the CEO (Director). During that time Chris was lucky enough that lots of opportunities to improve his CV came my way, and he took as many of them as he could. And that gave him a platform to do what I do now – which, essentially, has been to carry on studying ancient Egypt and sharing what he’s learned through books and TV.

Before doing what he does now, Chris did a few things. He worked on the checkout in Budgen’s supermarket when he was at school, stacked shelves overnight at Sainsbury’s during his university holidays, and then worked in several bars before getting the job at the EES.

Well, with hindsight I realize that I had watched a lot of TV when I was growing up, including a lot of documentaries and I suppose I had always thought that it would really wonderful to appear on television. I used to speak to a lot of production companies when I was working at the EES as they used the Society’s library in their research and I was in charge of the collection and often up working as a kind of informal consultant. I liked the idea of being involved and was also hoping that I might be able to persuade them to feature the Society’s work – the EES is a charity and relies on the support of the public, and I thought getting our work onto the TV would have been a great way of raising awareness. I never thought I would get the chance to get in front of the cameras myself but one day one of the producers I’d been speaking to asked if I’d be interested in presenting something for the BBC. I think they must have been looking for experts who could present rather than professional presenters, so they put me forward, I did a screen test, passed, and it took off from there. Once other producers had seen me on TV they must have thought I was OK in front of camera and so one invitation led to a few more, and after nearly ten years of doing it I suppose I’m quite well established as someone who is able to do what’s required. For his writing, Chris used to write on his sofa. but now he uses a desk in his bedroom at the moment. (It’s one reason why he and his partner are looking to move out of central London – to get a bit more room.)

For his inspiration, Chris considers himself lucky that he’s involved in quite a bit of work other than writing. All of his other work gives him plenty of opportunities to think about things that might become books in the future. One idea he has for a book he’d like to write at some point came from a TV documentary he was involved in recently. His next book is most likely to be based on a series of posts on social media which arose as a result of a tour to Egypt getting cancelled thanks to the lockdown; in Chris’ words: “what’s that phrase, adversity is the mother of invention? I think I’ve misremembered it but you know what I mean.”

National Geographic's
"Tut's Treasures - Hidden Secrets"

Chris both was and wasn’t a big reader as growing up. As a child, he read a lot. His mother was a teacher and specialized in children’s literature, so he had all the help and encouragement I could wish for. (After his mother died of Leukaemia a few years ago, her school renamed the library in her memory.) Chris also remembers being told off for reading by torchlight, sometimes under the covers when he was supposed to be trying to get to sleep. As an adult, he has hardly read any fiction but reads a lot of news. Since he left my last permanent job in part as a way of getting more time to do things he enjoys, he’s been trying to read more books too. Chris generally have several on the go at once – he get very enthusiastic about particular subjects, but then doesn’t have the patience to see a book through to the end before he gets distracted by the next thing. He’s just finished a beautiful book that’s part the history of a house and the writer’s experience of living in it, partly a lament about the loss of the old ways of the English countryside (At The Yeoman’s House by Ronald Blyth). Despite saying he rarely reads fiction, Chris has now moved onto Autumn by Ali Smith, having read about her recently competed quartet of books with the four seasons for titles. Of course he reads a lot for his work too and he buys a lot of books for his Egyptological library. Since becoming a freelancer and homeworker, he’s had more reason than ever to have my own library, and it’s a great excuse to keep acquiring new things. Chris is currently trying to track down a rare archaeological report from the 1960s. “It’s almost like a kind of archaeology…”

What first interested Chris about writing – and introduced it to him as a career – was reading. He has always had to write – essays at school and university, dissertations and theses for higher degrees, and then articles etc. for work. Academics are supposed to write such things, but for many years he never really enjoyed it. Chris kind of ‘found himself’ as a writer when he started writing online. When he became Director of the EES, the Trustees asked him to become the ‘face’ of the organisation. Up to that point their communications had mostly been very formal and expressed in the passive voice (‘it has been decided that’ etc), and he wanted to find a way of speaking to the members and other supporters that was more personal, and friendly, hence the blog. Chris set out very deliberately to ‘talk to’ people as he would if they were sitting across the table from me in the pub, and he found writing like that, without the burden of having to grapple with formal, academic language, very liberating. And he found he enjoyed writing. A short time after that Chris set up another blog about gigs (rock concerts) he had been to in the past and this took the process even further. Although it was a publicly accessible blog it wasn’t anything to do with his work and it was entirely personal to him – he hardly told anyone about it except for a few close friends – which meant he was even freer to write what he wanted in the way he wanted to express himself. And again, Chris found he really enjoyed the process. This set him up nicely for writing a first book, and indeed the commissioning editor at Thames and Hudson, Colin Ridler, who asked Chris to do my first, mentioned that he was already confident that he (Chris) could write having seen my (EES) blog.

On Chris’ website, he mentions that research he’s done in the past has focused on the history of archaeology in Egypt, and Egyptology as a whole, with a focus on the Egyptian Exploration Society, and Egypt’s twenty-fifth dynasty. He’s always been interested not just in what we know, but how we know it; he supposes that’s one of the essences of academic research in a subject like Egyptology – it’s not enough to take other scholars word for what happened in the past, you need to understand how they came to their conclusions so you can evaluate them. The history of archaeology and Egyptology helps understand how we know what we know, as it’s always been an interest. But Chris first became really interested in the subject when he began working at the EES which is itself an historic organisation (founded in 1882), for which many of the great names in the field have worked including Amelia Edwards (the founder), Flinders Petrie, Howard Carter and others. The 25th Dynasty is a period during which Egypt was conquered by a group of foreigners from the Kingdom of Kush to the south in modern-day Sudan. He had never come across this until he heard a lecture on the subject when I was an undergraduate. There’s something about the idea of Egypt being taken over by a group of people who were foreign in that they came from somewhere else and looked different and had some different customs, but who had adopted many aspects of Egyptian culture (language, script, religious beliefs, architecture) has continued to fascinate Chris ever since.