#  Life at “Harvard Camp” on the Giza Plateau 

 





Peter Der Manuelian



 

December 05, 2025

 

 

“It is on high ground, and it will, I am sorry to say, be rather conspicuous.

I am afraid it will draw a good many tourists.”1

If you were ready to start excavating at the famous Giza Pyramids, where would you build your expedition’s headquarters? British archaeologist Arthur C. Mace, who would later help Howard Carter with the Tutankhamun tomb in 1922, wrote the words quoted above in early 1903. At the direction of his boss, Harvard-trained American Egyptologist George Reisner, Mace had just found the spot at Giza for the new dig house, a few hundred meters west of the Khafre Pyramid, on the plateau’s highest point for many kilometers in all directions. The Egyptian Service des Antiquités officials wrote: “The spot selected…is well chosen, and I see no inconvenience likely to accrue to the Service from the presence of \[Reisner’s\] workmen there.”2

Since 1899, George Reisner was directing the Hearst Expedition, sponsored by American philanthropist Phoebe Apperson Hearst, on behalf of the University of California, Berkeley. After perfecting his new archaeological skills (he had started his career as an Assyriologist and philologist) at such sites as Quft, Deir el-Ballas, el-Ahaiwah, and Naga ed-Deir, suddenly in 1903 the most famous site in the country—Giza—became available for professional excavation.

Gaston Maspero, the French director of the Service des Antiquités, instructed the three foreign missions interested in Giza to divide the site amicably amongst themselves. The archaeologists included Reisner for the Americans, Georg Steindorff for the Germans, and Ernesto Schiaparelli for the Italians. Meeting on January 27, 1903, on the veranda of the Mena House hotel beside the Great Pyramid, representatives of each party drew lots out of a hat, dividing up for excavation the three pyramids and surrounding cemeteries of elite tombs.

A few seasons later, the Italians left for other sites in Upper Egypt, and Reisner found himself licensed to excavate two-thirds of the great cemetery west of the Great Pyramid of Khufu (with the Germans digging the middle third), all of the cemetery east of Khufu, and the temples associated with the third and smallest pyramid, belonging to Menkaure. When Phoebe Hearst could no longer support the Hearst Expedition, Reisner spent the summer of 1905 in Boston, negotiating to create the Harvard University–Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition in its stead. This marked the start of arguably the longest and most successful archaeological project of the first half of the twentieth century, covering not just Giza but another twenty-two other sites in Egypt, Sudan, and even Palestine, between 1905 and 1947. Reisner was to become a fixture on the Giza Plateau.

   ![fig1](/sites/g/files/omnuum7041/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2025-10/Manuelian01_LC-M33-%204479%20%5BP%26P%5Darrow.jpg?itok=0Wbu0STI) 

 

Figure 1. Aerial view of Giza, showing the location of Harvard Camp, probably 1932. Library of Congress, Matson photograph collection (<https://www.loc.gov/item/2019706690>).But before the many seasons filled with great discoveries could begin, a permanent headquarters had to be built. Reisner noted with pride that “Hearst (later Harvard) Camp” sprung up, consisting of “a seven room stone house with wood and tarfelt roof in the same time that it took the Germans to build three rooms using nearly 100 men.”4 Arthur Mace wrote: “We have got a fine concession of ground here: any number of fine tombs that have not been touched since ancient times. I shall be glad when we have got the house finished and can get to work" (Figure 1).4

Tourists today walk past the Harvard Camp area, unaware of how much history, how many spectacular discoveries, important visitors, and carefully researched publications are connected with this special spot (Figure 2). Personalities, both reserved and eccentric, masterpieces of ancient Egyptian painting and sculpture, the impact of two world wars and an economic depression, political intrigues, archaeological triumphs, and even some tragic suicides—Harvard Camp saw it all. Despite lacking electricity or running water, the Camp was home to a large and loyal Expedition staff of Egyptians and Westerners. In 1935, Reisner assistant and future MFA curator, William Stevenson Smith, spent some time at the fancier Saqqara dig house built by the University of Chicago, and wrote: “They have a most luxurious establishment and a very jolly crowd working this year… Incidentally it’s nice to be able to switch on a light and turn on a shower after our primitive surrounding which include sand closets, lamps and little tin bath pans. Still I’d rather be up here \[at Giza\] any day.”5

 ![fig2](/sites/g/files/omnuum7041/files/2025-10/Manuelian02_Montage.jpg)

 

Figure 2. A selection of objects discovered by the HU–MFA Expedition at Giza. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.The rooms housed offices, a photography studio, object storage magazines, kitchen, stable, garage, workmen’s barracks, tearoom and veranda, and later, even a tennis court (fig. 3). One of George Reisner’s contemporaries described how the place

   ![fig3](/sites/g/files/omnuum7041/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-10/Manuelian03_1936-02-29_Harvard%20Camp-labeled.jpg?itok=DZxi_KDU) 

 

Figure. 3. Aerial photograph of Harvard Camp from 274 meters (900 feet), with the various buildings identified, February 29, 1936. Egyptian Royal Army Air Force.…never became anything but an excavation camp—rooms built of rough uncut stones round a square court where recent finds were usually lying in the open, the walls unplastered outside and inside. A passage between two rooms on the south side led into the court: left of the passage against the outer wall was a large enclosed verandah where Mrs and Miss Reisner entertained visitors. Reisner’s office was in the northwest corner of the court, a long room with a bay looking north across the desert; two rows of tall boxes knocked up of common deal were arranged on shelves along one wall to hold his working library; along another wall more boxes held an ever-lengthening series of expedition records, year by year and site by site; his own table and the tables of assistants and draftsmen filled most of the floor space. Photographic rooms and store rooms ran along the west side of the court; the dining room, bedrooms, kitchen and so forth were on the south and east sides. On a lower ledge of the plateau nearer the pyramids was another building…; on a ledge to the north of this were the quarters of the Egyptian workmen and camp servants and, in later days, a garage and stabling.6

 ![fig4](/sites/g/files/omnuum7041/files/2025-10/Manuelian04_Menkaure%20montage.jpg)

 

Figure. 4. Seated statues of Menkaure: as found in his Valley Temple (top left, July 16, 1908, A251), sitting in Harvard Camp (top right, 1908, HU–MFA B450), JE 40704 = GEM 74070 (bottom left, 1908, HU–MFA A1088), and at the GEM (bottom right, November 17, 2024, author’s photo). Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.When the HU–MFA Expedition staff discovered statues, fragments of wall reliefs, inscriptions, objects of daily life, or funerary implements, they documented them first in their archaeological context, and then removed them to Harvard Camp. Thanks to Reisner’s meticulous record-keeping, we can follow the “afterlives” of these objects, from the day of discovery to removal to the dig house, where they were logged into a register book and ID number, photographed, conserved, studied, and ultimately sent either to the Cairo Museum or to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Figure. 5). The final destination resulted from the 50–50 division system of the day, known as *partage*, where the director Service des Antiquités determined, at the end of the dig season, which objects to keep and which to delegate to the foreign mission. (Nowadays all finds remain in Egypt.)

   ![fig5](/sites/g/files/omnuum7041/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2025-10/Manuelian05_1938-12-02_B9022_NS-GAR%20al-Musawar.jpg?itok=pudKVvpv) 

 

Figure. 5. George Reisner, Mahmud Said Ahmed Diraz, and Frank Allen examining records at Harvard Camp, December 12, 1938 (HU–MFA B9022). Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.For George Reisner personally, Harvard Camp was his only home. He owned no property back in America, either in Indianapolis, his birthplace, or in Cambridge or Boston, where he served as Harvard professor and Egyptian Department curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). In fact, he only returned to the U.S. a few times during his career, because archaeological fieldwork in Egypt was his true passion.7 His wife and daughter, both named Mary, spent each and every day with him, until he sent them home in 1941, owing to the dangers of the war. Writing to his patron, Phoebe Hearst in 1904, he revealed his romantic attachment to Harvard Camp: “Our veranda opening to the southeast with a view of the pyramids, the Nile Valley, the Mokattam hills and the Citadel is— well wait till you are here and see what it is.”8 Complaining in 1911 of the high rents during a stay in Boston, Reisner wrote to one of his students: “You forget that we have no house and have to buy the greater part of our food at a boarding house. I don’t know what the average ‘perfesser’ pays but I do know what I have to pay.”9 And to a young archaeology enthusiast, son of one of Reisner’s college classmates, he revealed his preference for Harvard Camp: “I dare say your father will tell you there is no magic but then he has always lived in a house. Nowadays people who live in houses never find out about magic. That is why I do not like living in a house myself. It is too lonely.”10

Phoebe Hearst herself came to visit Giza in 1905: “What views we have from there. The Pyramids in all lights. During the full moon it was enchanting. We went down one night and sat where we had a fine view of the Sphinx. It was far better than by daylight.”11 Reisner fortunately discovered a tomb chamber with two preserved statuettes while Phoebe looked on: “If you had seen me hanging over the edge of the place looking down to see the figures as they were uncovered, you might have thought it right to class me with excavators. I was more excited than any one.”12 Ironically, the day she left Giza, the Expedition made one of its greatest discoveries, the “slab stela” (tombstone) of the high official Wepemnefret, now in the Hearst Museum, Berkeley. Would Phoebe Hearst have changed her mind and continued to fund the dig if she had stayed at Giza for just a few hours more to witness the discovery herself?

In 1912, Reisner toured American industrialist Henry Clay Frick and his family up the Nile. Frick’s daughter Helen came away with a similarly inspired impression of Harvard Camp. After refreshments were served, the family enjoyed a nighttime visit to the mastaba fields and the Menkaure pyramid. Helen recorded in her diary: “It was wonderful moonlight and nothing could have been more mysterious than the scene before us. He \[Reisner\] took us into one of the many mastaba tombs and showed us the stele and side halls of a little offering chamber how can I describe it all?”13 Just a few weeks later, visitors were treated to two performances of the opera “Aida” in front of the Great Pyramid of Khufu.14

   ![fig6](/sites/g/files/omnuum7041/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-10/Manuelian06_Montage.jpg?itok=InsZ7LHA) 

 

Figure. 6. Left: objects in the Harvard Camp courtyard, 1907 (HU–MFA C462). Right: Menkaure pair statue being photographed, May 1910 (HU–MFA A429). Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.   ![fig7](/sites/g/files/omnuum7041/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-10/Manuelian07_1912-04-24_A691_NS_Penmeru_0.jpg?itok=cxgPQbDL) 

 

Figure. 7. Penmeru niche statue (MFA 12.1484), April 24, 1912 (HU–MFA A691, with recent color photo inset). Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.Upon stopping by Harvard Camp, such visitors as Phoebe Hearst, Henry Clay Frick, European and American Egyptologist colleagues, celebrities, royalty, the Aga Khan, or Egyptian officials were lucky to catch glimpses of the most recent finds sitting in the courtyard. Royal statues of Menkaure came from the king’s pyramid and valley temples in 1908 and 1910. For the king’s famous pair statue, the Expedition diary records how forty men lined up four-meter beams underneath a platform, lifted statue and platform out of the king’s valley temple on their shoulders, and slowly marched, chanting as they went, up the Plateau to deposit it in the courtyard of Harvard Camp (Figure. 6). A large limestone statue niche with a family group contrasts sharply with the laundry on a line in the background (Figure. 7) While the Expedition’s Egyptian photographers15 documented the finds in the photographic studio (Figure. 8), and other staff drew maps and plans, and filled the diary pages16, object register books, guests stayed to tea on the veranda, discussing archaeology and politics with Reisner (who was fluent in Arabic) and his family (Figure. 9).

   ![fig8](/sites/g/files/omnuum7041/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-10/Manuelian08_1916-11-20_D109_NS_Patrick%20Cheops_0.jpg?itok=3Hfi850f) 

 

Figure. 8. Mohamed Shadduf shooing “Patrick Cheops” away from glass plate photo negative contact prints, November 20, 1916 (HU–MFA D109). Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. ![fig9](/sites/g/files/omnuum7041/files/2025-10/Manuelian09_Montage%20tearoom.jpg)

 

Figure. 9. Four corners of the Harvard Camp tea room, clockwise from top left NW, NE, SW, SE; colorized with artificial intelligence, February 10, 1934. Photographs by Mary Reisner. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.Although watching the colors of the Pyramid change with the rising and setting sun might seem peaceful and soothing, life at Harvard Camp had its challenging moments too. During World War I, the Australian army set up a vast camp just off the Plateau, to the north of the great Western Cemetery. Worse than soldiers occasionally taking a shortcut to the Pyramids and trampling over the excavation zones were the bullets from target practice that whizzed by the Harvard Camp buildings. Returning from their daily horseback ride, Mary Reisner and her daughter were warned to approach the Camp from an alternate route. George Reisner was forced to petition the Australians for a “cease fire.”17

Another occasion that certainly terrified Reisner and the staff was the telegram received on October 27, 1913, from the MFA’s director, stating that the *Preussen*, the ship sailing for Boston bearing crates full of irreplaceable finds from Giza and Sudan, had caught fire. Imagine excavating antiquities nearly 5,000 years old and then losing them to disaster on the high seas, with the stress-filled delays caused by the slow communications channels of the age. The water used to put out the flames caused great damage to some of the objects.

   ![fig10](/sites/g/files/omnuum7041/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2025-10/Manuelian10_27.388_JL%20Smith%20Hetepheres%20painting_PDMphoto.jpg?itok=Uq50QRoP) 

 

Figure. 10. Oil painting of the burial chamber of Queen Hetepheres, G 7000 X, by Joseph Lindon Smith (MFA 27.388). Photo by the author.The year 1922 was bookended by two momentous world events that also impacted archaeology on the Giza Plateau. One was Egypt’s declaration of independence from the British on February 28 (while Reisner was in Sudan), and the other was Howard Carter’s November 4–5 discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings (Reisner was at Harvard Camp, Giza, celebrating his 55th birthday). Both events were fraught with political implications that influenced the HU–MFA Expedition’s next great discovery, just three years later. While Reisner was back in America, teaching at Harvard, his Expedition discovered a 30-meter (90 foot)-deep shaft, apparently containing burial equipment of King Khufu’s mother, Queen Hetepheres. The difference between how Carter handled Tutankhamun versus how Reisner handled Hetepheres, could not be greater (Figure. 10).

To assist with some of the Expedition’s work, Reisner and his assistant Dows Dunham pooled their resources in April 1922 to buy a Ford car for £E140, and they created a dirt road leading up to Harvard Camp, west of the Khafre pyramid. “It gives one a curious feeling to drive up through the pyramids at one o’clock in the morning and see the lamps of the car flashing across the faces of the pyramids and over the walls of the mastabas.”18 A curious feeling indeed, but hardly as curious as watching the Graz Zeppelin hover over the Harvard Camp and the Pyramids on April 10, 1931 (Figure. 11). This unique event caught all of Cairo’s attention over a period of three days.

   ![fig11](/sites/g/files/omnuum7041/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-10/Manuelian11_1931-04-10_A6473_NS_Graf%20Zeppelin.jpg?itok=Uxdp_WT_) 

 

Figure. 11. The Graf Zeppelin over the Giza Western Cemetery and mastaba G 2000, April 10, 1931 (HU–MFA A6473). Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.By the 1930s, despite additions and enlargements to the dig house, some of the more well-to-do visitors noticed the challenges facing the Expedition staff while living up on the Giza Plateau. Boston notable and

   ![fig12](/sites/g/files/omnuum7041/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-10/Manuelian12_%201927-03-31_A4626_NS-Topaz.jpg?itok=o0QbM3Qt) 

 

Figure. 12. View of Harvard Camp, March 31, 1927 (HU–MFA A4626, detail). Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.Fig. 12. View of Harvard Camp, March 31, 1927 (HU–MFA A4626, detail). Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

 MFA treasurer William Crowninshield Endicott visited the site with a small group in 1930, and witnessed some brutal windstorms that assailed the Camp. They were further upset to see Reisner stretched out on a chaise longue in the late afternoon on his open porch outside the dining room, wrapped in a steamer rug. The wind howled, forcing people to raise their voices to be heard. “A sudden gust of wind caused the small table on which stood the kerosene lamp, protected by a tin screen, to rock perilously. At the same time the light would flicker dismally and the wick of the oil heater \[began\] to waver and sputter.”19 Upon returning to Boston, Endicott leapt into action, writing to Reisner back at Giza: “I really do not think that your house is adequate for your comfort, and I was told by the Trustees to write and tell you that you are at liberty to spend at least two thousand dollars and put the house in such condition as you and Mrs. Reisner desire.” Endicott was cagey enough to realize the spartan Reisner would probably prefer to spend the money on the excavations, “but I really do feel that you ought to make yourself more comfortable,… and the two thousand dollars which I mention is solely for the purpose of accomplishing that very thing.”20 Grateful for the assistance, Reisner built another office room for himself, added glass to most of the windows, bought new furniture and equipment, made improvements to the workmen’s quarters, and enlarged the dining and tea rooms (“We are much more comfortable now;”21 Figure. 12).

   ![fig13](/sites/g/files/omnuum7041/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2025-10/Manuelian13_1938-02-26_A7915_NS_Reisner%20and%20Smith.jpg?itok=kHuWKlMG) 

 

Fig. 13. At Harvard Camp; left to right: Mary Reisner, MFA director George Harold Edgell, Joseph Lindon Smith, Evelyn Perkins, and George Reisner, February 26, 1938 (HU–MFA A7915). Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.The size and layout of Harvard Camp changed over the years, not least to accommodate the ever-growing collection of register books, glass plate photo negatives, and other documentation archives. Day to day, Reisner’s Egyptian staff handled the food shopping, cooking, transportation for errands downtown, laundering, accounts, and repairs. Atito was the name of the *sufragi* (house butler) who glided effortlessly to take care of the guests at tea in the late afternoons. Water came up to the Camp every day by camel; only many years later by car. Reisner reportedly had a sweet tooth and enjoyed grapefruit for breakfast and ending the day with a large dish of ice cream; the Camp had its own ice cream maker.

Besides George Reisner, several individuals added much color to life at Harvard Camp. In November of 1931, the Expedition hired as clerical assistant the British subject born in Tunisia, Evelyn Esther Perkins. She spoke six languages and became Reisner’s protector, keeping the unwanted distractions at bay, while coaxing him to respond to his ever-mounting backlog of mail. Another guest who added much color, literally and figuratively, to the Expedition was Reisner’s friend, the American artist Joseph Lindon Smith, and his wife, the Arabist and civic activist, Corinna (Figure. 13). Smith found his calling painting oil on canvas reproductions of ancient Egyptian landscapes and antiquities. Almost every year he arrived at Harvard Camp and documented many of the Expedition’s finds (Figure. 14). Throughout the 1930s, the staff held an annual art exhibition at Harvard Camp, inviting all of Cairo’s elites for the viewing. Arranging the parking for some 112 cars for 283 guests in April 1939 all around the buildings was no small achievement (Figure. 15).

Challenges came in many forms in the 1930s. First, began to claim Reisner’s eyesight. After unsuccessful surgery, he spent the final decade of his life nearly blind, but never stopped working. Then the Great Depression

   ![fig16](/sites/g/files/omnuum7041/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2025-10/Manuelian16_1938-03-10_A7947_NS_Ahmed%20Youssef.jpg?itok=ekEIq33q) 

 

Figure. 16 Ahmed Youssef and the Hetepheres curtain box, Harvard Camp, March 10, 1938 (HU–MFA A7947). Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. impacted the HU–MFA’s Expedition’s budgets severely. The excavation work at other sites, particularly in Sudan, ground to a halt, and the focus turned exclusively to working on the decades of Giza excavations. Master conservator Ahmed Youssef helped restore the Hetepheres furniture, now beautifully reinstalled at the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). Later he was the man responsible for restoring the famous Khufu boat, also on view at the GEM (Figure. 16).

Reisner’s 70th birthday party came in 1937. In a complete surprise to him, his Egyptian and Western staff gathered to present him with gifts (including a repeater watch, so he could “hear” the time at night, despite his blindness), read tributes and poems, and pose for many team photos. The following year, after a visit to Giza by MFA director George Edgell (Figure. 17), the staff participated—on a cold February night—in the world’s first live radio broadcast from the Giza Pyramids. Miles of cables stretched from Cairo to Mena House Hotel, up to the north face of Khufu’s pyramid, and even into the so-called King’s chamber. At Harvard Camp the workmen practiced chanting and digging sound effects for the background to the show (Figure. 18).

After war broke out in 1939, a few more years of productive work were all Reisner could manage, with declining health, and the departure of his wife and daughter for America in 1941. A series of strokes incapacitated him, and he spent much of his final year bedridden at Harvard Camp, hardly able to speak. He died on June 6, 1942, and is buried in the American Cemetery in old Cairo. Only in 1946–47, after the war, were curators from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, able to return to Egypt, to make the final decision to shut down the HU–MFA Expedition, and ship the remaining records home. But Harvard Camp lived on directly in the creation of the American Research Center in Egypt ([www.arce.org](http://www.arce.org)), an organization founded at the “Club of Odd Volumes” in Boston on May 14, 1948.

Today, the Harvard Camp buildings are no more, as they stood in the way of a new road behind the Pyramids, and not far from the new Khufu Center complex of shops and restaurants. But the site lives on as a 3D model, used for teaching and learning about the archaeological process in the early 20th century. The images in Figure 19 serve to “collapse time,” since the statues shown on tables were actually discovered many years apart from one another, and would never have stood in the courtyard together. But as a means of presenting an expedition, and the men and women who made it such a spectacular success, there is no better place to explore than this exceptional piece of real estate high on the Giza Plateau.

 ![fig19](/sites/g/files/omnuum7041/files/2025-10/Manuelian19_Montage%20Harvard%20Camp%203D%20model.jpg)

 

Figure. 19. Views of 3D computer model of Harvard Camp. Courtesy the Giza Project, Harvard University.

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

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