Road to Research

The process of reaching approval to proceed with researching female pharaohs in the 18th dynasty has been in progress for months with an interest that lasts beyond that. Around the time of the pandemic I began to get into  mythology but didn't have a specific location of interest until a visit to an Egyptian exhibit at a local museum. From there my interests snowballed as I began to read deeper into multiple elements of Egyptian culture though my favorite has consistently remained around female pharaohs and the 18th dynasty. 

Soon after I passed the prerequisite for AP Research and was able to take the class and choose a research project. I had to pick a research question that hadn't yet been answered which proved to be a little challenging since Egypt is a field that has captured the attention of many and while there are many holes in the expansive history the real challenge is finding a hole with enough existing material to answer. I couldn't fly to Egypt since there would not be enough funds nor would I have access to a dig site so it had to be accessible through databases. This was one of the biggest challenges however I continued to research and found an article by Vanessa Davies in which she compares the representation of Thutmose III and Hatshepsut across a few of Hatsheput's temples. This data was intriguing because the format was not written in a typical manner of most Egypt papers in which they analyze in depth facts but rather, Davies used statistics to compare the percents of appearances and factors on the temple walls. This was interesting as rather than arguing how they viewed evidence to be proof of a certain conclusion she only presented the facts of comparing representation through statistics and used the pure numbers to approach a conclusion. This was an interesting method as comparing representation through statistics was something that I hadn't found in other papers and thought it was a unique approach to analyzing evidence as statistics can be an excellent measure instead of the more frequently used method of comparison. 

After discovering this article my research was rapidly refined, I had wanted to measure the success of female pharaohs but comparisons and in depth analysis have been frequently made regarding female pharaohs but statistically analyzing features hasn't been done as a method of comparison. In addition, male and female pharaohs and their accomplishments from the 18th dynasty are rarely compared even in comparisons. This caused me to reach a research question that was unique by analyzing different pharaohs from the 18th dynasty  and how successful they were in their representation on their temples. This was a gap in the research that was solid as female and male pharaohs are rarely compared, there were no papers comparing their temples as a measure of success statistically to see who was most successful in temple creation, and statistic analysis is an underused method with regards to this research with only Vanessa Davies using this method and a few other researchers lightly using it in some of their papers. By analyzing multiple temples from multiple random pharaohs I had found a gap that was sufficient enough to be approved for research completing the first step.

After narrowing my research sufficiently and refining my research question further I was able to have an approval meeting and be approved to be able to proceed with the research project and move on to collecting data, beginning the writing of the paper, and randomly selecting pharaohs to research to continue on in the journey to research.

Source referenced in blog post:

Davies, Vanessa. “Hatshepsut’s Use of Tuthmosis III in Her Program of Legitimation.” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, vol. 41, 2004, pp. 55–66. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/20297187. Accessed 8 Sept. 2023.