Mark Lehner

Background

Mark Lehner was born on April 2, 1950, in Fargo, North Dakota, the son of Paul William Lehner and Ethel Lois (Davy) Lehner. He went to grade school in Jamestown, North Dakota, and had lived in other places, including California, before his family moved to Minot in 1965. The move followed his father's appointment as minister of First Congregational Church, a Protestant congregation in the Congregational tradition, in which each local church governs its own affairs.

As a young man he became interested in Edgar Cayce, the American psychic whose readings addressed ancient civilizations. Lehner later said that his initial ideas about ancient Egypt could not withstand the evidence on the Giza Plateau. He was skilled at surveying and drawing, and he began taking freelance work on expeditions in Egypt.

Education

Lehner graduated from Minot High School in 1968 and then attended Minot State College, now Minot State University, a public institution in north-central North Dakota. In 1973 he went to Cairo as a Year Abroad Student at the American University in Cairo, which had been founded in 1919 to offer American-style liberal arts education taught in English. He received a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology from the university in 1975.

He later earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Egyptology from Yale University in 1990. Yale, founded in 1701 in New Haven, Connecticut, is a private research university, and its Near Eastern studies department later honored his scholarship with a prize. His dissertation, titled Archaeology of an image: The Great Sphinx of Giza, focused on the Sphinx.

Career

Lehner's field career began in the late 1970s. From 1976 to 1978 he worked as an architectural surveyor, draughtsman and area supervisor on the Nag Hammadi and Faw Qibli expeditions of the Claremont Institute Antiquity and Christianity. Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, is the site where a collection of Coptic Gnostic codices was found in 1945. In 1978 he took part in the Science and Archaeology project, mapped the Bayt al-Razzaz site for the American Research Center in Egypt, a nonprofit organization supporting American research in Egypt, and carried out mapping and photography in the Sphinx area.

From 1979 to 1983 he served as field director and then director of the Sphinx and Isis Temple project sponsored by the American Research Center in Egypt, and he spent five years mapping the Great Sphinx stone by stone. In 1979 and 1980 he worked as an area supervisor, mapper and photographer on the Tell el-Amarna expedition of the Egypt Exploration Society, a British organization founded in 1882 to support research in Egypt and Sudan. Tell el-Amarna was the capital founded by the pharaoh Akhenaten. In 1980 he was an architectural surveyor for the epigraphic survey of the Tomb of Akhenaten, and in 1983 he was a surveyor on the Deir el-Ballas expedition of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which was founded in 1870 and is one of the largest art museums in the United States.

In 1983 he also took part in the Abydos Regional Site Survey of the University of Pennsylvania, a university founded in 1740. From 1983 to 1985 he worked as an architectural surveyor on the Tomb of Aperia project at Saqqara with the Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques, France's national research organization established in 1939. In 1984 he co-directed the Pyramids radiocarbon dating project of the American Research Center in Egypt. That same year he and David Goodman launched the Giza Plateau Mapping Project to create a high-precision map of the plateau's natural and cultural features; ARCE and Yale University sponsored the project, which Lehner has directed ever since. In 1985 he took part in the restoration of the Nasr Mohammed Mosque with the German Archaeological Institute, a research institution founded in 1829.

Lehner worked as a consultant for Time-Life Books from 1986 to 1987 and for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago from 1987 to 1988. The Field Museum, founded in 1893, is a natural history and anthropology museum. In 1989 he took part in a National Academy of Sciences committee study of Sphinx conservation; the academy is a private society of scholars established by Congress in 1863. That year he also consulted for the Getty Conservation Institute, a research institute of the J. Paul Getty Trust, and The Jerde Partnership, a Los Angeles architecture and urban design firm. In 1992 he took part in a symposium on Sphinx restoration organized by the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, the Egyptian government body responsible for antiquities at the time, and he served on a National Research Council steering committee on the conservation of Egyptian monuments.

Lehner's university career was based at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, which James Henry Breasted founded in 1919 to study the ancient Near East. He taught Egyptian archaeology as an instructor in 1990 and 1991, then as an assistant professor until 1995. From 1988 he also directed the Koch-Ludwig Giza Plateau Project for the university. Beginning in 1988, he excavated Heit el-Ghurab, a settlement about 400 meters south of the Sphinx that he later described as the Lost City of the Pyramid Builders. He later left the tenure-track post to protect that site from urban expansion, and he remained a research associate of the Oriental Institute.

In 1985 Lehner founded Ancient Egypt Research Associates, a nonprofit organization based in Boston that conducts archaeological research and education programs in Egypt. The Giza Plateau Mapping Project conducts annual excavations of Old Kingdom settlements near the Sphinx and pyramids, and AERA has been responsible for its finances and administration since 1995. At Harvard's Semitic museum, Lehner served as a research associate and lecturer, and AERA later reinvestigated the Menkaure Valley Temple at Giza, which George Reisner had excavated for Harvard in 1908 to 1910.

Lehner also worked with French Egyptologist Pierre Tallet, a professor at the Sorbonne, on the Wadi el-Jarf papyri discovered in 2013 at an ancient harbor on the Red Sea. Lehner's excavations of that harbor complemented the papyri, including the logbook of an official who oversaw workers in the reign of Khufu. Lehner has appeared on television programs, including National Geographic's Explorer and NOVA's series on the Sphinx and ancient technology. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University, a private research university in Washington, D.C.

Achievements

• Mapped the Great Sphinx stone by stone during the Sphinx Project of the American Research Center in Egypt from 1979 to 1983, work that formed the basis of his later Giza research.

• Excavated Heit el-Ghurab, a settlement south of the Sphinx that he helped establish as a major part of the Lost City of the Pyramid Builders, uncovering workshops, storage buildings, bakeries and barracks used by the pyramid builders.

Works

More photos

• non-fiction book

  • Giza and the Pyramids: The Definitive History

    (Co-authored with Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, this history o...)

    2017
  • The Complete Pyramids

    (Lehner's illustrated survey of Egypt's pyramids, publishe...)

    1997
  • The Red Sea Scrolls: How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids

    (Co-authored with Pierre Tallet, the book describes the di...)

    2022

Views

Lehner describes his research as the anthropology of pyramid building, reconstructing the culture and people behind the monuments from the fragments that remain. He has said that understanding the people who built Egypt's monuments is essential to understanding the monuments themselves.

His approach as director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates is interdisciplinary: specialists examine every excavated object, so that an overall picture of a site can be built from its buildings down to its pollen spores.

Membership

Lehner served on the board of directors of Ancient Egypt Research Associates, Inc., the nonprofit he co-founded in 1985 to conduct archaeological research and education programs in Egypt.

• Board of directors

  Ancient Egypt Research Associates, Inc.

Connections

Lehner's father, Paul William Lehner, became minister of First Congregational Church in Minot in 1965, and his mother was Ethel Lois (Davy) Lehner.

He married Suzanne Ayad Massoud on July 12, 1975, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1985. He has two sons, Ramsi and Luke Lehner.

On July 2, 1995, he married Julia Cort. The couple has a child, Eliza Rose Cort Lehner.

Father:

Paul William Lehner

Became minister of First Congregational Church in Minot in 1965.

Mother:

Ethel Lois (Davy) Lehner

Spouse:

Julia Cort

Spouse:

Suzanne Ayad Massoud

child:

Eliza Rose Cort Lehner

Son:

Ramsi Lehner

Son:

Luke Lehner

References

• Nd native Egyptologist shares knowledge, experiences with Minot community Minot Daily News article on Lehner's education, career at AERA, and his lecture on Giza in Minot.
  2019
• ND native Egyptologist embarks into further mysteries at Giza Minot Daily News profile covering Lehner's planned Giza research, his role in The Red Sea Scrolls, and his background in North Dakota.
  2022
• Uncovering Egypt's past: ND native, Egyptologist's team finds storehouse of Pharaoh Minot Daily News report on AERA's discovery of grain silos at Giza and on Lehner's career and early life.
  2024
• Illuminating the Lives of the Pyramid Builders With Egyptologist Mark Lehner at the Phanstiel Lecture Nov. 1 Syracuse University announcement of a lecture by Lehner on the lives of the pyramid builders, summarizing his research at Giza.
  2024
• Mark Lehner, AERA team profile Profile from Ancient Egypt Research Associates describing Lehner's education, fieldwork at Giza, and the founding of AERA.
• Lehner, Mark - Columbian College of Arts and Sciences profile George Washington University profile describing Lehner's directorship of AERA, his Giza Plateau Mapping Project, and his academic appointments.