Egyptologist here weighing in…
As others have said, your degree isn’t useless, and you certainly don’t have zero job prospects. People with Egyptology degrees are employed in many different fields, some of them in academia and others far afield.
People can have a career in academia, even in today’s market. Last year there were 3 (!) tenure-track job openings in Egyptology in the US, two of them brand new positions. This year there were two more Egyptology openings in the US and several post-doc positions that were filled by recently graduated Egyptology PhDs. Once you factor in positions in other countries, particularly Egyptology-heavy countries in Europe like Germany, prospects for a newly minted PhD are not entirely terrible. Of course, there are also teaching/research positions in the US in art history, history, linguistics, religious studies, anthropology, etc. (depending on one’s particular area of specialization). Due to extreme budget slashes in the humanities, humanities PhD programs have cut back considerably on the number of students they admit, so those who make it into graduate school have pretty decent odds of landing a job somewhere.
That said, job security is not nearly as secure as, say, in engineering or business. In fact, even getting into graduate school can be nightmarishly difficult due to the financial situation I mentioned above. As you probably know, there are currently only a few strong Egyptology programs in the US (Chicago, Penn, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and Brown) and a handful of weaker programs (Berkeley, Michigan, NYU, and perhaps Emory for art history). The University of Memphis is unique in offering a funded master’s program. Yale’s program has imploded due to the scandal in NELC, although new hires may change that. One could also add Toronto, although its funding for American students is abysmal. When you consider that many departments accept only one or two Egyptology students per year, PhD admissions is extremely competitive.
Spring of senior year is definitely a bad time to “figure something out” if graduate school doesn’t work out or if you decide you don’t want to attend. It’s good that you’re considering other career options. Too many get so focused on academia that they’re at a loss when they don’t get into any of the graduate programs to which they applied. (This is an all too common occurrence in the humanities for even the most qualified applicants, unlike other fields like engineering or the biological sciences.)
It’s difficult to participate in excavations as a hobbyist, certainly, but there are many people who take up Egyptology as a hobby. Some of them are dilettantes who mostly read popular news articles and watch the latest flashy documentaries, but many are remarkably well-informed and even present their research at professional conferences such as ARCE and ASOR. Often people with expertise in other areas – medicine, horsetraining, or glassblowing, say – have skills and knowledge to offer in the reconstruction of past activities. An Egyptologist may be able to translate an ancient ship’s log effortlessly but be utterly clueless about sailing techniques!
Yes, look at career surveys for humanities majors at Penn. Here’s the survey for NELC.
http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/undergrad/majors/nelac.php
I know several people who’ve gone into consulting from Egyptology, some of them undergrads and some of them frustrated graduate students. Since Egyptology programs in the US are at elite universities, they didn’t have too much trouble making the transition.
Yes, they’re fully funded.
Unfortunately, it’s quite common for Egyptology students to know very little (if any) Arabic unless they’ve been engaged in archaeological fieldwork in Egypt for several years. Acquiring the appropriate background in the various scripts and stages of the Egyptian language is very time-consuming, and on top of that they’re expected to know at least one other ancient language (e.g. Greek, Akkadian, or Hebrew) and the European languages used for scholarly publishing (French, German, Italian).
That said, Arabic is obviously useful. There are some difficulties involved in picking it up (it takes a few years to really hone one’s skills, and Egyptian Arabic is not often taught), but it expands one’s career options. The Critical Language Scholarship is an excellent opportunity (fully funded language study abroad!) but requires at least one year of prior Arabic study.