Hawass talking about Mark Lehner

My great friend Mark Lehner has been working at Giza for the past thirty years. During this time he has written many scholarly articles and published important books on the pyramids. He is one of the most respected Egyptologists in the world and a professor at the University of Chicago.

I first met Mark at a party in 1974. He was in Egypt studying Anthropology for a year at the American University in Cairo. He was a quiet man, but we got talking and he told me that he was interested in Egyptology, so I invited him to my office at the pyramids to talk. At this time I was a young archaeologist, only twenty-seven years old. As we got to know each other, Mark told me that he had come to Egypt from North Dakota with a scholarship from the Cayce Foundation. Edgar Cayce was a famous American psychic who would enter trances and diagnose illnesses; he would then suggest prescriptions to cure these illnesses. One day, in a trance, Cayce announced that in a previous life he had lived in Atlantis, and that when the island sank he took the technology of the Atlanteans to Egypt where he buried the records of his people in a box below the right paw of the sphinx. This room became known as the Hall of Records. I did not share Mark’s beliefs, but I still respected him and we became friends.

In 1975 Hugh Lynn Cayce, Edgar Cayce’s son, came to Egypt and Mark introduced us. He and more than 300 supporters went to meditate in the Great Pyramid, and, although I and other archaeologists gave them lectures on the history of the pyramids and the sphinx, we did not manage to change their minds. Mark, however, had learnt a lot about the history and archaeology of Giza by this time and was starting to question his beliefs.