L.A. Tycoon Finds He Digs Ancient Egypt
You think Indiana Jones lived dangerously? Consider Bruce Ludwig, Los Angeles real-estate tycoon and sometime raider of lost arks. A recent exploit featured the beefy, 6-foot-4 businessman slithering on his belly--undaunted by bats, rats, scorpions and snakes--through an Egyptian cave so blocked by centuries of silt that only a few airless inches were left between ceiling and floor.
“No question, it was traumatic,” he recalls. “If you were claustrophobic, you’d never make it through.”
But Ludwig’s fearsome trial paid off. In the company of archeologist Kent R. Weeks, he emerged from the uncharted cave into an intoxicating room--one unseen by humans for roughly 3,500 years.
The 70 x 80-foot chamber--carved from solid rock and supported by 16 monumental pillars--contained the archeological equivalent of pirates’ gold: the long-sought tombs of the sons of King Ramses II, whose reign ended in 1223 BC and who, some scholars believe, allowed Moses to flee Egypt in search of the Promised Land.
Plan for Preservation
This find will go down in history books. Egyptologists will study and chart the area, allowing no one but scholars--and Ludwig--in. Then the cave will be sealed to preserve it for centuries to come.
Twenty-four hours after the find, Ludwig is back in his everyday world: a house in Hancock Park, a downtown office on Bunker Hill, a hectic business and social life that includes what he calls “all the right clubs and charity boards.”
(The Los Angeles Blue Book listing for Ludwig and his wife, Carolyn, shows their affiliations as: the Jonathan Club, Assistance League, National Charity League, Amazing Blue Ribbon, California Pediatric Center, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Director’s Roundtable, Costume Council and Good Shepherd Center for Homeless Women.)
“I’m just an everyday real-estate guy,” he tells a visitor at TCW Realty Advisors, which invests pension funds in property. Ludwig--who was a commercial real-estate broker at Coldwell Banker for 18 years--now is a senior partner at TCW, an 8-year-old firm described in the July, 1989, issue of California Business magazine as one of a small number of investment funds that have “turned the world of real estate upside down by accumulating huge war chests and buying up prime pieces of property.”
How did this son of a South Dakota grocer, who was graduated from Burbank High School and Cal State Northridge (with a business degree), get in on the action of 1223 BC?
“It was easy,” he explains--and proceeds to confound even more.
“When John Wayne died, I met the professional treasure hunter that Wayne was partners with. He needed a new partner, and I said I’d do it. So for about 10 years now, I’ve been running a full-time crew.”
His crew hunts for old Spanish mines in Arizona during winter and for sunken treasure off the Florida coastline in the summer. They use satellite photos and infrared photography from a lab in Palo Alto, which they visit regularly to bone up on new techniques for such things as seeing through sand, spotting old vegetation trails, and finding underwater deposits.
No More ‘Crazy Ideas’
On one visit, Ludwig recalls, “the head of radio-physics at the lab told me about an Egyptology professor at Berkeley named Kent Weeks, who had a project that involved making a three-dimensional map, above and below ground, of the entire Theban Necropolis in Luxor, Egypt. He asked if I’d be interested in helping raise money for that. I said I wasn’t interested in any more crazy ideas, but I’d be happy to meet the fellow.”
The breakfast meeting turned into a lunch and dinner meeting. “I was thoroughly enthralled with Weeks and his project,” Ludwig says. “I took on principal responsibility for funding it and I’ve been his principal benefactor for the past eight or 10 years.”
Weeks, now at American University in Cairo, returned to the United States on vacation last week. Reached by phone, he allowed as how Ludwig is “quite unusual. A businessman who has an appreciation for the rather esoteric aspects of archeology. He’s able to understand the academic side, even though he’s probably more excited by the adventure of it all.”
But patience, rather than adventure, is what archeology is all about, Weeks explained. “We’ve been working in one tomb of the Valley of the Kings for three years. Just this month we’ve gotten through to the first chamber. If there are spectacular discoveries, we won’t find them for another two years, because of all the record-keeping that must be done as we excavate. It requires very slow, meticulous clearing of debris, recording of broken pottery, careful cleaning and conservation of the walls to help preserve them for the future. Only in the past 100 years have we come to realize that this meticulous work is just as important, maybe even more important, than barreling through to find a big hit.”
Ludwig is willing to wait it out, providing money for needed specialists and equipment and offering what Weeks calls “creative ideas that work.”
In fact, Weeks says, Ludwig has the only film of the fabulous pillared room containing the tombs of Ramses’ sons. “When he went in on his belly, he managed to take a video camera with him.”
Weeks says he will publish his recent findings in six weeks in a scholarly journal, and will “eventually write a book.”
But what will Ludwig get out of all this, aside from adventure and the privilege of regularly contributing six-figure sums?
“History,” Ludwig replies. “It’s a chance to contribute to history,” to help discover and preserve ancient civilization that would otherwise be undiscovered, unchronicled and destroyed.”
He collects no artifacts at the digs because “the Egyptians frown on that. The sites have been robbed and plundered for centuries.” And he would never “detach articles from their historical context,” he says, because it destroys what scientists do. An isolated piece doesn’t tell any story about itself or where it’s from.
Ludwig’s chance involvement with archeology has led him to a totally different life, which was perhaps “simply meant to be.” He feels “at peace in Egypt,” he explains, and is building a mud brick home on the Nile, which he may retire to someday. (Besides his Hancock Park residence, he owns homes in Aspen, New York and San Clemente.)
In fact, he loves the archeological life so much that he has just become one of three benefactors for another project, at Giza, site of the pyramids and Sphinx.
Mark Lehner, a Yale University researcher who heads the project, calls Ludwig “larger than life, a modern-day Lord Carnarvon.” He’s referring to the Englishman who financed the expedition to King Tut’s tomb. When he died a mysterious death--allegedly from inhaling bat-dung fumes--the story goes that all the lights in Cairo went out.
Does Ludwig ever fear retribution from ancient gods whose resting places are being disturbed? “Ridiculous,” Ludwig says. “Those stories are apocryphal. The lights go out in Egypt every time I’m there.”
The project to detail Giza excites Ludwig as much as all the rest. “There’ll be a map forever, a frame of reference for all the monuments we can restore and conserve.”
But the project’s “big hit” is to find out about the lives of the 100,000 working men who spent 200 years building the pyramids. Where did they live? What did they eat? How did they haul the immense stones without aid of the wheel or beasts of burden? Were they slaves or simply citizens drafted in exchange for tax abatement? Did they marry and divorce?
Lehner already has found the remains of a bakery and brewery used at the site from 2640 BC to 2550 BC, along with anecdotal wall writing indicating that team spirit and a sense of humor were valued even then. One stone bears the hieroglyphic equivalent of “this end up.” Another has a “gang” name etched in.
And if all this isn’t enough, Ludwig has become benefactor of a project in Tanzania, seeking the origins of man.
Lockwood Haight, Ludwig’s Hancock Park neighbor and longtime friend, has toured Egypt with Ludwig and both their families.
“We had our own houseboat, our own plane, and the privilege of the company of Dr. Weeks,” Haight says, adding that, as a result, he has “contributed some money” to their archeological cause.
Haight talks knowledgeably about Ramses, hieroglyphics and long-lost tombs. But he’s at a loss for words to describe his friend: “They threw away the mold when they created him. He’s imposing, intelligent, always interested in the offbeat. In fact, he’s a little beyond description, if you want the truth.”
