He was responsible for giving us the language used by Ra and the Abydonians in the Stargate feature film, and providing key details to the production team. Dial the Gate is privileged to welcome Dr. Stuart Tyson Smith. He currently serves as a professor with the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

We have many questions for our esteemed guest on how he joined the field, helped bring the world of Abydos to life, and his impact on the TV series that followed. He answers your questions, LIVE!

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Timecodes
00:00 – Opening Credits
00:40 – Welcome and Episode Outline
02:40 – Welcoming Stuart, the Egyptian language
12:30 – Language and Dialogue for Stargate the Movie
17:23 – Why did you study Egyptology?
22:32 – Highlights of Stuart’s career
30:31 – Aliens Visiting Earth and Building the Pyramids
36:02 – Jaye Davidson, bringing Ra to life, the set, Hathor mythology
45:41 – Fan questions: Working on The Mummy vs Stargate
51:15 – Wrapping up with Stuart, working on Stargate Origins
56:40 – Post interview housekeeping
57:23 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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Stuart Tyson Smith
Welcome to episode 137 of Dial the Gate and I did not brush my hair. Look at that, I look terrible. My name is David Read, thank you so much for joining me. I have a wonderful guest for our first episode today, Dr. Stuart Tyson Smith, who was the Egyptology consultant assigned to the Stargate feature film and Stargate Origins and the Mummy. If you’re into that genre, you’ve seen his work, and we’re going to discuss that. He is joining us for this episode to discuss the mythology, to discuss the language, he’s responsible for putting those foreign words into those folks mouths. But before we get into all of that, if you like Stargate, and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, it would mean a great deal to me if you click that Like button now. It makes a difference with YouTube’s algorithm and will help the show continue to grow its audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend. And if you want to get notified about future episodes, click the Subscribe icon. And giving the Bell icon to click will notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last minute guests changes. And clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next few weeks on the GateWorld.net YouTube channel. So as this is a live stream, Dr. Smith is with us. So I’m going to be asking him my questions for the first half of the episode. And then in the second half of the episode, we’re going to turn that over to the community who is currently at youtube.com/dialthegate where you can submit questions if you’re watching live to Tracy and Sommer and my moderating team, Antony, everyone who’s in there currently now, and they will organize those questions for me, and I will be sure to ask some of those questions to Dr. Smith. But until then, he’s all mine. Dr. Stuart Tyson Smith, Egyptologist, UC Santa Barbara, is that correct?

Stuart Tyson Smith
That’s correct.

David Read
Welcome, sir. How are you?

Stuart Tyson Smith
Very well. Getting looking forward to the summer, which is always nice.

David Read
Absolutely. I can imagine so absolutely. It is a thrill to have you. You are one of the original players responsible for helping to make not just the mythology, the content that we all know and love through Stargate work, the original content, but to make it real, as real as possible. And I’ve just got to ask, right off the top here, “How do we know what they sounded like all those 1000s of years ago?” I mean, that’s probably the most common question that you get. I wanted to get that out of the way before asking about you, your past, why you got into this particular niche of all the things that you could be doing in academia. How do we know what they sounded like?

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, that’s a great question. And you’re right, I do get asked that a lot. And it’s, the first thing to recognize is that ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, even though they look like picture writing, are actually primarily phonetic. So there are a few signs that are will be called determinatives, that are picture signs, but they’re usually combined with the spelling of a word. So for example, anything to do with thought, or sort of intellectual activities is a little papyrus scroll. Anything to do with emotion is little person with a hand to their mouth, like “oh!” And then in some of the kinds of things, some of them are really literal, like the word for crocodile as a crocodile. And sometimes you can just use the hieroglyphs for the crocodile, but more often it’s actually spelled out. And so the writing system is really complicated, and it only consists of consonants. So they didn’t write down vowels. And they, you have different different groupings of consonants, so they’re kind of like little bird skeletons in a way, and that you have a combination of signs that are basically alphabetic. They stand for a single consonant but again no vowels, or two consonants with three consonants, rarely four. And so they combine them in this very complicated system, it’s the total number of signs is about 700. So it’s a little tricky. The question of why they didn’t have vowels is a good one. And the thinking is that, in a way, it wasn’t really needed. As much as in Indo-European languages, like especially some of the Romance languages where you have, and German and other languages, where you have case markings. And they’re unique and similar with English, when you have the conjugation of verbs, you can’t really understand it unless you know what the vowels are, because they mark what the tense of the verb is, for example, whether it’s a direct object, and so on in other terms, but in Arabic and Hebrew, there also are no vowels. They use added diacritical marks, but the original scripts don’t have vowels. And of course I’ve worked in Egypt and Sudan and traveled widely in the Middle East. So I’ve talked with people and then they tell me that when they’re writing down Arabic, “Yeah, sometimes they put in those little diacritical marks or vowels, maybe just leave them out because the meaning’s obvious.”

David Read
Obvious to that era.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Exactly so. For us reading ancient Egyptian it’s a pain. I would really love to have the vowels. And if you really want to understand how the language works, you need to be able to reconstruct those vowels and the syllabic structure of the language, which isn’t obvious from these consonantal skeletons. So the way we do that is we have a number of different lines of evidence. So we have those little consonant structures. But there is a survival of ancient Egyptian that’s lasted into modern times called Coptic and that today it’s no longer spoken, except for a few people who want to revive it. But it’s still used in the Coptic Christian Church as a liturgical language kind of like Latin in the Roman Catholic Church. And so that maintain pronunciations from about the second century CE when the language was written down using a modified Greek alphabet so that which included vowel. And that gives us a pronunciation, kind of a baseline pronunciation from right at that time, including conjugations and everything else. But of course, that’s a very different language after 1000 years, to the language that was spoken say around the time of King Tut. And there we actually do have quite a lot of evidence for pronunciation from the transcription of ancient Egyptian names into cuneiform, which is that wedgie writing on clay tablets that was used in Mesopotamia. And so there’s a whole bunch of diplomatic correspondence that survived. One in a big archaeological archive from the city of Amarna in Egypt, and another from a place called Hattusa in Boğazkale in modern times in Turkey, which is the archetype of the Hittite Empire. And so the Egyptians exchange these diplomatic texts and there are a few other groups of these documents that have shown up. And they’re normally written in a language called Akkadian, which is related distantly to sort of Arabic and Hebrew in the life of it’s a Semitic language. But the names are, Egyptian names are transcribed. So I’ll just give you one example of what happens when you do that.

David Read
Please.

Stuart Tyson Smith
And so the famous name of the famous Pharaoh Ramses or Rameses, and that’s how an Egyptian Egyptologists would normally pronounce it. Well, we know what, we actually know how that name was pronounced because it’s transcribed into these texts. And you have to fiddle a little bit with it, cuneiform is actually a syllabary so it includes vowel consonant combinations, so you’ve got to fuss with it a little bit, but by the time you can really work out what the original pronunciation was. And so the pronunciation of Ramses was originally, “Rí-ʹa-ma-sé-sa.” So, very different from Ramses and…

David Read
Just a wee bit.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Just a little bit. Yeah, so Egyptologists because you have to, it takes a little bit of work to do these reconstructions. What you can do is you get a few words like the name for the sun god, which normally Egyptologists and most other people would pronounce Ra, which is really wrong.

David Read
REE-ou

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, exactly. It’s “REE-ou” in Stargate, very good. And by the New Kingdom, by the time of King Tut it was “REE-ah” because the W drops, the W is actually a consonant, that “oo” sound at the end. So that, you can look at those consonantal changes, and I built all of that into Stargate. So I use some archaic pronunciations because I figured the name of the sun god might be sacred and might continue in a very old kind of archaic form, but other things I pulled in from Coptic and how you get some of the changes and transformations over time to create a kind of interesting blend of pronunciations rather than an exact pronunciation from say King Tut’s time. Our King Ramses this time, which actually did do for the Mummy movies. So I reconstructed the pronunciation there which are set right about that time the reign of Seti the First, the father of Ramses the second. And so that’s exactly when we have all this evidence for pronunciation. So then what you can do is take those names, and names in ancient Egyptian like Ramses, or “Rí-ʹa-ma-sé-sa” is actually a little sentence, so it means Ra bore or engendered him. And so you get conjugation of verbs and all sorts of grammatical points from that, these names as well. So you can take all of that evidence for a small number of words and structures and things, you can check it against Coptic and reconstruct things like vowel shifts, and so on. And there’s some other evidence, there’s some names that were transcribed into Greek, ancient Egyptian names that give us a sense there in the 400s BCE, into Persian earlier than that. And so you can trace the development of the language over time, and reconstruct something that’s a pretty plausible pronunciation. I’ve always thought of it as if you were actually transported back into ancient Egyptian times, or through a Stargate, and talking to descendants of ancient Egyptian you’d speak with a horrible accent, but they can understand you and vice versa, right? Because it’s not exact, but it’s pretty good. And it’s certainly much better than Egyptological pronunciations, which are just super flat and think of the difference between Ramses and “Rí-ʹa-ma-sé-sa.” So with the accent, you lose the pace of it, you also lose the music of it, which is something that I actually and I just happened to study all of this because a couple of professors, one who sadly passed away an early casualty of the AIDS epidemic in the late 80s. But then he was replaced by another professor who was interested in exactly this question of how was ancient Egyptian pronounced. And so I work with graduate students who were constantly doing we call it vocalizations. So doing these reconstructed pronunciations and I took seminars from professors who were explained how it was done and everything else. So as it happens, when the Stargate people then contacted me and said, “Oh, we have this idea. And can you do this?” I say, “Oh, yeah. It’s easy.” And you can see how the main conceit of the film which is the Egyptologist character played by James Spader goes to this other planet and it doesn’t initially understand what people are saying, but then figures it out once he works out the vowels.

David Read
Was that your contribution?

Stuart Tyson Smith
That? I wrote that line.

Stuart Tyson Smith
And it works really well because that’s really plausible. If you were transported and people were pronouncing ancient Egyptian correctly with vowels and accent and everything else, you would actually be scratching your head to start with until you realized, and if you are brilliant linguist like Daniel Jackson is supposed to be, I probably couldn’t do that. One of my professors could for sure do it though. he was absolutely amazing with language.

David Read
I was gonna say.

David Read
So the language that the Abydonians use in terms of the vowels is an educated guess, based on their circumstances and the times, that of the amount of time that has passed, correct?

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, so what I did was I created a kind of hybrid of different phases of the language, to sort of simulate a language that had come over at a very early stage in the history of the language but then it continued to evolve along similar lines that we see ancient Egyptian evolved. So then I use those and the core evidence is that pronunciation that we have that dates from about 1400 to 1000 BCE, where we have all these cuneiform documents, and then Coptic as the baseline later on. And then just what Egyptologists have been able to figure out using some ideas from linguistics and other tricks, comparative languages, if you want to compare between ancient Egyptian and other ancient and modern languages and figure out how they fit in terms of language families, and just the structure of the language itself, you really need that. Also, ancient Egyptians were really fond of punning. And you can’t…

David Read
Really?

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, when it’s in translation you totally don’t get it. Right? Because it’s an English word and it’s not, it doesn’t necessarily rhyme or whatever else. But if you reconstruct the pronunciations, you can get a real appreciation for the Egyptian’s sense of humor.

David Read
That’s cool. What an interesting byproduct of the analysis.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Exactly. And yeah, the one, the one thing I still remember vividly on the set of Stargate. It was actually a scene that was truncated in the final version of the film. But it’s when Kasuf, the father of the young lady, freaks out when Daniel Jackson sort of being a gentleman sort of tries [both: to return her]. Yeah, exactly. And that was originally a really long, I mean, still great, but it was a really long sort of rant where he’s going, “Oh, my God, no, no.” So I remember sitting on the set with my little headphones on listening to the dialogue, and suddenly ancient Egyptian literally came alive to me. And I could sort of hear the music of it. And it was really became a living language, even though I’ve been, we’ve been doing these vocalizations before. We’ve been reconstructing the pronunciation, the seminars I was taking, it’s not the same as having an actor who’s speaking it in a normal speaking pace with emotion and the context of a scene and these amazing sets that they had, costumes and everything else in the eye it’s part of the plot of the film and all of that. It just really brought it to life. I still vividly remember that moment when the language came alive to me, and I hope that people, especially people who know the language have had a similar experience. And I know it has become a sort of Egyptology cult classic.

David Read
Well, when you have folks like Mili Avital and Alexis Cruz and Erick Avari you can’t lose. Erick half of the believability is his precision with what you gave him and the other half is his comedic timing. It’s sometimes subtle, but it’s so funny. “Why you don’t want her, take her. Okay.”

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, and I worked with him a lot and he was really great. And as were Alexis, and MIli as well. And then they were all wonderful to work with and the other actors. Well, with the exception of Jay Davidson, we can talk about that if you like, but.

David Read
He had his own. Yeah, absolutely. Before we get into that, I want to know, why this field? What in your childhood inspired you? Or where was the pivot point that said, for you, “This is what I want to do with my life.”

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, so I can give you that exact moment. And it was when I was maybe 10 years old. And it was between I think it was between the, it was either between the fourth and the fifth grade, or fifth and the sixth grade, the local PTA had organized this kind of summer school, but informal with just members of the PTA who had an enthusiasm would teach about little mini course on whatever that was. And there was someone in our community who was an amateur archaeologist, they’ve been on digs, they weren’t a professional, and they collected antiquities and things. And so they had a bunch of us in to talk about archaeology. And I just got hooked on archaeology. But then for ancient Egypt, when she talked about King Tutankhamun’s tomb that really fascinated me, and partly it’s the stuff, the material from the tomb is just incredible.

David Read
The mask is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen in person, man, they guarded it like a hawk when I was in Cairo, you couldn’t take a picture of it, nothing.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, and all that jewelry in that same room, and all that jewelry with incredible detail, and all the other objects from the tomb is just amazing. What ended up really hooking me was the fact that Howard Carter literally stepped back in time, when he stepped into the tomb. So he was the first person to gaze upon all of that for 3000 years. And one of the interesting things is, what he was looking upon is the sort of remains of tomb robbing because there were a couple of times the tomb was broken into, it was mostly intact, and the King’s body was intact. But the tomb had been rooted through basically looking for valuables, gold and other other things that can be easily converted. And people can make a profit of without anybody being able to trace it back. And one of the things that stuck with me is how what that says about, not so much Tutankhamun, but the tomb robbers. Because you can look and you can start seeing the logic of how they approached a tomb like that where there would have been security in the valley at that time. So they must have been nervous. You can sort of put yourself in their place, they got oil lamp scattering, they got these weird kind of fantastical animal dead heads and these weird things and they got to be thinking about spirits and curses and things like this, although there wasn’t really a curse in the tomb, but nevertheless there were spiritual consequences,

David Read
And they were a superstitious people.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, exactly. And there were legal consequences too.

David Read
That’s true.

Stuart Tyson Smith
You know, if you you’re caught robbing a royal tomb you met a very unpleasant end. And so they must have been nervous scrabbling around looking for valuables, they can break in, get inside, come out quick. And at some point something must have happened in the last episode of tomb robbery. Either they had a lookout posted, if they were smart they did, and the lookout shouted down in the tomb, “Cheese it, the cops!” And they all ran out and bumped into one another. But somebody dropped like just a scrap of cloth that was full of gold rings. And it was right next to the door and you know what happened when the police were sort of cleaning up after things, they picked it up, tossed it in the nearest box. The whole approach to cleaning up the tomb was kind of like you pull up your carpet and you sweep the stuff underneath, they sort of pack things away and made it look neat and tidy and just don’t bother with the rest. But each one of these rings is absolutely a gorgeous work of art itself. But the tomb robbers were only interested in to melt it down for gold. And so I thought this is really interesting how you can tell, you can tell something about Tutankhamun’s life and the nature of power and wealth in ancient Egypt. But you can also tell about the underside of Egyptian society. It’s like how, what the tomb robbers were after and so on. So that idea that you can step back in time, and you can tell stories about people who’ve really been forgotten from history like these tomb robbers. And all of that fascinated me, and then ancient Egypt just because in such a remarkable civilization, but also such a rich source of evidence. You have all these texts and art, monuments but also the places where ordinary people lived, the tombs that ordinary people built and were buried in, and all these things you can do to tell about people’s lives. And I just kept at it, and ended up going to undergraduate at Berkeley, where that professor took me to Egypt to work on a project and that kind of set me on my course. And then in graduate school continued with it, and then was lucky enough to get a position at UCSB and as a professor. So, yeah.

David Read
What has been some of the more delightful aspects of your career aside from getting to consult on these blockbusters. Any particular finds that you’ve been able to take part in, in terms of discoveries over there. Anything that you have been associated with that’s like, “Wow,” I’ve got to pinch myself every now and then knowing that I was a part of that.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah. Well, I do direct a dig along with a couple of colleagues in northern Sudan. And so I got interested in Nubia, which is the southern part of Egypt and northern part of Sudan. And our excavation is revealed, all sorts of interesting things about Nubia that, and I guess one of the most gratifying things about that is that we’ve been able to show how Nubia which is tended to be thought of as in the shadow of Egypt, and sort of everything good in Nubia is seen as coming from Egypt. But in fact what we’ve been able to show is that there’s a real back and forth. And so excavating in an ancient Egyptian colony that was built about, that was sort of established around 1450 BCE. And it continues to the in what Egyptologists called the New Kingdom. So when King Tut ruled and so on, at about 1000 BCE, and then the colony split away from Egypt. And these colonial communities continued to thrive as multi-ethnic communities. So we’re looking at how the two cultures kind of inter woven, entangled together and produced something new. And then that eventually produced a series of Kings who ruled Egypt for a while and then produced a remarkable kingdom that lasts in the northern part of Sudan and the southern part of Egypt that lasted for around 1000 years after that. Making you sort of, you look at their monuments and temples and things like that and you go, “Oh, yeah, that looks Egyptian,” but you start looking closer you realize, “Oh, no, they’re playing with it.” But kind of like Stargate actually transforming these Egyptian themes and to suit their own ideas about kingship and queenship and all this other stuff.

David Read
Well, lasted so long. I mean, we look at time completely differently. A lot of us Westerners look at it from like the last 2000 years, but I mean, so much is I suspect just lost to time. So much information. Please go ahead.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Well, and archaeology is kind of like a murder mystery. In a way not not some, sometimes literally, it’s murder, but normally not. But you have all these pieces to a puzzle that you’re trying to figure out. This is why archaeologists tend to love mysteries. And I don’t know if you know it, but Agatha Christie actually married an archaeologist.

David Read
I did not know that.

Stuart Tyson Smith
And she wrote a couple of archaeological mysteries in her career that are really fun to read as an archaeologist. But it’s that sort of putting puzzles together and it’s like you’re putting it together, a jigsaw puzzle, but you know, somebody threw out half the pieces.

David Read
And you’ll never get it back.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, exactly. And then you threw in a few pieces from someplace else, and you got to sort it all out and figure out what’s going on. So it’s a really cool intellectual exercise. But one of the things is an Egyptologist, namely Matthew Flinders Petrie, that kind of founded modern archaeology along with a few other forward thinking people about 100 years ago. And he said that archaeology is about saving lives to bring back into human consciousness these people who’ve been forgotten from history. And you do that through the material record, through archaeology, you can’t, if they’re not mentioned in texts and inscriptions, they’re lost. But if you through these objects, you can see the person who used it, you can see the artisan who crafted like a little Scarab or other things, and you can bring something of their lives back by doing this. And that’s what kind of drives me. But the absolute coolest thing I’ve found is the burial of a soldier from about 700 BCE in the time period when Nubian kings were ruling as Pharaohs in Egypt, and they were fighting in the Levant. Actually, they were allies of King Hezekiah of Judah against the Assyrians. And so it’s a really dynamic time. And we found the burial of this one soldier and it shows this interesting mix of Egyptian and Nubian features but also included all this really cool stuff. And the coolest was this cosmetic box it was with filled with little vessels for perfume and razors so you could shave. So here’s this big burly guy, and you know that from the skeleton, you can tell if a guy, someone’s burly by looking at muscle attachments, because you get the more you bulk out the big bigger bones get. And that, when he stepped out and he was like perfumed and oiled and…

David Read
You found his toiletries.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Exactly we did. And dude wanted to look fine when he went out. We also had these amazing little faience vessels. Faience is a kind of glazed, self-glazing ceramic material, brightly colored, and one of them has these little statuettes. And the statuettes are only like this big but incredibly detailed of this little dwarf god Bes, who was super popular in Egypt, but became really popular in Nubia, and a little lid with a frog on it. And it would have held a perfume or something like this, but it is the most amazing item. And there were two other faience vessels that were also astonishing. But these are just incredible, incredibly beautiful works of art. And they’re as good as it gets for that material. And it’s the sort of thing you might find in a royal tomb, and you wouldn’t be surprised that it would be in there. So this guy had connections too, and they are by far and away the most beautiful, extraordinary things that I found. It also shows that Nubia was not a backwater, as some Egyptologists have characterized it, but they were right up with the latest stuff. And a very cosmopolitan society, and this is the kind of thing, it’s not clear they may have made it locally, but it’s playing off of similar kinds of objects that were circulating among the wealthiest people, movers and shakers, throughout the Mediterranean world. And these Nubian elites, like our guy who was probably a military officer, and kings and whatnot, they were part of that and not just consuming but I think they were really participating in it. So this tomb tells us a lot about the life of this guy but then it has implications for the role of Nubia in world affairs and showing that it’s not just dependent on Egypt, but in fact, at that point, around 700 BCE, they were driving the agenda and they were pulled into this. So, I mean, is the most incredible thing and tomb robbers have broken into it and they took away his head so we don’t have his head sadly. They were probably going after some gold jewelry around his neck which disappeared. But it was the kind of vaulted tomb and the vaulting collapsed over it and apparently the tomb robbers just went “Oh, yeah, we got the gold so do you want to dig it out and see what else is in there? Yeah, we got to get stuff.” I love losing looters. And so they they left everything else in the tomb was intact. And so just amazing record of the life of this guy who otherwise we wouldn’t know about if we hadn’t found him. And it tells this whole story about how connected Nubia was to the world. Also the world of northeast Africa as well, so that’s been really cool and that’s definitely the coolest thing I’ve found, far and away.

David Read
So much has got to be left buried out there. And I have to ask before we get to our alien Ra. Do you think, what is in your mind the likelihood that we’ve been visited. That our Ancient cultures have been influenced by something extra terrestrial, in your opinion?

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, so in my opinion it’s fantasy.

David Read
It’s fantasy?

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, there’s no, or science fiction, actually probably more appropriately science fiction, which is fine. But Erich von Däniken who inspired Stargate and Roland was in particular a big fan, Dean a bit too. But Erich von Däniken himself admitted that he was writing fiction, at one point when pressed, because he fabricated some things and exaggerated some other things in writing his books. And in fact there’s no reason to suppose that anything that people achieved in the past was the result of aliens. When we, for example, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, which are one of the classic things, how could anybody make them? And I haven’t been there many times, I can totally understand why you might think that because they are incredibly huge monuments. My favorite thing is to stand next to a great pyramid and in the middle of one side of it, just look up and it’s…

David Read
Yeah, it’s a great big triangle.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, exactly. It’s lots and lots of rocks.

David Read
So awe inspiring, and the rocks are taller than us. I mean, you can’t climb on one easily. How would they, but anyway, okay, so…

David Read
That’s not as much as I expected.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah. They use sledges, ramps, and you know all of this. There’s good documentation for it. They recently found a whole set of documents that relate to the construction of the Great Pyramids at a port on the Red Sea, that are just now being published. This is only just a few years ago. It’s a lot of the logistics of it. So the big thing about building the pyramids was not the technology so much, it was the logistics. So how do you get all that stone there, most of the stone came from right nearby, those big blocks there, don’t get me wrong, like you say they’re the big and impressive and would be hard to climb. But you know, the average block weighs about two and a half tons, which sounds like a lot.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, and that’s not bad. There are fewer in the internal, like in the burial chambers inside are lined in hard stones like granite, diorite, and so on. And those are big. So those are maybe 40, 50, 60 tons. But even then we know Egyptians could, we have documents and we have images of Egyptians moving big statues and things that would be about that same way. So they have the technology, basic technology to quarry the stone and everything else and move it. So it’s like, how do you assemble the workforce? How do you make sure everything’s going smoothly in the stones are going up into the pyramid? So it’s a lot about logistics, getting food, equipment…

David Read
Slave labor.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Managing labor, actually, they probably weren’t slaves.

David Read
You don’t think so?

Stuart Tyson Smith
No, there would have been a professional corps. But then also there would have been probably seasonal labor that would have been kind of like military conscription. So that was the equivalent of a draft in ancient Egypt. But it was not just for the military, it was for public works and other other things. Trade expeditions or recording expeditions going out into the desert and stuff like that. They would work with a local leader, would assemble a group of people, and you didn’t have a lot of choice, but you were paid and clothed and everything else so wasn’t exactly free. But it wasn’t exactly, the people weren’t actually enslaved they were just in this kind of draft system that we call the corvée, which is just a way of of mobilizing labor and the leaders of the local areas where these people were drawn from came with them. We have some documents from later than the Great Pyramid was being built that other similar projects where the those guys are complaining to the central government that, “Hey, my guys clothes are getting ragged. You need to send us more.” So they were people were looking at just prosaic stuff like that. “You need to send this stuff now.” So they had advocates who are keeping track and making sure. And the cemetery nearby shows fairly high incidence of things like broken bones, as you might expect. A big construction project like that, but a really successful rate of healing. So they had medical attention, the best it could for that time, but things like setting bones and just basic stuff. And so they seem to have been relatively well cared for. And we have a lot of evidence for feeding them and everything else from the huge settlement that was found next to the Great Pyramids. So that we really understand and know, and you can say that for pretty much everything around the world that’s been attributed to aliens. We have the evidence. There’s still some debate as to the exact configuration of ramps and whatever else for building the Great Pyramid, for example, but there’s no question that the ancient Egyptians were capable of it.

David Read
That’s extraordinary. Jay Davidson, our villain, the other actor whose words were brought to life by what you said, by what you provided. And also a fair bit of post production, which Dean revealed to me at least about a year and a half ago was not the original plan. Tell us about working with Jay on this, bringing the villain, who wasn’t originally Ra it was a minion, to life.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah. So that’s a very good question. Yeah. So, Jay was, he was really good at playing himself basically. And that’s why he got the Oscar nomination in the Crying Game. And he was very, he had this amazing presence in terms of that kind of androgynous look, which is what they were going for with Stargate. Which also in a really interesting way, I think, queered the production, by creating this kind of sexual tension between Spader and Davidson and even though he’s a villain, the plot really circles around him.

David Read
There’s a lot of levels to play.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Exactly. I think in that aspect his performance added a lot. But in terms of acting he’s was not a professional actor, he was picked up for his look, and as I say, to basically play himself in the Crying Game, and he had serious issues with addiction. And so but he, I mean, we really did try, I worked with him a lot. And I would run through his lines, and he just could not remember his lines, all the other actors did fine but he would freeze on set. So suddenly there was a moment when I became the most important person on the set, because I had to get him through his lines. And so at one point, they had me in a little sound booth, and they had a sort of earwig in his ear, and I would feed him his lines. Then Roland told us great stories with looking at the the shot, and Jay walks up, it’s dramatic moment, tight down on his face and he says “Stuart, louder.” Because he’s British, so his British accent. And Roland, a really cool guy, both both Roland and Dean, the whole crew really was great. And that’s a testament to Roland and Dean and the other production crew and how they ran the set. And I talked to a lot of people and they were really loyal to their regular, the people they regularly work with. So he just went, “Okay, we need to find something else.” So he ended up settling on cue cards. So I would pronounce the line, work with Jay on the line. And then I would ask him to transcribe it into British English pronunciation, because how you write it down.

David Read
It’s something he would recognize.

David Read
Right.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, exactly. So we made these big cue cards. But even then they had to like point to the line whenever he was supposed to say it. And so in the end it just came across, it just didn’t come across convincingly. And also, Jay didn’t quite have the presence to be menacing. And so that’s when they added all this stuff into post production, where they, they overdubbed his dialogue. And they also added in that whole subplot of him being inhabited by the Goa’uld, the alien, that was not in the original film, he was actually still playing Ra, the Sun God, but he wasn’t really an alien. He wasn’t himself an alien, he was kind of a stooge for the aliens and playing god, with the help of technology and everything else. Which I thought actually was a really cool plot.

Stuart Tyson Smith
One of the things I’m also interested in, in terms of my academic life, is empires and the ancient Egyptian empire and the later Nubian Empire and the dynamics of power and all that kind of thing. And it was beautiful sort of illustration of how you use power and ideology, and theology and religion to dominate it.

David Read
Manipulate. Well, we see that with the Abydonians, they’re hiding under masks, and they’re shocked to find out that they’re human. And exactly the crux in the feature film. I mean, in the series Jaffa are walking around with human faces, but in the movie, they’re shocked by that and that’s what pushes Kasuf over the edge. His glorious moment running down the hill.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, exactly. And there are a whole bunch of things. And it’s partly my influence, but it’s partly Roland and Dean having good instincts, and their art people who are great. But there are a lot of things that really resonate well with ancient Egypt. And one of the things is that they mask gods. Yeah, and this was a common thing in ancient Egyptian rituals is for priests to wear masks, and impersonate deities and religious rituals. And you can think of them as kind of Mystery Plays as well that were able to reenact a mythological scene for at a big festival time or something like this. So that worked really well, that whole scene and that, I mean, the sets were amazing. That whole temple facade where the the pyramid was CGI, but the temple facade was full scale, it was as big as a temple in Egypt. And that whole scene where Daniel Jackson is supposed to execute his fellows, of course it’s space aliens and everything else but it’s exactly the same thing that would have happened in ancient Egypt, typically those big pylons are decorated with scenes holding enemy prisoners and getting ready to execute them. And they probably actually perform those rituals on a small scale, and executed prisoners or perhaps high level foreign military opponents and that kind of thing, who they captured in these special rituals. And so that idea of these masked individuals, and the big crowd below, and this demonstration of power is totally resonates with sort of ancient Egypt and the setting, how these temples function as a means that the king showing that in this case, of course, the god Ra, although in that case he has the mask of King Akhenaten, which is kind of cool. And the king demonstrating that he has the power, and he’s destroying these chaotic elements, these enemies that threaten the social order. And so that enactment is very cool. So lots of points in the film, where you have these really interesting resonances with ancient Egypt, kind of transformed in the context of space aliens, so it doesn’t have to be exact, which…

David Read
It just has to be in the right direction for…

Stuart Tyson Smith
Exactly, yes, [Inaudible] Yeah, that’s it. And that was the cool thing is that they were very interested in doing exactly that. They wanted it to resonate, they wanted it to work. And again, they drew on my expertise, quite a lot, but I think they really did have good instincts. Like there’s a great costume I have a PowerPoint, I’m looking at it now where I’ve got a picture inserted in it. And it’s like when one of the nice pictures of me with my headset on and Jay working with him on his dialogue. And he’s standing there, but he’s wearing that wonderful costume where he has the horns and the sun.

David Read
Yes. Yeah, the Hathor…

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, exactly.

David Read
The combat. Yeah.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that’s a cool thing. I mean, it of course highlights the sexual ambiguity but it’s the sexual ambiguity, not just of Ra right in the film, but it’s also how Ra actually worked. Ra was the creator so you embody both male and female. And his eye, and you have that wonderful eye of Ra image that runs throughout the film as well. The eye of Ra was Hathor, the same goddess who wears that iconic horn and sun disc, and she was Ra’s enforcer. And there’s a whole myth about how Hathor went crazy and started killing everyone because Ra said, Ra was upset with some humans who were not respecting him properly as if, “Go out and teach them a lesson.” And she was about ready to like eat all of humanity as a lion. But then they brewed up a bunch of beer and colored it red and told her it was blood and she drank all the beer and thinking she was drinking the blood of her enemies and she got happy and humanity was saved.

David Read
Wow.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Nice little myth, but you know, Hathor and Ra have this interesting relationship.

David Read
Daughter and wife.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, daughter and wife but also eye. Ancient Egyptian theology is very flexible, and you have these things where you seem is she his daughter, is she his wife, is she his eye? She’s all of those things. It just depends on the context to where it’s at, it resonates really well with that. It’s really cool.

David Read
It’s extraordinary. Would you be willing to come back? I need more time.

Stuart Tyson Smith
I would be happy to.

David Read
I would appreciate that. This fall we’re doing season three. And I think this is fascinating stuff. And I’ve got so many fan questions here for you. I want to throw a few at you really quickly here. Lockwatcher, “What difference did you see from working on the Mummy compared to working on Stargate?”

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, that’s a good question. So with Stargate, I was actually involved in pre-production. So I was actually talking to like, already some of the other people had been talking to me about sets and things, particularly the dig scene at the beginning, which is actually really good. Probably me, but partly because they wanted to make it right. And so I was working with the props guy, Doug Harlocker, and whatnot. And then I got contacted by I think it was Lars or Peter Winter, contacted me about the film and said, “You need Stargate and hieroglyphs.” I did that for them. And he had this great idea to bring them on board. So then they brought me on board. And so I saw an early version of the script, it was late in pre-production. But then I was in a number of pre-production meetings, met with the art people and all of that. And then I was actually on the set of the film for probably about three out of a more or less five month shoot. So anytime people had dialogue I had to be there. And of course, I got paid more so that was good. My daily rate. And so I was very grateful to James Spader, who always wanted me there whenever he had a line. And of course, Jay Davidson could be a pain. Well, he was always I have to say really nice to me. Because I think that yeah, he knew he was depending on me.

David Read
You were in his corner. You wanted to make it work.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah. But it was great. Because every time he had a line or anything I had to be there. So I was hanging out a lot on the set. And I was talking to people, I met with Dean and Roland all the time as they were tweaking the script, I wrote big chunks of dialogue. So they were really keen on getting everything as right as possible. And I think that’s because they both have made science fiction films, mostly together, and I think they were really interested, they really wanted to make it good science fiction, which has that idea that suspension of disbelief, you have one big thing: Stargates, aliens, all of that. And then everything else you make as convincing as possible. So they wanted the language to be right. They wanted the, not a made up language, but a real language and really ancient Egyptian. They wanted everything else to be as good as possible. So I wrote a whole bunch of Daniel Jackson’s dialogue, anytime he’s talking Egyptology I wrote it basically. And I would give it to him, they would tweak it to suit their needs and whatnot. And we go forward. Now the Mummy movies it was kind of dialed in. So they gave me the script to comment on, didn’t work with any of their set people or artists or art people or anything like that. I made a whole bunch of comments. And then I translated all the dialogue and put it into the correct pronunciation or at least our best estimate of the pronunciation for that period. And they made little bullet style tapes. I did that for Stargate too. The only actor I worked with was Arnold Vosloo and briefly with Dwayne Johnson, the Rock, fuzzy, fuzzy cell phone call to somewhere near Marrakech, because they decided he should say something in that iconic scene where he’s in the desert and so I fed him that line. So that was fun. So a couple minutes, he did a beautiful job. But otherwise it was kind of dialed in. So they weren’t you know, I think they thought it was a novelty. Actually, Erick Avari, who you know was in the first film, saw the script and said, “Oh, yeah, this guy Stuart Smith, you got all this ancient Egyptian dialogue can do it for you and he’s a cool guy. He’s not going to complain or anything.” Because I I love film and so I love science fiction and the Mummy genre as well. And so I was happy, only too happy to add my expertise to make it a little bit more real as much as I could. But they ignored about half of my advice so there are a whole bunch of things of the Mummy movies that are wrong like five canopic jars which are where they put the mummified internal organs. Four, I told them four but I guess they made the prop already, I don’t know. But one cool thing that I got in was that we’re going to call the desert warriors were protecting the tombs. And would call them something like [Mummia], or something like that. “No, no, no call them Medjay.” And Medjay were a Nubian group of nomadic desert people who were employed by the Egyptians in the Egyptian military and had a lot of influence on Egyptian military. By the New Kingdom they were the police force that guarded the Valley of the Kings. And so here you have this Nubian connection. I love Nubia so that was great. But also it works beautifully because it’s set in the New Kingdom. So here you have this group of people who are charged with enforcing the protecting the tombs, so then they transfer that, and then nomadic desert people. So they transfer that to the city in the desert, but in maintaining security and keeping people away from the Mummy. It worked wonderfully. A few other points like that where I got little tidbits in here and there. But like I said, they took about half of my advice on the script and ignored the rest, I don’t know. But the language all actually all turned out really well, in spite of the fact that I wasn’t there to coach them. They did a really good job. So they took the tapes and whatnot seriously, which was good.

David Read
Put it to work. Gategabber wants to know, “Do you do you teach any online classes that people can take part in?”

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, no, unfortunately, I don’t teach. I don’t teach online classes. If you Google me, though, I got a lot of lectures, if you’re interested in my research, including actually, I gave a talk about Stargate. I mean, it’s an academic talk,

David Read
I’m gonna link to it. We’ve already got a link to your website at the bottom of this conversation, but I will link to that one as well because it’s there’s a lot of information there. And pictures in there as well. So, this is really cool for me to have you on. And I have a number of other questions that I’m going to save for your next visits. If we can get you back sometime in the fall and make our schedules work. I want to talk to you about Origins. To talk to you about how one evolved into the other and any tricks that you picked up? But really quickly, though, what was it like working on Origins with that cast? SGO?

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah. Oh, that was great, too. So, Matt, and the Elena were the Producers were great. They came up, they contacted me and said, “Are you interested?” Is that right? Sure. They came up met with me and we had a great chat. And we were totally on the same page with everything, which was cool. And they really wanted to replicate the feel of the original film. And the cool thing about it is that like the original film, the language drove the plot. And so it was really fun to work with and the director who’s…

David Read
Mercedes?

David Read
Mercedes, [Mercedes Bryce Morgan] yeah, who’s done the Star Wars, directing for Star Wars now, and a whole bunch of things. She was great to work with as well. And they all wanted to get the language right and get the plot right. So they took all of my notes, and the actors were great to work with. They all did a wonderful job. I was kind of sad to see the voiceover overlays that goes all the way back to Jay’s inability to pull it off. Basically…

David Read
They were originally gonna go with that. And then the film came out, it’s like, “Oh, they went ahead and modulated her voice too.” So because there weren’t any glowing eyes.

Stuart Tyson Smith
They all did a really great job. With just the raw footage. Still, it’s still wonderful anyway. But yeah, some of the dialogue particularly the woman, whose name eludes me right now, who played Serqet.

David Read
Yeah, her Lieutenant.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, she was amazing. She picked up the language like this. And it was beautiful. And the other end, which is not to diminish what the other actors did, they all did a wonderful job as well.

David Read
Some people have just got that ear, I hate people like that, I wish I could do that.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, so that was a really fun, low budget, of course, compared to Stargate, but again, a great crew, really a nice set to work on. And very appreciative of what I was giving to them. And I think that shows in the final production, and I liked that, I thought the plot was fun and enjoyed it. I always hate Nazis, just like all archaeologists are…

David Read
If you get into the Stargate mythology, the DHD ended up in Berlin, so the Germans would have been involved at some point. So I always…

Stuart Tyson Smith
There you go.

David Read
Find it interesting.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, they’re really careful to keep canon Yeah. So there’s been so much!

David Read
I’ve been helping them do it.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Okay, there we go.

David Read
That’s a little known fact. That yeah, Dr. Smith, this was this was terrific. Sir. I really appreciate you coming out. Anything that you would like us specifically to be aware of, anything where we can continue to follow your work. Future expeditions?

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yeah, so I do. We do have a, I don’t know if you have Tombos site tombos.org, which is tombos.org? And that’s

David Read
The Archaeological Site.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Yes. So that’s our project blog. So if you want to get a sense of what we’ve been doing and the kind of work we’re doing in Sudan, that’s the place to look. So we got the blogs from the past seasons. And then we, once we get started again, we probably won’t be in the field for another couple of years. But we’ll start up getting some reports in from the field. And then, and yeah we’ll be continuing to add literature and things. And we always translate everything into Arabic, which is important, so that the Sudanese and Egyptians if they’re interested can read what we’ve been up to. And we’re trying more and more to engage with the local communities and both of archaeologists, but also just the folks in the village where we stay. We’ve always done that a bit. But now we’ve been working more and more with trying to communicate with them in, what they’re interested in, in terms of our work and what we can do to help them out. So we work with schools a lot, providing with materials, educational materials and whatnot.

David Read
This is terrific. Thank you so much for your time, sir.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Oh, your very welcome

David Read
I appreciate you coming on. All right. Well, I will be in touch with you soon.

Stuart Tyson Smith
Okay, great.

David Read
Thank you so much for your time.

Stuart Tyson Smith
You’re welcome.

David Read
Be well. Dr. Stuart Tyson Smith, who’s the Egyptology consultant on the Stargate feature film and Stargate Origins. And he is a professor at the University of Southern California, Santa Barbara. So his information is linked below. And I will add this Tombos website as well. Rachel Luttrell is coming up momentarily here. I’m going to just abridge this. If you enjoyed this content, please consider clicking that Like button and sharing this with a Stargate friend. We’ve got Rachel coming up in just a moment. I appreciate your time. Thanks so much for tuning in. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate and I will see you on the other side.