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entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello everyone and welcome back to the History of Egypt podcast.

This is part three in my interview with Professor Karakuni of UCLA. Having discussed ancient

craftsmanship and funerary practices and the reign of Hatshepsut and royal power in the 18th dynasty,

we now move to Professor Karakuni's life as an Egyptologist. What are the highs and lows of her careers, her favourite memories?

What questions would she answer if she could uncover anything from the past?

These questions and more in the next few minutes.

Enjoy. So moving now to your career as an Egyptologist, I'm curious, what first drew you to study ancient Egypt?

And then what made you decide that this was a career you wanted to pursue?

I was so naive.

I had no idea.

I just, I followed my heart on this one.

And the real answer to your question is I was allowed to follow my heart because I grew up with the entitlements that let me do that. And I also believe,

and you can counter me on this, being of a different gender than me, but being of the female

gender in my upper middle class Texas society allowed people to pat me on the head and say,

okay, sweetheart, you do that crazy thing you want to do.

And I don't think, even though my brother would have made a great academic, I don't think

he felt socially allowed to do that. And he is now a lawyer, an assistant attorney general

for the state of New York, and dealing with all kinds of stuff during COVID-19.

So in some ways, it's because I was entitled and enabled and privileged enough to do so. Now getting to the more emotional

question of why Egypt, I have no real answer to this and I do not understand it myself. And isn't it strange that I

see the world around me better through the lens of antiquity, that I can't figure out my own

...