Profile of Miroslav Barta

The Prague Post (Beth Potter)

A profile of Czech archaeologist Miroslav Barta.

Where Bárta once studied history books on his favorite monuments, he now writes the books and articles that propose new theories about things like the tools used by people in those ancient civilizations.

In fact, Bárta is currently in Egypt hoping to find some major discoveries in an area he has worked in before — Abusir, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) outside of Cairo — on behalf of the Czech Institute of Egyptology. He calls Egyptology a “new discipline” in that two or three major discoveries can still change the thinking about how the ancient world worked.

“Every day, every minute, you can discover new things,” Bárta says. Even if it all seems very much like a movie-set life, Bárta is down-to-earth sitting in his book-lined office in a Charles University building in Old Town recently. He shows off old black-and-white pictures of explorers tooling around the Egyptian desert and talks about the explosion of interest from average people in what he does — driven, he thinks, by Discovery Channel programs and Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones character. Then he snorts and says modestly, “We don’t have such nice hats.”

There's a mini-CV listing Barta's main career points on the page as well.

There are three photographs accompanying the piece, one of Barta and two of ancient Egyptian scenes, the second of which seems very ususual, at least to my prehistorically-orientated eyes. Neither have captions on the above page, but both are taken from the Czech Institute of Egyptology web gallery. The first shows a detail of the relief decoration of the funerary chapel of judge Inti (Abusir South). Inti’s favourite dog, who had a dwarf for his caretaker, was called Idjem. The second photograph shows a detail of the relief decoration on the walls of the burial chamber of priest Iufaa, with the working title “dancing cows” (the shaft tomb of priest Iufaa, Late period).

The Institute's website is well worth a visit - there is a lot of very good information on the site.