More than meets the eye
In contemporary western society, there's a vivid stereotype of ancient Egyptian aesthetics: weighty gold headpieces and kohl-rimmed stares. It's as striking as it is odd, if you know your history.
Much of the way in which ancient Egypt is portrayed from the mid 20th century onward, including in many textbooks, stems from a brief and in fact highly unusual span of Egyptian history. Around 1350 BCE, during an era known as the Amarna Period, King Tut's father, the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, ushered in a religious revolution. Adopting a new name, Akhenaten (meaning “beneficial to Aten”) and his queen consort, Nefertiti, oversaw a dramatic shift from polytheism to a cult that primarily worshipped a sole sun deity, Aten.
"Figures from that time — Nefertiti, Tutankhamun — really get highlighted, and then other just-as-significant people, if not more so, are not necessarily considered," says fourth-year UC Irvine anthropology major Mia Lekika Mayengue.
It was curious enough that Lekika Mayengue decided to do an archaeology-based honors project on it. "At first I was going to look at body image, because one of the aspects of the religious revolution was that the way the royal family was portrayed was very different," she says. For example, in an age when even female pharaohs sought to emphasize masculinity, Akhenaten portrayed himself with feminine characteristics. In any case, as Lekika Mayengue began researching, she became more interested in why modern media zeroed in on "this 30-year blip," she says. "I wanted to look at this idea of metonymy, of how one part of ancient Egypt that is so vast gets condensed into this 30-year strange period that isn't reflective of it."
"What essentially happened was the colonization of heritage. Descendants of ancient Egyptians were cut off from their own history by Western scholars," she says, noting that scholarship focusing on the time was often fairly arbitrary. "A lot of the known artifacts that are really prominent that we think of — like the bust of Nefertiti and Tutankhamun's mask, which actually is in Egypt right now — a lot of why those things are considered so highly and seen as these really important artifacts is just because Western scholars said they were."
Lekika Mayengue has always been interested in how people interact with each other, she says. "My interest in anthropology was really born out of work I did in high school, where I was doing research on social issues. I really was interested in anthropology as a human-observation sort of interest." In high school, she wrote a paper on how mothers were represented in children's books. "Then I found out that that was a really anthropological way of looking at things."
While in high school in Santa Ana, at Orange County School of the Arts, she began a dual-enrollment program through Glendale Community College. Then her family — a multi-generational household that includes her mother, a UCLA master's alumna — moved to Santa Ana. Lekika Mayengue wanted to follow in her mom's footsteps by attending a prestigious university that would afford her good opportunities. "I knew I wanted to go to a UC school," Lekika Mayengue says. "I want to get my graduate degrees, my Ph.D., hopefully. And I knew they had a good reputation for students moving on." So, after earning an associate's degree from Irvine Valley College in anthropology, Lekika Mayengue transferred to nearby UC Irvine in 2024.
Ultimately, anthropology was Lekika Mayengue's path into archaeology. "I knew I was into archaeology from a young age," she says. At UCI, she found that Ian Straughn, anthropology associate professor of teaching, had done some work on ancient Egypt. He was a natural fit, then, to advise her honors thesis, titled "All Roads Lead to Amarna: Media, Metonym, and Ancient Egypt."
"He sort of threw books at me at the beginning, which, overall, was really helpful."
Both Straughn and Angela Jenks, anthropology professor of teaching, have been helpful to Lekika Mayengue, as has their colleague Tom Boellstorff, anthropology professor. "It's been really helpful to bounce ideas off of them," Lekika Mayengue says. Christopher Lowman, anthropology assistant professor of teaching and another honors mentor — albeit not Lekika Mayengue's — has aided her archaeology research, too.
In the meantime, she's interned at the under-the-radar Cooper Laboratory, a facility that prepares and curates Orange County artifacts and fossils, as well as signed on to join a dig in Romania this summer, both through UCI. "We get to excavate two full skeletons by the end of the month, which is really exciting and not something typical to the California area," she says.
By the same token, she knew she wanted to go to Europe — or at least get "outside of the Americas" — for graduate studies. "I think it would be a really good experience as an archeologist to be studying outside of my local area," she says. This fall, she'll begin a 12-month master's program on Greek and Mediterranean archaeology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She's never been to Greece, but she feels well prepared for the challenge, thanks to the experience she's gained with both writing and independent study. "That'll help when I have to move and not have the same support system."
It will be a change of pace from UCI, where she's enjoyed the encouragement of so many enthusiastic professors. "They're clearly very happy and excited to help students," she says. "They're good at fueling whatever a student wants to research, which I think is really good and not always common in academic spaces."
She hopes to apply for Ph.D. programs next winter, so that she can continue with research in some capacity. "I really enjoy excavation, so I'm hoping I get to keep that in my life, in addition to whatever job I end up doing," she says. "I'd really like to be a professor. I'd be really happy if I got to teach at a community college. I think you can make a lot of change in that type of setting."
She's witnessed firsthand how influential the right teachers can be. When she first became aware of the honors program, she wasn't confident that she could — or should — do it. "I felt very [much] like I didn't necessarily want to, you know, take up that opportunity. And UCI did a really good job — especially my professors — in seeking me out and being direct about saying, 'I think this would be a good opportunity for you.' Without that, I wouldn't have done it."
Sometimes, it just takes a push to change one's perception.
—Alison Van Houten for UCI Social Sciences