Photo Provided Matt Adams, right, and the project “reis,” or foreman, Ibrahim Mohamed Ali, inside a 2,500-year-old brick tomb in Abydos, Egypt.

ABYDOS, Egypt — Vienna native Matt Adams has been involved in major archaeology excavations in Abydos, Egypt, for 30 years.

His work at Abydos, one of the oldest cities in ancient Egypt, is being shown on the National Geographic Channel at 8 p.m. today.

Adams, a 1980 graduate of Parkersburg High School, got his start doing archaeological work on Blennerhassett Island when the park was first being developed. He worked five summers on the Ohio River island during his high school and college years.

The knowledge he gained while working on Blennerhassett Island during those summers was important in his professional training in archaeology and career path, Adams said. Blennerhassett park officials encouraged Adams to work on the island excavations, including at the original mansion foundation and Indian village sites, during this time, he said.

His segment of the National Geographic show is about 14 mysterious wooden boats found buried in the desert at Abydos in the early 1990s. Although Adams wasn’t the director of the excavation at the time, as a graduate student he was there as a member of the team that found the boats.

Photo Provided Matt Adams, second from left, and some of the project team members walk across the site in Abydos, Egypt.

The program is an episode of National Geographic’s “Drain” series, which focuses on what would be revealed if the water could be drained from oceans, rivers, or lakes covering shipwrecks, sunken cities and other items.

“In our segment, what’s being virtually ‘drained’ is the desert sand covering the buried boats. The production company and I did on-site filming at Abydos last February,” Adams said in an email.

Adams completed his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania. He has a double Ph.D. in Archaeology and Egyptology.

As a student he worked on excavations in Turkey, Syria and Egypt, but his own research has always focused on the site of Abydos in Egypt.

Adams, who lives in New Jersey, has been director of excavations at Abydos for New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts since 1999.

Photo Provided Matt Adams and two New York University students at the funerary temple of King Khasekhemwy.

Adams described the excavations as important in learning about ancient Egyptian history.

After watching last week’s National Geographic television show about the Egyptian excavations, Adams said he was pleased with how the program turned out. The TV program producers have editorial control over what is shown and how, he noted.

Adams, as professor of archaeology at NYU and senior research scholar, spends two months every year — usually in January and February when the weather is not so hot — at the Egyptian excavation site. He is accompanied by graduate students.

He started working on Middle East archaeology excavation projects in 1981 and worked through the 1980s at various locations.

“The mystery of why boats would have been buried in the desert, which is addressed in the show, relates to the broader context of the history of the site and early Egypt,” Adams said.

Photo Provided Matt Adams, right, and the foreman at the funerary temple of King Khasekhemwy (2700 BC) in Abydos, Egypt.

“Abydos was the ancestral home of Egypt’s first kings, and it was also the place where they built their tombs, making it the first ‘Valley of the Kings’ several centuries before the pyramids and more than 1,500 years before the famous King Tutankhamun (“Tut”). In fact, the entire gigantic desert landscape at Abydos appears to have been a sort of vast ‘stage’ on which they ‘performed’ certain fundamental things that kings were supposed to do,” Adams said.

“Part of this, in addition to the royal tombs themselves, was to build huge ritual walled precincts that essentially served as funerary temples in a different part of the site. I’ve been excavating and researching these royal ritual precincts for some years.

“Many of them, as well as the corresponding royal tombs, were accompanied by the graves of courtiers and retainers who were sacrificed to accompany the king into the next world. The boats were buried next to one of these walled precincts for essentially the same reason — to be available to the king in the next world,” Adams said.

“All this stuff — monumental building, human sacrifice on a vast scale, burying a fleet of boats — was part of the early Egyptians working out just exactly who and what the king was and the nature of his power. What happened at Abydos started a line of development that led directly to the pyramids that are so well known,” he said.

Adams said he first became interested in Egyptian archaeology as a student at Vienna Elementary School. He remembers reading books on the subject at the Vienna Public Library.

It is important to educate the public about these archaeology discoveries — whether on Blennerhassett Island or beneath the desert sands of Egypt, Adams said.

Adams is happy to see that Blennerhassett Island Historical State Park has become an important part of the culture and an attraction in Wood County.

***

Want to Watch?

* The National Geographic Channel is scheduled to air a program that Matt Adams appears in tonight at 8 p.m. The series is “Drain the Oceans,” and the episode is “Egypt’s Lost Wonders.” The program premiered July 9.