Story by Erin Carlile

Kara Cooney is no stranger to the rigors and delights of television production. The Egyptologist, UCLA faculty member  and ARCE Board member has made several TV talk show appearances over the past few years and often contributes her expertise to documentaries about ancient Egypt. But her newest television venture is something of a leap forward and sideways at the same time.

In "Out of Egypt," airing on the Discovery Channel starting August 24, Cooney investigates the origins of major human phenomena—such as living in cities or forming a concept of the devil—from a cross-cultural perspective that literally takes her out of Egypt and around the world in search of answers.

"I found myself seeing the same type of program about ancient Egypt again and again—about the monuments of Ramses or the lighthouse of Alexandria, a discussion of mummification, or who murdered King Tut," she says. "These episodes were either encyclopedic or speculative, and they didn’t really encourage the audience to consider what ancient people might have thought and felt. So I started wondering if maybe these shows were asking the wrong questions."

That’s why one morning while brushing their teeth, Cooney and screenwriter husband Neil Crawford began discussing ideas for a different kind of show about ancient Egypt. "Neil said he had an idea for a show called 'The Traveling Egyptologist,'" Cooney remembers. "The main premise being that we’d start in Egypt asking a question—a basic human question that relates to both ancient and modern people—and then travel to several places around the world to find the answers."

After a successful pitch to Discovery, the show became "Out of Egypt," and began filming last fall. "It all went very quickly," says Cooney. "As a screenwriter for feature films, Neil is used to a much slower pace, where things might languish and never get made at all. But we quickly discovered that TV is so different; it is very, very fast."

Set up with a crew of nine people, Cooney and Crawford spent October through December of 2008 traveling to locations around the world in one lengthy, action-packed trip. The team visited sites in Egypt, Turkey, Italy, Cambodia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Dubai, Israel, Palestine, Mexico, Peru and the United States, ultimately creating six unique episodes. Each episode focuses on a specific theme that Cooney traces through ancient and modern cultures across the globe.

The first episode looks at relics and why human beings worship the sacred through dead flesh and bone. Subsequent episodes investigate the concept of the devil; the existence of pyramids around the world, and why cultures build them independently of one another; the connection between religion and violence; the origin of cities and their inherent social complexities; and rituals of death and burial.

"In the end, all the episodes demonstrate that human beings, ancient and modern, have the same biological and social needs," says Cooney. "We occupy the same earth and the same kinds of environments. And because we often live in similarly complex societies, we often create the same innovations, completely independently of one another."

This is what happened with pyramids, she explains. "You see ancient pyramids in both Mesoamerica and Egypt, even though these people had no contact with one another. You don’t need to explain this with aliens or supernatural forces. There are really good common-sense reasons connected to physics and politics that are much more compelling."

When exploring these thematic questions in locations other than Egypt, Cooney gets to play a role she relishes—the anti-expert. "When I go 'out of Egypt' in each episode, I get to be vulnerable and ask other specialists what they think about a particular human behavior," she says. "I get to ask stupid questions—which I love to do. I don't have to know everything when I'm in Salem, Massachusetts or Dubai. I can look at the world with fresh eyes."

During the course of the series, Cooney consults numerous sources including Capuchin monks, Hindu holy men, Vietnamese grave diggers, a Mexican shaman, as well as archaeologists who specialize in different cultures all over the world. In fact, be on the lookout for two other ARCE members on the show—Salima Ikram lends her expertise to the episode on relics, and Cooney visits Willeke Wendrich in the Fayum for the episode about cities.

"When you talk to 40 other specialists around the world, you realize how much you don’t know, and that’s ok," Cooney says. "We're all human beings, and in the end I think we are interested in other human beings because we like to learn about ourselves."

And learn about herself Cooney did, especially her capacity to work alongside her spouse. "Being on the road for almost three months straight, waking up in a different hotel room every third day, it did make my head spin," Cooney says. "When the crew went to the bar at the end of the day, [Neil and I] went back to our room and worked and wrote and researched. Even on the plane, it was a non-stop endeavor."

But that doesn’t mean the experience wasn't rewarding. "Come on, we went on a trip around the world together! It was the gift of a lifetime," says Cooney. "If I had gone alone, I would have been desperate to tell him all about the temple of the Buddha's tooth in Kandy, Sri Lanka, or the exhumation of the dead at two in the morning in Hanoi, Vietnam, or looking at sacred baboon mummies in the animal necropolis in Saqqara, Egypt. But he was there for all of it."

And, it was precisely because of their relationship that Cooney felt comfortable taking this leap at all. "Making a television show—especially as an academic who does not yet have tenure—is really putting yourself into a vulnerable space, and I had to work with someone whom I could trust completely and who understands the university world that I come from," she says. "I wouldn’t have taken such big academic risks, putting myself into places around the world where I know practically nothing about the culture, without him. He was always able to ensure that we were creating compelling stories."

And given how compelling these stories have turned out to be (Entertainment Weekly has named "Out of Egypt" one of the "14 TV shows we can't wait to see"), will there be another series in the future? Time will tell.

"The great thing about this concept is that we can create a nearly inexhaustible supply of themes and material just by asking simple questions about aspects of human culture and behavior that we often take for granted," says Cooney. "I hope the show provokes new questions and provides information that will make people more curious, so that they get online or pick up a book and try to find out more about the world’s people, both ancient and modern."

"Out of Egypt" airs on the Discovery Channel beginning August 24.
Learn more on the Discovery Channel’s website>>
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