The Real and Imagined Indiana Jones – A selective history of archaeologist adventurers

German businessman Heinrich Schliemann was so obsessed by the epics of Homer that he read 100 hexagrams of the Iliad at his second wedding (not as romantic as “God bless the broken road” by Rascal Flatts but still a bit of titillation for the bride I’m sure). In addition, in the early 1870’s Schliemann set out to prove that the Homeric myths had been real. His dedication led him to indeed finding not only the remains of Troy but Mycenae as well. The painful twist  is that Schliemann misunderstood which level of ruins Troy was at the excavation site. And so he and his crew ended up destroying much of the actual Troy to get to the deeper, older structures. Found lots of wonderful gold treasure as well, some of which his young wife (still smoldering from the hexagrams) got to wear for a time.

Fictional Allan Quatermain first appeared in H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines and its many sequels. In the initial book, Quatermain is actually looking for missing treasure hunter in Southern Africa and in the process finds…well, what he finds is cryptically hidden in the title. The character has appeared in a bunch films since 1937 (including being portrayed by Richard Chamberlain and Patrick Swayze) and is fittingly played by Sean Connery (Indiana Jones’ dad) in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

British archaeologist Percy Fawcett went exploring the jungles of Brazil for “Z”, his name for a lost ancient city. Unfortunately, Fawcett and his son himself went missing around 1925. Though Fawcett’s bones were eventually produced by the ingenious tribe that claimed to have murdered him, this pile ended up being the remains of some other poor dead guy. Thus, neither Fawcett nor Z have ever been located. Theories persist, including one that claims Fawcett indeed found the City of Z via a portal somewhere in the Roncador mountain range.

Also in the 1920’s another British archaeologist Howard Carter became famous for finding 18^th Dynasty Pharaoh Tutankhamun, aka King Tut. It was believed that there was a curse around Tut’s tomb and given the seemingly high volume of deaths among those who assisted Carter, it might’ve been true. 11 people-associated with the dig died prematurely and some mysteriously over the next decade, in addition to Carter’s pet canary which was swallowed by a cobra. Inspired the 1932 film The Mummy (with Boris Karloff) and all of it’s dumb remakes.

In 1952 Ronald Reagan played Jeff Williams in a film called Hong Kong. Williams is fleeing from the Communists as they take over China and ends up helping an orphan who happens to have a gold idol. Not only does it seem Spielberg and Lucas later raided the future president’s closet for his wardrobe but possibly the plot device of having a Chinese boy as a side-kick.

Two years after Hong Kong, the makers of Secret of the Incas also borrowed Reagan’s look for Charlton Heston’s portrayal of Harry Steele. Steele is a South American tour guide who’s secretly looking for the Inca’s golden “Sunburst”. Heston at one point uses sunlight blasting through a placed crystal to find his way to the treasure, a device which also found its way in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Indiana Jones debuted in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark and is the adventurer who is best known to us and for good reason. The films took all the gimmicks of the early b-movie paper machete-boulder, grave-robbing tales and made them feel as epic and as important as Lawrence of Arabia. Henry “I lifted my cooler nickname from the dog” Jones famously located the Ark of the Covenant, the cup of Christ and some other knickknacks, often side-stepping Nazi’s to do it.

Raiders-related fact: many in the Nazi upper echelon (especially Himmler) were truly obsessed with ancient occult beliefs, symbols and artifacts but mostly of pre-Christian Germanic paganism (the SS symbols that look like the s’s in the band Kiss’ name were actually runes called Schutzstaffel) and some Tibetan (the source of the swastika).

Although in development a few years before Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, the Atari 2600 game Pitfall! certainly was helped by the film’s success. Pitfall Harry runs around looking for various treasures in the jungle while having to jump/swing over scorpions, gaters, tar pits and the like. I wasted many hours trying to beat this game.

Though I think I assumed like everyone else that Romancing the Stone was a rip off of Indiana Jones, fact is it was a screenplay written in the late 1970’s by a waitress named Diane Thomas. Anyway, Kathleen Turner’s character is given a map from her murdered brother-in-law, ends up in Columbia and pays a bird smuggler named Jack Colton (Michael Douglas) to help her, they sleep together and I guess fortuitously eventually find an emerald named “El Corazon”.

Jackie Chan set out to make a series of Indiana Jones-type films but with a lot more fight scenes, which started with 1986’s Armour of God. This first movie’s plot is complicated but Chan plays “Jackie Asian Hawk” who used to be a musician but now searches for treasure and gets tangled up with a cult over the said armour. As a failed musician I can relate to making more money at a career more dangerous.

Side note: this is the film that almost cost Chan his life in that for a stunt he leapt into a tree but the branch broke (I hope someone yelled out “Asian Hawk down!”). Chan ended up cracking his skull and had a piece of bone shoved into his brain. He still has a plastic piece in his head to this day that you should ask him to show you next time you run into him.

Zahi Hawass is a real-life Egyptian archaeologist who has claimed to have discovered the tombs of the pyramid builders at Giza, the Valley of the Golden Mummies at Bahariya and other lost artifacts. A curse seems to have latched onto Hawass but in the form of controversy and strong criticism. Whether it’s accusations of being corrupt and a camera hog to his arguing that other than being slave labor, black Africans had no input into the building of Arabic Egypt (last I heard DNA tests have said otherwise). Also he lost his job as Egyptian Minster of State for Antiquities Affairs because of his close relationship with deposed strongman President Hosni Mubarak.

Tudor Parfitt is a historian and expert on the Jewish diaspora who would end up in the 1990s being commissioned by a wealthy Israeli to find the actual Ark of the Covenant (the belief was that discovery of the Ark would end the animosity between Jews and Muslims). His research led him everywhere from Ethiopia to Papua New Guinea and finally in Zimbabwe where a group called the Lemba claimed to have been a lost tribe of Israel and mentioned that they had brought a sacred drum or box with them. Thanks to DNA testing, come to find out they were indeed Semitic. I won’t spoil the ending but you can read about it in his 2008 book The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Old Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark.

The makers of the 1996 video game Tomb Raider admittedly wanted to make an Indiana Jones-type game but to avoid direct comparison gave the hero mammary glands (early on quite large). Hence Lara Croft was born. Over 20 years, 20 games and 3 disappointing movie adaptations later, Lara’s still climbing cliffs to find lost relics. One of my favorite game series to this day.

Sinologist Victor Mair has solved a lot of historical mysteries, which has garnered him the gift of being very unpopular at times. His revelation that the Tarim mummies (1800 BCE) found in China were in fact Europeans and not Chinese or Uyghurs or Arabs or any of the previously held educated guesses caused a lot of folks’ ancestral pride to get bruised. China had also for years asserted that their ancient civilization had developed bronze before the Europeans or others. But Mr. Mair’s research has concluded otherwise and his findings in recent years has finally been conceded by Chinese scholars. If Mair could next declare who invented noodles – the Chinese or the Italians- we could finally lay that argument to rest.