Shouldn’t everyone have at least one “useless passion”? Why it may be the most precious asset you have.

Dear ‘Ancient Egypt Lover’,

YOUR “USELESS PASSION” IN LIFE. It’s Vital Everyone Has One. You may not the best judge of the impact that your burning interest in ancient Egypt will have in your life (and critical friends or family may not be the best judges either). You call yourself an ancient Egypt ‘geek’ and possibly you have been labelled one. Geek? According to the popular definition of ‘geek’ that could mean one of two things, or both. 1. You an ‘unfashionable person’. 2. You are a ‘knowledgeable and obsessive enthusiast about a subject of minority interest, a ‘useless passion’ of little relevance. First, let’s deal with unfashionable. To me that means you have the capacity to live outside of your time, not to be bound by the trappings of the here and now. How boring to be otherwise, trapped in your own time and unable to feel the enthralling excitement of a mysterious past. Are you obsessive about a ‘minority interest’, or, in other words, seized by a useless passion with little relevance? I have come into contact with many young people who ask me if they should live their dream and study to become an archaeologist. One was a young woman torn between becoming a policewoman or an Egyptologist. ‘What are my chances of becoming a career Egyptologist?’ she wondered. ‘Probably not great,’ I had to admit. ‘After all, there aren’t that many openings in the field. And yet… every day, somebody is doing it and becoming a career Egyptologist.’ But this young woman could do something else and still pursue her dream, while working as a policewoman serving her community. She could live a rich, interior life and keep it nourished through endlessly satisfying study, reading, viewing, thinking, and maybe even writing about ancient Egypt as I do. Egypt is not just a slice of our civilization’s history. It’s pretty much the whole pie. While other empires lasted a century or so, Egypt’s lasted for thousands of years. Think how many millions lived and died over Egypt’s long history. Consider some recent estimates. If you take the average population of ancient Egypt at around three million and you say the civilization spanned around three thousand five hundred years, then some five and a quarter billion people lived and died on the Nile. Many secrets still lie hidden under the sands (and under the mud, beneath the Nile). Egypt they say is the gift of the Nile. You could also say that civilization is the gift of ancient Egypt. That’s what the ancient Greeks and Romans tell us. Egypt gave us the first nation state, the twenty-four hours of the day, the 365 days of the year, the first great buildings in stone, architecture, astronomy, medicine, paper, writing, even the invention of fictional dramatic stories recorded in writing… From a religious standpoint, ancient Egypt is front and centre in the Bible. Take away Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dream Coat, Moses and The Ten Commandments, The Exodus, the life-saving flight of baby Jesus and the holy family to Egypt and the Bible becomes a novella. Ancient Egypt also gives us the ultimate symbolic landscape for dreaming. It gives us mystery. Mummies. A sense of eternity captured in art and stone. A minority interest? The next time somebody tells you that ancient Egypt is ‘just ancient history’ that nobody cares about, show them the queues going around the block for the latest record-breaking Tutanhkamun or Gold of the Pharaohs blockbuster exhibition. Keep on geeking out - and don't ever lose your love of ancient Egypt. Yours encouragingly, Roy Lester Pond