Egypt Beyond the Pyramids And Glimpsing The Future In History With Sean McLachlan
<p class="whitespace-normal break-words">What’s it really like to be an archaeologist in the Middle East? <strong>How can modern travelers experience Egypt beyond the pyramids and tourist traps?</strong> What will survive from our digital age when future archaeologists dig through our ruins, and how does studying ancient civilizations change the way you see the world today?</p>
<p class="whitespace-normal break-words">Canadian ex-archaeologist and award-winning author Sean McLachlan shares insights from 25 years of full-time writing and decades of travel through Egypt, Morocco, and the Middle East.</p>
<p><a href="https://amzn.to/45hNUKr" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-3500 size-full" src="https://www.booksandtravel.page/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/SeanMclachlan-560x192.png" alt="Sean Mclachlan" width="560" style="display:block;margin:10px auto;max-width:560px;max-width:100%;"></a></p>
<p>Sean McLachlan is a Canadian ex-archaeologist and the multi-award-winning author of history, travel, and fiction. His books include The Masked Man of Cairo Historical Detective series, the Moroccan Mysteries, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi series, Toxic World.</p>
<ul class="[&:not(:last-child)_ul]:pb-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ol]:pb-1 list-disc space-y-1.5 pl-7">
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words">Sean’s previous archaeology career in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, including dangerous moments</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words">The reality of archaeological fieldwork vs. Hollywood portrayals, from Roman bath games to 3000-year-old fingerprints</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words">His Masked Man of Cairo detective series set in 1919 Egypt during the independence movement</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words">Hidden gems in Egypt beyond ancient sites: Islamic Cairo, desert oases, Coptic monasteries, and the new museums</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words">Practical travel advice for Egypt and the Middle East, including cultural sensitivity and safety tips</li>
<li class="whitespace-normal break-words">His post-apocalyptic fiction and thoughts on what will survive from our civilization for future archaeologists</li>
</ul>
<p>You can find Sean at <a href="https://www.seanmclachlan.net/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">SeanMcLachlan.net</a> and <a href="https://amzn.to/45hNUKr" target="_blank" rel="noopener">his books here on Amazon.</a></p>
<p><span id="more-3499"></span></p>
<h3>Transcript of the interview</h3>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Hello Travelers. I’m Joanna Penn, and today I’m here with Sean McLachlan. Hi Sean.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Hey, Joanna.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> It’s great to have you on the show. Just a little introduction. Sean is a Canadian ex-archaeologist and the multi-award-winning author of history, travel, and fiction. His books include The Masked Man of Cairo Historical Detective series, the Moroccan Mysteries, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi series, Toxic World.</p>
<p>Wow, lots there. Sean, you were just telling me how long you’ve been a full-time author?</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> It’s my 25th anniversary this year as a matter of fact.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> That is just incredible. But before we get into that, tell us about your previous career in archaeology, because obviously I’m fascinated with it. Lots of people are.</p>
<h3>What is the reality of the archaeologist’s job? Are you really like Indiana Jones?!</h3>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Well, not quite Indiana Jones. I worked for about 10 years in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, got a master’s degree. And it’s an amazing job actually. There’s a lot of meticulous excavation and fieldwork, surveying, a lot of lab work, and it is a lot of fun.</p>
<p>I ended up shifting out of it because I didn’t like the academic side of it too much – the fighting for office space and funding and the petty backstabbing that you see in so many university departments. I really liked the fun stuff, which was the actual fieldwork.</p>
<p>And as far as being Indiana Jones, well I never got shot at when I was in the field. I did get shot at by accident once when I was hiking in Arizona, but that’s a different story. And the only real danger was once there was a Palestinian Viper on the site when we were working in Tel Gezer in Israel, Which is this really nasty snake that the venom can kill you in 20 minutes. But we were working near a kibbutz and one of the kibbutz members had a tractor and ran it over. So that was the end of that problem.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> But just sort of coming back on, you said you didn’t like the academic side but you did enjoy the dig work and the lab work. So in my head, I know what dig work looks like from the movies, obviously. What did you do in the labs and —</p>
<h3>What time period were you working on?</h3>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Well, I worked in several different time periods. The biggest site I worked at was <strong>Tel Gezer, which was an old archaeological site in Israel.</strong> And a tell is basically an artificial mound where people will build a settlement usually on high ground. And then people will build on those foundations and people will build. And after several thousand years, you end up with an artificial hill, which is all just archaeological deposits and you get this a lot throughout the Middle East and they’re called Tell, which is Arabic for Hill.</p>
<p>And we were digging through that. And the main thing we were doing in those field seasons was we were working through an <strong>Egyptian governor’s palace when the Egyptians conquered the Levant</strong>. And so we found some nice hieroglyphics and all that. And also <strong>the city gate, which was commissioned by King Solomon</strong>. It’s actually mentioned in the Old Testament.</p>
<p>So we’re working on that. And that was actually the second time I got in danger in archaeology, both at the same site because we had these things to either side of the gate called casemate walls, where you had an inner wall and an outer wall, and then a storage room in the center.</p>
<p>And so we were digging down through the deposits to find all the stuff that was inside and somebody was working on the other side of the wall, and I’m about eight feet down. And this guy had found a big rock and he thought it was just a deposit. It was too big to move, so he was slamming at it with a sledgehammer, but what he didn’t realize, it was part of the wall.</p>
<p>So I’m eight feet down with this not very stable wall above me of these giant stones, and suddenly it starts going boom, boom.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Buried alive!</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Fastest I ever moved! I teleported out of that pit. I was just, one moment I’m in there and the other moment I’m about 10 feet away screaming my head off.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> And one of the tells I’ve been to is Megiddo, which is the biblical Armageddon.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Megiddo is amazing.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> What got me into writing the types of things that we both write is <a href="https://amzn.to/3IZAaLB" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>The Source</em> by James Michener</a>, which of course is based on that.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Well, I never worked at Megiddo. Michener’s book was amazing though. I read that in university and it was well worth reading. I actually read it in Bulgaria when I was on another excavation, and this was an interesting site because —</p>
<h3>One of the exciting things about archaeology is you never know what you’re going to find —</h3>
<p>and this site was on really high hill at this sharp turn of the Struma River, which runs through Bulgaria, down to Thessaloniki on the Greek coast.</p>
<p>We’d seen some Roman deposits come out of there. So we thought we were going to get a Roman village or a villa on top of this high ground. So we start digging down and the first thing we come to is ash. And we keep digging. <strong>We get more and more ash</strong> and we’re getting all like black hands and everything is poofing up everywhere and we’re sneezing black. It’s terrible.</p>
<p>And we went through about eight feet of this stuff and we asked around, and we found out that that had been <strong>a beacon from the Balkan Wars from 1912,</strong> because they were worried the Turks were going to come up the river valley and attack. And so this was to signal. So we got through that and then we found the Roman site.</p>
<p>But it wasn’t a villa, it was several graves. So we excavated those and we looked down further to see if we’d find more graves. And in the end, actually, we found a very well preserved Bronze Age village. So <strong>we went through a good 3000 years of habitation from 1912 all the way back to 1500 BC.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Wow.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> So that was a lot of fun.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> That is the romance of archaeology, right? That everybody thinks about. And then of course we both put that kind of stuff in our books now. But let’s talk about that because I wondered if you see things differently. I think when I went to Megiddo, I was kind of seeing the layers of story.</p>
<p>You travel a lot and you also research these different areas of history.</p>
<h3>How do you look below the surface of what is there to find those stories underneath?</h3>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Well, one of the interesting things about archaeological sites is <strong>thinking about the people that were there</strong>.</p>
<p>I was at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, these giant Roman baths, just a few weeks ago. And my favorite part, you’re going through these giant vaulted rooms. They’re still preserved 2000 years later, tile floors. Interesting little drains that are still there, like the drains are still there, so well preserved.</p>
<p>But on this sort of marble seat next to one of the pools, somebody had carved the board for an old Roman board game. So these people were sitting there enjoying the caldarium. It’s all steamy and warm, and they’re playing a board game while they got their feet in the pool. I love that, those little details are always the best.</p>
<p>And when often you see, when you pick up pieces of pottery where the potter has altered it a bit, just smooth things out, you’ll find their fingerprints or her fingerprints on there. So you got <strong>a 3000 year old fingerprint.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> I guess then you’re thinking about like who they were. It was really what you were just saying about the ash. That’s really interesting to me because the <strong>ash almost has no story because something was burnt there</strong>. But what you were saying <strong>gave it historical context and it loops back.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Yeah. You’re right. And <strong>it looped back to the present day</strong> because I was there in ’93 just after the fall of communism. And the new government, which was democratic with a small D, was making it very clear to the Turkish minority that they might be better off moving back to Turkey. And so there was that whole tension.</p>
<p>So while that was going on in town, we’re up there seeing the remnants of the last time those two sides had a war.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Yeah, yeah. The historical perspective is so interesting. So one of the places you go a lot is to Egypt and you’ve got this Masked Man of Cairo series, and a lot of us do think, and on this show I’ve talked, we’ve talked about ancient Egypt, but you are writing about a different time period there. So tell us about that time period and what people might think differently.</p>
<h3>Tell us more about your interest in more modern Egypt</h3>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> I decided to do my series set in 1919 right after World War I. And that was <strong>when the first wave of the independence movement started in Egypt</strong>. During World War I, the British Empire basically took over. They had already had a lot of influence in Egypt, but it was still technically an Ottoman Province. But when Britain and the Ottoman Empire found themselves on opposite sides of the war, they took the mask off and named Egypt as a protectorate.</p>
<p>And then they brought in a lot of people for the Egyptian expeditionary force to work as laborers on the Western front, which was very hard on the people that had to go. And one of the ways they calmed down the Egyptian people was to say that they would have a seat at the table after the war to discuss independence.</p>
<p>Well that didn’t actually happen. So the Egyptians took the British at their word and said, well, no, we need to be in Versailles. And the British said, no. And then that kicked off the whole independence movement. So I found that to be very interesting time period to set it in.</p>
<p><strong>And in a lot of my books, I explore colonialism</strong>. So I have three main characters in this series. One is Sir Augustus, who’s a World War I veteran. He’s a masked man because he’s lost half of his face. He has one of those masks that the French artists made – they would look at an old photograph of the person and make a mask that looked like their face, which sort of worked and sort of looked very disturbing. And he hates Europe, wants to live in Egypt, disapproves of colonialism, but is constantly benefiting from it.</p>
<p>Then I have Mustafa who is Nubian and that’s an interesting minority. They’re a very large minority in Egypt, but they’ve had to deal with a lot of racism at the hands of the Egyptians. And of course this being 1919, he experiences racism at the hands of the British too. But he’s also an archaeologist and Egyptologist. So he is very pro independence, but relies on European institutions for his career. So you got all these tricky problems.</p>
<p>And then we have Faisal, who’s a street kid who’s based on a lot of the street kids I’ve met in my neighborhood in Bab al-Luq in downtown Cairo, who doesn’t care about independence, he just wants his next meal.</p>
<p>So that’s an interesting trio and I wanted to have the historical background moving along in the background as they’re solving mysteries.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> I mean you mentioned where you live in Cairo. If people want to see things in Egypt or in Cairo itself that are more from that period or from other periods that are not just ancient Egypt, like —</p>
<h3>What are some of the places that you would recommend visiting?</h3>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Oh, it’s endless. I first went to Egypt in ’91 after I was working on a dig in Cyprus for the same reason everybody else did. I wanted to see the pyramids and the Sphinx and Karnak and all that, and I love that. But <strong>the more I kept going back, the more I discovered how much else there is.</strong></p>
<p>And there’s an amazing number of <strong>beautiful mosques</strong> there, most of which foreigners are allowed in as long as you behave yourself and dress appropriately. There’s a lot of old <strong>medieval architecture</strong>. The old areas, what you call <strong>Islamic Cairo</strong>, although most of it of course is Islamic, is fascinating. You can walk around these old labyrinthine streets, and there is a thousand year old fountain and there was an 800 year old mosque and you go around.</p>
<p>And then there’s all the bazaars and all the smells and sights of that. As far as things specifically from the early 20th century, not so much because it was sort of this transition period. But when I’ve read accounts from that era and when I’ve wandered around the back streets of Cairo, there’s a lot that you can still recognize.</p>
<p>I mean, of course everyone’s got cell phones and lights and all that, but <strong>the pace of life, a lot of the clothing, a lot of the way that people still interact, the traditional crafts, they’re all still there</strong>. So that makes it very easy to research. I always tell my readers it’s inspiration made easy. I just go off to these places.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Just walking around. I mean, you mentioned the mosques there, obviously you said there are so many.</p>
<h3>Is there one particular mosque that sticks out in your mind as particularly interesting or beautiful?</h3>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> My personal favorite is the <strong>Mosque of Ibn Tulun</strong>, which is from about 800 AD, one of the oldest mosques in Cairo. And it’s based on the mosque in Samarra, in Iraq. And instead of having the stairs on the inside, it has the stairs on the outside. So you go up these winding stairs and you end up looking over this beautiful view of Cairo, and right next to it is the Gayer Anderson Museum.</p>
<p>It was this old house from the early 20th century that was built in the Islamic style, but it was actually owned by a western professor. And you can tour that and see his art collection, see all the interior. There’s several old stately homes that you can tour the interior.</p>
<p>I also went up the <strong>mosque of Samarra in Iraq</strong>, and that was terrifying because I’m acrophobic and there’s no railing for the external staircase. So you’re going up and up and up and the staircase gets narrower and narrower and narrower. And I get right up to the top and I have this photo taking a photo of my boot on the step and there’s no more space. And the same size of my boot is the bus that we came in all the way down at the bottom.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Oh. And that turns my stomach even just thinking about it.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Yeah. I have a fear of heights. But I had to go up it. I would’ve kicked myself for the rest of my life if I didn’t go up it, so I went up it.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> That is interesting. I have, like, I do feel sick around heights and the last place I tried was <a href="https://www.booksandtravel.page/vienna-nuremberg-cologne/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Cologne Cathedral</a>, and I tried to climb up the spire and about halfway up I just was like, I literally can’t, and then I had to sit on my bum and go down the stairs on my bum all the way down again. So, yeah, I don’t think I’ll try that, but that sounds interesting.</p>
<p>And you mentioned a museum there, and again, there’s loads of museums. And now things have changed a bit, haven’t they? Like when I was there, I guess it was like 25 years ago, the Museum of Antiquities was still the old one, like in town. And that’s now moved.</p>
<h3>Have you been to that amazing new Antiquities museum?</h3>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Yeah, there’s actually a couple of new museums. The museum at Tahrir Square is still there, but they’ve taken a lot of the good stuff out, including King Tutankhamun. But <strong>the new Egyptian museum on the Giza Plateau right next to the pyramids is fantastic.</strong> It is huge.</p>
<p>I spent I think eight hours there in total, and I still didn’t get a proper look at it. I have to go back the next time I’m there. Amazing architecture. And the front hall is this series of steps with all these statues and sarcophagi. And then you get up to the museum proper where you go through the different periods as in a normal museum.</p>
<p>It is truly stunning. And then there’s a <strong>Museum of Egyptian Civilization</strong>, which is a smaller, sort of more bespoke museum that goes through all the periods, but also has a lot of modern stuff, including the different ethnic groups. There’s a section about the Nubian and a section about the Bedouin, Upper Egypt, Lower Egypt, the delta.</p>
<p>So that’s all well worth seeing too. I got to see that with some Egyptian friends. Their daughter who was nine at the time, gave me the tour, so that was interesting. It’s always fun to follow a child through a museum the way they dart around and make associations that you wouldn’t think of.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Yeah, they get bored quite quickly.</p>
<p>But I go quite quickly through museums and I stop when I’m like, <strong>that’s the thing I want to spend more time with</strong>. Because I imagine, I mean, it was pretty overwhelming when I was there, but I imagine now, like you said, if you spent eight hours there, that’s a lot.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> I’m a museum junkie. I can do it.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Yeah, you can do it. But I mean, a lot of people come into Cairo and do the pyramids and then leave, go down the Nile, up the Nile and do other bits quite quickly.</p>
<h3>If people are in Cairo for even a couple of days, are there things they should see?</h3>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> I would highly suggest <strong>Khan el-Khalili, which is the old market,</strong> which has been around for about a thousand years, and that is well worth seeing.</p>
<p>And when you’re in there, it’s very packed and there’s all these stalls and some of it’s tourist kitsch, but some of it is things for Egyptians to buy, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the spices and everything you’re seeing, but also look up because you’ll see all these old windows and these lovely arches and stuff. There’s people living up there too, you know, people peeking down, looking at you. So it’s well worth looking around there.</p>
<p>And also <strong>just relax, go to some of the cafes</strong>. The cafes are open for everybody. I’ve noticed a lot of foreigners are sort of hesitant about going to Egyptian cafes, but it’s never a problem. And I mean, Egyptian women go to cafes too, so they’re open for everybody and it’s a very relaxed cafe culture. The Egyptians are very Mediterranean that way.</p>
<p>So it’s well worth going to the cafes and getting a tea or a coffee and just watching the world go by. In my neighborhood in <strong>Bab al-Luq, which is down in the central part of old downtown</strong>, which has a lot of old 19th and early 20th century buildings during the big boom that they were having back then, there’s some<strong> lovely old shaded pedestrian roads</strong> where they’re just lined with cafes. It’s very relaxing.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Yeah. And I guess most people, in fact, I wouldn’t associate the word relaxing with Cairo.</p>
<p>I remember the traffic being particularly difficult and I guess also sometimes the heat, depending on what time of the year. Cultural stereotypes, I think make people afraid. And the media in fact, and of course there have been issues, there always are issues in every country, but people may think religious fundamentalism, there are potential issues. So what, <strong>how can you help people be more relaxed? Like how should they behave to make the most of it?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> It’s easier because I’m a man, let’s just put that out there.</p>
<p>Women traveling with men will not have any problems at all. My wife’s been there a bunch of times, has never had a problem. Women traveling together tends to be okay. Just no mini skirts and halter tops. I mean, <strong>you’re in a Muslim country. I mean, I don’t wear shorts when I’m there. I always wear long pants, just get some light khaki pants</strong> or something. And it’s getting more accepted than it used to be, but it’s still not a good idea. And you can’t go into a mosque dressed that way.</p>
<p>Religious fundamentalism, the current junta of generals has done a very good job of crushing the Muslim Brotherhood, so there haven’t been any terrorist attacks for quite some time. That said, you will occasionally meet people that you don’t get a very good vibe off of. Although that happens to me all the time.</p>
<p>It’s sad to say, but I will not get into a taxi with an openly religious taxi driver because they always try to overcharge me.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Interesting. It’s tourist tax. You know there is a level of tourist tax that should be allowed, I think in any place. But you are more of a regular.</p>
<p>I mean, I guess the other thing is the street hawkers, some of whom are often children as well in some places. And that can be overwhelming. Like you feel like you should be buying something or giving money, and then as soon as you do, there are lots more. Is that still?</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> That is a problem. They’ve cleared them out a little bit, but see, I don’t mind the people who go around at night around the cafes trying to sell whatever it is they’re trying to sell. Because <strong>a lot of these kids, they’re not homeless, but they’re very poor.</strong> They’re probably living eight to a room. And everybody has to have a little job to supplement the income. And if it’s something I would reasonably want to buy, then I buy it. I don’t mind.</p>
<p>What I don’t like is the tourist hustlers who are like pushing you, like, oh, come to my shop. No, no, because then if you go to the shop, you’re doomed. They’re going to pressure you and pressure you and pressure you.</p>
<p>And <strong>you just have to learn to say no and mean it</strong>.</p>
<p>And one of the tactics that they sometimes use is if you’re refusing, you say, no, no, sorry, I’m just not interested in say, what? Are you racist? No, I’m not. No, I’m not racist. I just don’t want your plastic bust of Nefertiti.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Yeah, I think it’s especially at the tourist sites, I remember the, I think it was the Temple of Hatshepsut. And gosh, there were so many there. But there the coaches offload and I guess it’s a good spot. But <strong>be aware that that’s going to happen and just watch out for it.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> And there’s no real way to avoid it.</p>
<h3>The more you go, the more comfortable you get.</h3>
<p>And the less they come after you, they realize, they sense it.</p>
<p>One thing that you do have to watch out for, and this isn’t happening in the new museum, but happens in the old Egyptian museum in Tahrir, is you’ll be taking photos or a video and some guy will come up to you, flash an ID in Arabic and say, I work for the museum. You’re not allowed to take photos, you don’t have permission. You have to give me 400 pounds. These guys are just hustlers. And what they’re flashing is not their museum ID. It’s actually their national ID.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Yeah, that’s a good one. I mean, a lot of the cathedrals in Europe, you do have to pay like an extra fee to take photos, but you do that at the front desk when you get your ticket, basically.</p>
<p>I would also say like, I traveled as an independent woman, but I went with a group, so I think this is easy enough, like there are millions of different groups you can join traveling in Egypt. So I guess also —</p>
<h3>What are some other areas of Egypt that you find interesting that, again, are often overlooked in the rest of the country?</h3>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Oh, well, all of them, but that’s not a very good answer, is it?</p>
<p>Well, obviously <strong>Upper Egypt, Karnak, Aswan, Luxor,</strong> all that, but a lot of people go there. One of my favorite places is the Western desert and the oases in the Western desert. I have a whole book set in <strong>Bahariya, which is a very isolated oasis</strong> out in the middle of nowhere, way out past Cairo. You get on a bus and you drive and drive and drive and drive and drive.</p>
<p>And there’s some amazing stretches of desert out there. I went camping. <strong>Beautiful star filled nights</strong> where the sky felt like it was about 12 feet above your head. So many stars. You can’t even recognize the constellations, but amazing geography there, geology there where the wind will scour the rock into all these weird shapes. And there’s a White Desert, which is all this gypsum. And then there’s a Black Desert, which is all volcanic stuff. And so that was really, really interesting.</p>
<p>And there’s some archaeological sites in Bahariya as well. It’s a very different culture because they’re Bedouin who’ve settled and they settled hundreds of years ago. So they’re not Bedouin, they’re not Nile Valley folk, they’re Bahariya.</p>
<p>And the <strong>Faiyum is another more accessible oasis.</strong> It’s on a branch of the Nile, about three hours southwest of Cairo, and that has this lovely lake and there’s a large stretch of cultivated land there. And then you can go out in the desert, go see some old archaeological sites there and these amazing sand dunes.</p>
<p>And I’m actually putting them in the next book that’s coming out in August. My characters go there to solve a murder. And you can see what the locals call <strong>‘sand whales,’ which are fossilized whales from when the whole area was an inland sea.</strong></p>
<p>And what’s interesting about these whales is you might’ve heard how whales were originally land animals that became amphibious and then went into the sea. Well, <strong>these fossils are old enough that you can still see vestigial hind legs on them and their front legs turned into fins. It’s amazing.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> That’s very cool. You can find archaeology everywhere.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Yes. There’s still regions I haven’t seen. There’s all these <strong>Coptic monasteries in the Red Sea area</strong> that I want to go to. I’ve been to the ones in <strong>Wadi Natrun</strong>, which is another road trip well worth doing. You can see monasteries that have been functioning since the fifth century.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> The Coptics are fascinating. I still remember the first time I was in Jerusalem on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre and the Ethiopian Coptics there have a little shrine on the roof. They’re poor but close to the shrine.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> That’s Jerusalem. Jerusalem’s an electric place. I love that.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Well that’s a whole other episode.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> I haven’t been in years either.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> No, I haven’t either. But yes, let’s just come onto an angle I wanted to tackle since you also write post-apocalyptic books. And I think this is so interesting because you are mainly historical and ex-archaeology and you think about this and I wondered —</p>
<h3>What do you think we will leave in the historical record from our era?</h3>
<p>Because it feels to me like we are so interested and we write about these times that are quite ancient.</p>
<p>And as you mentioned, even like the 1919, when you are writing like there isn’t necessarily that much from then. So what do you think about what will last?</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Well, that’s a good, a lot of plastic. But other than that, that’s a good question. I mean, <strong>all this electronic data that’s gone very early, a lot of my very early writings is gone.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Disappeared.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> You’re not launching this into space?!</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Maybe, but no, we should. I mean, even our books, our books rot. I mean the books that last, this is what’s interesting. The books that last are usually made of, I guess there’s papyrus in Egypt, but like vellum or more organic matter, I guess.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> There’s a great book called <a href="https://amzn.to/44WaQNX" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>The World Without Us</em> by Alan Weisman</a>, I think is the author, The World Without Us. And he looks at the theory, what would happen if all humans disappeared tomorrow, how much would be around? And so he looks at a lot of older sort of modern ruins.</p>
<p>He goes to the Green Line in Cyprus. Back in, I think it was ’72 or ’73, the Turks invaded Cyprus because they were having a fight with the Greek national party that wanted to join with Greece, there was a division that cut right through Nicosia and a couple other cities. And so there was this green line between the Turkish North and the Greek Cypriot South.</p>
<p>And there’s a strip there that has just been sitting there for 50 years and he got to visit it. He had to get visas from both sides and have guards go with him and everything, but what he was surprised was how much was gone, like so much had just fallen apart.</p>
<p>Things that you don’t think about like tires because tires dry out. And so there were cars there that he went to a gasoline station that had a stack of tires that all that was left were the rims. Like everything else had just shredded. There was just this sort of black dust and the heap around. That sort of thing.</p>
<p>A lot of the buildings had simply fallen in, even though they were solidly enough made back in the sixties or the fifties or whenever they had been built, because they just been sitting around for 50 years. Because he went in the 2010s. They had all fallen apart.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Yeah. And you wonder whether the like the Burj Khalifa for example, or the Shard in London, do they end up crumbling? Because like in London and in Egypt and Cairo, there are these buildings that are a thousand years old or you are excavating things that are much, much older.</p>
<h3>Are these things going to last or are we just not building like that anymore or making things? I think we don’t really build to last though.</h3>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> I give you a good example. I’m here in <a href="https://www.booksandtravel.page/oxford/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Oxford</a> University doing research right now and I’m in the Bodleian Library, lovely library. It’s 600 years old, the oldest parts and they’re still solid and I can sit in there and work and everything is fine.</p>
<p>My wife is at the astrophysics department in a building that was built in the mid fifties.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Oh, they’re so ugly around there, aren’t they?</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Brutalism! How can you put brutalist architecture in the middle of Oxford? I know it’s criminal. And the concrete’s already beginning to decay because it’s not fully waterproof — in England!</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Which is crazy. I was at Mansfield College, which is right near that science area and yeah, it’s reasonable looking and has a nice chapel, but yeah, I mean, it’s completely different in different colleges and different time periods. But I mean, <strong>Oxford itself is a sort of time capsule</strong>, isn’t it?</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Oh, sure. And I love that about it. I went to high table in Christ Church once, and the person who was sponsoring me to get in, because I’m not an Oxonian, therefore I just can’t go to these things.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Well, they wouldn’t let me in there!</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> She took me down the side passage that led to the kitchen and there was this huge slab of an open table. And I look at that, I’m like, that looks old. And she says, this might be the oldest thing in Oxford. Because it was just, it was obviously old growth and it was obviously medieval because it was just this big slab with legs.</p>
<p>And the top was literally this thick and it was shiny because it was so old, but there’s all these deep carved scratches in it and everything. And <strong>this table had been serving the university for literally centuries and it will outlast the astrophysics department and it’ll outlast our books.</strong> It’s also just too heavy to move, so it’s just going to stay there.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Interesting.</p>
<h3>When you write your post-apocalyptic books, are you thinking about this view of history or casting your mind into a future where it goes horribly wrong?</h3>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Well, what I do with Toxic World is I decided, as much as I like zombies and all that, I didn’t want to use zombies or a plague or a meteor because I felt that was kind of a cop out.</p>
<p>What happens in my scenario is there’s <strong>resource depletion and overpopulation</strong>, and then World War III kicks off and a lot of things crumble, and then people start building up, and then there’s more wars and the countries fragment into city states, and there’s more wars and more degradation and et cetera.</p>
<p>There’s some nukes go off just for chuckles and there’s a bio war, so a bunch of animals go extinct and <strong>everything just slowly decays</strong> to the point where there’s only one town left called New City. And it’s not really a city. It only has 3000 people in it. And they barely are able to keep the lights on. And there’s ravaging hordes out there and toxic wasteland.</p>
<p>And sad to say, I think that that’s much more of a likely scenario that might actually, if we’re not careful, that might actually be how it goes down.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Except overpopulation? I think now we are basically dying off by not having children?</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Well, some sections of the world and some sections still are growing. So it’s sort of a trade off. There are predictions that the rise in population’s going to level out. Whether it does or not, we shall see.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> We should see, but I do find this interesting because as you say, like, let’s go back to that pile of ash that you were excavating again, evidence of war, and going back to Tel Megiddo in Israel, same thing.</p>
<h3>Evidence of cities razed and destroyed and the next city built on top of it, and then the next city, and on and on.</h3>
<p>And just these levels and levels. I mean, that is history, but what you are also writing is, that’s also the future. I guess<strong> are we just stuck in these cycles?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> There’ll be decline and then people will rise up.</p>
<p>I mean, you’re seeing certainly Europe’s, <strong>I would say Europe is definitely in decline on a number of levels</strong>. China seems to be booming. How viable that is in the long term is hard to say. I mean, they only really started this communist capitalist experiment 30 years ago. So it’s way too early to say what’s going to happen.</p>
<p>Some people say the United States is in decline. I’m not so sure they are. They’re certainly undergoing a fundamental change. Where that’s going to end up, I have no idea. But I wouldn’t write off the United States quite yet.</p>
<p>But <strong>all empires die</strong> and the American Empire will die. The Chinese empire will die. And the next one, the Canadian Empire.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> When we have it. The glorious days, the Canadian Empire. When was that?</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> It’s coming next!</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Well, it’s so funny because I agree with you obviously being British and feeling like <strong>we live past the end of empire</strong>, so the end of the British Empire was a while ago now, you know, not in our lifetime. And like you’re in Oxford. I’m in Bath.</p>
<h3>We live in this kind of nice museum of Europe. The whole continent is like a museum.</h3>
<p>And then you go to America and I agree with you. I think America’s still got that sort of pushing forward energy.</p>
<p>And then what I like doing though, as a British person is going to Portugal because I feel like their empire died before the British Empire. And so I see the future of Britain in Portugal, which let’s face, it’s got a great quality of life. And it’s got some lovely parts about it, but a lot of people don’t realize how big an empire Portugal once had.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Oh, it was vast.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Huge. And there’s a podcast called <a href="https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Hardcore History</a>, and Dan Carlin, the host, has a book <a href="https://amzn.to/4lLlnD1" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>The End is Always Near,</em></a> which is about this collapse of civilizations. I guess you talked about decline, but is there anything else, like if we think about traveling to places. Because I didn’t go to New Orleans before the big hurricane.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> So I haven’t been since.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Oh, you haven’t been since, okay. So I have been since, but I remember being invited to go visit someone and I said, ‘oh no, I’ll do that another time.’ And then obviously Katrina happened and you know, all of that. But are there places where you visit and it’s like, okay —</p>
<h3>Are there are places that we need to see because things are going to change and they might disappear?</h3>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> I’m more aware of that ever since ISIS. Because when I was much younger in the mid nineties, I traveled to Syria before the Civil War and spent a couple months there. Wonderful. Had a great time. Saw Palmyra, saw a lot of that.</p>
<p>I also did some journalism in Iraq between, in this a peaceful period between the surge and the rise of ISIS. And there was this sort of a lull for about a year and a half, and I got in right then. And so I saw a lot of sites there. So I saw a lot of places that ISIS wiped off the map.</p>
<p>I also saw several Christian communities near the border of Syria that became ISIS territory. And so the people I met and the towns I saw, well, they just don’t exist anymore. So yeah, that made me very aware.</p>
<p><strong>I had always been aware because I was an archaeologist, when you are working on a city and nobody knows what it was called or any of the people who lived there, it changes your perception a little bit</strong>. But when it was people I actually met and places I actually saw myself, and then they got wiped off the map, that really brought it home to me.</p>
<p>Everything’s fragile and there’s nasty people in the world.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Or just natural disasters. Things that happen.</p>
<p>My <em>Map of Shadows</em> and <a href="https://jfpennbooks.com/collections/mapwalker-dark-fantasy-thrillers" target="_blank" rel="noopener">my Mapwalker series</a> has this split world. And <strong>on the other side of the map are all the places that got pushed out of our maps</strong> because like you mentioned, Iraq for example, someone drew it on a map and there it was, all these places, those lines don’t necessarily exist and they change and that also shifts people. But it is super interesting to think what might go.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> But <strong>things endure too</strong>, which is something that I’ve always found interesting. I mean, Iraq, the name is Uruk. The old city state from 3000 BC.</p>
<p>There is a, since you’ve lived in London, I suppose, there’s a road called Houndsditch, and they were doing some excavations there. The Museum of London. And they found that it was a ditch outside the old Roman wall, and they found a bunch of dog skeletons in it. It’s where they dumped their dead dogs. And that ditch later got paved over, turned into a road that got named Houndsditch.</p>
<p>You talk to people in Houndsditch, they have no idea why it’s called Houndsditch. But that name got preserved and passed through three different languages to make it to our present day.</p>
<p>So some things will endure, and I think that people interactions, <strong>the more I read history, people don’t change a huge amount.</strong></p>
<p>I mean, culturally there’s shifts, but <strong>what we want out of life and how we interact with friends and family</strong>, I don’t think they’re vastly different. And so I think some things remain the same.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Yeah, we still want to sit on the edge of that bath and play a game.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Exactly. I can just totally see these people with their feet in the water and they’re playing a game. I love that.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> That’d be me. Although I might have a book rather than play a game, but well, let’s just come back, we could talk all day actually, I think about all this kind of stuff, but I am interested just in an attitude to travel. So you obviously, you travel a lot. You’re a relaxed type of guy. You’ve got a lot of experience traveling and then people might be listening and like, well, how do I do that?</p>
<h3>What’s your overarching tip for people who want to travel but maybe just struggle?</h3>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> <strong>Slow down, see less for longer</strong>. I mean, I understand that not everyone can go off for two months a year to Cairo like I can, but find a place you like and just hang out.</p>
<p>I’m very lucky that I’m married to a woman that likes to travel that way. Because so many people want, it’s like, oh, they have a whole checklist of things I have to see. I need to see a dozen things. That drives me insane. Just stresses me out. I’d rather stay home and work, but slow down. Have a second coffee at a cafe in Tahrir Square or go for a walk at night or in Alexandria just sit by the seaside and look out. That sort of thing.</p>
<p>And <strong>try to meet people</strong>. I often travel alone, especially if I’m going to crazier places. I’m planning a trip to Algeria for probably November, and I’m going to go alone, because if you’re alone, you’re going to meet more people and that’s a lot of fun.</p>
<p>And you can do this as a woman in the Middle East, you’re just going to be meeting women. And what’s been fun is I’ve traveled, like with my wife, but with other women beforehand, we’d travel in the Middle East together and then she’d go off with ladies and I’d go off with the guys and we’d come back at the end of the evening and we’d have had completely different experiences. And so we’d just compare notes. So that was kind of fun.</p>
<p>So it’s very doable, and as a woman, solo traveler is, if you keep your head about you, <strong>it’s not going to be any more dangerous than London. Perhaps less dangerous than London</strong>. London’s maybe not the best one to compare it to, but less dangerous than St. Louis. How about we put it like that?</p>
<p>There’s very little street crime in Cairo. There’s just hassling in Cairo. And so I would just say go for it. <strong>Relax, spend more time, talk to the locals and just have a good time.</strong> And people tend to be fairly laid back the more you can. You more, you reach out and try to understand and try to speak the local language, that helps too.</p>
<p>I did a project in Harar, which is an old medieval walled city in eastern Ethiopia, and they have their own language, Harari, which is only spoken in this little walled city. And this city is not really a city. It’s about 50,000 people. And I remember the first time I managed to make a coherent sentence in Harari. Everyone just flipped out. There weren’t very many more after that, but the fact that I tried enough to actually make a sentence in Harari and don’t ask me to repeat it because it’s long since gone, being able to do that, that really helps.</p>
<h3>People are just generally curious about one another.</h3>
<p>And people want to meet, especially in more remote areas because they don’t get to meet very many foreigners. And we’re trained with this idea that the world’s hostile and you watch the news and everyone’s blowing each other up. But <strong>mostly people just want to relax and enjoy their life and have a good time and just like anybody else.</strong></p>
<p>And you get them on that level and everything’s generally okay.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Fantastic. Right, so this is the Books and Travel podcast.</p>
<p><img decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-3501" src="https://www.booksandtravel.page/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Egypt-and-end-of-the-world-books-560x175.png" alt="Egypt and end of the world books" width="560" style="display:block;margin:10px auto;max-width:560px;max-width:100%;"></p>
<h3>What are a few books that you recommend around the topics we’ve discussed today?</h3>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> One crazy book that I just read recently is <a href="https://amzn.to/3UpApSD" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>Walking The Nile</em> by Levison Wood</a>. Have you read that?</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Oh yeah.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Total Mad Dogs and Englishman type book. This guy decides to walk the length of the Nile. And he doesn’t start at Lake Victoria. He starts in Rwanda. Good job. And that’s very well written and very interesting. It has a bit of the sort of dashing British adventurer ignoring local politics. He’s very much that. But it is well written and it is a lot of fun to read.</p>
<p>And I was just in the Oxfam shop near my house, and I picked up this, which is an excellent classic book on Morocco, <em>Morocco That Was</em> by Walter Harris. He was a correspondent for the Times around the turn of the century. So he wrote several books. And Walter Harris traveled all through Morocco in the teens, in the twenties, just my era.</p>
<p>And described a lot of the old kasbahs and meeting the Sultan and the old bandits that used to be around there, but also a lot of cultural mores and customs that are still around today. So that’s a lot of fun.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Fantastic. And then just tell us a bit about your books if people want to try them.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Oh, I was just at a book fair here in Oxford and sold almost all the copies of my books. But I do have, this is book five. I sold book one through four. This is for the Masked Man of Cairo series. This is the case of the Asphyxiated Alexandrian. This is where they go up to Alexandria searching for Alexander’s tomb, which of course has been long since lost.</p>
<p>Sir Augustus has to go because one of his old war buddies gets murdered. And so he has to go find it. I don’t have anything from the Toxic World or Moroccan mysteries because those all sold out. But I do have a copy of a standalone I did based in modern Tangier called The Last Hotel Room.</p>
<p>And this I wrote right after the Syrian civil War kicked off and there was always a small Syrian community in Tangier in Northern Morocco. And what the King of Morocco decided to do was allow Syrians in without a visa. So suddenly there was this huge influx, but he didn’t give them citizenship or residency, so they couldn’t go to school. The kids couldn’t go to school, the parents couldn’t work.</p>
<p>I mean, they weren’t getting bombed, but they were stuck in this sort of limbo and they couldn’t get to Europe. Not at that moment. They started going later. And I was watching this influx. And so I wrote a book about some of the Syrian refugee kids that I met, and a portion of the last hotel room goes to a charity there. There’s a few charities I like to support for kids in the Middle East. Because there’s a lot of need. It’s pretty rough.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Interesting. You have books about so many things.</p>
<h3>Where can people find you and your books online?</h3>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Well, I’m at <a href="https://www.seanmclachlan.net/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">seanmclachlan.net</a>. And I’m on all the socials at WriterSean, on Instagram, my Facebook author page. And I just started a Pinterest account, so I’m putting up things on Pinterest as well and Amazon, of course.</p>
<p><strong>Jo:</strong> Well, brilliant. Thank you so much for your time, Sean.</p>
<p><strong>Sean:</strong> Thank you. It’s been a lot of fun.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the authentic conversation between Jo Penn and Sean McLachlan about archaeology, Egypt, Morocco, travel, and writing.</em></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.booksandtravel.page/egypt-beyond-the-pyramids/">Egypt Beyond the Pyramids And Glimpsing The Future In History With Sean McLachlan</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.booksandtravel.page">Books And Travel</a>.</p>
