Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures 0415843693, 9780415843690

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Histories of Egyptology

Histories of Egyptology are increasingly of interest: to Egyptologists, archaeologists, historians, and others. Yet, particularly as Egypt undergoes a contested process of political redefinition, how do we write these histores, and what (or who) are they for? Egyptology possesses a complex past: not only linked to questions of modernity and the colonial encounter, but also to issues of the postcolonial era. How do we relate this complexity, and what do we hope to achieve by doing so? Histories of Egyptology thinks about these questions by bringing together contributions and commentaries from many different perspectives to establish a more nuanced, reflective, and interdisciplinary debate about what the histories of Egyptology should be. This volume addresses a variety of important themes, from the historical involvement of Egyptology with the political sphere, to the manner in which the discipline stakes out its professional territory, the ways in which practitioners have made and represented Egyptological knowledge, and the relationship of this knowledge to the public sphere. Histories of Egyptology provides the basis to understand how Egyptologists constructed their discipline. Yet, the volume also demonstrates how Egyptologists construct ancient Egypt and how that construction interacts with much wider concerns: of society and of the making of the modern world. The volume will not simply be of relevance to Egyptologists. Practitioners from related disciplines will also find material of interest: archaeologists and anthropologists in particular, but also museum professionals. Historians, too, will find material that relates to their concerns—particularly relating to science, culture, and the history of the modern Middle East. The history of Egyptology is relevant to a wide constituency; this volume demonstrates why. William Carruthers will take up a Max Weber postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in September 2014. He recently submitted his doctoral dissertation (“Egyptology, Archaeology and the Making of Revolutionary Egypt, c. 1925–1958”) to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

Routledge Studies in Egyptology

1 Ancient Egyptian Temple Ritual Performance, Pattern, and Practice Katherine Eaton

2 Histories of Egyptology Interdisciplinary Measures Edited by William Carruthers

Histories of Egyptology Interdisciplinary Measures Edited by William Carruthers

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Histories of Egyptology : interdisciplinary measures / edited by William Carruthers. pages cm. — (Routledge studies in Egyptology ; 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Egyptology—History. 2. Egypt—Civilization—To 332 B.C.— Historiography. 3. Egypt—Antiquities—Historiography. 4. Excavations (Archaeology)—Egypt. I. Carruthers, William, 1982– editor of compilation, author. II. Series: Routledge studies in Egyptology ; 2. DT60.H57 2014 932.0107—dc23 2014008109 ISBN: 978-0-415-84369-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-75413-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Figures Acknowledgments A Note on Transliteration 1

Introduction: Thinking about Histories of Egyptology

ix xi xiii 1

WILLIAM CARRUTHERS

PART I The Creation and Isolation of an Academic Discipline 2

The Object of Study: Egyptology, Archaeology, and Anthropology at Oxford, 1860–1960

19

ALICE STEVENSON

3

The Anglo-Saxon Branch of the Berlin School: The Interwar Correspondence of Adolf Erman and Alan Gardiner and the Loss of the German Concession at Amarna

34

THOMAS L. GERTZEN

4

The Cursed Discipline? The Peculiarities of Egyptology at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

50

JUAN CARLOS MORENO GARCÍA

5

Interdisciplinary Measures: Beyond Disciplinary Histories of Egyptology DAVID GANGE

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Contents

PART II Knowledge in the Making 6

Beyond Travelers’ Accounts and Reproductions: Unpublished Nineteenth-Century Works as Histories of Egyptology

81

ANDREW BEDNARSKI

7 Studies in Esoteric Syntax: The Enigmatic Friendship of Aleister Crowley and Battiscombe Gunn

96

STEVE VINSON AND JANET GUNN

8 Margaret Alice Murray and Archaeological Training in the Classroom: Preparing “Petrie’s Pups”

113

KATHLEEN L. SHEPPARD

9 Discussing Knowledge in the Making

129

CHRISTINA RIGGS

PART III Colonial Mediations, Postcolonial Responses 10 On Archaeological Labor in Modern Egypt

141

WENDY DOYON

11 Remembering and Forgetting Tutankhamun: Imperial and National Rhythms of Archaeology, 1922–1972

157

DONALD M. REID

12 The State of the Archive: Manipulating Memory in Modern Egypt and the Writing of Egyptological Histories

174

HUSSEIN OMAR

13 Histories of Egyptology in Egypt: Some Thoughts MARWA ELSHAKRY

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PART IV Representing Knowledge 14 Thomas “Mummy” Pettigrew and the Study of Egypt in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

201

GABRIEL MOSHENSKA

15 Repeating Death: The High Priest Character in Mummy Horror Films

215

JASMINE DAY

16 What’s in a Face? Mummy Portrait Panels and Identity in Museum Display

227

DEBBIE CHALLIS

17 Legacies of Engagement: The Multiple Manifestations of Ancient Egypt in Public Discourse

242

STEPHANIE MOSER

Postscript 18 The Old and New Egyptian Museums: Between Imperialists, Nationalists, and Tourists

255

MOHAMED ELSHAHED

Contributors Index

271 275

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Figures

3.1 3.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 7.1 7.2 8.1 10.1 10.2 11.1

11.2

11.3

Adolf Erman Alan Gardiner Frédéric Cailliaud, drawn by André Dutertre A composite image of Cailliaud’s pl. 45a, along with earlier incarnations Cailliaud’s plate 66, depicting a scene of foreign tribute within the tomb of Rekhmire Photograph of the portion of wall within the tomb of Rekhmire depicted in Cailliaud’s plate 66 Battiscombe George Gunn Aleister Crowley, posing with a facsimile of the “Stela of Revealing” Margaret Alice Murray University of Pennsylvania Museum excavations at the Palace of Merenptah, 1915 University of Pennsylvania Museum camp at Memphis, 1915 Top and Center: UK and Egyptian Stamps for the fiftieth anniversary of the Tutankhamun discovery. Below: Tutankhamun on £LE1 banknote of National Bank of Egypt, first issued 1930 Seasonal Rhythms of Archaeology and Tourism in Egypt: keyword listings for Tutankhamen (and variant spellings) in The Times by month. Business and advertising listings and racehorse named Tutankhamen excluded Remembering and Forgetting Tutankhamun: keyword listings for Tutankhamen (and variant spellings) in The Times by month. Business and advertising listings excluded

35 36 82 91 92 93 97 98 114 142 150

158

160

166

x

Figures

14.1 Thomas Pettigrew pictured leaning against an Egyptian sarcophagus 16.1 “Diogenes the Flute Player,” as featured in Amelia Edwards’s (1891) Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers

203 231

Acknowledgments

Particular thanks are due to Stephen Quirke of University College London (UCL), Ayman El-Desouky of SOAS, University of London, and Chris Naunton of the Egypt Exploration Society, who co-organized the conference that this volume is partially based on. Financial and other support for the conference came from the Heritage Studies Research Group at the UCL Institute of Archaeology (for which thanks to Tim Schadla-Hall), the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies at SOAS, the Egypt Exploration Society, and their various administrative staffs. Thanks also to Ian Carroll for his patience as we took over the Leventis Gallery and to Gabriel Moshenska for helping to set everything up at extremely short notice. Further thanks go to all the speakers and attendees over the course of the event. This volume would not have seen the light of day without the support of Laura Stearns, Stacy Noto, and Lauren Verity at Routledge; thanks to them all, and particular thanks to Lauren Verity for putting up with seemingly constant e-mails about copyright in the final stages of putting the manuscript together. Thanks also to the anonymous peer reviewers of the initial proposal (for help with which thanks also to Ayman El-Desouky and Eleanor Robson). Meanwhile, many thanks to Marwa Elshakry for stepping in at the last minute—and at what seemed like the worst possible time—to write her chapter, and thanks to Jim Secord both for reading the introduction and for making a comment that made me see this project in a different light. Thanks to Ruchama Johnston-Bloom, too, for putting up with it all (and also for finding time to read the introduction and proposal); now this book is done, I hope never again to use the 18:45 from Cambridge to King’s Cross as an office. Additional thanks go to various individuals and organizations for copyright permissions: Andrew Bednarski for figure 6.4; the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford, for material quoted in chapter 3, and for permission to reproduce figure 3.2; W. Benson Harer, Jr., for permission to reproduce figures 6.1–6.3; the University of Liverpool’s Special Collections and Archives for material quoted in chapter 2; the Manchester Museum for material quoted in chapter 8; the Ordo Templi Orientis for material quoted in chapter 7; Oxford University Archives for material quoted in chapter 2;

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Acknowledgments

the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Archives for material quoted in chapter 10, and also for permission to reproduce figures 10.1 and 10.2 (which are Penn Museum images #33944 and #36670, respectively); the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL, for permission to reproduce figure 8.1; the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, for material quoted in chapter 7; UCL Special Collections for material quoted in chapter 8; the UK National Archives for material cited in chapter 11; Wellcome Images for permission to reproduce figure 14.1; Gustavo Camps for photos of figures 6.2 and 6.3; Scott Noegel for photo 11.1.

A Note on Transliteration

Transliteration of Arabic is notoriously inconsistent. Additionally, Egyptological work often seems to have developed an entirely different set of transliteration standards for personal and place names. This volume generally uses the system of transliteration set forward by the International Journal of Middle East Studies. However, where certain spellings connected to the Egyptological world have become standard (particularly those related to the names of archaeological sites or scholars), this volume uses them in order to retain consistency. Any mistakes are, of course, the editor’s own.

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Introduction Thinking about Histories of Egyptology William Carruthers

This book is the start of a conversation. It brings together a disparate group of people who, while working alone, have also begun to ask questions that are of relevance to each other. These people research the history of Egyptology: the disciplined study of ancient Egypt. Yet, this “field” of historical research does not currently coalesce around shared aims or methods, and it is uncertain whether the people working within it would perceive the need for this amalgamation to occur. This volume, then, is an attempt to address this issue. It attempts to ask what a dialogue about the history of Egyptology that is informed by and crosses a variety of disciplinary perspectives can achieve and also attempts to work out how that dialogue might take place. What, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, constitutes the history (or histories) of Egyptology? What does this history consist of, and what (or who) should it be for? How can Interdisciplinary Measures suggest the direction the writing of that history (or those histories) might take? These questions are not easy to answer, and this introduction only scratches the surface. But the productive dialogue this volume calls for is possible. The chapters it contains, alongside some commissioned pieces, represent revised versions of papers given at a conference held in London during June 2010. Disciplinary Measures? Histories of Egyptology in MultiDisciplinary Context achieved what its title suggested. A collaboration between the University College London (UCL) Institute of Archaeology, the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies at SOAS, University of London, and the Egypt Exploration Society, the conference comprised three days of panel discussions and paper presentations. The conference asked participants for diverse disciplinary perspectives on what the history of Egyptology might be. The event also brought those participants into conversation with one another, moving beyond their isolated research to produce a sustained dialogue of which this volume is one manifestation. The strength of these essays therefore lies in the diverse expertise and opinion from which they have been able to draw. Contributors to this book are not only practicing Egyptologists. Archaeologists are also present, yet these archaeologists have interests that stretch beyond excavation and into the realms of representation and memory. At somewhat more of a remove,

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anthropological expertise is involved, too. Meanwhile, historians are also represented: of culture, of art, of science, and of Egypt and the Middle East. Museum professionals also find a place. While, then, the contributors to this volume all have an interest in the topic at hand, they also all bring different perspectives to it, further informed by the particularity of their own training and career trajectories. No one opinion is the same in this volume, and this variety lies at the heart of what this book attempts to do: create a truly interdisciplinary discussion about what the history of Egyptology is (or histories of Egyptology are) and also create a similar discussion about what studying the history of the discipline is for. Thus, on one level, this book is an experiment in how such a discussion might operate and be presented. How might a publication be edited together whose contributors could, due to their varied biographies and official disciplinary affiliations, be considered to be engaged in incommensurable work? How might an interdisciplinary publication be constituted? These questions are of vital importance in an era when the positives of interdisciplinarity are constantly noted yet rarely critically thought through (cf. Shapin and Schaffer 2011, xliv–xlv). This book provides one answer, and its format is outlined further below. Yet, it is not the answer (if there even is one), nor would it expect to be. The chapters within it could (or should?) have been placed together in various other combinations, and they can be read in other orders to the one in which they are presented here. The chapters might be read separately or together, and the meaning made of them is contingent on the reader, among various other factors. The chapters in Interdisciplinary Measures are not the authoritative take on the history of Egyptology, but they should provoke thought and therefore provide a useful example of why crossing disciplinary boundaries to discuss such a history can be useful. This introduction suggests why this discussion is necessary, and also what forms it might take. CLAIMING EGYPTOLOGY? It is not obvious how a history of Egyptology should be constituted. Disciplinary histories have long been written (see, e.g., Dawson 1934; Wilson 1964; Wortham 1971, among other examples). But particularly in recent years, publications discussing the history of Egyptology (broadly construed) have been appearing thick and fast, mirroring a wider and also growing interest in the history of connected fields. For example, scholars have increasingly attended to archaeology and Orientalist research as noteworthy historical phenomena (for which see, e.g., Díaz-Andreu 2007; Marchand 2009; Murray and Evans 2008). In the case of the history of Egyptology, as in these other areas, this attention has led to the development of a bewildering variety of approaches to the topic, with authors writing texts from any number of perspectives and their work encompassing the gamut from the

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celebratory to the critical. The history of Egyptology, if such a history actually exists, is written at cross-purposes: everyone writing about it seems to think they know what it is, despite not reaching any sort of consensus. As, though, the history of such disciplines is becoming of increasing interest, so it is becoming increasingly essential to work out how to write about them. What, then, do current differences in approach signify, and do these differences create intractable problems for future research? Some would say that they do. Discussing the wider growth of the history of archaeology as a field of enquiry since the year 2000, Marc-Antoine Kaeser (2009, 1) has noted that “divergence [in aim] . . . has made it quite difficult for historians of archaeology to cooperate on a common ground.” What, then, are histories of archaeology—or, in the case of this volume, Egyptology—for? This question is pressing given the wide variety of approaches to historical writing taken within these areas. How do these approaches constitute the field they write about, and are the ways in which they constitute it compatible? If not, why not? A survey of recent publications can help to answer these questions as well as illustrate that Egyptological histories suffer issues not so far removed from histories of archaeology, making the discussion of solutions to these problems doubly useful. Since the year 2000, a growing amount of historical work has been published that is written by scholars who would define themselves either as practicing Egyptologists or as doing work that is connected to or complements the discipline. By and large, this work expresses a desire to improve Egyptological research and remove it from unnecessary biases through a process of historical reflection (cf. Bednarski this volume for examples). This work is similar, then, to recent work in the history of prehistory, which often (Kaeser 2009, 1) presents a critical take on past research and aims at delivering improved research in the future, free from previous constraints and imperfections. In this work, a binary therefore appears to hold strong between an internal disciplinary world and an external world of other goings on (cf. Colla 2007). This binary is manifest in a recent issue of the Journal of Egyptian History, which collects together various papers dealing with “ideology and its implications for our . . . understanding of ancient Egypt, of Egyptology as a discipline, and of the past as a whole” (Meltzer 2012, 1). These papers include a lengthy piece by Thomas Schneider (2012) on the relationship between German Egyptologists and the Nazi regime. Schneider’s paper is based on a letter written after World War II by the German Egyptologist Georg Steindorff to a colleague in the United States, which contained a list of those of his colleagues who had supported National Socialism and those who had not. Schneider details the biographies of these individuals with a view to understanding the relationship between their scholarly work and the wider political discourse that had been operative in Germany. What emerges from this discussion, however, is a recounting of the evidence for and against the links between two stable worlds: in this particular

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example, those worlds are one of German Egyptology (and of Egyptology more widely) and another of National Socialism. In this frame, the implication— whether purposeful or not—is that Egyptology is at heart a “pure” discipline, an ordered and stable set of practices that objectively inquire into and constitute what is understood of ancient Egypt. Furthermore, it is implied that these practices can, after appropriate historical reflection, be separated from pernicious political “ideology.” In this way, influences inappropriate to the conduct of scholarly inquiry can be placed outside the Egyptological sphere and the discipline progress to better, implicitly more correct, work. In this sense, then, constituting disciplinary history is akin to a practice of purification: a means of claiming future Egyptological work as authoritative by suggesting that it can be removed from negative influences and instead take on an ideal form. Other types of Egyptological history are similar, albeit written from a different perspective. Biographical studies have often tended to suggest that an ideal Egyptological discipline can exist: it just has to follow the style of work promoted by whichever Egyptologist the biography is about. This sort of perspective is also not dissimilar from wider reflections on the history of archaeology. For example, the editors of a recent book on the history of archaeological work in the Ottoman Empire were forced to note that, even within their own volume, “a celebratory focus on the individual archaeologist is still alive and well” (Bahrani et al. 2011, 28). Within the history of Egyptology, this sort of celebration can verge on the extreme. In this context, the autobiography of the British Egyptologist I. E. S. Edwards (2000) is an (obvious) case in point. Much of the volume rests on Edwards’s account of the British Museum’s exhibition of artifacts from the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1972 (cf. Reid this volume). Edwards, needless to say, is very keen to emphasize the primacy of his own role and disciplinary experience in organizing the event. He suggests, then, that his personal qualities hold the key to the correct way of doing Egyptological work. Yet, while Edwards’s account perhaps represents an (almost inevitable) zenith of self-interest, it is not isolated in its overall purpose of using the biographical genre to suggest that Egyptological rectitude exists. For example, Jill Kamil’s (2007) biography of the Egyptian Egyptologist Labib Habachi is one example of this phenomenon. On one level, the volume provides a useful (indeed, the only) account of Egyptian practitioners of the discipline in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet, the work also rests, in the main, on an attempt to resuscitate Habachi’s Egyptological career from the apparent animosity directed toward it by certain of his colleagues. The volume also shares other similarities to Edwards’s account of his life. For one, there is (some, but) little reflection on how and why Egyptology is constituted: the discipline is naturalized as an adjunct to the main biographical thrust of the narrative at hand. Egyptology becomes, then, a pure but vague ideal, occasionally sullied by being undertaken by the wrong type of personality; in this case, the sort of person who would have made life difficult for

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someone like Habachi. On a much wider level, Who Was Who in Egyptology, now in its fourth edition (Bierbrier 2012), does similar work. Again, on one level, the volume is useful: it not only provides potted accounts of the lives, but it also provides detailed sets of references to the publications of many people involved with the discipline that are otherwise unavailable. But the volume’s encyclopedic thrust also establishes a heroic disciplinary genealogy by mobilizing figures from many other worlds into a story of “Egyptological” achievement. If conducted by the right sort of individual, then, the volume implies that the discipline’s work (whatever that work is) will usefully and unproblematically proceed, even if the individual involved does not identify themselves as an Egyptologist. The publication co-opts various individuals for the discipline’s purposes, and in the process, it makes the discipline more real as a unified entity. Other publications, though, constitute the history of Egyptology differently and therefore question the sort of accounts discussed above. These publications, like further work on the history of prehistory discussed by Kaeser (2009, 1), aim at delivering “an epistemological understanding of the development of the discipline.” For example, Stephanie Moser’s (2006) volume on the display and representation of ancient Egypt at the British Museum is relevant in this context. Moser aligns the changing display of ancient Egyptian objects within the Museum with the wider history of the changing institution and the construction of the discipline of Egyptology itself. Her volume therefore demonstrates how these displays helped to promote certain approaches to the Egyptian past at the same time as various practitioners increasingly organized work relating to that past along disciplinary lines. Moser demonstrates how unstable representations of ancient Egypt became what appeared (and often still appear to be) stable, disciplined facts, questioning the fixed representations of Egyptological practice discussed above. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Abt’s (2011) biography of the Egyptologist James Henry Breasted does similar work. Abt ties Breasted to the development of an Egyptological discipline during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whether in terms of that discipline’s practices or in terms of how the discipline was related to other contemporary modes of inquiry. Abt also places this history in the context of American institutional and intellectual life: Rockefeller philanthropy plays a key role in the Breasted story, for instance. Such work, then, demonstrates that to discuss the history of Egyptology is to discuss the history of a discipline that is neither pure nor stable, but one whose practices and existence are historically and spatially contingent. Both Abt and Moser therefore demonstrate that to discuss the history of Egyptology is to discuss something far more complex than what sort of work Egyptology should be or who conducted that work the “best” way. Yet, such inquiries are few and far between. Turning to archival work, it, too, is often used to suggest that the history of Egyptology is about promoting pure (if vaguely defined) disciplinary practice. In recent years, the

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Egyptological archive has gained in prominence as part of the wider move to understand the history of the discipline. Again, this situation is not dissimilar to the wider history of archaeology, in relation to which scholars have discerned the huge potential of archival work: Schlanger and Nordbladh (2008, 3) are correct when they write that “archival materials can help us reach further into . . . those operational and practical aspects [of archaeology] normally taken for granted and left unsaid.” In contrast to accounts of intellectual development, such as Trigger’s (2006) A History of Archaeological Thought, archival materials offer one way to understand how archaeology and its connected disciplines have constituted both themselves and their objects of study in a more practical way. For example, Nadia Abu elHaj’s (2001) Facts on the Ground demonstrates the power of understanding archaeological routine conducted through a historically grounded ethnography of the discipline’s work in Israel/Palestine. Detailed archival work, though, offers a way to deepen and widen this sort of research: it is in the mundane and quotidian field practices recorded in archives that archaeology’s meanings are made (cf. Hodder 1999 on this process). Yet, current archival projects directed toward the history of Egyptology are not all attached to this sort of inquiry. Stephen Quirke’s recent (2010) Hidden Hands offers an example that is attached: tapping into a discourse (most notable in Reid 2002 and Colla 2007) that provincializes the dominance of historical accounts written about Egyptology’s European center, the volume uses the archives of the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie to produce a detailed account of just how reliant Petrie’s excavations in Egypt were on Egyptian labor, alongside detailing the sort of disciplinary and political practices that this reliance constituted. Yet, other archival work attaches itself to the celebratory focus: the very act of using archival material in repositories that have historically been organized by disciplinary practitioners runs the risk of naturalizing the heroic Egyptological genealogies that these practitioners have themselves often promoted. For example, the University of Oxford’s Griffith Institute has been placing specific pieces of archival material online on the birthdays of individuals it defines as prominent in past Egyptological work. Howard Carter, principle excavator of the tomb of Tutankhamun, is among them (Griffith Institute n.d.). Much of this material is of historical interest, and the Griffith Institute deserves positive comment for making it available. But such practices might also appear problematic when viewed from a certain critical perspective. For example, one among many other commentators, Dirks (2002, 48) has noted that “the archive is simultaneously the outcome of historical process and the very condition for the production of historical knowledge.” In this context, questions must therefore be asked about what historical process these Egyptological archival acts are the outcome of and what historical knowledge these acts produce (cf. Omar this volume). How do the organizational schemes of such archives, in addition to their regular focus on the role of the heroic individual, constitute the history of Egyptology, and

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why? Is the construction of a heroic Egyptological genealogy (or its practices) in archival form different to the construction of that genealogy in a publication? Addressing such questions and reflecting on the wider historiographical situation therefore demonstrates that writing the history of Egyptology is a (surprisingly) contentious task. What role, then, do discussions of such a topic play for the people involved in them? As this chapter has hinted, one way of thinking about these discussions is as a number of more or less powerful claims to authority. Here, Gieryn’s conception of boundary work is useful. Through this process (for which see Gieryn 1983), a set of knowledge practices is defined that constitute the proper object of a field of inquiry, practices that contain the source of that field’s continued reproduction and relevance while also setting the rules of who can and cannot partake in it and defining the worlds in which the field can be said to be connected. Histories of Egyptology have been a useful way of setting such boundaries. For example, studies that attempt to derail earlier biases or provide heroic biographical narratives carry out this sort of work. By defining what is right and what is wrong, what counts as the history of Egyptology and what does not (and particularly by suggesting how that history might be purged of unsavory influence), these studies represent the imposition of a certain type of disciplinary order. The act of constructing a pure discipline, no matter how unintentionally, allows practitioners attached to that discipline to assert their place within the world: by purging order, order is also produced. This thought is not new (see, e.g., Shapin and Schaffer 2011). But it does bring questions about what writing the history of Egyptology (or archaeology) is for into firmer focus: practitioners who consider themselves attached to these disciplines often see themselves as trying to improve them by considering disciplinary history, yet what work does constituting a purified disciplinary history do? By suggesting that a discipline already exists that would be wonderful (if only it was cleared of its imperfections, and particularly its imperfect practitioners), what forms of order are promoted? Perhaps the most interesting recent literature on the history of Egyptology recognizes the importance of this question. For example, Elliott Colla’s (2007) Conflicted Antiquities is a tour de force in this respect. To some extent building on Donald Reid’s (2002) account in Whose Pharaohs? (although with a substantially different methodological focus), Colla demonstrates how Egyptological histories are embedded within a network of interests that relate, at their broadest, to the governance of Egypt. He (2007, 62) discusses how multiple disciplinary histories have related Egyptology’s birth as the moment when antiquarian work related to ancient Egypt was superseded by practices based around the ordered scientific investigation of artifacts, an object category that also gained tangible existence and meaning in the world through the making of such claims. Such histories have therefore been exclusionary: they have enforced the idea that it is necessary

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to have a certain sort of training (from a certain sort of European institution centered on artifact discourse) before it is possible to work within the Egyptological field. This realization is not so far from the sort of work done by Moser and Abt discussed above, nor from that carried out by Quirke. Yet, Colla’s volume also perhaps goes further by discussing how such institutionalization produced order on a much wider scale, too. For example, Colla argues that asserting disciplined, scientific control of Egyptian artifacts helped to bolster colonial control of Egypt: linked as colonialism was to European discourses of progress and civilizational superiority, so asserting scientific superiority in the investigation of the material remains of ancient Egypt helped make European claims to control of Egypt material. As the rise of scientific artifact discourse meant that ancient Egyptian remains became perceived as subject to unscientific treatment by local Egyptian populations, so it became morally necessary for Europeans to intervene and restore order (see, e.g., Colla 2007, 76). Colla’s work, then, is about “the broad array of discourses and institutions made possible” by the invention of the category of the scientific artifact, which “brought into being a new relation to the material world of modern Egypt and its inhabitants” (Colla 2007, 8–9). Colla also discusses the extent to which this new relationship was indexical to processes of cultural contestation through its constitution in the discourses of interwar Egyptian nationalism. Here, then, is work that makes the material turn to reveal how and why boundaries—disciplinary and political, among others—are constituted and also grounds this turn in history in order to suggest how and why this constitution might change over time. Instead of an Egyptological discipline whose constitution is vaguely defined (but still oddly fixed), the picture becomes one of a discipline whose history is dynamic, whose constitution not only alters through time but which has also been (materially) grounded in various overlapping discourses, practices, and interests. What possibilities does this sort of work offer in a contemporary context where published Egyptological histories consistently talk across one another? HISTORICAL TRADING ZONES Such work opens up the history of Egyptology (and archaeology) to a substantial number of new questions and purposes. Not only does this approach suggest, alongside the work of Abt and Moser, that it is possible to write a history of disciplinary inquiry into ancient Egypt that takes into account that discipline’s inherent instability. It also suggests—alongside, say, the work of Quirke and Reid—that it is possible to place that inquiry within the context of the development of wider social, political, and material worlds and their own contingent instabilities. Most importantly, Colla’s example suggests that it is possible to produce works that do both at the same time.

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By attending to the manner in which disciplined knowledge of ancient Egypt has been made, represented, contested, and circulated (by making use, in other words, of much recent literature in the history and sociology of science, or in cultural history), it is possible to relate the history of that knowledge far beyond questions of who did what, when, and where, or what political orientation they had when they did it. Rather, it is possible to suggest that the coming about of Egyptological inquiry and the sort of knowledge (narratives of ancient Egypt) that that inquiry produced can tell us something both about what it means to make such knowledge and also the wider world of which that knowledge has been (and still is) a part. This act, therefore, also allows the study of this history to play a much wider and much more useful role than it already has. Bruno Latour once (1993) wrote that We Have Never Been Modern, rejecting the idea of such a term as a social construction. By much the same logic, neither have Egyptologists nor ancient Egypt existed: they, too, are socially ordered (but also deeply contested) categories. Yet, as Latour’s call to reject categories of sociological analysis like the modern, the social, or the intellectual can be rejected on the grounds that they “were, and continue to be, among the resources people used (and use) to make sense of their world and to identify proper and improper conduct” (Shapin and Schaffer 2011, xlix), neither is it worth rejecting Egyptology or ancient Egypt as categories of discussion, either. The resourceful use of these terms across time and space can tell us far too much about the world of which they have been a part. This perspective is beginning to be adopted. In particular, David Gange (2013; cf. his chapter in this volume) has demonstrated the potential of setting discussions about ancient Egypt in the context of much wider debates, particularly ones relating to religion, science, and the origin of civilization that took place in Victorian Britain. In his chapter in this volume, Gange also notes the potential for those who currently identify as Egyptologists to contribute to the interdisciplinary debates and working groups that are becoming a part of the institutional apparatus of the arts, social sciences, and humanities as these disciplines seek a continued role in the ever-changing academy; practitioners from other disciplines are interested in what Egyptologists might have to say. This suggestion is not surprising coming from a historian who has made it part of his job to illustrate how discussions about what constitutes Egyptology or ancient Egypt have always been part and parcel of much wider debates. Yet, the point also resonates well with the message of this book. Rather than Egyptological practitioners using history to go to ground arguing what their work should or should not constitute, it would be more productive to engage with the historical—and continuing—instability and heterogeneity of this constitution. In this way, attachment to a discipline (Egyptology) that often seems to be an isolated and somewhat anachronistic oddity (see Moreno García and Gange this volume) can become a positive. Knowledge of past (and current) disciplinary practices is vital if much wider

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questions relating to the making of specialist knowledge within society are to be answered. Moreover, perhaps these answers might allow such specialist knowledge to find a useful place. This aim can be achieved. As this book demonstrates, for instance, it can be productive to place histories of Egyptology as they currently stand within the sort of “trading zone” defined by Peter Galison in his discussion of the history of microphysics. For Galison (and in relation to physics in particular), a trading zone is the “social, material, and intellectual mortar binding together the disunified traditions of experimenting, theorizing, and instrument building” (1997, 803). The trading zone allows the people involved with these traditions to “coordinate their [discrete] approaches around specific practices” (1997, 806). This volume suggests that, just as the discrete communities of physicists discussed by Galison overcame their differences to work toward specific practices, so (given the appropriate configuration) scholars who write about the history of Egyptology can also come together around a specific aim: such as answering the questions about that history set forward in this introduction. By doing so, these scholars can develop work about the making of ordered knowledge of ancient Egypt and also develop work about the place of that knowledge-making activity in society. As Galison (1997, 803) himself has noted, trading zones are visible in locations other than the twentiethcentury laboratories that he discusses. This book is one of those locations. What follows, then, is a volume structured around the various approaches to the history of Egyptology discussed above. Some chapters within the volume deal with biography (some perhaps heroically, some perhaps less so), and there are certainly also contributions that assert that what has been a fairly stable Egyptological discipline needs to improve to retain that stability, or that an Egyptological discipline has existed and been open to impure influences that now no longer trouble it. Others, meanwhile, take a more critical stance. As this introduction has suggested, though, all ways of writing Egyptological history need to be taken seriously as generators of meaning in the world: what does it mean to make different historical claims, and why? In a trading zone, it is easier to answer these questions. This book is therefore organized around four thematically grouped sections. The contents of these sections are discussed throughout the volume. For now, though, it is important to note that each section ends in a discussion piece that reflects on how its constituent chapters relate to wider discussions and questions. This format is at the center of how this volume’s trading zone works: by binding together methodologically discrete chapters through concentrated discussion, this book hopes to find a way forward for future research. What will future histories of Egyptology look like? Discussions written by individuals from worlds beyond (although sometimes connected to) the Egyptological provide the space in which these questions can be asked, and all four of the discussion chapters published here are therefore written by authors who possess the wide-ranging expertise that is required.

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It is to be hoped that the discussion these chapters provide provokes significant thought as Egyptological histories continue to appear in unprecedented number. HISTORIES OF EGYPTOLOGY AND RECENT POLITICAL CHANGE IN EGYPT This discussion is particularly essential now. Since the events of January 2011, Egypt has undergone—and is still undergoing—a series of major political changes; practices related to the constitution of an ancient Egyptian past have been part of this process. As events have altered the parameters of political debate, so too have they transformed discussions about Egypt’s past. State discourses, legal instruments, and the Egyptological discipline itself, all of which have attempted to frame discussions about what constitutes the Egyptian past for many years, are now also under increased— although not necessarily successful—scrutiny. This process, like Egypt’s current political changes, has historical roots. Before 2011, various actors had increasingly managed to discredit recurrent claims that Egyptians lacked an interest in the country’s past. Instead, these claims became recognized as historical strategies used to assert the right to control of the country, whether by colonial administrators or local elites— and most recently, as the chapters by Omar and Elshahed in this volume demonstrate, as part of moves toward restructuring the Egyptian economy on a broadly neoliberal basis. Over the last two hundred years, constructing an Egyptian nation-state has often meant constructing an Egyptian past from which various actors have found it possible to claim the majority of its nascent citizenry are at best disinvested. At worst, it has meant constructing a past in regard to which that citizenry are seen as constituting an active threat (Colla 2007; Godlewska 1995; Van der Spek 2011). As scholars and others have increasingly recognized the existence of these powerful (literary and material) discourses, however, so these discourses have become questioned, particularly outside of the organs of the Egyptian state and of the Egyptological world (whose practitioners have often necessarily connected their work to that state). To take one example, private publishing initiatives discussing the Egyptian past in relation to these issues have grown in visibility in Egypt, whether in print or online (see, e.g., Rawi Magazine). Indeed, before 2011, these responses to the management and disciplined knowledge of the Egyptian past represented one aspect of much wider contention aimed at state institutions and structures of governance. But since 2011, the scale of this grassroots activity has grown larger. Simply searching the internet, it is not difficult to find a proliferation of Egypt-based discussion relating to the Egyptian past, whether in English or in Arabic: this discussion has grown at the same time as discussion of Egyptian politics has grown too (see, e.g., Cairobserver; Egypt’s Heritage

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Task Force; The Walls of Alexandria). Over the last few years, this discussion—and the accompanying disquiet relating to how Egypt’s past is dealt with—also seems to have had some effect. Strikes within and demonstrations outside the country’s Ministry of State for Antiquities have led to several changes in the hierarchy and leadership of the organization, questioning the role of the state in the management of Egypt’s past (see, e.g., Yasin 2013 for a recent example). At the time of writing (early 2014), it is uncertain exactly what effect such disquiet might now have and whether such changes will last. But grassroots activism based around the protection of Egyptian heritage (ancient or otherwise) has taken on a new urgency and visibility. Even in the often myopic international media, much (although not all) information about what has happened to this heritage since 2011 has come from young Egyptian activists who are increasingly challenging the authority of the Egyptian state representatives and other international “experts” who previously provided go-to opinions for the press (see, e.g., Hiel 2013). The frame within which Egypt’s past is discussed has therefore changed and is also still changing. Furthermore, it remains to be seen how the (predominantly European and American) institutions that have dominated archaeological fieldwork in Egypt will adapt to dealing with new groups of claimants to that past. Previously, cooperation with the Egyptian state (and, in particular, various previous incarnations of the Ministry of State for Antiquities) has been a way of securing the possibility of further excavation and survey work in the country. Training programs for state employees run by these institutions, for example, have been popular in recent years (see, e.g., AERA n.d.). Yet, with activism against that state still persisting even as its institutions appear to be clamping down on dissent (and Egyptians increasingly call for “security” after several years of political turmoil and economic instability), what happens next? This question goes further than asking how events on the ground will now pan out. History is vital here, too, because it can suggest the extent of the practices that have been in place to silence (non-state, or non-Egyptological) claimants to the Egyptian past. Therefore, an awareness of this history can be used (as Elshahed this volume suggests) to shape responses to the current management of the Egyptian past: how might awareness of this troubled history be used to help work out not only who should have access to that past, but also how might such awareness be used to suggest what narratives about it they might now construct? For instance, publications related to the disinvestment of the Egyptian population from constructions of a national past hint at the depth of this (barely tapped) issue. Elliott Colla’s (2007) work hints at just how ingrained such processes of alienation were from the very beginning of Egyptian state antiquities legislation in the nineteenth century, while Kees van der Spek (2011) discusses one (long-lasting) example of these processes on the West Bank at Luxor. With processes this deep, though, what other examples of such colonial and state violence might there be? Is it possible (as Omar this volume discusses) to understand them?

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Furthermore, what correctives to these processes might be put into place, and will—or should—Egyptologists have anything to do with this work? This volume puts these questions on the table. It does not pretend to have all the answers, but it goes some way toward illustrating how reframing discussion about not just the history but also the histories of Egyptology in terms of their implication within wider forms of order might help begin to understand what answers exist. In the past, writing the history of Egyptology (mostly) seems to have been an exercise in disciplinary purification: an attempt to remove the problem of wider forms of order from appearing connected to Egyptological work; from the perspective of the current discussion, particularly that order relating to the politics of Egypt. Unsurprisingly, the discipline now finds itself questioned as part of this political order. This volume therefore suggests that reframing Egyptology as an impure entity with multiple different and overlapping histories can help to clarify the discipline’s future purpose: with these different histories acknowledged, the space potentially exists for such difference to be acknowledged again and for a new sort of Egyptological work (if still required) to take place. There is little point in attempting to impose any sort of future role for the discipline, particularly within Egypt. An awareness of different histories, though, might yet offer Egyptology and its practitioners some sort of way ahead. BIBLIOGRAPHY Abt, J. 2011. American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Abu el-Haj, N. 2001. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. AERA. n.d. “Field School.” Accessed 21 January 2014. www.aeraweb.org/fieldschool-program/ Bahrani, Z., Z. Çelik, and E. Eldem. 2011. “Introduction: Archaeology and Empire.” In Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914, edited by Z. Bahrani, Z. Çelik, and E. Eldem, 13–43. Istanbul: SALT. Bierbrier, M., ed. 2012. Who Was Who in Egyptology? 4th ed. London: Egypt Exploration Society. Cairobserver. Cairobserver. Accessed 21 January 2014. http://cairobserver.com/ Colla, E. 2007. Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dawson, W. R. 1934. Charles Wycliffe Goodwin, 1817–1878: A Pioneer in Egyptology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Díaz-Andreu, M. 2007. A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dirks, N. B. 2002. “Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History.” In From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, edited by B. K. Axel, 47–65. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Edwards, I. E. S. 2000. From the Pyramids to Tutankhamun: Memoirs of an Egyptologist. Oxford: Oxbow. Egypt’s Heritage Task Force. Egypt’s Heritage Task Force: al-Hamla al-Mujtamʿiyya li-l-Riqaba ʿala al-Turath wa-l-Athar. Accessed 21 January 2014. www.facebook. com/EgyptsHeritageTaskForce

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Galison, P. 1997. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gange, D. 2013. Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gieryn, T. F. 1983. “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from NonScience: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists.” American Sociological Review 48 (6): 781–95. Godlewska, A. 1995. “Map, Text and Image: The Mentality of Enlightened Conquerors; A New Look at the Description de l’Egypte.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s., 20 (1): 5–28. Griffith Institute. n.d. “Howard Carter’s Drawing of the Festival Procession of Opet.” Accessed 21 January 2014. www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/carter-special.html Hiel, B. 2013. “Egyptologist Risks Life, Career to Expose Looting.” TribLIVE. Accessed 21 January 2014. http://triblive.com/usworld/world/4198483-74/hannaheritage-archaeological#axzz32BBvPDA7 Hodder, I. 1999. The Archaeological Process: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Kaeser, M.-A. 2009. “Establishing Prehistory: The Foundation of the International Congress.” In Archaeologists without Boundaries: Towards a History of International Archaeological Congresses (1866–2006); Archéologues sans frontières: pour une histoire des Congrès archéologiques internationaux (1866–2006), edited by M. Babes and M.-A. Kaeser, 1–3. Oxford: Archaeopress. Kamil, J. 2007. Labib Habachi: The Life and Legacy of an Egyptologist. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated from the French by C. Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marchand, S. L. 2009. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship. Cambridge and Washington, D.C.: Cambridge University Press and the German Historical Institute. Meltzer, E. S. 2012. “Egyptologists, Nazism and Racial “Science”.” Journal of Egyptian History 5: 1–11. Moser, S. 2006. Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Murray, T., and C. Evans, eds. 2008. Histories of Archaeology: A Reader in the History of Archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quirke, S. 2010. Hidden Hands: Egyptian Workforces in Petrie Excavation Archives, 1880–1924. London: Duckworth. Rawi Magazine. Al Rawi: Egypt’s Heritage Review. Accessed 21 January 2014. www.rawi-magazine.com/ Reid, D. M. 2002. Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schlanger, N., and J. Nordbladh. 2008. “General Introduction: Archaeology in the Light of Its Histories.” In Archives, Ancestors, Practices: Archaeology in the Light of Its History, edited by N. Schlanger and J. Nordbladh, 1–5. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Schneider, T. 2012. “Ägyptologen im Dritten Reich: Biographische Notizen anhand der sogenannten ‘Steindorff-Liste’ ” Journal of Egyptian History 5: 120–247. Shapin, S., and S. Schaffer. 2011. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. 2nd ed. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Spek, K. van der. 2011. The Modern Neighbors of Tutankhamun: History, Life, and Work in the Villages of the Theban West Bank. New York: Oxford University Press. The Walls of Alexandria. Jadran Madina Mutʿaba. Accessed 21 January 2014. http:// thewallsofalex.blogspot.co.uk/

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Trigger, B. G. 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, J. A. 1964. Signs and Wonders upon Pharaoh: A History of American Egyptology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wortham, J. D. 1971. British Egyptology, 1549–1906. Newton Abbot, UK: David and Charles. Yasin, M. 2013. “Muzahira li-l-Athariyyin Amam Majlis al-Wuzara? li-l-Mutaliba bi-Iqalat Wazir al-Athar.” Al-Masri al-Youm (online). Accessed 21 January 2014. www.almasryalyoum.com/News/details/237410

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Part I

The Creation and Isolation of an Academic Discipline The chapters in this first section, “The Creation and Isolation of an Academic Discipline,” discuss how the practice of defining Egyptology has overlapped with or distanced itself from other disciplinary worlds, demonstrating the complexity of the discipline’s history. Adding to this complex picture, these chapters also demonstrate how this practice has often been linked to the different national contexts within which it has taken place. As Shapin (2010) has applied the epithet Never Pure to the work of science in general, so Egyptology also therefore deserves this description: the discipline’s work (often itself labeled as science) is also Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority. The chapters in the first part of this book demonstrate how this description held even as a more general (if ill-defined) Egyptological identity took shape. Alice Stevenson’s chapter demonstrates how Egyptology at the University of Oxford (and also in Britain) came to be defined as a distinctive discipline even as its practitioners’ work possessed meaningful links with other disciplinary worlds—that of anthropology in particular. Stevenson demonstrates that Egyptological work has never had as singular a definition as many of its practitioners seem to have suggested. Meanwhile, Thomas Gertzen demonstrates how professional Egyptological interests often found themselves refracted along national lines even as individual practitioners managed to cross them: in this case, the British Egyptologist Alan Gardiner and the German Egyptologist Adolf Erman found their work—and the Egyptological interests of their respective countries more generally—following this pattern after World War I, even as they themselves put aside national differences and worked toward personal and professional rapprochement. These two chapters demonstrate the historical complexity of what it has meant to be an Egyptologist, in addition to the folly of any disciplinary history that attempts to suggest a simpler picture. Juan Carlos Moreno García’s chapter in this section suggests one possible result of such essentializing work: the eventual isolation of Egyptology as

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irrelevant, removed from making any sort of contribution to much wider debates. García is (perhaps justifiably) angry, his chapter a polemic. Yet, personal experience suggests that this disciplinary isolation does exist, at least among some Egyptological practitioners. Furthermore, in relation to this volume’s introduction, one might suggest how this isolation has left Egyptologists unable to comprehend their difficult and historically complex position in Egypt today: there is simply very little discussion of this history within the Egyptological world (cf. Riggs 2013). In his valuable discussion of these first three chapters, David Gange thus not only places their contents in wider historical context, he also somewhat affirms this point. Yet, in this isolated context, what price a move toward a different (inter-) disciplinary stance? BIBLIOGRAPHY Riggs, C. 2013. “Colonial Visions: Egyptian Antiquities and Contested Histories in the Cairo Museum.” Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 1: 65–84. Shapin, S. 2010. Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

2

The Object of Study Egyptology, Archaeology, and Anthropology at Oxford, 1860–1960 Alice Stevenson

Egyptology is . . . a prolific branch of the great science of anthropology, probably destined to illuminate the general history of mankind more searchingly and powerfully than the anthropology of a hundred other countries. —(Griffith 1901, 9)

In his inaugural lecture given at the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum on 8 May 1901, Francis Llewellyn Griffith (1862–1934), Reader of Egyptology, outlined his vision for the future of the discipline. It was an address that was full of optimism for the manner in which his specialist subject would contribute to the developing science of anthropology. Yet, as the twentieth century progressed, disciplinary boundaries became far less permeable, and Egyptology found itself increasingly isolated from other subjects. Accounting for such disciplinary cleavages is not simple, and Griffith’s perspective highlights only one moment in the complex and entangled relationship of Egyptology, archaeology, and anthropology. His address also highlights one very particular social and intellectual setting for the academic enactment of Egyptology: the University of Oxford. A brief case study of aspects of Egyptology at this institution within the context of British Egyptology and anthropology forms the basis for this chapter. Broader accounts of the estrangement of Egyptology from anthropology have been offered before (Adams 1997), but as Gosden (1999) has highlighted for the divisions between archaeology and anthropology, any such attempt is made problematic by different academic traditions across the world. Moreover, disciplinary histories are not simply linear narratives of intellectual advancement. Rather, they are products of specific, often fortuitous, sociopolitical circumstances and competing voices (cf. Gosden 1999, 34; Mills 2008). What follows here is only a series of snapshots taken from the perspective of a small cast of individuals, but nevertheless their role in the development of British Egyptology, anthropology, and archaeology may illuminate some wider themes in the ruptures and abrasions experienced more generally at disciplinary boundaries. My aim is to avoid an

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internalist account of the development of Egyptology as a university subject and instead to situate it within the wider intellectual culture of the time (cf. Mills 2008, 17). In particular, I wish to demonstrate that the protean nature of anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could, and did, accommodate many aspects of Egyptology (contra Champion 2003) and that those who were socialized in this environment looked beyond their specialist materials for broader, comparative frames of reference. Yet, as the topography of disciplinary discourses shifted—from their gestation within the intellectual societies of London to their institutionalization within museums and increasingly universities at the turn of the twentieth century, followed by professionalization in field practice from the 1920s onward— these subjects became increasingly inward-looking. Ideas, people, and their relationships could easily take precedence within such a narrative. There is also, however, a strong material dimension to disciplinary engagement (Colla 2007), one that I would suggest was equally significant in how these subjects would define themselves within Oxford and in Britain more widely. Before examining these developments, a note on the timeframe within which this account is set is in order. In any historical narrative, the choice of temporal departure point is in some respects arbitrary. Commencing this account around 1860 can be justified on the basis of two observations, both germane to the emergence of the disciplinary identities under scrutiny here. First, the 1860s were the decade during which, in the wake of evolutionary discourse and the (contested) establishment of the “antiquity of man,” crucial shifts in the intellectual clubs of London occurred. For example, among others, the Anthropological Society of London (later the Royal Anthropological Institute) was founded in 1863. It was also around this time that the term Egyptology (in the English language at least) was introduced (Champion 2003, 180).1 Closing this narrative around 1960 may be warranted given the greater interaction between Egyptology and the social sciences that is often considered to have been initiated by the construction of the Aswan High Dam and the subsequent UNESCO rescue operations (Baines 2011, 575; Weeks 1979). A brief word about the nature of disciplinarity may also be helpful. A useful departure point is provided by Messer-Davidow et al. (1993), who themselves borrow from Foucault’s work on disciplinary practice. They (1993, 3) contend that disciplinarity can be understood as “the means by which ensembles of diverse parts are brought into particular types of knowledge relations with each other.” This argument is informative not just for considering how specialist areas of study were articulated in relation to wider epistemologies but also for illuminating how subjects constructed themselves internally. With regard to Egyptology, for example, while the study of ancient Egyptian scripts has long occupied the mainstay of its identity, this study’s importance relative to other methods of elucidating Egypt’s past has altered considerably. This shifting emphasis of disciplinary praxis is of particular concern in this paper.

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UP THE NILE AND DOWN THE THAMES: 1860–1900 An interest in anthropology as a broad category of intellectual inquiry into humankind is evident within the University of Oxford from the 1860s onward (Rivière 2007, 2). The University did not, however, possess a niche for the specific study of Egyptology (or indeed anthropology or archaeology), as Griffith found to his dismay on arriving at Queen’s College in 1879. What he did find, however, was the support and encouragement of Queen’s Fellow Reverend Archibald Sayce (1846–1933; Gardiner 1934, 72). Sayce was primarily an Assyriologist and philologist, but by the late 1870s he was turning his attention toward Egypt and wintered there annually, often assisting Flinders Petrie in his early excavations (Smith 1933, 70). Through this channel, Griffith was provided with the opportunity to become involved in Petrie’s fieldwork, and he quickly became an accomplished archaeologist, in addition to his exceptional philological talents. Petrie and Griffith remained close collaborators throughout their careers. Together with Sayce, Petrie appears to have been highly influential in shaping Griffith’s disciplinary perspectives. Petrie (1853–1942) had first been drawn to Egypt in 1880 to survey the Great Pyramid (Drower 1985). By contrast, Sayce, like many prominent Victorian intellectuals, had been attracted to Egypt by Thomas Cook’s conveniently packaged promise that the Nile was a waterway “for health and for pleasure” (Cook and Son, Ltd. 1881, 5; cf. Reid 2002, 89–92). Cook’s steamers also ferried other key luminaries of the period up the Nile, including Herbert Spencer, John Evans, Thomas Huxley, and General PittRivers. Their late nineteenth-century sojourns might be dismissed as mere leisure activities, yet each never missed the opportunity to investigate and pass comment upon central issues in comparative anthropological debate (Stevenson 2011). The forum for discussion of their observations was not the universities but rather the intellectual societies of London, such as the Anthropological Institute. In these settings, those within the emerging discipline of anthropology were all personally acquainted (Chapman 1989), and it is unsurprising that Sayce, for instance, should have socialized with the cultural evolutionist Herbert Spencer while in Egypt (Duncan 1908, 206) or that Petrie should first have met Pitt-Rivers in London (Stevenson 2012). Crucially, knowledge was not merely constructed in verbal presentations within the halls of these societies or conveyed in articles for their journals but materialized in the objects that these men acquired (Evans 2007). In this form, nineteenth-century anthropology could be characterized as being informed by an “epistemology of artefacts” (Henare 2005, 153). It was this “material anthropology” (Gosden and Larson 2007, 121–46) that gave objects a primary role in Victorian constructions of knowledge about the world. The activities of the commanding figure of General Pitt-Rivers (1827– 1900) epitomized this type of anthropology. On coming into his inheritance

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of the Rushmore Estate in 1880, one of the first things Pitt-Rivers did was book passage to Egypt, not because of a specific interest in Egyptology but because it was the perfect destination for a polymath such as himself. In particular, the trip allowed Pitt-Rivers to situate himself conceptually relative to a range of issues in the comparative development and evolution of culture, exemplified by his analysis of ancient Egyptian “boomerang[s]” (Pitt-Rivers 1883). Notably, the Paleolithic flints that Pitt-Rivers (1882) recovered in Egypt were embedded within the same Theban gravel into which ancient Egyptian New Kingdom tombs had been cut. This juxtaposition of prehistoric with historic evidence neatly encapsulates the dual significance that Egypt held at this point in Victorian discussions of the past: the country’s relation to the antiquity of man on the one hand and to the origin and spread of civilization on the other. In terms of the latter, Egypt occupied a privileged position as “the land in which western culture first began to put forth its strong shoots” (Lane Fox 1875, 413). In practice, this view meant that the General, like many of his contemporaries, used Egyptian material as the departure point for several of his evolutionary series (e.g., Pitt-Rivers 1890). Similarly, his plans for a new museum positioned Egypt at the fulcrum between prehistory, as it was then understood, and “history,” as represented by civilization (Pitt-Rivers 1888). His own collecting concerned both archaeology and anthropology, but objects were acquired with the same end in mind: as evidence of the cultural age of the society that produced them, be that “primitive” or “civilized” (Gosden and Larson 2007, 93). Cross-cultural methods of this nature permitted anthropologists to collapse spatial and temporal distance by bringing together objects for comparative study (Henare 2005, 215). Egyptology (including the study of language) could thus be comfortably accommodated within wider anthropological discourse. The influence of a “material anthropology” and the cultural-evolutionary vernacular that echoed through the London institutions and informed Pitt-Rivers’s work is equally prevalent within Petrie’s own writing and typological practices. His establishment of a chronology for Predynastic Egypt (Petrie 1899), for instance, with its basis in the idea of evolutionary gradualism and degeneration, was indebted to the serial numismatics of John Evans (Schlanger 2010), the cultural evolutionism of Tylor (1871), and the arrangement of Pitt-Rivers’s own vast collection. This influence is also evident in Petrie’s fieldwork practice, which not only set out to take a “systematic” approach to Egyptian archaeology but was similarly oriented toward the retrieval of objects as the “material facts of history” (e.g., Petrie 1888, vii, and 1904, 48–49; Stevenson 2013a). This focus was reflected in the form of archaeological monograph that Petrie advocated in which it was objects, not the ancient landscape, that were the principal concern. In British Egyptology and archaeology, Petrie’s role is significant because of his commitment to training students by developing initiatives such as the British School of Archaeology in Egypt (BSAE). Through such field-mentoring, a

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generation of Egyptologists and archaeologists were introduced to his view of a material anthropology, including most of Oxford’s early twentiethcentury Egyptologists and papyrologists: Bernard Grenfell, Arthur Hunt, David Randall-MacIver, Arthur Mace, Aylward Manley Blackman, and John Garstang (although cf. Sheppard this volume). Many, however, did not stay in Oxford for the remainder of their careers, limiting perhaps the institutionalization of this view. Petrie’s work was far more geographically circumscribed than that of Pitt-Rivers, Evans, and Tylor, but he too remained committed to a broader anthropological agenda. Many of his first papers appeared in the journals of the London societies that Pitt-Rivers frequented (see Uphill 1972), and, like Griffith, Petrie was convinced that Egyptology had a crucial role to play in the wider development of anthropology. Petrie was also instrumental in the establishment of the Anthropological Institute’s publication, Man, as letters between Petrie and Oxford classical archaeologist John Myres demonstrate (cf. Petrie 1931, 164).2 These missives also highlight Petrie’s concern that the linguistic aspects of Egyptology could be too specialized and inward-looking, and he suggested that such concerns might not be best suited to inclusion within the remit of the new journal.3 Nevertheless, Sayce and Griffith were regular contributors, as were many of the most prominent early twentieth-century Egyptologists. Indeed, Griffith wrote to Myres warmly supporting Petrie’s proposals.4 Similarly, Egyptologists were among the attendees of the annual British Association for the Advancement of Science Section H (anthropology), and several acted as its president, including Petrie, Sayce, and Percy Newberry. These institutions and publications gave a platform upon which Egyptology was promoted more widely and gave it a more substantial role in anthropological circles. In summary, although Egyptology undoubtedly had a distinct identity within scholarly networks at the end of the nineteenth century, there simultaneously existed the view that specialist inquiry could only be properly appraised in relation to the wider study of mankind. Many prominent Oxford scholars who were working in Egypt were also firmly integrated within the London-based anthropological societies, contributing actively to their discussions and wide-ranging publications. A final snapshot may be seen in the fellowship list of the Anthropological Institute of 1900, which records 298 individual names (Anonymous 1900). Among their number were Petrie and Sayce, together with Petrie’s students and colleagues: Griffith, Mace, and Randall-MacIver, all of whom had first studied at Oxford. THE UNIVERSITY SETTING: 1901–1930 As the twentieth century commenced, new opportunities for the study of anthropology, archaeology, and Egyptology began to emerge. At first glance, the academic structures in which Egyptology now found itself might

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be considered a point of isolation from anthropology and archaeology as Griffith’s position in 1901 was established within Oxford’s Faculty of Oriental Languages. This appointment was only the second of its sort in the UK, following on from the creation of the Edwards Professorship of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology at University College London, held first by Flinders Petrie from 1892. However, despite its situation within a faculty that might privilege the study of ancient Egyptian languages, Griffith’s inaugural lecture emphasized that both material and linguistic evidence were “of great and perhaps equal importance” (Griffith 1901, 4) to the study of Egyptology and that the “broader the student lays his foundations of general training the better will be the superstructure” (Griffith 1901, 22). His (1902) entry for Egyptology in the tenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was equally broad in its scope, giving equal attention to archaeology, art, antiquities, and language. Griffith’s all-encompassing approach to the study of Egypt is also reflected in his first series of lectures, given in Michaelmas Term 1901, which were advertised as covering the “principles of hieroglyphic writing and its anthropological teachings” (Oxford University Gazette, 11 June 1901, 688). These lectures were followed in the subsequent term by four talks on “the tombs of Deir el-Gebrawi” (Oxford University Gazette, 28 January 1902, 300), and the Gazette advised that informal instruction in Egyptian archaeology would also be provided for interested students. The final term of that first academic year would then be devoted to the “antiquities and literature of Egypt.” In the following years, Griffith would continue to offer a range of perspectives on Egypt through instruction in language, archaeology, and the study of artifacts in the Ashmolean Museum. Thus, despite Griffith’s reputation as “the foremost philologist in the whole range of Egyptian texts in Britain” (Bierbrier 2012, 227), it was in fact a methodological breadth to the study of Egyptology that he propagated throughout his tenure as Reader and eventually Professor of Egyptology. For those students who wished to specialize in Egyptian language, Griffith nevertheless still emphasized the importance of practical fieldwork and material engagement. A case in point is Aylward Manley Blackman, who, following the completion of his BA in Moderations in Classical Studies in 1904, spent two years studying in the Faculty of Oriental Languages, focusing on Egyptian and Coptic. As Blackman’s mentor, Griffith took an active role in advising the young scholar on his future, and, when Petrie offered to tutor Blackman in the field, Griffith implored him not to let the opportunity slip.5 Yet, we should be cautious in attributing too much weight to Griffith’s teaching because it is not clear how many students he formally taught. Anecdotal evidence from Rosalind Moss (John Baines, pers. comm.) suggests that he had almost no pupils at all during this period, and the Oxford BA in Egyptology was not introduced until after his death. Griffith’s view of Egyptology, therefore, was one that was possibly not instilled in the next generation. This point in itself may go some way toward explaining

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why—in Oxford at least—Egyptology of the 1930s had very different emphases (see below). Nevertheless, there were certainly attempts to incorporate Oxford’s Egyptological specialist within broader degree structures at the University. Griffith’s appointment was coincidental with Oxford’s establishment of Britain’s first anthropology course. The subject was officially recognized in 1905 in the form of a graduate diploma, the first examinations for which were in 1908 (Rivière 2007). From the outset, the curriculum was broad, encompassing zoology, paleontology, ethnology, archaeology, sociology, and technology. The diploma’s teaching staff was equally varied. Indeed, notable among their large number was the Reader in Egyptology (Rivière 2007, 48). This arrangement stayed in place until World War I, after which the list of contributors shrank (Rivière 2007, 50). Many of the first students were colonial administrators, and it was in this context that Griffith found himself contributing eight lectures on the “ethnology of Sudan” to the 1908 cohort from the Sudan Government Service (Tilley 1994, 314). It was also through the Anthropology Diploma course that Rosalind Moss (1890–1990) became acquainted with Egyptology from 1917 onward. With Griffith’s encouragement, she was appointed in 1924 to the position of editor of The Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Statues, Reliefs and Paintings, an encyclopedic series of reference volumes whose compilation had been initiated by Griffith twenty years earlier (see, e.g., Porter and Moss 1927). However, Moss also maintained her wider anthropological interests, publishing The Life after Death in Oceania and the Malay Archipelago a year later (Moss 1925). The Pitt Rivers Museum also played a central role in this early program in anthropology. Its connection with Pitt-Rivers and Tylor ensured that classes there were framed by objects arranged according to the social evolutionary principles of the late Victorian era. Through these artifacts, a complex whole of global culture was laid out according to sequences of “progress, degradation, survival, revival, [and] modification” (Tylor 1871, 16). This approach had a profound influence upon a number of students who attended the course, such as Aylward Blackman’s sister Winifred, whose ethnographic fieldwork (Blackman 1927) drew great acclaim from anthropologists and Egyptologists alike (see, e.g., Gleichen 1928; Peet 1928). Winifred had been encouraged to read widely in anthropology by her brother, and she first experienced life along the Nile when she accompanied him during his 1924 excavations at Meir (Stevenson 2013b). She viewed her work as an exercise in salvage anthropology, and her mantra was that Egyptian customs were rapidly dying out. This argument was a common refrain in the early twentieth century (see, e.g., El Shakry 2007, 47–53, for further examples) and deemed particularly pressing for Egyptologists, as these customs were considered to be the last known “survivals” from ancient times (Seligman 1913; Wainwright 1919). The idea of survivals was itself an integral part of Tylor’s comparative anthropology, allowing Egyptology to accommodate twentieth-century material culture and ethnographic detail.

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Other students not on the diploma course, but who were enthralled by the Pitt Rivers displays during their time in Oxford, included Petrie’s students RandallMacIver, Garstang, and Gerald Wainwright, all of whom made substantial donations of both ancient and modern Egyptian material to the Museum. Significantly, all remained committed to a broad anthropological agenda, expanded their interest to societies beyond Egypt, and also advocated forms of material anthropology (e.g., Randall-MacIver 1933; Wainwright 1938). Thus, in the early twentieth century, there were concerted efforts to incorporate Egyptology within the wider remit of anthropological study. Nor was this interest one-sided. Many anthropologists engaged actively in Egyptological endeavors by making their own contributions through publication (e.g., Balfour 1897; Seligman 1916). Additionally, they were members of the committees of the BSAE and the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF), founded in 1882 to excavate for evidence of Biblical events in the Nile Delta (for which see Gange 2013). Among those who were members were Alfred C. Haddon, Baron A. von Hügel, and James G. Frazer (see any BSAE or EEF monograph for committee lists). Passing mention should also be made of Egypt’s role in Elliot Smith’s work on diffusionism, for it is often presumed that it was this work that led to ancient Egypt having an important place in anthropological dialogue (e.g., Adams 1997, 26). Yet, Elliot Smith’s ideas attracted severe criticism, not just from anthropologists but also from Egyptologists (Crook 2012). Oxford scholars were particularly affronted because of Smith’s attacks on the anthropology of Tylor. Not too much credence should therefore be given to the importance of diffusion in bringing ancient Egyptian culture to the attention of anthropologists or to its decreasing profile in the wake of critiques of such hyper-diffusionist theories. Rather, Egypt was already visible in anthropological circles in the early twentieth century and, as explored below, its subsequent fading from view may be attributed to fundamental changes in the nature of fieldwork and resulting shifts in knowledge relationships within universities. SHIFTING FIELDS OF PRACTICE: 1931–1960 When William Y. Adams (1997) surveyed the history of Egyptology and anthropology, he suggested that it was during the 1930s that the two subjects became detached. That date concurs with the evidence from Oxford, as it was during this decade that a combination of personal fortunes, disciplinary visions, and wider political developments conspired to curtail wider intellectual exchange between subjects and redefined their methodological priorities. At Oxford, this development was largely brought about by a new generation of academics. The Anthropology Diploma, which for decades had been dominated by three men—Robert Ranulph Marett, Henry Balfour, and

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Arthur Thompson—was to face its most severe critic: Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), who sought to promote his own vision for a “new” anthropology on his arrival in Oxford in 1936 (Mills 2007, 2008, 41–46). Balfour had insisted upon the close relationship between archaeology and anthropology and upon retaining a broad curriculum. Radcliffe-Brown was staunchly against any such approach, berating the diploma for being unwieldy, too general, and consequently useless. Instead, he successfully advocated a diploma centered on the specialist study of “social anthropology.” These changes were coincident with the death of Griffith in 1934. His successor was to be Eric Peet (1882–1934), who unfortunately passed away before his appointment commenced. Nevertheless, an inaugural lecture was delivered, and, in comparison to Griffith’s 1901 proclamations, Peet’s comments reflected a far narrower purview of Egyptology. Rather than addressing the subject’s wider contribution to the study of humankind, as Griffith had attempted, Peet had more particularist concerns with ancient Egypt as his focus. In his inaugural lecture, he sought to address the question as to how much was then known about the ancient Egyptians and what was left to discover. In contrast to Griffith (1901), Peet’s answer was that “we are not very likely to learn very much more Egyptian history from excavation in Egypt itself.” Rather, it was in the philological side of Egyptology “that there is most reason for hope” (Peet 1934, 11). Such a shift in emphasis may in part be attributed to the changing epistemological opportunities closely linked to political developments at the end of the British colonial era in Egypt. These changes included the more assertive role of the now (nominally) independent Egyptian authorities in restricting access to archaeological sites and objects following the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun (Colla 2007). For example, Petrie had been dismayed by such restrictions and had left for Palestine in the late 1920s, where he would live out the remainder of his life (Drower 1985). His departure marked the end of more than forty years of frantically paced excavations, through which had been accumulated an enormous material legacy. The “material facts of history” (Petrie 1888, vii) had been amassed, ordered, and distributed across the world, perhaps explaining why Peet had been of the opinion that there was little more to be done. After Peet’s untimely death, it was the linguist Battiscombe George Gunn who found himself leading the next generation of Oxford scholars as Professor of Egyptology from 1934 until 1950 (Bierbrier 2012, 232; cf. Vinson and Gunn this volume). One of his first students was Peter Shinnie, who decades later wrote of his experiences: I went to Oxford in 1934 . . . but soon found that the text-bound study, which is what most British Egyptology was then, seemed too limiting. . . . My intention was still to work in Egyptology but with a somewhat wider view of the nature of the subject than was held by my teacher Battiscombe Gunn, one of the great Egyptologists of the time. He did not consider the study of artefacts very necessary (1990, 221).

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This quote may seem somewhat surprising given that Gunn’s early career had been built around the care of artifacts through his curatorial positions in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Yet, Gunn’s later neglect of material culture is reflective of the wider fundamental shift in the position of artifacts across many disciplines and also of the development of fieldwork methodologies that began to give subjects their own unique set of evidence and methods (Gosden 1999, 33). In anthropology, fieldwork had come to focus more on the generation of field notes for the production of new forms of ethnographic monograph rather than the collection of objects. Anthropology thereby became progressively dematerialized and increasingly theoretical. Museums that had previously enjoyed elevated importance on account of epistemologies of artifacts began to decline as anthropology moved out of the “museum era” (Stocking 1995). Linguistic methodologies gained ground over the analysis of artifacts (Henare 2005, 211), and instead of sweeping comparative studies that collapsed space and time, more focused synchronic examinations of particular societies became the norm. In archaeology, earlier descriptive studies of objects, like those of Petrie, began to be replaced by a new emphasis upon site features and depositional sequences. This change is typified by Mortimer Wheeler’s work, which, from the 1920s and particularly from the 1930s onward, employed box grids, encouraging far greater attention to site formation histories (Trigger 2006, 294). As anthropology and archaeology both sought self-definition through specific fieldwork methodologies that were actively taught as part of the professionalization of the disciplines (particularly at the University of London’s Institute of Archaeology, the London School of Economics, and the University of Cambridge), British Egyptology faced more restricted opportunities for new fieldwork and so also generally looked inward toward its most uniquely distinguishing feature: the language and the texts that it studied. Egyptology’s philological emphasis remained strong into the 1950s, as is clear from the discussions concerning the future of the Oxford Professorship of Egyptology following Gunn’s death in 1950. Alan Gardiner (1879– 1963; cf. Gertzen this volume), the independently wealthy Egyptologist who provided funds for the position, wrote to the University Council advising that there ought to be three teachers of Egyptology. He argued that one should handle Demotic and Coptic, another philology and archaeology of the pharaonic period, and that the final teacher should deal with Egyptian archaeology. With regard to the latter, Gardiner noted that it “seems hopeless at the present juncture to ask for or find a highly competent holder of such a post,” perhaps a reference to the far more limited opportunities for excavation at that time (the BSAE was largely dormant and was formally discontinued in 1954) or that few students had been sufficiently trained in

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the study of artifacts. Gardiner concluded by observing that the Professor of Egyptology: could to a considerable extent make up for the absence of a Reader in Egyptian archaeology, since, contrary to what is often supposed, any competent hieroglyphic scholar cannot fail to have a wide if not very detailed, knowledge of Egyptian archaeology.6 The implication was that archaeology did not require training, which was contrary to its increasing professionalization at this time and the rise in specialist courses elsewhere. Further, it might be suggested that many were more confident in Egyptology’s own particularist identity and that the discipline had become more isolated from developments in other subjects. It may be the case, however, that Gardiner was simply keen to install the philologist Jaroslav Černý in the position (John Baines, pers. comm.), and that to Gardiner, Černý was more preferable than the otherwise small pool of active field archaeologists at that time (for a contrasting view, see Glanville 1947, whose author was keen on field archaeology). Whatever the case, Černý arrived at Oxford in 1951 and remained in post for fourteen years, during which time (in 1961) the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford was founded. By the early 1960s, therefore, archaeology, anthropology, and Egyptology all had discrete spaces of activity within the University, independently setting their own individual agendas and courses. CONCLUSION The history presented here is only a brief and partial one. Other threads of the wider intellectual tapestry remain to be woven in, such as the role of classics and papyrology. However, despite this caveat and the chapter’s focus on Oxford, some generalizations can perhaps be gleaned. British Egyptology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was composed of a small, close-knit community. The discipline was, however, originally situated within the much wider intellectual context of Victorian material anthropology. Many key British Egyptologists at this time sought to situate their specialism within this framework and took inspiration from it. As anthropology and Egyptology acquired institutional settings, this epistemology of artifacts continued to inform disciplinary study, with the museum a site of learning, and fieldwork in Egypt focused on the recovery of objects. In the 1920s, however, the landscape across which research and learning was conducted began to change. As archaeology and anthropology both became more sharply defined in specific fieldwork methodologies, sites for the development of Egyptology—in Britain at least—became more restricted, moving away from both excavation and

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museum collections. In surveying this century of Egyptological inquiry, it is also clear that the ensemble of parts that comprised the subject were variously interleaved by different personalities, from Griffith’s methodological breadth to Gunn’s philological focus. In the ebb and flow of disciplinary practice, therefore, both conviction and chance played their respective roles, as continues to be the case today.7

NOTES 1. The term was first introduced to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1862. 2. Myres Papers, University of Oxford Special Collections, Bodleian Library, MSS Myres 59 (Myres Papers), fol. 94–95. The letters date between 1896 and 1901. 3. Petrie to Myres, 29 December 1896, Myres Papers, fol. 103–104. 4. Griffith to Myres, 11 December 1896, Myres Papers, fol. 41–42. 5. Griffith to Blackman, 5 August 1905, Blackman Papers, Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool Library, D84/1/22. 6. Gardiner to University of Oxford Council, 27 March 1950, University of Oxford Archives UR 6/ER/2, file 1. 7. I am enormously grateful to John Baines for his close reading of a first draft of this chapter and for his helpful suggestions, which have vastly improved it. Outstanding errors remain my own.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Unpublished Sources University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool Library. University of Oxford Archives, University of Oxford. University of Oxford Special Collections, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Published Sources Adams, W. Y. 1997. “Anthropology and Egyptology: Divorce and Remarriage?” In Anthropology and Egyptology: A Developing Dialogue, edited by J. Lustig, 25–32. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press. Anonymous. 1900. “Ordinary Fellows.” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute 30: 3–12. Baines, J. 2011. “Egyptology and the Social Sciences: Thirty Years On.” In Methodik und Didaktik in der Ägyptologie: Herausforderungen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Paradigmenwechsels in den Altertumswissenchaften, edited by B. Backes and A. Verbovsek, 573–97. Munich: Fink. Balfour, H. 1897. “On a Remarkable Ancient Bow and Arrows Believed to Be of Assyrian Origin.” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 26: 210–20. Bierbrier, M., ed. 2012. Who Was Who in Egyptology? 4th ed. London: Egypt Exploration Society.

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Blackman, W. S. 1927. The Fella a¯hῑ n of Upper Egypt: Their Religious, Social and Industrial Life To-Day with Special Reference to Survivals from Ancient Times. London: Harrap. Champion, T. 2003. “Beyond Egyptology: Egypt in 19th and 20th Century Archaeology and Anthropology.” In The Wisdom of Egypt: Changing Visions through the Ages, edited by P. Ucko and T. Champion, 161–85. London: UCL Press. Chapman, W. 1989. “The Organizational Context in the History of Archaeology: Pitt Rivers and Other British Archaeologists in the 1860s.” The Antiquaries Journal 69: 23–42. Colla, E. 2007. Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cook, T. and Son, Ltd. 1881. Up the Nile by Steam. London: Thomas Cook and Son. Crook, D. P. 2012. Grafton Elliot Smith, Egyptology and the Diffusion of Culture: A Biographical Perspective. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press. Drower, M. 1985. Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology. London: Victor Gollancz. Duncan, D. 1908. The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer. London: Methuen. Evans, C. 2007. “ ‘Delineating Objects’: Nineteenth-Century Antiquarian Culture and the Project of Archaeology.” In Visions of Antiquity: The Society of Antiquaries of London, 1707–2007, edited by S. Pearce, 267–305. London: Society of Antiquaries. Gange, D. 2013. Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gardiner, A. 1934. “Frances Llewellyn Griffith.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 20 (1/2): 71–77. Glanville, S. R. K. 1947. The Growth and Nature of Egyptology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gleichen, E. 1928. Review of The Fellaa¯hῑn of Upper Egypt: Their Religious, Social and Industrial Life To-Day with Special Reference to Survivals from Ancient Times, by W. S. Blackman. Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 7 (2): 135. Gosden, C. 1999. Anthropology and Archaeology: A Changing Relationship. London: Routledge. Gosden, C., and F. Larson. 2007. Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griffith, F. L. 1901. The Study of Egyptology: Inaugural Lecture Delivered in the Ashmolean Museum on May 8, 1901. Oxford: Hart. ———. 1902. “Egypt–Egyptology.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10th ed., 628–43. Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, and London: The Times. Henare, A. 2005. Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lane Fox, A. H. 1875. “On Early Modes of Navigation.” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 14: 399–437. Messer-Davidow, E., D. R. Shumway, and D. J. Sylvan. 1993. “Introduction: Disciplinary Ways of Knowing.” In Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Discplinarity, edited by E. Messer-Davidow, D. R. Shumway, and D. J. Sylvan, 1–21. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Mills, D. 2007. “A Major Disaster to Anthropology? Oxford and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown.” In A History of Oxford Anthropology, edited by P. Rivière, 83–97. Oxford: Berghahn Books. ———. 2008. Difficult Folk? A Political History of Social Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Moss, R. L. B. 1925. The Life after Death in Oceania and the Malay Archipelago. London: Oxford University Press.

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Peet, E. T. 1928. Review of The Fellaa¯hῑ n of Upper Egypt: Their Religious, Social and Industrial Life To-Day with Special Reference to Survivals from Ancient Times, by W. S. Blackman. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 14 (1/2): 197–98. ———. 1934. The Present Position of Egyptological Studies: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 17 January 1934. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Petrie, W. M. F. 1888. Tanis: Part II; Nebesheh (Am) and Defenneh (Tahpanhes). London: Egypt Exploration Society. ———. 1899. “Sequences in Prehistoric Remains.” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 3/4: 295–301. ———. 1904. Methods & Aims in Archaeology. London: Macmillan. ———. 1931. Seventy Years in Archaeology. London: Sampson Low. Pitt-Rivers, A. H. L. F. 1882. “On the Discovery of Chert Implements in Stratified Gravel in the Nile Valley near Thebes.” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 11: 382–400. ———. 1883. “On the Egyptian Boomerang and its Affinities.” Journal of the Anthropological Institute 12: 454–63. ———. 1888. “Address as President of the Anthropological Section of the British Association, Bath, September 6, 1888.” Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1888): 825–35. ———. 1890. King John’s House, Tollard Royal, Wilts. Printed privately. Porter, B., and R. L. B. Moss. 1927. Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Reliefs and Paintings, vol. 1, The Theban Necropolis. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Randall-MacIver, D. 1933. “Archaeology as Science.” Antiquity 7: 5–21. Reid, D. M. 2002. Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rivière, P. 2007. “The Formative Years: The Committee for Anthropology 1905–38.” In A History of Oxford Anthropology, edited by P. Rivière, 43–61. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Schlanger, N. 2010. “Series in Progress: Antiquities of Nature, Numismatics and Stone Implements in the Emergence of Prehistoric Archaeology.” History of Science 48 (3/4): 343–69. Seligman, C. G. 1913. “Ancient Egyptian Beliefs in Modern Egypt.” In Essays Presented to William Ridgeway: on His Sixtieth Birthday, 6 August, 1913, edited by C. Quiggin, 448–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1916. “The Uas Sceptre as a Beduin Camel Stick.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 3: 127. El Shakry, O. 2007. The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Shinnie, P. 1990. “A Personal Memoir.” In A History of African Archaeology, edited by P. Robertshaw, 205–20. London: James Currey. Smith, S. 1933. “The Rev. Archibald H. Sayce: Born 25 September, 1845: Died 4 February, 1933.” Man 33: 69–70. Stevenson, A. 2011. “Pitt-Rivers and Egypt.” Part of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: Analysing the Activities of a Nineteenth-Century Collector website. Accessed 10 October 2013. http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/rpr/index.php/article-index/12-articles/ 495-pitt-rivers-and-egypt ———. 2012 “ ‘We Seem to be Working in the Same Line’: A. H. L. F. Pitt-Rivers and W. M. F. Petrie.” Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 22 (1): 4–13. ———. 2013a. “Artefacts of Excavation: The British Collection and Distribution of Egyptian Finds to Museums, 1880–1915.” Journal of the History of Collections online pre-publication: 1–14. doi: 10.1093/jhc/fht017

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———. 2013b. “ ‘Labelling and Cataloguing at Every Available Moment’: W. S. Blackman’s Collection of Egyptian Amulets.” Journal of Museum Ethnography 26: 138–49. Stocking, G. W., Jr. 1995. After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Tilley, H. 1994. Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism and the Politics of Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Trigger, B. G. 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tylor, E. B. 1871. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. Vol. 1. London: John Murray. Uphill, E. P. 1972. “A Bibliography of Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853– 1942).” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 31: 356–79. Wainwright, G. A. 1919. “Ancient Survivals in Modern Africa.” Bulletin de la Société Sultanieh de Géographie 9: 105–30 and 177–97. ———. 1938. “Ethnographical Museums.” Nature 141: 332. Weeks, K. R., ed. 1979. Egyptology and the Social Sciences: Five Studies. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press.

3

The Anglo-Saxon Branch of the Berlin School The Interwar Correspondence of Adolf Erman and Alan Gardiner and the Loss of the German Concession at Amarna Thomas L. Gertzen

In the early 1920s, the loss of the prewar German excavation concession at the site of Amarna in Middle Egypt to Britain’s Egypt Exploration Society (EES) caused a severe rupture in the relationship of the leading Egyptologists Adolf Erman and Alan Gardiner, who had just resumed correspondence after the end of the conflict. This dispute, which very nearly put an end to the friendship of the two scholars, is discussed in detail in this chapter. The dispute is also placed within the context of Anglo-German relations within Egyptology as a whole and, in particular, the importance of the excavations at Amarna for German practitioners of the discipline. Issues of nationalism, research, and personal networks within Egyptology are therefore addressed. JOHANN PETER ADOLF ERMAN (1854–1937) Adolf Erman was of bourgeois Jewish—as well as Réfugié—descent (for the French-protestant background of the Ermans, originally spelled “Ermend” and pronounced accordingly, cf. Rosen-Prest 2005), born in Berlin on 31 October 1854 into a family with a long academic tradition, the son of Adolf and Mari (née Bessel) Erman (cf. Erman 1929 and Schipper 2006). He attended the French Grammar School in Berlin, but it seems he was bored by his lessons there. During his childhood, he also showed interest in Berlin’s Egyptian Museum and attempted to teach himself hieroglyphs. In 1874, after completing his secondary education, Erman began studying Egyptology with Georg Ebers in Leipzig, with whom he formed a rather close teacher-disciple relationship (Gertzen 2013a, 101–23, 137–46); later, in 1875, he went to study with Karl Richard Lepsius, one of the founding fathers of modern Egyptology, at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. While completing his doctoral thesis on Egyptian Plural Forms (Die Pluralbildung des Ägyptischen, 1878), Erman joined the staff of the Muenzkabinett (roughly: coin collection) of the Berlin Museums. In 1880, he

The Anglo-Saxon Branch of the Berlin School

Figure 3.1

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Adolf Erman.

earned his Habilitation, and, in 1885, he succeeded his teacher Lepsius both as Professor of Egyptology and as Director of the Berlin Egyptian Museum. The same year, Erman travelled to Egypt for the first time. In 1895, he was elected a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Science, and he initiated the Berlin Egyptian Dictionary Project (the ancient Egyptian Wörterbuch) in 1897. Erman subsequently became a towering figure in German as well as international Egyptology (Schipper 2006) as both editor of the major journal Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde (cf. Gertzen 2013c) and also head of the Commission for the Publication of the Egyptian Dictionary, which oversaw the work of the academic attaché at the German Consulate in Cairo. This modest-sounding post, initially filled in 1899, evolved by 1907 into the Imperial German Institute for Egyptian Archaeology (Imperial Institute; for which see Voss 2013, 43–68, 108–113, 115–28). Erman’s academic career ended in 1923 with his retirement; in 1934, under the Nazi government, he was officially excluded from the faculty of the FriedrichWilhelms-Universität in accordance with the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums (roughly: Act for the Reestablishment of the Civil Service; Rebenich 2006, 360–63). On 26 June 1937, Erman passed away in Berlin.

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SIR ALAN HENDERSON GARDINER (1879–1963) Alan Henderson Gardiner, younger son of Henry John and Clara (née Honey), was born on 29 March 1879 in Eltham in the English county of Kent (Bierbrier 2012, 205–207). The family fortune provided him with the opportunity for an excellent education—first with private tutors, later at Temple Grove School in East Sheen, and finally at the public school Charterhouse. Gardiner, like Erman, seems not to have particularly appreciated his school lessons. He began reading books about ancient Egypt early on and developed a strong interest in philately, publishing his first articles on that subject in 1893 at the age of fifteen. His father, displeased with his son’s preoccupation, encouraged Alan to find a more serious profession. Gardiner chose Egyptology and was granted access to the British Museum collections by eminent Coptologist Walter Ewing Crum and to University College London by Edwards Professor of Egyptology William Matthew Flinders Petrie. Gardiner also commenced correspondence with Francis Llewellyn Griffith, Britain’s leading Egyptian philologist at the time and also an adherent of the teachings of Erman’s Berlin School, at that time already being contested by the adherents of the “French School”

Figure 3.2

Alan Gardiner.

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(cf. Marchand 2000, 127). Gardiner spent 1895 learning French in Paris where he attended the lectures of Gaston Maspero at the École des Hautes Études and the Collège de France. In 1897, he matriculated at Queen’s College, Oxford and studied Classics, Hebrew, and Arabic, earning a BA in 1901. Subsequently, he traveled to the Rhineland to learn German. After his marriage to Hedwig Rosen, a Viennese, they spent their honeymoon in Egypt. Meanwhile, back in London, Gardiner encountered Erman, whose Egyptian Grammar (Ägyptische Grammatik, 1894) had made a deep impression on him. He readily followed the older scholar’s invitation to work with German colleagues at the Wörterbuch from 1902 onward. Returning to England in 1911, Gardiner helped to further develop the study of ancient Egyptian philology, publishing in 1927 the first of three editions of his seminal Egyptian Grammar (Gardiner 1927), which he himself termed “the most important achievement of my life” (quoted in Müller 1965, 172). Although he was undoubtedly one of Britain’s leading Egyptologists, Gardiner always remained an amateur, or (as he called himself) a dilettante (Brunner 1966, 269); he had neither students nor a permanent academic appointment. Despite appointment to a research professorship at the University of Chicago in 1924, Gardiner never actually visited the United States (US). He obtained a LittD from the University of Oxford in 1909 as well as honorary doctorates from the Universities of Durham and Cambridge (in 1952 and 1956, respectively). In 1948, he was knighted. Gardiner died on 19 December 1963 at his country estate of Court Place in Iffley, Oxfordshire. ANGLO-GERMAN RELATIONS WITHIN EGYPTOLOGY From the beginning of his academic career, Erman showed a strong dislike for the methods of his French counterparts (Schenkel 2006, 236; Voss 2012a). In contrast, the general opinion of the representatives of the Berlin School was that British Egyptologists were “German” in spirit (Gertzen 2010a). Alternatively, they considered them dilettantes, who presented a danger to the professionalization of the discipline, as Erman’s student and successor Kurt Sethe pointed out to him in a letter of 23 July 1902: “wir müssen da doch schließlich zu Zuständen kommen wie in England, wo außer Griffith eigentlich nur Dilettanten die Aegyptologie fördern.”1 Additionally, while German Egyptologists considered themselves leaders in the field of Egyptian philology (Gertzen 2010b), they were also perfectly willing to concede British preeminence in archaeology, as Sethe noted: Was Erman für die ägyptische Philologie geleistet hat, hat in gewissem Sinne entsprechend für die ägyptische Archäologie Flinders Petrie geleistet, der gleichfalls die zeitliche Entwicklung in den Vordergrund rückte und, wie gesagt, gewissermaßen überhaupt erst der Begründer

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Thomas L. Gertzen der neueren Archäologie in unserer Wissenschaft geworden ist (Sethe 1921, 41; cf. Gertzen 2009, 117–19).

Apparently, this characterization was shared by the British. As early as 1893, Flinders Petrie remarked in his inaugural lecture: “the language has its greatest exponents in Germany. For ourselves—the only classical work of England is that of Wilkinson, on the artistic and material civilization. To this side we may then well devote our attention” (quoted in Janssen 1992, 100; Wilkinson is Wilkinson 1837). Although this segregation of tasks by nation may seem rather simplistic, it remained fundamentally in force until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Contrary to the popular notion, Anglo-German relations in the field of Egyptology were not affected by imperial interests in Egypt but instead by a sense of national scholarly competition (Voss 2013, 25–34, 154–56; cf. Kröger 1991 and Schoellgen 1984). Gardiner, however, became the central figure in inaugurating an independent English-speaking branch of Egyptology. Although he had welcomed Erman’s proposal to participate in the Wörterbuch project: “in meinen frühesten Tagen hatte ich die Hilfe von so bedeutenden Männern wie Griffith, Petrie und Maspero. Aber erst, als ich 1902 nach Berlin als Hilfsarbeiter an das große Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache kam, lernte ich, was eine ‘wholehearted’ wissenschaftliche Zusammenarbeit bedeutet und welche enge Bindungen sie schafft” (quoted in Müller 1965, 170), Gardiner later complained about a certain disregard both of his contribution and of his personal research interests among his German colleagues. He later recalled that when, in 1908, he was offered the co-editorship of the Wörterbuch, “this meant, however, that I should work on exactly the same footing as Erman, without any formal acknowledgement of the fact” (Gardiner 1962, 12). With regard to the Wörterbuch project itself, Gardiner also stated: “I had printed some very outspoken criticisms of the inevitable defects of that gigantic but highly experimental work” (Gardiner 1962, 12). The reasons both for Gardiner’s physical departure from Berlin as well as his distancing of himself from Egyptology as practiced there at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century seem to be somewhat multilayered. Hermann Grapow, who later became Erman’s successor at the Wörterbuch, wrote: In dem, was Gardiner von seiner Mitarbeit . . . schreibt, klingt ein leises Bedauern darüber mit, daß er diese ihm lieb gewesene Arbeit . . . aufgegeben hat beziehungsweise aufgeben mußte, im Jahre 1909. Er mag gehofft haben, sich weit länger oder gar dauernd der Herstellung des Manuskripts und dann der Herausgabe . . . widmen zu können. . . . eine solche Stellung . . . konnte Erman ihm jedoch nicht in Aussicht stellen, der ihm zudem amtlich eröffnen mußte, daß eine derartige Stellung einem Deutschen vorbehalten sein sollte (Grapow 1973, 6–7).

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In fact, it was Grapow himself who was later appointed to this permanent position as the editor of the Wörterbuch. Whether Erman had to “officially declare” (amtlich eröffnen) that such a post could only be offered to a German cannot be definitely established today. However, writing to Gardiner on 18 July 1921, Erman stated that: “Ich hatte früher mir gedacht, dass Sie einmal Budges’ oder Petries’ Nachfolger sein würden, und hatte Ihnen daher, als Sie mich einmal frugen, ob Sie in Berlin bleiben sollten, geraten, nach England zurückzugehen, damit Sie dort nicht als Ausländer erschienen.”2 Nationality seems to have played a role in Egyptological careers at the turn of the century, whether in Germany or in Britain. However, Erman’s remarks suggest not only this interpretation. Additionally, they highlight a fundamental difference between German and British attitudes toward the image of a scholar (cf. Jonker 2002, 150–54). Erman expected Gardiner to follow a formal academic career; he would become a professor, thereby no longer remaining a dilettante. However, Gardiner, displaying a particularly British attitude toward scholarship, took pride in having this other status. Yet, Germans considered the label of dilettante to be offensive and used it as a pejorative (Jonker 2002, 162–63). This difference created tensions and a bellicose atmosphere: the objections of Egyptologists to criticism of their theories seem divisible into two heads. The first, which is the favorite one in Germany, is that no one has the right to criticize anything unless he is an “expert”. Formerly, one hardly ever read anything proceeding from the adherents of the Berlin School which did not contain some remarks directed against those whom they called dilletanti, or amateurs (Legge 1913, 103). Thus, Anglo-German relations within Egyptology had already become discordant before World War I, mainly as a result of differing perceptions of scholarly research in Germany and Britain and a diametrically opposed understanding of the status of the dilettante in the discipline. These tensions were further aggravated when, in 1908, Gardiner (justifiably) accused Ludwig Borchardt, the newly appointed Director of the Imperial Institute (Voss and von Pilgrim 2008), of scholarly espionage. Borchardt had bribed the Cairo photographer Dittrich to provide him with copies of the photographic documentation he made for non-German archaeologists excavating in Egypt (Voss 2013, 155; Wölffling 1960, 48–52). Meanwhile, during World War I, in 1915 the German (excavation) House at Thebes (for which see Polz 2008) was purportedly destroyed by the British—at least according to the report sent by the American Consul Olney Arnold to the US Ambassador in Berlin, dated 24 August 1916: “I have been informed by the Authorities that the house in question was found by them to be the centre of illicit antiquities trade, as well as otherwise undesirable from the point of view of the British Military Authorities who, therefore, ordered that it

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should be pulled down in November of last year” (quoted in Voss 2013, 177). However, worse even than this issue was the loss of the German excavation concession at Amarna. THE GERMAN CONCESSION AT AMARNA AND WORLD WAR I Whereas representatives of the Berlin School such as Erman were perfectly willing to cede Egyptian archaeology to the British, Ludwig Borchardt, newly appointed Director of the Imperial Institute, intended to establish his own branch of Egyptology within the field of architectural history. While Erman, heading the Wörterbuch Commission and thereby being in charge of the Institute, expected Borchardt to provide the Wörterbuch with copies of hieroglyphic texts and perhaps also garner intelligence about the archaeological missions of other countries, he certainly did not want him to undertake large-scale excavations (Voss 2012b; Voss and von Pilgrim 2008). Regardless, Borchardt succeeded in raising funds from the Deutsche OrientGesellschaft (the German Oriental Society; DOG) for excavations at Amarna (Voss and Gertzen 2013). The excavations were actually financed by the merchant James Simon, rendering the DOG a mere arbiter for this private enterprise (see Matthes 2012). Borchardt argued that the previous excavations at the site under the charge of Petrie (from 1891 to 1892) and Alexandre Barsanti (in 1896) had left two-thirds of the ancient city unexplored. In 1908, Borchardt thus built an excavation house at the site, although he could not begin excavating until January 1911 because of the recent introduction of a capital transfer tax (the Schenkungssteuer) in Germany (cf. Matthes 2000, 254). Though it was Borchardt’s primary intention to gather architectural data, the site provided Germany with one of the most iconic objects in Egyptology in 1912: the painted limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti (a discovery that several German museums commemorated with exhibitions, starting in December 2012; cf. Gertzen 2013b). Amarna became a source of national pride, bolstering the importance it had already gained in German Oriental studies when the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, under Erman, outbid the British to acquire the so-called Amarna tablets (cf. Gertzen 2012). However, with the outbreak of World War I, German excavations in Egypt came to an end. The concessions of the German Kaiserreich were laid in trust of the American Consulate on 6 January 1915 to be reserved until after the conclusion of the conflict. However, this reservation was not to be. According to Consul General Olney Arnold in a letter he wrote to Borchardt on 29 January 1915, this measure had been originally intended to gain “the appreciation which German scholars would feel for english [sic] fairness if these concessions were given back after the war.” Arnold continued: “the concessions have been annulled, but they will not be given to anyone else.”3 For the time being that was all German Egyptologists could hope for. After the war, Borchardt and Erman feared for the German standing in Egypt; indeed, they had to struggle to regain their former positions there.

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Astonishingly, neither imperial competition between the European powers (which had never been such an important issue from the German perspective) nor chauvinism and hatred for the enemy formed the biggest problems (cf. Voss 2012c). Though mutual suffering and war propaganda had taken their toll, it was the old national rivalries between scholars and the scholarly independence gained by British Egyptology before the war that caused considerable conflict and tensions—namely between Erman and Gardiner. POSTWAR CONFLICT Reestablishing their correspondence on 27 August 1919, Erman sent a conciliatory reply to a postcard Gardiner had sent offering condolences on the death of Peter, Erman’s eldest son, at the Western Front in 1916.4 Both men concurred that only renewed work could now offer consolation for such losses. However, in Gardiner’s response to Erman’s letter, dated 2 September 1919, he wrote: “my German colleagues must please believe that I shall work unceasingly for the best advantage of my Science [sic] under existing conditions, and I hope they will help me by not asking me to co-operate with them before it is opportune.”5 Obviously, Gardiner was concerned about international as well as national criticism if he were to venture working with the former enemy again so soon. However, on a personal level, both men resumed their good relations. Gardiner provided Erman with offprints of his publications, and the two scholars also discussed Gardiner’s intention to write his own ancient Egyptian grammar. In the summer of 1920, however, these good relations ruptured. Erman sent Gardiner a letter on 31 July thanking him for another postcard, but he rather bluntly came to the point. He had read in a newspaper article that “an Egypt Exploration Society, unknown to Erman and others” was raising funds for excavations at Amarna. Erman implied that the EES he had known would never carry out such an act; it had to be some other Egypt Exploration Society. Confounded, he wrote: Leider wurde die Freude nun durch die böse Nachricht gestört, die uns am 20. Juli hier erschreckte: eine mir und anderen unbekannte ‘Egypt Exploration Society’ erlässt in der Times einen Aufruf zur Beschaffung von Geld zur Ausgrabung von Tell Amarna. Though he might accept the destruction of the German House at Thebes as an act of “philistines” (Banausen), Erman considered the takeover of the German Amarna concession—though formally legal—as a “robbery” (Raub) that reflected disgracefully on British scholars: Wenn englische Offiziere im Jahre 1915 es fertig bekamen, das deutsche Haus in Theben zu zerstören, so konnte man dies als die Handlung aufgeregter Banausen vielleicht verstehen. Aber an dem Raub—‘Raub’

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Thomas L. Gertzen muss ich es nennen—natürlich ist es in gänzlich legalen Formen erfolgt, juristisch unanfechtbar, von Tell Amarna sind englische Gelehrte selbst beteiligt.

Referring obliquely to the postwar reparations Germany was obliged to render, Erman added that “intellectual property” (wissenschaftliches Eigentum) differed from ships, coal, and other material. Finally, he alluded to the confiscation of objects of art in Germany during the Napoleonic Wars: “und es hat immer als eine Schmach für die Franzosen gegolten, dass sie in der napoleonischen Zeit die Kunstwerke der besiegten Länder für den Louvre raubten” (cf. Savoy 2011). Erman also mentioned the finds excavated by the DOG at the site of Assur in Iraq, at that time exhibited in Porto, after they had been confiscated in the “neutral” port of Lisbon: “dass uns . . . die ganzen Funde aus Assur geraubt werden” (cf. Crüsemann 2003, 59). He even suggested to Gardiner that he circulate the letter among his British colleagues: “Ich musste Ihnen dies doch sagen; ich habe nichts dagegen, wenn Sie den Brief anderen mitteilen.”6 Erman’s national and professional feeling was raised. But Gardiner showed very little understanding for the German position in his response, dated 19 August 1920.7 Indeed, Gardiner felt that Erman had attacked him personally, since it was not his idea to apply for Amarna: “seeing that until recently I was Honorary Secretary of the Egypt Exploration Society, the responsibility for me having applied for and obtained the concession of El-Amarna [sic] must largely rest upon my shoulders. In point of fact the idea did not originate with me.” He then sets out his view on the current political situation: Do you really imagine that the French Director of the Service of Antiquities [Pierre Lacau], who has seen one sixth of his country overrun and devastated by the German armies would willingly countenance the resumption of German excavations in Egypt, so long as he could possibly prevent it? And do you think it likely that the British who stood shoulder to shoulder with the French in defending Egypt against Turkish and German invaders, would be disposed in this matter to adopt the German point of view in preference to the French? Furthermore, Gardiner dismisses Erman’s notion of scholarship being above politics, particularly because German professors themselves forfeited any claim to such a stance when they engaged in war propaganda (for which see Böhme 1975 and von Ungern-Sternberg 1991; for Egyptology, see Raulwing and Gertzen 2012, 44–55, 68–84). Had all scholars been internationalists, had they stood entirely aloof from the actions of their governments, then I can conceive that their work might have had some just title to special consideration; but

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everywhere, as you know as well as I, the Professors, with a few signal exceptions, have been the most extreme of chauvinists. Moreover, archaeological concessions are not only a matter of mere intellectual property “but rather of the acquisition of valuable objects for national museums.” Finally, Gardiner points out to Erman that the EES was not the only applicant for the concession: I will particularly ask you to note what I know from M. Lacau to be a fact, namely that prior to our own application for El-Amarna [sic] there were before the Archaeological Committee in Cairo no less than four separate applications for that site representing three different countries. . . . If you wish it I am prepared to publish in the [EES’] Journal [of Egyptian Archaeology] both your letter and my reply to it. But I make this offer with great reluctance, as I cannot imagine that your letter could have any other effect than to harden opinion among all English-speaking scholars. In reply, Erman could only appreciate Gardiner’s frankness, writing on 20 August 1920: “An Ihrem Briefe hat mir das ehrliche Aussprechen Ihrer Ansicht gefallen, aber im Übrigen hat er mich mehr betrübt als ich sagen kann.” Erman—obviously unaware of Gardiner’s support for the EES application—had expected his British colleague to stand up for the German cause. Disregarding Gardiner’s realpolitik approach, Erman insists on German “moral right” (moralisches Recht): Aber es giebt [sic] neben dem formellen Recht auch ein moralisches und dies galt bisher als das höhere und wenn es in der Politik und im kaufmännischen Geschäft leider manchmal ignorirt [sic] wurde, so lag darin auch nach unserer veralteten Anschauung ein Makel für diese. Dass wir ein solches moralisches Recht durch unsere mehrjährige und gewissenhafte Arbeit in Tell Amarna erworben hatten, dass werden Sie ja wohl nicht bestreiten. Erman’s allusion to kaufmännische Geschäfte (roughly: business relationships) might even be interpreted as an echo of German war propaganda conceptualizing “perfidious Albion” as a nation of capitalists (see Hoffmann 1991, 49). He simply repudiates the idea that the Germans had been searching for “valuable museum objects” (Museumsstücke) at Amarna and instead insists that Borchardt’s excavations had been focused on architectural history: Es klingt aus Ihrem Briefe auch heraus, als glaubten Sie, die in Tell Amarna gefundenen Museumsstücke seien für uns die Hauptsache bei der

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Thomas L. Gertzen Grabung gewesen—es ist gerade das Gegenteil der Fall. Wir sind nach Tell Amarna gegangen, um dort zu lernen, wie eine Stadt des neuen Reiches aussieht, im Ganzen und im Einzelnen, und haben lediglich darauf hin gegraben.

It is the fait accompli, the fact that British Egyptologists did not try to contact their German colleagues before applying for the concession, which is particularly annoying to Erman. Gardiner’s mention of French suffering as a justification also led Erman to give an account of the German hardships: Und wenn Sie fragen, wie ein Franzose gegen Deutsche noch gerecht sein könne, nachdem ein Drittel [sic—Gardiner mentioned one sixth] seines Landes verwüstet sei, so bitte ich Sie auch zu bedenken, wie schwer es uns Deutschen fallen muss, gerecht zu bleiben, gegen die Urheber aller der Greuel [sic], die wir erlitten haben, vor allem auch der Hungerblockade, die noch nach dem Waffenstillstand fast eine Million von Frauen, Kindern und alten Leuten dem langsamen Tode übergeben hat. Und doch bestreben wir uns, gerecht zu bleiben und den Hass nicht in die Wissenschaft hineinzutragen. Aber dazu gehört leider auch, dass unsere Gegner aus dem Kriege die gleiche Gesinnung betätigen und dazu scheint mir nach den neuesten Erlebnissen leider nicht viel Aussicht. Personally suffering from the bottleneck that inhibited the flow of essential goods in Germany at that time, Erman is disgusted with the British Politics of Hunger (Vincent 1985). He concludes his letter on a very personal level: “denn ich habe in Ihnen immer etwas wie einen jüngeren Bruder gesehen, bei dem ich eine solche Verschiedenheit der Gesinnung nicht für möglich hielt.”8 A CHANGE IN TONE Gardiner expressed his “disappointment” with Erman’s letter in his response of 3 September 1920: “though I clearly saw from the first that you had definitely committed yourself to a condemnation of the action of the Egypt Exploration Society, and that no explanations would bring you to view the matter in a different light.” He seems to have been particularly offended by the term “robbery” employed by Erman: “what you describe as Raub would necessarily be regarded by the average Frenchman or Englishman as an obvious compensatory act of justice.” Whether this remark should be considered as an emotional reaction to Erman’s accusations or even as some sign of a guilty conscience, it definitely shows a certain shift in Gardiner’s argument. The appropriation of the formerly German concession at Amarna by the British is not merely to be regarded as a perfectly legal act but also as compensation for French and

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British losses during the war—at least by the “average Englishman.” If there had been a chance for a renewal of the German concession, Gardiner states: “I should not have supported the [British] demand, for I have the greatest admiration for Borchardt’s work, which seems to me very nearly ideal scientifically.” After this more conciliatory remark, Gardiner himself expresses his personal disappointment with Erman: “it is a bitter experience to find an old friend so ready to believe the worst. . . . Indeed I should find your present attitude to me very difficult to forgive.”9 Both men seem to have wanted rapprochement, since Erman replied on 12 September 1920: “Könnten wir eine halbe Stunde zusammen sprechen, so würden wir vermutlich sehen, dass wir im Grunde ziemlich gleich denken.” Somewhat typically for the representatives of the Berlin School, Erman tries to ease the situation by a lexicographical discussion of the term Raub: Ich will nur noch bemerken, dass der Ausdruck ‘Raub’, der Sie zu kränken scheint, nach unserem gewöhnlichen Sprachgebrauch nichts weiter bedeutet als ein Fortnehmen ohne Zustimmung des Besitzers, eine Handlung die im Kriege als erlaubt gilt, im Frieden aber nicht stattfinden sollte.10 The letter ends with a peace proposal: “Also, lieber Gardiner, ich halte meinerseits an der alten Freundschaft und der alten Liebe fest, an der ich auch bei Ihnen nie gezweifelt habe und nie zweifeln werde.”11 Gardiner happily accepted on 25 September 1920: “it [Erman’s letter] was so much more friendly and conciliating in tone that I too for my part, wish to forget all this unpleasant discussion and to return to the old relations with you.” Taking up Erman’s proposal of détente, Gardiner gives further reasons for the recent events, somehow trying to disperse responsibility but also carefully avoiding placing the blame at the doorstep of someone else: “in Paris I saw Lacau and every word he uttered confirmed me in my view that on no account would any German work be permitted in Egypt for some years to come.” Gardiner continued: “I do not believe that the feeling that lies behind this policy is entirely a feeling of resentment.” Instead, he then hinted at the imperial position of Great Britain and France in Egypt in the context of growing Egyptian nationalism: “it is the consideration that the Egyptians themselves would certainly interpret concessions made to Germany at the present moment as a sign of weakness on the part of the Entente [Cordiale].”12 Erman and Gardiner apparently overcame their differences. Shortly thereafter, in a letter sent to Erman on 15 August 1921, Gardiner was moved to write: “what a fatality it is, how disastrous for the science, that Germans cannot be working in Egypt still. But I foresee that even if politically that became possible, financial difficulties would be a very serious obstacle.”13 On 12 April 1923, Gardiner even begins to miss the Germans in Egypt: “the disorder in the Cairo Museum is terrible, and I truly wish two or three ‘tüchtige Deutschen’ [sic; the meaning is “efficient Germans”] could be here to help put the place in order.”14 National sentiments linked to professional

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ambitions were part and parcel of the postwar Egyptological world. However, personal relationships played a role, too. CONCLUSION The loss of the excavation concession at Amarna sent severe shock waves through German Egyptology, which had been under the illusion that scholarship would not be influenced by political events and that “intellectual property” would outlast the chauvinistic zeitgeist of the postwar period. From the British perspective, Germany and German scholars had forfeited their moral rights to any prewar privileges, and, since alleged French thirst for revenge and the fear of rising Egyptian nationalism would prevent German engagement in Egypt in the near future, the British not only felt that they had the right but perhaps also felt that they had the obligation to stand in. The correspondence of Adolf Erman and Alan Gardiner in the early 1920s reflects this situation, in addition to the lingering effects of wartime propaganda. However, the correspondence of the two scholars also reflects the effects of personal and professional ambition within these national contexts. Gardiner had left Berlin in 1911 because Erman could not offer him a position within the Berlin School—according to Hermann Grapow, because Gardiner was a foreigner. Additionally, Gardiner later stated that he missed “formal acknowledgement” of his contribution to the Wörterbuch. And, indeed, Erman had planned the project as an expressly German one, albeit one that would include international participation (see Gertzen 2013a, 151–52, 242–44). Meanwhile, the year 1914 not only witnessed the outbreak of World War I but also the appearance of the first English language periodical for Egyptology, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, published by the EES. If only tangentially mentioned in their correspondence, Gardiner had also begun to write his own grammar on 4 November 1919.15 The Anglo-Saxon branch of Berlin School Egyptology was becoming increasingly independent. However, this independence did not portend a permanent split. While Egyptology was structured around a distinctively national self-perception of scholars and was also undoubtedly marked by competition, the discipline was fundamentally based upon personal relationships and/or research networks. Erman and Gardiner’s later correspondence illustrates this point.

NOTES 1. Bremer Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek: Nachlass (correspondence) of Adolf Erman (BStUB). 2. Griffith Institute, University of Oxford (Griffith): Gardiner MSS. 42.93.68– 130, Adolf Erman Letters 1902 to 1922.

The Anglo-Saxon Branch of the Berlin School 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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BStUB. Griffith. BStUB. Griffith. BStUB. Griffith. BStUB. It should not go unmentioned that Erman’s definition applies more accurately to the German Diebstahl, which means theft. Griffith. BStUB. BStUB. BStUB. BStUB.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Unpublished Sources Bremer Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Nachlass of Adolf Erman. Griffith Institute, University of Oxford.

Published Sources Bierbrier, M., ed. 2012. Who Was Who in Egyptology? 4th ed. London: Egypt Exploration Society. Böhme, K. 1975. Aufrufe und Reden deutscher Professoren im Ersten Weltkrieg. Stuttgart, Germany: Reclam. Brunner, H. 1966. “Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner.” Archiv für Orientforschung 21: 269–70. Crüsemann, N. 2003. “Von Assur nach Berlin: der lange Weg der Funde vom Grabungsort ins Museum.” In Wiedererstehendes Assur: 100 Jahre deutsche Ausgrabungen in Assyrien, edited by J. Marzahn and B. Salje, 53–63. Mainz am Rhein, Germany: Philipp von Zabern. Erman, J. P. A. 1878. Die Pluralbindung des Ägyptischen. Leipzig, Germany: Engelmann. ———. 1894. Ägyptische Grammatik: mit Schrifttafel, Litteratur und Wörterverzeichnis. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard. ———. 1929. Mein Werden und mein Wirken: Erinnerungen eines alten Berliner Gelehrten. Leipzig, Germany: Von Quelle und Meyer. Gardiner, A. H. 1927. Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1962. My Working Years. London: Coronet Press. Gertzen, T. L. 2009. “Ägyptologie zwischen Archäologie und Sprachwissenschaft: die Korrespondenz zwischen A. Erman und W. M. Flinders Petrie.” Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 136: 114–25. ———. 2010a. “The Anglo-Saxon-Branch of Berlin School: The War Correspondence (1914–1916) of J. H. Breasted (1865–1935) and J. P. A. Erman (1854–1937).” Egyptian & Egyptological Documents, Archives, Libraries 2: 147–68. ———. 2010b. “Der angebliche ägyptische Bericht über die Umschiffung Afrikas: eine wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Einordnung.” Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 137: 104–12.

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———. 2012. “Denn was ich Ihnen als Phantasie bezeichnet habe, das liegt seit vorgestern im Museum: einige Marginalien zum Ankauf der Keilschriftkorrespondenz aus Amarna durch J. P. A. Erman.” Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 139: 28–37. ———. 2013a. École de Berlin und “Goldenes Zeitalter” (1882–1914) der Ägyptologie als Wissenschaft: das Lehrer-Schüler-Verhältnis von Ebers, Erman und Sethe. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 2013b. “ ‘In the Light of Amarna’: Centenary of the Nefertiti Bust Discovery Exhibition at the Berlin Egyptian Museum.” Kmt: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt 24 (1): 18–35. ———. 2013c. “Brennpunkt ZÄS: die redaktionelle Korrespondenz ihres Gründers H. Brugsch und die Bedeutung von Fachzeitschriften für die Genese der Ägyptologie Deutschlands.” In Ägyptologen und Ägyptologien zwischen Kaiserreich und Gründung der beiden deutschen Staaten, edited by S. Bickel, H.-W. Fischer-Elfert, A. Loprieno, and S. Richter, 63–112. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Grapow, H. 1973. Meine Begegnung mit einigen Ägyptologen. Berlin: Richard Seitz. Hoffmann, C. 1991. “Eduard Meyers England und Amerikabild.” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin 40: 45–53. Janssen, R. M. 1992. The First Hundred Years: Egyptology at University College London, 1892–1992. London: University College London. Jonker, G. 2002. “Gelehrte Damen, Ehefrauen, Wissenschaftlerinnen: die Mitarbeit der Frauen in der Orientalischen Kommission der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (1907–1945).” In Frauen in Akademie und Wissenschaft: Arbeitsorte und Forschungspraktiken, 1700–2000, edited by T. Wobbe, 125–66. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Kröger, M. 1991. ‘Le bâton égyptien’—der ägyptische Knüppel: die Rolle der ‘ägyptischen Frage’ in der deutschen Außenpolitik von 1875/76 bis zur ‘Entente Cordiale’. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Legge, F. 1913. “New Light on Sequence Dating.” Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 35: 101–13. Marchand, S. 2000. “The End of Egyptomania: German Scholarship and the Banalization of Egypt, 1830–1914.” In Ägyptomanie: Europäische Ägyptenimagination von der Antike bis heute, edited by W. Seipel, 125–33. Wien, Austria: Gingko. Matthes, O. 2000. James Simon: Mäzen im Wilhelminischen Zeitalter. Berlin: Bostelmann & Siebenhaar. ———. 2012. “Ludwig Borchardt, James Simon und der Umgang mit der bunten Nofretete-Büste im ersten Jahr nach ihrer Entdeckung.” In Im Licht von Amarna: 100 Jahre Fund der Nofretete, edited by F. Seyfried, 427–37. Petersberg, Germany: Michael Imhof. Müller, H. W. 1965. “Sir Alan Gardiner.” Jahrbuch der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (no vol. no. given): 167–74. Polz, D. 2008. “Das Deutsche Haus in Theben: die Möglichkeit gründlicher Arbeit und frischen Schaffens.” In Begegnung mit der Vergangenheit: 100 Jahre in Ägypten; Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Kairo 1907–2007, edited by G. Dreyer and D. Polz, 25–31. Mainz am Rhein, Germany: Philipp von Zabern. Raulwing, P., and T. L. Gertzen. 2012. “Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr von Bissing im Blickpunkt ägyptologischer und zeithistorischer Forschungen: die Jahre 1914– 1926.” Journal of Egyptian History 5: 34–119. Rebenich, S. 2006. “Adolf Erman und die Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften.” In Ägyptologie als Wissenschaft: Adolf Erman (1854–1937) in seiner Zeit, edited by B. U. Schipper, 340–70. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Rosen-Prest, V. 2005. “Zwischen den Welten: Paul Erman, ein Berliner Hugenotte der vierten Generation.” In Zuwanderungsland Deutschland: Die Hugenotten, edited by S. Beneke and H. Ottomeyer, 135–42. Berlin: DHM Edition Minerva.

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Savoy, B. 2011. Kunstraub: Napoleons Konfiszierungen in Deutschland und die europäischen Folgen. Wien, Austria: Böhlau. Schenkel, W. 2006. “Bruch und Aufbruch: Adolf Erman und die Geschichte der Ägyptologie.” In Ägyptologie als Wissenschaft: Adolf Erman (1854–1937) in seiner Zeit, edited by B. U. Schipper, 224–47. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Schipper, B. U., ed. 2006. Ägyptologie als Wissenschaft: Adolf Erman (1854–1937) in seiner Zeit. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Schoellgen, G. 1984. Imperialismus und Gleichgewicht: Deutschland, England und die orientalische Frage 1871–1914. München: Oldenbourg. Sethe, K. 1921. Die Ägyptologie: Zweck, Inhalt und Bedeutung dieser Wissenschaft und Deutschlands Anteil an ihrer Entwicklung. Leipzig, Germany: Hinrichs. Ungern-Sternberg, J. von. 1991. “Eduard Meyer und die deutsche Propaganda zu Beginn des ersten Weltkrieges.” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin 40: 37–43. Vincent, C. P. 1985. The Politics of Hunger: The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1915– 1919. London: Ohio University Press. Voss, S. 2012a. “La répresentation égyptologique allemande en Égypte et sa perception par les égyptologues français du XIXe au milieu du XXe siècle.” Revue Germanique Internationale 16: 171–92. ———. 2012b. “Archäologie und Politik: Nofretete und das Kaiserlich Deutsche Institut für ägyptische Altertumskunde in Kairo—eine Analyse.” Antike Welt 6/2012: 17–22. ———. 2012c. “Die Rückgabeforderung der Nofretete-Büste im Jahre 1925 aus deutscher Sicht.” In Im Licht von Amarna: 100 Jahre Fund der Nofretete, edited by F. Seyfried, 460–468. Petersberg, Germany: Michael Imhof. ———. 2013. Die Geschichte der Abteilung Kairo des DAI im Spannungsfeld deutscher politischer Interessen: Geschichte des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts im. 20 Jahrhundert, vol. 1, 1881–1929. Rahden, Germany: Marie Leidorf. Voss, S., and T. L. Gertzen. 2013. “Germans at El Amarna 1911–1914.” Kmt: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt 24 (1): 36–48. Voss, S., and C. von Pilgrim. 2008. “Ludwig Borchardt und die Deutschen Interessen am Nil.” In Das Grosse Spiel: Archäologie und Politik, edited by C. Trümpler, 294–305. Köln, Germany: DuMont. Wilkinson, J. G. 1837. Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians. London: J. Murray. Wölffling, S. 1960. “Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Deutschen Instituts für ägyptische Altertumskunde zu Kairo.” Unpublished PhD diss., Martin-LutherUniversität Halle-Wittenberg.

4

The Cursed Discipline? The Peculiarities of Egyptology at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century Juan Carlos Moreno García

When Steven Spielberg released his acclaimed movie Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, it was hardly a surprise that an archaeological adventure aiming to reach vast audiences was set in Egypt. Later on, in 1996, Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient again captured the imagination of a worldwide public with a romantic story where love, spying, archaeology, and adventure evolved together in the Egyptian deserts. All the necessary ingredients were thus ready to strike a chord once more in people’s love for exotica and romanticism. As an Egyptologist trained and working in France, I have had many occasions to meet colleagues from other disciplines amazed at the apparently inexhaustible appeal of ancient Egypt to contemporary audiences. Occasionally, ancient Rome or biblical stories gain a similar media presence. Yet, it is surprising to realize how ancient Mesopotamia, in contrast, has failed to become equally popular in spite of its immense archaeological wealth and similar environmental setting. Even in slightly more extravagant situations—like meeting people proclaiming themselves to be the reincarnation of some celebrity of the past—the supremacy of ancient Egypt is simply overwhelming; which Egyptologist has never met an enthusiast amateur claiming to be Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, or Cleopatra’s reincarnation? On the contrary, poor Assyriologist colleagues find it really hard to meet actual re-embodiments of, say, Marduk-nadin-ahhe or Nabu-apla-iddina. However, both Egypt and Mesopotamia had fascinated Western observers until the construction of Egyptology and Assyriology as modern scientific disciplines in the late nineteenth century. At that point, ancient Egypt continued to exert and to increase her powerful magnetism, while ancient Mesopotamia became more and more confined within the limits of scholarly culture. Even nowadays, as disciplines such as economics replace the humanities as central to the work of the university and society at large, ancient Egypt possesses a huge valency in both popular and elite culture; new exhibitions, another book on the pyramids, or fresh notices about King Tut are avidly consumed by the public. However, the discipline has paid a very high price for this popularity. A vicious circle has established the image of Egyptology and Egyptologists as inseparable from show and mystery, as most of the discipline’s

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archaeological work is devoted to the discovery of new tombs and temples, thus entertaining the popular image of Egyptologists as true embodiments of Indiana Jones (cf. Tejerizo 2011). As a consequence, future discoveries will fuel the excitement of the public and of sponsors, attract the attention of the media, and promote emulation among archaeologists, thus paving the way for further research on tombs, temples, and prestigious residential areas. In sharp contrast, other aspects of Egyptian civilization still remain underrepresented in contemporary research, like social and economic history or urban and landscape archaeology. As a result, disciplinary reputations continue to be built up more on spectacular findings than on historical or sociological thought, to the point that Donald Redford’s (1979, 7) statement continues to be valid: “the idea of advancement in the discipline centres more on the discovery of a new stela than on a new interpretation.” More than thirty years ago, the groundbreaking book Egyptology and the Social Sciences (Weeks 1979) sought to open new paths of research into areas where wider scholarly contact was considered possible and stimulating for Egyptology. These paths have certainly been followed (see, e.g., Bietak et al. 2010; Kemp 2006; Kemp and Stevens 2010; Kemp and VogelsangEastwood 2001; Lustig 1997; Moreno García 2006, 2010, 2014, and in press; Nicholson and Shaw 2000; Wilson 2009) but still remain a conspicuously minority pursuit within our discipline; thus, for instance, the recent book Egyptology Today (R. H. Wilkinson 2008) contains, significantly, no chapter at all devoted to social and economic history. I have tried to explain elsewhere why such lack of interest in social and economic matters continues to pervade Egyptology (Moreno García 2009). Broadly speaking, “spiritual” subjects (religion, art, literature) are privileged, while others, more “materialist” (economy, sociology, habitat), are neglected. All the same, the writing of social and economic history within Egyptology is not the only victim of this situation. Egyptology itself remains highly isolated, and, as a consequence, comparative studies and interdisciplinary research are relatively uncommon, while Egyptological contributions to historical debates are rare and, quite often, trivial.1 A further trend sees Egyptology more and more parceled into subdisciplines and chronological specialties with little contact among themselves and where transversal research is rare. However, far from being anxious about this atypical, frustrating, and, in the end, menacing situation, many Egyptologists seem apparently not concerned by it at all and continue to invoke the so-called peculiarity of our discipline in order to justify its excessive insularity and the persistence in many cases of outmoded and unimaginative agendas of research. I am consistently astonished when many colleagues from France, Italy, Germany, and Spain continue to declare, in private, that the only and true object of Egyptology should be the study of “beautiful objects.” Why? In this chapter, I suggest that the question to be answered is that of why Egyptologists think of Egyptology as a “different” or “peculiar” discipline.

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“ETERNAL EGYPT”: THE CREATION AND ENDURANCE OF A MYTH To explain this situation, the myth of “eternal Egypt” provides a good starting point. As I have tried to explain elsewhere (Moreno García 2009), such a construction is inextricably linked to the declining cultural values of the European high bourgeoisie at the end of the nineteenth century. Artists and intellectuals sought desperately for paradises of beauty, charm, and conservative order as they felt menaced by the rising power of the masses and their political organization (Burrow 2000; Glaser 1976; Le Rider 1990; Schorske 1980). Not by chance, ancient Egypt and modern Tibet became regarded as repositories of arcane wisdom, spiritual values, social order, and undemocratic but paternal leadership. “Tradition” is the keyword. Such conservative orders, preserved for centuries until their supposed final extinction at the point of contact with “modernity” (i.e., foreign influence), were evoked with nostalgia. As hierarchy and unchanging social structures had supposedly proved to be operative for centuries in Egypt and Tibet, the two countries constituted a prestigious precedent to evoke when dealing with the uncertainties of the turn of the twentieth century. The powerful imagery associated with this interpretation is well known: paternal pharaohs governed a submissive population and provided for their needs, while the biblical prestige of the story of Joseph further enhanced this stereotype. Ancient Egypt became a lost paradise and an enchanted land of mystery, with Egyptologists playing the role of zealous keepers and unique interpreters of pharaoh’s achievements, a position ultimately threatened by “materialist” approaches or by exigent intellectual agendas. I feel that most Egyptologists are not really aware of the burden and intellectual cost of this reactionary utopia, as the myth of “eternal Egypt” and its by-products continue to hamper our comprehension of the pharaonic world. As a consequence, religion and the archaeology of “beautiful objects” and monuments continue to have a disproportionate weight in Egyptology, thus totally distorting our understanding of the pharaonic past. What is more, the preferential attention devoted to works of art has traditionally encouraged an elitist attitude halfway between antiquarianism, connoisseurship, and romantic archaeology, which further enlarges the divorce between Egyptology and the social sciences, as if, in the end, only masterpieces deserve the consideration of Egyptologists. Hence, aestheticism, spiritual values, and nostalgia for a conservative order happened to meet again. In some extreme cases, the history of entire periods has been reduced to the mere enumeration of statues and monuments, deprived of any intelligible interpretive framework and accompanied by hasty historical analogies, as if the objects could talk directly by themselves. Vercoutter’s (1992) L’Égypte et la vallée du Nil: des origines à la fin de l’Ancien Empire is a good example of such a historicist approach.

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However, the attractive combination of myth, beautiful objects, and treasure hunt explains the popularity of Egyptology and its close contact with numerous amateurs organized in (usually) nonprofessional societies. No other civilization of the past enjoys, to my knowledge, the privilege of having a learned society consecrated to it in almost every important city of the Western world. In some cases, the financial support of these societies is crucial for selected archaeological projects, conferences, and even research. But I feel that their members expect in return that a certain image of ancient Egypt remains intact, with the obvious exceptions of the most important societies, like the Egypt Exploration Society, the Société Française d’Egyptologie, or those devoted to specific sites, like the multinational Hierakonpolis Expedition (Hierakonpolis n.d.). To put it another way, many such societies may carry an equivocal message to Egyptologists, as to strengthen the feeling that only spectacular discoveries, evocations of a lost paradise, and traditional interpretations are worth seeking. But the preference for beautiful objects and monuments has also crystallized in a powerful network where certain museums and archaeological institutions (for example, the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale) have played an essential role. Collecting, cataloging, and studying individual objects within the framework of art history and philology have then been preferred to historical interpretations, which, in any case, were not the main concern of museums. As for archaeological institutions, much of their effort consisted for decades in digging and controlling the concessions for certain excavations. Thus, work encouraged by these institutions and their sponsors sought to increase their collections, and the only way to achieve this goal was by digging sites able to provide prestigious objects before “the competition” could gain control over them (Bierbrier 2003, 69–75; Reid 2002, 172–212). Temples and tombs were privileged again. As for universities, Egyptology has traditionally occupied a strange position: philology and object-oriented research, usually in the framework of outmoded perspectives, have transformed Egyptology into a discipline whose practices, concepts, and intellectual concerns are simply alien to current debates in ancient history and archaeology. The study of individual objects or limited sets of them and the possibility of finding new items in the next digging campaign have had a perverse consequence: historical analysis is relegated to the future, while archaeology dominates history, instead of putting archaeology at the service of historical problems that should be explored, proven, or rejected by specific archaeological projects. Under these conditions, the gap between overly specialized research and general synthesis is usually filled by naive interpretations, as Redford (1979) rightly stressed three decades ago. The fate reserved to groundbreaking works like Kemp’s (2006) Anatomy of a Civilization, Trigger et al.’s (1983) Ancient Egypt: A Social History, or Liverani’s (1990) Prestige and Interest outside the English-speaking world is highly significant: they are usually ignored.

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Finally, popular culture and the media consider Egyptology as a provider of entertainment and illusion for our rather gloomy present. Hence, sponsors of Egyptological research frequently expect some kind of show and publicity in return, thus strengthening old practices and themes while “bookish” and different approaches are relegated. In some extreme instances, forgeries inspired by Egyptian antiquities may appear as a temptingly quick way for gaining celebrity, prestige, and wealth. The Spanish “Veleia Affair” (Elkin 2009) is quite noteworthy: in 2006, a team of Basque archaeologists announced the discovery of several hundred ostraca—ancient potsherds with writing on them—in a Roman town dated to the third century AD. The discovery turned out to be a forgery, but it included false inscriptions with mentions of names of ancient Egyptian royals, such as Nefertiti, Nefertari (written in Spanish!), Ramses, and Seti. That Egypt should be present in the forgery in order to gain an easy popularity and the attention of the media is quite significant in itself. THE CONSTRUCTION OF EGYPTOLOGY AS A PECULIAR SCIENTIFIC FIELD The many peculiarities exhibited by Egyptology might be better understood when considering how the discipline took shape (Vernus 2009, 285–98). A crucial element is the idiosyncratic construction and reproduction of Egyptology as a scientific field (in Bourdieu’s 1994 sense). Two aspects are intrinsically related in this respect: the first concerning the nature of the sources currently used in Egyptology; the second concerning the academic practices built upon them. As stated above, most of the archaeological and written sources available to Egyptologists are anything but representative of pharaonic society. This situation is not only due to the circumstances that determined these sources’ destruction, decay, or survival. The choices, priorities, and academic background of Egyptologists themselves have also focused on very specific themes of research leading to an overrepresentation of monuments and texts, which may themselves be roughly labeled under the categories of “official,”“elite,”“prestige,” and “religious” (temples, tombs, palaces, funerary papyri, administrative documents produced by cult institutions and personnel, etc.). In contrast, settlement and landscape archaeology as well as sources derived from domestic, nonofficial, and nonreligious contexts have been largely overlooked. This situation means that the vast majority of ancient Egyptian society has been relatively ignored, despite the widespread consideration of presently utilized sources as representative of Egyptian society as a whole (cf., for example, the so-called scenes “de la vie quotidienne”: Vandier 1964 and 1969; cf. Fitzenreiter and Herb 2006). The “Egyptian exception” (Baines and Yoffee 1998, 203; O’Connor 1997), with its emphasis on religion, artistic masterpieces, (ancient Egyptian) isolation, and

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conservatism has nothing to do with the ancient record (still to be explored in many aspects) but corresponds, in fact, to an “Egyptological exception” made up of disciplinary choices. Such “Egyptological exception” is the consequence of the isolation of Egyptologists themselves. In spite of the discipline’s disproportionate visibility in the media, Egyptology remains a rather modest field not only within the humanities but also within the more restricted domain of ancient studies. In fact, the number of Egyptologists and Egyptological departments is currently rather small, even in countries with a solid academic tradition devoted to the study of the ancient world, as the list of scholars and academic centers provided by the International Association of Egyptologists shows (available via IAE n.d.). However, the collections of Egyptian antiquities in the hands of museums, private owners, and academic institutions are exceedingly vast. As a consequence, a relative subordination of researchers to the objects preserved in these institutions (and especially to those objects considered the most attractive and idiosyncratic, like works of art and religious texts) has left its mark on the development of Egyptology, in particular when establishing disciplinary priorities and concentrations of research. Another consequence is that many Egyptological institutions were—and still are—financed and sponsored by states (chiefly in Europe) and that, for many years, museums and archaeological institutes were involved in nationalist competition with their counterparts abroad (see, e.g., Colla 2007; Jeffreys 2003a; Montserrat 2000; Reid 2002). States were thus in a privileged position to dictate which activities were to be financed and supported, considered culturally relevant, or, simply, of national interest, thus shaping the main axes of Egyptological research. A second consequence of the reduced academic weight of Egyptology is that it has taken a long time for specialized subdisciplines in Egyptology to develop and become autonomous fields of research. Furthermore, only recently have these subdisciplines started to adopt sophisticated research methodologies from fields such as literary criticism or settlement archaeology. As a result, Egyptologists have only recently been able to enter into dialogue with neighboring fields of research within ancient history, anthropology, or archaeology on such grounds: the regrettable consequences of this situation are evident within Egyptological research on art, literature, economy, sociology, history, and religion (Moreno García, 2006, 2009, and 2010; O’Connor 1997; Redford 1979, 2003, and 2008). Indeed, it is only in recent times that literary studies have departed from this tendency (Loprieno 1996; Parkinson 2002 and 2009). Several reasons can explain this situation. On the one hand, the term “Egyptologist” evoked until quite recently a professional able to show some degree of competence in many different fields, leaving little time and possibility for a true specialization in each one of them. On the other hand, the priorities, needs, and habits of a philological and “museological” perspective emphasized discovery, restoration, classification, and publication of texts and objects at the expense of further

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in-depth analysis and the use of sophisticated methodologies developed in other fields of research. Thus, for instance, art and literary history in Egyptology have too often consisted in the past in little more than descriptions of the objects studied. Finally, the fortunes of such subdisciplines were inextricably linked to the choices, priorities, and academic possibilities of a tiny number of talented academic personalities, thus often making the transmission of this work to the next generation problematic. Agut-Labordère has shown, for example, that the history of Demotic studies is the story of a succession of brilliant but isolated personalities whose erudition and scholarship died to a certain extent with them, thus forcing the subdiscipline to be reinvented by the next generation of scholars (2010). Meanwhile, the small number of Egyptologists working in universities has meant that the bulk of their teaching and academic activity has inevitably been devoted to the basic rudiments of ancient Egyptian culture (language, writing systems, epigraphy, and papyrology) as well as to its more idiosyncratic cultural markers (literature, religion, and art history). It has also meant that a rather restricted number of professors, directors of institutes, and heads of collections have exerted a considerable power over the careers and thematic choices of students and employees, especially in countries where marked academic hierarchies and educational centralization conferred a conspicuous authority to well-placed mandarins (Vernus 2009, 285–98). Individuals, not teams, have prevailed in Egyptological research, to the point that single personalities continued to dominate and shape entire areas of research until the last decades of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the work of these individuals was heavily influenced by the very nature of the collections preserved in archaeological institutions, museums, and universities. Such collections, made up of prestigious objects mainly found in rather circumscribed elite sites (temples, tombs, palaces), favored approaches that emphasized religion, literature, and art history at the expense of history and the social sciences, thus disregarding analytical tools other than philology as secondary. Not surprisingly, description and source-knowledge have too frequently been mistaken for true analysis. Under these circumstances, philology, digging, and the study of beautiful objects left little time, opportunity, or consideration for more in-depth attention to theoretical or comparative issues or, simply, for dialogue with other disciplines. Institutionalization of these practices, in addition to connected archaeological priorities and choices, has perpetuated practices, perspectives, and traditions that have made Egyptology a rather isolated, conservative, and bounded discipline, dominated by philology and still, in many cases, by old-fashioned archaeological concerns. Consequently, while the number of ancient Egyptian remains is simply overwhelming, Egyptology finds it difficult to integrate this rich heritage within sophisticated social and historical narratives, even less to contribute in any stimulating manner to current discussions in ancient history, archaeology, anthropology, and the social sciences. Academic isolation, then, seems largely responsible for the

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common assumption among social scientists that ancient Egypt was dominated by religion and conservative social practices, while economy, politics, social conflict, or geopolitical concerns appear almost as nonexistent. The fatal consequence is the reinforcement of the myths of “eternal Egypt” and of the “Egyptian exception,” bolstering well-established Egyptological practices and meaning that ancient historians disregard pharaonic Egypt as a somewhat esoteric and, in the end, incomprehensible world (Jeffreys 2003a and b; Redford 2003 and 2008; Rowlandson 2003; Shaw 2004, 25–28; Valbelle 2003). A third consequence is the weakness of networked and integrated research within Egyptology itself. For the sake of academic convenience, the periodization of the long history of ancient Egypt into various distinct eras has led to the gradual consolidation of historical sibdisciplines linked to these eras that have become progressively isolated, thus making transversal studies difficult. The fact that, within each of these periods, language and writing systems appear rather distinctive, even quite different from those of other times, has had the regrettable effect that specialists of a given period are not necessarily familiar with the sources, current debates, and historical problems characteristic of other eras. Even the nature and composition of the main corpus of sources preserved for each period are rather idiosyncratic and hardly comparable to the contents of those from other periods. This point is particularly true for the first millennium BC, traditionally regarded as rather distinctive and somewhat detached from the “normal” course of pharaonic history, due to both historiographic prejudices (a “decadent” age defined by political division, foreign influence, and recurrent invasions) and the difficult writing systems then employed (Demotic, abnormal hieratic, epigraphic cursive forms; for which see Lloyd 2000, 369 and Morkot 1999, 139). Broadly speaking, two features have contributed to the lack of integration within Egyptology. On the one hand, the weight of individuals working in isolation within their respective areas of research and academic centers, coupled with the institutional makeup of Egyptology, meant that networks and teams were difficult to create, maintain, and reproduce, the only exceptions being long-term archaeological projects and basic philological tools like Adolf Erman’s ancient Egyptian dictionary project (for Erman, see Schipper 2006). For example, international congresses focused on collaborative research have only become common in recent times. The International Congress(es) of Egyptology have only been held since the 1970s (compare with the Rencontres Assyriologiques Internationales, held since 1950), and, in sharp contrast with their Assyriological counterpart, they have been never devoted to or intended to provide the state-of-the-art on specific topics. Rather, the meetings appear as a massive, patchy succession of communications instead of a truly stimulating forum of research and of interdisciplinary dialogue. Nevertheless, periodic congresses like Abusir and Saqqara (for the first, see Bárta and Krejčí 2000) or Egypt at Its Origins (for

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the first, see Hendrickx et al. 2004) are good examples of the potential of such meetings and suggest more productive paths of research. However, I think that the peculiarities and isolation of Egyptology also require further explanation. A comparable discipline like Assyriology has succeeded in addressing discussions in ancient history and has enlarged its foci of research to new topics and perspectives, thus escaping a narrow philological basis: archaeological surveys were introduced in the 1930s (T. J. Wilkinson 2003, 10–11), and social and economic history have been well rooted since the middle of the twentieth century (Van de Mieroop 1999, 173–74); scholars like Gelb, Liverani, or Jursa, among many others, have regularly participated in and stimulated discussions in ancient history (Gelb 1980; Jursa 2010; Liverani 2005). This point is the more significant when considering that Assyriology, like Egyptology, also deals with extensive bodies of religious texts. The key, once more, is the weight of beautiful objects and spectacular discoveries in Egyptology, still defining many of the priorities of research in our discipline. A new tomb or another decorated temple are (at first sight) immediately accessible to a nonspecialist eye, and, consequently, they are more easily consumed by the public and the media than cuneiform tablets with very specialized administrative and juridical contents. Additionally, beautiful objects and monuments, as well as a certain kind of archaeological research still enveloped in a romantic aura, are certainly crucial in entertaining the myth of ancient Egypt as a lost paradise zealously guarded by Egyptologists themselves. This reason is why, in spite of the concern about the rapid destruction of ancient settlements in Egypt, particularly in the Nile Delta, many Egyptologists still prefer to focus their attention in digging (potentially) rich tombs in Upper Egypt or the Memphite area (Trampier in press). LOOKING TO THE FUTURE The reasons discussed above have contributed to the shaping of Egyptology as a particularly idiosyncratic field of inquiry. This idiosyncrasy is not due to an “Egyptian exception” but rather an “Egyptological exception.” Is there any chance of transforming the current dominant practices in Egyptology? I feel confident that the answer is yes, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, where collaboration between disciplines and the influence of anthropology and social history are evident in the work of some of the most innovative Egyptologists. However, considering the promising paths opened in the late 1970s and early 1980s, typified by Egyptology and the Social Sciences (Weeks 1979) and Ancient Egypt: A Social History (Trigger et al. 1983), one must admit that progress has been limited. Several reasons may be invoked. On the one hand, the rise of postmodernity and microhistory has provided a last resort for old perspectives of research, as the “end of metanarratives” justified the traditional

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attention devoted to individual objects and narrow topics. Meanwhile, the weakening of the welfare state, recent reforms of research and higher education (like the Bologna Process) in a context of severe budgetary restrictions, and, lastly, the rise of private enterprise as provider of financing, have affected research funding and precipitated the decline of “unproductive” disciplines like those within the humanities. Seeking financial support now implies “selling” a project apt to draw the attention of private enterprise and politicians; the consequence is that publicity and show are expected in return, so explaining the rapid succession of “great discoveries” of rather limited importance in recent years (usually about popular personalities of the Egyptian past and well-known archaeological sites: the pyramids, the Valley of the Kings, new tombs, etc.). Meanwhile, museums seem to repeat exhibitions on popular subjects like pyramids, pharaohs, and religion ad nauseam (cf. Pitkin 2012). Finally, the postmodern end of certainty in the contemporary world has revitalized the popular image of ancient Egypt as an ideal alternative, a lost paradise full of grace, beauty, and spirituality (Hornung 2001; MacDonald and Rice 2003). Yet, I hope that this chapter is neither overly depressing nor too much of a caricature. If I have chosen to highlight what still hampers, in my opinion, the integration of Egyptology among the social sciences and other related fields, it is because I hope that the discipline could at last enter into the mainstream of historical discussion and comparative research where its contributions would certainly be quite significant. In an academic environment dominated by severe financial restrictions, uncertainties about the role to be played by the humanities, an increasingly enterprise-oriented higher education, and the consolidation of economy, sociology, and political science as providers of historical paradigms, Egyptology has still to find its place and become able to contribute in a stimulating way to current discussions. If we Egyptologists fail in this task, the risk is great that Egyptology will be more and more deeply confined within the narrow limits of academic curiosity, an irrelevant survival of a romantic era of archaeological discoveries and antiquarianism, unable to meet the cultural needs and scientific standards of an increasingly competitive world. The task is considerable, but I think that the necessary tools are also available: interdisciplinary research projects promoted and financed by international institutions provide indispensable support to explore innovative themes of research, and a critical mass formed by professionals and students is more and more interested in topics traditionally neglected in Egyptology. Meanwhile, there is an expansion in networking activity due to a variety of congresses, workshops, collaborative projects, and internet tools used for discussion and exchange of ideas and working papers. In addition, the recent multiplication of critical approaches to the history of Egyptology and its intellectual roots is quite significant in itself and, in all probability, attests to a certain uneasiness, the feeling that things can no longer continue as they are at present (see, e.g., Moreno García 2009; Nicholson 2010; Schipper 2006; Schneider 2008 and 2012;

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Verbovsek et al. 2011). If we Egyptologists are responsible for the “Egyptological exception,” it is also our duty to reverse this situation. NOTE 1. Thus, pharaonic Egypt is conspicuously absent in some recent publications devoted to comparative studies on ancient empires and tributary states (Bang and Kolodziejczyk 2012; Manning and Morris 2005; Morris and Scheidel 2009; Van der Spek et al. 2014).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agut-Labordère, D. 2010. “Comme un phénix . . . : les réseaux de démotisants dans l’ombre de l’égyptologie.” In Connaître L‘Antiquité: individus et institutions, projets et publications, stratégies et savoirs du XVIIIe au XXIe siècles, edited by C. Bonnet, V. Krings, and C. Valenti, 65–76. Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Baines, J., and N. Yoffee. 1998. “Order, Legitimacy and Wealth in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.” In Archaic States, edited by G. N. Feinman and J. Marcus, 199–260. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Bang, P. F., and D. Kolodziejczyk, eds. 2012. Universal Empire: A Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and Representation in Eurasian History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bárta, M., and J. Krejčí, eds. 2000. Abusir and Saqqara in the Year 2000. Prague: Czech National Centre of Egyptology. Bierbrier, M. L. 2003. “Art and Antiquities for Government’s Sake.” In Views of Ancient Egypt Since Napoleon Bonaparte: Imperialism, Colonialism and Modern Appropriations, edited by D. G. Jeffreys, 69–75. London: UCL Press. Bietak, M., E. Czerny, and I. Forstner-Müller, eds. 2010. Cities and Urbanism in Ancient Egypt. Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Bourdieu, P. 1994. Raisons pratiques: sur la théorie de l’action. Paris: Seuil. Burrow, J. 2000. The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Colla, E. 2007. Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Elkin, M. 2009. “The Veleia Affair.” Archaeology 62 (5): 18. Fitzenreiter, M., and M. Herb, eds. 2006. Dekorierte Grabanlagen im Alten Reich: Methodik und Interpretation. London: Golden House Publications. Gelb, I. J. 1980. “Comparative Method in the Study of the Society and Economy of the Ancient Near East.” Rocznik Orientalistyczny 41 (2): 29–36. Glaser, H. 1976. Sigmund Freuds zwanzigstes Jahrhundert: Seelenbilder einer Epoche; Materialen und Analysen. Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser. Hendrickx, S., R. F. Friedman, K. M. Cialowicz, and M. Chlodnicki, eds. 2004. Egypt at Its Origins: Studies in Memory of Barbara Adams. Leuven and Paris: Peeters. Hierakonpolis. n.d. Hierakonpolis Online. Accessed 23 December 2013. www.hier akonpolis-online.org/ Hornung, E. 2001. The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. IAE. n.d. International Association of Egyptologists. Accessed 23 December 2013. http://iae-egyptology.org

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Jeffreys, D. G. 2003a. “Introduction—Two Hundred Years of Ancient Egypt: Modern History and Ancient Archaeology.” In Views of Ancient Egypt Since Napoleon Bonaparte: Imperialism, Colonialism and Modern Appropriations, edited by D. G. Jeffreys, 1–18. London: UCL Press. ———. 2003b. Views of Ancient Egypt Since Napoleon Bonaparte: Imperialism, Colonialism and Modern Appropriations. London: UCL Press. Jursa, M., with contributions by J. Hackl, B. Janković, K. Kleber, E. E. Payne, C. Waerzeggers, and M. Weszeli. 2010. Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC: Economic Geography, Economic Mentalities, Agriculture, the Use of Money and the Problem of Economic Growth. Münster, Germany: Ugarit. Kemp, B. J. 2006. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Kemp, B. J., and A. Stevens. 2010. Busy Lives at Amarna: Excavations in the Main City Grid 12 and the House of Ranefer, N49.18. 2 vols. London: Egypt Exploration Society. Kemp, B. J., and G. Vogelsang-Eastwood. 2001. The Ancient Textile Industry at Amarna. London: Egypt Exploration Society. Le Rider, J. 1990. Modernité viennoise et crises de l’identité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Liverani, M. 1990. Prestige and Interest: International Relations in the Near East ca. 1600–1100 B.C. Padova, Italy: Sargon. ———. 2005. “The Near East: The Bronze Age.” In The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models, edited by J. G. Manning and I. Morris, 47–57. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lloyd, A. B. 2000. “The Late Period (664–332 BC).” In The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, edited by I. Shaw, 369–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loprieno, A., ed. 1996. Ancient Egyptian Literature. Leiden, New York, and Köln: Brill. Lustig, J., ed. 1997. Anthropology and Egyptology: A Developing Dialogue. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield University Press. MacDonald, S., and M. Rice, eds. 2003. Consuming Ancient Egypt. London: UCL Press. Manning, J. G., and I. Morris. 2005. The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mieroop, M. van de. 1999. Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of History. London and New York: Routledge. Montserrat, D. 2000. Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt. London and New York: Routledge. Moreno García, J. C. 2006. “Introduction: nouvelles recherches sur l’agriculture institutionnelle et domestique en Égypte ancienne dans le contexte des sociétés antiques.” In L’agriculture institutionnelle en Égypte ancienne: État de la question et perspectives interdisciplinaires, edited by J. C. Moreno García, 11–78. Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3. ———. 2009. “From Dracula to Rostovtzeff or: The Misadventures of Economic History in Early Egyptology.” In Das Ereignis: Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Vorfall und Befund, edited by M. Fitzenreiter, 175–98. London: Golden House Publications. ———. 2010. “Introduction: les élites, le pouvoir et l’État dans les sociétés antiques; le cas de l’Égypte pharaonique.” In Élites et pouvoir en Égypte ancienne, edited by J. C. Moreno García, 11–50. Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Université Charlesde-Gaulle Lille 3. ———. 2014. “Penser l’économie pharaonique.”Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales 69: 7–38.

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———. in press. “Egypt, Old to New Kingdom (2686–1069 BC).” In The Oxford World History of Empire, edited by P. Bang, C. A. Bayly, and W. Scheidel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morkot, R. 1999. “The Origin of the ‘Napatan’ State.” In Studien zum antiken Sudan, edited by S. Wenig, 139–48. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz. Morris, I., and W. Scheidel, eds. 2009. The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nicholson, P. T. 2010. “ ‘Other than’—Egyptology as Science? A Selective History.” In Pharmacy and Medicine in Ancient Egypt, edited by J. Cockitt and R. David, 122–26. Oxford: Archaeopress. Nicholson, P. T., and I. Shaw, eds. 2000. Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Connor, D. 1997. “Ancient Egypt: Egyptological and Anthropological Perspectives.” In Anthropology and Egyptology: A Developing Dialogue, edited by J. Lustig, 13–24. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield University Press. Parkinson, R. B. 2002. Poetry and Culture in Middle Kingdom Egypt: A Dark Side to Perfection. London and New York: Continuum. ———. 2009. Reading Ancient Egyptian Poetry, among Other Stories. Malden, MA, Oxford, and Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Pitkin, M. 2012. “Invisible History: The First Intermediate Period in United Kingdom (UK) Museum Exhibitions.” In Egyptology in Australia and New Zealand 2009, edited by C. M. Knoblauch and J. C. Gill, 125–31. Oxford: Archaeopress. Redford, D. B. 1979. “Egyptology and History.” In Egyptology and the Social Sciences: Five Studies, edited by K. Weeks, 1–20. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. ———. 2003. “The Writing of the History of Ancient Egypt.” In Egyptology at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century, edited by Z. A. Hawass and L. Pinch Brock, vol. 2, History, Religion, 1–11. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. ———. 2008. “History and Egyptology.” In Egyptology Today, edited by R. H. Wilkinson, 23–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reid, D. M. 2002. Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rowlandson, J. 2003. “Approaching the Peasantry of Greco-Roman Egypt: From Rostovtzeff to Rhetoric.” In Views of Ancient Egypt Since Napoleon Bonaparte: Imperialism, Colonialism and Modern Appropriations, edited by D. G. Jeffreys, 147–52. London: UCL Press. Schipper, B. U., ed. 2006. Ägyptologie als Wissenschaft: Adolf Erman (1854–1937) in seiner Zeit. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Schneider, T. 2008. “Journal of Egyptian History: Preface.” Journal of Egyptian History 1 (1): 1–2. ———., ed. 2012. Egyptology from the First World War to the Third Reich: Ideology, Scholarship, and Individual Biographies. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Schorske, C. 1980. Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Shaw, I. 2004. Ancient Egypt: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spek, R. van der, J. L. van Zanden, and B. van Leeuwen, eds. 2014. A History of Market Performance: From Ancient Babylonia to the Modern World. London: Routledge. Tejerizo, C. 2011. “Arqueología y cine: distorsiones de una ciencia y una profesión.” El Futuro del Pasado 2: 389–406. Trampier, J. in press. “Unsettled Questions: Dynamic Cultural and Natural Landscapes in the Western Nile Delta in the First Millennium B.C.” In Dynamics of Production and Economic Interaction in the Near East in the First Half of the First Millennium BCE, edited by J. C. Moreno García. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

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Trigger, B. G., B. J. Kemp, D. O’Connor, and A. B. Lloyd. 1983. Ancient Egypt: A Social History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Valbelle, D. 2003. “Response to D. B. Redford.” In Egyptology at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century, edited by Z. A. Hawass and L. Pinch Brock, vol. 2, History, Religion, 20–22. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Vandier, J. 1964. Manuel d’archéologie égyptienne, vol. 4, Bas-reliefs et peintures; scènes de la vie quotidienne. Paris: A. et J. Picard. ———. 1969. Manuel d’archéologie égyptienne, vol. 5, Bas-reliefs et peintures; scènes de la vie quotidienne. Paris: A. et J. Picard. Verbovsek, A., B. Backes, and C. Jones, eds. 2011. Methodik und Didaktik in der Ägyptologie: Herausforderungen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Paradigmenwechsels in den Altertumswissenschaften. München, Germany: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Vercoutter, J. 1992. L’Égypte et la vallée du Nil, vol. 1, Des origines à la fin de l’Ancien Empire (12000–2000 avant J.-C.). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Vernus, P. 2009. Dictionnaire amoureux de l’Égypte pharaonique. Paris: Plon. Weeks, K. R., ed. 1979. Egyptology and the Social Sciences: Five Studies. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Wilkinson, R. H. ed. 2008. Egyptology Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilkinson, T. J. 2003. Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Wilson, P., ed. 2009. The West Nile Delta Regional Survey: Beheira and Kafr elSheik Provinces. London: Egypt Exploration Society.

5

Interdisciplinary Measures Beyond Disciplinary Histories of Egyptology David Gange

In studies of the history of Egyptology, the discipline can often appear to have been created and developed in a hermetic compartment, separated cleanly from its surroundings and isolated in purely disciplinary space. Text without context, it seems to require theorizing only in its own terms, amenable to explanation only through its internal dynamics irrespective of the complex relations between Egyptology and society. Any such appearances are obviously illusory: Egyptology (like so many things) is first and foremost a socially constructed enterprise. Its agendas, theories, and practices are always historically specific, and the range of historical themes and processes with which it intersects are far wider than any individual will ever be capable of grasping. The myth of “eternal Egypt” has, as Moreno García (this volume) states, been strangely persistent; so too has what we might call the myth of “eternal Egyptology.” In fact, the gulf between the scholar in the present and the Egyptologist of even fifty years ago is far wider than is commonly assumed, and the reasons why students take up the discipline or the public buy scholarship on ancient Egypt are not the same today as they were in 1963 or 1913. Reconstructing these motivations is a fundamental task confronting anyone who wishes to make Egyptology an object of historical scholarship: they need to be followed when they lead into politics, aesthetics, theses of civilizational rise and fall, conceptions of the relationship between past and present, theories of language, death, time, the self, and, of course, discipline construction. This point is particularly important since the public roles played by Egyptology have been much greater in the past, especially between the 1870s and 1950s, than they are today. Understanding what brought audiences to Egyptology (especially since all Egyptologists themselves begin as audience) and how Egyptologists engaged with other disciplines is far more than peripheral to writing Egyptological histories. To traditional skeletal histories (such as Wortham 1971), all the anthropologist’s techniques of thick description need to be added in order to comprehend Egyptology in and of its time. As a historian, I also consider it highly desirable that the growing urge to write histories of Egyptology should develop into something that is not internalist

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but is outward-looking, seeking comparison with the histories of other disciplines and processes whenever possible. Analysis of the cultural and political roles played by the reception of ancient Egypt over millennia has a great deal to offer historians, literary scholars, classicists, theologians, art historians, and historians of science; the goal of connecting up the diverse approaches practiced in each scholarly field is of great importance. This process means being familiar not just with the most thematically pertinent texts in neighboring disciplines but knowing too the methodological assumptions from which each discipline begins and the foundational concepts that give form to its particular approaches. Since many of these disciplines (including classics, history, and English literature) are as fragmented and incoherent as Egyptology itself, this task is a huge endeavor and means that writing the history of Egyptology is not to be taken lightly. The problems here can be elucidated by one of the most troubled of all disciplinary boundaries: that between archaeology and history. Each of these disciplines tends to depict the other with thinly veiled hostility, using caricatures that are at least thirty years out of date, as several recent polemics have shown (e.g., Halsall 2009, 1–48, 49–88).1 Attempts to write histories of archaeology from archaeological and historical perspectives have been bedeviled by this tension. There is no reason why Egyptology should fall into similar traps so long as conversation is not impeded by our carefully guarded disciplinary boundaries. The three papers in the section addressed here offer several strategies for this cooperation. “A PROLIFIC BRANCH OF THE GREAT SCIENCE OF ANTHROPOLOGY”? We begin, then, with one Egyptologist, Alice Stevenson, quoting the words of another, F. L. Griffith, penned in 1901. Stevenson opens with a quote from Griffith’s inaugural address, a moment rich in meaning for British Egyptology as the discipline secured a firm footing in a second institutional home, the University of Oxford. This is a quote rich in meaning too, and one that has the potential to be unwound into rich analysis of the status and meanings of Egyptology at a key moment in its history. Having recently written the chapter on “Egypt and Assyria” for David Hogarth’s centennial assessment of the condition of archaeology, Authority and Archaeology, Sacred and Profane (1899), Griffith was well placed to provide authoritative statements on his discipline’s role in the turn-of-the-century academy. And having found his own efforts at University College London (UCL) subverted by personal and disciplinary jealousies (prevented, for instance, from teaching formal classes in the Egyptian language by R. S. Poole, Yates Professor of Archaeology), Griffith was uniquely positioned to assess the shifting disciplinary alignments of nascent university Egyptology.

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When Griffith discusses his discipline as a branch of anthropology, he therefore commands our attention. As Stevenson points out, scholars have been far too eager to dismiss the strength and persistence of historical links between these disciplines, and real study of their interaction is a very significant goal. Stevenson, with her detailed knowledge of the Egyptological protagonists of the early twentieth century, provides a map for how that study might begin. However, the period covered, 1860–1960, is too long and diverse to allow that detailed analysis to be carried out here, especially since the new intensity of focus on Egyptian prehistory in the first decade of the twentieth century makes it a unique moment in the discipline’s history. Old alliances, with the classics and theology, were slowly undermined, while newer ones—with anthropology in particular—developed and deepened. This long view creates the temptation to read disciplinary perspectives of 1900 back into the 1880s, when there are distinct dangers in presenting the idiosyncratic work of Pitt-Rivers as representative of how disciplinary boundaries functioned. In fact, the epistemologies with which Egyptologists and anthropologists operated in the 1880s were remarkably dissonant: this period was before Egyptologists—German, French, or British (Petrie included)—developed a burning interest in prehistory, and it was a period when Egypt was far more often a tool used by those arguing against a high “antiquity of man” than those arguing for it. This argument was something for which major scientific, anthropological, and social thinkers, from Richard Owen to Grant Allen, were quick to excoriate Egyptologists in the 1880s and 1890s (e.g., Allen 1890, 51). To claim that Petrie in the 1880s was motivated by similar concerns to Pitt-Rivers is also to read far too much of the “twentieth-century” Petrie into his younger self and to elide the vast differences between these two scholars. This was a period of intense conflict over Egypt’s meanings and their use, something that Stevenson’s time-scale serves to smooth over, creating the requirement to narrate this period in a few hundred words. This need to trace ideas and disciplines through the conflicts and contingencies that gave them form is an instructive point to dwell on, especially since the history of anthropology, and writing on race more generally, has been a field in which this aspect of historical methodology has been particularly hotly contested in recent years. Here, the apparatus of the historical discipline has been tested and frequently found wanting, meaning that statements about the social role of anthropological ideas are likely to be scrutinized particularly closely. One arena for this debate was a series of articles in the journal Cultural and Social History in 2004 (Hesse 2004; Jones 2004; Mandler 2004a and b; Watts 2004). In a thinkpiece entitled “The Problem with Cultural History,” the cultural historian Peter Mandler challenged his peers to find more rigorous ways of interpreting the social circulation of ideas. Texts must be located in networks of other texts and, equally importantly, in relation to readers: who read these texts, when, why, and with what result? How do we establish the significance, or otherwise, of any particular thinker and their ideas? Answering these questions, Mandler insisted:

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must be a constant, recursive process, rather than an occasional tip of the hat. In short, a cultural historian must have a mental map of the whole field of representation in which their texts sit and have ways to communicate this to the reader (2004a, 97). Posing the question “whose discourse?” Mandler (2004a, 96) tackled the frequently propounded idea that the emergence of the powerful culture of biological racism, so familiar to those who work on late Victorian Britain, occurred in the 1840s. He (2004a, 98) began by suggesting that historians and theorists who have “racialize[d]” the thought of canonical mid-century figures such as Mill and Carlyle have succeeded in demonstrating the racial content of some of their thought but have failed to show that this racial thought was anything more than marginal to their reception. Even Carlyle’s immense cultural authority in this period was not great enough to carry readers along with his biological ideas: the widespread criticism, even mockery, to which these ideas were subjected demonstrates that the acculturation of biological racism was a considerably later occurrence. Mandler’s main focus in this section of his article, however, is the figure of Robert Knox, author of Races of Men (1850). The historian of anthropology Robert Young has treated Knox’s views as a dominating feature of mid-Victorian life, and several recent historians have followed his lead. Mandler shows that Knox’s readership was confined to a small group, socially very different from those to whom Young attaches its influence. “Older” views on race, which Young suggests Knox’s ideas replaced, were in fact later, far more widely read, and also more favorably received than the work of Knox, who begins to look marginal, isolated, and eccentric. Although Pitt-Rivers’s ideas are not a direct parallel to this situation—his views did not arouse the same degree of hostility—his work on Egypt was, in the 1880s, of similar marginality to the reception of ancient Egypt among Egyptologists and the public alike. Stevenson is on much safer ground in the twentieth century, in part because Egyptology’s new disciplinary identity makes tracing ideas (both through archives and culture) less problematic. The beginning of the century is skipped over rather quickly, given that this was a period when anthropologists as canonical as W. H. R. Rivers studied Egyptological workforces, when Egyptologists and anthropologists combined forces to salvage Nubian remains ahead of the 1912 extension of the first Aswan Dam, and when Margaret Murray both wrote her own ethnological interests into the first examinable UCL degree and also devoted great emotional effort to futile efforts to mollify the intense hatred between Petrie and the Professor of Anthropology at UCL, Grafton Elliot Smith. Contested though Elliot Smith’s work was, the existence of a briefly influential anthropology that did not just use ancient Egypt but was formed around it and privileged it above all other societies is important. This point is especially true when so many readers of major popular works, including H. G. Wells’s Outline of History (1920; by far the bestselling history book of this period) received Elliot Smith’s, not Petrie’s, version of ancient Egypt.2

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Meanwhile, Stevenson’s coverage of the Blackmans—siblings who embody Oxford Egyptology’s combination of philology, archaeology, and anthropology in Egypt—is really valuable. They help to differentiate Oxford scholarship from the general stew of interest in material anthropology at the height of its influence. They demonstrate one way (Margaret Murray would reveal another) in which shared interests were developed into a specific, practicable, approach. Yet, the most powerful material here is perhaps the lucid explanation Stevenson offers for the attenuated bonds between Egyptology and anthropology after 1930, featuring both Radcliffe-Brown’s social anthropology and Peet’s vision of a university Egyptology shorn of exactly those “philosophical,” moralizing, and popularizing agendas that had given the Petrie of Janus in Modern Life (1907) his roles as public intellectual. Peet’s insistence that “we are not very likely to learn very much more Egyptian history from excavation in Egypt itself” (see Stevenson this volume, 27) is elucidated beautifully as a product of post-Tutankhamun politics: the Egyptological flipside to the exodus of archaeologists such as Petrie and Garstang to Palestine. This moment was (as Stevenson, quoting Stocking, notes) the twilight of the museum era for both disciplines, for reasons that were epistemological as well as ethical and practical. Mortimer Wheeler’s focus on site formation becomes the archaeological parallel to social anthropology. Philology, on the other hand, becomes in Alan Gardiner’s hands the focal point of Egyptological authority (alongside the long-lived situation whereby knowledge of Middle Egyptian becomes an unlikely substitute for archaeological training). This is a compelling argument that places changing practice within disciplinary structures. As with the early twentieth-century material, there is a powerful further study to be written on this development between the 1930s and 1950s: demonstrating the contested developments of this period will be a valuable project that I hope Stevenson will take on. Since 1900 is roughly the point at which approaches and ideas resembling those of Pitt-Rivers were widely taken up by Egyptologists, this is a story that can be, more or less, self-contained, telling the rise and fall of a potent bond between two disciplines and demonstrating, authoritatively, the fallacy of all those texts that claim the perpetual distinction between anthropological and Egyptological practice.3 ANGLO-BERLINERS Of equal potency to the prospect of a history of the relationship in Oxford between Egyptological and anthropological thought is a history of the relationships between German and British Egyptology in a similar period. This history is particularly significant since so little of any quality has been written in English about the profession in Germany. This is, of course, a history grounded in philology, and given the profound professionalism of German

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philology in contrast with persistent British dilettantism, this was not a relationship built on equality. Even more “an amateur” than most of his British peers, yet far more cosmopolitan and integrated into the world of German philology, Gardiner makes a fine, and unique, object of study: on several counts, the kind of exception that can be elucidated to prove rules. The national jealousies involved in Egyptology have been famously persistent, but were also unpredictable and paradoxical, never quite running through archives in the way they are assumed to have operated. Key “nationalist” works have strangely “internationalist” features, such as the dedication to Napoleon of Charles Piazzi Smyth’s supposedly anti-French Life and Work at the Great Pyramid (1867): one of many examples where imperialist appropriations of ancient Egypt often seem to have appropriated the society to the “wrong” empires. There is never any possibility that the all-too-regular claims that Egyptology was “a science remote from politics” might ring true (Egyptology has obviously always been a discipline mired in complex politics), but the precise nationalist nature of the enterprise needs always to be demonstrated rather than assumed.4 A study of how World War I reshaped these jealousies, and how they were given unique forms in particular personal relationships, is therefore valuable. The War was a moment when all historical disciplines were divided along distinct national lines that were subject to new, intense scrutiny. In Britain, the historical discipline itself was floundering in a deep positivistic morass out of which it was not to escape for some time; J. B. Bury’s excruciatingly simple-minded Idea of Progress (1920) stands as a monument of that tradition. The best of British history was amateurish and untrendy, G. M. Trevelyan being a rare shining example. In France and Belgium, however, the War gave birth to a new kind of history, one that began the process of removing the nation from the center of the historical frame, or at least creating the possibility of visions of the past that were not created to valorize a supposed set of national characteristics or traditions. Henri Pirenne’s (1939) rereading of the Fall of Rome as, almost, a historical non-event might be the first masterpiece in this tradition, but the career of Marc Bloch and the emergence of the Annales tradition are its most significant manifestations (see, e.g., Bloch 1954). Their insistence that history’s focus on national leaders and political geography had accentuated the nationalist prejudices that led to war provided the impetus for a new kind of comparative, plebeian, and anthropologically influenced historiography. In America, this reorientation took place on a popular level, numerous history books for children pressing the dangers of nationalist sentiment and the importance of recognizing the “essential unity of mankind” (Van Loon 1921, 457). Many of these children’s books (including the most famous and enduring, Hendrick van Loon’s The Story of Mankind) began in ancient Egypt and found in Grafton Elliot Smith’s hyperdiffusionism an easy way to frame their narrative. In so doing, they took a very idiosyncratic version of Egypt to (literally) millions of young readers and created a “horizon of expectation” (to use the

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terminology of reader-response theory) against which any subsequent reading about ancient Egypt would be measured. In the wake of the War, Egyptology itself developed under the same kind of social pressures, but with its own unique problems. Its national jealousies were fought out not just over abstractions but over physical things—antiquities, sites, institutions, people—in the contested space of Egypt itself. Few other disciplinary formations had localized ties of so inalienable a kind, and those that did (for example, classical archaeology) faced conditions that were perhaps less complex, though equally fractious. In Egypt, these conditions would be transformed repeatedly in the years following 1919 as Egyptian nationalism became a force that European administrators could not simply ignore or belittle. Yet, all these events happened just at the moment when it appeared that British Egyptology would emerge with new confidence. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology finally meant that the excavators of Britain’s Egypt Exploration Society could both communicate with the public and create a technical record of archaeological process (with excavation reports no longer attempting to fulfill both irreconcilable roles). Thanks to efforts at UCL, Oxford, and Liverpool, the range of expertise on show was now on an entirely different scale from a generation earlier. To say all this is not, of course, to underestimate the scale of German dominance. The shadows of Ebers, Erman, and Borchardt (perhaps, still, of Lepsius) were too long for Griffith, Gardiner, or even a no-nonsense Liverpudlian papyrologist like T. E. Peet to evade.5 The events surrounding the Amarna concession therefore raise important questions. How, for instance, did conceptions of expertise coexist with political contingencies in shaping Lacau’s policies? When was the nature of concessions shaped by the identity of the persons intending to dig and when by the nations proposing to sponsor them? Were there pressures, as there were in almost all other historical pursuits at this moment, to attempt to subvert the national nature of disciplinary organization? Letters between Erman and Gardiner traverse the whole range of attitudes from intense, politically inspired suspicion to frustration at the way in which Egyptology continued to be (as it had been since 1798) tossed around, helpless, on angry political troughs and crests. There is one perspective beyond those raised by Gertzen that would help make sense of the forces at work here, which is that of Lacau himself: the person caught at the nexus of Egyptian nationalist claims to the past, the traditional, prewar archaeological settlement and the claims of a postwar world in which it became expedient for the new international political order to see its mirror image reflected back in arrangements on the ground in Egypt. Gardiner’s statement that “Egyptians themselves would certainly interpret concessions made to Germany at the present moment as a sign of weakness on the part of the Entente” (see Gertzen this volume, 45) is underlain with multiple power relationships working themselves out at one of the most tense moments in recent Egyptian history.

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What we have, then, in Gertzen’s chapter is one facet of an intensely complex struggle for power and influence in a new world order that no Egyptologist nor administrator had yet developed the perspective to comprehend with clarity. This is a theme that could be analyzed in fruitful conversation with Timothy Mitchell’s powerful work collected in Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (2002). As with Stevenson’s chapter, there is not the space to elucidate these threads in Gertzen’s piece, but his book represents a major contribution to the field and an important intervention in the international, comparative understanding of discipline formation. EGYPTOLOGICAL INVERSIONS The final contribution to this section of the volume is different in tone and purpose from the others. It emulates the grand tradition of disciplinary polemics that has helped shape many historical, archaeological, and anthropological fields over the last century. It resembles, in some essentials, the famous mid-twentieth-century debates over the proper objects of archaeology itself. These often fell back on the divisive hierarchy of Hawkes’s Ladder, but in good Herodotean tradition, Egypt and its study continue to invert the world: religion, far from the archaeologist’s inaccessible abstraction, remains, as always, the center of gravity for perceptions of Egyptology. My perspective on Moreno García’s paper is that of an outsider to the discipline, but his statements on the discipline’s tendencies toward insularity do ring true. The conferences I usually attend are in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, or twentieth-century history or literary studies. At these, a host of scholars who work (or worked) in distant fields are common currency. At the last event I attended, the musicologist Richard Taruskin, the art historian Michael Baxandall, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, and the philosopher Michael Allen Gillespie were all made part of debates they could never have expected their work to contribute to. History is, after all, the ultimate magpie of achievements in other disciplines: possessing no agreed methodology of its own, it borrows, begs, and steals relentlessly from elsewhere. I have never, however, heard historians or literary scholars make use of any Egyptologist except one: that figure is someone who has made statements about the nature of the past and human engagement with history and memory, which have become truly interdisciplinary in appeal. Predictably enough, that Egyptologist is Jan Assmann. It is a sad observation on the reading habits of historians (and historians’ own tendencies to insularity) that many of those who quote Assmann when talking about, say, war and memory, have no idea that he is an Egyptologist. He is quoted second-hand by historians who will, at best, read only Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis (1992).6 This is a disciplinary rupture that does not exist with many past-oriented disciplines. Writers on the ancient world, from Paul Veyne to Jas Elsner, form part of the methodological background for historians of modernity.

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It is often the huge difference in source material between modern historians and scholars of the ancient world that makes conversation concerning method so fruitful. Large, lavishly funded projects in the humanities (whether conducting traditional reception studies or more theoretical pursuits) now bring classicists and historians of the modern world together; history of science departments incorporate Assyriologists and historians working on preclassical Greece. All too rarely is an Egyptologist, in Britain or America, involved in any of these activities. It is worth pondering why this might be the case. Why, for instance, did a group such as Subaltern Studies—which brought together scholars of the disempowered in the modern world (most notably of the population of India after Independence) and scholars of the disempowered of the past, such as Spartan helots, medieval peasants, and early industrial workers— never consider the disempowered of ancient Egypt? Even on the most popular and superficial level, those who toiled over pyramids, palaces, tombs, and temples surely epitomize the social groups subjected to “the enormous condescension of posterity” as much as those who constructed the Bombay to Calcutta railway; yet, there was little or no communication, in either direction, between Egyptologists and the exponents of Subaltern Studies.7 This relative isolation is obviously rather new: it did not exist a century ago. In the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, the ideas of Lepsius can be traced through a huge range of disciplinary constructions from geology and astronomy to theology. They were transported through European cultures by international, genre-defying intellectuals such as Christian Carl Josias von Bunsen (e.g., Bunsen 1848–1867). It is difficult to find major figures from the late nineteenth century, whether scientists or statesmen, who did not make statements on Egyptology, whereas it is difficult to find equivalents today who have done so. Even in the early twentieth century, when a cultural authority such as H. G. Wells wanted to demonstrate the cyclical nature of social change, he did not necessarily look to Spengler, as might be expected, but drew on Petrie: Petrie’s ideas often acted as the kind of universal, cross-disciplinary currency that those of a Sahlins or Deleuze have now become. In 1913, Europe still looked to classical and biblical “heartlands” to generate originary stories and teleological schemes, and thus Egyptologists like Petrie or Margaret Murray could rove far beyond ancient history in driving home their discipline’s claims to public attention. Even in the interwar decades, as Richard Overy has hinted, the Egyptology of Petrie, Breasted, and Pendlebury (among others) continued to hold great prestige with its claim to link modern Europe to its primeval origins (Overy 2009, 25–26). Today, after vigorous attacks on Eurocentrism by scholars from Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) to J. M. Blaut (1993 and 2000), universalizing narratives beginning in the Eastern Mediterranean are deeply suspect, and Egyptology has long lost this claim to general pertinence.8 The question that arises from this situation, though, concerns the grounds from which a new relevance can emerge. If Egyptologists are serious about increasing

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engagement with other disciplines (and other disciplines are serious about increasing their engagement with Egyptology), what ways forward can be identified? To answer this question, it is useful to turn again to the interactions of other disciplines. It is telling that here theory has been key. In some circles, theory has a bad reputation for creating cultural enclaves capable only of internal communication; yet, it is far more often the cause of interdisciplinary interaction. Debate during the 1990s between classicists, literary scholars, and art historians over the potential, and the failings, of Foucault’s writing on sexuality is a superb instance of this point.9 And this debate did not mean embracing Foucauldian perspectives with all their flaws. In fact, Foucault’s faults were the most significant impulse toward this communication. His work provided a superb arena for discussion, a less compelling dogmatic framework for research. Fears that engaging with theory means rejecting the empirical are also misconceived: the most useful theory is grounded in empirical treatment of anthropological, linguistic, and behavioral evidence, and theory is, for most scholars anyway, a catalyst, not a self-contained project. Even if ancient Egypt maintains some of its aura of exceptionalism, that does not preclude it from these conversations: establishing the limits to the usefulness of any theoretical approach is as important as elucidating its operation in fields it fits neatly. Not just Egyptology, but also the history of Egyptology, has a great deal to offer here. One of the obvious (although hardly one of the most interesting) instances relates to Orientalism. Several recent works, including the most sophisticated recent study to deal with the history of Egyptology, Suzanne Marchand’s German Orientalism in the Age of Empire (2010), have sought to complicate assumptions about the relationship between historical scholarship and Orientalism. The scholars drawn on by Moreno García in his (2009) article on the disciplinary identity of Egyptology—Meyer, Weber, Petrie—provide telling case studies in the Egyptological culture of Orientalism. Said is a profoundly important thinker (far more important than all his detractors combined), but the history of Egyptology demonstrates the care with which his ideas need to be approached and applied. Said criticizes nineteenth-century scholars such as Edward William Lane for approaching Egypt with literature such as the Arabian Nights as a form of “conceptual baggage” that prevented them from seeing Egypt “as it really was;” yet, Said’s ideas can themselves become conceptual baggage that leads us to assume, rather than reconstruct with care, the agendas of early Egyptologists.10 The texts cited in Moreno García’s 2009 article demonstrate that the diversity of roles that Egypt played relative to Orientalist clichés is surprisingly large. Petrie’s Revolutions of Civilisation (1911), for instance, is a deeply Orientalist work that draws stark distinctions between East and West in the ancient and modern worlds, yet superficial assumptions concerning this Orientalism are subverted at every turn. Revolutions subverts, for instance, the persistent assumption that early Egyptologists considered Egypt to be “Western” until the Arab conquests when it was annexed by

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“the East.” For Petrie, Islamic Egypt remains part of Western civilization, as the strange parallels he draws between the architecture of Cambridge and Cairo demonstrate. Mesopotamia, on the other hand, is emphatically Eastern, grouped with India and China. Petrie’s stark boundary between East and West runs not around, but through, the Arab world. His scheme can help to elaborate and problematize the assumptions made by diverse scholars who study the period in which he worked. And because so much more recent (and more sophisticated) theory has been formed around anthropological and linguistic observations, Egyptologists are particularly well placed to contribute to its elucidation. Moving on several decades from Said, the current debates that split the historical profession engage Moreno García’s themes even more closely because they relate to the roles of the social and the economic in a disciplinary environment where the “linguistic turn” now seems like last decade’s story. Mandler’s article cited above was a plea to historians to reengage the social sciences: to look at the ideas historians borrowed from sociologists and psychologists a generation ago and to ascertain how their conceptual development in our field compares with that in the disciplines from which they originated. This is an agenda that has been argued over in a swathe of recent “position pieces,” including Patrick Joyce’s (2010) Past & Present article “What is the Social in Social History?” and Frank Trentmann’s “Materiality in the Future of History” (2009), both of which perpetuate the current trendiness of Bruno Latour. This has even been labeled the “material turn” in volumes such as Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (2010), co-edited by Joyce and Tony Bennett. This is a “turn” felt in a host of disciplines, perhaps most notably in literary studies where “things” have been increasingly fashionable since Bill Brown’s The Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (B. Brown 2003). The so-called material turn has engaged scholars from several disciplines with issues that Egyptologists have been interested in for decades (the practice, for instance, of writing object biographies). The multidisciplinary field of material culture studies, founded by archaeologists and anthropologists but also contributed to by Egyptologists, is now burgeoning on an unprecedented scale. Lynn Meskell, treating Egyptian archaeology as “an anthropology of the past” (2004), has already asked pertinent questions about the social worlds and object worlds of ancient Egypt that might usefully become grounds for conceptual debate between Egyptologists, anthropologists, historians, classicists, and literary scholars. This moment—when other disciplines are professing interest in Egyptology’s established specialisms— is surely an opportunity for the sustained interdisciplinary engagement that the discipline has sometimes lacked. The first priority in capitalizing on this situation is that scholars in each discipline look “outward” when they write. Studies of the history of Egyptology that ignore such things as politics, gender, social analysis, and religion will always fail to engage historians, just as those that ignore the

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intricacies of meaning making will be found wanting by literary scholars or sociologists, and those that do not engage a substantive conceptual frame of one kind or another are likely to find their disciplinary reach limited. Of course, nobody, ever, can satisfy all these claims on their attention; but everybody, always, should be aware that writing a reception history is not an easy option to kill time in gaps between periods of empirical research but is a demanding, long-term project that requires immersion in a wide range of scholarly literatures. The three articles in this section of Histories of Egyptology show three scholars with the skills to further this agenda and contribute to a world in which a future version of this volume can feature a section entitled “The Creation of a Discipline” with no need to append the question of its “Isolation.”

NOTES 1. Halsall (2009) collects various separate pieces, page references to the first two of which are given here. The first piece was originally published in Bentley (1997); much of the most interesting material is in additions for the 2009 version, however. 2. For references in this paragraph, see Gange (2013, especially 1–52 and 271–326). 3. Many instances could be found of texts that, in passing, dismiss this link. One example is Bard (1999). 4. Perhaps the most famous instance of this sentiment, and the one this wording is taken from, is Petrie’s inaugural address at UCL, reprinted in Janssen (1992, 98–103). 5. For examples of this point, see these Egyptologists’ own statements on Erman’s dominance (e.g., Griffith 1899). 6. It is also an indictment of disciplinary disjunctions, however, that so much of the work on memory in the late 1980s and early 1990s produced duplicative ideas simply with different terminology. Compare, for instance, Assmann (1992) with Social Memory: New Perspectives on the Past by the anthropologist James Fentress and the historian Chris Wickham (1992). 7. This phrase originates in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), but has taken on a life of its own as the rallying cry of several movements that aim to extend the project of History from Below, including, most recently, histories of animal agency such as Hribal (2007). 8. For more recent exposition of efforts to undermine traditional Eurocentric perspectives, see Drayton (2011). 9. Classic examples of texts on gender and sexuality inspired or responding to Foucault that resulted in extensive interdisciplinary debate are P. Brown (1988), Laquer (1992), and Stoler (1995). 10. For this usage of “conceptual baggage” and discursive construction, see Gregory (1999 and 2005). Derek Gregory conducted extensive research into travelers and early excavators in Egypt. Although he has not published that research in fully developed form, some of the theoretical sensitivity he would have brought to the field can be gleaned from his forceful critique of American warfare in the Middle East (e.g., Gregory 2008).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, G. 1890. “The Gods of Egypt.” Universal Review 8 (29): 51–65. Assmann, J. 1992. Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis. Munich: C. H. Beck. Bard, K., ed. 1999. Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt. London: Routledge. Bennett, T., and P. Joyce, eds. 2010. Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn. Basingstoke, UK: Routledge. Bentley, M. 1997. Companion to Historiography. London: Routledge. Blaut, J. M. 1993. The Colonizer’s Model of the World. New York: Guilford. ———. 2000. Eight Eurocentric Historians. New York: Guilford. Bloch, M. 1954. The Historian’s Craft. Translated from the French by J. E. Anderson. London: Kegan Paul. Brown, B. 2003. The Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Brown, P. 1988. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press. Bunsen, C. C. J. 1848–1867. Egypt’s Place in Universal History: An Historical Investigation. 5 vols. Translated from the German by C. H. Cottrell. London: Longmans. Bury, J. B. 1920. The Idea of Progress. London: Macmillan. Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Drayton, R. 2011. “Where Does the World Historian Write From? Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism.” Journal of Contemporary History 46 (3): 671–85. Fentress, J., and C. Wickham. 1992. Social Memory: New Perspectives on the Past. Oxford: Blackwell. Gange, D. 2013. Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gregory, D. 1999. “Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the Cultures of Travel.” In Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, edited by J. Duncan and D. Gregory, 114–50. London: Routledge. ———. 2005. “Performing Cairo: Orientalism and the City of the Arabian Nights.” In Making Cairo Medieval: Transnational Perspectives on Space and Place, edited by N. AlSayyad, I. Bierman, and N. Rabbat, 69–93. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ———. 2008. “The Rush to the Intimate: Counterinsurgency and the Cultural Turn in Late Modern War.” Radical Philosophy 150: 1–46. Griffith, F. L. 1899. “Egypt and Assyria.” Authority and Archaeology, Sacred and Profane: Essays on the Relation of Monuments to Biblical and Classical Literature, edited by D. G. Hogarth, 155–219. 2nd ed. London: John Murray. Halsall, G. 2009. Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian Gaul: Selected Studies in History and Archaeology, 1992–2009. Leiden: Brill. Hesse, C. 2004. “The New Empiricism.” Cultural and Social History 1 (2): 201–207. Hribal, J. C. 2007. “Animals, Agency and Class: Writing the History of Animals from Below.” Human Ecology Review 14 (1): 101–112. Janssen, R. M. 1992. The First Hundred Years: Egyptology at University College London, 1892–1992. London: University College London. Jones, C. 2004. “Peter Mandler’s ‘Problem with Cultural History’, or, Is Playtime Over?” Cultural and Social History 1 (2): 209–15. Joyce, P. 2010. “What is the Social in Social History?” Past & Present 206: 213–48. Knox, R. 1850. Races of Men: A Fragment. London: H. Renshaw.

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Laquer, T. 1992. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loon, H. van. 1921. The Story of Mankind. New York: Liveright. Mandler, P. 2004a. “The Problem with Cultural History.” Cultural and Social History 1 (1): 94–117. ———. 2004b. “Problems in Cultural History: A Reply.” Cultural and Social History 1 (3): 326–32. Marchand, S. 2010. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meskell, L. 2004. Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present. Oxford: Berg. Mitchell, T. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Moreno García, J.-C. 2009. “From Dracula to Rostovtzeff or: The Misadventures of Economic History in Early Egyptology.” In Das Ereignis: Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Vorfall und Befund, edited by M. Fitzenreiter, 175–98. London: Golden House Publications. Overy, R. 2009. The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilisation. London: Penguin. Petrie, W. M. F. 1907. Janus in Modern Life. London: Archibald Constable & Co. ———. 1911. The Revolutions of Civilisation. London: Harper. Pirenne, H. 1939. A History of Europe. Translated from the French by B. Miall. London: Allen and Unwin. Smyth, C. P. 1867. Life and Work at the Great Pyramid during the Months of January, February, March, and April, A.D. 1865; with a Discussion of the Facts Ascertained. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas. Stoler, A. L. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thompson, E. P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz. Trentmann, F. 2009. “Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices and Politics.” Journal of British Studies 48 (2): 283–307. Watts, C. 2004. “Thinking about the X Factor, or: What’s the Cultural History of Cultural History.” Cultural and Social History 1 (2): 217–24. Wells, H. G. 1920. The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind. London: George Newnes. Wortham, J. D. 1971. British Egyptology, 1549–1906. Newton Abbot, UK: David and Charles.

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Part II

Knowledge in the Making

The chapters in the second section of this book, “Knowledge in the Making,” discuss how multiple different worlds have impacted upon the work of constructing knowledge about ancient Egypt. For example, Andrew Bednarski’s chapter highlights how nineteenth-century travelers’ accounts of ancient Egypt have (inadvertently) been used to create a genealogy for Egyptological work that practitioners now claim needs to be improved and built upon: travelers made mistakes, but contemporary practitioners can correct them. Conversely, though, Bednarski also illustrates how a nineteenthcentury travel account that he has edited for publication can demonstrate the choices that these travelers made in terms of the ancient Egypt that they represented in their work. Rather than suggesting the need for a corrective, Bednarski therefore opens up the possibility of examining on their own terms the complex meanings that nineteenth-century European explorers made of ancient Egyptian remains. In this way, a more nuanced understanding of “Egyptological” history might become a possibility. Steve Vinson and Janet Gunn’s chapter in this section suggests a similar possibility and thus works with Kathleen L. Sheppard’s following piece to highlight the intellectual and social worlds that have become hidden as Egyptology has coalesced as a disciplined term. Vinson and Gunn provide further evidence (cf. Gange 2013, 262–69; Montserrat 2000) of Egyptology’s long connection to the esoteric. This connection is often denied by the discipline’s practitioners, yet it seems that the case of the British Egyptologist Battiscombe Gunn provides an interesting instance of how involvement with esoteric practices—and the esoteric practices of Aleister Crowley, no less—could go hand in hand with involvement in Egyptological work. Sheppard, meanwhile, discusses the life and work of Margaret Murray. Murray is often remembered as Flinders Petrie’s assistant in London, yet Sheppard explains how much of a role Murray played “behind the scenes” in making not only the work of Petrie but also the work of many of his students in Egypt possible. Sheppard also refocuses histories of Egyptology (and archaeology more generally) on the classroom, allowing the possibility of moving away from the depictions of (heroic male) fieldworkers that have become so common. This move also creates the possibility of asking new

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questions: not only about what role gender has played in the construction of disciplines like Egyptology and archaeology (cf. Carr 2012) but also about the role of different sites of knowledge production. Meanwhile, emphasizing the historical nuances that this and the other chapters in this section of the book demonstrate, Christina Riggs’s discussion of these three pieces recognizes the impurity of the Egyptological discipline. Thus, Riggs recognizes the urgent need to highlight the slippages, inconsistencies, and long-presumed-fossilized intellectual stances that this impurity reveals if Egyptologists are to continue to possess relevance: the discipline’s work carries far too much baggage to do otherwise. BIBLIOGRAPHY Carr, L. C. 2012. Tessa Verney Wheeler: Women and Archaeology Before World War Two. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gange, D. 2013. Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Montserrat, D. 2000. Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt. London and New York: Routledge.

6

Beyond Travelers’ Accounts and Reproductions Unpublished Nineteenth-Century Works as Histories of Egyptology Andrew Bednarski

Stories of nineteenth-century Egyptian exploration have been popular in English works for more than two hundred years. For scholars interested in the history of Egyptology and archaeology, the events at the heart of these stories form logical starting points for research. For more casual readers, these events evoke entertaining stories of danger and adventure in an exotic land (Belzoni 1820; Brier 1999; Buhl 1986; Ceram 1952; David 2000; Denon 1802; Ebers 1878; Fagan 1975; Trigger 1989; Wilson 1964). Many of these accounts over the past twenty-five years, both popular and academic, have used early nineteenth-century source material (AUC Press 1997; Gillispie and Dewachter 1987; Mayes 2008; Russell 2001 and 2005). Given the relative popularity of Egyptian exploration in the early 1800s, and the uses to which contemporaneous material has been put, it is not surprising that unpublished works from this period have occasionally been reproduced. These reproductions form exciting new sources of data to flesh out our understanding of the early days of Egyptology. With the history of Egyptology in ascendency as an area of study in its own right, the time seems ripe to explore the forms such unpublished material has taken and how such forms might be further developed. As a first step in this direction, I will explore the structure and presentation of three such publications: Jason Thompson’s edition of Edward William Lane’s Description of Egypt (Thompson 2000), Patricia Usick and Deborah Manley’s The Sphinx Revealed (Usick and Manley 2007), and David Jeffreys’s The Survey of Memphis VII (Jeffreys 2010). With these case studies in mind, I will then suggest alternate avenues of research from the perspective of my work publishing an early nineteenth-century manuscript by Frédéric Cailliaud, Arts and Crafts of the Ancient Egyptians, Nubians, and Ethiopians (Bednarski 2014). FRÉDÉRIC CAILLIAUD, 1787–1869 Although largely forgotten in English literature today, Cailliaud (fig 6.1) was the stuff of legend in the early 1800s. Between 1815 and 1822, the trained

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mineralogist undertook two journeys to Egypt. Over the course of these trips, he rediscovered the ancient emerald mines of Mount Zubarah, was the first European to explore portions of both the Eastern and Western Deserts, and also rediscovered the famous city of Meroe in Sudan (Chauvet 1989). His accomplishments were so highly regarded that the French government awarded him the Legion of Honor. Shortly after his return to France, Cailliaud turned his attention back to his first love, natural history, and rose to become one of Europe’s leading luminaries in mineralogy and conchology. His work in Egypt and Sudan, however, played a key role in the developing European culture of inquiry into Egypt’s past. The findings of his journeys were published in the monumental Voyage à l’Oasis de Thèbes (edited by Jomard, 1821–1862) and Voyage à Méroé (Cailliaud 1826–1827), the latter being the first systematic survey of ancient Nubian monuments. Cailliaud also amassed the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities in France between the time of the Napoleonic invasion and Auguste Mariette’s work at the Serapeum (Mainterot 2011, 317). Some of his material, in fact, helped Champollion to confirm his theories on translating Egyptian hieroglyphs prior to the publication of his famous Lettre à M. Dacier in 1822 (Mainterot 2011, 199–204). In addition to his sensational explorations and academic productivity, Cailliaud’s time in Egypt resulted in a host

Figure 6.1

Frédéric Cailliaud, drawn by André Dutertre.

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of accusations that imbue his story with a human dimension. These accusations include deliberately destroying ancient, sculpted reliefs to thwart a rival explorer in Philae (Belzoni 1820, 249), stealing tomb scenes with a crowbar in Thebes (Athanasy 1836, 107), bamboozling a competitor with a forged antiquity (Belzoni 1820, 287; de Forbin 1819, 47f; Lilyquist 1988, 54), and even cheating his own government by creating forgeries (Dewachter 1984, 49). CAILLIAUD’S ARTS AND CRAFTS The sense of adventure and exoticism that surrounded Cailliaud did not end with his death. In the 1830s, with his work on Meroe completed, Cailliaud turned his attention to writing a different kind of publication on Egypt and Sudan than that which he had already produced. This publication was meant to be something other than an account of his wanderings. It was, in fact, meant to synthesize the sum of his experiences. The project changed considerably over the years, with Cailliaud adding to it and reworking it at different points in his life. Its ultimate incarnation was that of an ambitious encyclopedia on ancient and modern Nile civilizations. He called it Recherches sur les arts et métiers, les usages de la vie civile et domestique des anciens peuples de l’Égypte, de la Nubie et de l’Éthiopie, suivies de détails sur les mœurs des peuples modernes de ces contrées. To complement his intended text, Cailliaud compiled eighty-nine sumptuous plates that were printed in seventeen parts (Cailliaud 1831–1837). Unfortunately, only one hundred copies of this volume of plates were published and, of that, roughly half were destroyed when the building in which they were stored collapsed (Chauvet 1989, 327). Cailliaud fully intended to produce the text meant to accompany and explain his visual corpus. With his energy focused more and more on natural history, however, he proved both unable to keep pace with the growing amount of contemporary scholarship on Egypt and unable to find the time to complete his work. As a result, the intended text was never finished. The manuscript’s movements after Cailliaud’s death, as best as can be reconstructed, are explained elsewhere (Bednarski 2014). Suffice to say that the current owner of the material, W. Benson Harer, Jr., brought the papers to the attention of the Director of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), Gerry D. Scott III, who initiated a project in 2008 to complete the editorial process and publish Cailliaud’s Recherches in both French and English. Making sense of the material, hereafter the Harer Papers, for publication purposes proved a challenge from the very start of the project. The Papers are composed of approximately one thousand pages of text and well over a hundred related images, of which eighty-nine formed the series of plates published in the 1830s. No polished, final draft of the text meant to accompany the volume of plates exists. Instead, the thousand pages of text

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comprise a mass of notes, a series of notebooks written in a narrative style, and two later drafts of Cailliaud’s Recherches that take an encyclopedic format. The latest such draft was never finished, although a good proportion of it appears to contain Cailliaud’s final thoughts on a number of the encyclopedia topics. When confronted with this material, ARCE was, at first, uncertain how best to address it. A suggestion was made early in the project’s history to take the story of Cailliaud’s life, his explorations, and the fate of his longlost manuscript, interject them with excerpts from his never-before-seen text and artwork, and produce either an engaging travel account or a popular biography. A nineteenth-century travel account of a daring European explorer seemed wholly appropriate, given the well-established tradition of such works in the English language. Dominique Vivant Denon’s Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, for example, was published in French and English in 1802. For nearly a century and a half after its initial appearance, it was continually in print (Ghali 1986, 182), with Terrence Russell’s The Discovery of Egypt (Russell 2005) the latest English edition. Another example of this tradition is Patricia Usick’s Adventures in Egypt and Nubia (2002), which chronicles the travels of William John Bankes. In the same vein, the early years of this century have seen a wealth of biographies of explorers and archaeologists of Egypt published (Breasted 2009; Grundon 2007; Hankey 2001; Kamil 2007; Mayes 2008; Thompson 2010). It was ultimately decided, however, to publish the latter draft of Cailliaud’s Recherches as a critical English print edition with an electronic transcription in French, downloadable as a PDF. This decision was born from the desire to present Cailliaud’s final written thoughts on the subjects he addressed in a comprehensible format to English readers while still providing the source material for further research. This publication plan, unfortunately, falls short of providing the majority of the material—namely, the sum of Cailliaud’s notes, the early series of notebooks, the transitional draft of Recherches, and facsimiles. LANE’S DESCRIPTION OF EGYPT The problems surrounding the publication of the Harer Papers are not unique, and I will now discuss several models that I might have used in order to put my own work on Cailliaud’s manuscript into a context of presentation. For example, the issue of how best to present an unpublished, unfinished nineteenth-century manuscript about Egypt to contemporary readers was confronted by Thompson in his reproduction of Edward William Lane’s Description of Egypt (Thompson 2000). Lane (1801–1876) arrived in Egypt three years after Cailliaud had left, residing there from 1825 to 1828, 1833 to 1835, and from 1842 until 1849. Like Cailliaud, he had an early interest in ancient Egypt, but his later career took him in a

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different direction. Lane became the leading Arabic scholar of his time in Europe, and he is best known for his Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), his translation of The Thousand and One Nights (1839– 1841), and his Arabic-English Lexicon (1863–1893). Yet, his earliest work, arguably one of his most important, was a manuscript on ancient material known as the Description of Egypt (Thompson 2000, ix). Indeed, Thompson claims that had the work been published in the early 1830s, it would have been regarded as the best English-language book on ancient Egypt at that time and likely would have put Lane’s career on a very different path (Thompson 2010, 274). Thompson’s publication of the work presents a critical edition of Lane’s latest draft. The work amounts to 588 pages, excluding a seventeen-page editor’s introduction and a seven-page note on the book’s text and illustrations. The introduction recounts Lane’s life prior to his first trip to Egypt, his early days in Cairo, his studies and explorations, discusses his investigations in a historical context, and explains Lane’s visual corpus (Thompson 2000, ix–xiv). Thompson discusses the various drafts of Description, including their chronology, the topics covered within them, their composition and style, the intended placement of illustrations within them, and how the work led to his Modern Egyptians (Thompson 2000, xiv–xvi). Delays in the manuscript’s publication, as well as Lane’s revisions, are briefly addressed. Thompson encourages future researchers to compare the various drafts more closely than he is able to within his work (2000, xvi–xviii). The development and preparation of the accompanying visual corpus is discussed, along with elements of the third draft of the work used as the basis for the reproduction (Thompson 2000, xviii–xix). Thompson recounts the demise of Description as a publication project, he reconstructs Lane’s state of mind using correspondence from the time, and he recounts the genesis of Manners and the independence of the two works (2000, xix–xxi). This section ends with Thompson discussing later attempts to publish portions of Description, the work’s relationship to other projects by Lane, and how it likely inspired his nephew’s choice of career (Thompson 2000, xxii–xxiv). Thompson’s note on the Description’s text and illustrations begins with a brief commentary on the need to edit for publication and how he wished to make changes to the text both obvious and reversible. To this end, Thompson added a table of contents to his reproduction, combined Lane’s intended three books into one, and included a chapter that had been deleted by Lane. He also chose not to recount the “myriad editorial details of preparing Lane’s text for typesetting” (Thompson 2000, xxvi). Thompson comments on comparative material in order to reconstruct Lane’s manuscript conventions and explains how marginalia provides additional editorial guidance (2000, xxvi–xxvii). He lists his editorial alterations to Lane’s text, discusses the placement of Lane’s images, the images’ accompanying captions, and Lane’s system of Arabic transliteration, noting that it requires further study (Thompson 2000, xxvii–xxxi). At this point in the work, Thompson offers

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a telling comment on his own annotations and how they were dictated by the chosen format for this project: Description of Egypt was a document of its time, intended for a readership in the 1830s. Since then, the readership has changed, as have the things that could be taken for granted in its understanding. My first impulse was to annotate heavily. . . . Then reality intervened. The length of Lane’s basic text combined with his illustrations already strained the limits of a one-volume format, even without my introductory comments. Consequently I went to the other extreme and kept my annotation to a distressingly bare minimum (Thompson 2000, xxxi). Thompson’s use of “bare minimum” is somewhat self-effacing, as many of Description’s pages have substantive annotations. To compensate for this perceived deficit, he offers a bibliography and suggests supplementary material for the reader. Nonetheless, the publication format of Description, as alluded to above, likely limited Thompson’s ability to do much more than present Lane’s work within a very good, but basic, historical context. The result is 588 edited, annotated pages of Lane’s work, including additional end-matter, and twenty-four pages of commentary that touch briefly upon a number of subjects related to Lane’s life and the manuscript. SALT’S MEMOIR ON PYRAMIDS AND SPHINX It seems appropriate to move from a work by Edward William Lane to one based on the work of Henry Salt, the early nineteenth-century British Consul to Egypt. Salt (1780–1827) was Lane’s first friend in Egypt. Along with acknowledging Salt’s artistic abilities, Lane even quoted his derided (Bierbrier 2012, 484) poem Egypt in his Description (Thompson 2010, 220). Salt’s time in Egypt overlapped with that of Cailliaud, and the two men were more than passing acquaintances. Cailliaud first met Salt in the Valley of the Kings, where they visited the recently opened tomb of Seti I (Mainterot 2011, 39). He was also allegedly the victim of one of Cailliaud’s cons. Salt supposedly bought a modern pipe that Cailliaud had disguised to look ancient for an outrageous sum of money in the hopes that he could publish it (Belzoni 1820, 287; de Forbin 1819, 47f; Lilyquist 1988, 54). Beyond that incident, Salt wrote a letter of introduction for Cailliaud after his first trip through Egypt to Bon Joseph Dacier, the Secretary of the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (Chauvet 1989, 94). Not recognized as a scholar like Lane or Cailliaud, Salt is best remembered for his collections, amassed through a number of agents, including Giovanni Caviglia (Bierbrier 2012, 484). In 1817, Salt employed Caviglia to explore the Giza Plateau. It was this work that formed the basis for Salt’s manuscript, entitled simply Memoir

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on Pyramids and Sphinx but published by Usick and Manley as The Sphinx Revealed (2007). Salt’s manuscript is a very different animal to Lane’s and, as such, is presented in a very different manner. Unlike Thompson’s tome, Usick and Manley’s comes to only seventy-six pages, containing an eleven-page introduction, five pages that list and describe Salt’s plates and sketches, a series of transcriptions, facsimiles, and images, in addition to indexes, lists of monuments, and a bibliography. The untitled introduction begins by briefly explaining the manuscript’s rediscovery, the explorations on which it is based, its preparation, and its partial publication. It then describes the manuscript’s text, corrections made by reviewers and colleagues, the different hands it contains, and its annotations, before describing the images in its corresponding atlas. The editors briefly discuss the men who were involved in the work, their explorations, their accounts, and their publication efforts. Usick and Manley contrast Caviglia’s account of the work with Salt’s before reconstructing how the manuscript’s text and images arrived in the British Museum and why the work was never fully published (Usick and Manley 2007, 1–4). The editors then stress the importance of the book’s contents over previously published accounts of the work; The Sphinx Revealed provides descriptions of explored tombs around the pyramids and links these to Salt’s ground plan, thereby providing provenances for a variety of antiquities (Usick and Manley 2007, 5). Brief mention is made of the excavation work’s funding and Salt’s relationship to Thomas Young’s Egyptian Society, formed to publish all known hieroglyphic inscriptions to aid the study of decipherment. The editors also mention other explorers’ efforts at Giza before emphasizing what they believe to be the most valuable contribution of their book: approximately forty of the sixty-eight images contained within it were unpublished and unknown (Usick and Manley 2007, 5–6). After a quick discussion of one of the sketches in the atlas, the introductory section ends with an explanation of Salt’s other projects (Usick and Manley 2007, 6–7). The following section of the work includes a valuable combination of lists, plates, manuscript facsimiles, transcriptions, and sketches from Salt’s manuscript (Usick and Manley 2007, 7–71). A one-paragraph editors’ note prior to Salt’s textual transcription discusses conventions that were used, alterations to the text, the insertion of figures, page and reference numbers, marginalia, footnotes, quotation marks, spellings, the use of capital letters, and a conversion scale for measurements (Usick and Manley 2007, 56). The work then ends with a series of indexes, lists, and a bibliography (Usick and Manley 2007, 72–76). Usick and Manley clearly did not face the same constraints as Thompson during his publication of Description. Unlike Thompson’s weighty tome, the reproduced transcriptions, facsimiles, and images that comprise The Sphinx Revealed only come to fifty-six pages. Nonetheless, like Thompson, Usick and Manley chose to reproduce the manuscript within a basic historical context.

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HEKEKYAN’S PAPERS My final case study stems from the publication of work by Joseph Hekekyan (1807–1875), a man directly tied to Samuel Briggs and, accordingly, one step removed from Henry Salt. Briggs was one of Salt’s financiers for his work at Giza. He was a merchant and banker based in Alexandria, and between 1803 and 1810, he was the British Pro-Consul in Egypt (Bierbrier 2012, 80; Usick and Manley 2007, 4–5). A Turkish-Armenian by birth, Hekekyan was educated in England, and it was Briggs who oversaw this education (Bierbrier 2012, 251). Trained as an engineer, Hekekyan returned to Egypt in 1830 to work for Mehmed ʿAli. He fell from grace after Mehmed ʿAli’s death, was forcibly retired, and was eventually commissioned to investigate the rates of alluvial increase at the sites of both Heliopolis and Memphis. This work saw him devote considerable effort to reveal Memphis’s ancient monuments and to understand their context. His work at Memphis was brief, undertaken between 1852 and 1854, but it resulted in a considerable amount of documentation (Jeffreys 2010, 89–91). It is this material, including texts, images, and other sources, that forms the basis for Jeffreys’s The Survey of Memphis. Jeffreys’s book is divided into nine sections contained in two parts: the first comprises sources and commentary and the second discussion. The book begins with a two and a half-page introduction to the Egypt Exploration Society’s work at Memphis, which gave birth to Jeffreys’s book, and Joseph Hekekyan. The first three sections of the work chronologically list sources relevant to ancient Memphis, from classical antiquity through the eighteenth century. These sections contain brief descriptions of, and commentaries on, the interaction of the various authors with the site, as well as extracts of references from their works. They combine anecdotal material with summaries of sources both well-known and neglected (Jeffreys 2010, 5–68). The fourth section presents the Hekekyan Papers in a systematic order. Unusually, Jeffreys offers no explanation of his editorial efforts in his transcriptions. This section introduces a narrative structure, describes the records, and discusses the neglect of Hekekyan’s work. Jeffreys explains Hekekyan’s methodology, the resulting wealth of material for archaeological investigation, and his excavation work at Memphis. Within this explanation, Jeffreys notes that Hekekyan’s records are now the only sources on areas built over by contemporary structures (Jeffreys 2010, 89–174). Section five comprises a shortlist of finds at Memphis, their current museum numbers, Hekeyan’s sketches of them, and relevant bibliographic references (Jeffreys 2010, 175–82). The sixth section resumes the format presented in the first three as it cites sources from the later nineteenth century. These entries occasionally offer insight into Hekekyan’s personal and professional relationships (Jeffreys 2010, 183–90). The second part of the work starts with section seven. This two-page section addresses the mythology of Memphis, the historic difficulty of correctly identifying the site, and the city in folklore and as a perceived center of occult

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knowledge (Jeffreys 2010, 191–92). Section eight discusses Memphis’s natural environment, the movement of the Nile, and other aspects of the site’s location, scale, and vulnerability. Jeffreys’s efforts to revisit areas worked by Hekekyan demonstrate the usefulness of archival research in archaeological investigation (Jeffreys 2010, 193–95). The book concludes with a brief assessment of Hekekyan’s contributions to Egyptian archaeology, bias his work likely faced from Western scholars, and the intellectual environment in which he lived. The volume ends with a discussion on the dispersal of objects found during Hekekyan’s work (Jeffreys 2010, 196–203). DISCUSSION OF CASE STUDIES AND ARTS AND CRAFTS The case studies discussed above present three reproductions of archival material that are in some ways very different from each other. Thompson’s Description is based upon Lane’s fair copy, the size of which proved a challenge to reproduce for modern readers. Usick and Manley’s Sphinx is based upon a similarly polished manuscript by Salt, but one of considerably less size and literary ambition. Jeffreys’s Survey presents material clearly not prepared for publication and fleshes it out to an extraordinary level through the use of other sources. These three publications, however, also share similarities: all are neglected works, all are sources of information on monuments that have changed over time, and all three make archival material more accessible and comprehensible for scholarly research. This final similarity, however, appears to be the works’ central focus: all three are internalist volumes that present archival material as data sets for future research. Furthermore, all three appear to encourage future lines of inquiry that mirror the specific focuses of the editors. The editors of The Sphinx Revealed and the Hekekyan Papers appear primarily concerned with presenting data that complements research into the archaeology of Giza and Memphis. Thompson’s subject matter is of broader appeal, but its primary focus appears to be on a narrative of Lane’s early nineteenth-century antiquarian exploration of Egypt. Each of these publications presents its material within a historical context, and each contributes in some sense to the study of Egyptology’s history. Yet, they touch only briefly upon elements of their texts and artwork that would enable a deeper understanding of the development of their material and, in turn, the development of Egyptology. My own efforts with Cailliaud’s Arts and Crafts have encouraged me to suggest alternative lines of inquiry when publishing archival material. Like Thompson and Jeffreys, one of the challenges I faced with the Harer Papers was to make the material comprehensible to contemporary readers. Much of Cailliaud’s writing needs to be firmly grounded in a historical and academic context. I addressed this issue by building explanatory chapters and running footnotes. Unlike Thompson’s, but like Jeffreys’s and Usick and Manley’s works, I was fortunate that the size of the material with which

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I worked was small enough to allow for relatively extensive explanatory notes. The size of the chosen material also allowed for the inclusion of a chapter placing Cailliaud within a historical context and a chapter dedicated to the Harer Papers’ history, form, content, evolution, and goals. To better understand the scholarly context in which Cailliaud’s works existed, both of these chapters address the issue of the reception of Cailliaud’s Voyage à l’Oasis de Thèbes, Voyage à Méroé and Recherches in France and in England. Like Thompson’s and Jeffreys’s efforts, I used these two chapters to contextualize the limits of Cailliaud’s knowledge of both ancient and modern Egypt. An obvious example of one of these limits was his understanding of hieroglyphs. His two visits to Egypt predate accepted decipherment techniques, meaning he was unable to read the texts on the material he collected. This issue points toward an interesting avenue of research not explored in an in-depth manner in the three case studies cited above: the means by which nineteenth-century antiquarians grappled with such material. While building a context of knowledge for modern readers, I also addressed how Cailliaud approached his subject matter. He was, first and foremost, a mineralogist. This training informed both his interests in Egypt and his understanding of what he saw. As a result, it is no surprise that his chapter on iron ore is his longest, even though to current readers it appears out of place in a work of broad ethnographic and antiquarian scope. The manner in which Cailliaud approached his subjects suggests another avenue of research that might suit both the Lane and Salt manuscripts: the nonspecialist nature of early nineteenth-century antiquarianism and its implications for the formation of the discipline of Egyptology. While building a context of knowledge, I also investigated the sources to which Cailliaud turned in his work. Cailliaud primarily relied upon classical texts, as such works formed the backbone of information on ancient Egypt in the early 1800s among European scholars. Understanding this material allows for a better comprehension of the issues with which Cailliaud wrestled. Chapter seventeen of Arts and Crafts, for example, discusses ancient Egyptian mummification. While much had been written on mummification by the early nineteenth century, the reasons put forward for elaborate ancient Egyptian burials were not in agreement. John Gardner Wilkinson exemplifies this tension in his Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians. He expresses dissatisfaction with the nineteenth-century notion that the Egyptians believed the souls of men moved to the bodies of animals before returning to those of human beings over the course of thousands of years: “We are therefore still in uncertainty respecting the actual intentions of the Egyptians, in thus preserving the body, and ornamenting their sepulchres at so great an expense” (Wilkinson 1837 vol. 3, 439–46). This tension, inherent in early studies of ancient Egypt and visible in other works of the time, provides yet another avenue of research: the historiographical state of knowledge on ancient Egypt in the early nineteenth century. The Cailliaud material also offers insight into the editorial processes of scientific and early Egyptological works in the early 1800s. The various drafts are

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handwritten, like all such works that predate the typewriter, which means the physical corrections, deletions, and insertions, be they grammatical or a choice of sources, are visible. As noted by Thompson in his Description, such evidence presents another avenue of research. As with the three case studies mentioned above, Cailliaud’s visual corpus formed an integral part of his work. For this reason, and unlike Thompson, Usick and Manley, and Jeffreys, I have written a chapter devoted to Cailliaud’s visual corpus. This chapter addresses Cailliaud’s place in the history of copyists in Egypt, the methodology he used to build his visual material, and, like Usick and Manley, presents examples of unpublished images. The Harer Papers’ images offer insight into how an accompanying, scholarly visual corpus was edited in the early nineteenth century. An example of this process can be seen in plate 45a and its earlier drafts (fig 6.2), which are based on a figure copied from the tomb of Ramses VII. The image on the left is filled with annotations discussing how the final plate should be colored: “the whole bird and serpent yellow gold; the yellow for the flesh is paler; forgot the fringe; see the model for the small stars on the belt.”1 The middle image has only one annotation and has the previously mentioned stars on the belt around the figure’s mid-section. The image on the right is the published plate with minor differences. How nineteenth-century scholars chose the images they wanted to represent and how they physically constructed their plates is yet another avenue of research for material such as Cailliaud’s. A subject that is not addressed in the three case studies, but which is particularly relevant to the artwork accompanying many early nineteenth-century manuscripts, is unashamed, or even intentional, inaccuracy. It is tempting to

Figure 6.2 A composite image of Cailliaud’s pl. 45a, along with earlier incarnations.

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disregard pre-facsimile efforts at recording monuments out of hand. Doing so, however, leaves significant sources of information overlooked. The Harer Papers clearly show that Cailliaud’s primary focus for his images was the elucidation of his intended chapters, not accuracy, and I have addressed this issue within my chapter explaining his visual corpus. One such example of this focus is his plate 66 (fig 6.3). This image, taken from the Theban tomb of Rekhmire, depicts a procession of foreign tribute. In it we see a man with a long tunic and straw hat leading a baby elephant on a leash. In the actual scene (fig 6.4), however, the elephant and giraffe are on two different register lines. Similarly, the man in the hat, leading the elephant, is not actually depicted in front of the giraffe. The portion of the wall containing the figure leading the elephant was likely already destroyed at the time of Cailliaud’s visit. Wilkinson, who was active in Egypt at the same time as Cailliaud, records the wall and indicates the loss of the scene in this exact area (Wilkinson 1837 vol. 1, pl. VII). Cailliaud clearly substituted another figure, perhaps from another portion of the scene, into the spot with the elephant. In addition, the proportions of the figures in Cailliaud’s scene are slightly different than those on the actual wall. Despite the problems that possible artistic liberty and simple inaccuracy may pose for researchers nowadays, understanding how the Cailliaud images were created, what was considered important visually at the time of his work, such as subject matter, and possibly what was not, such as accuracy, is vital to using them as sources of information regarding the history of documentation for many standing and lost monuments. Doing so is possibly more important to the study of Egyptology’s history than republishing a corpus of images with an accompanying text.

Figure 6.3 Cailliaud’s plate 66, depicting a scene of foreign tribute within the tomb of Rekhmire.

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Figure 6.4 Photograph of the portion of wall within the tomb of Rekhmire depicted in Cailliaud’s plate 66.

CONCLUSION Cailliaud’s Arts and Crafts, Lane’s Description, Salt’s Sphinx, and Jeffreys’s Survey present important data sets for Egyptological research into monuments and sites. As work on Cailliaud’s Recherches suggests, however, this material can be mined in a number of ways not traditionally presented in English reproductions. Despite possible precedents, it is important for Egyptologists to engage with broader, non-Egyptological issues that impacted on the development of their archival material. Such engagement will lead to a better understanding of how the current state of knowledge on their areas of research came to exist, including the identification of previously unacknowledged historical methodologies. Egyptologists might struggle with elements of such an interdisciplinary investigation with which they are not familiar. The effort, however, can only be worthwhile, as the intimate knowledge they possess of their material will lend insight that scholars not versed in Egyptology lack. The reproduction of archival material, such as that cited above, provides glimpses into the foundations upon which Egyptology rests. Two hundred years later, the discipline remains popularly and academically relevant and continues to invoke social and political debate. I look forward to seeing how early nineteenth-century sources are used further to explore our understanding of Egyptology’s history.

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NOTE 1. The original reads: “Toute la poule et Serpent [sic] jaune or [?]; la jaune des chairs est plus pâle; frangeoubliée; Voir le modèle pour les petites Etoiles [sic] de saceinture.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Athanasy, G. 1836. A Brief Account of the Researches and Discoveries in Upper Egypt, Made under the Direction of Henry Salt, Esq. London: John Hearne. AUC Press. 1997. Description de l’Égypte: Complete Edition. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Bednarski, A. 2014. The Lost Manuscript of Frédéric Cailliaud: Arts and Crafts of the Ancient Egyptians, Nubians, and Ethiopians. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Belzoni, G. B. 1820. Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia. London: John Murray. Bierbrier, M., ed. 2012. Who Was Who in Egyptology? 4th ed. London: Egypt Exploration Society. Breasted, C. (1943) 2009. Pioneer to the Past: The Story of James Henry Breasted. Chicago: The Oriental Institute. Brier, R. 1999. “Napoleon in Egypt.” Archaeology: A Publication of the Archaeological Institute of America 52 (3): 44–53. Buhl, M.-L. 1986. “Frederick Ludvig Norden and His Danish Predecessors as Travellers in Egypt.” In The Danish Naval Officer Frederick Ludvig Norden, edited by M.-L. Buhl, E. Dal, and T. H. Colding, 5–39. Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Cailliaud, F. 1826–1827. Voyage à Méroé, au Fleuve Blanc, au-delà de Fazoql, dans le midi du royaume de Sennar, à Syouah et dans cinq autres oasis: fait dans les années 1819, 1820, 1821 et 1822. 4 vols. Paris: Imprimerieroyale. ———. 1831–1837. Recherches sur les arts et métiers et usages de la vie civile et domestique des anciens peuples de l’Égypte, de la Nubie et de l’Éthiopie. Paris: Debure frères. Ceram, C. W. 1952. Gods, Graves and Scholars: The Story of Archaeology. Translated from the German by E. B. Garside. London: Victor Gollancz in association with Sidgwick and Jackson. Chauvet, M. 1989. Frédéric Cailliaud : les aventures d’un naturaliste en Égypte et au Soudan, 1815–1822. Saint-Sébastien-sur-Loire, France: ACL-Crocus. David, R. 2000. The Experience of Ancient Egypt. London: Routledge. Denon, D.-V. 1802. Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt. Translated from the French by F. Blagdon. London: James Ridgway. Dewachter, M. 1984. “Exploitation des manuscrits d’un égyptologue du XIXe siècle: Prisse d’Avennes.” Bulletin de la Société Française d’Égyptologie 101: 49–71. Ebers, G. 1878. Egypt: Descriptive, Historical and Picturesque. Translated from the German by C. Bell. London: Cassell, Patter, Galpin, and Co. Fagan, B. M. 1975. The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Forbin, (Comte) L. N. P. A. de. 1819. Travels in Egypt, Being a Continuation of the Travels in the Holy Land in 1817, 1818. London: Sir Richard Philippe. Ghali, I. A. 1986. Vivant Denon ou la conquête du bonheur. Cairo: L’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale.

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Gillispie, C. C., and M. Dewachter. 1987. The Monuments of Egypt: The Napoleonic Edition. Old Saybrook, CT: Konecky and Konecky. Grundon, I. 2007. The Rash Adventurer: A Life of John Pendlebury. London: Libri. Hankey J. 2001. A Passion for Egypt: A Biography of Arthur Weigall. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Jeffreys, D. G. 2010. The Survey of Memphis VII: The Hekekyan Papers and Other Sources for the Survey of Memphis. London: Egypt Exploration Society. Jomard, E.-F. 1821–1862. Voyage à l’Oasis de Thèbes et dans les déserts situés à l’Orient et à l’Occident de la Thébaïde: fait pendant les années 1815, 1816, 1817, et 1818. 2 vols. Paris: Imprimerie royale. Kamil, L. 2007. Labib Habachi: The Life and Legacy of an Egyptologist. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Lane, E. W. 1836. An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians: Written in Egypt During the Years 1833, –34, and –35, Partly from Notes Made During a Former Visit to that Country in the Years 1825, –26, –27, and –28. London: Charles Knight. ———(translator). 1839–1841. The Thousand and One Nights: Commonly Called, in England, the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. 3 vols. London: Charles Knight. ———. 1863–1893. An Arabic-English Lexicon: Derived from the Best and the Most Copious Eastern Sources. 8 vols. London: Williams and Norgate. Lilyquist, C. 1988. “The Gold Bowl Naming General Djehuty: A Study of Objects and Early Egyptology.” Metropolitan Museum Journal 23: 5–68. Mainterot, P. 2011. Aux origines de l’Égyptologie: voyages et collections de Frédéric Cailliaud, 1787–1869. Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Mayes, S. (1959) 2008. The Great Belzoni: The Circus Strongman Who Discovered Egypt’s Treasures. London: Tauris Parke. Russell, T. M. 2001. The Napoleonic Survey of Egypt: Description de l’Égypte, The Monuments and Customs of Egypt; Selected Engravings and Texts. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. ———. 2005. The Discovery of Egypt: Vivant Denon’s Travels with Napoleon’s Army. Stroud, UK: Sutton. Thompson, J., ed. 2000. Edward William Lane: Description of Egypt. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. ———. 2010. Edward William Lane, 1801–1876: The Life of the Pioneering Egyptologist and Orientalist. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Trigger, B. G. 1989. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Usick, P. 2002. Adventures in Egypt and Nubia: The Travels of William John Bankes (1786–1855). London: British Museum Press. Usick, P, and D. Manley, eds. 2007. The Sphinx Revealed: A Forgotten Record of Pioneering Excavations. London: British Museum. Wilkinson, J. G. 1837. Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians: Including Their Private Life, Government, Laws, Art, Manufactures, Religion, and Early History. 3 vols. London: John Murray. Wilson, J. A. 1964. Signs and Wonders upon Pharaoh: A History of American Egyptology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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Studies in Esoteric Syntax The Enigmatic Friendship of Aleister Crowley and Battiscombe Gunn Steve Vinson and Janet Gunn

No less than in our own twenty-first-century world, the nineteenth century, the period in which modern Egyptology crystallized, was a period of intense spiritual controversies. But those controversies were not, as some may now suppose, limited to the struggle between conservative, traditional Christianity and scientific modernity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Christianity found its preeminence in the European tradition challenged not only by scientific theories like those of Charles Darwin or Charles Lyell but by a widespread interest in what may be loosely described as “esotericism”: alternative practices that led directly to what is often today defined as “new age” spirituality. These interests—which overlapped and interpenetrated one another to a considerable extent—included spiritualism (belief in communication with the dead), occultism (belief in ritual magic), neo-paganism (revival of pre-Christian religion), and investigation of the paranormal (claimed phenomena like telepathy and precognition). Additionally, they included exploration and practice of non-Western religious or other traditions and concepts from around the world, particularly those from Asia (yoga, reincarnation, karma), in addition to study or practice in astrology, alchemy, and Kabbalah. Today, such pursuits are often dismissed as marginal. However, in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, they were taken seriously by all sorts of individuals at the apex of cultural and intellectual life, including litterateurs, politicians, and scholars (Hutton 1999; Owen 2004). With this chapter, we would like to explore some evidence for the interest in esotericism evinced by Battiscombe Gunn (1883–1950; fig 7.1 and cf. Stevenson this volume). Gunn was among the most gifted Egyptologists of his era, best remembered for his friendship and collaboration with Alan Gardiner (for whom see Gertzen this volume) and for his breakthrough Studies in Egyptian Syntax (Gunn 1924); he became Professor of Egyptology at Oxford University in 1934. However, at least as a young man, Gunn was interested—and apparently to some extent active—in the Theosophical movement of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (see Owen 2004, 33–37). He apparently also had a more-than-casual relationship with Aleister Crowley

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Battiscombe George Gunn.

(1875–1947; fig. 7.2). Crowley was, and remains, the most notorious and controversial of the British occultists active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: an individual who came to be known as the “wickedest man in the world” (Owen 2004, 219) and who regarded himself as the “Beast 666,” a prophet who proclaimed the advent of the new “Aeon of Horus” (Owen 2004, 212). We write that Gunn’s association with Crowley was “apparently” more than casual because the evidence is entirely from Crowley’s side, or from third-party sources. We have been unable to discover any personal papers that would illuminate the relationship from Gunn’s perspective. But the evidence at hand suggests that Crowley relied more than once on Gunn’s expertise in ancient Egyptian and in Biblical Hebrew, and it appears that Gunn and Crowley corresponded, including over personal matters. It also appears that they had a substantial circle of mutual friends and acquaintances, and Gunn is mentioned more than once in Crowley’s diaries. It is difficult to know what to make of this situation. There is almost no evidence for a Crowley-Gunn connection after the early 1920s, which suggests that Gunn’s interest in Crowley and his circle may have been a (more-or-less) youthful phase. And Gunn became a forceful debunker of at least some paranormal claims regarding Egypt later in life. But the evident fact that Gunn had, at one point, a personal interest of some nature in the esoteric appears to have been forgotten among Egyptologists, if it was ever common knowledge

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Figure 7.2 Aleister Crowley, posing with a facsimile of the “Stela of Revealing” (image from Crowley and d’Este Sturges 1913, no page or plate number).

at all, and neither did any memory of Gunn’s interest in these matters persist within the Gunn family. It therefore seems worthwhile to consider what the enigmatic friendship of Aleister Crowley and Battiscombe Gunn might imply about the contours of Egyptology as it existed a century ago. For Egyptologists, the most familiar descriptions of Gunn’s life and career will be those in Who Was Who in Egyptology (Bierbrier 2012) and in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Simpson 2004). Both are written by Egyptologists and largely rely on information that appeared in obituaries of Gunn at his death in 1950 (e.g., The Times, 2 March 1950; Bakir 1950; Barns 1950; Dawson 1950). These obituaries, in turn, were either written by Egyptological colleagues of Gunn’s or else based on information provided by Egyptologists. It is therefore understandable that none of these pieces have anything to say about Gunn’s interests in matters that were not strictly Egyptological. By 1950, any mention of Gunn’s association with Aleister Crowley will have undoubtedly been regarded as embarrassing, to say the least. And in any case, it will not have been seen as relevant to an appreciation of Gunn’s career and achievements.

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Ultimately, credit for the rediscovery of Gunn’s interest in Crowley and in the esoteric belongs to Gunn’s granddaughter Janet Gunn. Much of the following overview of Gunn’s interest in the esoteric, and of the facts of his acquaintance with Aleister Crowley and other British occultists, is based on sources discovered by her in the course of research into family history. We also explore previously unpublished material held in the Yorke Collection (located by Vinson), an extensive archive of Crowley maintained at the Warburg Institute of the University of London that was donated by Gerald Yorke, Crowley’s literary executor, in the 1950s.1

GUNN AND BRITISH ESOTERICISM The earliest evidence for Gunn’s interest in the esoteric is his participation in the second annual meeting of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society, held in London in July 1905. Theosophy is a movement that is associated with Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891) and particularly with her massive tome Isis Unveiled (1877), a work that does not deal with Isis as a specific deity but identifies her as a manifestation of the universal “Divine Mother” (Blavatsky 1877, vol. 1, 16). As a general proposition, Theosophy teaches the underlying unity of the world’s religious and esoteric traditions (Hutton 1999, 18–20). Gunn was twenty-two at the time of the conference, and at least as far as the conference proceedings indicate (Council of the Federation 1907, 21), his principal activity was to perform the role of the Priest of the Waters in The Shrine of the Golden Hawk. This short play had been written ten years earlier by the then prominent London stage actress Florence Farr, with collaborator Olivia Shakespear.2 Farr herself directed the 1905 production, which was staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London’s Sloane Square— a not-unimpressive venue—along with the dramatic poem The Shadowy Waters by William Butler Yeats (1905). According to the “Argument” given in the published text of the play: The scene is in a cave on Mount Bakhua, near Sinai, about 4000 B.C. Gebuel, the Magician of Fire and Metals, makes a talisman to Heru in the form of a Golden Hawk, in the hope of overwhelming the power of Zozer, King of Egypt, builder of the Step-pyramid at Sakkara. Zozer finds this out, and sends his daughter, who is skilled in the sombre mysteries of Isis, to win for Egypt the Golden Hawk, giver of exultation of heart (Farr and Shakespear 1895, unpaginated; spellings authors’ own). Gunn, as Priest of the Waters, was to be dressed in a “robe and symbolic headdress of blue and green.” His character appears at the beginning of

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the play, engaged in a discussion with the Priest of the Harvests (again unpaginated): PRIEST OF HARVESTS: Our Master finishes his work tonight. PRIEST OF WATERS: At last! Each day his spirit becomes more charged with lonely suspicion. I doubt sometimes if this act of faith will bear good fruit for us. PRIEST OF HARVESTS: Do not fear. Gebuel, being a great magician and our master, has promised us victory. Even the Majesty of Egypt, whose name shakes our land, is to be overcome. PRIEST OF WATERS: Gebuel shall overcome Zozer, the enemy of our arts. PRIEST OF HARVESTS: Hark! did you not hear the distant thunder? Which of us has dared name the king of Egypt for these many years? PRIEST OF WATERS: Pah! He, whom I have named, is the enemy of our arts. When I cursed the land of Egypt with a great flood, he opened watercourses, and the evil became a good, and the desert was no longer a waste. Needless to say, Zozer and his daughter, Nectoris, go on to defeat Gebuel and his evil priests. Florence Farr’s talents as an actress no doubt exceeded her abilities as a playwright, and she was a fixture of London’s social and artistic scene, at various times mistress to luminaries such as Yeats and George Bernard Shaw (Owen 2004, 63–65). Perhaps it was through Farr that Gunn met the playwright Arthur Pinero, for whom he worked as private secretary from 1908 until 1911. But Farr was also an enthusiastic occultist, with a particular interest in ancient Egypt (Butler 2011, 55–56, 88–90; Owen 2004, 81). She had also been a prominent, early member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which had been ground zero for British occultism from 1888 until the end of the century, at which time the movement began to splinter into numerous factions (Owen 2004, 51–84, especially 3, 61, 69 on Farr). Gunn would have been too young for any real involvement in the original Golden Dawn, but his association with Theosophy and with Farr suggests that he had found his way into circles associated with the former members of the order by 1905. Presumably, it was also around this time that he became acquainted with two other important, ex- or soon-to-be-ex-members of the Golden Dawn, Arthur Waite and Aleister Crowley. However, as discussed below, the earliest definite indication of Gunn’s association with Waite appears only in 1910, and Gunn does not definitely appear in association with Crowley until 1912. Meanwhile, Gunn was now also well on the way to becoming an accomplished Egyptologist. Only one year after the second Theosophy Congress, Gunn produced his earliest major Egyptological publication, his (1906)

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edition of the Old Kingdom wisdom text The Instruction of Ptah-hotep. Gunn’s Ptah-hotep is remembered as an immature work, and he himself repudiated it in later life. However, the publication is also remembered as an advance over earlier translations, and it certainly demonstrated promise in the field (Dawson 1950, 230). It was also popular and widely read at the time (Dawson 1950, 230). Presumably, therefore, the success of Ptah-hotep gave Gunn substantial cachet not only among Egyptologists but also among Theosophists, occultists, and others, who—like Florence Farr—hoped to revive authentic ancient Egyptian religious beliefs and practices (see Butler 2011, 96 on Farr’s Egyptological interests). In fact, it may not be unreasonable to suggest that Gunn’s choice and treatment of this text reflected his Theosophical interests and sympathies. The volume appeared in the popularizing series The Wisdom of the East, which, while not directly linked to the Theosophist movement, treated subjects that were clearly of interest to a Theosophist readership. Wisdom of the East books were often reviewed in Theosophist publications like the Theosophical Quarterly (e.g., a review of K. Saunders, Lotuses of the Maha¯ya¯na, in Theosophical Quarterly, July 1925, 186, or a review of Gunn’s Ptahhotep itself in the Theosophical Review (American Edition), March 1906, 92), and the series was published with a universalist intent that was congenial to Theosophist readers. As series editors L. Cranmer-Byng and Dr. S. A. Kapadia described their purposes: The object of the Editors of this Series is a very definite one. They desire above all things that, in their humble way, these books shall be the ambassadors of good-will and understanding between East and West, the old world of Thought and the new of Action. . . . They are confident that a deeper knowledge of the great ideals and lofty philosophy of Oriental thought may help to a revival of that true spirit of Charity which neither despises nor fears the nations of another creed and colour (in Gunn 1906, 77; capitals authors’ own). Additionally, Gunn himself believed that Egyptian religious ideals were, at their best, no less elevated and relevant to modern spiritual needs than those of the monotheistic traditions: [S]o simply and purely does Ptah-hotep speak of the God that the modern reader can, without degradation of his ideals, consider the author as referring to the Deity of monotheism, and if he be of Christendom, read God; if of Islam, read Allah; if of Jewry, Jehovah (Gunn 1906, 35–36).3 In any event, by 1910, Gunn was apparently involved in the Independent and Rectified Rite, a faction of the old Golden Dawn that had been established in 1903 by Arthur Waite (Gilbert 1987, 120). Waite was a committed Christian, if one of a mystical bent, who “doubted the wisdom of any

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operative magic and invocations to pagan deities” (Hutton 1999, 80–81). Nevertheless, Waite remained in control of one of the original Golden Dawn Temples, the Temple of Isis-Ourania, which now “confined itself to a Christian mysticism, mediated through ritual” (Hutton 1999, 81). In a biography of Waite, R. A. Gilbert reports that: Thus in March 1910 Battiscombe Gunn, who was an artist, an Egyptologist and an oriental linguist, argued at great length over the correct transliteration of Hebrew terms used in the Grade rituals; Waite was wise enough to listen and in the printed rituals Gunn’s corrections were made (Gilbert 1987, 122, no source cited). Crowley himself had left the Golden Dawn in 1907 to found his own magical order, the enigmatically-named A .·. A .·. (often explained as an abbreviation for “Astrum Argentum,” “Silver Star;” Hutton 1999, 81 and note 50 on 426). By 1912, Crowley had also been initiated into the Ordo Templi Orientis, an order that proclaimed its origins in the medieval Knights Templar but that regarded sex as the highest form of magic (Owen 2004, 186–220; especially 217–18 for Crowley’s ordination). Meanwhile, in that same year, Gunn finally appears in association with Crowley. In his journal The Equinox, Crowley published a rambling satirical blast aimed at Arthur Waite entitled “Waite’s Wet.” In the article, Crowley imagines a ceremony that would take place upon the return of Waite to, as Crowley evidently imagined it, the true fold. Part of the ceremony was imagined to involve Gunn: “Waite’s photograph, frock-coat and all, was carried in its red plush frame shoulder high by Mr. Battiscombe Gunn” (Crowley 1912a, 239). A year later, in a similar article entitled “Dead Weight,” Crowley imagined the ceremonies that would accompany the death of Waite (which was not actually to occur until 1942): Mr. Battiscombe Gunn was rapidly revising the funeral arrangements of the dying saint, which he proposed to found on some unedited documents of the Second Dynasty, which showed conclusively that the sacred lotus was in reality a corset, and the Weapon of Men Thu [i.e., Montu] a button-hook (Crowley 1913a, 220). It is difficult to be certain whether Crowley was here poking fun at Gunn for some residual loyalty to Waite or whether this description should be taken as evidence that Gunn was now in the Crowley camp. Was Gunn actually involving himself in the rituals of the A .·. A .·.? It seems difficult to believe, but there is at least one piece of evidence we can adduce that suggests that Crowley regarded Gunn as, in some sense, a “pupil.” In a copy of The Equinox 1 (8) once owned by Crowley and now in the hands of an anonymous private collector, there are a series of annotations in Crowley’s handwriting to an “Editorial” on sex and love (Crowley 1912b).4 According to Crowley,

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past spiritual masters like the Buddha and St. Paul had urged their followers to avoid sex, but Crowley himself laid no such restrictions on his followers. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that allowing his devotees the freedom to pursue love on their own terms was “hard upon the weak” (Crowley 1912b, xxiii), and he proceeded to follow up this statement with a series of brief anecdotes on recent romantic misadventures of individuals who were, presumably (although not explicitly identified as such), his own disciples. In the published editorial, the individuals in question are all identified only by letters “A” through “J.” However, in the Crowley copy, Crowley had written the names of the persons referred to in the margins. Next to “H”—who, it was said, “had to shave off the loveliest red beard to show what a strong chin he really had” (Crowley 1912b, xxiv)—is penciled the name “Gunn.” This is certainly a reference to Battiscombe Gunn. Gunn did have red hair and a prominent chin, and although no photographic proof appears to have survived, Gunn family tradition—through his wife Meena—recalls that he did indeed have a beard as a young man. Additionally, also beginning in 1912, we can see repeated occasions on which Gunn acted as a scholarly consultant for Crowley. In a compendium of Kaballistic numerology that had appeared in The Equinox as a “Special Supplement” entitled Sepher Sephiroth (i.e., Book of Emanations), Crowley credits Gunn—described, evidently with tongue in cheek, as “Rabbi Battiscombe Gunn”—for providing him with a Hebrew transliteration of his own name: ‫( אליטסיר קרולי‬i.e., ’lystyr qrwly) (Crowley and Bennet 1912, 57). Additionally, Gunn—with assistance from Alan Gardiner—appears around this time to have provided Crowley with a translation of a Saiteperiod funerary stela of a certain Ankhefenchonsu (today held at Cairo’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities as object Cairo A9422; Munro 1973, Textband 187 and Tafelband, fig. 5 on pl. 2). The stela’s text comprises a few unremarkable extracts from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (spells 2, 30, and 91), but Crowley was to base much of his personal religious philosophy on the stela, which he was to dub the “Stela of Revealing” (Crowley 1912c). Crowley had first encountered the object in 1904 during a visit along with his wife Rose to the newly opened Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in what is now Cairo’s Tahrir Square (Crowley 1912c, 367–68).5 At that time, the Crowleys had been struck by the fact that the stela had inked on its reverse side the number “666,” the object’s inventory number in the old Bulaq Museum, the new Museum’s forerunner. Soon thereafter, Crowley and his wife met over dinner with Museum Keeper Émile Brugsch (brother of Demoticist Heinrich Brugsch), who agreed to have one of his assistants translate the stela (Crowley 1936, 74). But by 1912, Crowley reported that he was now using “the most recent translation of the Stele, by Messrs Alan Gardiner, Litt.D., and Battiscombe Gunn” (Crowley 1912c, 369). When and under what circumstances Gunn and Gardiner produced this translation is unclear. There seems to have been no prior publication by Gunn and Gardiner of the stela (Munro 1973, Textband, 187 lists no

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publications at all), which may support the frequent conjecture by Crowley devotees that the Gunn/Gardiner translation was made specifically for Crowley. Had Crowley found the earlier translation of the stela unsatisfactory? This point seems doubtful; Crowley himself had no knowledge of ancient Egyptian and—setting aside for the moment the possibility of a revelation from some higher being—would have had no means of judging the quality of the rendering. Possibly Gunn had actually suggested to Crowley that he could do a better job. It is also worth mentioning that, aside from Crowley’s account of this incident, we are unaware of any evidence that Gardiner and Crowley ever had anything to do with one another, or even knew each other. Therefore, we presume that Gardiner was brought into the project by Gunn; he may not have even known the reason for Gunn’s interest in the stela.

GUNN IN CROWLEY’S DIARIES AND PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE But how close were Crowley and Gunn personally? The annotated Equinox discussed above might be taken as circumstantial evidence, at least, that Gunn was a pupil of Crowley’s, or at least someone who was close to him and well known to other members of his circle. But were they actually friends? For that possibility, we turn to mentions of Gunn in two categories of Crowley’s personal papers: entries in his diaries and correspondence between the two men. First, we consider the diaries. We can point to two entries. The earlier, written on 21 April 1917 in New York City, is from an unpublished diary in the Yorke Collection and will appear in the near future in Aleister Crowley, The American Diaries, edited by William Breeze and published by the Ordo Templi Orientis. Here, Crowley reports a dream in which Gunn figured, albeit indirectly: April 21. I seem to have nothing to record but dreams. Magical work is utterly impossible in N.Y. City. But this dream is quite unique in all my life. I went to Egypt, to some excavations. In a chamber of a ruined temple sat a man named R.C.D. Balfour-Campbell (!) who knew Battiscombe Gunn. Then suddenly I had some power given me by a god named Tef-Gu, or some similar name, I’m sure of the “Tef”& that it was not Tef-nut. We were moved on in some procession by another god, & Campbell preceded me in a space between wall and table. I felt myself “lost” if I went on; my only chance was to protest instantly. I exerted my whole will, & retraced my step, to the utter amazement of the shepherding god, who said “But you can’t” as who should say “2 plus 2 must make 4”. The rest I forget. But two days later I am still wondering about this dream, almost all the time. The dream was on the night of dies ♃ 19 April.6

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We have been unable to trace “R.C.D. Balfour-Campbell,” and—with William Breeze—we suspect he was a figment of Crowley’s dream. Gunn next appears in a later diary, this one published, in an entry dated 23 May 1923 at 4:40 p.m., written in Tunisia (Crowley 1996, 36). While musing on Kabbalistic numerology, astrological symbolism, and the relation of both to the tarot, Crowley wrote: XVIII plus XIII=Pisces, Scorpio [=150=]. NQ or QN=feminine principle. Glamour and death, the fish and the serpent, the vulva and the womb (Beetle in Pisces a crab-louse. Ask Battiscombe Gunn). These diary entries are not directly informative about Gunn’s relationship with Crowley, although the fact that Gunn figured in one of Crowley’s dreams is, perhaps, evidence that in 1917, Gunn was often on Crowley’s mind. Additionally, the Tunisia entry suggests the possibility that Gunn and Crowley remained in contact as late as 1923. That year, Gunn was forty years old, only one year away from publishing Studies in Egyptian Syntax. But if there ever was a truly personal relationship between Crowley and Gunn, then the best evidence for it consists of two letters that Crowley dictated and—presumably—sent to Gunn in 1913. At that time, Gunn was thirty, living in Paris, and working as an editor for the European edition of the London Daily Mail. Crowley had retained the original shorthand drafts of these and many of his other letters; the drafts were transcribed and typed for Gerald Yorke around 1950 and now form part of the Crowley collection in the Warburg Institute. Mr. William Breeze also kindly shared with us photocopies of the shorthand drafts in his possession. The Yorke Collection has only these two letters from Crowley to Gunn, and none from Gunn to Crowley, but the letters give every indication that Gunn and Crowley corresponded and met with some regularity. No date appears in either of the letters, but the evidence for their dates is solid enough. The shorter of the two has written on it a handwritten note, probably from Yorke, which gives its date as “1 Sept (1913).” The reference to “Equinox X,” itself dated to September of 1913, supports the date. The letter reads: To Battiscombe Gunn Dear Gunn I am just back from Russia, and hope to be in Paris just about the time when your next quarter’s rent falls due, when I will bestow the 30 francs and Equinox No X. Say no more. Yours ever.7

This short missive raises intriguing questions. Was Crowley actually helping Gunn with the rent on his Paris flat? Alternatively, as Mr. Philip Young of the Warburg Institute has suggested, the letter could refer to a debt of thirty

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francs that Crowley owed to Gunn.8 Gunn could have been using his own impending rent payment to push Crowley to make good on the debt sooner rather than later. Crowley’s “say no more” might have been intended to assure Gunn that he would not have to exert any more pressure to collect his thirty francs. In the case of the more extensive letter, the reference to “Book 4” also suggests a date of 1913: the initial two parts of Book Four, Crowley’s wellknown treatise on ritual magic (Crowley and d’Este Sturges 1913) were published serially in that year. Most probably, the letter belongs to a period early in the year, since Gunn had, apparently, yet to see “Part II” of the book. The spelling below follows an interlinear transcription that appears in the shorthand text. In the typed version in the Warburg Institute, the “a” key on the typewriter used by Yorke’s secretary had apparently malfunctioned, and so “e” is substituted throughout (i.e., “Deer” for “Dear,”“Bettiscombe” for “Battiscombe”). Battiscombe Gunn Esq 3 Rue [sic; no street name appears in the shorthand copy or the typed transcript] Dear Gunn I should have written before but for the uncertain issue of the contemptible intrigues of my swindling friend. Her name was Miller & is Mrs Cohn. Her address is 14 Sussex Place, Regent’s Park & she has a flat in the Champs Elysees or a house. I am not sure which. She is undoubtedly responsible to La Prade, Echaverria, King, Barne, O’Connor, & if these persons should bring action against her in France, she will have to pay up. As I have two independent witnesses to the fact that she commissioned me to buy pictures for her & an acknowledgement in writing which implies that she did so, you might see these people & ask them if they would like to take any steps. They can be sure of the heartiest support from me & my friends. Banks walked into the Cafe Royal the other night & was rather offensive, though I was glad she thwarted Hener Skene. She thinks the rhythm clique the only artists past, present & future. I am aware that I am using the word ‘thinks’ most uncordially. Mary d’Este Sturges descended upon us on Sunday. She kicked the terrible Turk out of doors & has started a scent shop 4 Rue de la Paix. I have been rather ill with influenza & things, but am all right now. There is a kind of vague possibility of my getting over to Paris in the course of the next 10 or 12 days. Banks, by the way, brought strange tales of you. Let me have a line from you. I suppose we have to thank you for the notice of Book 4 in the “Mail”. You will get a copy of Part II next week Yours ever9

Of the individuals named in this letter, Mary d’Este Sturges is the best known as an associate of Crowley’s: she appears as coauthor of Book Four. “Mrs Cohn” was the former Phoebe Miller, wife of London solicitor Edgar B. Cohn. Crowley had apparently only recently been on somewhat better

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terms with Phoebe Miller Cohn, having congratulated her on her “latest venture in matrimony” in a note in The Equinox (Crowley 1913b, 8). “Hener Skene” refers to Henry Skene, a prominent member of the European and British Bohemian crowd from which many of Crowley’s devotees were drawn; Skene, a classically trained pianist, was also closely associated with dancer Isadora Duncan, for whom he worked as an accompanist beginning in 1908 (William Breeze, pers. comm.). The Café Royal was a fashionable meeting-place for London Bohemians and celebrities from the 1860s until its closing in 2008; it has recently reopened as a luxury hotel (Café Royal n.d.). The “Banks” who brought Crowley “strange tales” of Gunn in Paris appears to have been (Dorothy) Georges Banks, a cartoonist and essayist who often contributed to the short-lived London arts journal Rhythm (thus her reference to the “rhythm clique”). We have been unable to trace the other individuals in the letter, but evidently Crowley took it for granted that they were all known to Gunn. It is also intriguing to note that Gunn had apparently either written, or else arranged for, a review of Book Four in the Daily Mail. Unfortunately, the Daily Mail at this era is not indexed, and up until the time of writing this article, we have been unable to locate a copy of the review. If Gunn himself was the author, his thoughts on the book would be interesting indeed! After 1923, we have been unable to trace any certain indication of contact between Gunn and Crowley. In any case, by the late 1930s, Gunn’s attitude towards the paranormal appears to have been that of a skeptic. In 1937, in his capacity as editor of The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Gunn published a deliciously caustic description of the “Rosemary” case, the case of a young girl who, it was alleged, had begun speaking ancient Egyptian—albeit with a Babylonian accent, as she was supposed to be the reincarnation of a Babylonian wife of the pharaoh Amenhotep III named “Nona” (Gunn 1937, 123–24). And Gunn declined repeated entreaties from “Rosemary’s” promoters to debate them on the plausibility of her claims and the genuineness of her spoken Egyptian, stating that he was “not interested in mediumship” (Griffiths 1986, 152). The only possible hint of any late contact between Gunn and Crowley that we can cite is a letter written to Crowley on 26 May 1941 by Frieda Harris, an artist who, at the time, was helping Crowley with the design of a new tarot deck that he called the “Book of Thoth.”10 Crowley and Harris were planning a public launch of the new deck in Oxford, but—because of Crowley’s reputation—were running into difficulty in securing a venue. The letter concludes with a P.S.: “The proofs have not turned up yet in spite of telegrams & letters. I enclose a letter from Gunn. Not propitious also.” There is no evidence that this “Gunn” was Battiscombe Gunn, and William Breeze suggests that he may actually have been associated with the printers who were producing the cards. But if the reference is to our Gunn, then perhaps Crowley was reaching out to his old friend, now an important Oxford don, for help with the launch of the “Book of Thoth.” If Crowley

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had written to Gunn through Frieda Harris, then perhaps that would indicate that the two had been out of touch for years, perhaps not parting on the best of terms. Perhaps now Gunn was declining to help. But that is pure speculation. CONCLUSION The evidence presented here is certainly more suggestive than probative. Gunn clearly had a relationship of some sort with Aleister Crowley, one that seems to have endured for at least a decade. Crowley was notorious and magnetic, particularly at the time Gunn first encountered him: in 1912, Gunn was twenty-nine and Crowley thirty-seven, with a reputation as a poet, a mountain climber, a mystic, and an uncompromising advocate of psychological, intellectual, and sexual liberation. Gunn, later described by his friend and mentor Alan Gardiner as a “true Bohemian” (Gardiner 1962, 32), may well have been just the sort of young person who was intrigued by, and attracted to, Aleister Crowley. Furthermore, Crowley was clearly impressed by Gunn’s scholarly abilities and credentials. But was Gunn ever really an “occultist” himself? Nothing considered here really answers that question definitively. Our own hunch is that Gunn’s thinking on such matters probably evolved continuously during the years of his young manhood. But certainly interest in the occult, the paranormal, and the esoteric was not uncommon in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, including among Gunn’s scholarly peers (for which see Gange 2013, especially 262–69). British Museum Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge associated, at least, with members of a group of paranormal researchers who called themselves the “Ghost Club” (Luckhurst 2012, 64). Gunn’s own early teacher in Egyptology, the long-time University College London archaeologist and professor Margaret Murray (1863–1963; cf. Sheppard this volume), was well known later in life for her interest in witchcraft; in fact, the self-understanding of the modern Wiccan movement is largely based on Murray’s theories of the survival of pre-Christian religious traditions in Western Europe (Hutton 1999, 194–201). It remains somewhat unclear whether Murray ever practiced witchcraft herself, but in her autobiography, she made clear her own acceptance of the reality of telepathy, of ghosts (which she regarded as inanimate atmospheric “photographs” of past events), and of reincarnation and karma (M. Murray 1960, 175–83, 205). Perhaps most famously, the Oxford University classicist Gilbert Murray (1866–1957) was fascinated by the possibility of psychic phenomena, particularly telepathy. He was well known for experiments in which he attempted to test and demonstrate his own psychic abilities and those of his friends (Lowe 2007; Wilson 1987, 278–82). If Gunn came later to abandon his interest (whatever its nature) in the esoteric, his Oxford colleague

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Murray never did: he served his second term as the President of the Society for Psychical Research in 1952, at the age of eighty-six (see G. Murray 1949–1952). Gunn, then, from the perspective from which we have viewed him here, was a man of his time. Egyptology, and the study of ancient civilizations generally, grew up alongside a popular fascination for the occult, the esoteric, and the paranormal. It would not be incorrect to say that in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, the various scholarly disciplines that had emerged to study the past, and the systematic pursuit of occult knowledge, were flip-sides of one coin. If the Egyptologist or the anthropologist wanted to discover the unknown past of humanity, the occultist wanted to recover it—to reintegrate it into modern life. Undoubtedly, many felt impulses in both directions. Indeed, the definite distinction between historical scholarship and esotericism/occultism may really be an artifact of the definitive abandonment of the esoteric by mainstream scholarship in the later twentieth century. This abandonment came about on empirical grounds, but those grounds were not yet fully apparent to many of those like the Murrays (Gilbert as well as Margaret, no relation), and perhaps to Battiscombe Gunn, whose own intellectual and spiritual roots were in the Romantic world of the late Victorian period.

NOTES 1. Cf. Wikipedia n.d., of which Janet Gunn is principal author. Vinson would particularly like to thank Mr. William Breeze, Executive Director of the Ordo Templi Orientis, which holds copyright and controls access to the documents in the Yorke Collection, for permission to quote the Crowley papers and for very useful correspondence on Aleister Crowley, his circle, and his times. Vinson is also obliged to Mr. Philip Young, librarian at the Warburg Institute, for his assistance in locating and scanning documents and for information on the history of the collection. Thanks also to Dr. Edmund Meltzer for help with Hebrew-language issues and for his comments on this paper. 2. The table of dramatis personae in Farr and Shakespear (1895) (similarly, Council of the Federation 1907, 21) designates Gunn’s character as the “Priest of the Floods and Storms,” but this is shortened to “Priest of the Waters” in the actual script of Farr and Shakespear (1895). 3. Gunn did not claim that the Egyptians were in any sense monotheists. Rather, Gunn was of the opinion that the expression “the God” in Ptah-hotep and throughout Egyptian wisdom and religious literature, when used generically, was intended as shorthand for “the God of your allegiance, whoever He may be” (Gunn 1906, 36, note 1). In his view, the evidence that had sometimes been adduced, even by eminent senior Egyptologists, for a “philosophical” monotheism in ancient Egyptian priestly circles (cf. Hornung 1982, 15–32), was “in the highest degree unsatisfactory” (Gunn 1906, 36, note 1). 4. Our thanks to Mr. William Breeze for bringing this copy of The Equinox to our attention and for obtaining a scan of the annotated pages from the current owner. Our thanks also to the anonymous owner for permission to discuss the Crowley annotations.

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5. Note that while Crowley describes the events as taking place in the “Boulak” Museum, the Museum in Bulaq had been closed since 1890, when its collection had been moved to a temporary home in Giza. The current Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo’s Tahrir Square had been open since 1902. For the chronology of the various antiquities museums in Cairo, see Reid (2002, 2, 105, 183; cf. David 1994, 249–50, 258). 6. Yorke Collection (OS A2, diary from 1917–1918); the designation “dies ♃” is for “day of Jupiter”—that is, Thursday. 7. Yorke Collection Box NS12 b. 8. Our thanks to Mr. Young for the following observation (e-mail of 20 August 2012): “in my dealings with the correspondence in the Yorke Collection, it seems that Crowley is almost always the one who owes people money.” 9. Yorke Collection Box NS12 a. 10. Aleister Crowley Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. Egyptologists may wonder whether Crowley might have chosen the title “Book of Thoth” for his tarot deck in emulation of the “Scroll of Thoth” in the “First Tale of Setne Khaemwas.” The “Scroll” or “Book of Thoth”from “First Setne” does turn up repeatedly in Gothic and horror fiction in and after the 1880s: in Sax Rohmer’s novel Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918), for example, or H. P. Lovecraft’s short story Through the Gates of the Silver Key (Lovecraft and Price 1934). There is, however, no mention of the tale in Crowley’s book explaining the meaning and use of his deck (Crowley 1944). In fact, the term “Book of Thoth” had been applied to the tarot since the late eighteenth century at least, decades before the 1822 decipherment of ancient Egyptian (cf. Court de Gebelin 1787, 395). This situation would point to an imagined connection between cartomancy and the esoteric tradition of the Corpus Hermeticum.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Unpublished Sources Aleister Crowley Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. Yorke Collection, Warburg Institute, University of London.

Published Sources Bakir, A. 1950. “Professor Battiscombe George Gunn, M.A. (Oxon)—(1883– 1950).” Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte 50: 421–27. Barns, J. 1950. “Battiscombe George Gunn.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 36: 104–105. Bierbrier, M., ed. 2012. Who Was Who in Egyptology? 4th ed. London: Egypt Exploration Society. Blavatsky, H. 1877. Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. 2 vols. Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University Press. Butler, A. 2011. Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic: Invoking Tradition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Café Royal. n.d. Café Royal: Regent Street, London. Accessed 18 October 2013. www.hotelcaferoyal.com/ Council of the Federation. 1907. Transactions of the Second Annual Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society, Held in London July 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th, 1905. London: Council of the Federation.

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Court de Gebelin, M. 1787. Monde primitif, analisé et comparé avec le monde moderne, considéré: Dans divers Objects concernant l’Histoire, le Blason, les Monnoies, les Jeux, les Voyages des Phéniciens autour du Monde, les Langues Américaines, &c. Ou Dissertations mêlées remplies de découvertes interessantes; Avec une Carte, des Planches, & un Monument d’Amérique. Vol. 8. Paris: Durand, Neveu, Librairie. Crowley, A. 1912a. “Waite’s Wet or the Backslider’s Return.” The Equinox 1 (8): 233–43. ———. 1912b. “Editorial.” The Equinox 1 (8): xxiii–xxvi. ———. 1912c. “The Temple of Solomon the King (Continued).” The Equinox 1 (7): 355–401. ———. 1913a. “Dead Weight.” The Equinox 1 (10): 211–25. ———. 1913b. “Editorial.” The Equinox 1 (10): 5–8. ———. 1936. The Equinox of the Gods. Comprising The Equinox 3 (3). London: Ordo Templi Orientis. ———. 1944. The Book of Thoth: A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians. Comprising The Equinox 3 (5). London: Ordo Templi Orientis. ———. 1996. The Magical Diaries of Aleister Crowley, edited by S. Skinner. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser. Crowley, A., and A. Bennet. 1912. “Sepher Sephiroth.” Special Supplement to The Equinox 1 (8). Crowley, A., and M. d’Este Sturges. 1913. Book Four. London: Wieland. David, E. 1994. Mariette Pacha: 1821–1881. Paris: Pygmalion/Gérard Watelet. Dawson, W. R. 1950. “Battiscombe George Gunn, 1883–1950.” Proceedings of the British Academy 36: 229–39. Farr F., and O. Shakespear. 1895. The Beloved of Hathor and the Shrine of the Golden Hawk. Croydon, UK: E. G. Craig. Gange, D. 2013. Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gardiner, A. H. 1962. My Working Years. London: Coronet Press Limited. Gilbert, R. A. 1987. A. E. Waite: A Magician of Many Parts. Wellingborough, UK: Crucible. Griffiths, J. G. 1986. “Some Claims of Xenoglossy in the Ancient Languages.” Numen 33 (1): 141–69. Gunn, B. 1906. The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke’gemni: The Oldest Books in the World. The Wisdom of the East. London: John Murray. ———. 1924. Studies in Egyptian Syntax. Paris: P. Geuthner. ———. 1937. “Notes and News.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 23 (1): 117–24. Hornung, E. 1982. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Translated from the German by J. Baines. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hutton, R. 1999. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lovecraft, H. P., and E. Price. 1934. “Through the Gates of the Silver Key.”Weird Tales (July 1934): 60–85. Lowe, N. 2007. “Gilbert Murray and Psychic Research.” In Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics, edited by C. Stray, 349– 70. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luckhurst, R. 2012. The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Munro, P. 1973. Die spätägyptischen Totenstelen. Ägyptologische Forschungen 25. 2 vols. Glückstadt, Germany: J. J. Augustin. Murray, G. 1949–1952. “Presidential Address.” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 49: 155–69. Murray, M. 1960. My First Hundred Years. London: William Kimber.

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Owen, A. 2004. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Reid, D. M. 2002. Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rohmer, S. 1918. Brood of the Witch-Queen. London: C. Arthur Pearson. Simpson, R. S. 2004. “Gunn, Battiscombe George (1883–1950).”Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online. Accessed 18 October 2013. www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/33607 Wikipedia. n.d. “Battiscombe Gunn.” Accessed 18 October 2013. http://en.wiki pedia.org/wiki/Battiscombe_Gunn Wilson, D. 1987. Gilbert Murray OM, 1866–1957. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Yeats, W. B. 1905. The Shadowy Waters. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company.

8

Margaret Alice Murray and Archaeological Training in the Classroom Preparing “Petrie’s Pups” Kathleen L. Sheppard1

Studies in the history of archaeology tend to favor a heroic male fieldworker. This approach unfortunately eschews the work done by archaeologists in other academic areas, such as in the museum, in the library, and in the classroom. In fact, coursework, museum collections, and the classroom were crucial to training future archaeologists for their careers in the field, as collectors, and as teachers. This chapter highlights the classroom training of archaeologists in the early twentieth century by focusing on the Egyptology program at University College London (UCL). I explore part of the career of Margaret Alice Murray (1863–1963; fig 8.1), who spent much of her life training students in the classroom. It was her organization and consolidation of the first two-year training program in archaeology at UCL that produced graduates who became famous field archaeologists. David Livingstone recently argued for the importance of the agency of different types of sites of knowledge acquisition—such as texts, bodies, buildings, and individual rooms (Livingstone 2003 and 2010; cf. Livingstone and Withers 2011). The field site in archaeology is, no doubt, well understood as a crucial site for the acquisition of knowledge about past cultures from the material remains left behind—one could not be a “real” archaeologist without excavation experience (Livingstone 2003, 45; Livingstone 2010; Livingstone and Withers 2011). Yet, it is also true that “the crafts deployed in the field are nonetheless typically acquired at home” (Livingstone 2003, 45). In other words, without particular theoretical, cultural, and linguistic knowledge gained in the classroom, the materials would be misinterpreted and misunderstood in the field. The field, then, would not be a lucrative site for data collection and knowledge production. In the history of scientific education, recent scholarship has explored the site of the classroom and the role of teaching as gendered arenas, usually occupied by women (Dyhouse 1995; Sinner 2006; Watts 2003, 2007). It has been well documented that women’s roles were not only less visible but that women were also paid less and usually worked longer hours at a more demanding pace. However, women were still able to make names and niches for themselves outside of these assistant roles, and classroom

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Figure 8.1

Margaret Alice Murray.

teaching was one possible avenue for this process. Historians of archaeology continue constructing this gendered assistant role by making the classroom secondary to the field. In Breaking Ground, Cohen and Joukowsky’s (2004) volume discussing past women in archaeology, the title itself clearly emphasizes fieldwork. Murray and others such as Dorothy Garrod and Gertrude Caton-Thompson have brief biographies in this book, but their influence in the discipline because of their instruction is minimized or missing entirely (Bar-Yosef and Callander 2004; Drower 2004a and b). This hierarchy of practical field work over instruction in theory can be seen in Murray’s own autobiography—she devoted more attention to her fieldwork, travels, and publications as a result of travel than she did to her teaching, students, or work at UCL (Murray 1963). There are a few exceptions to this rule. Rosalind Janssen’s institutional history is the only full-length work about the first century of the Egyptology Department at UCL, beginning in 1892 when William Matthew Flinders Petrie—Murray’s teacher and mentor—was appointed to the Edwards Professorship of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology (Janssen 1992). Janssen organizes her discussion around the men who occupied the Edwards Chair throughout its history, but throughout the book she details the coursework

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at UCL and argues that it was crucial to the development of the discipline itself. Importantly, she also acknowledges that Petrie had relatively little to do with the day-to-day teaching of courses, and she clearly portrays Murray as Petrie’s main assistant in the Department. Petrie’s biographer Margaret Drower focused specifically on certain aspects of the Department at UCL, such as Petrie’s appointment to the Chair and his annual exhibits in the museum (Drower 1985). However, it is his work outside of the Department that is highlighted; while Drower mentions Murray often, she is represented as no more than Petrie’s assistant, albeit an important one. Pamela Jane Smith’s recent A “Splendid Idiosyncrasy” is an excellent account of the beginning of the Department of Prehistory at Cambridge (2009). The classroom, the administration, and the activities happening in these sites at home in England, far from being forgotten spaces, are instead the central framework around which Cambridge began to build their program. Women were central to this new curriculum, as Smith demonstrates by detailing Dorothy Garrod’s career and her successful application to the Disney Chair of Archaeology in May 1939. However, as Smith points out, it was indeed Garrod’s fieldwork on Paleolithic sites in the Levant, Asia, and England that earned her the Chair, not her teaching or administration (2009, 69–102). Cambridge is therefore not a point for comparison. Indeed, there are few points of comparison for Murray because she was a teacher first and an excavator second or third, unlike most others. Therefore, I use Margaret Murray’s career as a teacher at UCL as a crucial case study, and I argue that it is first in the classroom, and not in the field, where the “heroes” of archaeology are made. MARGARET MURRAY AND PETRIE’S PUPS Murray was the daughter of a British merchant, raised in India in the AngloIndian lifestyle of so many British children in the mid-nineteenth century. She arrived at UCL in 1894, when she was thirty-one years old, just two years after the Egyptology Department was founded under the leadership of Flinders Petrie (Janssen 1992, 10; Murray 1963, 92–93). Because the terms of Petrie’s appointment as Chair included that “he should normally give a course of lectures in the first and third terms, but be free during the winter months to work in Egypt,” he was gone much of the time; in fact, he was still excavating in Koptos when Murray arrived (Janssen 1992, 4). Within just a few months of her arrival, Petrie returned from the field and found in Murray a competent and responsible illustrator and copyist; she found in him an inspiring teacher. She soon began helping Petrie with his excavation reports and organizing many of the material finds from his digs in Koptos. Murray was a quick learner, and in 1898, she was appointed Junior Lecturer with a salary of forty pounds per year to teach a beginner’s course in hieroglyphs (Drower 2004a, 121).2 After four years of working alongside Petrie

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in the Department at UCL as a copyist, cataloger, linguist, and teacher, she was finally invited into the field. From 1902 until 1904, Murray spent the winters in Egypt with Petrie’s crew, first excavating at Abydos and then copying tombs at Saqqara (Murray 1904 and 1905a). She had been a respected teacher long before her time on site, but these trips were crucial to her career in one main way: Murray was essentially following the same path down which she would send her own students. It is difficult indeed to prepare students for an experience the teacher has not had herself. Therefore, having experience as an excavator and fieldworker made Murray part of the field itself. Upon her return to UCL, she was fully ready to train Petrie’s diggers. When Murray arrived in London fresh from the field in 1904, the Egyptology Department was a “small, self-contained body” within University College and claimed only a fraction of the total number of students, but a substantial number were women (Bellot 1929, 400). Murray taught and had an impact on all of the students coming through the Department in these early years of the twentieth century, many of whom went on to become well-known and respected in Egyptology. The size of the museum collections was also growing rapidly, augmented annually by Petrie’s finds from his excavation seasons, for which the Department had been given a large space at the College with special display cases (Janssen 1992, 17–20). While Egyptology would always remain a small department, it grew substantially in its first few years and had quickly become a reputable training ground for future Egyptologists. Much of this growth was made possible by Murray’s steadfast and determined effort. After 1904, Murray stayed in London during term time so she could teach, returning to Egypt twice more in her life. However, each year Petrie continued to spend each winter digging in Egypt. He usually left “in mid-November and did not return till April or even May” (Murray 1963, 103). Excavations in Egypt were conducted during the winter months when the weather was cooler; although Petrie’s biographers mention his absence during the majority of the academic year, most do not discuss who, then, would have taken his place (Janssen 1992, 15–26). There were other teachers in the Department who Petrie trusted, but it was clear that Murray was the primary choice. Murray “ran a regular Department during Petrie’s annual absences,” organizing the seminar schedules, giving tours to visiting dignitaries such as Queen Mary, and managing students (Janssen 1992, 14, 21; cf. Drower 2004a, 121). Murray recalled of Petrie’s short stints of presence in the Department that, although he was “always willing to help he could not give any regular training to the students” (Murray 1963, 103). She therefore “shouldered a heavy load of teaching in all three terms of the semester, including evening classes twice a week” (Janssen 1992, 22; cf. Drower 2004a, 116, 121). She was constantly “engaged in organising the training of students in Egyptology, which meant also the general principles of archaeology, and in research work and writing” (Murray 1963, 103). For the remainder of her career at UCL, Murray continued a busy schedule,

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teaching day classes there while, in the evenings, she “taught in the evening school and gave courses outside the college,” such as Oxford extension courses at the British Museum, in order to supplement her annual salary, which had grown to about two hundred pounds by 1918 (Drower 2004a, 121; cf. Sheppard 2013). Even though they rarely saw Petrie in the classroom, UCL’s Egyptology students from this period are known to historians as “Petrie’s pups” (Janssen 1992, 12). There are several reasons for this designation. The first is that the Department was founded with money left by Amelia Edwards meant to fund Petrie specifically as the first Chair, and then Petrie built the program through his excavations and research. However, this work was only possible with a veritable army of assistants, one of the first of whom was Murray. So why did Petrie get all the credit for training these students? One reason may be that Murray’s various appointments divided her time among teaching and other duties at UCL, working at other museums, cataloging and detailing their collections, and teaching short courses at outside institutions (see Murray 1898–1899, 1902, and 1910 for details of these institutions). This reason is not very convincing, however, because Petrie divided his time between Egypt and UCL while also lecturing and doing work for other museums, such as Manchester. Another reason, which seems more likely, is that Murray’s relatively indefinite status at UCL tends to undermine recognition of her work in the historical record. Murray’s full teaching schedule and vague appointment status were not uncommon, however. Many women who were teachers at universities in this period had risen from the student ranks in the same department; rarely did women get hired into any department from the outside as a teacher until after World War I. Even then, many times women in positions similar to Murray’s were saddled with comparably large workloads. Many other women academics in Murray’s generation had to put forth tremendous efforts in order to make ends meet, to receive collegial recognition, or in order to receive any later recognition from historians (Dyhouse 1995, 139–40). Clearly, at UCL and elsewhere, the status of an academic appointment such as Murray’s “was often rather ambiguous . . . these posts were often underpaid, insecure, and carried heavy teaching responsibilities” (Dyhouse 1995, 136, 139). Unlike Petrie and other men who spent winters in the field, which resulted in excavation notes, data to analyze, and theories to write up for publication, Murray and her cohort had little to no data to contribute to the study of the field—unless they did research in their own time. Perhaps the most significant reason for the omission of Murray is that a student who called him or herself a “Petrie pup” did so because they were part of a group “selected by Petrie to act as his assistants in the field” (Janssen 1992, 12). This term was applied to all students who were talented enough to be chosen for fieldwork, even though they had spent a majority of their preparation time learning and interacting in the classroom

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with Murray. Murray’s labors, however influential within the walls of the Department, were in the classroom and not in the field. As Murray’s earlier experiences have shown, for archaeologists, excavations historically take precedence as the real training ground over any work done in the classroom (cf. Root 2004, 9). The curriculum with which Murray stayed busy teaching was of her own making. The two-year program, the first of its kind in England and first fully implemented in 1911, involved eighty total hours of coursework in each term and “gave a complete and systematic training in archaeology” (Janssen 1992, 11). After completing the coursework, students took eleven exams and, if successful, were awarded a Certificate in Egyptology. The purpose of the course in its entirety was to provide “able students with the opportunity for active fieldwork with the professor” (Janssen 1992, 12). “The professor,” of course, was always Petrie. Petrie depended on Murray’s courses to prepare his excavators to be true archaeologists and not just diggers. While Petrie believed that “the most needful of all acquisitions is archaeological experience,” that is to say fieldwork, he also believed from his personal experience and training (or lack thereof) that without understanding the cultural and historical context of the period or area, “the value and meaning of discoveries cannot be grasped, and important clues and fresh knowledge may be passed by” (W. Petrie 1904, 3, 5). From her time on excavation, Murray knew that archaeologists should be familiar with a variety of fields, such as anthropometry, anatomy, geology, mineralogy, and ancient and modern languages. They also needed an awareness of how objects such as tools and pottery were made (Murray 1963, 191–93). Murray put together an “intensive and extremely practical” training course in these subjects for students who were about to enter the field and aimed to “deter dilettante applicants” by making the course material sufficiently rigorous and comprehensive (Janssen 1992, 12). Petrie appreciated this work and counted on “her sharp eye,” which “divided the sheep from the goats . . . many distinguished men started in this way” (Janssen 1992, 13). Murray had shifted the emphasis of knowledge creation and legitimation from the field to the lecture hall because the kind of information gained there was essential to success on site. An early syllabus from the 1912–1913 academic year indicates that Murray’s course had components in the history, religion, customs, language, art, physical anthropology, ethnology, mineralogy, and geology of Egypt (Janssen 1992, 12).3 Murray taught five of the classes (those relating to Egyptian history, Egyptian religion, and ancient language elements) from September until April and brought in specialists to teach subjects such as anthropological methods and ancient art. Petrie was of course included—he taught three classes, when he was able: Religious Life in Egypt, Recent Discoveries (a single lecture about his past year’s work), and Dating of Objects. Crucial to this plan was the fact that Murray used Petrie’s growing museum collections as tools for training in artifact analysis and copying, as well as in language

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translation and data organization (cf. Alberti 2011). This approach allowed for the students to have some “field” experience in handling artifacts and analyzing them while still in the safety of the Department in London. Although the components offered in the certification course changed over the years (Organic Chemistry, for example, was added in 1916), the basic outline from 1911 was still in use as late as 1935 by Stephen Glanville, Petrie’s and Murray’s successor, thus demonstrating its perceived usefulness in training students for careers in Egyptology.4 The main ideas in Murray’s lectures that pertained to Egyptian history, chronology, and culture were in line with the contemporary theories of her day, and much of the general information given in the courses she wrote was standard teaching (see, e.g., Gelb 1950). Murray began her introductory classes by presenting the uniqueness of Egypt, arguing that a student of Egyptian history could not understand Egypt without understanding its climate or geography. She discussed the importance of the Nile as it flows through Egypt, the distinct line that divides the desert and the farmland, and the dominance of the sun in all life there. Murray’s handwritten lecture notes from her Archaic Egypt course state: “Egypt [is] merely [a] long ravine cut by [the Nile] river though [a] natural fault in [the] limestone plateau. . . . This little narrow strip of cultivable ground [is] bordered by desert, enclosed by cliffs, & divided by a river” (cf. Murray 1949, xvii).5 Due to the deposit of nutrient-rich soil each year by the annual flooding of the river plain, it was possible for inhabitants of the unfriendly environment to grow food and sustain a population. The history of Egypt had thus begun. Murray then covered topics such as the dates and chronology of ancient Egyptian dynasties, which rulers belonged to which period, and which periods were known as weak or strong, expansive in land or in knowledge, or declining in both. Murray gave her explanation of Egyptian history and government, informing students that the “Pharaoh was, as always, the supreme head, but under him were numerous officials appointed by himself” (Murray 1949, 73). Agriculture was dependent on the annual inundation, which took place from about the beginning of what we know as September to about the end of November, and Egyptians used tools such as the hoe and the ox-driven plow (Murray 1949, 79). The architecture of Egypt was inspired by the “starkness of the landscape” and the power of the sun to light or provide shade in its shadow (Murray 1949, 223–24). Except for some non-elite dwellings such as those at Deir el-Medina, the architecture that had survived until today consisted of monumental temples and mostly elite tombs, ensconced in religious symbolism and “made for Eternity” (Murray 1949, 224). As the river and sun were the sources of life in Egypt, they were central to the understanding of architecture, and Egyptian science was also dependent on the river and sky. The Egyptian lunar calendar, for example, was based on the study of the constellations (Murray 1949, 285). Meanwhile, Murray’s lectures regarding the language and literature of the Egyptians within other, more general historical courses

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focused on studying a few examples of religious, dramatic, and lyric poetry and prose that she retranslated herself (Murray 1949, 289–313).6 Although this may seem like a superficial survey, much of the material in Murray’s introductory classes was designed to prepare students for more specific subject matter. In more in-depth seminars, such as Hieroglyphs, she argued the importance of the ability to translate and read the ancient Egyptian language. Her courses were intensive undertakings. In fact, she later said about her abilities: “I am a teacher of language, and I think I can safely say that any student who began his study of Egyptian with me had never anything to unlearn even if he became a linguist” (Murray 1960). This assessment was indeed fair. Introductory students used Murray’s recently published and thorough texts, Elementary Egyptian Grammar and Elementary Coptic (Sahidic) Grammar (Murray 1905b and 1911). Both books were written for beginner classroom students as well as the interested outside reader, as Murray’s texts often were. The more advanced students copied texts from stelae in Petrie’s collection and the British Museum for translation and transliteration in their own notebooks.7 Murray offered not only the resources to translate the texts but also taught students to make their own assessments of passages and historical context. Courses such as The Arts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt detailed Egyptian methods of stone working, painting, glass making, woodworking, weaving, and more.8 In 1911, lectures for the second-year class in Archaic Egypt began with a general history of the early period, followed in the next five weeks by more in-depth analyses of various issues in this episode of Egyptian history, including art, religion, culture, customs, and kingship.9 Murray was a thorough and rigorous teacher, and she expected the same devotion to the subject from her students. MURRAY’S GANG As a woman leading the training site of the library and classroom, Murray prepared future archaeologists not simply to dig but also to produce quality research. The courses Murray developed and maintained are important to understanding the learning environment at UCL. Nevertheless, it is Murray’s students who are the crucial link to understanding her lasting influence on the broader discipline of Egyptology. She inspired a number of them to international success, and it is clear that her relationships with them were powerful and long-lasting. She passed her own intellectual interests on to them, and it is in the careers of her students that we can most clearly see Murray’s impact on the discipline. Countless students enrolled in the burgeoning training program at UCL from 1904 until 1935, and results were mixed. The first students to be taught under the new system formed a class of six “who all arrived around 1911 [and who] became known as ‘The Gang’ ” (Janssen 1992, 14). This

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group included Myrtle Broome, Guy and Winifred Brunton, Reginald (Rex) Engelbach, and Georgina Aitken. After the Gang finished Murray’s classes and left her classroom for Petrie’s field training, it was not long before their work became well-known. Murray fondly recalled these pupils in her autobiography, stating that they showed: gratifying results later: Rex Engelbach became Director of the Antiquities Museum of Cairo; Guy Brunton became the Deputy Director and also made a name for himself by his work on the predynastic [sic] periods of Egypt. Mrs. Brunton and Miss Myrtle Broome became well known for their illustrations (Murray 1963, 103). Although they learned field techniques from Petrie, the Gang’s success in the field is clearly and primarily linked to the tools and ideas they developed in Murray’s classes at UCL. Engelbach was one of Murray’s star students. He began with the Gang but went to the field more quickly than the rest (Glanville 1946, 97). In his first year at UCL, he went to assist Petrie’s digging at Heliopolis and Shurafeh (Brunton and Engelbach 1927; W. Petrie 1969, 223–24). He continued in languages and other classes taught at UCL when he was not excavating. Engelbach served during World War I, and from 1920 he remained in Egypt: first as the Chief Inspector in Upper Egypt for the Egyptian Antiquities Service, then from 1924 as the Assistant Keeper at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo, and then from 1931 as Head Keeper, a position he held until his death in 1946 (Glanville 1946, 97–99). As the Head Keeper, Engelbach “constituted a focus for all archaeologists visiting Egypt, and performed a special service by the good relations he maintained with excavators of all nationalities” (Glanville 1946, 97). Among other works, Engelbach was instrumental in organizing and writing a catalog of the antiquities in the Museum, with his classmate Guy Brunton at his side as Assistant Keeper (Engelbach 1923 and 1931). This catalog gave the first comprehensive overview of the holdings of the Museum up to that point and was central in establishing the authority of the institution, at least in the eyes of Europeans. Engelbach’s work on excavation was therefore a relatively small portion of his career. Indeed, it was the preparation for museum administration and organization he received at UCL and the training in languages that most influenced his future endeavors and therefore the study of Egypt in the first part of the twentieth century. Guy and Winifred Brunton married in 1906 and arrived at UCL together. They trained with Murray for almost two years, then left to dig with Petrie at Lahun, about sixty miles south of Cairo, from 1912 until 1914 (H. Petrie 1914, 185–86). It was here in 1914 that the crew (including Engelbach) made a discovery “which has been equaled but rarely in the whole history of Egyptian excavation” (Lythgoe 1919, 7): a tomb, plundered in the distant past, that contained a “treasure belonging to one of the [Twelfth Dynasty]

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princesses at Lahun,” most likely “the Royal Daughter Sat-Hathor-Ant,” as identified from the alabaster canopic jars left in the tomb (H. Petrie 1914, 185). This important first find was crucial in Guy’s career not only for the experience in careful digging with Petrie but also in practicing his writing skills in analyzing the importance of the items within it for the resulting field reports (Brunton et al. 1914–1920). After service during World War I, Guy worked on a number of Predynastic sites, such as Qau, Badari, and Sedment, and became one of the most authoritative scholars on early Egypt (Brunton and Petrie 1924; Brunton et al. 1927–1930; W. Petrie 1969, 240–55). In 1931, Brunton was appointed the Assistant Keeper at Cairo’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities and, with Engelbach, substantially rearranged its collections. All the while, Winifred had been trained by Murray and was able to join Guy on his excavations and made a name for herself as her husband’s chief illustrator (Janssen 1992, 14). Myrtle Broome was trained not only on the two-year program with Murray, but she was also skilled as an artist, a talent that Murray encouraged. Broome’s success in the field depended on collaboration as well, but not with a husband or male mentor. She is best known for her work for Britain’s Egypt Exploration Society (EES) with the archaeological copyist Amice Mary Calverley at Abydos during the late 1920s and early 1930s. As one half of this “partnership of the greatest harmony,” Broome copied scenes from the temple of Seti I and also the so-called Osireion (James 1992, 154). The plan for this project began as an attempt to create “a full publication of the temple in a manner which would do justice to the superb quality of the originals, and provide a lasting record for scholarship” (Kemp 1992, 85). The work ended in 1937, and only four volumes were produced.10 These volumes, nevertheless, are arguably “the most sumptuous published by the Society. They cover the rear part of the temple, but not the front part, from the first hypostyle hall outwards, or the annex on the south-eastern side of the rear. For these several more volumes are required” (Kemp 1992, 85). The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos (Gardiner 1933) “set a standard of excellence which, in the absence of special funding and of the artistic skills of the two ladies involved, may be difficult, if not impossible, to match in present circumstances” (Kemp 1992, 85; cf. James 1992, 155). Broome obviously excelled at copying inscriptions, much like Murray did. No doubt she was able to refine her technique with help from Murray while doing illustrations at UCL. It is not clear who the sixth member of Murray’s Gang was, but its fifth member is almost as difficult to track down. Georgina Aitken began studying with Murray in one of the university extension courses in 1911 but soon began attending classes full-time at the Department. Aitken was a family friend of the Bruntons and even introduced Petrie to Engelbach that same year (Brunton 1948, 1). The trajectory of her career is elusive, but by 1919, she was recognized as an official member of faculty, teaching hieroglyphs in the evening and given the title of Honorary Assistant (Janssen 1992, 14, 22). Five years later, Aitken went to dig with Petrie at Qau, but when she

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returned she “apparently disappeared later in 1924 returning only in February of 1929” to fill in for Murray in the Department when she was in Finland to give a series of lectures (Janssen 1992, 14, 22). Aitken retired in 1929 and “never published on the subject” of Egyptian language (Janssen 1992, 14, 22). Although she may not have become well known in the wider discipline, Aitken was, for a short while, an indispensable part of the Department. Her copious notes, now kept in the archives at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at UCL, demonstrate that she was an attentive student in class, and both Murray and Petrie must have trusted in her abilities as a linguist and instructor a great deal if Aitken assisted them both in important tasks. Until she left UCL for good, Murray had many other future archaeologists take her classes, and she took special interest in a number of them. At the end of their careers, many shared their memories of being in Murray’s classroom and the impact she had on them, personally and professionally (Janssen 1992; cf. Caton-Thompson 1983, 82–85). Most easily recognizable was the linguist Raymond Faulkner. After the war, Faulkner became one of Murray’s best language students. Later on, he inscribed his Dictionary of Middle Egyptian: “to Dr. Margaret Murray, who first taught me Ancient Egyptian, in gratitude and affection” (Faulkner 1962). This dictionary provided not just a vocabulary reference for linguists but also gave textual and bibliographical references for a number of terms. That way, a scholar did not have to have a specialist’s library but could simply refer to one concise volume. Faulkner’s work was clearly influenced by Murray’s earlier dictionaries, which were one complete volume written for scholars and beginners alike (Sheppard 2013). During the early twentieth century, the presence of women students at university was also beginning to be felt. More than ever before, young women in the middle classes were spending most of their time out of the house and out of their parents’ supervision. Murray, as a faculty member and therefore unofficial chaperone, took it as part of her duties to take care of and encourage her female students. Murray mentored many of her students on both professional and personal matters but, although she clearly had personal ties with many of them, relatively little is known about specific relationships. Murray hardly left any archival evidence behind: no diaries, few letters, and one autobiography. However, it is Murray’s correspondence with a scholar at the Manchester Museum, Winifred Crompton, in which we may see evidence of the kind of guidance many of Murray’s female students likely experienced. Crompton, just seven years Murray’s junior, began work with Murray when Murray visited Manchester in 1906 to work at the Museum. Murray was there, presumably through Petrie’s suggestion and recommendation, to help Crompton organize and catalog the Egyptian collections. At the institution two years later, Murray performed the unwrapping of two mummies unearthed by Petrie, and Murray and Crompton continued both a professional collaboration and a personal friendship

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until Crompton’s sudden death in 1932. In 1912, Crompton was appointed assistant-in-charge of the Egyptian collection at the Manchester Museum; from 1922 onward, she would become Assistant Keeper. This period was crucial in the Museum’s development. With donations from the local textile merchant Jesse Haworth, it was possible to expand the exhibition space for the growing collections (Alberti 2009, 71, 171). Crompton was in charge of organizing, cataloging, labeling, and displaying the Egyptian collections, which, from 1908, had grown rapidly in popularity and importance (Alberti 2009, 71, 171; Manchester Museum 1911, 17–19). She also aided a number of scholars when they needed to access the Museum collections for their work and did some research for them as well (cf. Perry 1923, vii–viii). Many of the first letters from Murray to Crompton dealt with the numbering of mummy bandages as well as with health and personal news of mutual friends of theirs.11 It is, however, the later letters that reveal Murray’s care for her informal student. In letters from 1919 and 1920, Murray advised Crompton—who was already Assistant Keeper—to write to other scholars with specialized knowledge if she had troubles in certain areas of study. Murray attempted to ease any discomfort Crompton might have had with that situation, and in February 1919, urged: “say I told you to write.”12 About one year later, Murray encouraged Crompton to write an original piece of research about nome signs, the symbols that distinguished the ancient provinces of Egypt from one another: Why don’t you work up some of these points yourself? It is time you did a piece of solid research, & this is a good subject to begin on. Just go ahead & do it, you are quite qualified for it. Take the nome signs, & find out all the early signs; this will throw a flood light on the local ceremonies and on the early religious beliefs. The John Rylands Library [at the University of Manchester] will get you the books you want, if they know you are really in need of them. Don’t be afraid of asking, & don’t be afraid of tackling a subject that is quite within your powers.13 There is no record of Crompton’s replies to Murray, but a few days later, Murray wrote to advise Crompton on research methods: There is no royal road to research. You must look through everything that has been published; keep careful notes in a book, & never trust to your memory. Better keep four note books, one for early, one for O[ld] K[ingdom], one for M[iddle] K[ingdom], & one for N[ew] K[ingdom]. When you read an article, take the author’s facts & not his conclusions, verify all his references. It is a desperately slow job. . . . If you get into difficulties, write to me.14 I have not found evidence that Crompton did write a paper on nome signs, but she did publish a few items in the EES’s Journal of Egyptian Archaeology and later her work appeared in Ancient Egypt, the journal of Petrie’s British

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School of Archaeology in Egypt (Crompton 1916, 1918, 1932). Murray probably considered Crompton more of a junior colleague, but Murray’s attitude toward her was indicative of her attitude toward all her female students. In this period especially, women who had supportive mentors who fostered independent thinking were more likely to succeed in the professions newly opened to them. As Petrie had led Murray through her first writing projects, Murray did the same for Crompton. Furthermore, Murray had arrived at UCL at a time of growth and flux, much like the situation at the Manchester Museum in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Undoubtedly, Crompton viewed Murray as a mentor and teacher, a confidant and friend. CONCLUSION Murray’s most lasting and most visible legacy was her students. She was equally devoted to their professional and personal wellbeing, and they enjoyed both formal instruction and informal mentoring relationships with their teacher in and out of the classroom. Furthermore, the classroom as a site of knowledge acquisition is clearly crucial to understanding the continuing importance of archaeological work in all areas. Although Petrie said early in his career that “no greater mistake is made than supposing that an excavator must needs be a scholar,” he in fact depended on Murray’s courses to prepare his excavators with the knowledge necessary to become archaeologists and not just untrained “diggers” (Janssen 1992, 13). Without the classroom space at UCL, of which Murray was the leader, Petrie would not have had the pool of students from which to choose his future protégés. In the end, Petrie understood the importance of Murray’s work in directing students in the acquisition of necessary knowledge in coursework. Murray’s students, many of whom went on to lengthy and successful careers in Egyptology, archaeology, and linguistics, would not have had the variety of choices of path without the breadth and depth of Murray’s program. The work and acknowledgement Petrie’s “pups” give to Murray’s influence is also evidence of this point. My aim here is not to exaggerate the role of the classroom but simply to bring it into the narrative as a space for knowledge creation. The “hero” of archaeology may continue to exist, but he or she is made in the classroom.

NOTES 1. This chapter, with permission, draws upon portions of Sheppard (2013). 2. It is not clear whether Murray ever received a degree for her work over the previous four years. 3. Other syllabi show similar components, for example, one from c. 1915 entitled: “A Course of Six Lectures on Egyptology, Syllabus.” This syllabus (UCL Special Collections (UCLSC), MS ADD 387, A-561, Series 1) has lectures on religion, the gods, cults, and rituals.

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4. The syllabus manuscript is visible at UCL Records Office and is entitled: “University of London, University College, Session 1934–35. Department of Egyptology, Course Listing.” 5. Murray’s The Splendour that was Egypt (1949) is, essentially, an outline of many of her lectures. She repeats much of the same information in published form that is also available in unpublished manuscripts, and in this discussion I use both sources here for ease of availability and reference; this source (UCLSC MS ADD 387, A-561, Series 1) is a manuscript from 1911 entitled: “Lecture I, Predynastic Period.” 6. Murray’s 1911 “Lecture VI, Language and Literature.” UCLSC MS ADD 387, A-561, Series 2. 7. See, e.g., Georgina Aitken’s undated notebook “Egyptian History, Vol. I” (UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology Archives AITKEN/01/). Cf. “Egyptian Exercises, c. 1931” by Margaret Drower (UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. Archives, 12/1). 8. The syllabus is preserved in manuscript as “A Course of Six Lectures on The Arts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt, Syllabus” (UCLSC MS ADD 387, A-561). 9. This 1911 syllabus (“A Course of Six Lectures on Archaic Egypt, Syllabus”) is available at UCLSC MS ADD 387, A-561, Series 1. 10. The survey work was picked up again in the 1980s by John Baines (1990) for the EES. 11. See, e.g., Murray to Crompton, 29 June 1909, Manchester Museum Archive (MMA). 12. Murray to Crompton, 20 February 1919, MMA. 13. Murray to Crompton, 5 February 1920, MMA. 14. Murray to Crompton, 9 February 1920, MMA.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Unpublished Sources Manchester Museum Archive, Manchester. UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology Archives, London. UCL Records Office, London. UCL Special Collections, London.

Published Sources Alberti, S. J. M. M. 2009. Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ————. 2011. “The Status of Museums: Authority, Identity, and Material Culture.” In Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science, edited by D. N. Livingstone and C. W. J. Withers, 51–72. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baines, J. 1990. “Recording the Temple of Sethos I at Abydos in Egypt.” Bulletin of the Ancient Orient Museum, Tokyo 11: 65–95. Bar-Yosef, O., and J. Callander. 2004. “Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod, 1892–1968.” In Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists, edited by G. M. Cohen and M. S. Joukowsky, 380–424. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bellot, H. H. 1929. University College London, 1826–1926. London: University of London Press. Brunton, G. 1948. “Reginald Engelbach.” Annales du Service des Antiquitiés de L’Égypte 48: 1–7.

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Brunton, G., and R. Engelbach. 1927. Gurob. London: British School of Archaeology in Egypt. Brunton, G., A. H. Gardiner, and W. M. F. Petrie. 1927–1930. Qau and Badari. 3 vols. London: British School of Archaeology in Egypt. Brunton, G., and W. M. F. Petrie. 1924. Sedment. London: British School of Archaeology in Egypt. Brunton, G., W. M. F. Petrie, and M. A. Murray. 1914–1920. Lahun. 2 vols. London: British School of Archaeology in Egypt. Caton-Thompson, G. 1983. Mixed Memoirs. Gateshead, UK: Paradigm Press. Cohen, G. M., and M. S. Joukowsky, eds. 2004. Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Crompton, W. 1916. “Two Clay Balls in the Manchester Museum.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 3: 128. ———. 1918. “A Carved Slate Palette in the Manchester Museum.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 5: 57–60. ———. 1932. “Two Glazed Hippopotamus Figures Hitherto Unpublished.” Ancient Egypt 16 (1): 21–27. Drower, M. 1985. Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology. London: Victor Gollancz. ———. 2004a. “Margaret Alice Murray, 1863–1963.” In Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists, edited by G. M. Cohen and M. S. Joukowsky, 109–141. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2004b. “Gertrude Caton-Thompson, 1888–1985.” In Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists, edited by G. M. Cohen and M. S. Joukowsky, 351–79. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Dyhouse, C. 1995. No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870–1939. London: UCL Press. Engelbach, R. 1923. The Problem of the Obelisks, from a Study of the Unfinished Obelisk at Aswan. London: T. F. Unwin. ———. 1931. Index of Egyptian and Sudanese Sites from which the Cairo Museum Contains Antiquities. Cairo: Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte. Faulkner, R. 1962. A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian. Oxford: Griffith Institute. Gardiner, A. H., ed. 1933. The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos. 4 vols. London: Egypt Exploration Society. Gelb, I. J. 1950. Review of The Splendour that was Egypt, by M. A. Murray. The Scientific Monthly 70 (4): 275. Glanville, S. R. K. 1946. “Reginald Engelbach.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 32: 97–99. James, T. G. H. 1992. “The Archaeological Survey.” In Excavating in Egypt: The Egypt Exploration Society 1882–1992, edited by T. G. H. James, 141–60. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Janssen, R. M. 1992. The First Hundred Years: Egyptology at University College London, 1892–1992. London: University College London. Kemp, B. J. 1992. “Abydos.” In Excavating in Egypt: The Egypt Exploration Society 1882–1992, edited by T. G. H. James, 71–88. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Livingstone, D. N. 2003. Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2010. “Keeping Knowledge in Site.” History of Education 39 (6): 779–85. Livingstone, D. N., and C. W. J. Withers. 2011. Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lythgoe, A. M. 1919. “The Treasure of Lahun.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s., 14: 1–28. Manchester Museum. 1911. Report of the Museum Committee for the Year 1910–1911. Manchester: Sherratt & Hughes.

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Murray, M. A. 1898–1899. “Catalogue of the Egyptian Antiquities in the National Museum of Antiquities, Edinburgh.” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 33: 465–531. ———. 1902. “Scarabs in the Dublin Museum.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1902): 31–38. ———. 1904. The Osireion at Abydos. London: Egyptian Research Account. ———. 1905a. Saqqara Mastabas Part I; and Gurob. London: Bernard Quaritch. ———. 1905b. Elementary Egyptian Grammar. London: Bernard Quaritch. ———. 1910. The Tomb of Two Brothers. Manchester: Sherratt & Hughes. ———. 1911. Elementary Coptic (Sahidic) Grammar. London: University College Press. ———. 1949. The Splendour that was Egypt: A General Survey of Egyptian Culture and Civilisation. New York: Philosophical Library. ———. 1960. Interview of Murray by L. Cottrell on BBC Radio, March 1960. ———. 1963. My First Hundred Years. London: William Kimber. Perry, W. J. 1923. The Children of the Sun: A Study in the Early History of Civilization. London: Methuen. Petrie, H. F. 1914. “The British School of Archaeology in Egypt.”The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 1 (3): 185–86. Petrie, W. M. F. 1904. Methods & Aims in Archaeology. New York: MacMillan. ———. (1932) 1969. Seventy Years in Archaeology. Reprint. New York: Greenwood. Root, M. C. 2004. “Introduction: Women of the Field, Defining the Gendered Experience.” In Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists, edited by G. M. Cohen and M. S. Joukowsky, 1–33. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Sheppard, K. L. 2013. The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman’s Work in Archaeology. Baltimore, MD: Lexington. Sinner, A. 2006. “Sewing Seams of Stories: Becoming a Teacher during the First World War.” History of Education 35 (3): 369–404. Smith, P. J. 2009. A “Splendid Idiosyncrasy”: Prehistory at Cambridge 1915–1950. Oxford: Archaeopress. Watts, R. 2003. “Science and Women in the History of Education: Expanding the Archive.” History of Education 32 (2): 189–99. ———. 2007. Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History. London: Routledge.

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Discussing Knowledge in the Making Christina Riggs

Writing to the Philadelphia anatomist Samuel Morton in 1841, George Robbins Gliddon could make the claim, “we, as hieroglyphists, know Egypt better now, than all the Greek authors or the Romans” (emphasis original; Nott and Gliddon 2004, xxvi–xxvii). It is a revealing claim in many ways. What does it mean to “know” ancient Egypt, where did this knowledge come from, and how did Gliddon think such knowledge could be measured and evaluated? Gliddon implies that the ability—still relatively new, in 1841—to read hieroglyphic texts was the key to direct and incontrovertible knowledge of Egypt: its history, culture, and society. A self-styled expert by virtue of his years spent living and working in the country as US Vice Consul, Gliddon adopts an empirical stance that can winnow truth from fiction and fact from myth with all the confidence of the nineteenth-century mind. Yet, in many permutations of Egyptology today, such empiricism is not the Victorian relic it should be: from the narratives of “discoveries” and “truth” that drive popular forums (television documentaries, media and Web coverage, commercial publishing) to the academic discipline’s own emphasis, in both its teaching and research outputs, on establishing “facts,” on documenting texts, objects, and sites, and on limiting its engagement with theory and critique. Similar observations have been made for the cognate discipline of archaeology, where concern for the collection, recording, and interpretation of data overrides what should arguably be the essential counterpart of such practices: critical interrogation of disciplinary histories and methodologies (cf. Gosden 2001, 2004; Liebmann and Rizvi 2008). Gliddon’s letter to Morton is a telling demonstration of the constructed nature of knowledge and the embedded histories and networks in which knowledge is produced: what Gliddon and Morton “knew” was the Caucasoid race of the ancient Egyptians, and Gliddon reproduced their correspondence in the preface to Types of Mankind (Nott and Gliddon 2004), the lengthy and popular work he coauthored with Josiah Nott, an Alabama doctor, slave owner, and fervent anti-abolitionist (Young 1995, 118–41). Ideas about the physical appearance and cultural affinities of the ancient Egyptians were formulated amid late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century

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scientific and political debates about race, a concept itself entwined with colonial expansion and the slave trade. Yet, if the application of racial theory and anatomical method espoused by Gliddon now seems crude, distasteful, or simply misleading, one has only to visit museum galleries like those of the Manchester Museum (in its 1986 to 2012 installation) or follow press coverage of mummy scans and facial reconstructions to see that the underlying methodological assumptions are alive and well, their scientific facticity scarcely questioned within or without academe (Riggs 2014; Wieczorkiewicz 2006). This chapter discusses the three attempts in this section of this volume to understand how such facticity is made. THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE The need to set the discovery and ordering of knowledge in historical context is one tenet or outcome of postcolonialism, an umbrella term for engagement with the cultural effects of colonialism both during and after the colonial period, and a scholarly approach that challenges the representation of the colonized Other (Liebmann 2008, 2–4; Patterson 2008; Young 2003). Especially relevant to discussions of Egyptology is one of the foundational texts of postcolonial studies, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Said used the work of Michel Foucault to demonstrate that the “Orient”—including both the modern Middle East and the ancient Near East—has emerged from a set of discursive practices, encompassing not only the literary material that was Said’s focus but also pictorial representation (both imaginative and documentary), performance arts, and popular culture. In this context, discourse defined the episteme: the subject of study and the limits imposed on how (and by whom) that subject was studied, an analytical category that Foucault first explored in The Order of Things (1970) and then refined in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972). This archaeological metaphor was key, even if archaeology has been slow to pick up on the implications: systems of knowledge, including agreement about what “knowledge” is, operate according to rules and frameworks of which individual actors at any given time are unaware. Excavating these discursive formations allows the historian, in the broadest sense of that word, to investigate the underlying motivations, conceptual shifts, and long-range effects of discourse. In other words, what we know about the past is a function not of that past, but of our own. Orientalism has been subject to a range of responses and critique (including Said’s own), and for postcolonial studies, Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) offers a significant alternative or counterpart (cf. Patterson 2008). For the purposes of my discussion here, however, the Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis and the creation of knowledge, which Said used to such effect in Orientalism, is most relevant—and continues to be a productive way to evaluate specific historical contexts, as Burke and Prochaska (2008) have argued. After Orientalism, Mitchell (1988, 1998) exemplified how such an approach, with critical adjustments,

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can be brought to bear on the representation of Egypt in the nineteenth century, while in the field of museum studies, Bennett (1995) has analyzed the development of museums in a complementary way. Like Mitchell and Bennett, the three chapters in this section of the book—two by scholars trained in Egyptology, one by a historian of science—cover the crucial period spanning the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, which is well-trodden but by no means exhausted ground. Although the chapters do not explicitly engage with theory, they do offer discrete case studies in an attempt to draw out the contingencies and contexts of knowledge making about ancient Egypt. Each chapter also raises the role of individual biography and agency and the concomitant importance of the personal networks formed through individual and institutional interactions. Over the course of the “long” nineteenth century, these networks informed Egyptology as it acquired the apparatus of a professional academic discipline, including its training, publication, and dissemination strategies. Moreover, the role of actors and networks, as well as a wider public, in maintaining this episteme can be explored through another body of theory, known as Actor-Network Theory (or ANT; Latour 2005; Law and Hassard 1999). Best known in archaeology and anthropology through the work of Bruno Latour, ANT is similarly indebted to Foucault in that it explores how technological or scientific developments—which many people might assume are the most easily demonstrable forms of knowledge—arise through social relations (for instance in a modern laboratory environment) and are revised over time: shifting modalities from, say, a fleeting observation, to instead take on the appearance of unimpeachable fact. Latour (1990) has himself used ANT to challenge the division between “the West and the rest” (the phrase is from Hall 1992) and deploys the 1976 French medical examination of the mummy of Ramses II to make a point as applicable to the methodology of the sciences as it is to other fields: an ancient Egyptian king can only be said to have died from tuberculosis—that is to say, an infection with the tuberculosis bacillus first described by Robert Koch in 1882—if we in the present perpetuate a set of premises and practices that allow us to extend Koch’s bacillus backwards in time, beyond the “local, practical and material networks” that produced it in the first place, and not in Egypt but in Koch’s Berlin lab (Latour 2000, 250). No ancient Egyptian thought Ramses II had died of tuberculosis: our knowledge creation ignores or overrides theirs, a Whiggish approach to history that “transplant[s] into the past the hidden or potential existence of the future” (Latour 2000, 248). As the example of the Ramses II examination demonstrates, there is ample scope for considerations of knowledge production to be carried through the twentieth century and into the present day. But the three chapters here, which are set at the height of the European colonial encounter with Egypt, offer a useful focus on that encounter and how it shaped, and was shaped by, the activities of nation-states as well as individuals, the operation of practices such as publication and teaching, and the multivalency of “ancient Egypt” as a generator of meaning for academics and a wider public. These

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chapters, like others in this volume, are only the first steps in interrogating the complex and interwoven histories of Egyptology and the knowledge regimes to which it has contributed. Taken as a whole, they contribute to a growing recognition of the need for a deeper understanding of these histories—by embedding them in disciplinary training, for instance—and for a sustained engagement with critical and self-reflective analysis of knowledge production in the study of Egyptian antiquity. ANDREW BEDNARSKI: “BEYOND TRAVELERS’ ACCOUNTS AND REPRODUCTIONS” Like the best adventure stories, the European encounter with Egypt began with a map—or, at least, the desire to make one. In countless books about ancient Egypt and the history of Egyptology, the Napoleonic expedition of 1798 to 1801 serves as a founding myth, although Egypt was already imagined as a site of French mastery before Napoleon put his plans of conquest into action (Porterfield 1998). The savants who formed an integral part of the expedition were on an Enlightenment quest for knowledge—but they were also engaged in processes of mapping and of visual and verbal representation that would help create both “ancient” and “modern” Egypt and exert both intellectual and actual European control of the country. In this respect, the resulting Description de l’Égypte was comparable to other encyclopedic projects in colonial contexts, for instance in French Algeria; the Description may have been even more significant to French audiences since it came to represent a territory they had lost (Godlewska 1995; Prochaska 1994). Nonetheless, the feats of the Napoleonic expedition also captured the public imagination in Britain, not only through the display of seized antiquities at the British Museum (notably the Rosetta Stone) but also through the popular account written by Dominique Vivant Denon, which was widely available in English translation (Bednarski 2005; Harrison Moore 2002). In his chapter here, Bednarski explores the work of another Frenchman, Frédéric Cailliaud, who, like Denon, came to public attention through his diverse accomplishments as a natural historian and mineralogist (Mehmed ʿAli backed Cailliaud’s travels to extract minerals, in conjunction with a violent campaign against Nubia) and used the medium of print to relay his discoveries. His multivolume Voyage à Méroé (1826–1827) appealed to armchair travelers and antiquarians alike, with its account of a mummy unwrapping Cailliaud staged at the Louvre with the help of no less than Jean-François Champollion. Cailliaud’s unfinished work on arts and crafts in Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia—Recherches sur les arts et métiers—tellingly sought to relate ancient practices to contemporary practices as well, eliding the ancient and the modern in established “Orientalizing” mode. The textual and visual corpus Cailliaud assembled, with which Bednarski has worked in its archival form, raises questions about how best to use

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and present such material today. Comparable manuscripts have been mediated through editors and choice of publication formats in different ways, with the risk that modern priorities and distinctions, for instance about the relationship between text and image, are imposed on the original author. The early nineteenth-century recording work undertaken by the Napoleonic expedition and by researchers like Cailliaud, Edward William Lane, Henry Salt, and Joseph Hekekyan captures an epistemological status quo, as it were, with potential not only for historiography, as Bednarski suggests, but also for considering how emergent Egyptology came to define its objects of study, its methods, and its priorities (cf. Colla 2007). Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822 was a watershed, which motivated the recording and collection of inscriptions and papyri and, it could be argued, privileged philological study, in a pattern similar to the development of other branches of “Oriental Studies” concerned with ancient and modern languages. That decipherment, too, could be usefully studied in this mode. Epigraphy and clearance work also contributed to the development of systematic archaeology, however, and the impact of material remains on the formation of ideas about ancient Egypt cannot be underestimated. It was the magnitude of the remains, not (just) in size but in quantity, that transported Egypt into museums, fixed it in tourist itineraries, and, by the late nineteenth century, brought the country under the purview of legislation that recategorized certain objects as “antiquities” and made them subject to regulation. As Nadia Abu el-Haj has observed with reference to the archaeology of Palestine (and also to the work of Latour): the very possibility of archaeological practice itself emerged from this demarcation of the (legal) category of antiquities. Disciplines, after all, require their own distinct objects of knowledge through which their expertise is formed and in relation to which their source of authority is established and the significance of their specialized practices recognized. Once taken out of everyday circulation, it is the very right of access to antiquities that is regulated (Abu el-Haj 2001, 43). In the Egyptian context, both the Ottoman government and the European powers active in the region built archaeology into the apparatus of the state, but the relationship between archaeology and colonialism, or for that matter nationalism, was not a necessary or incontrovertible one (Abu elHaj 2001, 6). Instead, it is significant that archaeology proved to be such a persuasive and significant mode of research in certain places, at certain times, and, in the case of colonial Egypt, that archaeological techniques fit within the political landscape as well as the actual one. A generation after Cailliaud, it fell to the Frenchman Auguste Mariette to help found Egypt’s first archaeological service and a national museum, which became a point of contention after the British invasion of 1882 (Reid 2002; Riggs 2013). Correspondence between the British Consul-General Evelyn Baring, who

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served as President of the Egypt Exploration Society, and William Matthew Flinders Petrie, the “father of Egyptian archaeology,” leaves no doubt as to how important archaeology had become for controlling ancient and modern Egypt alike (Gange 2013, 276). However, we do well to remember that archaeology began at home. KATHLEEN L. SHEPPARD: “MARGARET ALICE MURRAY AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL TRAINING IN THE CLASSROOM” Margaret Murray’s long life and career exemplify the relative permeability of boundaries of class, gender, and creed in the professionalization of Egyptology in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (beyond her chapter in this volume, cf. Sheppard 2010). First trained as a nurse, and at the end of her life better known for her research on European witchcraft, Murray was the first woman appointed to an academic post in Egyptology. This appointment was made possible not only through Murray’s own abilities but also thanks to University College London (UCL)’s policy of admitting women to study for degrees, something which other British universities at the time did not permit. Indeed, UCL’s full admission of women students was the reason Amelia Edwards chose it as home for the Chair of Egyptology founded in 1892 under the terms of her will, a chair first held by Edwards’s protégé (and Murray’s mentor) Flinders Petrie (for Edwards, see Moon 2006). Although it is Petrie who receives the lion’s share of the credit for training an entire generation—or two—of field archaeologists working in Egypt, Sheppard points out that the field was only one venue for this training, and the one in which Petrie was most active, absenting him from UCL during much of the teaching year. Murray and other staff at UCL were thus left responsible for delivering a program of Egyptian language and history instruction. Murray also devoted time outside her academic duties to lecturing and cataloging collections for museums in Dublin, Edinburgh, and Manchester, strengthening ties Petrie had already established. At Manchester, Murray organized and conducted the well-known unwrapping of the so-called Two Brothers burial from Deir Rifa (Alberti 2007; Sheppard 2012), but the claim sometimes made (for instance, in the Museum’s publications and exhibitions, from the 1970s to 1990s) that Murray was the first curator of the Manchester collection is erroneous and overlooks the role of professional networks, including personal friendships, in developing and furthering Egyptological research. Murray acted as an advisor, and a mentor of sorts, to Winifred Crompton, who was employed as the Manchester Museum’s printer and from 1912 as the assistant-in-charge of the Egyptian collection (Alberti 2009, 71). The point is an important one: the terminology and organization of the discipline and its professional manifestations are not fixed but in flux; historically, they emerged in specific contexts and are intrinsically relevant to the creation of knowledge and method. In the

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United Kingdom in the early twentieth century, for instance, only the British Museum employed a curator (Wallis Budge, the “Keeper”) specific to its Egyptian collection (for Budge, see Ismail 2011). Murray’s advisory capacity where museums like Manchester were concerned was possible precisely because she was a member of UCL’s academic staff. As Sheppard’s chapter makes clear, the university classroom was as much a “field” as the excavation site, or for that matter the museum. Moreover, the relationships between a teacher and her students were only one part of the network, another being the interpersonal connections forged between those who studied together at the same time. These connections affected not only the more obvious outcomes, like the career prospects of “Petrie’s pups,” but also the way in which the scholarly ideas and methodologies of these students furthered, or reacted against, the previous generation of scholarship. Political delicacies meant that Petrie’s efforts in Egypt would be as close as Britain ever came to having a “British School” in the country, but none of his work would have been possible without the parallel operation in Bloomsbury, where Murray and her colleagues had the task of turning archaeological “discoveries” into a curriculum of canonical certainties about ancient Egypt. These ancient “facts” were never more important than during the heyday of imperial Britain, as bulwarks set against the many fictions where anxieties about modern Egypt threatened to break through. Sheppard’s chapter goes some way toward revealing how these bulwarks were set into place. STEVE VINSON AND JANET GUNN: “STUDIES IN ESOTERIC SYNTAX” Bloomsbury made strange bedfellows, too. Home to UCL, the British Museum, and the British Library, those stalwarts of British intellectual life, it was also the meeting place of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a spin-off from Freemasonry that embraced Theosophy and spiritualism and counted among its membership W. B. Yeats, Olivia Shakespear, Aleister Crowley, and at least one Egyptologist in the form of Battiscombe Gunn (Luckhurst 2012, 219–30). Vinson and Gunn’s contribution brings to light what they call the “enigmatic friendship” between Crowley and Gunn, whose encounters have the making of a Rider Haggard short story—to no surprise. Tales of revivified mummies, lost lands, and esoteric knowledge took on a particular urgency after the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, creating an imaginary archaeological landscape where the excavator-hero’s passion for the nearest ancient princess mirrored the real-life Egyptologist’s dedication to scientific fact, with all the political implications that this dedication literally and figuratively embodied: Since the presence of British scholars in Egypt was authorized by the high-minded ideals of protecting and studying vulnerable antiquities, the moment those relics were pronounced safe and well-catalogued

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If the mystical allure ascribed to Egyptian relics by such diverse writers as Rider Haggard or Shakespear (who coauthored the occultist plays The Beloved of Hathor and The Shrine of the Golden Hawk, for which see Luckhurst 2012, 223–24) seems to have the character of a subconscious, irrational, or libidinal urge, it is worth remembering that Freud’s own term for such a fixation was Besetzung: occupation (Deane 2008, 407). The exotic and erotic potential of ancient Egypt developed, like any other discursive statement, from the preoccupations of the present. Crowley’s involvement in the Order of the Golden Dawn was divisive, leading to Yeats’s resignation from the group and cementing Crowley’s reputation as a figure “simultaneously mocked and feared” in Edwardian circles, whose “ambiguous status . . . was perfectly at one with the ambivalence of mummy curse rumours” (Luckhurst 2012, 230). As Vinson and Gunn point out, it is unclear just how close the Crowley and Gunn relationship was in the years leading up to World War I and afterwards, but their correspondence and Crowley’s diary references to Gunn suggest that their contact constituted more than mere acquaintance, with Crowley looking to Gunn for expert advice on Egyptological matters. Difficult a figure as Crowley was, he was also charismatic, and Gunn’s involvement with the Order of the Golden Dawn was not exceptional. A number of other professional Egyptologists took part in what we might characterize as “alternative religions,” or belief systems outside the mainstream. Vinson and Gunn mention Budge’s membership of the Ghost Club and Murray’s alleged involvement with Wicca, while Petrie himself first went to Egypt thanks to the pyramid theories of Charles Piazzi Smyth, and American Egyptologist Mark Lehner (n.d.) has also described his initial interest in Edgar Cayce’s pyramidology. Hence, the Manichaean duality between “esoteric” and “academic” Egyptology that some scholars have proposed (e.g., Hornung 2001) is misleading. Theosophy and other “alternative” apprehensions of ancient Egypt, though often viewed with suspicion or derision by university-focused Egyptology, nonetheless resemble each other in that they lay claim to ancient Egypt as a source of evidence—and of identity. From the founding myth of the Napoleonic expedition, to modern myths of scientific objectivity and academic rationalism, Egyptology has too fervently embraced a positivist, often essentializing, approach to its sources and interpretive strategies. Scholarship does not, and has never, proceeded in an orderly manner “untainted” by the messiness of history or politics and divorced from networks of interaction or belief, and the accrual of ever more—and more precise—knowledge is a smokescreen or, perhaps more fittingly, a desert mirage. Vinson and Gunn posit the “definitive abandonment of the esoteric” by mainstream Egyptology in the later twentieth century but, to return to my earlier discussion of the role of discourse in the making

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of knowledge, Said’s Orientalism sounds a cautionary note here: we create our Other to define ourselves. BIBLIOGRAPHY Abu el-Haj, N. 2001. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Alberti, S. J. M. M. 2007. “Molluscs, Mummies and Moon Rock: The Manchester Museum and Manchester Science.” Manchester Region History Review 18: 130–54. ———. 2009. Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Bednarski, A. 2005. Holding Egypt: Tracing the Reception of the Description de l’Égypte in Nineteenth-Century Great Britain. London: Golden House Publications. Bennett, T. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Bhabha, H. K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Burke III, E., and D. Prochaska. 2008. “Introduction: Orientalism from Postcolonial Theory to World Theory.” In Genealogies of Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics, edited by E. Burke III and D. Prochaska, 1–74. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Cailliaud, F. 1826–1827. Voyage à Méroé, au Fleuve Blanc, au-delà de Fazoql dans le midi du royaume de Sennâr, a Syouah et dans cinq autres oasis; fait dans les années 1819, 1820, 1821 et 1822. Paris: Imprimerie royale. Colla, E. 2007. Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Deane, B. 2008. “Mummy Fiction and the Occupation of Egypt: Imperial Striptease.” English Literature in Translation, 1880–1920 51 (4): 381–410. Foucault, M. (1966) 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated from the French. London: Tavistock. ———. (1969) 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated from the French by A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock. Gange, D. 2013. Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Godlewska, A. 1995.“Map, Text and Image: The Mentality of Enlightened Conquerors; A New Look at the Description de l’Egypte.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s., 20 (1): 5–28. Gosden, C. 2001. “Post-Colonial Archaeology.” In Archaeological Theory Today, edited by I. Hodder, 251–66. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. ———. 2004. “The Past and Foreign Countries: Colonial and Post-Colonial Archaeology and Anthropology.” In A Companion to Social Archaeology, edited by L. Meskell and R. W. Preucel, 161–78. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Hall, S. 1992. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In Formations of Modernity, edited by S. Hall and B. Gieben, 275–320. Cambridge: Polity Press in association with The Open University. Harrison Moore, A. 2002. “Voyage: Dominique-Vivant Denon and the Transference of Images of Egypt.” Art History 25 (4): 531–49. Hornung, E. 2001. The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Ismail, M. 2011. Wallis Budge: Magic and Mummies in London and Cairo. Glasgow: Hardinge Simpole.

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Latour, B. 1990. “Drawing Things Together.” In Representation in Scientific Practice, edited by M. Lynch and S. Woolgar, 19–68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2000. “On the Partial Existence of Existing and Nonexisting Objects.” In Biographies of Scientific Objects, edited by L. Daston, 247–69. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, J., and J. Hassard, eds. 1999. Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell. Lehner, M. n.d. “A Note from AERA’s Director.” Accessed 20 September 2013. www. aeraweb.org/about/mark-lehner/ Liebmann, M. 2008. “Introduction: The Intersections of Archaeology and Postcolonial Studies.” In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by M. Liebmann and U. Z. Rizvi, 1–20. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira. Liebmann, M., and U. Z. Rizvi, eds. 2008. Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira. Luckhurst, R. 2012. The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, T. 1988. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order.” In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, edited by D. Preziosi, 455–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moon, B. E. 2006. More Usefully Employed: Amelia B. Edwards, Writer, Traveller and Campaigner for Ancient Egypt. London: Egypt Exploration Society. Nott, J. C., and G. R. Gliddon. (1854) 2004. Types of Mankind. Reprint. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Patterson, T. 2008. “A Brief History of Postcolonial Theory and Implications for Archaeology.” In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by M. Liebmann and U. Z. Rizvi, 21–34. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira. Porterfield, T. 1998. The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798–1836. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Prochaska, D. 1994. “Art of Colonialism, Colonialism of Art: The Description de l’Egypte (1809–1828).” L’Esprit Createur 34 (2): 69–91. Reid, D. M. 2002. Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Riggs, C. 2013. “Colonial Visions: Egyptian Antiquities and Contested Histories in the Cairo Museum.” Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 1: 65–84. ———. 2014. Unwrapping Ancient Egypt. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Sheppard, K. L. 2010. “The Lady and the Looking Glass: Margaret Murray’s Life in Archaeology.” PhD diss., University of Oklahoma. ———. 2012. “Between Spectacle and Science: Margaret Murray and the Tomb of the Two Brothers.” Science in Context 25 (4): 525–49. Wieczorkiewicz, A. 2006. “Unwrapping Mummies and Telling Their Stories: Egyptian Mummies and Museum Rhetoric.” In Science, Magic and Religion: The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, edited by M. Bouquet and N. Porto, 51–71. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Young, R. J. C. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2003. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part III

Colonial Mediations, Postcolonial Responses The third part of this book, “Colonial Mediations, Postcolonial Responses,” explores particular examples of the relationship of Egyptology to wider political order. The first of these examples relates to labor history and class within Egypt. Building on Stephen Quirke’s (2010) work, Wendy Doyon’s chapter illustrates how Egyptology’s presence in Egypt has been built upon not only the work of “others” (the numerous laborers employed during excavations) but also upon the construction of class in the country. Doyon demonstrates this situation in terms of Egypt’s colonial period: since at least the late nineteenth century, Egyptologists have been as responsible for constructions of class within Egyptian society as the Egyptian state within and with which they worked and collaborated. Yet, Doyon also implies how powerful this role remains by referencing a particular contemporary museum display: it is a role, then, that cannot (and should not) go without comment, even today. Yet, coupled with the reflections in Hussein Omar’s chapter about the power of the (colonial and postcolonial) Egyptian state in constructing its own archive, it is important that Egyptologists recognize this situation. Official archives in Egypt (if extant at all) have always been subject to the state’s manipulation: official demands for “security” having recently been particularly notable. The likelihood of using such archives—at first glance perhaps the most relevant—to examine the labor and class history of Egyptological fieldwork is, then, unlikely for the time being, if ever. Yet, field notes written by Egyptologists represent one potential solution to this issue, as Doyon shows; many of these notes have also now been made available for researchers to inspect. Yet, it is up to the Egyptologists who write them to recognize the powerful meanings that their own field notes carry and to make certain that this availability can continue. The third chapter in this section, written by Donald M. Reid, echoes Omar’s reflections by demonstrating how Egyptology has, at heart, always been a political enterprise. Discussing the changing political relationship between Britain and Egypt between 1922 and 1972 through the lens of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun and the exhibition of the tomb’s artifacts, Reid explains how this political experience retained its valence even as

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Egypt moved into the postcolonial era and as political narratives changed. What, then, has been the result of this over-arching political reality? Marwa Elshakry’s discussion chapter suggests one possibility: commenting on the pieces in this section, she demonstrates how one transformation in Egypt resulting from Egyptology’s place in politics has related to consciousness of Egyptian history itself. As Elshakry puts it, “Egyptology marked the modern Egyptian landscape in profound ways.” Yet, given the narratives of power discussed in this section, what other sorts of transformation was the discipline responsible for? Only further historical inquiry can suggest. BIBLIOGRAPHY Quirke, S. 2010. Hidden Hands: Egyptian Workforces in Petrie Excavation Archives, 1880–1924. London: Duckworth.

10 On Archaeological Labor in Modern Egypt Wendy Doyon

Visitors to the Egyptian galleries at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (University of Pennsylvania Museum) have the rare privilege of exploring the ceremonial throne room of the earliest royal palace known to us from Egypt’s ancient capital city of Memphis, located in what is today the Governorate of Giza. The reconstructed throne room, with its monumental gateways and decorated columns, was the ritual centerpiece of a royal palace belonging to the pharaoh Merenptah, son of Ramses II. Visitors to the Museum’s Egyptian gallery may also notice a wall label announcing the “Excavation of the Palace of Merenptah,” accompanied by a photograph of the University of Pennsylvania Museum excavations in progress at the site in 1915 (fig. 10.1). This photograph nicely illustrates the stratigraphy of Memphis, with the palatial New Kingdom columns in situ beneath the ruins of a Roman building surrounded by the cultivated fields of the nearby village of Mit Rahina. What many visitors may not notice so clearly, however, is the group of Egyptian workers actively excavating the palace. They are young men and boys from the local village, paid by the day to haul dirt, a foreman from the town of Qift, Upper Egypt, standing in the middle of the group, and a young girl looking up at the camera, who was perhaps bringing food for her father, brother, or uncle on site the day this photograph was taken.1 As a visual record of the archaeology of Memphis, these local people, who excavated hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of dried mud to make this archaeological perspective possible, were not really meant to be seen in the photograph at all. Instead, as Egyptology entered the twenty-first century, the Egyptians pictured in this very photograph to illustrate The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt’s entry for “Archaeology” in 2001, were associated only with the “insidious forces” threatening archaeological sites today (Weeks 2001, 109). In this entry’s five pages, no mention is made of modern Egyptians or the local context of archaeological practice at all. The workers in the photograph, mid-conversation, have been silenced by the larger archaeological community that is positioned “behind the lens,” so to speak, and whose aesthetic choices have insisted on a juxtaposition between archaeological workers and a mute archaeological record. Whether intentional or not, this

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Figure 10.1 University of Pennsylvania Museum excavations at the Palace of Merenptah, 1915.

juxtaposition is essentially a value-statement of social and cultural incompatibility between photographer and subject; it sends a message to working Egyptians to “keep their place” in the order of things Egyptological. This chapter, which is based on original sources documenting Egyptian fieldwork in archaeological archives such as the University of Pennsylvania Museum, aims to examine the social and labor relations of Egyptian archaeology in the light of the history of modern Egypt and to explore the social construction of class at the intersection of Egyptology and Egyptian society since 1800. It does not argue for the postcolonial deconstruction of Egyptology or a rejection of its philosophical and aesthetic values. Rather, it aims to raise questions about the power structure and moral authority on which the archaeological tradition in Egypt rests. EGYPTOLOGY AND ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE MODERN WORLD In a conventional sense, the story of how Merenptah’s throne room came to be reconstructed in Philadelphia is a story about the end of the heroic age of archaeology at the turn of the twentieth century, a time when the plunder of preceding centuries was giving way to more explicitly scientific methods of

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excavation by European archaeologists—methods also shaped by new political engagements with Egyptian, Arab, and Turkish nationalism, in addition to American interests in the Middle East (Colla 2007; Doyon in press; Petrie 1904, 1932; Reid 2002; Trigger 1984, 1989). In another sense, it is also a story about the role of archaeology in the modern world economy during its transformation to an integrated world market with an international division of labor after 1750. With the expansion of the French and British trade empires into Asia, Africa, and the Americas, European capital investment reached inland from ports to railways, roads, canals, and communication networks, as well as to scientific activities like surveys, specimen collecting, and archaeological excavations (Jasanoff 2005; Schaffer et al. 2009). In particular, the investment of British capital in ports and shipping from India to the Middle East and East Africa, which coincided with the age of abolition, has been credited with the partial transformation of the Indian Ocean economy from slavery to wage labor. In contrast, the expansion, centralization, and commercialization of regional empires that invested little in wage labor, such as Mehmed ʿAli Pasha’s dynasty in Egypt, instead resulted in the creation of new kinds of slavery for low-status and dispossessed village communities (Campbell 2005; cf. Ahuja 2002; Ewald 2000). Between 1810 and 1830, Mehmed ʿAli Pasha, Ottoman governor of Egypt from 1805 to 1848, launched an industrial state-building project, which featured major institutional reforms, land and property redistribution, the conscription of an Egyptian army, and a corvée labor policy to implement the construction of dams, canals, and factories (Baer 1962; Fahmy 1997; Hunter 1984; Mikhail 2011; Reid 2002). This combination of forced labor, land redistribution, and tax reform created a large, new class of low-status peasant laborers, whose labor then became a form of private property for the state and an expanding class of high-status landowners. Because many of the Pasha’s institutional reforms were modernizing and in some sense Westernizing, traditional social institutions such as Islamic schools and courts received less and less state patronage, while European institutions, such as consular courts and land concessions for economic development, received a greater share of legal protection. The Ottoman treaty privileges known as capitulations—which granted a special legal status to non-Muslim foreigners in Muslim territories, primarily merchants but also European consuls and collectors—came to represent increasingly independent commercial concerns that were protected, in an extraterritorial sense, by French and English civil law.2 Thus, during this period, the Pasha’s institutional and land reforms gradually eroded the traditional authority of Islamic institutions, alienated the status of his Muslim subjects, and increasingly privileged the civil status of a new upwardly mobile class of wealthy, educated, Westernized, and landowning elites traditionally excluded from the Turkish upper classes (now including European patrons with concessions for land development). This process

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occurred at the expense of the majority of Egyptians not protected by the shifting state patronage of civil, as opposed to Islamic, law. As Maya Jasanoff (2005) has shown, after Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition in 1798, French and British consuls in Egypt under Mehmed ʿAli’s administration began to pattern their investments in Egyptian antiquities after imperial collectors in India, thus becoming the first generation of Egyptian collectors, whose privileged status in Egypt enhanced their social mobility in Paris and London. In a broader sense, as she and others have shown, archaeology and its claims to scientific objectivity in the nineteenth century served to reproduce the upper-middle class interests of mostly European men (Bailkin 2004; Thomas 2004; Trigger 1989). As British and French consuls and their clients holding archaeological concessions began to receive a greater share of protected legal status relative to the majority population of Egypt, it can be suggested that the class privileges associated with collecting in nineteenth-century Egypt gave Egyptologists a certain, if potentially illegitimate, claim to moral authority and a right to produce knowledge to the exclusion of then “second-class” Egyptian citizens. Moreover, as Julian Thomas (2004) has shown, a universalizing belief in scientific objectivity tends to free anything labeled as science from ethical consideration. Thus, because the use of the scientific method is one of many ways that archaeology claims moral authority as a way of knowing, it often appears to be separate from concerns of an ethical or political nature, whereas the moral authority of archaeology is, in reality, a struggle for social and political legitimacy rather than an absolute right. For this reason, the class status of Egyptologists within Egyptian society is an issue of historical significance. The production of archaeological knowledge should perhaps be understood in terms of political economy as much as it is understood in terms of intellectual history. In Egypt and the Middle East, for example, the large scale of archaeological excavations, both systematic and unsystematic, has always determined the kinds of questions that archaeologists have been able to ask, and therefore indirectly shaped the nature of the archaeological record there. To understand how the social structure of archaeology has in part determined the archaeological record, we must examine the economic relations that have reproduced archaeological interests in Egypt, which generally fall into four distinct periods. The early nineteenth century, from 1800 to 1850, was characterized by Mehmed ʿAli’s state-building project, land reform, and corvée labor policy, and the exploitation of these circumstances by men like Henry Salt, Bernardino Drovetti, Lord Elgin, Dominique Vivant Denon, and Jean-François Champollion, who established archaeological spheres of influence with claims to property rights in land and labor on behalf of Britain and France (Jasanoff 2005; Manley and Rée 2001). The next period, from 1850 to 1880, was characterized by French dominance in the Egyptian Antiquities Service, archaeological corvée, and the rising class tensions of Egyptian nationalism during the reign of the Francophile Khedive Ismaʿil (1863–1879). The

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following period, from 1880 to 1900, was defined by British administration of the Egyptian government after 1882, increasing privatization of archaeological excavations following the establishment of the Egypt Exploration Fund the same year, the intensification of British-French rivalry in the Egyptian Antiquities Service administration, and increasing popular support for the Egyptian nationalist movement. Finally, the period from 1900 until 1922 signaled Egypt’s move for national independence and liberalization, the rise of American interests in Egyptian archaeology, and the strengthening of Egyptian nationalism through Egyptology, culminating in the discovery and nationalization of the tomb of Tutankhamun (Reid 2002). Modern class relations have often been cast as a dialectical struggle between workers and peasants against the state (for example, in Marxist, postcolonial, and subaltern analyses).3 Beyond conventional class analysis, Philip Curtin (1984) was among the first contemporary historians to suggest that centralized control of political economies tends to be overstated, while the social interactions of trade and cultural constructions of value, independent of state authority, have been understated. It was Curtin’s view, followed here, that merchants, traders, and other go-betweens create political economies that reproduce their own status and class interests, while state expansion and contraction is only one sphere of interaction among many in the modern world economy. In this context, Curtin and others have identified the existence of cross-cultural communities of traders and other political economies independent of state authority (Bang 2003; Bose 2006; Jasanoff 2005; Schaffer et al. 2009; White 1991). Additionally, in the context of the transformation of the modern world economy from slavery to wage labor, labor brokers and go-betweens representing traditional communities often built new partnerships with foreign capitalists, whose privileged status could in some sense be shared by the new power brokers and perhaps diversified along more traditional lines, such as religion and kinship, within new spheres of trade and cultural exchange (Ahuja 2002; Ewald 2000; Raj 2007). Thus, in Egypt, as Mehmed ʿAli’s centralizing empire expanded into the countryside during the first half of the nineteenth century, suddenly bringing many independent household, village, and tribal communities into his sphere of authority, legally protected European spheres of investment, such as archaeological concessions, were bound to create new forms of social mobility, refuge, and security, at least for some. As archaeological excavations began to create a partial wage labor economy in Egypt, a new class of go-betweens with a kind of diplomatic status—represented by the figure of the raʾῑ s, or foreman—emerged during the early part of the century, became centralized in the middle part of the century, diversified toward the end of the century, and in a sense became industrialized in Qift by the turn of the twentieth century. Thus, in exchange for reliable labor, the protection enjoyed by archaeologists came to be shared with the raʾῑs, whose position shifted from a marginalized to a special status over time and whose dual

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social status probably also worked in the other direction to legitimate the property claims of archaeologists in the eyes of many Egyptians. ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE RAʾῙS-SYSTEM IN EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY, C. 1800–1895 Prior to the establishment of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, archaeological concessions in Egypt were decentralized, and available labor was in some sense owned by landlords and other patrons with control over debts and taxes. Early in this period of decentralized authority, village shaykhs near Giza and Thebes, on behalf of Mehmed ʿAli and his cadre of Ottoman governors, routinely levied hundreds of men, women, and children (as young as the age of five) as daily laborers to excavate for French and British consuls at major sites in these areas (Belzoni 1835; Usick and Manley 2007; Vyse 1840). In the region of Giza, men were paid by the day to clear dirt and stones, boys called “basket carriers” to haul the dirt, and women to carry water. Each day several locally appointed foremen, usually skilled in masonry or quarry work, were contracted to oversee the excavations. A typical workforce might have had one raʾῑs for every twenty-five to thirtyfive workers (Vyse 1840). Men and boys were expected to supply their own basket and turiyya (or hoe) for excavating; women contributed, if indirectly, by supplying food and water and helping the children with the baskets. In rural, nineteenth-century Egypt, domestic households represented the basic economic unit of all paid, taxed, and indirect labor, from which larger labor networks were constructed via multi-household family groups (Tucker 1985; Zilfi 2004). In terms of the sexual division of fieldwork, female labor in the region of Giza and Memphis was more direct than in Upper Egypt, but less direct than in the Nile Delta, where both men and boys excavated and girls carried the baskets, even substituting for boys in the lighter excavations on occasion (Petrie 1904, 1932; Vyse 1840). While the observation that men excavated, boys and girls carried dirt, and women carried food and water is in many ways a prosaic one, it is nonetheless important to point to the social construction of archaeological fieldwork in an Egyptian context, such as the familiar and oppressive ways that many Egyptians have experienced archaeology, in order to contrast this experience with the social construction of knowledge in a disciplinary context, such as may occur in the institutional settings of archaeology outside Egypt. As in the photograph taken at Memphis in 1915 (fig. 10.1), the disciplinary frame in which Egyptians often appear takes for granted a certain natural relationship between Egyptian peasants and the ruins of ancient Egyptian civilization. Without recognizing the historical context of these images and the many unacknowledged tensions of race, class, gender, and cultural differences that are present in archaeological archives, such images risk continuing to reproduce the racism of colonial power structures (Shanks 1997).

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Under Saʿid Pasha’s administration (1854–1863), the Frenchman Auguste Mariette Pasha won a vast archaeological concession over all of Egypt, which he brought under centralized control with the establishment of the Egyptian Antiquities Service and Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo. With this concession, which had its parallel in the Suez concession granted to his French contemporary Ferdinand de Lesseps, Mariette Pasha was granted the power of direct archaeological corvée (Reid 2002). Thus, in the 1860s and 1870s, a new network of Museum foremen with highly centralized authority controlled the pivotal point of security between household networks on the one hand and state interests on the other. In this system, the raʾῑs carried orders to local villages for a certain number of workmen, anywhere from one hundred to one thousand, and selected from those who could not afford to pay a tribute (Petrie 1932). By strengthening his ability to collect tribute and to impose the whip, or kurba¯j, on excavations, Mariette Pasha enhanced the coercive power of the raʾῑs, though certainly the question of the legitimacy of the raʾῑs in this context is another matter. There is some evidence, however, that this legitimacy may have derived in part from another kind of class status, known as baraka, or religious authority. In Sufi traditions, such as those that shaped most rural social relations in nineteenth-century Egypt, baraka refers to both the possession of spiritual wealth and its translation into worldly status (Bang 2003; Winkler 2009). In one sense, baraka is a kind of cultural commodity, which can be acquired in many different ways and which appears to have been used by some foremen to perform dhikr, a kind of meditative practice, literally a “remembrance of God,” on French excavations in Upper Egypt toward the end of the century (Maspero 1911, 1914). Dhikr was one of many purposes served by the adaptation of traditional folksongs on excavations throughout Egypt, which were also used to keep time, to protest working conditions, and perhaps to recreate the boundaries of a more familiar social universe in the midst of a strangers’ world (cf. Clément 2010; Poppe 2011; Schaefer 1904). Thus, the extent to which the legitimacy and success of the raʾῑs in running archaeological excavations depended on his Sufi credentials is an open, and significant, question. The 1860s and 1870s were in many other ways also a period of indirect French control of the Egyptian economy under Khedive Ismaʾil, but by 1880, things had changed dramatically. In 1875, the establishment of the Mixed Courts brought French, English, and Islamic law into one sphere of civil authority—an awkward policy, which though it continued to protect the legal status of foreigners and their extraterritorial privileges at the expense of Egyptians, also permanently disrupted the administrative authority of the French in Egypt (Hunter 1984). Anti-Turkish class tensions that had been brewing within the Egyptian army and popular nationalist movements for years also boiled over with Ismaʾil’s overthrow in 1879, leading to the nationalist ʿUrabi rebellion followed by the British occupation in 1882. In the midst of these crucial turning points in Egyptian government and society,

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William Matthew Flinders Petrie arrived in Egypt to set archaeology on a new course (Drower 2004). Also in 1882, the Egypt Exploration Fund was established in Britain, allowing Petrie the private sponsorship to invest in new, more systematic, methods of archaeological fieldwork through which he could compete independently with the central French administration (Petrie 1904, 1932). Petrie began his Egyptian career by working with permanent foremen from the network of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities to recruit and organize local workforces. However, before long he began negotiating directly with local shaykhs, deliberately circumscribing the coercive practices of the Museum foremen, offering regular and competitive wages and managing his accounts and employment records directly. By creating a private, wage labor network independent of the Museum, Petrie also created the possibility— indeed the necessity—of diversification within that network to legitimize his own authority. In 1887, he began appointing multiple foremen to act as lead excavators for the regular work crews, usually comprising one to two hundred excavators and a similar number of basket carriers. By 1891, Petrie had formed a permanent team of six experienced foremen from Egypt’s Fayum region, led by one ʿAli al-Suayfi (Drower 2004; Petrie 1904, 1932; Quirke 2010). The impact of Petrie’s methods—which emphasized the systematic control of excavations with attention to find context—on the development of archaeological thought owes much to the specialized class of foremen that joined his excavations during this period and trained others to excavate. AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL INDUSTRY IN QIFT, C. 1895–1920 In 1893, Petrie and his team arrived in the town of Qift, located on the ancient site of Koptos, where they began training local excavators. After the first two seasons of excavation, that training quickly expanded and diversified into a local industry, and, by the turn of the century, the Quftis (as they came to be known) came close to forming a monopoly on the market for skilled archaeological labor. The reasons for this sudden specialization and expansion are unclear. Stephen Quirke has recently suggested that ʿAli alSuayfi’s first wife Fatima, whom he met while excavating for Petrie during 1893 to 1895, may have hailed from the “Qift area,” or, more specifically, Naqada (Quirke 2010, 235, 301). If it can be substantiated that the household network of Qift did in fact have a sphere of influence extending to Naqada at this time, then we might imagine that this factor played a role in the expansion of those Qufti households into archaeology. Another factor, however, was the arrival of another foreign “privateer” in Qift, just a few short years behind Petrie. This man was the American archaeologist George Reisner, who began his Egyptian career excavating at Koptos in 1899 on behalf of the Hearst Expedition of the University of California (Reisner 1905). The importance of Reisner’s career-long association with Qift, and

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the subsequent influence of the Quftis on the methods and research questions developed by (among others) upper-class Egyptian, American, British, and German archaeologists, has been crucially overlooked. George Reisner and his American protégé Clarence Fisher took up and elaborated Petrie’s systematic methods of excavation—a radical departure from the unsystematic practices of the French-led Egyptian Antiquities Service, with its focus on the clearance of tombs and monuments and the acquisition of museum pieces—by emphasizing stratigraphic context and complete methods of site documentation in their work.4 While it has been recognized that the “American Method” practiced by Reisner, Fisher, and a few of their contemporaries had come to characterize best practice by the 1920s (Davis 2004), it has not been concomitantly recognized that such detail-oriented, high-cost objectives would have been almost impossible to meet without the skilled and large-scale specialization of the people of Qift, whose indispensability to these methods was reflected in their involvement, at considerable cost, in American expeditions to Palestine and the Sudan during the early part of the twentieth century.5 The Arabic field diaries kept by the most senior foremen on American expeditions from this era leave no doubt as to the senior Quftis’ unacknowledged status as specialists in excavation, documentation, illustration, keen observation, and sometimes contextual interpretation. By the end of World War I, the responsibilities of senior Quftis on American-sponsored excavations up and down the Nile Valley extended far beyond excavation and site documentation to the management of internal accounts, transportation, communication, and social welfare networks, involving not just foremen and excavators, but clerks, porters, tailors, and craftsmen from Qift, and sometimes even women to make and ship bread for men in the field. Clarence Fisher arrived in Egypt on 18 December 1914—the very day that Egypt’s nominal Ottoman dependency was replaced by a British Protectorate— as the new Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s Eckley B. Coxe, Jr. Egyptian Expedition. A student of George Reisner, trained for several years prior in Egypt and Palestine, Fisher was met on his arrival by a previous associate from Qift, raʾῑs Mahmud Ahmad Saʿid al-Mayyit, the second foreman on Reisner’s excavations at Giza, then sponsored by Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Raʾῑs Mahmud and his brother raʾῑs Saʿid Ahmad (the head foreman at Giza) most likely hailed from the village of al-Qalʿa in Qift, where they had worked with Petrie in 1898. Since beginning their work at Giza in 1905, George Reisner and ra’ῑs Saʿid Ahmad had built one of the largest labor networks operating in Egyptian archaeology at the time, which they hoped to expand by forging a partnership with the Coxe Expedition. The Expedition’s first concession was a minor cemetery at Giza, donated by Reisner, and carefully excavated by raʾῑs Mahmud and a crew of sixty transferred from Reisner’s excavations that winter. Thus, as Director of the Coxe Expedition, Fisher became one of Reisner and the Quftis’ most important clients. By March 1915, a

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new concession was approved for the University of Pennsylvania Museum at nearby Mit Rahina, covering roughly two acres of the ancient site of Memphis in the areas of Koms al-Qalʿa and al-Qalama. Fisher, raʾῑs Mahmud, and their head photographer set off for Memphis by train from Giza on 11 March, while the crew of sixty hiked the twelve miles to Mit Rahina on foot. At first, these cooperative arrangements satisfied everyone’s interests, strengthening both Reisner and Fisher’s influence in Egypt, and no doubt enhancing the reputation of raʾῑs Saʿid Ahmad and his family in Qift. At Memphis, the team’s living arrangements reflected the relative status of archaeologists and Quftis, as Fisher settled into an unoccupied dig house with high ceilings and shaded terraces; the Expedition’s “good tent” was set up close to the house with Fisher’s “old folding green bed” for the raʾῑs, and six additional tents were erected in a large open area some distance from the house for the workmen, presumably sleeping ten people to a tent (fig. 10.2).6 With the later addition of a small mud brick house for raʾῑs Mahmud, these arrangements probably represented some of the most comfortable housing of any expedition in the land. In no time, Fisher proclaimed that the Museum “had a splendid force of workmen with the best head foreman in Egypt.”7 The Museum’s wages and baqshῑsh, or bonuses, were very competitive, and benefits included complete medical care, travel expenses, holiday and party funds, hospitality for visitors, and even a provision for homemade bread to be shipped in from Qift. In the first season at Memphis, the Expedition spent sixty dollars to transport forty sacks of bread per month

Figure 10.2 University of Pennsylvania Museum camp at Memphis, 1915.

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from Qift to Mit Rahina, and by the following year, a special allowance had been set aside to meet the cost of making and shipping the Quftis’ bread, from which $325 was drawn in 1917 and $210 in 1918. For the first three seasons, the Quftis claimed more than half of the Coxe Expedition’s total field expenses, and by 1919, a time of extreme deprivation for most Egyptians during the anti-British struggle that year, a special overnight rail car had been commissioned to transport the workforce from Qift to Memphis, “reserved for [the Expedition’s] men and . . . switched off at Badreshein station [as] a great convenience to the men, [who] always have a lot of luggage and would have difficulty in finding places on the crowded express.”8 All of these benefits were in contrast to the low-status, unskilled labor of the so-called basket boys hired from the local villages for two or three piasters (ten to fifteen cents) per day, to haul debris fifty meters back and forth from the trenches to the dumpsite all day long. The special status of the Quftis, relative to peasant wage laborers, was reproduced by foreign investments in the celebrations, travel, and hospitality expenses associated with their work as power brokers because the Quftis’ role in negotiations between agricultural and archaeological land use (such as access to sabakh, or fertilizer), for example, was key to the legitimacy of archaeological land claims at the time. In many ways, Reisner built his reputation with the senior Quftis and their specialized labor network by reinforcing traditional forms of patronage and legitimacy. At Giza, for example, practices such as seasonal crew rotation, worker substitutions, workers’ accounts, and loans, were internal Qufti affairs under the authority of the raʾῑs, who in turn ensured the reliability of the workforce on the whole. The authority to control loans and debts among the workforce was a fundamental form of legitimacy for Qufti foremen and,9 having worked for Reisner for fifteen years, raʾῑs Mahmud naturally brought this ethic to his work with him at Memphis. Fisher, however, felt that Reisner’s strategic flexibility placed too much power in the hands of the Quftis, and this point became a deep source of mistrust and resentment on his part. Fisher’s suspicion of the Quftis betrayed a commonly held attitude of his time, which he shared, that while Egyptians may have been essential to the work of archaeology, they were considered racially and culturally inferior with regard to the production of knowledge in any meaningful aesthetic or scientific sense (see, e.g., Becker 2005; Petrie 1904, 1932; Reid 2002; Trigger 1989). In a departure from Reisner’s management style, Fisher instead decided to pursue the unconventional strategy of alienating the initial crew of sixty, led by raʾῑs Mahmud, from their larger network of peers and kin. His aim was to create a permanent and independent workforce, loyal to the University of Pennsylvania Museum and its generous, perhaps extravagant, benefits. From 1915 to 1918, the Coxe Expedition alternated between excavating Memphis, a wet site that was inundated and unworkable in the fall, and Dendera, a dry site in Upper Egypt that was workable during the winter months, for an exhausting seven to eight months instead of the more typical three- to fourmonth season. When, after their first successful season at Memphis, raʾῑs

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Mahmud proposed to expand his financial duties by taking charge of the Expedition’s accounts and bookkeeping at Dendera, Fisher responded by cutting off all of the raʾῑs’s financial responsibilities and giving them to an English assistant instead. Fisher’s aggressive imposition of highly bureaucratic practices thus robbed the raʾῑs of his full authority, and he was forced to take advances on his own pay to make loans to the workers and maintain control of the excavations. When Fisher became aware of raʾῑs Mahmud’s act, he took it for a betrayal and a threat to his own authority and began making loans to the workers out of the Expedition’s regular budget. Thus, in spite of his various concessions to the Quftis, Fisher undercut raʾῑs Mahmud’s legitimacy and caused a deep division within the Coxe Expedition. Still confident in his vision and emboldened by the allocation of half a million dollars to the Expedition’s endowment in 1916, Fisher continued to stoke tensions with the raʾῑs over the next two seasons, until the struggle over labor management between these two different cultural systems— the shared authority of the Harvard Expedition and the more centralized approach of the Coxe Expedition—broke down relations in 1917. Demoralized by his struggle with Fisher, raʾῑs Mahmud began to openly defy Fisher’s authority and to decrease the efficiency of the excavations. He began to sulk and avoided work—on two occasions he refused a work order and on at least one he turned his back to Fisher. Finally, raʾῑs Mahmud deliberately flaunted a taboo that marked the class boundary between them when he openly smoked a cigarette in front of Fisher. Also in many respects a moral boundary, here smoking marked the limit of a man’s status with respect to his superiors, including the authority of a raʾῑs with respect to his mudῑr (director).10 Ultimately, this act cost Mahmud al-Mayyit his job, but as relations broke down and he left the Expedition in May 1917, he took most of the workforce with him on strike, leaving for Giza in a fury of condemnation against Fisher, the Expedition’s standing in the village, and the team’s premeditated replacement from a rival village in Qift. At Giza, Reisner was ultimately unwilling to dismiss raʾῑs Mahmud in solidarity with Fisher, since such an action would amount to an attack on raʾῑs Saʿid and lead to a strike on Giza. Thus, raʾῑs Mahmud’s actions caused a split between the two archaeologists, which, though it was later resolved, showed a crack in the intellectual foundation of the discipline, where social motivations rather than ideas can create the conditions of archaeological discovery. Through this crack, let us take another look at the photograph from Memphis to find the limits of Egyptology with respect to Egyptians and to ask: how can we look at the “Excavation of the Palace of Merenptah” in 1915 and not see the Egyptians standing inside of it? CONCLUSION In some ways, one could say that the relationship between archaeological meaning and value, in an Egyptian context, is based on an unequal division

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of labor between highly educated, upper-middle-class archaeologists—with plenty of real and moral capital to invest in the reconstruction of ancient worlds reflecting their own interests and cultural values—and unskilled, low-status agricultural workers with an interest in the value of their manual labor on the antiquities market. This conception, however, misses something fundamental about the cultural construction of meaning and value and the shared nature of authority and power in political economies. Taking into consideration the role of the archaeological raʾῑs, whose legitimacy draws from his complex relationship with both workers and archaeologists, both the nature of the archaeological record and the moral authority to interpret it become complicated by the point he (or anyone in an analogous position between value-systems) represents. We know now, for example, that the pharaoh Merenptah probably once stood in his royal throne room, at the height of Egypt’s imperial power, to enact the sacred practices that held the Egyptians’ universe together through divine kingship (O’Connor 1991). However, this knowledge does not exist independent of the fact of the palace’s excavation in 1915. Thus, evidence of the nature of that excavation and the lived experience of archaeological labor—the girl looking directly at the camera, identifying herself and her place in Egyptian society, the Sufi beliefs once embodied by the young men as they excavated, the role of the raʾῑs as power broker—show clearly that archaeological contexts are not just buried with the past, they are constructed in the present (cf. Thomas 2004). For this reason, as in other contexts where archaeologists’ subject-positions and interpretive biases have been identified and questioned (Preucel and Meskell 2004; Trigger 1980; Wylie 2002), it is quite possible that modern claims about the nature of power in ancient Egypt, for example, have been overly determined by relations of power in the Egyptological present. If so, this structure may indicate a historical bias in the archaeological record— namely, that of the special class status of archaeologists with respect to land, labor, and cultural property in modern Egypt. Because the legitimacy of those claims has depended in some part on the interests of the raʾῑs, his place in Egyptian society is also crucial to understanding the economic relations that have reproduced the moral authority of Egyptology and to rescuing the unacknowledged interests of Egyptian communities inherent to the construction of archaeological meaning and to the preservation of Egyptian heritage. NOTES 1. The town of Qift (or, Quft), which is located approximately five hundred kilometers south of Cairo in the Governorate of Qina, has since the turn of the twentieth century been home to Egypt’s largest and most successful network of archaeological foremen, known as Quftis. The Arabic term raʾῑs (sing.; pl. ruʾasaʾ), when used to refer to an archaeological foreman from Qift or elsewhere, denotes a social status on a par with boat captains and other master

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Wendy Doyon tradesmen in rural contexts—in contrast to urban contexts, where it may be used more generally by middle-class professionals to address uneducated or unskilled workers (cf. Parkinson 1985, 145). On the capitulations, see Inalcik (1994); for Egyptian context, cf. Baer (1962), Hunter (1984), Jasanoff (2005), and Reid (2002). For important postcolonial and subaltern perspectives in relevant Egyptian contexts, see Clément (2010), Fahmy (1997), Mikhail (2011), and Mitchell (1988). On the Petrie method, see Davis (2004, 28–31) and on the Reisner-Fisher method, see Davis (2004, 59–61). This discussion draws on the field records of the Eckley B. Coxe, Jr. Egyptian Expedition to Giza, Memphis, and Dendera (from 1914 to 1923) at the University of Pennsylvania Museum Archive (see Fisher 1917, 1924) and on the administrative records of the Museum’s Egyptian Section for the same period, as well as the field records of the Harvard University-Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Expeditions to Egypt and the Sudan (particularly the period from 1909 to 1916) at the Giza Archive, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. For access to these materials, I am especially grateful to Mr. Alex Pezzati at the University of Pennsylvania Museum Archive and to Dr. Peter Der Manuelian at Harvard University. Coxe Egyptian Expedition (Fisher Diary, Memphis, 11 March 1915). Ibid. (Fisher to Gordon, 10 May 1915). Ibid. (Fisher Diary, Memphis, 26 September 1919). Giza Archive, Arabic Diary B, p. 48 (Giza, 4 January 1916). University of Pennsylvania Museum Archives, Egyptian Section (Fisher to Gordon, 14 December 1917; Reisner to Gordon, 11 June 1918).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Unpublished Sources Giza Archive, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. University of Pennsylvania Museum Archive, Egyptian Section.

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Quirke, S. 2010. Hidden Hands: Egyptian Workforces in Petrie Excavation Archives, 1880–1924. London: Duckworth. Raj, K. 2007. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Reid, D. M. 2002. Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reisner, G. 1905. “The Work of the Hearst Egyptian Expedition of the University of California in 1903–4.” Records of the Past 4: 131–41. Schaefer, H. 1904. The Songs of an Egyptian Peasant. Translated by F. H. Breasted. Leipzig, Germany: J. C. Hinrichs. Schaffer, S., L. Roberts, K. Raj, and J. Delbourgo, eds. 2009. The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications. Shanks, M. 1997. “Photography and Archaeology.” In The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology, edited by B. Molyneaux, 73–107. London: Routledge. Thomas, J. 2004. Archaeology and Modernity. London: Routledge. Trigger, B. 1980. “Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian.” American Antiquity 45: 662–76. ———. 1984. “Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist.” Man, n.s., 19: 355–70. ———. 1989. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tucker, J. 1985. Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Usick, P., and D. Manley. 2007. The Sphinx Revealed: A Forgotten Record of Pioneering Excavations. London: The British Museum. Vyse, H. 1840. Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837. London: James Fraser. Weeks, K. 2001. “Archaeology.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, edited by D. Redford, vol. 1, 104–109. Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, R. 1991. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winkler, H. 2009. Ghost Riders of Upper Egypt: A Study of Spirit Possession. Translated by N. Hopkins. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Wylie, A. 2002. Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zilfi, M. 2004. “Servants, Slaves, and the Domestic Order in the Ottoman Middle East.” Hawwa 2: 1–33.

11 Remembering and Forgetting Tutankhamun Imperial and National Rhythms of Archaeology, 1922–1972 Donald M. Reid1 In 1972, not one but two countries—the United Kingdom and Egypt—issued postage stamps to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon (fig. 11.1). The British Museum put on a dazzling exhibition of Tutankhamun treasures on loan from Cairo. Both countries had clear memories of their earlier clash over the tomb, but the exhibition held out hope for better relations in the postcolonial age. Britain’s Moment in the Middle East, as Elizabeth Monroe (1981) entitled her book covering the period from 1914 to 1971, came close to bracketing the two peaks of the British-Egyptian encounter over Tutankhamun. The first peak, from 1922 to 1925, was marked by clashes over ownership, publicity, and supervision of the work. The second peak—the 1972 exhibition— sealed the passing of the British Empire in the Middle East; the last British troops had evacuated the Persian Gulf the year before. This chapter attempts to do two things. First, it charts the rhythm of a long cycle of both British and Egyptian interest in Tutankhamun, with high points in the 1920s and in the early 1970s. Second, it argues that the two peaks and the intervening four-decade trough were closely tied to the overarching issue of imperial domination and the Egyptian struggle for independence. Britain’s slackening of the imperial reins in 1922 proved to be just enough for Egypt, after a bitter clash, to keep the entire contents of the tomb for the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo. But thereafter, with Egyptian hopes for full independence frustrated for several more decades, Tutankhamun faded into the background of both British and Egyptian consciousness. The persistence of the imperial milieu enabled French Egyptologists to retain the directorship of the Egyptian Antiquities Service until the 1952 revolution, and the idea of lending antiquities for exhibit in the West never came up. Full independence after the Suez War of 1956 freed a proudly independent Egypt in control of its own antiquities to consider lending exhibits abroad, initially to mobilize aid for salvaging Nubian antiquities ahead of flooding by the Aswan High Dam. American and French archaeologists had figured in the drama surrounding the discovery, and in the 1960s, the United States (US) and France beat out Britain in obtaining Tutankhamun

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Figure 11.1 Top and Center: UK and Egyptian Stamps for the fiftieth anniversary of the Tutankhamun discovery. Below: Tutankhamun on £LE1 banknote of National Bank of Egypt, first issued 1930.

exhibitions on loan from Cairo. Not until 1972 had British-Egyptian relations healed sufficiently for the London exhibition. In Egypt, Britain, and elsewhere, these and later blockbuster exhibitions awakened a more sustained interest in Tutankhamun than had been possible before the arrival of the postcolonial age. RHYTHMS OF MEMORY AND FORGETTING Until November 1922, only a handful of Egyptologists had heard of the obscure teenager who reigned briefly late in Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty of ancient rulers. Then Tutankhamun became a household name overnight—a

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lieu de mémoire in Pierre Nora’s terminology—in Britain, Egypt, and the world (Nora 1984, 92). To Egyptians, Tutankhamun’s treasures offered vindicating proof of past glory and inspiration at a critical moment in their struggle for independence. To Britons, beset by postwar economic and political troubles and fears of imperial decline, the discovery came as a wonderful diversion. Hurrying home after the tomb’s opening, Lord Carnarvon recounted the adventure directly to King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace. Britain had occupied Egypt in 1882 in order to guard the Suez Canal, its imperial lifeline to India. In 1914, this “veiled protectorate” (Milner 1970), hitherto nominally Ottoman, lost its veil and became officially British. The Egyptian uprising of 1919, however, led to Britain’s unilateral declaration of Egypt’s independence in February 1922, although with extensive reservations. Tutankhamun burst on the scene eight months later. From an imperial perspective, it was a moment too late. Had the discovery come ten years earlier—as in the case of the bust of Nefertiti still in Berlin—Tutankhamun’s treasures might be scattered among the British Museum, Carnarvon’s castle at Highclere, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. As a point of comparison, Iraq trailed Egypt by a decade in winning partial independence, and Leonard Woolley’s finds at Ur from the 1920s are divided among London, Philadelphia, and Baghdad (Fagan 1979, 264). A few individual threads of memory of the discovery persisted over half a century. Lady Evelyn Herbert (later Beauchamp) entered the tomb with her father Lord Carnarvon and Carter in 1922 and attended the British Museum’s celebratory dinner fifty years later. I. E. S. Edwards, the organizer of the 1972 exhibition, had thrilled to news of the discovery as a boy (Edwards 2000, 10). Western perceptions and memories of the discovery (Carter and Mace 1963; Frayling 1992; James 2001; McAlister 2001, 125–54; Reeves 1990; Winstone 1991) have been extensively explored—Egyptian memories (Colla 2007; Haikal 2003; Hawass 2005; Muhammad 1985) far less so. T. G. H. James tirelessly tracked down British and American sources for his admirable biography of Carter but did not similarly pursue Arabic sources or Egyptian memories and perceptions. In addition to long-term rhythms of remembering and forgetting, the first four years of the discovery featured annual rhythms of Egypt’s intense winter archaeological and tourist seasons, followed by summer lulls (figure 11.2). Fever-pitch attention to Tutankhamun in the metropole, its rebellious Egyptian “province,” and beyond could not be sustained indefinitely. “The best time for a tour in Egypt,” pronounced Baedeker (1985, xiii), “is between November 1st and May 1st.” Then tourists fled the heat, affluent European and Egyptian residents left for Europe or Alexandria, and Western archaeologists went home to organize exhibits, lecture, write, and plan their next season. The index to The Times shows that news of Tutankhamun poured out of the Valley of the Kings through the winter of 1922 to 1923 (the period after the discovery of the tomb), led to the reporting of Carnarvon’s unexpected death in April 1923, and tapered off in June that year. The 1923–1924 winter season, which culminated with Carter’s strike and lawsuit against the

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Figure 11.2 Seasonal Rhythms of Archaeology and Tourism in Egypt: keyword listings for Tutankhamen (and variant spellings) in The Times by month. Business and advertising listings and racehorse named Tutankhamen excluded. (The Times Digital Archive)

Egyptian government, brought a renewed frenzy of coverage. Yet, coverage of Carter’s third season, dedicated to conserving objects already brought out of the tomb, was sparse. After the fourth season, 1925–1926, with the opening of the coffins and unwrapping of the mummy, press coverage fell off sharply. OWNERSHIP OF THE NEWS AND THE FIND Three disputes during the first two seasons embittered memories of the discovery—ownership of the news, ownership of the find, and supervision of the work. Ignoring the press of the country in which he was digging, Carnarvon invited only The Times’ correspondent Arthur Merton to cover the opening, enabling him to scoop the world on 30 November 1922 (James 2001, 277–82, 480–85). Six weeks later, Carnarvon sold The Times exclusive publication rights. Other Western papers and the Arabic press came together, for once, to oppose the monopoly, which Egyptologist-journalist Arthur Weigall dubbed “Tutankhamen and Co. Ltd” (Hankey 2001, 260). The paper of the Watani Party of the late Mustafa Kamil, al-Liwaʾ, protested: But Lord Carnarvon has succeeded in seizing the Valley of the Kings where the precious treasures—Tutankhamen, and his sacred and

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valuable relics have been discovered. . . . [W]ealth lies in making propaganda about these contents. People all over the world desire to read the exact description of the finds, from both the technical and historic points of view, and every word that is written on the subject is being paid for by all the readers in the world. How many millions of pounds or even piastres will enter the pockets of Lord Carnarvon? Do not forget the prices of photographs and cinema films and all propaganda materials (translation, Egyptian Gazette, 26 February 1923). Antiquities Director General Pierre Lacau and his Egyptian superiors resisted Carter’s maneuver of claiming Merton as a member of his staff and following up exclusive evening dispatches to The Times with free releases to the Egyptian press the next morning (James 2001, 320–25). In 1858, Auguste Mariette had refounded the abortive Egyptian Antiquities Service that Mehmed ʿAli had decreed in 1835. Mariette obtained a monopoly on excavation and first claim on any finds for the Bulaq Museum (a predecessor to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities), which he opened in 1863. His successor Gaston Maspero retained French control of the Antiquities Service despite the British occupation, partly by allowing foreign expeditions, with some exceptions, to take home half of their finds (Reid 2002). But on the eve of the Tutankhamun discovery, Maspero’s successor Pierre Lacau announced the intention to claim all finds for Egypt, with only optional gifts of duplicates to excavators. STRIKE, LAWSUIT, AND STALEMATE The crush of dignitaries, journalists, and tourists clamoring for a glimpse inside the tomb slowed Carter’s work and raised tempers. A dispute over visitors brought his clash with the Egyptian government to a head on 12 February 1924. Forbidden to show the wives of his coworkers the tomb, Carter snapped. He locked the tomb and posted a notice in Luxor’s Winter Palace Hotel: Owing to impossible restrictions and discourtesies on the part of the Public Works Department and its Antiquities Service, all my collaborators in protest have refused to work any further upon the scientific investigations of the discovery of the tomb of Tut.ankh.amen. . . . the tomb will be closed, and no further work can be carried out (Carter 1998, 103–104). Carter badly underestimated the Wafdist government of Saʿd Zaghlul, which had just won elections under a new constitution. Fikri Abaza protested in al-Ahram: There in . . . the Valley of the Kings, an absolute despotic government has arisen on the ruins of the ancient Pharaohic [sic], and of the modern

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Minister of Public Works Murqus Hanna canceled the concession, banned Carter from the tomb, and sent Lacau with a locksmith to take possession. Carter sued the government in the Mixed Courts, which had protected foreign interests since the 1870s. A week before the 15 March 1923 opening of parliament, trains whisked Hanna, MPs, and diplomats to Luxor (al-Hilal, 1 April 1924). High Commissioner Lord Allenby and British Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald, eager for a treaty with Egypt, refused to be drawn into the dispute. MacDonald telegraphed: “urge Carter on highest authority to stop legal proceedings. Make amicable arrangement with Egyptian authorities” (Frayling 1992, 31). Carter, whose lawyer F. M. Maxwell had unfortunately once sought the death penalty for Hanna, the Minister now being sued, was on his own. Ruling the matter as one of internal administration, the Mixed Court of Appeals threw it out. The British journal Outlook deplored the “continued insults of these hysterical [Egyptian] children who are playing at self-government” (Egyptian Gazette, 27 February 1924, 4). However, the British-run Egyptian Gazette was surprisingly sympathetic to Egyptians: Mr. Carter would appear to have failed to realize the significance of the changes that have been taking place in the political situation here during the past two years. . . . When the immediate danger to the tomb has been removed, the Government will not, of course, have need for hurry in carrying out whatever plans it may have in view. It would need an “archeological mission” to Europe to equip some young Egyptians to engage on the uncompleted task of Mr. Carter. A few years more or less counts for nothing beside the centuries of Tutankhamen’s undisturbed respose. But it would count for a good deal if these relics of ‘the ancient glories of Egypt’ were finally disposed of at the hands of the new Egypt that is so conscious of its rights (Egyptian Gazette, 19 February 1924).

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Neoclassical poet Ahmad Shawqi used Tutankhamun to address contemporary politics. His Tutankhamun and Parliament imagined the pharaoh coming home: He traveled forty centuries, considering them until he came home, and found there . . . England, and its army, and its lord, brandishing its Indian sword, protecting its India (as translated in Colla 2007, 220). But the new parliament represented awakened self-respect: “Tutankhamun has returned authority to our sons” (Colla 2007, 221). Even the usually pro-British daily al-Muqattam opined: We hope that this incident will open the eyes of both the Government and the nation to the fact that it is time for Egyptians to study their own antiquities and practice the task of excavation and dealing with antiquities. It is not worthy of a great State to be monopolized by foreigners, while the inhabitants of this country stand by as onlookers in regret at not having the means to do otherwise (translation, Egyptian Gazette, 23 February 1924). Egypt’s only Egyptologist with a modicum of international recognition, Ahmad Kamal Pasha (Reid 2002, 186 et passim), had retired years earlier and would die in August 1923 after writing a few articles on Tutankhamun for the Arabic press. Except for Dr. Salah Hamdi, Carter’s professional staff was entirely British and American. Director of sanitary services at Alexandria and former Director of the Cairo School of Medicine, Hamdi’s experience only underlined colonial exclusion. Carter’s acknowledgements thanked Hamdi and Dr. Douglas Derry, the School’s Professor of Anatomy—for a report on the dissection of the mummy. But Hamdi’s name did not appear alongside Derry’s on the title page of Carter’s second volume or the title page of the appendix on the dissection. Derry buried his only mention of Hamdi’s collaboration on the sixth page of the text of the appendix. A photo of the dissection casts Derry and Carter as the active discoverers; Hamdi is a bystander, caught awkwardly looking at the camera instead of the task at hand (Carter and Mace 1963, vol. 2, title page, xx, 65, 143–61, pl. 28). TUT GOES TO WEMBLEY: THE BRITISH EMPIRE EXHIBITION Tutankhamun’s replica tomb at the British Empire Exhibition, opened by King George V and Queen Mary at Wembley in April 1924 (Frayling 1992, 32–36), suggested Egypt’s relationship to the Empire—awkward to include but too important to be left out. “When you come to think of it,” mocked

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Punch, “what is the imperial status of Egypt? Is it autonomous under a Khedive, or is it a British Protectorate under Howard Carter, or what?” (Punch, 12 March 1924). The Tutankhamun relics at Wembley were only replicas; were Egypt’s British-declared independence, Belgian-inspired constitution, and parliament real? Replicas? Fakes? No one quite knew. Having touted Egypt’s independence, Britain could hardly display Tutankhamun’s wares alongside those of Canada, India, and Malaya. So “Tut-ankh-amen’s Tomb” ended up in the Amusement Park (Frayling 1992, 32–33) among the “joy jaunts”—the Giant Switchback, Caterpillar, Water Chute, Jack and Jill, and Derby Racer (Illustrated London News, 19 April 1924). Carter was not amused, but for a different reason. He sued on the grounds that the replicas fashioned by William Aumonier had illegally relied on photographs belonging to the Carnarvon expedition. But the defendants proved that Arthur Weigall and his friends had supplied the photos and sketches instead (Frayling 1992, 35–36; Hankey 2001, 287–88). Punch joked that Aumonier’s Tottenham Court Road studio in London was on “Tutankhamen Court Road” and concocted a pedigree: TUT-ANKH-AMEN was not really buried at Luxor at all but only a nameless man in his stead, and the young king wandered off and found a boat and went down the Nile, and when he came to the sea there was a ship with grave Phoenician traders on the decks, and he went aboard and hid in the bales, and so came to Cornwall, and from the West Country right up to London along the traders way. . . . Thus TUTANKH-AMEN was the earliest of all the gipsies to come into this land, and taught men the art of working in metal and the making of furniture, having a little booth first of all not very far from Goodge Street Station [Aumonier’s studio] (Punch, 12 March 1924).

FRENCH AND AMERICAN THREADS OF MEMORY Discovering, remembering, and forgetting Tutankhamun was not, of course, an exclusively British-Egyptian affair. French and American secondary actors participated in the drama of the discovery. France and the US shared in the relative neglect of Tutankhamun for decades thereafter and in reviving his memory with landmark exhibitions in the 1960s that paved the way for the British Museum’s exhibition of 1972. Antiquities Director Pierre Lacau was heir to a tradition of Franco-British rivalry in Egyptology threading back through Maspero, Mariette, and Champollion to Britain’s seizure of the Rosetta Stone in 1801 and its enshrinement in the British Museum. Unlike his predecessors, though, Lacau had to take Egyptian nationalism seriously. British and American accounts often dismiss him as an intrusive bureaucrat who harassed Carter and caved in to unreasonable Egyptian nationalist

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demands. Éric Gady has countered with a sympathetic account of Lacau’s handling of the discovery (Gady 2005, 825–68). Coming of age at the turn of the twentieth century (Reid 2002, 198–201; Thomas 1995–1996), American Egyptology was closely intertwined with its British counterpart. Carter dug for American millionaire Theodore Davis before going to work for Carnarvon. Staff members of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, who assisted Carter on the tomb, included Britons Arthur Mace and photographer Harry Burton (Bierbrier 2012, 96, 346–47). Carter made a lecture tour of the US and Canada, received an honorary doctorate from Yale, and twice visited President Calvin Coolidge in the White House. American James Henry Breasted, who had recently founded the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, assisted Carter with epigraphy and attempted in vain to mediate Carter’s dispute with the Egyptian government. In 1926, Breasted’s proposal of a Rockefeller-funded, Westerncontrolled museum in Cairo would prove him as out of touch as Carter with postwar Egyptian nationalism (Abt 2011, 303–36). CLIMAX AND TAPERING OFF Late in 1924, Lord Allenby seized on the assassination of Sir Lee Stack, Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian army and Governor-General of the Sudan, to replace Zaghlul’s nationalist government with a palace-dominated one under Ahmad Ziwar. Once Carter and Lady Carnarvon had renounced The Times monopoly and any claim to objects from the tomb, Carter was readmitted to work there, and Lady Carnarvon was promised a gift of duplicate objects (James 2001, 379–84). In January 1926, Tutankhamun’s funerary mask and coffin went on display in Cairo’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. It was said that “all Cairo is flocking to pay its five piastres a head at the turnstile,” and: Schoolmasters and school mistresses are planning organized mass visits of their pupils, hardened residents who have remained indifferent to all the stir hitherto made about Tutankhamen and his buried treasures are being roused from their lethargy to pay their first visit in thirty years to the Museum, and on all sides there are signs of an awakening curiosity regarding the life and times of the Boy Pharaoh (Egyptian Gazette, 12 January 1926). Figure 11.3 shows the fall in keyword mentions of Tutankhamun in The Times after 1926. Carter’s six remaining seasons in the tomb were only minimally reported. Interest did remain high for the limited number of Western tourists; Baedeker’s 1929 guide dedicated five of twenty-three pages on Cairo’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities to Tutankhamun (Baedeker 1985, 88–111). In 1930, Egypt reimbursed the Carnarvon expedition’s expenses but declined to follow through on a gift of duplicates.

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Figure 11.3 Remembering and Forgetting Tutankhamun: keyword listings for Tutankhamen (and variant spellings) in The Times by month. Business and advertising listings excluded (The Times Digital Archive).

As with Western media, coverage of Tutankhamun in the Egyptian daily al-Ahram and the monthly al-Hilal was intense in the first two seasons, flickered up again in 1926, and nearly ceased by the mid-1930s. An account of the Khedivial Secondary School’s visit to the tomb in March 1926 (Shawqi 1929) may have been the only Arabic book on Tutankhamun in the interwar period. FORGETTING TUTANKHAMUN After Carter completed his fieldwork in 1932 and published the third volume of his popular account in 1933, Tutankhamun nearly vanished from the news for almost thirty years. Carter’s proposed six-volume specialized report never got off the ground (James 2001, 442–44). The tomb and the Cairo collection remained prime tourist attractions, but until the 1960s, only Egyptians and the modest numbers of Western visitors had access to them. In 1939, The Times punctured the near-silence with a report on the BBC’s broadcast of notes played on a trumpet from the tomb and a notice on Carter’s neglected funeral (The Times, 15 April 1939, 14; cf. James 2001, 465–66, 468–69). Still fearing diplomatic complications, the Foreign Office

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and Ambassador Miles Lampson shied away from helping Carter’s executors ensure a discrete return to Egypt for a few pieces that Carter or Carnarvon had spirited out of the tomb (James 2001, 469–71). Egyptologists had their own reasons for steering clear. T. G. H. James noted: For someone like myself, who grew up before the Second World War, and became a professional Egyptologist after the war, Tutankhamun and Howard Carter have been constant symbols of the popular appeal of Egypt, although for much of the time it would have been thought slightly de trop to show professionally too active an interest in them (2001, xii). James waited until retirement to write his biography of Carter. The British Library lists only three books published on Tutankhamun between 1934 and 1960 (British Library n.d.). John Romer claimed that even as late as the 1960s, his frequent visits to the Valley of the Kings surprised older Egyptologists: “royal tombs were out of fashion” (Romer and Romer 1994, 19). In Egypt, the pharaonism that Tutankhamun had helped amplify retreated in the 1930s before Arab and Islamic themes (Gershoni and Jankowski 1987). Tutankhamun’s portrait endured on the £E1 banknote most of the time from the 1930s through the 1950s (World Paper Money 1996, 2: Egypt, National Bank of Egypt, Nos. 22, 24, 30), but the significance of this presence for Egyptians is unclear. The issuing National Bank of Egypt was long British-controlled, the image may have seemed merely that of a generic pharaoh, and Islamic symbols generally balanced off pharaonic ones on banknotes. THE RETURN OF TUTANKHAMUN Before Egypt could consider lending Tutankhamun objects abroad, it had to regain control of its Antiquities Service and win full independence. The last French Director General of Antiquities, Étienne Drioton, was forced out by the 1952 revolution along with his patron King Faruq. In 1956, the Suez War ended the British occupation of Egypt for good. It took five years to restore British-Egyptian relations after Suez and eleven more to bring Tutankhamun to London. Egypt dispatched the Tutankhamun’s Treasures exhibition to the US in 1961 to attract international assistance for the UNESCO-led Nubian archaeological salvage campaign that was to take place before the region was flooded by the construction of the Aswan High Dam. The homeland of Carnarvon and Carter had to wait in line for Tutankhamun behind the US, Canada, Japan, and France. As the Western Cold War superpower jockied for influence in Egypt after Britain’s departure, the US came first. President

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Kennedy persuaded Congress to donate to the Nubian campaign, and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy opened the Tutankhamun exhibition at Washington’s National Gallery of Art. It toured eighteen US, three Canadian, and three Japanese cities. Only the cover of the American exhibition catalog was in color (Tutankhamun Treasures 1961); the selling of King Tut’s gold had a long way to go. PARIS BEFORE LONDON Although France and Britain had attacked Egypt together in 1956, the Louvre beat the British Museum to a Tutankhamun exhibition by five years. Algerian independence in 1962 cleared the air for France. Mme. Christiane Desroches Noblecourt of the Louvre was well placed to obtain the exhibition (Noblecourt 1997, 14, 18–37, 56). Her professor Gustave Lefèbvre had arranged the original Tutankhamun exhibit in Cairo, and she had lectured on Tutankhamun at the Louvre as a student in 1933. Noblecourt’s UNESCO appointments in Egypt (Centre d’Études et Documentation de l’Art Égyptien in 1954 and then with the Nubian campaign) kept her in Egyptian good auspices despite the disaster of Suez. Noblecourt persuaded Egyptian Minister of Culture Tharwat ʿUkasha to allow British publisher George Rainbird to rephotograph Cairo’s Tutankhamun collection in color (Noblecourt 1997, 18; ʿUkasha 1987, vol. 1, 559–73). Posted to Paris and Rome after the 1952 revolution, ʿUkasha was an unusually cosmopolitan Free Officer. Noblecourt wrote the text and ʿUkasha the preface for Rainbird’s project (Noblecourt 1963), which was published simultaneously in eight languages. Noblecourt thought an anonymous reviewer in The Sunday Times resented that: it had not been a Briton who had dared to broach the problem of Tutankhamun. The subject appeared to be ‘a private preserve’ for the sons of Albion. However, more than forty years had passed since the discovery (author’s translation from Noblecourt 1997, 19). Pretending not to suspect that I. E. S. Edwards of the British Museum was the reviewer, she wrote him suggesting that the reviewer was neither a gentleman (since a gentleman signs what he writes) nor (judging by the content of the review) an Egyptologist (Noblecourt 1997, 19–21, 33–37). The first round of Tutankhamun exhibitions and the Noblecourt-Rainbird book helped launch the Tutankhamun revival. The British Library lists eleven books on him in the 1960s (British Library n.d.). The Griffith Institute at Oxford, which holds Carter’s excavation records, issued the first of a series on objects from the tomb in 1962 (Davies and Gardiner 1962). Drawing 1.2 million visitors, the Louvre exhibition reinvigorated Tutankhamun as a European lieu de mémoire. Nasser promised Minister of Culture

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André Malraux Tutankhamun’s golden funerary mask, and President de Gaulle seized the opportunity to improve Franco-Egyptian relations. But for Egyptians, the exhibition ended under a cloud—Israel’s victory in the June 1967 war—and the country turned inward in shock (Noblecourt 1997, 21–32). COMING HOME? TUTANKHAMUN AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM A year and a half after Anwar al-Sadat succeeded the late Nasser as Egyptian President, Edwards of the British Museum realized his dream of a Tutankhamun exhibition in London. “Secrecy as pharaoh’s treasures are prepared for a journey to the land of their discoverers,” headlined The Times (2 November 1971). Edwards’s father had told him in 1925 of seeing objects from the tomb in Cairo. Becoming an Egyptologist at the British Museum, Edwards wrote in his autobiography that he decided in 1951 not to apply for an Egyptology opening at University College London, for this: would involve the abandonment of an ambition which I had entertained since my first visit to Egypt [1937–1938] and saw [sic] the treasures of Tutankhamun in the Cairo Museum. There must, I felt sure, be millions of people still alive who remembered the excitement of the discovery of the tomb in 1922, and I wanted them to have an opportunity of seeing even a few of those treasures with their own eyes—how it could be contrived I had no idea, but I knew instinctively that there must be some way (Edwards 2000, 198). In 1966, Tharwat ʿUkasha had told Edwards that Noblecourt had won the upcoming Louvre exhibition as a reward for France’s contributions to the Nubian campaign. The British government had not been similarly forthcoming, but ʿUkasha suggested Tutankhamun in exchange for a performance of the Royal Ballet at Cairo’s millenary celebrations in 1969. Nasser agreed, and The Sunday Times was eager to cosponsor the London exhibition (Edwards 2000, 290–98). Prime Minister Edward Heath was so impressed upon visiting the exhibition that he wanted to invite President Sadat to see it. The British Embassy in Cairo warned, however, that doing so might arouse unrealistic expectations in Egypt, such as an increase in British aid or a tilt toward the Arabs in their conflict with Israel.2 Queen Elizabeth II’s speech at the opening recalled the imperial context: “it was fifty years ago, during the reign of my grandfather, King George V, that Howard Carter and his colleagues, working under the patronage of Lord Carnarvon entered the tomb.” But she diplomatically forgot the ensuing rancor: Fortunately for us they [Carter and his colleagues] recorded and preserved all they found. And fortunately for the world, the King’s

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Donald M. Reid possessions, which surrounded him in the tomb, have been kept safe and sound in Cairo throughout these fifty years.3

This time, the Egyptians were equally diplomatic, making no mention of the Rosetta Stone enshrined only a few rooms away. Some three decades later, they would demand its return to Egypt (al-Ahram Weekly, 20–26 July 2005). The Stone even figured in the story of the 1972 exhibition. The UK postage stamp celebrating the exhibition featured a gilded statue of Tutankhamun harpooning from a boat. The statue had earlier been ruled too fragile to travel to Paris, but Edwards was persuasive (Edwards 2000, 263–69), and Noblecourt graciously blessed its trip to London. This courtesy helped her obtain the loan of the Rosetta Stone to the Louvre for the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its decipherment: Thus an incalculable number of French lovers of history and students passed through the Henry IV gallery, at the Louvre, before the Stone which, thanks to the prophylactic deed of the Tutankhamun harpooner, came, on the banks of the Seine, to render homage to Champollion, its decipherer (author’s translation from Noblecourt 1997, 37).

CONCLUSION In the construction of national symbols, it has been suggested that “Pierre Nora was right: ‘Because foreigners take the Eiffel Tower to be the very image of France, the country has strongly internalized the world’s regard’ ” (Loyrette 1998, 350), and “first proposed, if not imposed, by foreigners, the cock nevertheless became an authentic symbol for France, a symbol as rich in content as if it had been chosen by the French themselves” (Pastoureau 1998, 406). The Egyptian foreign dichotomy should not be overdrawn, but Western enthusiasm for Tutankhamun helped make him a national icon for Egyptians—at least on the official level—in the 1920s and again since the 1960s. The Louvre exhibition likely inspired Egypt’s January 1967 Tutankhamun “Post Day” stamps (Scott 2012, Nos. 712, 713), and its set coinciding with the London exhibition followed suit. A variety of personal and professional circumstances contributed to the long slump in British popular and scholarly publication on Tutankhamun after the early years, and the focus of unresolved problems in British-Egyptian relations shifted elsewhere until after Suez. In Egypt, Tutankhamun’s image appeared on paper currency from 1930, but rather ambiguously. Objects from his tomb appeared on only one stamp before 1959, and textbooks bypassed his short, obscure reign for those of greater pharaohs (Coudougnan 1988).

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A 1959 stamp with an alabaster vase from the tomb (Scott 2012, Egypt No. 481) antedated the first exhibition abroad and anticipated Tutankhamun’s subsequent popularity on Egyptian postal issues. Forty years after the British Museum exhibition, the “boy king” shows no sign of fading from the collective memories of either postimperial Britons or postcolonial Egyptians. The 1972 exhibition kicked off the second, or Sadat, round of Tutankhamun exhibits, which culminated in 1981, the year of Sadat’s assassination. One of the objects was accidentally damaged in Germany, and Egypt banned lending Tutankhamun’s irreplaceable treasures abroad. In 2004, the financial and other benefits again carried the day, and the third round of Tutankhamun exhibits began (Hawass 2005, 12). The end of empire diminished the centrality of Egyptian-British relations to both parties, and a Tutankhamun exhibit from Cairo did not return to London until 2007 to 2008. By 2009, memories had mellowed enough for Egypt to honor Carter by turning his house opposite Luxor into a museum. The eighth Earl of Carnarvon, grandnephew Stuart Carter, and Zahi Hawass, Secretary-General of the then Supreme Council of Antiquities, attended the inauguration (al-Ahram Weekly, 19–25 November 2009). Tutankhamun’s iconic funerary mask now anchors both ends of Egypt’s currency, the £E100 note (balanced by the mosque of al-Sayyida Zainab on the other side) and the £E1 coin. With the centennial of the discovery only ten years away, contestations of power since the January 2011 revolution may have put Tutankhamun’s fate as a national icon up for renegotiation within Egypt. Meanwhile, Britons will continue to watch Tutankhamun’s future there with interest, but unlike their imperial forebears, they will have to do so mostly from the sidelines.

NOTES 1. I am grateful to the organizers of two London conferences at which early versions of this chapter were presented:“Re-Visiting Sites of Memory: New Perspectives on the British Empire,” the German Historical Institute, London, at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor (29 June–2 July 2006) and “Disciplinary Measures: Histories of Egyptology in Multi-Disciplinary Context,” the Egypt Exploration Society, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and University College London, 10–12 June 2010. Special thanks go to William Carruthers for the latter conference and current volume. I also thank the American Research Center in Egypt and the National Endowment for the Humanities for a fellowship in Cairo in 2005 that furthered this project. Paula Sanders kindly supplied me with an unpublished index of archaeological articles in al-Ahram. 2. UK National Archives: FCO 39/1242, Bridges to Graham, 12 June 1972; Grattan to Bridges, 23 June 1972. 3. UK National Archives: FCO 39/1238, Queen’s Speech, 29 March 1972.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Unpublished Sources UK National Archives, Kew Gardens, London.

Published Sources Abt, J. 2011. American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of his Oriental Institute. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baedeker, K. (1929) 1985. Baedeker’s Egypt 1929. London: David & Charles. Bierbrier, M., ed. 2012. Who Was Who in Egyptology? 4th ed. London: Egypt Exploration Society. British Library. n.d. British Library Public Catalogue. Accessed 16 November 2013. http://catalogue.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=BLVU1 Carter, H. (1924) 1998. Tut.Ankh.Amen: The Politics of Discovery. Originally Tut. Ankh.Amen: Statement, with Documents. London: Libri. Carter, H, and A. C. Mace. (1922–1933) 1963. The Tomb of Tut.Ankh.Amen: Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter. 3 vols (vols. 2 and 3 by Carter alone). New York: Cooper Square Publishers. Colla, E. 2007. Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coudougnan, G. 1988. Nos ancêtres les pharaons: l’histoire pharaonique et copte dans les manuels scolaires égyptiens. Cairo: Centre d’études et de documentation économique, juridique et sociale. Davies, N. M., and A. H. Gardiner. 1962. Tutankhamun’s Painted Box: Reproduced in Colour from the Original in the Cairo Museum. Oxford: Griffith Institute. Edwards, I. E. S. 2000. From the Pyramids to Tutankhamun: Memoirs of an Egyptologist. Oxford: Oxbow. Fagan, B. M. 1979. Travelers, Archaeologists, and Monuments in Mesopotamia. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Frayling, C. 1992. The Face of Tutankhamun. London: Faber. Gady, É. 2005. “Le pharaon, l’égyptologue et le diplomate. Les égyptologues français en Égypte, du voyage de Champollion à la crise de Suez (1828–1956).” PhD diss., Université de Paris IV-Paris-Sorbonne. Gershoni, I., and J. Jankowski. 1987. Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930. New York: Oxford University Press. Haikal, F. 2003. “Egypt’s Past Regenerated by its Own People.” In Consuming Ancient Egypt, edited by S. MacDonald and M. Rice, 123–50. London: UCL Press. Hankey, J. 2001. A Passion for Egypt: Arthur Weigall, Tutankhamun, and the “Curse of the Pharaohs.” London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Hawass, Z. 2005. Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs. Washington, DC: National Geographic. James, T. G. H. 2001. Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun. 2nd ed. London: Tauris. Loyrette, H. 1998. “The Eiffel Tower.” In Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, edited by P. Nora and L. D. Kritzman (and translated by A. Goldhammer), vol. 3, Symbols, 348–73. New York: Columbia University Press. McAlister, M. 2001. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000. Berkeley: University of California Press. Milner, A. (1892) 1970. England in Egypt. New York: Howard Fertig. Monroe, E. 1981. Britain’s Moment in the Middle East 1914–1971. Revised edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Muhammad, M. 1985. Sariqat Malik Misr. Cairo: Markaz al-Ahram li-l-Tarjama wa-l-Nashr. Noblecourt, C. D. 1963. Toutankhamon, vie et mort d’un pharaon. Paris: Rainbird, Hachette. ———. 1997. La Grande Nubiade, ou, Le parcours d’ une égyptologue. Paris: Stock/Pernoud. Nora, P., ed. 1984. Les lieux de mémoire. Vol. 1. La république. Paris: Gallimard. Pastoureau, M. 1998. “The Gallic Cock.” In Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, edited by P. Nora and L. D. Kritzman (and translated by A. Goldhammer), 404–30. New York: Columbia University Press. Reeves, N. 1990. The Complete Tutankamun: The King, The Tomb, The Royal Treasure. London: Thames and Hudson. Reid, D. M. 2002. Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Romer, J., and E. Romer. 1994. The Rape of Tutankhamun. London: Michael O’Mara. Scott. 2012. Scott 2012 Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue. 6 vols. Sidney, OH: Scott. Shawqi, H. 1929. Al-Durr al-Maknun fi Jadath al-Malik Tut ‘Ankh Amun: Adab wa Tarikh. Cairo: al-Matabaʿa al-Haditha. The Times Digital Archive. The Times Digital Archive, 1785–1985. Accessed 16 November 2013. http://infotrac.galegroup.com/ Thomas, N., ed. 1995–1996. The American Discovery of Ancient Egypt. 2 vols. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Tutankhamun Treasures. 1961. Tutankhamun Treasures: A Loan Exhibition from the Department of Antiquities of the United Arab Republic. Sponsored by the American Association of Museums. Circulated by the Smithsonian. Washington, DC: H. K. Press. ʿUkasha, T. 1987. Mudhakkirati fi-l-Siyasa wa-l-Thaqafa. 2 vols. Cairo: Madbuli. Winstone, V. F. 1991. Howard Carter and the Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun. London: Constable. World Paper Money. 1996. Standard Catalog of World Paper Money. Vol. 2. General Issues to 1960. 8th ed. Iola, WI: Krause.

12 The State of the Archive Manipulating Memory in Modern Egypt and the Writing of Egyptological Histories Hussein Omar When he began writing his memoirs in 1932, Fathallah Barakat Pasha, a leading Egyptian nationalist and politician, paid a visit to the newly established royal archives at ʿAbdin Palace in Cairo. Among other things, the Pasha was searching for the minutes of a controversial debate he had led in the country’s Legislative Assembly just under two decades earlier. In 1913, marking the first debate in which elected representatives had a say in lawmaking, Barakat had broken a long silence over the Khedival decree of June 1899 and argued fiercely against it. Passed under great pressure from Lord Cromer, the British High Commissioner, the decree had forcibly removed the rebellious, yet elected, Rector of al-Azhar and Mufti of Egypt, Shaykh Hassuna al-Nawawi, from his post. He was replaced with a more timorous and obedient colleague, threatening the autonomy of the hitherto independent religious institution. The act set a dangerous precedent for the interference of politics into religion. Above all, it incensed those, like Barakat, who were deeply opposed to the British occupation of Egypt. Yet, delving into the archives, Barakat quickly realized that all evidence of this particular debate had gone missing. The discarded documents had not met the approval of the ʿAbdin Palace archivists, who were largely imported experts from France and Italy. As he relates in his diaries, “I was furious that they had changed and replaced the papers I sought.” The Pasha, however, was determined not to let the truth be forgotten. He writes, “the abuses perpetrated against the evidence were protected by . . . my own memory, which shed light on, and disrobed all those who posed in the transparent garments of Nationalism” (Barakat 1932, 1–5). In the new archive, there would be no place for an episode as embarrassing as this one to the Crown. Although the ʿAbdin Palace Archive, established in 1920 by King Fuʾad I (ruled 1917–1936), was ostensibly designed to collect and provide material for the first generation of Egypt’s professional historians, its mission was overtly political. The new archive was cobbled together from a number of different and disconnected repositories of documents around Cairo. These repositories included the Daftirkhane, established in 1829 and housed in the Citadel, which contained most state records, along with a separate repository created in the late nineteenth century known as

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Dar al-Mahfuzat (although what distinguished this new institution from the Daftirkhane remains unclear). The ʿAbdin archives also incorporated the official records kept by the Shariʿa and Mixed Courts, as well as those of the Ministry of Awqaf, which held all the waqfiyya (Islamic trust funds) dating as far back as the thirteenth century. When King Fuʾad decided to move these vast repositories into his palace at ʿAbdin he appointed the Ottomanist Jean Deny to begin a survey and a catalog of the collections (see Di-Capua 2009, 106–11 for this process and its wider contexts). Rather than simply consolidating these collections, Deny edited their content very heavily; he also inaugurated a translation project rendering earlier Ottoman records into Arabic. Yet, neither Deny nor his employer had any pretensions that what they were doing was politically neutral. On the contrary, the choice, organization, and translation of the documents was explicitly centered on the history of Mehmed ʿAli and his descendants in Egypt’s ruling dynasty—and unabashedly propagandistic. Deny deliberately denied his employer’s request to survey documents that did not directly pertain to the dynasty of Mehmed ʿAli or the state-building role he thought them to have played. Presumably, the Legislative Assembly debates that Barakat Pasha was searching for fell into the category of documents that Deny believed to be uninteresting. Yet, this royal appointee would become the gatekeeper of the nascent nation’s past, for it is from his early creation that the National Archives of Egypt (Dar al-Wathaʾiq al-Misriyya) of today are descended (Di-Capua 2009, 294). If the histories of Egyptology are to be written using Egyptian archival material, it is this institution that at least partially sets the terms of what can (and cannot) be discussed. This chapter illustrates the contours of this discussion within this wider context and also points to future possibilities. ʿABDIN AND ITS DISCONTENTS It was therefore from its conception that the first national archive of Egypt, apparently assembled and organized by modern and professional principles, was born with original sin. Documents relating to the lives of “peasants, merchants, soldiers, corvée workers, slaves, lower-class women, and other disenfranchised populations” were simply excluded from the collection (Di-Capua 2009, 111). These categories of individuals were thought to be subject to history and not the makers of it. Meanwhile, having recently severed all formal links from the Ottoman Empire after the end of World War I, any documents that portrayed Egypt’s ruling classes as operating within the Ottoman imperial context were manipulated to tell a different story, either through reorganization or by translation. Khaled Fahmy has pinpointed the ways in which translation into Arabic from the original Ottoman was anachronistically nationalist (K. Fahmy1997, 24–25). One such creative translation substitutes devlet-i aliyye (the sublime porte) in the Ottoman

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into “my nation” in Arabic (Di-Capua 2009, 128). Similarly, in Jacques Tagher’s editions of the Khedive Ismaʿil’s (ruled 1863–1879) collected speeches, the still technically Ottoman Governor of Egypt is said to speak of “independence,”“my people,”“my country,” and so forth (Di-Capua 2009, 128). The palace archives of ʿAbdin, much like any archive, actively laid the blueprint for what kind of narratives historians could extract from them. In its first incarnation, the narrative was that of monarchical nationalism; when the archive was reorganized in the 1950s, it shifted to conform to the narrative of Nasserism. Furthermore, despite its pretensions to being a civic archive where the citizen could discover his or her nation’s past, ʿAbdin was neither transparent nor accessible. Hidden away in the back of the Palace, it never had the legal status of an archive but rather that of a private royal library (Di-Capua 2009, 132). It was only in 1954, with the creation of the National Archives of Egypt, that a theoretically public institution was built. Yet, as heir to the legacy of ʿAbdin, the National Archives continue to this day to be held within the state’s coercive grip. Established by the ominously named Ministry of National Guidance, this institution would become the first truly national Egyptian archive. While we know little about the circumstances leading to its creation, the nascent institution was given important legal powers. For example, it could determine what documents were historically valuable and seize them. While making oeuvres to the international standards that govern good archival practice (transparency, accountability, and accessibility), the reality is now, and was then at its establishment, significantly different (Di-Capua 2009, 294–95). Unlike other world-class document repositories, such as the British National Archives in Kew, the National Archives of Egypt are not open to the public. Access is limited to those with permits, and it is the state’s repressive security apparatus that acts as arbiter. The process for applying and gaining access is extremely opaque. Because the procedure is overseen by Egypt’s Ministry of Interior, it is security officials with no understanding of the work of historians who hold the power to halt or facilitate their research. Despite the efforts of Khaled Fahmy, ʿEmad Abu Ghazi, and ʿEmad Helal to make the collections accessible to a wide and interested public, state security viciously restricts access to all but a privileged few; these people tend to be professional historians whose research is perceived as nonsubversive to the state and its narratives, which are overwhelmingly nationalist. Indeed, research considered as subversive is actively restricted. In recent years, one scholar’s research proposal on the department stores of early twentieth-century Cairo was rejected on the grounds that many were owned by Jews whose property was sequestered in 1956. The applicant was (mistakenly) feared to be a Jew who would then use their findings to sue the Egyptian government and reclaim their community’s nationalized property. The employees of Egypt’s security apparatus have thus become selfproclaimed sentries of Egypt’s past and are able to direct much of the research conducted on the country’s modern history. However, in recent

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years, scholars within the Anglo-American academy have developed creative strategies for sidestepping the archive’s repressive policies (Jakes 2012). As a result, a younger generation of scholars has shifted the focus of its inquiry from the state to its subjects. This move coincided with the spreading of cultural history in the late 1980s. The most important recent works of Egyptian history written in the Anglo-American academy have thus relied heavily on periodicals or print material found in European or American research institutes, or else on material found in personal collections; with the exception of Reid (2002), the histories of Egyptology are no different (see, e.g., Colla 2007 or Quirke 2010). Research agendas, instead of being problem-driven, are often guided by what material is available or even accessible. Scholars like Z. Fahmy (2011), Gasper (2009), Jacob (2011), Khuri-Makdisi (2010), and Pollard (2005) have turned to press collections in private universities and libraries, both locally and internationally, which tend to be much better organized and easier to access. Similarly, Hanley (2007) and Ibrahim (2013) have turned to hitherto untouched consular and patriarchal records, respectively, to write about “sensitive” topics, such as the history of cosmopolitanism and sectarianism. Additionally, a recent initiative by Nicolas Michel and the Institut Français d’ Archéologie Orientale will begin cataloging and publishing documents held in personal collections (IFAO n.d). Meanwhile, though, the wealth of material in private hands in Egypt remains largely unexplored. Again, material relating to Egyptological work is no different, and it is difficult to name even a single piece of work that has referenced such material. Since 1963, when a precedent-setting court decision forced the family of Egypt’s nationalist icon, Saʿd Zaghlul, to “gift” his diaries to the state, heirs and private collectors have tended to keep their troves of material hidden from view (Di-Capua 2009, 233). Indeed, perhaps tellingly, 1963 was the very same year that Egypt’s Ministry of Culture formed a new Committee for the Writing of Egyptian History under the guidance of the historian Muhammad Anis, which was tasked with identifying documents of “national importance.” Those documents deemed worthy of the honor were confiscated from their owners and deposited in the National Archives. However, rather than having the desired effect of bringing new resources out into the public, the Committee has encouraged owners—be it through inheritance or purchase—to hide away their collections and restrict access to them. Scholars such as Ryzova and Kalmbach have innovatively turned to Cairo’s antiquarian book market for research material: previously ignored diaries, photo albums, and autobiographies were incorporated by Ryzova (2014) in her research on the emergence of an Egyptian middle class in the interwar period, while Kalmbach (2011) collected rare directories, dictionaries, and pamphlets relating to an important training college for teachers that existed in the late nineteenth century. Influenced by feminist historians such as Carolyn Steedman and Antoinette Burton, Ryzova in particular has criticized the way in which women are written out of “history,” the

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domain of political statesmen, relegating their pasts instead to the province of “memory.” Implicit in her work is a critique of the way in which historians related to their source material (Ryzova 2014; cf. Burton 2003; Omar 2010, 2012; Steedman 2001). Until now, the Egyptian archives have largely been used uncritically, treated as a neutral resource rather than as an important arm of the state- and nation-building project. This unthinking reliance on the archive renders subaltern social actors invisible or denies them agency. Indeed, turning again to Egyptology, it is only recently that historians of the discipline have addressed the subaltern individuals who have been present, often as highly skilled laborers throughout the discipline’s history. Notably, these histories have not utilized officially derived source material from the Egyptian archives but have instead used the accounts written by contemporary observers of work practices, alongside excavation notebooks and work records (see, e.g., Clément 2010; Doyon this volume; Quirke 2010). HISTORIES OF EGYPTOLOGY? Yet, the situation described above raises questions about the epistemic status of the few histories of Egyptology that have attempted to write subaltern social actors back into the discipline’s history, particularly given that this history has often been centered on a heroic narrative of disciplinary progress (cf. Colla 2007). The excavation of “properly archival” evidence such as that held within official archives remains the measuring stick by which historical research is judged and to which all other outlying forms of evidence must be compared (Burton 2003, 21). The notion that this form of archival research is factual or closer to the “truth” continues to dominate professional history writing as much in Egypt as it does in many faculties and research institutes around the world. As such, memoirs, oral testimonies, autobiographies, and diaries are dismissed as falling under the auspices of “Memory,” assumed to be closer to fiction than “History” (both capitalized and therefore reified as dichotomous). Within this paradigm, History, which takes the archive as its basis, is assumed to be disinterested, verifiable, and truthful. On the other hand, Memory is characterized by “lapses of forgetting, silences and exclusions” (Burton 2003, 21). It is cast as fickle and therefore unauthoritative and unreliable. Thus, where oral histories, letters, autobiographies, and testimonies (those forms of evidence characterized as Memory and increasingly used by historians of Egyptology) throw doubt on dominant narratives, they can be dismissed as unreliable, or at the very least questionably used. Given what we know about History’s (and therefore the archive’s) role in legitimating male, elite, and nationalist dominance, it is no surprise that sources produced by women, workers, and the subaltern voice are dismissed as unreliable and therefore as falling within the realm of Memory (cf. Burton 2003, 23).

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These contrasting attitudes have fractured faculties of history. The split divides those who count themselves as “social historians” (read: empiricist, archival, and reality seeking), and those who describe themselves as “cultural historians” (read: textual, linguistic, and discourse analysis). The former is the descendent of nineteenth-century social science, whereas the latter was borne out of the “linguistic turn” and twentieth-century anthropology. In this battle, the archive has come to symbolize the putative irreconcilability of these two historiographical approaches: for social historians it is to be treated as source, for cultural historians, as a subject in its own right (Kale 1998). Published histories of Egyptology, even when non-heroic, increasingly reflect this split (contrast, for instance, Colla 2007 and Reid 2002). However, out of this contentious situation, the “archival turn” was born. It sought to redress the blindness to political motives behind archive assembly and creation that permeated history writing. The new cultural historians taught us that far from being innocent repositories of documents, archives— and national archives in particular—were concerned with doctoring and engineering narratives the state wanted to tell about the nation it purportedly represented. This historical imagining was a crucial component of the state-building exercise. And, like other “less reliable” source caches, the archive too was plagued with lapses, silences, and exclusions, many of them deliberate. As such, we could no longer naively use the archive as mere source, but rather we had to examine it critically as historically contingent subject. Therefore, it is too early to abandon research into the histories of Egyptology in Egyptian archives. Historians have been raising the battle cry to open up the archives not simply because they are stubbornly attached to a narrow and statist conception of history or even because they have unthinkingly inherited an uncreative empiricism. Instead, the insights of the historians associated with the “archival turn,” when used most productively, allow us to produce alternative narratives from within the archive itself. Archives should be read against their own logic in terms of both what is present but also what is absent. By doing so, one might avoid reproducing the state’s portrait of itself. After all, neither Fuʾad nor Nasser’s archivists were as successful or as comprehensive in their efforts to narrate the state’s autobiography as they had hoped. FURTHER ISSUES Even on their own terms, though, the Egyptian National Archives are notoriously unreliable; the institution’s self-proclaimed mission—to preserve documents pertaining to the history of modern Egypt—is consistently undermined by cataloging problems, disorganization, vandalism, and theft. While it is the case that Zahi Hawass—the erstwhile Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and, for part of 2011, Minister of State

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for Antiquities Affairs—was obsessed with repatriating “stolen” ancient showpieces like the bust of Nefertiti and the Rosetta Stone, he long overlooked the theft of Egypt’s non-ancient heritage. While he was simultaneously charged with the responsibility for Egypt’s ancient and modern pasts, Ottoman deeds and Khedival records that have mysteriously appeared in both private and public collections in the Gulf, for example, fell entirely outside the remit of the campaigns. As a result, nineteenth-century records quite frequently appear for sale in Cairo’s antiquarian market. Important manuscripts in the National Archive’s sister institution, Dar al-Kutub (the National Library), such as the diaries of the so-called father of the Egyptian nation, Saʿd Zaghlul, have been scribbled over in red biro. A prominent architectural historian (pers. comm.) has reported a number of alarming occurrences where he witnessed pages being torn out of records by the researcher examining them. Moreover, many ministerial documents never make it into archives in the first place. Important political papers, even those that have passed Egypt’s thirty-year declassification rule, are often regarded as sensitive or a threat to national security. Their whereabouts remain obscure (K. Fahmy 2012a). This situation is especially true of documents from the second half of the twentieth century, relating to the 1952 revolution, to the Arab-Israeli wars, and beyond. Indeed, documentation in the Egyptian National Archives relating to the history of Egyptology—in terms of the Egyptian state’s interactions with the discipline—from this era onward appears to be particularly scanty, and recent attempts to gain access to records held by Egypt’s Ministry of State for Antiquities have been unsuccessful (William Carruthers, pers. comm.). In various articles, Khaled Fahmy (2012b, c, d) has asked where the extant documents from the era after Egypt’s 1952 revolution actually are. Fahmy raises the legitimate concern that, so long as these documents are not available, Egypt’s modern history is bound to be written from a foreign perspective rather than an Egyptian one. His point is made particularly poignant by the publication of a number of recent histories of the 1967 ArabIsraeli War based on documents found in Israeli archives. That the Egyptian documents relating to this conflict continue to be concealed suggests that the ʿAbdin model is still in place. History and historical memory continue to be fiercely guarded by a state that grants access to them as selectively as it applies laws or as arbitrarily as it issues decrees. Its guardianship of records relating to antiquities, then, appears to be no different, and it is likely that histories of Egyptology are also bound to emerge using documents based on the exclusively foreign perspective for the time being, even if that perspective is treated critically. The denigration of the archive to Egypt’s national backstage is at once politically deliberate and the result of an inherited prejudice. Egypt’s successive rulers have clearly understood that restricting access to, and knowledge of, the country’s past is a powerful tool of governance. For example, like the monarchs that preceded him, Nasser inaugurated a workshop based out of

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the newly established National Archives to “rewrite history.” What could be said and who could write about the Egyptian past began to be monitored by the nation’s most famous socialist university professors, most prominently Muhammad Anis. Anything that did not tow the line of their extremely narrow conception of what the Egyptian past consisted of was not tolerated. Indeed, they called for the transformation of university departments from factories of “History for its own sake” to “History for the people.” Science or art for its own sake was believed to be a “luxury Egypt can no longer afford” (Di-Capua 2009, 301). Even as moves were made to resuscitate the Egyptian fellahin from an elitist historiography that ignored them, still no room was left in order to take subaltern agency into account. As a result, although no longer as heavily policed as it once was, history-writing’s dispositions continue to be informed by the Nasserist project to rewrite history. For example, historian Sherif Younis has recounted the resistance and the ostracization he faced as he conducted research on Nasserism even over thirty years after Nasser’s death (Khaled Fahmy, pers. comm.). Attempts to guard the fragile national myth are likely to come under much greater strain in the post-Mubarak years, as political actors contend the “true nature” of Egypt’s national character. Furthermore, the political instability of the post-2011 years has made the officials of Egypt’s Ministry of Culture ever more paranoid. In November 2012, Egypt’s preeminent daily newspaper published an article celebrating the seizure of documents that had been mistakenly sold from the dusty storerooms of the National Archive. Thinking it junk, an employee had sold papers, including lists of those families whose property had been nationalized in the aftermath of the 1952 revolution, for the meager sum of two hundred Egyptian pounds. Horrified by this grave error, Dr. ʿAbd al-Wahid al-Nabawi, the Director of the National Archive, called for “increasing awareness” about the importance of the documents housed. Convinced that the documents were due for smuggling out into Israel—the list included some Jewish families, he reasoned—he forcefully reasserted what has now become a familiar axiom that seems unlikely to change for some time to come: “protecting the National Archive is a matter of national security” (al-Ahram, 21 November 2012). Any attempt to write Egyptological histories from Egyptian archival material will be forced to contend with this situation. Additionally, such an attempt will also have to counter a more deeply rooted disdain for the “modern” that has become institutionalized within the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. The Supreme Council of Antiquities (originally under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture but then redesignated as its own Ministry of State for Antiquities in 2011) has consistently scorned what could not be displayed in expensive vitrines and hastily photographed (cf. Elshahed this volume). Egypt’s post-“Islamic” culture, particularly of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has therefore been ignored—if not actively denigrated—despite being part of the organization’s remit. First the Council, and now the Ministry, has been divided into three subsections:

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Ancient, Islamic, and Coptic. It has no official arm for dealing with the modern, the assumption being that anything recent is somehow less “authentic” than that which belongs to the more distant past. For example, it was only on 31 December 2010 that some one thousand buildings in downtown Cairo that date to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were listed and given the protected status previously reserved for antiquities (al-Ahram, 31 December 2010). Egypt’s more recent past did not fit into the commodification of Egypt’s heritage by the bodies responsible for it. Indeed, it could not. For many years, the Ministry treated “culture” and “heritage” as twin commodities, to be sold easily to tourists and marketed abroad. For instance, in recent years, blockbuster exhibitions promoted by Zahi Hawass, alongside his ubiquitous television appearances and numerous publications (which often appeared with introductions by none other than former first lady Suzanne Mubarak), were all part of a consolidated attempt to portray the Mubarak regime as civilized and sophisticated by using a model of Egypt’s ancient past within which its more modern history did not play a role. For many, particularly in the United States, Hawass became the face of Mubarak’s Egypt. The Ministry of Culture, and particularly the Supreme Council of Antiquities, appealed mainly to the tastes of package tourists and ignored the interests of ordinary Egyptians. For instance, in the early years of the twenty-first century, the long-time inhabitants of Fustat (the original Arab settlement in the area of Cairo) were ordered to convert their workshops into tourist shops or face eviction, as their presence was deemed unsightly. Likewise, a concrete wall was built around the temple of Karnak to hide from view the nearby early twentieth-century Nubian mud-brick houses, thought to be a blemish on this architectural marvel. Under the auspices of the controversial Governor of Luxor, Samir Farag, nineteenth-century Nile-side villas were torn down to make place for glitzy hotels, which critics derided as “Vegas on the Nile” (Hauslohner 2010). By requisitioning the past, and severing it from any ties to the present, the Ministry of Culture has manufactured a state of national amnesia. As a consequence, to write a history of Egyptology within Egypt, the scholar must rely greatly on sources held abroad. Other than hagiographies of Egyptian Egyptologists published by Hawass (1999), much of Egypt’s recent historical record has consistently been deemed irrelevant to Egypt’s past. That the very foundational myths of Egypt (of its unblemished, golden past) were often manufactured by foreigners within this context—the very same people essentially responsible for the country’s colonial-era humiliation—is a situation that has been seen to pose a dangerous threat to the genealogy of the Egyptian nation. No wonder it was individual hagiographies that Hawass addressed, and not the more embarrassing questions of exploitation, labor conditions, and the emergence of a certain racial politics that histories of Egyptology could explore. For it is precisely in the history of Egyptology (and also in its twin, the history of tourism) that one may begin to understand how the ancient past is experienced, understood, and relates to the Egyptian present.

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CONCLUSION In the heady days immediately after Egypt’s 25 January 2011 uprising, a group of young, optimistic historians and sociologists under the leadership of Khaled Fahmy and Hania Sholkamy inaugurated an oral history project to chronicle the final days of the Mubarak regime and the events of the uprising itself. They held a number of workshops in the National Archives building in Cairo. Despite the fact that most of the participants were historians or graduate students of history, many had not been inside the forbidding building before. The symbolic importance of this point was not lost on anyone. In his opening statement, Fahmy suggested that the process of political democratization following the revolution would have to be accompanied by a democratization of Egypt’s history in the ways that it is produced, consumed, and disseminated. It was indeed hoped that a large-scale collaborative project, which had received the blessings of the new Minister of Culture, ʿEmad Abu Ghazi, would inaugurate that process. However, at the time of writing—as Egypt’s political landscape has become ever more contested and polarized, and as various interests vie to redefine the cultural character of the new Egypt—it seems that the perhaps naive wish to open up the Egyptian archives has become ever more unlikely. Indeed, one of the many worrying clauses in Egypt’s December 2012 draft constitution euphemistically stipulated that the state should be responsible for the “protection” of the nation’s history and heritage. Histories of Egyptology (as reflected in this volume) will be forced to use other sources in the near future at least. Although it is doubtful that the employees of the Ministry of Culture and officials of the Ministry of Interior are aware of the etymological origins of the word “archive” (from the Greek arche, “to govern”), their draconian policing of the institution suggests that they intuit something of its potential power. BIBLIOGRAPHY UNPUBLISHED SOURCES Barakat Pasha, F. 1932. An Autobiography of H. E. Fathallah Barakat Pacha. Cairo.

PUBLISHED SOURCES Burton, A. M. 2003. Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clément, A. 2010.“Rethinking ‘Peasant Consciousness’ in Colonial Egypt: An Exploration of the Performance of Folksongs by Upper Egyptian Agricultural Workers on the Archaeological Excavation Sites of Karnak and Dendera at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1885–1914).” History and Anthropology 21: 73–100. Colla, E. 2007. Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Di-Capua, Y. 2009. Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Fahmy, K. 1997. All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed ʿAli, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. ———. 2012a. “The Production of Knowledge.” Egypt Independent. Accessed 12 February 2014. www.egyptindependent.com/opinion/production-knowledge ———. 2012b. “Aina Wathaʾiq Harb Oktubr?” [“Where Are the Documents from the October War?”] Al-Shuruq. Accessed 12 February 2014. www.shorouknews. com/columns/view.aspx?id=f04c30a8-dd90–4146-be3e-5a9c2a009f6b ———. 2012c. “Al-Qittwa Muftah al-Karar.”[“The Cat and the Key to the Storeroom.”] Al-Shuruq. Accessed 13 February 2014. www.shorouknews.com/columns/ view.aspx?cdate=14062013&id=816fd5ef-9aeb-4710–8004-bf269e486281 ———. 2012d. “Kaifa Naktub Tarikhna al-Harbi?” [“How Do We Write Our History of War?”] Al-Shuruq. Accessed 13 February 2014. www.shorouknews.com/columns/ view.aspx?cdate=12042013&id=1b319bb7-f981–4386-af03-a20fb10c7592 Fahmy, Z. 2011. Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gasper, M. E. 2009. The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hanley, W. 2007.“Foreignness and Localness in Alexandria, 1880–1914.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Hauslohner, A. 2010. “Egypt’s Plans for Luxor: Vegas on the Nile?” Time. Accessed 13 January 2014. http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2026394,00.html Hawass, Z. A. 1999. “Excavating the Old Kingdom: The Egyptian Archaeologists.” In Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids, 154–64. Exhibition catalog (no editor given). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ibrahim, V. 2013. The Copts of Egypt: Challenges of Modernisation and Identity. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. IFAO. n.d. Archives privées dans l’Égypte ottoman et contemporaine. Accessed 13 January 2014. www.ifao.egnet.net/axes-2012/ecritures-langues-corpus/2012archives-privees/ Jacob, W. C. 2011. Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Jakes, A. 2012.“The Invisible State.” Arab Studies Journal 20 (1): 236–45. Kale, M. 1998. Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kalmbach, H. 2011. “From Turban to Tarboush? Dar al-ʿUlum and Social, Linguistic, and Religious Change in Early Twentieth Century Egypt.” PhD diss., University of Oxford. Khuri-Makdisi, I. 2010. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press. Omar, H. 2010. “Making Memory History.” In Speak, Memory: On Archives and Other Strategies of (Re)activation of Cultural Memory, edited by L. Carderera, 22–27. Cairo: Townhouse Gallery. ———. 2012. “Who Should Save Egypt’s Archives?” Al Jazeera. Accessed 12 February 2014. www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/2012121132641226409.html Pollard, L. 2005. Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt, 1805–1923. Berkeley: University of California Press. Quirke, S. 2010. Hidden Hands: Egyptian Workforces in Petrie Excavation Archives, 1880–1924. London: Duckworth. Reid, D. M. 2002. Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ryzova, L. 2014. The Age of the Efendiyya: Passages to Modernity in NationalColonial Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steedman, C. 2001. Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

13 Histories of Egyptology in Egypt Some Thoughts Marwa Elshakry

When we think about the history of Egyptology against the history of Egypt, we are also invited to consider the various claims, global and local, that these histories formed a part of. After all, the professional rise of Egyptology coincided with the nineteenth-century age of empires, and hence the very disciplinary and material context of this rise reflected the various and often competing political geographies at stake. A border discipline among others that took shape in the crucible of empire—including history, archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, and comparative philology and mythology— Egyptology rested upon geopolitical networks as the material and political filiations that moved artifacts across borders.1 As the chapters in this section show, the history of Egyptology in Egypt was deeply bound up with the politics of knowledge, affecting all aspects of the discipline in practice, whether in terms of links to imperial diplomacy or to colonial labor policies (Reid and Doyon). This point is especially evident when one brings together different historical sources, whether from or beyond the archives of the colonial and postcolonial Egyptian state (Omar). These chapters thus focus on reading European archaeology in light of Egyptian histories—whether intellectual, labor, or diplomatic—and they make it clear that archaeological artifacts, as much as the knowledge these artifacts gave rise to, were part of multiple political geographies: national as well as imperial and colonial (cf. Trigger 1984). Looming above everything were the ambiguities of sovereignty in Egypt: evident—if not from the moment Mehmed ʿAli massacred the Mamluks in 1811—then after the 1840 Convention of London, when he received a heritable governorship under the Ottomans. The extraordinary ambiguities of Egypt’s legal and political status under the “new imperialism” of the long nineteenth century presented archaeologists as well as diplomats with the dilemma of having to negotiate a series of competing, multiple sovereignties, from the dual Anglo-French control and the British military occupation of 1882 to the (nominal) recognition of independence in 1922, and later to the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936. The nineteenth century, to be sure, was a period in which systems of partial sovereignty accelerated around the world. Egypt was an early, and perhaps extreme, example of this process, caught

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between Ottoman and Egyptian and French and British systems of control and law. Egyptology was thus embedded from the start within a complex set of competing claims—imperial, international, and national—about property and patrimony and about the past itself. Of course, this form of nation-state nationalism (like internationalism, too) was itself a product of the nineteenth century, and archaeology played a critical role in its rise. The liberal revolutions of the 1830s, for example, saw the rise of new nationalist claims based on the work of archeologists in places such as Greece, Mexico, and Peru (Díaz-Andreu 2007). Simultaneously, Egypt under Mehmed ʿAli gave rise to similar legal, intellectual, and institutional arguments in favor of the preservation of the antique past. This process occurred even as Mehmed ʿAli’s state retained ambiguous political relations with the Ottoman Sublime Porte—and, increasingly, with European powers—but these relations and the subordination they implied only spurred nationalist impulses to reclaim the past. One of the expressions of this subordination was that in the nineteenth century, Egyptians themselves played a minor role in shaping Egyptology in Egypt. The fact that the Frenchman Auguste Mariette served as the head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service at its foundation in 1858, rather than the Egyptian intellectual Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi (1801–1873), for example, demonstrates how far institutional control by Egyptians was curtailed from the start (Reid 2002). With the British occupation of Egypt and the new imperialism after the “Scramble for Africa” (in which old, dynastic land empires were transformed and new ones appeared in their wake) and with the simultaneous rapid professionalization of historical and archeological techniques and methods, the competing claims between Egyptians and their various imperial masters grew only more intense. I proceed below to explore this competition, especially as waged on the battlefield of ideas, as a way into a collection of essays whose primary goal is to invite reflection on the politics of the history of Egyptology when viewed from the perspective of Egypt itself. ARTIFACTUAL AND MONUMENTAL HISTORIES The publication of the Napoleonic Description de l’Égypte remains a useful starting point in analyzing the study of ancient Egypt (although, as Bednarski 2005 and Gange 2013 show, the work’s impact was far from as uniform as has often been assumed, and the differential reception of the work still requires significantly more study). The Description’s imperial lineage points to how the inauguration of modern Egyptology in Europe itself thus began as a deeply political affair—whether practically or discursively—and indeed the discipline was already deeply bound up with a number of competing novel political ideologies of the time. One has only to consider the use of Egyptian symbols by French Revolutionaries, Masons, and anti-Catholic liberals, or the later use of Egyptian iconography by mystical and spiritist

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orders to see how ancient Egypt helped to spur visions of a revolutionary future world order (Buchwald and Josefowicz 2010; Edelstein 2004). But while popular and underground mystical and hermetic movements may have retained an interest in Egypt’s ancient past, Egyptology was critically transformed for a broader public through the rise of the new scientific archaeology of the late nineteenth century, a transformation that was simultaneously conceptual, material, and monumental. All three transformations came together to cement new historical temporalities. Historic—and especially “prehistoric”—artifacts had given rise to new systems of meaning and new hermeneutic methods for archaeologists ever since Christian Jürgensen Thomsen reworked the mythical ages into historic ages of metals: giving rise to the new Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages of history, and establishing a system in which all found artifacts could be read—against others in closed finds—to determine their proper historical origins and relative temporal progressions (cf. Rowley-Conwy 2007). Egyptologists, particularly at the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, were similarly driven by the quest to accurately recover, date, and decipher Egypt’s ancient artifacts. But in truth it was a fascination—for various different reasons—with the monumentality as much as the competing visions of the historicity of these artifacts that had drawn many to the country (for a detailed discussion of this history in relation to Britain, see Gange 2013). Grandeur as the expression of a certain political aesthetic spoke across the centuries to a very new generation of dynasts and their advisers. When Champollion advised Mehmed ʿAli in the 1830s that “all of Europe will take notice [if] . . . His Highness would . . . assure the conservation of temples, palaces, tombs, and all kinds of monuments which still attest to the power and grandeur of ancient Egypt, and which are at the same time the most beautiful ornaments of Modern Egypt,” (Reid 2002, 55) it was clear that he thought the “grandeur and power” of the new Egypt was to be bolstered by the monumental scale of its ornamental artifacts: vast temples and tombs that attested to the might of a state that could muster colossal capital and labor forces at will. Past as future, if all went well, with Mehmed ʿAli bringing what had been part of the Ottoman periphery into the modernity of Europe. Coming at a time when European powers—and company men—were slowly encroaching upon Egyptian borders in the cause both of the new Egyptian state and also of their own vast, capital-heavy, and labor costly engineering and technological works, the metaphors of power and grandeur were perhaps more than a little charged with the concerns of the present (Colla 2007, 9; Reid 2002, 55). Indeed, the fascination with monumental remains typically generated their own monumental regimes of labor, as required by the archaeologists themselves. From Mehmed ʿAli’s providing of corvée labor to the Prussian Karl Richard Lepsius from 1842 until 1845, and later Khedive Saʿid’s (ruled 1854–1863) envoy to Mariette, the consistently powerful structure of

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colonial labor practices can be seen at play. As Doyon (this volume) hints, Egyptologists’ theories about the scale of power that had been required to construct ancient monumental edifices in the first place were implicitly acknowledged even as they repressed the nature of the brutal labor regimes that they themselves engaged in (cf. Wynn 2008). But the recovery of ancient monuments as a testament to one’s own power and grandeur in the present seemed, at least initially, to interest the European powers more than the Egyptians themselves. Mehmed ʿAli was much less interested in excavation than in other works of monumental labor power and technological know-how that could secure Egypt’s political and international status. He famously exchanged the Dendera Zodiac—an artifact that would prove to be an object of intense debate over religion and science in restoration France—for a cotton mill (indeed, Champollion’s advice to him had come in the wake of this exchange; for the Zodiac, see Buchwald and Josefowicz 2010). Later, he used blocks from the ninth pylon at the temple of Karnak for a saltpeter factory. By 1835, however, Mehmed ʿAli came to realize both the diplomatic and symbolic importance of the conservation of Egypt’s ancient past, and that year a decree was passed to preserve historic monuments (the timing was close to that of other states in Europe: Francois Guizot helped pass a similar law in France around the same time; Ottoman authorities did not pass such a law until 1868). Any historical (and particularly ancient) artifacts found in Egypt—“Islamic” ones would not gain the same legal interest until later— were thereafter to pass through the directors of Cairo’s new School of Languages (for which see below). In other words, they were to pass to Tahtawi and to Joseph Hekekyan (1807–1875), an Armenian engineer who had gone to inspect the cotton mills of Manchester and later became an important bureaucrat, educator, translator, and historian in Egypt (Reid 2002, 54–63; cf. Jeffreys 2010). EGYPTOLOGY AND THE EGYPTIANS Both Tahtawi and Hekekyan serve as interesting examples of how Egypt’s antique past was slowly being recuperated in a contemporary Egyptian context. For both men—as for many other civil servants and younger members of the intelligentsia writing in Arabic at this time—the hope was that Egypt, “which in Ancient times passed to Europe the sacred fire of science and civilization,” would be able to “reignite its [own] torch.” This hope for renaissance meant first following the model of “European civilization and power.” In 1836, an Egyptian society was founded, modeled on the many Orientalist societies that were founded around the same time in Europe, and plans for an Egyptian Museum were drawn up. Yet, the latter plan in this manifestation ultimately failed, and an export ban on antiquities introduced in 1835 was largely ignored; in 1858, the position of Director of the new Egyptian

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Antiquities Service was given (as noted above) to the Frenchman Auguste Mariette (Reid 2002, quotes on page 63). Exhibits of ancient Egypt at the mid-century world’s fairs were therefore controlled by the likes of Mariette, Ferdinand de Lesseps (developer of the Suez Canal), and the German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch, as well as by French adviser-bureaucrats stationed in Egypt. Private British, Belgian, and Greek entrepreneurs also played a role. Meanwhile, within Egypt itself, the institutions and material and intellectual networks that Egyptology created were controlled by an informal system of “dual control”: French and British archaeologists (although not without some conflict between themselves) exerted the chief power, with Gaston Maspero running the new, Cairo-based Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale in the early 1880s and Flinders Petrie working at the Giza pyramid field at around the same time. British experts came to Egypt largely through private enterprise: for instance, Petrie’s excavations were partly financed by the Egypt Exploration Fund (founded in 1882, the year of the British occupation), one of whose founders, the writer and traveler Amelia Edwards, would later fund the first chair in Egyptology in Britain. Indeed, the very ambiguities of the legal situation of the British in Egypt after 1882 in particular contributed in part to the Egyptian government’s laissez-faire approach. The British Consul-General, Lord Cromer (Evelyn Baring), had in fact little control over rights to conduct excavations in Egypt, which was one reason why the British Museum official E. A. Wallis Budge, a fierce critic of Britain’s predilection in these matters, resorted to smuggling artifacts out of Egypt in 1886. Cromer’s hesitation to interfere rested in part because he thought it would complicate matters politically with France (as well as setting an awkward precedent within the Ottoman Empire generally), and—much as Mehmed ʿAli had realized earlier—he too came to believe that Egypt’s ancient artifacts were best regarded as objects of exchange for other political or material benefits. Day-to-day policy making was bedeviled by Egypt’s indeterminate political and legal status, with multiple, contending local parliamentary and international dimensions— whether Egyptian, European, or Ottoman. In the 1880s, a Consultative Archaeological Committee (also known as the “Egyptology Committee”) was set up, partly under Cromer’s supervision. The Committee consisted of mostly French and Englishmen, with a handful of (typically Gallicized) Egyptians, Germans, and other Europeans. But remember that France did not officially recognize Britain’s presence in Egypt until the Entente Cordiale of 1904, and even that event did not mean that the country was willing to relinquish its privileged institutional role in Egypt’s ancient past: the Entente contained a clause specifying that the Director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service should be French (Reid 2002, 180–96; cf. Genell 2013 for background on Egypt’s complex legal regime). After 1882, Egyptians continued to play a role in Egyptology, albeit a minor one. Ahmad Kamal (1851–1923) set up a school for Egyptians to

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study Egyptology, but it only lasted for three years (from 1882 to 1885) and had only one graduating class. Kamal was also the first Egyptian assistant curator of the Bulaq Museum (the forerunner to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities) in Cairo (he was appointed in 1891), and the following year, Ahmad Najib Bey (1847–1910) became the first Egyptian Inspector General of Antiquities. Yet, in 1883, a new antiquities law was issued by the Ministry of Public Works (and not the Ministry of Education as in Istanbul), suggesting that the issue at hand was perceived to be more a matter of public affairs than of citizenship and national patrimony. Only in 1929, seven years after Egypt’s nominal independence had been granted by the British, did the Ministry of Education take the Egyptian Antiquities Service under its charge (Reid 2002, 175, 188; for archaeology in the Ottoman Empire more generally, see Bahrani et al. 2011). ANCIENTS AND MODERNS In short, as the potted summary above shows, and as the chapters in this section explain in greater detail, Egyptians were never granted anything approaching full autonomous institutional or political control over their antiquities. In the tussle that defined Egyptology’s global exchange of objects, ideas, and people, what remained for most Egyptians was literally left to history. Along with the tombs, temples, and obelisks uncovered and left behind—and in the local ministries and museums that helped to manage them—perhaps the greatest impact Egyptology had was in the general transformation of Egypt’s historical consciousness—or in its very sense of history and of the past itself. In nineteenth-century Egypt, the rise of scientific archaeology consolidated as much as it transformed disparate practices of uncovering the ancient past. Of course, before this transformation occurred, there were many other instances of premodern attempts to recover this antique past, both in artifactual and discursive forms. For example, the ʿAbbasid Caliph Maʾmun (ruled 818–833) had sent an expeditionary force to the pyramids of Giza in search of the treasures of the wisdom of the ancients—looking, it seems, for ancient manuscripts (Cooperson 2004, 135). Furthermore, from the ʿAbbassid quest for universality to the Wunderkammern (cabinets of curiosities) of European antiquaries, Egypt’s ancient past had inspired many premoderns to seek to restore or reclaim its source of knowledge and power. This concern motivated some of the medieval Arabic chroniclers as well. Over time, this interest—like interest in universal histories more generally— slowly began to die out, and later chronicles, which would emerge as the dominant form of historical writing in Arabic, would make only a passing mention of it; al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) offers a good example here: he might have deplored the apocryphal destruction of the Giza sphinx’s nose by a Sufi shaykh, but he hardly dwelled on the meaning of the monument itself. By

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the end of the eighteenth century, the intellectual struggles between iconoclasts and rationalists that had driven earlier interest in Egypt’s pre-Islamic artifacts had largely subsided. Indeed, it seems that many of the ʿulamaʾ who observed the activities of Napoleon’s savants were somewhat perplexed by their interest in the rubble and remains of Egypt’s antique past.2 It was only a little later that scholars such as Tahtawi started to rely on Arabic sources for histories of ancient Egypt. Referring to such writers as al-Masʿudi (896–956) and al-Suyuti (1445–1505), Tahtawi did not draw so much on a continuous discursive tradition of universal history as recover and utilize these older commentaries for novel purposes (the nineteenthcentury Egyptian reformer ʿAli Mubarak, writing a few years later, did something similar, drawing on Maqrizi and Suyuti in his discussion of theories of the pyramids and their construction).3 As mentioned earlier, the interest in conservation of historic monuments was also novel, and Tahtawi had played an early—if small and ultimately curtailed—role in that practice. When Mehmed ʿAli gave away the Dendera Zodiac, Tahtawi advised that Egypt should be preserving its antiquities given that she “has undertaken to accept civilization and instruction on the model of European nations” (Reid 2002, 54). Tahtawi himself composed a number of histories of ancient Egypt, and he contributed to school journals, texts, and curricula as well. As Director of al-Alsun (the School of Languages and Teachers’ Training College in Cairo), he also worked with several Arabic writers of history. These writers included ʿAbd Allah al-Suʾud, who translated Mariette’s guidebook to the Egyptian Museum and published an abridged version of the latter’s history of ancient Egypt as Kitab Qudamaʾ al-Misriyyin (Book of the Ancient Egyptians). Al-Suʾud helped Tahtawi compose Bidayat al-Qudamaʾ wa Hidayat al-Hukuma (The Beginnings of the Ancients and the Bequest of Wisdom; al-Tahtawi 1838), a work that was also similar to the history of ancient Egypt he composed earlier, Anwar Tawfiq al-Jalil fi Akhbar Misr wa Tawthiq Bani Ismaʿil (The Radiance of the Sublime Tawfiq in the History of Egypt and the Descendants of Ismaʿil; al-Tahtawi 1868). In these works, Tahtawi covered the pharaonic, Greco-Roman, and Byzantine eras before dealing with Egypt after the rise of Islam (a second volume followed dealing with the history of the Arabs after Muhammad, but it was not published until after Tahtawi’s death by his son, ʿAli Fahmi Rifaʿa). In both Anwar and Bidayat al-Qudamaʾ, al-Tahtawi used a number of diverse sources, including prophetic texts—such as the Qurʾan, aha¯dith, tafsir, and the Israʾilliya¯t traditions—alongside ancient and modern Arabic and French texts. He also relied on new French works, including most notably a translation of Manetho’s list of the ancient Egyptian dynasties that was published during his period of studies in Paris (much of Tahtawi’s chronicle of the Egyptian dynasties follows Manetho’s text). In fact, Tahtawi’s reliance on older Arabic histories like those of al-Masʿudi and al-Suyuti also reflected this milieu, as these histories were themselves being revived

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by French Orientalists at the time. The model for his history, which also became the source of the historical periodization he utilized, was one that was as marked by the new methods of historicism as it was by the interest in the recovery of ancient sources of universal history. Hence, his influences ranged from Ibn Khaldun’s (1332–1406) three-volume history of the Arabs and Berbers—Tahtawi had edited Khaldun’s 1377 work Muqaddima for publication for the first time in Arabic in 1857, which also proved a key point of discussion among Orientalists, as Tahtawi’s diary during his five-year journey to Paris makes clear—to Manetho himself, Auguste Mariette, and Gardner Wilkinson (whose Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians was published by the Bulaq Press—Cairo’s government press—in 1836). In the process, Tahtawi combined sacred and secular histories in novel ways, mingling divine prophecy with human testimony and putting together divine with historical narratives. When dealing with the ancient Egyptians, Tahtawi described them as the “mother of all nations” and the first source of wisdom and learning. He follows Mariette’s chronology and Manetho’s list of thirty dynasties, using liberal French Archbishop François de Bovet’s (1835) edition of Manetho’s work. Tahtawi’s main concern with the ancients was their wisdom, with the very origins of knowledge itself, and his history here too was modeled on older h·ikma, or wisdom, literature traditions. Equating a syncretic RamsesSesostris with Hermes Trismegestus, for example, Tahtawi relied on previous tropes of the resurrection of knowledge, constructing a trinity between Ramses, Hermes, and the Qurʾanic prophet Idris to unify the various traditions that he saw modern Egypt as heir to: Egyptian, Greek, and Muslim. Tahtawi also identifies the ancient Egyptians as Sabians (S.abiʾa)—in other words as among the monotheists or Ahl al-Kita¯b (lit. “the people of the book,” a reference to non-Muslim adherents of faiths that have a revealed scripture). The volume ends with the Islamic conquest of Egypt in AD 640. To Tahtawi, Muhammad thus formed the great historical divide, a periodization common to many Arabic universal histories too. However, this divide was not an absolute one, for Tahtawi also assigns a kind of “middle age” between the ancient (pre-Muslim) and the new (post-Muslim) era: the end of the ancient world was also marked by the Roman Emperor Theodosius’s decree of AD 391 (one of an anti-pagan series starting in AD 389), which led to the destruction of many ancient temples and thus symbolized for him the end of an older, pagan order. In fact, Tahtawi’s history of ancient Egypt formed a short prequel to his other, real interest in ja¯hili (pre-Muhammad’s revelation) history. In the Anwar, his history of the ancient covers also Alexander and the Ptolemies, then moves on to the Romans up to Theodosius, before finally briefly attending to the Byzantine and Islamic Conquests. In essence, the real crux of Tahtawi’s work was the Greco-Roman past, an era that had never traditionally formed an important section of previous Arabic histories and a subject that he had studied extensively when a student at the “Egyptian School” set up by Drovetti and Jomard in Paris in the 1830s

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(the heyday of European Philhellenism). For Tahtawi, the ancient Egyptians and Greeks were the true forefathers of Egypt’s ancient past; indeed, for him, they stood at the pinnacle of the great civilizations of the ancient East, and he gave the Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, and others much less attention (Reid 2002, 144–45). Tahtawi’s histories also progressed along a dual timeline. His division of the Bidayat al-Qudamaʾ into “divine” and “human” histories shows how the combination of these two narratives itself allowed Tahtawi to identify epochal moments of transition or of equivalence—whether as moments of continuity or transformation—that followed the model of historical time that was emerging in so many universal histories in contemporary Europe (cf. Lianeri 2011). Simultaneously, Tahtawi provided a kind of translation of these moments into the idiom of more classical Muslim chronologies. The specter of multiple temporalities that haunts Tahtawi’s works thus also spoke to the possibilities of competing visions of universality. This point was true, too, of later Arabic discourses that attempted to cast their own narratives against both the categories of Western historical time and the concerns (and institutional and political realities) of their present. Hence, it was no accident that Tahtawi likened Mehmed ʿAli to Alexander the Great (at the very moment the former was rebuilding Alexandria), or that Mehmed ʿAli’s dynastic successor Khedive Ismaʿil was praised by Tahtawi as “restorer” of the ancient glory of Egypt. In short, it was a new intellectual beginning. Within a generation, civil servants as well as popular and professional historians would continue to narrate Egypt’s history in service of a broader narrative of civilizational rise and decline. Indeed, Tahtawi’s histories gave rise to a number of new works on Egypt that sought to integrate the nation’s ancient and modern histories. For example, Ahmad Kamal wrote a history of ancient Egypt and composed an ancient Egyptian grammar in the 1880s (before his death, Kamal also worked on—but failed to publish—his twenty-four volume ancient Egyptian dictionary). Ahmad Najib wrote a book of essays on ancient Egypt for the Ministry of Education around the same time. Furthermore, Ahmad Hassan composed a history of Egypt to the Islamic conquest in 1888, while Husayn Zaki wrote a history of the “ancient East,” Tarikh al-Sharq alQadim, in 1892. Mikhail Sharubim integrated Coptic with pharaonic histories and went to even greater lengths than Tahtawi to reconcile Islamic lore on pharaohs with sources newly available, particularly Manetho’s history of the ancient Egyptians. However, the legacies of ancient Egyptian history were sometimes also viewed as mixed. In the 1890s, Ibrahim al-Muwaylihi’s fictional musings on the pyramids presented them not only as a symbol of civilization and slavery but also as a source of national income and an unfortunate space for local entertainment and lewd dancing (Reid 2002, 201–12). The figure of the writer Jurji Zaidan (1861–1914; born in Beirut) offers perhaps the best example of how the subject of ancient Egypt was

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popularized for broader Arabic audiences. This was a subject this prolific author approached in many of his historical writings as well as in his novels and novellas. Like Tahtawi, Zaidan folded ancient Egyptian history into a prehistory of Islam, helping to further reconceptualize the history of the ja¯hiliyya. Like Tahtawi, Zaidan also held a keen interest in the ancient Greeks and Romans in Egypt, writing a history on the subject in 1899. Like many of his generation, Zaidan’s interest in Egypt’s antique past was always mediated by the concerns of its present. For instance, his emphasis on the Arabs’ inheritance of the ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian law codes could be seen as itself reflecting his support of Egypt’s recent embrace of Napoleonic law. Zaidan, like many others of his generation who wrote on the history of the Arabs in the context of the post-Ottoman colonial Egyptian state, also emphasized the continuity of history through the intermingling—and translation—of civilizations. Yet, Zaidan also gave more weight to the ancient Mesopotamian cultures and peoples than a writer like Tahtawi did: the ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, and Phoenicians were thus important historical players in his histories of the East. He also presented the deep history of the ancient East as part of a broader history of “Islamic civilization” itself: a history carried through by the successive translation of civilizations and the transfer of the learned arts and sciences, as well as the specific legal, political, and linguistic codes of the Arabs. Unlike Tahtawi, then, this new generation of which Zaidan was a leading figure reconceptualized Islam as a category of Western universal history itself, turning divine histories into more worldly narratives of civilizational progress derived ultimately from European intellectual models. For Zaidan, Islam was a critical epoch in world history in that it served as the conduit of ancient knowledge—from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece, to the Arabs (Islam) and, finally, to Europe. Zaidan himself synthesized much of his historical thought in lectures he wrote in the early 1900s in anticipation of a post he hoped he would—but never did—hold at the (then) Egyptian and (now) Cairo University. A one-time translator for the British military mission in the Sudan and liberal colonial intellectual who helped spearhead (if not invent) the idea of an Arab renaissance (or Nahd. a), Zaidan was in a sense seeking to underwrite his own lifetime project of Arabic translations. Whether by translating European novels, popular science journal articles, or histories, Zaidan and other self-labeled Nahd. awi intellectuals of his generation were critically involved in the translation of European ideas and values for middleclass Arabic readers; viewing the deep Arab past as an entrepôt empire also helped refigure competing views and varieties of ethnic and religious nationalisms (and emerging “traditionalisms”) in the region.4 Arabic works that encompassed ancient Egyptian history may not have been large in number, but their significance rested in more than their quantity. The history curriculum for state preparatory schools that was approved in the 1870s (around the time of Tahtawi’s death) was organized surprisingly

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similarly to the manner in which Tahtawi organized his history of ancient and modern Egypt: in the first year, students studied ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia; in the second, ancient Greece and Rome; in the third, Theodosius to Islamic history; and in the fourth, the Crusades, Ayyubids, Mamluks, and Andalusia. From 1908 until 1909, Ahmad Kamal taught ancient Egyptian history at the new Egyptian University in Cairo (the institution later published his lectures, which covered up to the period of the ancient Egyptian Fifteenth Dynasty, and began, much like Tahtawi, with a reflection on human and divine histories and on the sources of civilization). In 1910, Kamal also convinced the Ministry of Education to institute an Egyptology section at Dar al-ʿUlum (the new—founded in 1871—Teachers’ Training College in Cairo). Meanwhile, the professionalization of the social and historical sciences (and the universalization of education) gave rise to new bids for the lessons of ancient Egyptian history for the modern Egyptian state: the 1920s, at the height of anticolonial political movements in Egypt, would become the heyday of the use of ancient Egyptian symbols and iconography in bids for Egyptian nationalism (Gershoni and Jankowski 1986; El Shakry 2007). That decade saw a number of Egyptian intellectuals like Taha Hussein (who wrote and taught on Greco-Roman history, but in particular Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt) resurrect Egypt’s ancient past toward nationalist ends (Reid 2002, 204, 211). CONCLUSION The artifacts and disciplines of knowledge created by ancient Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth century continued to play an important role in the annals of Egyptian history well after Hussein and others of his generation had helped to foster new historical narratives for the post-independence state. Indeed, these narratives remain important till the present: new archaeological finds and sites, and international bids for (and disputes over) ancient artifacts and the knowledge they produce, continue to feature in the headlines of daily papers in Arabic. This chapter has offered some thoughts on the early history of Egyptology in Egypt, and in particular on the discipline’s involvement in multiple local and international sites. It has considered Egyptian bureaucrats in the nineteenth and early twentieth century as, torn between the Khedival palace, the Ottoman Porte, and Westminster Hall, they took part in the construction of new institutions and new forms of knowledge around Egyptology in Egypt. Egyptology was, in many ways, the disciplinary and institutional product of multiple bids for political dominion. And while this situation often constrained the role Egyptian thinkers and institutions played in it, it turned out to be critical for them, too. This importance led to material as much as discursive changes: one has only to drive through any major city in Egypt to see the remnants of ancient monuments placed boldly within busy traffic highways. Yet, like Mehmed

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ʿAli’s own interpretation of the monumental potentiality of Egypt’s ancient artifacts—which saw him exchange monuments for mills or other modern mechanical wonders—the histories alluded to here offered their own particular blend of narrative priorities, and they too weave together ancient, medieval, and modern in unique ways. It may be that it was the world beyond Egypt that introduced the recovery of Egypt’s ancient past there, but, as these chapters show, other histories also marked this recovery in profound ways. NOTES 1. Indeed, Egyptology’s imbrication with colonialism remains a politically salient point in Egypt to the present (Riggs 2013). 2. See al-Jabarti (1993) on this situation, for instance. On earlier attitudes, see Haarmann (1980) or El-Daly (2005). Meanwhile, Greece offers an interesting point of comparison: for a comparable analysis to Haarmann of local peasant significations of monumental remains coexisting with intellectual indifference, see Stewart’s (2012) introduction and also Clogg (1983); also worth mentioning is Hamilakis (2007). 3. For more on these earlier universal Arabic histories, see Khalidi (1994); cf. El-Daly (2005). 4. The relevant works to this discussion are Zaidan (1902–1906, 1908).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bahrani, Z., Z. Çelik, and E. Eldem, eds. 2011. Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914. Istanbul: SALT. Bednarski, A. 2005. Holding Egypt: Tracing the Reception of the Description de l’Égypte in Nineteenth-Century Great Britain. London: Golden House Publications. De Bovet, M. 1835. L’histoire des derniers Pharaons et des premiers rois de Perse, selon Hérodote, tirée des livres prophétiques et du Livre d’Esther. 3 vols. Avignon, France: Seguin ainé. Buchwald, J. Z., and D. G. Josefowicz, 2010. The Zodiac of Paris: How an Improbable Controversy over an Ancient Egyptian Artifact Provoked a Modern Debate between Religion and Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clogg, R. 1983. “Sense of the Past in Pre-Independence Greece.” In Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe, edited by R. Sussex and J. C. Eade, 7–30. Columbus, OH: Slavica. Colla, E. 2007. Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cooperson, M. 2004. “Al-Maʾmu−n, the Pyramids and the Hieroglyphs.” In ʿAbbasid Studies II: Occasional Papers of the School of ʿAbbasid Studies, Leuven, 28 June—1 July 2004, edited by J. Nawas, 165–90. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters. El-Daly, O. 2005. Egyptology: The Missing Millennium; Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings. London: UCL Press. Díaz-Andreu, M. 2007. A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edelstein, D. 2004. “Restoring the Golden Age: Mythology in Revolutionary Ideologies and Culture.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania.

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Gange, D. 2013. Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Genell, A. M. 2013. “Empire by Law: Ottoman Sovereignty and the British Occupation of Egypt.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Gershoni, I, and J. Jankowski, 1986. Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930. New York: Oxford University Press. Haarmann, U. 1980. “Regional Sentiment in Medieval Islamic Egypt.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 43 (1): 55–66. Hamilakis, Y. 2007. The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Al-Jabarti, ʿA al-R (with an introduction by R. L. Tignor). 1993. Napoleon in Egypt: Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the First Seven Months of the French Occupation, 1798. Translated from the Arabic by S. Moreh. Princeton, NJ: M. Wiener. Jeffreys, D. G. 2010. The Survey of Memphis VII: The Hekekyan Papers and Other Sources for the Survey of Memphis. London: Egypt Exploration Society. Khalidi, T. 1994. Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lianeri, A. 2011. “Introduction: Unfounding Classical Times; The Idea and Ideal of Ancient History in Western Historical Thought.” In The Western Time of Ancient History: Historiographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts, edited by A. Lianeri, 3–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reid, D. M. 2002. Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Riggs, C. 2013. “Colonial Visions: Egyptian Antiquities and Contested Histories in the Cairo Museum.” Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 1: 65–84. Rowley-Conwy, P. 2007. From Genesis to Prehistory: The Archaeological Three-Age System and its Contested Reception in Denmark, Britain, and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. El Shakry, O. 2007. The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stewart, C. 2012. Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Al-Tahtawi, R. R. 1838. Bidayat al-Qudamaʾ wa Hidayat al-Hukuma. Cairo: Bulaq Press. ———. 1868. Anwar Tawfiq al-Jalil fi Akhbar Misr wa Tawthiq Bani Ismaʿil. Cairo: Bulaq Press. Trigger, B. 1984. “Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist.” Man, n.s., 19 (3): 355–70. Wynn, L. L. 2008. “Shape Shifting Lizard People, Israelite Slaves, and Other Theories of Pyramid Building: Notes on Labour, Nationalism, and Archaeology in Egypt.” Journal of Social Archaeology 8: 272–95. Zaidan, J. 1902–1906. Tarikh al-Tamaddun al-Islami. 5 vols. Cairo: Dar al-Hilal. ———. 1908. Tarikh al-ʿArab qabla al-Islam. Cairo: Dar al-Hilal.

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Part IV

Representing Knowledge

The chapters in part four of this book, “Representing Knowledge,” demonstrate how easily the transformations wrought by a discipline like Egyptology can be forgotten, in these instances outside of Egypt. For example, discussing the (nineteenth-century) days before an Egyptological discipline had coalesced in Britain, Gabriel Moshenska’s chapter about the surgeon Thomas “Mummy” Pettigrew—famous at the time for unrolling ancient Egyptian mummies—prompts questions about why, exactly, such a practitioner has not necessarily entered established disciplinary lineages. What practices formed an Egyptology that did not find room for this once-eminent personage, and why is this transformation now forgotten? Why, as Moshenska states, does the story of Pettigrew now form, at most, an element of Egyptological “comic relief”? The answers to such questions are only just starting to appear (see, e.g., Gange 2013), and more work is necessary to illustrate the events and practices that relate to them. Jasmine Day’s chapter provides a further (if slightly different) way to think about how such transformations have occurred. Day discusses mummy horror films, whose relevance to the history of Egyptology is linked to the relevance of the esoteric discussed by Vinson and Gunn: popular culture has always been linked to the discipline and its practitioners, even while this situation has often been denied by them. Day’s chapter thus suggests that Victorian inhibitions have continued into the revived mummy films of recent years, an unnoticed transformation of recent cultural meanings that also alludes to the continued valence of past cultural attitudes linked to Egyptology. Day’s chapter, influenced by Freud, is only one reading of the meaning of these films (see, e.g., Luckhurst 2012 for another discussion of mummies). But her work is thought-provoking in connection to questions about whether historical attitudes to Egypt remain forgotten and buried within Egyptological work. If these historical meanings are present, what transformations have taken place that mean that they have been forgotten, and what past attitudes are concealed? Debbie Challis’s chapter prompts similar questions. Challis notes the multiple meanings of the so-called Fayum portraits (excavated at the site of Hawara by Petrie in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries),

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therefore demonstrating how representations of such material have changed over the years and according to context. Yet, what historical meanings do these transformations conceal? Challis’s chapter provides answers. Meanwhile, Stephanie Moser’s discussion chapter, which emphasizes the impossibility of drawing any sort of binary between “academic” and “popular” representations of ancient Egypt, emphasizes these answers’ relevance. Scholars of ancient Egypt might suggest that they have moved—or can move—on from earlier interests and “biases.” Yet, the ever-present feedback loop between Egyptology and the world that Moser discusses suggests that earlier attitudes still continue to have resonance. Returning to issues discussed in this volume’s introduction, there is no question of understanding “ideology” as separate from disciplinary practice: the two constitute each other even as they claim their isolation. BIBLIOGRAPHY Gange, D. 2013. Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luckhurst, R. 2012. The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

14 Thomas “Mummy” Pettigrew and the Study of Egypt in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain Gabriel Moshenska

Thomas Joseph Pettigrew (1791–1865) has faded into the background of history. A man of many interests and activities, Pettigrew’s extraordinary life and legacy reside in the archives, footnotes, and marginalia to the histories of medicine, science, archaeology, and literature. Only in particular histories of Egyptology does he emerge from the shadows, but even then as little more than comic relief: the showman, the vulgarizer who unrolled Egyptian mummies in front of gawping early Victorian audiences. In the often Whiggish histories of scholarship, it has long been traditional to knife one’s antecedents in the back, even as one professes to stand upon the shoulders of giants. With his humble origins and lack of formal education, his eclectic interests and his propensity for feuds, it is perhaps unsurprising that Pettigrew remains a neglected ancestor. But as this chapter will hopefully demonstrate, Pettigrew made a number of important contributions to the study of Egypt and the popular fascination with the country in the early nineteenth century, and he was part of the scholarly community that included Gardner Wilkinson, Birch, Bunsen, Leemans, and others. My aim in this chapter is to provide an overview of Pettigrew’s work on Egypt and its impact on early nineteenth-century scholarship and culture. Thomas Pettigrew was born in October 1791 at 128 Fleet Street, his family home. His father, William, had served as a surgeon in the Royal Navy on a number of ships including HMS Victory1 and was by this time a surgeon and apothecary with responsibility for the workhouse inmates of the parish of St. Bride, Fleet Street. From the age of twelve, the boy who would become famous for unwrapping Egyptian mummies began to conduct anatomical investigations on the bodies of those who had died in the workhouse—much to the horror of the inmates (T. Pettigrew 1840, 3). Pettigrew was scathing about the education he received at the private school he attended for several years, noting that “from the labours of the whole, I literally derived nothing, or worse than nothing” (1840, 3). He studied anatomy with a family friend, the surgeon William Hilliard, and at the age of sixteen became an instructor and technician at the medical school run by surgeon John Taunton. Alongside his punishing workload, Pettigrew set about remedying his lack of formal education, paying for private

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tutoring in classical and modern languages, literature, and philosophy (Dawson 1931). Early on in his employment, Pettigrew suffered a physical and mental breakdown; fearing that he might be becoming mad, he studied medical texts on insanity and later gave a lecture on the subject at the first meeting of the City Philosophical Society. This society, which included the young Michael Faraday, gave rise to the Philosophical Society of London. The first evidence of Pettigrew’s interest in ancient Egypt can be found in a report that he wrote on a series of lectures given to the Society in 1812 by a Mr. Clarkson. As Pettigrew described it: the first object of Mr. C. is to establish the point, that the Pyramids in question were not sepulchres, but temples dedicated to the mysteries of Solar Fire; and we think he has succeeded. Indeed, he has brought together such a mass of evidence from every possible source, from Arabian manuscript, Coptic tradition, Hindoo analogy, Greek record, various etymology, and logical deduction; he has condensed such an intense corradiation of proof, as we feel assured will scarcely fail, on perusal, to produce a simultaneous conviction (T. Pettigrew 1812, 143). The substance of the paper is merely proof (if it were needed) that pyramidiocy based on the misinterpretation and cherry-picking of a bewildering variety of sources has changed very little in the last two centuries. In 1811, Pettigrew married Elizabeth Reed, with whom he went on to have twelve children, several of whom followed him into medical careers and antiquarian activities. The following year, he was elected Secretary of the Medical Society of London (MSL), at “the absurdly young age of twenty,” supported by his friend and the Society’s founder John Coakley Lettsom (Hunting 2003, 142). This election, and subsequent appointments as Registrar of the MSL and Secretary and Registrar of the Royal Humane Society (RHS), brought Pettigrew to the attention of many prominent figures in the medical world and beyond. Thus, by the time he resigned from his posts at the RHS in 1820, he had been appointed surgeon to the Duke and Duchess of Kent and surgeon and honorary librarian to his long-time mentor the Duke of Sussex, as well as surgeon to the Asylum for Female Orphans. He had become a freemason, vaccinated the infant Princess (later Queen) Victoria, and moved from the MSL’s house in Bolt Court into apartments in the more fashionable Spring Gardens (Dawson 1931; T. Pettigrew 1840). By the age of thirty, Pettigrew had established an elevated professional and scholarly reputation that endured, despite numerous bumps and hiccups, for the rest of his life. Pettigrew’s family life was punctuated by tragedies in the early deaths of several of his children, including his first son Thomas Lettsom Pettigrew, a lieutenant in the Madras Light Cavalry, who died in India at the age of twenty-four in 1837. Following his son’s death, Pettigrew withdrew into

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his work for several years and stopped holding his popular weekly conversaziones at his home (Dawson 1931, 82). Nevertheless, the Pettigrew family circle was by all accounts a warm and happy one, as his son Samuel reflected many years later: “my home life was a very happy one, blessed beyond measure in my parents and brothers and sisters; living in the very heart of London, in a bright and cheerful spot” (S. Pettigrew 1882, 3). Most of Pettigrew’s career was spent in reasonably prosperous private medical practice, and upon the death of his wife in 1854, he retired from medicine altogether and devoted the final decade of his life to archaeology, in particular to the British Archaeological Association, which he served as Vice-President for many years. Thomas Joseph Pettigrew died at his home in Brompton in November 1865 at the age of seventy-four, leaving behind a remarkable legacy of writing and scholarship in medicine, archaeology, antiquarianism, the history of science and medicine, and (as I hope to demonstrate) within the early British study of Egypt (fig. 14.1).

Figure 14.1 Thomas Pettigrew pictured leaning against an Egyptian sarcophagus.

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EARLY INTEREST IN MUMMIES Pettigrew’s most formative foray into the study of ancient Egypt came in 1820 through his acquaintance with Giovanni Battista “The Great” Belzoni (T. Pettigrew 1840). This former circus strong-man, inventor, and traveler was present in London to exhibit a collection of Egyptian antiquities at the Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly (Mayes 1959). Belzoni’s collection included several mummies, and he invited a number of medical men, Pettigrew among them, to witness their unwrapping. Reflecting on his long-term study of mummies, Pettigrew recalled that: my intention had been directed to this curious subject of inquiry from an intimacy with the celebrated traveler Belzoni. With him I had the opportunity of examining three Egyptian mummies, and although the state of their preservation was not of the best description their condition was sufficient to awake my curiosity (T. Pettigrew 1840, 31). Inspired by his encounter with Belzoni, Pettigrew purchased and unrolled his first mummy. This specimen from Saqqara arrived in England in 1741 in the possession of the physician Charles Perry and was later owned by the artist Richard Cosway (Dawson 1934, 170). Like most of the mummies in Britain, this one had been imported for its container—in this instance, a painted wooden sarcophagus, rather than for the body the sarcophagus held. Even Pettigrew with his anatomical interest describes it thus: “a few years ago I purchased at a sale by auction a fine specimen of a sycamore sarcophagus, which contained the remains of a mummy” (T. Pettigrew 1834, xvii). The remains themselves proved to be disappointing: “having removed the mummy from the case, I found it in a very decayed state. The flesh had been burnt up by the rapidity with which the process of embalming had been conducted, and the bones were rendered exceedingly brittle” (T. Pettigrew 1834, xviii). As Dawson observed, Pettigrew’s examination of this mummy took place privately at his leisure and in his home: his subsequent mummy autopsies were conducted as demonstrations in front of audiences ranging from colleagues and friends to theaters full of interested members of the public (Dawson 1934). Subsequently, his heavy professional workload prevented Pettigrew from paying as much attention to Egypt as he had hoped, and it was not until 1825 that he began to study the subject in earnest and to begin the accumulation of antiquities, literature, and notes that were to form the basis of his later work (Dawson 1931, 56).2 CONVERSAZIONES In 1824, Pettigrew moved to the house on London’s Savile Row that was to be his home for the next thirty years. In this new, more spacious house,

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Pettigrew began to hold conversaziones: social events aimed at promoting the discussion of scientific, antiquarian, and literary subjects among the guests. Conversaziones in the early Victorian period were a link between the more informal salons and the cabinets of curiosity of the eighteenth century and the grand museums and more carefully structured meetings and lectures that became increasingly common in the late nineteenth century (Alberti 2003). Pettigrew recalled that the Duke of Sussex: did me the honour to attend a series of conversazioni held at my house during several seasons, and thus associating with numerous literary and scientific characters, manifested the warmest interest in everything relating to intellectual improvement (T. Pettigrew 1840, 27). It was at these conversaziones that Pettigrew began to exhibit his collections of Egyptian antiquities, alongside his own and others’ collections of coins and other artifacts, innovative scientific apparatus, natural history specimens, and other assorted curiosities. From his correspondence, it is clear that these social occasions were extremely popular among his friends and acquaintances, and that the attendees included an impressive array of “Dukes, Earls, Barons, Judges, Members of the House of Commons and eminent scientific men [who] were to be seen gliding through his magnificent suite of apartments” (Dawson 1931, 82). UNROLLING MUMMIES Following the unrolling of Dr. Perry’s mummy in 1821, it would be more than a decade before Pettigrew began the series of mummy autopsies that would make him famous.3 During this time, Pettigrew maintained a scholarly interest in ancient Egypt, paying particular attention to developments in the reading of hieroglyphs, which in turn spurred him to apply his anatomical expertise to mummies: the discoveries of Dr. Young and the probability afforded by them of becoming acquainted more intimately with the learning and science of the ancient Egyptians through the medium of the hieroglyphics, served to stimulate me in the inquiry, and upon the sale in 1832, of the antiquities belonging to Mr. Salt,4 the English consul in Egypt, I availed myself of the opportunity of purchasing a specimen upon which I could proceed to examine into the subject (T. Pettigrew 1840, 31). On 6 April 1833, Pettigrew held the first of his mummy unrollings in front of an audience at the anatomy theater of Charing Cross Hospital, the institution where he was employed at the time.5 The audience at the unrolling consisted of Pettigrew’s friends and colleagues as well as some who he

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hoped to impress, among them a number of Lords, distinguished physicians and surgeons, antiquarians, and archaeologists. One of the press reports observed: “the room was attended by many men of literature and science, who warmly greeted the able lecturer when he had concluded his interesting work” (Literary Gazette, 13 April 1833). The Charing Cross unrolling set the pattern for most of Pettigrew’s subsequent autopsies: he began with a lecture on the history of mummification, based largely on the writings of Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, before moving on to the unrolling. There remains a widespread conception that to open a mummy is merely a process of unwrapping soft cloth bandages: in fact, as Pettigrew repeatedly demonstrated, the resinous carapace of a wrapped mummy often required saws, chisels, and crowbars to break through, and was a dirty and extremely physical process. Two mummies were opened on this occasion, the first belonging to his friend Saunders, which was found to be in a very poor state, and the second belonging to Pettigrew. The latter was well preserved, despite the loss of the outer layer of bandages, and found with hair and fingernails intact. The skin, part of which was coated in gold leaf, was still soft to the touch. Pettigrew, the surgeon and anatomist, conducted his unrollings in part as medico-legal autopsies, taking care to note irregularities and fine details such as, in this first case, the traces of natron salts on the hand that had been used in the desiccation of the corpse prior to embalming. Among the press reports on the event was one written by Pettigrew himself in The Gentleman’s Magazine, which gives a full account of the lecture and the unrolling and suggests that his main aim was to compare physical evidence of the Egyptian embalming process with the historical accounts given in the classical sources (The Gentleman’s Magazine, April 1833). Between 1833 and 1851, Pettigrew was to preside over dozens of mummy unwrappings as well as assisting at a number of others, gaining the nickname “Mummy” Pettigrew (e.g., T. Pettigrew 1838, 1849b).6 In 1834, he published his History of Egyptian Mummies, an ambitious and fascinating book that remains a milestone in the development of mummy studies. The volume included illustrations by Pettigrew’s long-standing friend George Cruikshank, best known for his work for Dickens,7 and drew on Pettigrew’s many years of study of ancient Egypt as well as the mummy autopsies that he had carried out in the preceding months. The book examines, inter alia, the history of the term “mummy” and of the use of mummy as a drug, drawing on Pettigrew’s knowledge of the history of medicine. It covers Egyptian religion, funerary rites, and ceremonial architecture, the physical processes as well as the cloths and chemicals used in embalming, and the amulets, texts, and coffins that accompanied mummified Egyptian bodies. The book also includes sections on the mummification of animals by the Egyptians and concludes with a short section on mummification in other countries and cultures, including Peru, the Canary Islands, Burma, and the desiccated bodies in the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo. Pettigrew’s biographer Dawson

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called the book “the first British scientific contribution to Egyptian archaeology” (1934, 170), and even today it remains an excellent and entertaining read.8 The attention to non-Egyptian mummies remained a consistent thread in Pettigrew’s work, not least as travelers and collectors sought him out to try and sell him items that they had collected. For some time, he was in possession of the smoked head of Yagan, an Aboriginal war leader and rebel, which was later buried in an unmarked grave in Liverpool and only returned to his descendants in the 1990s (Fforde 2002). In 1857, Pettigrew was offered a guano mummy: a body found preserved in the thick bird droppings on the island of Icaboe off the coast of Namibia. When the mummy unrolled at Charing Cross Hospital was displayed at Pettigrew’s home during one of his conversaziones, it was exhibited alongside two others: “one from Teneriffe [sic], believed to be of extreme antiquity, and a natural British one, we believe from St. Saviour’s church, and said to be of the age of Charles the First” (Literary Gazette, 13 April 1833). EGYPTOPHILIC COLLEAGUES Among Pettigrew’s claims to historical significance is the sheer number of prominent people who he knew, corresponded with, or counted among his friends, including Dickens, Disraeli, Coleridge, Turner, Landseer, and Faraday. His capacity for friendship was tempered by an astonishing capacity for provoking divisions, scandals, and vendettas, which he pursued to the extent of publishing self-righteous pamphlets and furious letters to The Times. Within the small world of the early nineteenth-century study of Egypt, Pettigrew is notable for his close connections to many of the most prominent figures in Britain and abroad, including James Burton, Robert Hay, Joseph Bonomi, Baron von Bunsen, Isaac Cullimore, John Davidson, Dunbar Isidore Heath, and Samuel Birch (Dawson 1931, 1934). One of Pettigrew’s longest-lasting friendships was with Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, author of Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, who returned to Britain in 1833 after twelve years in Egypt with a mastery of hieroglyphs and a wealth of knowledge of the country’s past (Thompson 1992). Pettigrew maintained a long-standing correspondence with Wilkinson during the latter’s travels, which shed light on the nature of their friendship. Wilkinson addressed Pettigrew with a variety of pet names, and his letters ramble across the study of Egypt, religion (he was heartily opposed to Catholicism), literature, and a considerable amount of petty gossip. There is also an astonishing amount of information in the letters about Wilkinson’s health, some of it eye-wateringly intimate, on which he regularly consulted Pettigrew’s advice due to his mistrust of foreign doctors (Moshenska 2011). Another of Pettigrew’s friends and frequent correspondents was Conrad Leemans, Director of the National Museum of Antiquities in the Netherlands

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and author of numerous catalogs of Egyptian antiquities and texts. Leemans visited Britain as a young scholar in 1836 and was made welcome by the community of scholars interested in ancient Egypt, which included Wilkinson, Hawkins, and Lee (Leemans 1973, 4). Leemans became a Pettigrew family favorite, staying with them on his subsequent visits to Britain and hosting assorted Pettigrews at his home in Leiden. His trips to Britain left Leemans a confirmed Anglophile (much to the amusement of his compatriots), and he wrote to Pettigrew of his hopes of a job in London. Like Pettigrew, Leemans maintained a correspondence with Samuel Birch of the British Museum, who, as a young man, had attended several of Pettigrew’s unrollings as a guest of his more senior colleague Charles Barnwell. Birch later solicited a letter of recommendation from Leemans for his application to become Assistant Keeper in the Department of Antiquities at the British Museum, with Pettigrew providing a second reference (Leemans 1973). In May 1836, Pettigrew unrolled a mummy at the Royal Institution in London, and in his written account of the evening, he noted that he had invited men “distinguished for their knowledge of hieroglyphical literature” who he named as “Mr. Wilkinson, Mr. Burton, Dr. Leemans, Lord Prudhoe, Rev. Mr. Tattam, Mr. Cullimore, &c.”(T. Pettigrew 1836, 17). These and other scholars were part of Pettigrew’s intellectual and social worlds, and their presence at his performance is testimony to their friendship as well as their interest and support for his work. THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA ÆGYPTIACA Despite the success of his mummy unrollings and the History of Egyptian Mummies, Pettigrew’s interests in Egypt ranged far beyond the funereal. His growing stature within the field of Egyptian studies and his friendship with many of the most prominent scholars and explorers encouraged Pettigrew to attempt a more ambitious program of publication: a comprehensive encyclopedia of Egyptian history and archaeology in light of new discoveries. He recalled that: in 1841 I had many conversations with Sir Gardner Wilkinson, Mr. Birch and others interested in Egyptian Antiquities and proposed the publication of an Encyclopædia Aegyptiaca as a work that would be of great help to the Egyptian Scholar and to all who felt any interest in such subjects (quoted in Dawson 1931, 93). The anticipated encyclopedia was to be issued in approximately twenty-four monthly installments, and due to the anticipated expense, a considerable number of subscribers was required to make the project viable. The first volume was therefore issued as a sample and a prospectus, with an introduction encouraging interested subscribers to write to the author at his home

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address. Pettigrew acknowledged his debt to his Egyptophilic friends in the preparation of the text, noting that the project: had been undertaken at the suggestion and by the persuasion of some of the most eminent of our Egyptian scholars and antiquaries, who have, with the utmost liberality, offered not only the use of their portfolios and their notes made during their travels and researches in the East, but also volunteered their assistance in the composition of several of the articles (T. Pettigrew 1842, 1) In the introduction to the encyclopedia, Pettigrew describes ancient Egyptian history and chronology, offering insights into the racial origins of the Egyptians as derived from mummy skulls as well as a number of perceived points of correspondence between Egyptian and biblical history. This brief historical account also extended up to the more recent past, when the French were driven out of Egypt “by the force of British arms and British valour” (1842, 18). One of Pettigrew’s stated aims was to provide an overview of the astonishing advances in the study of ancient Egypt since the decipherment of hieroglyphs just a few years earlier and to put to rest any lingering skepticism. The short extract of the proposed encyclopedia in the prospectus ran from AAH (“the phonetic hieroglyphics of the moon”) to ABOSHEK (“see ABOO SIMBEL”). Despite the 151 subscribers to the initial section, not enough further subscriptions were obtained, and the projected work never appeared. The fragment of encyclopedia was Pettigrew’s last substantial published contribution to studies of Egypt. ASSOCIATIONS Shortly after the publication of the first and only part of the Encyclopædia Ægyptiaca in 1842, Pettigrew was elected an Honorary Member of the short-lived Cairo-based Egyptian Literary Association, of which Wilkinson was also a member (Reid 2002, 49; Thompson 2002, 4). This fairly meaningless honor was Pettigrew’s first connection to a formal society of the study of Egypt. The following year, Pettigrew was a founding member of the British Archaeological Association (BAA), formed largely of disaffected Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London, who felt that the latter organization paid too little attention to British and other nonclassical antiquities.9 Shortly after the BAA’s first annual meeting was held at Canterbury in September 1844, Isaac Cullimore, a scholar of ancient Egypt, wrote to Pettigrew, forwarding him a letter from a friend: It has often occurred to me as desirable to have meeting of the Egyptian scholars in this country in different localities. They could not . . . constitute a section at the British Association meeting, but I thought

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Gabriel Moshenska they might at the British Archaeological Association, of which the first meeting is to be at Canterbury next week. I see in a paper I got this morning a notice of it, and its four intended sections . . . an Egyptian or Syro-Egyptian section would give a great stimulus to this branch of knowledge. I can see that Mr Pettigrew is to preside at the opening of a Mummy at Canterbury. Surely this will introduce the subject.10

The proposed Syro-Egyptian section of the BAA never emerged, and it is worth noting that Pettigrew’s mummy unrolling at Canterbury took the form of an entertainment for the attendees and local dignitaries, in a meeting otherwise largely devoted to British antiquities (Moshenska 2013b). However, a few months later, in December 1844, the Syro-Egyptian Society of London was founded by Cullimore, Lee, and others, which survived until 1872 before being absorbed into Samuel Birch’s Society of Biblical Archaeology. Pettigrew did not play an active role in this new association, possibly due to clashes within his already punishing schedule of evening engagements including the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Society, Entomological Society, Numismatic Society, Grand Lodge, and others. THE DUKE OF HAMILTON One of Pettigrew’s last contributions to the British experience of Egypt is also one of his most famous: the mummification of the Duke of Hamilton in 1852 and the Duke’s interment in an Egyptian sarcophagus in the purpose-built mausoleum at Hamilton House in Scotland. Alexander, the tenth Duke of Hamilton, was an avid Egyptophile who had been a subscriber to Pettigrew’s History of Egyptian Mummies as well as his Encyclopædia Ægyptiaca and was determined to be buried in the style of the ancient Egyptians. In 1837, the Duke acquired a large basalt sarcophagus, under the mistaken impression that the purchase was under commission from the British Museum (Dodson 2007). While under Pettigrew’s medical care, the Duke died at his London home on 18 August 1852 at the age of eighty-four: one source claimed that “the last drive he took had been to buy spices for his own embalming” (quoted in Dodson 2007, 47–48). One of the Duke’s staff, George Squibb, immediately summoned Pettigrew to conduct what was clearly a prearranged mummification: You will be as much shocked and surprised as I was when I tell you that the Duke of Hamilton died suddenly this morning at a few minutes past 9 o’clock. Yesterday morning he complained of nothing—his pulse was as good as when you left him . . . at 9 o’clock this morning got out of bed to make water, returned back & desired his valet to give him the Vol upon Egyptian Antiquities he was reading—laid his head back upon the pillow and appeared faint they become alarmed sent for me, I went

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immediately and in 2 minutes after The Duke Expired without a sigh or groan—you must come up directly if you please if you & myself are to Embalm him, & Mr Ranken has given me charge of the Body for that purpose let me hear if you please when you are arrived I am waiting in much haste.11 The precise details of the embalming process are unclear, but the embalmed body was transported from London to Hamilton where it was placed inside the sarcophagus with some difficulty. Pettigrew provided an Egyptian flavor to the proceedings (Dawson 1934). In 1921, following subsidence that threatened the mausoleum, the sarcophagus was removed from its plinth and buried in the nearby Bent Cemetery, where it remains interred (Dodson 2007). DISCUSSION Like many contemporary British scholars of Egypt, Thomas Pettigrew never visited the country, and his knowledge of it and its rich history and archaeology was derived from books and the notes and sketches made by his friends and colleagues who had lived and explored there. Taken individually, Pettigrew’s contributions to the study of Egypt were mostly of negligible lasting impact, with the notable exception of his book on mummies. Pettigrew was by no means the first medically trained antiquarian to autopsy mummies in search of archaeological information, and his publications of individual mummies are notably unscientific in comparison to those of Granville (1825) and others. It is interesting to observe the ways in which Pettigrew is remembered in histories of British Egyptology. While Wortham (1971) gives a fair account of Pettigrew’s significance, later studies have tended to focus on the showmanship Pettigrew displayed in publicizing his later, more public mummy unrollings (e.g., Brier 1996; Ikram and Dodson 1998). The sense that such public events detracted from the scholarly seriousness of Pettigrew’s endeavor were clearly expressed at the time, with hostile press reports common: “Pettigrew seems positively to do nothing else but unroll mummies; and, whenever the dirty process is to be gone through, he is pitched upon as naturally as when nightwork is to be done one sends for the scavenger” (Anonymous 1837, 58). In light of this point, it is perhaps unsurprising that, despite his close connections to many of the principal figures in the nineteenth-century study of ancient Egypt in Britain, Pettigrew has remained something of a marginal figure. The history of Egyptology is growing and maturing as a distinct field of study, drawing on developments in cognate disciplines such as the history of science and medicine, together with recent works such as Quirke’s (2010) study of Egyptian laborers on excavations. Prosopographies, studies

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of knowledge-geographies, fine-grained economic histories, and similarly novel approaches to Egyptology will hopefully continue to produce new perspectives on the origins of the discipline and the men and women in its margins and footnotes. The astonishing life and work of Thomas Pettigrew, which in this short paper I have barely scratched the surface of, is an example of the kinds of stories lurking in archives waiting to be told. NOTES 1. Pettigrew referred to his father’s service aboard Victory in the introduction to his scandalous biography of Nelson (T. Pettigrew 1849a). Pettigrew had obtained the private letters between Nelson and Emma Hamilton and published the first biography to reveal the true nature of their relationship, which had hitherto been regarded by many as purely platonic. 2. At this time, Pettigrew was also working as honorary librarian to the Duke of Sussex, cataloging and expanding his extraordinary collection of books, including thousands of rare religious texts. At the time of the Duke’s death, the library consisted of forty thousand volumes, and Pettigrew had published two large volumes of catalog, the Bibliotheca Sussexiana (T. Pettigrew 1827–1839). 3. For more detailed information on Pettigrew’s studies of mummies, see Moshenska (2013a) and Dawson (1934). 4. Pettigrew has misremembered the facts: the sale was in fact from the collection of John Barker and was held in March 1833. 5. Pettigrew was fired from Charing Cross Hospital in 1836 amid allegations of corruption. 6. For more details on Pettigrew’s mummy unrolling, see Dawson (1934) and Moshenska (2013a). 7. A marvelous footnote in a biography of Cruikshank sheds light on their relationship: “Doctor Pettigrew, the family doctor of Cruikshank’s family, was among the few who exercised a little authority over the turbulent and selfwilled George. When his fortunes grew, and he became assistant surgeon to the Duchess of Kent, then librarian to the Duke of Sussex, and afterwards Mummy Pettigrew and a personage of his time, Cruikshank was a constant guest at his table, as well as an artist at his service” (Jerrold 1898, 134). 8. Dawson’s biographical work on Pettigrew is based on a staggering amount of original archival research but is weakened by a near-total inability to critically evaluate his sources and his desire to paint his subject in the best possible light. 9. The early history of the BAA saw a quite spectacular schism and ensuing unpleasantness, a great deal of it directed at Pettigrew, and not all of it unjustified. The result was the foundation of a rival organization, the (later Royal) Archaeological Institute (RAI). Today, both the BAA and RAI endure as rather staid organizations. At the time of its foundation, however, the BAA was the most dynamic and forward-thinking body for antiquarians and archaeologists, modeling itself consciously on the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Wetherall 1994). 10. Isaac Cullimore to Thomas Pettigrew, 28 September 1844, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library OSB MSS 113/4/159. 11. George Squibb to Thomas Pettigrew, 18 August 1852, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library OSB MSS 113/19/1043.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Unpublished Sources Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University, New Haven, CT.

Published Sources Alberti, S. 2003. “Conversaziones and the Experience of Science in Victorian England.” Journal of Victorian Culture 8: 208–30. Anonymous. 1837. “Scientific Mummery.” Figaro in London 6 (280): 58. Brier, B. 1996. Egyptian Mummies: Unraveling the Secrets of an Ancient Art. London: Michael O’Mara. Dawson, W. R. 1931. Memoir of Thomas Joseph Pettigrew F.R.C.S., F.R.S., F.S.A. (1791–1865). New York: Medical Life Press. ———. 1934. “Pettigrew’s Demonstrations upon Mummies: A Chapter in the History of Egyptology.” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 20: 170–82. Dodson, A. M. 2007. “Legends of a Sarcophagus.” In Egyptian Stories: A British Egyptological Tribute to Alan B. Lloyd on the Occasion of his Retirement, edited by T. Schneider and K. Szpakowska, 47–53. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. Fforde, C. 2002. “Yagan.” In The Dead and Their Possessions: Repatriation in Principle, Policy and Practice, edited by C. Fforde, J. Hubert, and P. Turnbull, 229–41. London: Routledge. Granville, A. B. 1825. “An Essay on Egyptian Mummies: With Observations on the Art of Embalming among Ancient Egyptians.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 115: 269–316. Hunting, P. 2003. The Medical Society of London 1773–2003. London: Medical Society of London. Ikram, S., and A. Dodson. 1998. The Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the Dead for Eternity. London: Thames & Hudson. Jerrold, B. 1898. The Life of George Cruikshank in Two Epochs. London: Chatto & Windus. Leemans, W. F. 1973. L’Egyptologue Conrade Leemans et sa correspondance: Contribution à l’histoire d’une science. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Mayes, S. 1959. The Great Belzoni. London: Putnam. Moshenska, G. 2011. “Diagnosing Sir John Gardner Wilkinson: a Footnote to the History of Egyptology.” Antiquity 85 (online). Accessed 4 October 2013. www. antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/moshenska328/ ———. 2013a. “Unrolling Egyptian Mummies in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” The British Journal for the History of Science online pre-publication: 1–27, doi:10.1017/S0007087413000423 ———. 2013b. “The Archaeological Gaze.” In Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity, edited by A. González-Ruibal, 211–19. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Pettigrew, S. T. 1882. Episodes in the Life of an Indian Chaplain. London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington. Pettigrew, T. J. 1812. “London Philosophical Society.” The Philosophical Magazine 39: 142–50. ———. 1827–1839. Bibliotheca Sussexiana: A Descriptive Catalogue, Accompanied by Historical and Biographical Notices, of the Manuscripts and Printed Books Contained in the Library of His Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex, K.G., D.C.L., in Kensington Palace. 2 vols. London: Longman & Co. ———. 1834. A History of Egyptian Mummies, and an Account of the Worship and Embalming of the Sacred Animals by the Egyptians, with Remarks on the

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Funeral Ceremonies of Different Nations, and Observations on the Mummies of the Canary Islands, of the Ancient Peruvians, Burman Priests &c. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman. ———. 1836. “Account of the Unrolling of an Egyptian Mummy, with Incidental Notes of the Manners, Customs, and Religion, of the Ancient Egyptians.” Magazine of Popular Science and Journal of Useful Arts 2: 17–40. ———. 1838. “Account of the Examination of the Mummy of PET-MAUT-IOHMES, Brought from Egypt by the late John Gosset, Esq. and deposited in the Museum of the Island of Jersey.” Archaeologia 27: 262–73. ———. 1840. Medical Portrait Gallery: Biographical Memoirs of the Most Celebrated Physicians, Surgeons etc. etc. who have Contributed to the Advancement of Medical Science. Vol. 4. London: Whittaker and Co. ———. 1842. Encyclopædia Ægyptiaca; or, Dictionary of Egyptian Antiquities. General View of Ancient Egypt: Forming the Preliminary Discourse. AAH— ABO. London: Whittaker and Co. ———. 1849a. Memoirs of the Life of Vice-Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, K.B., Duke of Bronté, etc. etc. etc. 2 vols. London: T. & W. Boone. ———. 1849b. “Observations on the Practice of Embalming among the Ancient Egyptians, Illustrated by the Unrolling of a Mummy from Thebes, Presented to the Association by Joseph Arden, Esq., F.S.A., for the Worcester Congress.” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 4: 337–48. Quirke, S. 2010. Hidden Hands: Egyptian Workforces in Petrie Excavation Archives, 1880–1924. London: Duckworth. Reid, D. M. 2002. Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thompson, J. 1992. Sir Gardner Wilkinson and His Circle. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2002. “Introduction: Egyptian Encounters.” Cairo Papers in Social Science 23 (3): 1–10. Wetherall, D. M. 1994. “From Canterbury to Winchester: The Foundation of the Institute.”In Building on the Past: Papers Celebrating 150 Years of the Royal Archaeological Institute, edited by B. Vyner, 8–21. London: Royal Archaeological Institute. Wortham, J. D. 1971. The Genesis of British Egyptology, 1549–1906. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

15 Repeating Death The High Priest Character in Mummy Horror Films Jasmine Day1

If Frankenstein’s monster warns of the dangers of playing God, Dracula divulges repressed sexual urges and Mr. Hyde represents the dark side of the human personality (Towers 1996), what ontological dilemma does the mummy represent? Appropriated by the public and media from the world of Victorian and Edwardian Egyptology, the mummy—one of the paramount icons of horror in nineteenth-century literature and twentieth-century cinema and television—has long served as an Other-figure, whether to censure colonial plundering of Egypt’s heritage with its notorious curse or endorse lucrative exploitations of the country’s image. The meanings and sociocultural functions of mummies have changed over time (Day 2006), but while those associated with Victorian literature and late twentieth-century popular culture have been explored in some detail, more remains to be said about the mummies of mid-twentieth-century cinema.2 Their ontological status has not been fully explored, partly as a consequence of academic neglect and partly because another character type with whom they are allied, the High Priest, who directs them to kill their enemies, has been overlooked. The ancient Egyptians referred to the fate of blessed souls after death as repeating life. I want to show that the High Priest characters in 1940s mummy films act as doppelgangers of mummies, doomed to repeat their sin and punishment of death and that, conversely, mummies act as doppelgangers of High Priests. Although a creation of Hollywood screenwriters, this type of doppelganger relationship imported into twentieth-century cinema the sexual mores embedded in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mummy fiction upon which the films were based. This echo of old neuroses might account for the ephemeral appeal of the High Priest (who soon disappeared from mummy narratives) and also for mummy films’ ensuing slump in popularity until a recent revival and thematic revision of the genre. FROM PAGE TO SCREEN Over forty mummy films were produced in the early years of cinema (Lupton 2003, 36–37), many of which have now been lost. The first mummy film with sound, Universal Pictures’s The Mummy (Freund 1932), starring Boris

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Karloff as Im-Ho-Tep, became the most influential work of its kind (Lupton 2003, 37). It established a generic plot for later, derivative works: an Egyptian priest, forbidden to break his vow of chastity, yearns for a young princess and, after her premature demise, attempts to raise her from the dead. His sacrilege discovered, he is condemned to endure a living death during which he must forever guard the tomb of his beloved. Thousands of years later, an expedition including or connected with a young hero uncovers the woman’s tomb, and her spirit enters into a new body, that of the hero’s lover. The expedition’s sacrilege invokes the curse of the tomb’s guardian, the mummy, who kills the expedition members one by one and pursues the hero’s lover as the reincarnation of his princess. The hero finally defeats the mummy and reclaims his lover. The Mummy was hailed as a masterpiece, but when Universal Pictures faced budget restrictions during World War II, it mined the Karloff classic as a source of ideas for a series of cheap matinee thrillers. The Mummy’s Hand (Carbanne 1940) starring Tom Tyler was the first; its sequels were The Mummy’s Tomb (Young 1942), The Mummy’s Ghost (Le Borg 1944), and The Mummy’s Curse (Goodwins 1944), starring Lon Chaney, Jr. This saga followed the mummy Kharis as he pursued the plunderers of the tomb of Princess Ananka from Egypt to the United States. Britain’s Hammer Studios later revived Universal’s mummy franchise in a series of high quality productions including The Mummy (Fisher 1959), The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (Carreras 1964), The Mummy’s Shroud (Gilling 1966), and Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb (Holt 1971). The Universal and Hammer mummy series share themes, plots, and character types that shaped all subsequent popular references to mummies, so that they can be regarded as a de facto body of work, the “Classic” films (Day 2006, 64–65; Madison 1980, 67, 69, and 80). Classic formulae have been traced back to Victorian and Edwardian mummy fiction; in the absence of documentary evidence, it appears that the Karloff Mummy combines the romance plot of “The Ring of Thoth” (1890) (Halliwell 1986, 207 and 212–13) with the vengeful living mummy plot of “Lot No. 249” (1892) (Day 2006, 67; Carter Lupton, pers. comm.), both famous short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.3 The latter tale includes a unique character, Edward Bellingham, who revives a mummy with a potion distilled from an ancient plant and orders it to murder his enemies. The Karloff Mummy adopts Doyle’s ambulatory mummy, but the Kharis saga also incorporates “tana leaf” potion brewed by a High Priest who directs the mummy’s murderous spree. Overshadowed by the Karloff and Hammer productions, the Kharis saga has been neglected by most academic studies of Classic mummy films. The series is significant for its bifurcation of Karloff’s character type, a priest-turned-mummy, into a High Priest and a mummy whom he directs. The celibate High Priest, who shuns women in pursuit of a reincarnated Egyptian woman, may have been inspired by the protagonists in Le roman de la momie by Théophile Gautier (1858) and “Smith and the Pharaohs”

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(1912–1913), a story by Henry Rider Haggard. Furthermore, the High Priest Harmachis in Haggard’s novel Cleopatra (1889) “is buried alive by his priests for failing to remain pure to Isis” (Freeman 2009, 2, citing Pearson 2000, 230). Celibacy, more so than the burial of the living that Freeman emphasizes, is the salient concept in the Kharis films. BECKONING DEATH A doppelganger is a person’s double or lookalike; ghosts, twins, and alter egos have long featured in literature and folklore within and beyond the Western world (Rank 1971). The original German term doppelgänger refers to a second embodiment of the Self that brings bad luck if seen by others and which, if glimpsed by oneself, portends one’s own death (Rank 1941, 73–76). In the latter case, the doppelganger is, in effect, a manifestation of death itself. After reviving, Karloff’s mummy Im-Ho-Tep disguises himself as a living Egyptian, Ardeth Bey. Writing The Mummy’s Hand, Griffin Jay split Karloff’s persona into two distinct characters, Kharis the mummy and Andoheb the High Priest. His momentous decision might have had mundane origins.4 Perhaps Tom Tyler’s facial movement under heavy makeup was as constrained as that of Karloff, whose features had been coated in inflexible collodion-wrinkled cotton strips (Mank 1989, 24).5 The excision of Kharis’s tongue during his punishment for sacrilege (Carbanne 1940) excused Tyler’s silence. A High Priest instead would explain the mummy’s mission, scold his enemies, and express Kharis’s love for his paramour from time immemorial, the Princess Ananka. This contrivance, however crude in conception, generated a kinship between the two characters reminiscent of a doppelganger affiliation. Each character sustains the other’s life—the High Priest feeds the mummy vital tana fluid, and the mummy’s mission gives the priest his raison d’être—until, sent away by the priest who plans to betray him, the mummy fails to protect his master, who is shot by one of the heroes, Babe Jenson. The mummy thus loses his source of tana and is now exposed to attack by his enemies. A similar scenario unfolds in The Mummy’s Tomb. In The Mummy’s Ghost, the doppelganger’s role as harbinger of death is refined slightly: although the mummy ultimately escapes alive in order to permit a sequel to be filmed, it is he, not a hero, who kills his new High Priest Yousef Bey after Bey attempts to purloin Amina Mansori, Kharis’s reincarnated lover. In The Mummy’s Curse, Kharis kills not the High Priest Ilzor but his assistant, Ragheb, in order to avenge Ragheb’s murder of Ilzor. Ragheb, like his High Priest predecessors, has fallen in love with a forbidden woman (albeit one other than the mummy’s lover) and murders his master when Ilzor chides him for bringing her to their hideout. Kharis’s retribution against Ragheb brings about his own—and this time final—demise when he tears down a building that collapses upon them both.

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No single installment in the Kharis saga follows the death-personification doppelganger template strictly. The template’s ideal realization would be the murder of the High Priest by the mummy, with the mummy’s own death as a direct consequence, so that the High Priest’s death prefigures that of the mummy. The necessity that Kharis should survive the first three films and that heroes should intervene to dispatch villains, along with the insertion of an extra priest and heroine in the final installment, disrupt the formula. Full consistency between the films cannot be expected, as each was created by a different screenwriter. It is nevertheless apparent that the High Priest’s downfall (whether he dies or not) usually causes or contributes to the mummy’s downfall (whether he is destroyed or not). Therefore, the High Priest’s fate foreshadows that of the mummy. If the mummy kills his master, he effectively commits suicide. Aside from this foreshadowing of death, another parallel between the High Priest and mummy confirms their relationship as doppelgangers. The High Priest’s downfall, like that of the mummy before him, is usually the result of his attempted dalliance with a woman. When she is the mummy’s reincarnated lover of ages past (Ghost and Curse), both men want the same woman. Therefore they are, in a sense, elements of one man. Furthermore, the High Priest’s crime is not simply that of betraying the mummy but also of betraying his vow of celibacy. This abstinence is never openly proclaimed, but it is implicit. The mummy is an ancient High Priest who broke his own vow of celibacy in seeking a tryst with a forbidden princess or priestess (sometimes identified as a vestal virgin), which also involved the unnatural act of first raising her from the dead with black magic. Existing in a state of limbo, the mummy has been sentenced to spend eternity in servitude to his priestly successors, protecting the body of the woman he desired from other men’s hands. Just as the death of the High Priest foreshadows that of the mummy, the mummy’s living death—his interminable penalty for refusing chastity—prefigures the High Priest’s own sin and execution. As a personification of Death, the High Priest is the mummy’s doppelganger, but the roles reverse when the mummy, embodying sex and transgression, signifies his master’s impending doom. The two characters are each other’s mirror reflection, each a High Priest and a dead man walking. The distinction between the two dissolves when the High Priest commits his sin and becomes, in effect, another mummy. “[A]ny one who has violated . . . a prohibition assumes the nature of the forbidden object as if he had absorbed the whole dangerous charge” (Freud 1940, 42). In a rare theoretical engagement with the Kharis saga, Bruce Kawin interprets The Mummy’s Ghost in Freudian terms as a dream in which the conflicting parts of the Self are represented by contradictory characters. The mummy, trapped in an endless cycle of pursuing the heroine and eliminating his competitors for her possession, embodies neurosis, “the deathless persistence of compulsive fixation that may have begun in sexual desire but has become only an undead, rigid, destructive, rejecting anger” (Kawin 2004,

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15). At times in the Kharis saga and the Karloff Mummy, the heroine exists as a counterpoint to the mummy, escaping the cycle of neurosis (hypnotism by the mummy) through a cathartic reconciliation between her unconscious mind and her conscious, independent thoughts (Kawin 2004, 12–13). Kawin does not discuss the High Priest, but his description of the mummy caught in a self-destructive behavioral cycle alludes to the repetition of fate. This point concurs with my assertion that the High Priest follows and thereby draws attention to the mummy’s progress to ruin. Kawin also specifies that sexual frustration drives the mummy’s devastating course of action, just as I believe it motivates the High Priest. The ethos of science fiction cinema is that the protagonist should reclaim and unite the disparate parts of the Self, the conscious and unconscious minds represented by characters of science and faith; conversely, in horror films, the threatening part of the Self is “rejected and repressed” only to return, as in the form of a mummy that revives repeatedly from the dead (Kawin 2004, 8). In spurning the Other, the Self is only drawn dangerously toward it; the abject “is something rejected from which one does not part. . . . [I]t beckons to us and ends up engulfing us” (Kristeva 1982, 4). The High Priest’s struggle to defeat his sexual urges fails as the two halves of one consciousness, man and mummy, are inexorably drawn together and the priest must become a corpse. In Kawin’s terms, the High Priest does not contend with his neurosis but tries instead to satiate it, attempting to consummate his desire for a woman instead of reconciling himself with his Other, rejected Self: the manifestation of his anger, the mummy. The doomed man thus predicts his own demise: Two High Priests of Amon-Ra came to America to bring [Kharis] and Ananka home to Egypt. . . . Both . . . have met a violent death. . . . And now you, Ragheb, shall help me to succeed where they have failed. We shall fulfil our sacred duty, or die by violence. —Ilzor Zandaab, High Priest, The Mummy’s Curse (Goodwins 1944) Doppelgangers possess forms of knowledge denied to their percipients, notably divination, so the purpose of their apparition is often the delivery of a warning or benevolent advice (Evans 1984, 66).6 The High Priest and mummy manifest each other’s fate; that the High Priest should gaze upon his mummy-destiny and fail to take heed foreshadows his coalescence with the mummy—implying, in turn, that man and mummy began as parts of the same being. Mummies are one of the oldest modern Western symbolic instruments for contemplation of ontological issues; the mummy is the Other, but since the Self projects the Other, the mummy is ultimately part of the Self.7 In making the mummy the High Priest’s doppelganger, Griffin Jay was working within an established mummy paradigm, whether or not he was conscious of the fact.8 Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century didactic

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fiction was populated by wise characters from other lands, other planets, or the past who visited contemporary or future societies to criticize and improve them. European explorations in Egypt introduced mummies into these imaginative social critiques (Christopher Frayling, pers. comm.), the most outstanding example being the pharaoh Cheops, a former villain, who, seeing the error of his ways, sets out to reform English government in Jane Webb Loudon’s pioneering (1827) science fiction novel The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century. EXPELLING SEX Victorian vampire fiction disclosed a fascination with sex that was largely repudiated elsewhere (Towers 1996, episode 4). The erosion of Victorian prudery has boosted the popularity of vampires today. Mummies, in contrast, have connoted thwarted sexual fulfillment: in Victorian and Edwardian mummy romance tales, the male protagonist usually failed to capture the spirit of some beloved Egyptian woman (Allen 1878; Doyle 1890; Everett 1896; Gautier 1840 and 1858; Haggard 1912–1913). Mummies were the inverse of vampires and, hence, relatively less popular following the advent of Western sexual liberation. They spent the mid- to late twentieth century as horror monsters and the comical, grotty playmates of children (Day 2006, 64–128). Reviving its mummy franchise in 1999, Universal Pictures had to make mummies sexy; Imhotep, the Egyptian priest, and his lover Anaksunamun were not always depicted as horrific corpses but sometimes as supple living bodies, Imhotep muscular and handsome, Anaksunamun dressed only in golden body paint (Sommers 1999). Hollywood’s first mummy films perpetuated the literary theme of sexual frustration, but by reimagining the mummy as a male character and pairing him with a High Priest,9 they shifted the locus of sexual conflict to this partnership and magnified its tragedy: now two men failed to win the princess and destroyed each other in the process. What was the meaning of Hollywood’s doppelganger device, with its collapse of the Self into the Other? Did it express the old Western fear that Egypt, the archetypal Other-land, would swallow up outsiders who came to prey upon it? Did it instead condemn Egypt as a backward place beset by “a bad sort of eternality” (Said 1991, 208) whose past, incarnate as a mummy, thwarted its aspirations for modernity embodied by the High Priest? In Hammer’s Mummy (Fisher 1959), High Priest Mehemet Bey threatens the archaeologist John Banning with a curse, only to recant, “we like to think that our European dress, our liberal education have buried the past. But occasionally one is forced to realize that all this is only a veneer. Thousands of years of traditional belief cannot be dismissed in one generation.” The symbolism of the doppelganger in mummy films requires further investigation. It is possible that the screenwriters who created and elaborated

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this device did not intend to impart some profound idea through it, given that cinema’s adoption of Victorian sexual mores was probably inadvertent. Motifs connoting celibacy were embedded in the literature appropriated by Hollywood writers. Classic mummy films have often been studied in isolation from the earlier fiction that inspired them, which has created an impression that they possess some internal consistency. I have shown that the films’ fusion of motifs drawn from the divergent literary traditions of romance and horror creates thematic contradictions (Day 2006, 72 and 81–90), so the films’ incorporation of old sexual neuroses may further demonstrate the limits of their writers’ discernment in adapting historic texts for the screen. The residue of old neuroses in mummy films provides greater insight into Victorian sexuality than into twentieth-century issues of ontology or sexuality. A fascination with celibacy, encapsulated by the male protagonists of Haggard (1912–1913) and Gautier (1858), who yearn for an Egyptian queen or princess and spurn the company of living women, seems masochistic and may have expressed ambivalence about sex. It was not the cinematic successor of these characters—the leading man in a mummy movie—who inherited the antisocial tendencies of the mummy romance hero, but the High Priest. While Hollywood heroes usually “got the girl” at the end of the film, High Priests inherited only celibacy, siphoning this debility so essential to a mummy romance plot away from the hero. High Priests’ celibacy was initially imposed under religious vows but ultimately self-imposed through hopeless pursuit of a forbidden love. This perpetual barrenness was a kind of impotence, a curse akin to that of the mummy; like the tragic romantic protagonist before him, the High Priest suffered emasculation. This point suggests not only that he served to buttress the masculinity of the Hollywood hero by way of contrast but also that the celibacy of his Victorian literary predecessors denoted, perhaps, some crisis of masculinity. As the High Priest’s doppelganger, the mummy too suffered prolonged celibacy both in his former lifetime and in his undead state. Thus, the High Priest’s celibacy was analogous to the mummy’s liminal status as a being neither fully alive nor properly dead.10 Celibacy was presented as an agony in films just as it had been in literature, but the perpetual failure of High Priest and mummy to acquire a mate must have arisen from some literary imperative other than mere sexual tension. Victorian sexual taboos are one possibility; just as death has been regarded among some peoples as a power from beyond a benevolent world of nature, an intruder into the ordered universe (Frazer 1913, 53, 59; Hertz 1960, 77), many Victorians may have unconsciously regarded sex as unnatural or abhorrent. Another possibility is that the image of a damaged man, especially an impotent man, appealed to the Victorians because they tended to eroticize loss and failure, a perversion perhaps inherited from Christian antagonism toward sex (Susan Pearce, pers. comm.).11 The “passing of youthful beauty” encapsulated in the image of a young man in extremis evoked melancholy as well as a homoerotic “voyeuristic interest in [the] dying body” (Montserrat 1999, 24). Images of

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beautiful (and often naked) virgins dead or dying by violence also carried a powerful erotic charge in Victorian art (Trippi 2011, 64–69). If a chaste and doomed figure was sexually alluring to the Victorians, the High Priest epitomized this type even despite postdating the Victorian period. He seems to have been the culmination of a particular type of perversion, even though Hollywood screenwriters cobbled him together from snatches of old stories and were probably oblivious to his eroticism. Sexuality drenched their literary sources of inspiration and so crept into children’s matinee fare. CONCLUSION I have suggested that cinema’s High Priest was jettisoned from mummy lore by the late twentieth century because the degeneration of mummy narratives into children’s entertainment entailed a simplification of their plots and character ensembles (Day 2006, 112, 120). It is now evident that this disposal also resulted from the erosion of Victorian sexual neuroses from mummy narratives as social attitudes toward sex changed. If a theme of celibate impotence was fundamental to these narratives, then the loss of the High Priest, along with the mummy’s beloved princess in many horror and comedy scenarios, took the “mummyness” out of mummy productions. Indeed, the plots of millennial blockbusters The Mummy (Sommers 1999) and The Mummy Returns (Sommers 2001) are like those of the Indiana Jones saga—a treasure hunt instigating a romance between two living protagonists, with the superficial elements of a mummy tale forming a veneer. In both films, Imhotep, the mummy, is also a former High Priest; he acts independently, recombining the mummy and man elements of the Self into a character like Karloff’s mummy. In The Mummy, the museum curator Dr. Terrence Bey wears a fez like Karloff’s High Priest and many of the other equivalent characters in Universal and Hammer mummy films. Yet, he and Ardeth Bey,12 the leader of a band of Medjai tomb guardians, declare themselves “part of an ancient secret society” dedicated not to aiding and abetting Imhotep but to incarcerating and, if need be, destroying him. Dr. Allen Chamberlain, an Egyptologist featured in the same film who also resembles a Classic High Priest, is only a token fez-wearer who soon becomes one of Imhotep’s many victims (Sommers 1999). Mummy films, per se, are dead (unless someone, someday, resurrects them). Rooted in a vanishing inhibition, their demise was inevitable, but this loss reveals both the source of mummy romance narratives’ initial appeal and one of the principal, hitherto unremarked causes of their collapse.13 Classic mummy films were a transitional phase in mummy lore, both in their imperfect blending of romantic and curse narratives and in grappling with matters of self-identity raised by Victorian mummy literature with the introduction of a High Priest as the mummy’s doppelganger. More broadly, Classic mummy films are part of the twentieth-century response to

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the legacy of the nineteenth century; they address colonialism (Day 2006, 64–93; Johnson 1991; Schroeder 2003; Shohat 1997) and can now also be demonstrated to tackle ontological issues. Classic mummy films engaged with history at a critical moment when the West faced the horrors of war and the uncertainties of the postwar and postcolonial period.

NOTES 1. I am grateful to Susan Pearce and Christopher Frayling for productive discussions. 2. Notable theoretical studies of the mummy in literature (e.g., Briefel 2008; Daly 1994; Hawthorne 1993; Hopkins 2003; Lyu 2005; Pearson 2000; Rickels 1992; Strickrodt 1999) and cinema (e.g., Freeman 2009; Johnson 1991; Kawin 2004; Schroeder 2003) have tended to focus upon a single text or limited range of works, neglecting other works such as the Kharis film saga (save for Kawin 2004) and most late twentieth-century mummymania altogether. This approach cannot account for changes in the meanings of mummies over time or explore associations between works produced in different media. Thus, the relationships between nineteenth-century literary mummies and their twentieth-century cinematic progeny have not yet received sufficient consideration (although Freeman 2009 augurs a more comprehensive study). I have redressed the dearth of comparative research into mummymania—and the limited attention paid to its late twentieth-century phase—with an evolutionary study of its paradigms in various media and social settings throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Day 2006). 3. While Doyle’s famous tale was the most likely source of Hollywood’s ambulatory mummy motif—which departed from the ghostlike apparitions emanating from mummified bodies in the romance literature of Doyle’s contemporaries— it was not the first instance of an ambulatory mummy in fiction. The protagonist in “How I Became an Egyptian” was chased by an unspecified, demonic creature, the description of which (Waller 1856, 98) appears to have been plagiarized by Doyle (1892, 540). The earliest known ambulatory mummies in Western fiction (as opposed to plays and poems) were Jane Webb Loudon’s Cheops in The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827) and Edgar Allan Poe’s Allamistakeo in Some Words With a Mummy (1845), but these works were satirical; the first known ambulatory mummy of horror fiction was female, in The Mummy’s Soul (Anonymous 1862). All of these stories, save Poe’s and Doyle’s, had probably been forgotten by 1932, and if Poe’s tale was ruled out as a source by the Karloff film writers on the grounds of its satirical theme, this would leave “Lot No. 249” as their only principal ambulatory mummy source. 4. Some other iconic motifs in mummy films of the period, which influenced subsequent portrayals of living mummies in popular culture, had mundane origins. For instance, the arthritic shamble of Tom Tyler, the first actor to play Kharis, was imitated and thereby immortalized by his successor in the role, Lon Chaney, Jr. (Halliwell 1986, 218). The similarity of cast, plot, and characters in Universal Pictures’s The Mummy and its earlier production of Dracula was driven by the insolvent studio’s need to capitalize upon a successful formula during the Great Depression (Freeman 2009, 5). Kawin (2004, 15–18) regards the survival of Kharis at the denouement of The Mummy’s Ghost as a deliberate departure from a standard formula designed to emphasize

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

Jasmine Day and critique this very formula, but, in light of the circumstances of the film’s production, this reading may overly intellectualize a text dictated by practical concerns. Given the production of Ghost’s sequel The Mummy’s Curse in the same year, the two films were probably planned jointly so that Kharis had to survive Ghost. He had not survived previous episodes, his revival during the opening scenes of The Mummy’s Tomb and Ghost having evidently been contrived ad hoc each time producers decided to further exploit their mummy franchise. Subsequent Kharis films substituted a rubber mask for time-consuming makeup (Halliwell 1986, 221), which perpetuated the mummy’s inexpressiveness (Hogan 1988, 103). Here, I cite a study of paranormal phenomena, but its author takes a sociological rather than a credulous approach. Evans (1984) interprets alleged encounters with UFOs, ghosts, and other types of doppelganger entities as psychological experiences that assume forms determined by the iconographies of the percipients’ cultures or religions. Mummies were, for example, a common motif in early to mid-nineteenth-century poetry, which addressed themes such as the survival of the soul after death and the establishment of common understandings between people of different times and cultures. These ontological explorations necessarily reflected the values of poets, not their subjects, so the poetic mummy was an Other projected by the Self (the poet). For detailed discussion, see Day (2013). Little evidence for the literary sources of Hollywood’s early mummy films survives; we can only identify likely sources on the basis of similarities between plots and characters in particular works of fiction and corresponding elements in particular films. I cannot prove that Griffin Jay was familiar with Loudon’s novel or other works of Georgian didactic fiction—and most of these early works had probably been forgotten by the 1940s—but Jay’s employment of a mummy as a doppelganger suggests that this association had previously been established in popular consciousness, so that he may have been at least unconsciously aware of it. Hollywood turned mummies into males for practical reasons (see note 4). The limited special effects available during the 1930s and 1940s obliged mummies to be portrayed by costumed actors, so they were presented as corpses rather than the ethereal spirits of Victorian fiction. Since it was taboo to portray female bodies as polluting or horrific, mummies became male (Day 2006, 86–87). The Classic film mummies are variously described as neither alive nor dead (Holt 1971), comatose (Fisher 1959), reanimated corpses (Carreras 1964; Freund 1932; Gilling 1966), or people who never died (Carbanne 1940; Goodwins 1944; le Borg 1944; Young 1942). Christian anti-sexual sentiment is epitomized by Grail lore, which fascinated the Victorians (Susan Pearce, pers. comm.). This character’s name pays tribute to the alter ego of Karloff’s Im-Ho-Tep. An exception to the demise of mummy romance narratives is The Mummy or Ramses the Damned (Rice 1989), which was inspired by Victorian and Edwardian fiction but appeals to contemporary audiences with overt eroticism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, G. 1878. “My New Year’s Eve among the Mummies.” Written under the pseudonym J. Arbuthnot Wilson. Belgravia Christmas Annual (December 1878): 87–101.

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Anonymous. 1862. “The Mummy’s Soul.” The Knickerbocker; or New York Monthly Magazine 59 (5): 435–46. Briefel, A. 2008. “Hands of Beauty, Hands of Horror: Fear and Egyptian Art at the Fin de Siècle.” Victorian Studies 50 (2): 263–71. Carbanne, C., director. 1940. The Mummy’s Hand. Universal Pictures. Carreras, M., director. 1964. The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb. Hammer Films. Daly, N. 1994. “That Obscure Object of Desire: Victorian Commodity Culture and Fictions of the Mummy.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 28 (1): 24–51. Day, J. 2006. The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-speaking World. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2013. “The Maid and the Mummy.” In Egypt: Ancient Histories, Modern Archaeologies, edited by R. Dann and K. Exell, 193–231. New York: Cambria Press. Doyle, A. C. 1890. “The Ring of Thoth.” The Cornhill Magazine 61: 46–61. ———. 1892. “Lot No. 249.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 85 (508): 525–44. Evans, H. 1984. Visions, Apparitions, Alien Visitors: A Comparative Study of the Entity Enigma. Frome and London: Book Club Associates. Everett, H. D. 1896. Iras, a Mystery. New York: Harper. Fisher, T., director. 1959. The Mummy. Hammer Films. Frazer, J. G. 1913. The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead. Vol. 1. London: Macmillan. Freeman, R. 2009. “The Mummy in Context.” European Journal of American Studies 1. Online journal. Accessed 22 December 2013. http://ejas.revues.org/7566 Freud, S. 1940. Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican. Freund, K., director. 1932. The Mummy. Universal Pictures. Gautier, T. 1840. “Le pied de la momie.” Le Musée des Familles 7: 367–72. ———. 1858. Le Roman de la momie. Paris: L. Hachette. Gilling, J., director. 1966. The Mummy’s Shroud. Seven Arts and Hammer Films. Goodwins, L., director. 1944. The Mummy’s Curse. Universal Pictures. Haggard, H. R. 1889. Cleopatra: Being an Account of the Fall and Vengeance of Harmachis, the Royal Egyptian, as Set Forth by His Own Hand. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green & Co. ———. 1912–1913. “Smith and the Pharaohs.” The Strand Magazine 44–45: 264–66. Halliwell, L. 1986. The Dead That Walk: Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy and Other Favorite Movie Monsters. New York: Continuum. Hawthorne, M. C. 1993. “Dis-Covering the Female: Gautier’s Roman de la Momie.” The French Review 66 (5): 718–29. Hertz, R. (1907) 1960. Death and the Right Hand. Translated from the French by R. Needham and C. Needham. Aberdeen, UK: Cohen and West. Hogan, D. (1986) 1988. Dark Romance: Sex and Death in the Horror Film. Reprint with new title (originally Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film). Wellingborough, UK: Equation. Holt, S., director. 1971. Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb. Hammer Films. Hopkins, L. 2003. “Jane C. Loudon’s ‘The Mummy!’: Mary Shelley Meets George Orwell and They Go in a Balloon to Egypt.” Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text 10. Online journal. Accessed 22 December 2013. www.cardiff. ac.uk/encap/journals/corvey/articles/cc10_n01.html Johnson, C. 1991. “The Limbs of Osiris: Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo and Hollywood’s The Mummy.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the MultiEthnic Literature of the United States 17 (4): 105–15. Kawin, B. (1984) 2004. “The Mummy’s Pool.” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by B. Grant and C. Sharrett, 3–19. Revised edition. Lanham, MD, Toronto, and Oxford: The Scarecrow Press.

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Kristeva, J. (1980) 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated from the French by L. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Le Borg, R., director. 1944. The Mummy’s Ghost. Universal Pictures. Lupton, C. 2003. “ ‘Mummymania’ for the Masses—is Egyptology Cursed by the Mummy’s Curse?” In Consuming Ancient Egypt, edited by S. MacDonald and M. Rice, 23–46. London: UCL Press. Lyu, C. 2005. “Unswathing the Mummy: Body, Knowledge, and Writing in Gautier’s Le Roman de la Momie.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 33 (3 and 4): 308–19. Madison, A. 1980. Mummies in Fact and Fiction. New York: Franklin Watts Library. Mank, G. 1989. “Production Background.” In The Mummy: The Original Shooting Script, edited by P. Riley, 21–34. Absecon, NJ: MagicImage Filmbooks. Montserrat, D. 1999. “ ‘To Make Death Beautiful’: The Other Life of the Fayum Portraits.” Apollo: The International Magazine of the Arts 150 (449): 18–25. Pearson, R. 2000. “Archaeology and Gothic Desire: Vitality beyond the Grave in H. Rider Haggard’s Ancient Egypt.” In Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, edited by R. Robins and J. Wolfreys, 218–44. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Poe, E. A. 1845. “Some Words with a Mummy.” The American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science 1: 363–70. Rank, O. 1941. Beyond Psychology. Camden, NJ: Haddon Craftsmen. ———. (1925) 1971. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study. Translated from the German by H. Tucker Jr. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Rice, A. 1989. The Mummy or Ramses the Damned. New York and London: Ballantine Books and Chatto and Windus. Rickels, L. 1992. “Mummy’s Curse.” The American Journal of Semiotics 9 (4): 47–58. Said, E. (1978) 1991. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Reprint. London: Penguin. Schroeder, C. 2003. “Ancient Egypt on the Silver Screen: Modern Anxieties about Race, Ethnicity, and Religion.” Journal of Religion and Film 7 (2). Online journal. Accessed 22 December 2013. www.unomaha.edu/jrf/Vol7No2/ancienteqypt.htm Shohat, E. 1997. “Gender and Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema.” In Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, edited by M. Bernstein and G. Studlar, 19–66. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Sommers, S., director. 1999. The Mummy. Universal Pictures. ———., director. 2001. The Mummy Returns. Universal Pictures. Strickrodt, S. 1999. “On Mummies, Balloons and Moving Houses: Jane (Webb) Loudon’s The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827).” In Lost Worlds and Mad Elephants: Literature, Science and Technology 1700–1990, edited by E. Schenkel and S. Welz, 51–59. Glienicke and Berlin: Galda and Wilch. Towers, D., director. 1996. Nightmare: The Birth of Horror. 4 episode TV series. British Broadcasting Corporation. Trippi, P. 2011. J. W. Waterhouse. London and New York: Phaidon. Waller, J. 1856. “How I Became an Egyptian.” The Living Age 48 (607): 97–106. Webb Loudon, J. 1827. The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century. London: Henry Colburn. Young, H., director. 1942. The Mummy’s Tomb. Universal Pictures.

16 What’s in a Face? Mummy Portrait Panels and Identity in Museum Display Debbie Challis

The small gallery called Arts of Greco-Roman Egypt at the Getty Villa in Malibu is dedicated to Classical period Egypt. The display is positioned in a reimagining of the Villa Dei Papiri at Herculaneum and feels embedded within Roman Egyptomania itself. The gallery emphasizes the intermingling of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art, in addition to religion and culture. The mummy portrait panels displayed there are used to illustrate Greek painting and the encaustic technique, while the mummy of a man named Herakleides is used to illustrate how these mummy portraits were originally used as funerary masks. Arts of Greco-Roman Egypt places Roman mummy portraits firmly within a Greco-Roman artistic context while illustrating the Egyptian funerary practice of mummification. Yet historically, the position of Egyptian antiquities in museums has “occupied uncertain terrain” (Whitehead 2009, 92). The ordering and placing of objects in museums reflects how they are seen by the institution and then perceived by the public: Christopher Whitehead has illustrated how the museum can be viewed as a map around academic disciplines and connecting subject areas, but a map that is not neutral. The travel through space and time that a museum can offer represents a form of “spatialised knowledge” in which cultures are surveyed, laid claim to, and “authority over cultural terrain is sought” (Whitehead 2009, 137). Arts of Greco-Roman Egypt at the Getty Villa represents several ways of viewing the mummy portrait panels famously found at Hawara in Egypt by Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The display emphasizes the aesthetic importance of the panels while also illustrating their practical role. At the same time, the position of these portraits from Egypt within a replica Roman villa places them almost physically within the Mediterranean world of Classical Greece and Rome rather than in the long artistic funerary traditions of ancient Egypt. This chapter therefore draws attention to some of the discourses that have surrounded and, in some cases, attempted to construct the political and cultural identity of these panels. Its examples come from a range of museum maps and exhibitions to give a sense of how one set of objects can be perceived differently in a different location and exhibitionary context.

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DISCOVERY AND EARLY DISPLAY In the late nineteenth century, excavations in the Fayum area of Egypt led to the discovery of numerous mummy portrait panels. Most notable among the excavators was William Matthew Flinders Petrie, whose excavations at Hawara in 1888 and from 1910 until 1911 were the “best-documented discovery of mummy portraits anywhere in Egypt” at that time (Roberts 2007, 13). The discovery of these portrait panels meant that people could see the application of a Greco-Roman art form in Egyptian burial customs. Petrie exhibited the portraits and other finds from his Hawara excavation at the Egyptian Hall in London (Drower 1995, 141), indicating that he anticipated a huge public response. He framed and mounted each picture ready for the opening on 18 June 1888, and, in order to ensure the exhibition’s impact, he sent personal invitations to influential cultural figures (Drower 1995, 142). Petrie was rewarded with the interest of painters such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema, William Holman Hunt, and Edward Poynter, as well as the Director of the National Gallery, Sir Frederic Burton. Echoing artistic interest, there was a rapturous reception of Petrie’s exhibition in the press. The Times reported that: in the drawing room of the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, there will be on view one of the most curious collections of Egyptian antiquities that has ever been brought together. Many of the objects, it is true, are of the kind in which every museum abounds, but the portraits, over thirty in number, are almost absolutely new to Egyptologists (The Times, 2 July 1888). The paper further commented that these Hellenic and Roman portraits from Egypt “have the appearance of being no older than Tuscan portraits of the time of Giotto.” This reference to early Renaissance painting, and the painting of Giotto and Florentine art in particular, was a recurring one in the reception of the portrait panels in 1888. The Times stressed the Hellenic and Roman origins of the paintings as well as the naturalism of the portraits. In this, the art journal Academy concurred, commenting that the “lifelike character of the portraits and their variety of type and expression . . . attest to the fact these are portraits in the truest sense of the word” (Academy, 7 July 1888). In 1889, John Forbes-Robertson discussed the portraits in The Magazine of Art in which he stressed their artistic value as giving us an “echo of the masterpieces of Greek genius.” Commenting that the portraits were “Egyptian in form, though Greek in face,” Forbes-Robertson argued that the portraits should find a “resting place in the British Museum and the National Gallery” as they illustrated the tradition of Greco-Roman craftsmanship before the “blow” to art of Byzantium (Forbes-Robertson 1889, 178–79). In this way, the mummy portrait panels were defined as artworks representing a “lost” link between Classical Greek and early Renaissance art.

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Jesse Haworth, one of Petrie’s sponsors for the Hawara excavations, presented seven mummy portraits to the National Gallery, and, perhaps more surprisingly, the National Gallery purchased another four for £95. In a letter to the Director of the National Gallery, Sir Frederic Burton, Petrie apologizes “not to have persuaded my friends to give more to the National Gallery in preference to other places; but I have made a special point of securing the old man’s head for you.”1 Burton considered “the old man’s head” (probably British Museum object number EA74708) as similar to the work of the Italian portrait painter Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520/4– 1579), and Petrie’s patron Amelia Edwards recorded that Burton thought that portrait to be “worth all the rest put together” (Edwards 1891, 106). The Times reported that the acquisition of these mummy portrait panels added to a sense of “unbroken sequence in the history of the arts” and that a “national museum . . . should aim at being in the fullest sense of the word representative” (The Times, 28 August 1888). Frederic Burton’s acquisition of these mummy portraits was criticized by some of the Gallery’s trustees, but Burton argued that they belonged in the gallery alongside early Italian art: I consider these things as appropriate and desirable for a Gallery that pretends to be historical as any early Italian fresco or other work. They belong to European Art and show the method which had already become traditional in it from the time of the Hellenic painters (quoted in Conlin 2006, 324). In 1912, after Petrie had excavated more portrait panels in Hawara, another four entered the collections of the National Gallery, which were followed by a further bequest of a portrait panel from Algernon Bent in 1916 and one from Major R. G. Gayer-Anderson in 1943. Additionally, two more entered the Gallery in the Mond bequest in 1924, which representatives of the Gallery had chosen from the collection of the chemist and philanthropist Ludwig Mond. Some of these mummy portraits were exhibited in the central hall next to the work Virgin and Child Enthroned by Margarito d’Arezzo (painted sometime in the 1260s) and late fourteenth-century fresco fragments by Spinello Aretino. The identity of the portraits as Greek was crucial to their importance in the “great chain” of Western European art. Thus, the mummy portrait panels were displayed as the link between Classical and Renaissance art in the Western tradition. DEFINING THE FACE The title of the 2008 catalog of mummy portrait panels in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London is Living Images (Picton et al. 2007), which plays on the idea that the mummy panels are so

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lifelike that they appear to represent real people. In the 1990s, John Prag and Richard Neave of the University of Manchester used skulls found with two of the panels to reconstruct the faces of the owners: faces that appear to represent the likeness, with varying quality, of the person they were buried with (Prag 2002; although see Filer 1997 for criticism). Indeed, Petrie created life stories or personal characteristics for the portraits after excavating them. For example, he described “R” (now unidentified) by commenting that “he looks as if he would have made a very conscientious hardworking curate, with a tendency to pulpit hysterics” (Petrie 2007, 90). Meanwhile, Dominic Montserrat has explored the nineteenth-century fascination with the portraits both in terms of the “funerary images as evocations of living bodies” and “the ability of the portraits to reanimate and evoke the people of the past in a quasi-psychic way” (Montserrat 1998, 174). He also noted that racial attribution of the people represented in the portraits began early. Part of the reason Petrie collected some of the skulls discovered at Hawara and labeled them by the letters given to the portraits was to ascertain whether they matched the face depicted on the panel and to locate the racial identity of that face. In 1893, the German Egyptologist Georg Ebers produced “the first popular book on the mummy portraits,” claiming that they were from the Ptolemaic period in Egypt and therefore unequivocally Greek. Ebers used the collection of the Viennese art dealer Theodor Graf as the basis for his book in which he assigned “carefully graded racial types to individuals in the Fayum portraits on pseudo-physiognomic principles” (Monserrat 1998, 176). Ebers thought some portraits belonged to Semitic or Ethiopian “types” but claimed that most of the portraits were of Hellenic people: But the sun of the South quickly tans the fair European skin, and Hellenic Greeks whose families remained in Egypt for several generations would not be likely to preserve their original fair hue. Certainly most of the pictures show us truly Greek features, and this is the case in many of rather dark complexion (Ebers 1893, 38). Ebers was not alone in reading the portraits as examples of racial types. In Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers, Amelia Edwards assigned racial identities to the mummy portrait panels. In the volume, Edwards asserts that where there are no names on the coffin cases, many are “surely identified by their racial characteristics” (Edwards 1891, 100). For example, she describes one mummy portrait as follows: This lady is clearly a Greek. The nose and forehead are in one unbroken line, the eyes are well spaced and well opened, and the mouth is prettily drawn (Edwards 1891, 103).

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Another panel is described as Egyptian: Her features are moulded in the unmistakeable Egyptian type. The eyes are long and heavy lidded, the nostrils wide, the lips full and prominent. The complexion is swarthy with a dull reddish blush under the skin and the whole expression of the face is that of Oriental languor (Edwards 1891, 104). Edwards also attributed some portraits as being “distinctly Jewish in type,” such as “Diogenes the Flute Player” (Edwards 1891, 101; fig. 16.1). This kind of racial attribution led to more extreme anti-Semitic use by Hans F. K. Günther in the 1920s and 1930s. Günther used portraits from

Figure 16.1 “Diogenes the Flute Player,” as featured in Amelia Edwards’s (1891) Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers.

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Greek and Roman art in The Racial Elements of European History (1927) and seven Fayum portraits in his Rassenkunde des Jüdische Volkes (1930), supposedly illustrating his argument that there were too many Jews in Europe (Günther 1930, 72 and 76; cf. Fenton 1997). This racial attribution of the mummy portrait panels is an important part of their reception but should make contemporary viewers of these faces wary of attributing personalities and identities to them (Challis 2013). Indeed, the attribution of personal characteristics and racial identities to physical features must be placed within the context of the widespread use of physiognomy in the late nineteenth century. The emphasis in the reception of these panels until the 1930s was very much on them as portraiture within the European art tradition. This emphasis was consistent with the interest in portraits of “great” individuals, which led in part to the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1856 and the opening of its bespoke building on St. Martin’s Place in 1896 as well as the thriving business of portrait making during the latter half of the nineteenth century (Cannadine 2007, 34–35). Little, if any, emphasis was placed on the use of the mummy portrait panels as funerary equipment within ancient Egyptian burial rites. THE MODERN DISPLAY OF ANCIENT FACES By 1936, the mummy portraits were no longer considered important for the story of European art put forward in the National Gallery; they were removed from display and loaned to the British Museum. Greater emphasis was placed upon the portraits’ geographical and historical context in Late Antique Egypt, and some were subsequently displayed in the British Museum’s display of Coptic material in its “Coptic corridor.” This shift in thinking was formalized sixty years later when, in 1994, the National Gallery defined itself as housing the “nation’s European paintings from 1300 to 1900” and used the Museums and Galleries Act of 1992 to officially transfer the seventeen mummy portraits in its possession to the British Museum (National Gallery 1994). In 1997, the Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Ancient Egypt exhibition at the British Museum placed the portraits, once again, in the public gaze. Ancient Faces displayed the portrait panels alongside funerary equipment from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, such as gilded mummy masks and grave goods. The mummy portrait panels were dated and defined as belonging to Roman-ruled Egypt but placed within the context of the Egyptian practice of mummification and the legacy of Hellenism. Despite this emphasis on historical and archaeological context, the leaflet guide to the exhibition highlighted some of the “most interesting portraits,” and visitors were urged “to muse on the lives and personalities of their subjects, who seem to have turned to us as if we had just called them by name” (Ancient Faces 1997). Much as one hundred years earlier, the faces were described emotively, the leaflet described one as “wistful” and another as “perhaps not handsome

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but certainly holds your attention.” The exhibition illustrated how conservation of the portrait panels had led to new discoveries about artistic technique and materials and finished with the display of shrouds dating from a later period and a consideration of the potential connection of the panels to Byzantine painting. A version of this exhibition later went on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which exhibited portrait panels from collections in North America, such as those of the Getty Villa in Malibu. A common theme in reviews of Ancient Faces was identification with the mummy portrait panels. For example, Adrian Searle’s review in The Guardian stated: we recognise the tanned, overweight yuppies of the time and their wives, a man with a tic, his mouth dragged down on one side, proud soldiers and free slaves. How modern they look, just like you and me, except for their I Claudius hairdos and jewellery, their nicely trimmed beards, their Roman poses (The Guardian, 7 June 1997). Despite the exhibition’s focus on historical context, Ancient Faces was also reviewed in ways reminiscent of late nineteenth-century art-historical understanding. Brian Sewell’s review embodies this approach, and, in typical agent provocateur mode, his comments generated controversy. Sewell’s Hellenocentric tone, such as “this portraiture does not illustrate a native Egyptian skill or sensibility, but is Greek in origin” and his emphasis on the portrait panels’ importance in European art history sounds much like John Forbes-Robertson in 1889. Sewell attacked the transfer of the mummy portraits from the National Gallery to the British Museum because they were a: footnote in Egyptology, make far better sense in the National Gallery, and it is intriguing to find that not only do two of them belong in Trafalgar Square [the National Gallery’s location] but that a further seventeen once did. A room displaying nineteen such portraits, most of the highest quality, could and should have been one of the glories of the National Gallery, and a permanent reminder of how much ancient art has been destroyed, breaking the link between antiquity and the Renaissance (Evening Standard, 5 June 1997). The National Gallery and the British Museum responded by stating that the British Museum was the best place to display the portraits in terms of historical and geographical context, in addition to the Museum’s environmental conditions and conservation department being optimal in terms of the portraits’ care. Sewell is known for his maverick views, but this mild controversy reflects an interesting response in viewing the mummy portraits. Positioning the mummy portraits as either art works or archaeological objects limits the recognition of multiple visualities at play. Today, some of the mummy portrait panels are displayed in the Egyptian Death and Afterlife: Mummies gallery in the British Museum. There they

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help to illustrate examples of funerary practice in Roman Egypt within a broadly chronological sequence of other mummies. Thus, the portraits are effectively marked as part of Egyptian archaeology and history. This emphasis is reflected in most regional displays in Britain where relevant material is held, such as at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. The display at Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow combines collections from the British Museum and Glasgow Museums, and the mummy portrait panels, including some of those excavated by Petrie, are similarly exhibited within the context of funerary practice in ancient Egypt. Egyptian material is usually seen in a museum but “mounted on individual pedestals [ . . . ] the same objects become fine art” rather than archaeological evidence (Newhouse 2005, 109). In these cases, the mummy portrait panels are effectively marked as Egyptian archaeology, and the focus is purely historical. Yet, the portrait panels have a considerable influence on how Classical painting is understood, and the idea that “artistic interest waned” after the nineteenth century has been questioned (Bierbrier 1997, 24). In a review of Ancient Faces, Jed Perl pointed out the influence of the portrait panels on modernist artists, such as Matisse and André Derain, commenting that this influence may have been overlooked because these “products of Roman Egypt could be fitted into neither a primitivist nor a classicist reading of the origins of modern art” (Perl 1997, 40). In the early 1950s, the French cultural critic André Malraux drew attention to the connections between these portrait panels and Derain, as well as pointing to their foreshadowing of Byzantine art in style and technique (Malraux 1954, 196). Of course, the danger with any display of the mummy portrait panels is on limiting the responses to and context around them. The question of their artistic influence—ancient and modern—is, then, a particularly interesting one in terms of their reception in Greece. HELLENIC IDENTITY A year after the Ancient Faces exhibition took place at the British Museum, the Vikelaia Municipal Library in Heraklion, Crete, led the organization of the exhibition From the Portraits of Fayum to the Beginnings of the Art of Byzantine Icons, which “allowed the visitor to observe the relationship between Byzantine art and the painterly tradition of antiquity” (Benaki Museum website a). Euphrosyne C. Doxiadis was academic advisor to this exhibition and author of Mysterious Fayum Portraits in which she explored the stylistic and technical similarities between the mummy portraits and early Byzantine art (Doxiadis 1995). The exhibition was displayed at St. Mark’s Basilica at Heraklion in Crete, the Museum of Byzantine Culture at Thessaloniki, and the Benaki Museum of Greek Civilization in Athens during 1998. A number of Fayum portraits that had been in Ancient Faces were displayed in this Greek exhibition, including mummy portrait panels

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and icons from the British Museum, six from the Petrie Museum, and two from the collections of the Benaki Museum. Accompanying the exhibition at the Benaki Museum was another display entitled Portraits of Fayum and the Generation of the ’30s in its Search for Greekness, which considered how Greek painters reinterpreted the mummy portraits. The involvement of the Benaki Museum in an exhibition celebrating the continuity of Greek art exemplifies the idea that “life speaks through art” (Plantzos 2008, 13). Each room in the Benaki Museum takes the visitor on another step in the historical and cultural development of Hellenism. Two mummy portrait panels from the Egyptian site of Antinoopolis are displayed as part of the Byzantine Collection linking “the ancient Greek world to that of modern Greece” (Benaki Museum website b). In this way, they are perceived as proving a “bridge between the Greco-Roman and Byzantine pictorial traditions,” and early Byzantine icons are described as displaying “a close affinity with traditional Roman portrait painting, mainly as expressed in the Egyptian funerary portraits.” The mummy portrait panels become a stage in the continuous development of Greek art “from Late Antiquity to medieval Byzantium” (Drandaki 2005, 95), with little acknowledgement of their Egyptian or Roman context. Doxiadis’s Mysterious Fayum Portraits emphasized the Greek style of the mummy portrait panels and expanded knowledge on the style, its four color palette, and the links between the encaustic techniques (and others) used on the panels to later Byzantine work as well as the connections of the panels with the work of the modern artist Yannis Tsarouchis; some of these technical continuities had also been suggested by Malraux in the early 1950s (Malraux 1954, 196). In an article for Minerva, Doxiadis argued that the discovery of further portrait panels at Alexandria strengthened the link of such portraits to the Hellenic Alexandrian school as they are “purely Greek works” stylistically, though at the same time having a duality of identity since the panels depict both Greeks and Egyptians (Doxiadis 1996, 18 and 21). This interpretation bolsters her statement in Mysterious Fayum Portraits about the dominance of Greek culture and lifestyle in the portraits, whatever the ethnic identity of the actual person depicted (Doxiadis 1995, 35). Additionally, Doxiadis makes a number of assertions about the identity of the people in the Fayum portraits. For example: it as though we had caught the eye of this very memorable, very Greek looking individual, with his strong direct glance, in an Athens street today. The extraordinary freshness with which the image is rendered . . . transports us instantly across two thousand years (Doxiadis 1995, 185). Again, like Sewell’s review of Ancient Faces, the 1880s reception of the portraits seems to repeat itself. In his review of Doxiadis’s book, John Ray argued that the distinction between Greek and Egyptian had largely broken

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down by the time of the Fayum portraits and was “in practice one of education and money” and that “they are just Egyptians” (Ray 1996, 36). Ray’s concerns are valid. Doxiadis’s claims to trace ethnic identity in a face echo those of Amelia Edwards one hundred years previously. However, the search for these supposed identities and the emphasis on Greek continuity of tradition needs to be placed within the use of antiquity and ancient material culture within the changing constructions of modern Hellenic identity over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The nationalist Megali Idea (Great Idea), the dominant ideological concept of a “Greater Greece” that would stretch over areas occupied by Hellenic people, was dropped after the disastrous invasion of Asia Minor by Greek troops during 1921 and 1922. In the 1930s, a new Hellenic identity was articulated among Greek intellectuals, which revolved around the idea of hellenikotea (Greekness) or Hellenicity. This idea “referred to the intrinsic qualities of the Greek psyche, which had survived, often undetected, through antiquity and Byzantium, to the present day” (Plantzos 2008, 18). The poets Giorgos Seferis and Odysseus Elytis are perhaps the most wellknown exponents of Hellenicity, but painters such as Yannis Tsarouchis, Yiannis Moralis, and Nikos Nikolaou also “promoted ideas on the singular essence of Hellenic art—Prehistoric to Byzantine” (Plantzos 2008, 19). At about the same time, Byzantine art was more fully incorporated into the Greek national narrative, and interest in Byzantine studies grew in the 1930s as the Byzantine Museum moved into its new permanent home at the Villa Illissia in Athens in 1930 (Mourelatos 2008, 198). Hellenicity began as an idea among these left-leaning members of the Greek political and artistic elite but was given a right-wing bent by the Metaxas dictatorship in 1936. Now the glories of ancient, Byzantine, and modern Greece were considered to be connected; linked was the idea of the purity of the Greek race across the ages. The photographer Elli Souyioultzoglou-Seraïdari (better known as “Nelly” or “Nelly’s”), produced modernist images influenced by the healthy body culture she had encountered in 1920s Germany. The most iconic of her photographs positioned impressive looking bodies among impressive looking ruins, which were also supposed to reflect the continuity of the Greek race. For example, Nelly produced images for a section entitled “Race” in the 1937 tourist brochure Hellas that supposedly ratified this concept of the purity of race (Damaskos 2008, 328). These views still have a certain currency; the images were reused in an online article called Racial Type of the Ancient Hellenes by the “racial anthropologist” Dienekes Pontikos (Pontikos 2009). Interestingly, Pontikos’s blog on race and genetics draws on the work of long-derided race theorists, such as Hans F. K. Günther, to support Pontikos’s nationalist and right-wing political agenda. I do not suggest that Doxiadis’s book is similar to or supports this kind of political race theory, but there are dangers inherent in making assumptions based on preconceived notions of what constitutes a “racial

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type” or the kind of “familiar face” we might see in a street in Athens or a coffee shop in Cairo. When looking at these faces from Roman-ruled and Greek-occupied Egypt, it is important to interrogate our own assumptions. ON DISPLAY TODAY The only large Egyptian Antiquities collection in Greece is at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. The collection was formed from the donations of two Greek expatriates in Egypt, Ioannis Dimitriou and Alexandros Rostovitch, who donated the objects to the Museum in 1880 and 1904 respectively. The collection’s objects are separate to the rest of the Museum’s collection, which displays antiquities from across historical periods and locations in Greece. The collection is also placed in a late nineteenth-century context, with the feel—though it is laid out in chronological periods—of a private collection (Egyptian Collection 2008, 5). Three Fayum portraits are displayed in a case entitled Roman Period in Egypt and set apart from the other display cases, a move that positions the portraits as art objects with the caption that “art [in the Roman period] was limited to crafts, with the exception of the Fayum portraits” (Museum Label, National Archaeological Museum, Athens). Unlike the Benaki Museum, the position of the objects in the gallery stresses both their Roman and Egyptian origins. However, there is little intersection with the Classical period objects displayed in the rest of the Museum and the Egyptian gallery in general. Meanwhile, the portrait panels also possess a Roman identity, though it has rarely been touched on in their reception in museums until recently. The Hadrian: Empire and Conflict exhibition at the British Museum in 2008 used the mummy portrait panels to illustrate people in Hadrian’s Egypt in the second century AD. Portraits that were identified as belonging to c. AD 117–150 through coiffure, clothes, and archaeological evidence were represented as contemporaneous with Hadrian. The portrait panels originally from Antinoopolis, a town founded in Egypt by Hadrian in memory of his lover Antinous, were described as providing a “titillating glimpse of the first generations of settlers in Antinoopolis and their contemporaries in other parts of the country.” The description continued by stating that the portraits’ “striking immediacy” brings us “face to face with the people who lived when Hadrian and his party visited Egypt and can stand in for the thousands of people all over the empire he must have met” (Opper 2008, 194). In this exhibition, the vivid lifelike qualities of these portrait panels represented people of the Roman Empire in Egypt with emphasis on identification with these faces from the past. The Byzantium, 330–1453 exhibition at London’s Royal Academy, which opened as Hadrian and closed in October 2008, displayed an early example of a mummy portrait panel (c. AD 55–70) in “naturalistic style.”

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A portrait panel excavated by Petrie in 1911 was used to illustrate the connections between “these portraits and early icons” while establishing that: the development of the icon emerges from the practices of Greco-Roman art rather than simply the funerary portraits of Egypt (the production of Fayum portraits stopped in the mid-third century) (Cormack 2008, 389). Robin Cormack, one of the curators, stresses here that the stylistic continuities between funerary practice and early Byzantine art are not unique to the mummy portrait panels. This point lessens the emphasis on Hellenic style and technique, though this exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Benaki Museum, which, as we have seen, presents the portraits within themes of Hellenic cultural continuity. These two exhibitions in London during 2008 used the portraits in very different ways; one represented people of a certain place and historical period and the other illustrated the connections between periods of art through stylistic practice. Meanwhile, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which reopened in 2009, displays its mummy portrait panels in two galleries with different themes. Next to the Exploring the Past section on the lower ground floor, which orientates the visitor around key themes of the Museum, is the Human Image gallery. One of the most striking galleries in the Ashmolean, it illustrates the ways in which different cultures and ages presented the human form. Amid idealized sculpture, death-masks, and portrait busts is a doublesided mummy portrait panel in tempera on wood (Ashmolean object number AN1966.111.2). The label considers whether this “portrait” documents the multiple identities of people in Roman Egypt, as the panel shows on one side an Egyptian villager and on the other a woman in Greek Alexandrian fashion (Museum Label, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford). Up a floor in the gallery Rome 400 BC–AD 300, there are another two mummy portrait panels displayed under the heading Moving around the Roman Empire. Here the panels are used to illustrate the development of the Roman Empire and its mix of Greek, Roman, and local cultures. The panels are displayed alongside other objects illustrating this mix of cultural traditions, such as a terracotta figure of a priest at Smyrna, Anatolia, from c. AD 300–350. In this one Museum, then, mummy portrait panels illustrate the artistic representation of the human figure and identity as well as cultural fusion in the Roman Empire. As yet, there has been little emphasis in exhibition or display on the insights the panels give to the techniques of ancient art. An ongoing conservation research project into the mount systems on the mummy portrait panels at the British Museum was prompted by the return from loan of one panel that showed signs of active deterioration due to the rigid system that had been used. As a result, heavy restoration of these portraits in the recent past has been revealed (Newman and Harrison 2009). The portrait panels can be used to illustrate this modern practice as well as providing evidence for ancient polychromy on Greek and Roman sculpture. Research at the British Museum and in the Tracking Colour project at the Ny Carlsberg

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Glyptotek has used the pigments on the portrait panels and compared them with traces of color on sculpture (Østergaard 2009). Meanwhile, the portrait panels have also been scrutinized for signs of disease— in particular, neurological ailments, as they “apparently represent people as they appear in life” (Appenzeller et al. 2001, 524). The portrait panels that match the skulls of the people that Petrie collected are viewed as particularly useful for this analysis (Appenzeller et al. 2004, 346). Diseases such as progressive facial hemiatrophy or tropia have been identified on faces depicted on the portrait panels at the British Museum. In this way, the portraits have been pathologized, adding another dimension to their potential interpretation.

CONCLUSION The mummy portrait panels from Roman-ruled Egypt represent an intersection between Egyptian traditions and Classical cultural forms. They are both art works and archaeological objects as they are evidence of artistic technique and style as well as evidence for funerary equipment and practice during a particular historical period. The mummy portrait panels were precursors to Byzantine style, acted as inspiration for Modernist artists, have become conduits to medical diagnosis of disease, and play a part in the construction of Hellenic identity. The portrait panels have multiple narratives that can be told through museum display, and no doubt they still have more tales to tell. Above all, the portrait panels depict faces. Whether they are the “true” likenesses of the people in whose wrappings they were uncovered is on one level irrelevant. Looking into a face can arouse powerful feelings and identification with those lifelike features. Reading these faces is never an objective act. NOTE 1. Petrie to Burton, 4 August 1888, National Gallery Archives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Unpublished Sources Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. National Gallery Archives, National Gallery, London.

Published Sources Ancient Faces. 1997. Ancient Faces Exhibition Leaflet. London: British Museum. Appenzeller, O., M. Amm, and H. Jones. 2004. “A Brief Exploration of Neurological Art History.” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 13 (4): 345–50.

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Appenzeller, O., J. M. Stevens, R. Kruszynski, and S. Walker. 2001. “Neurology in Ancient Faces.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 70: 524–29. Benaki Museum Web site. a. From the Portraits of Fayum to the Beginnings of the Art of Byzantine Icons. Accessed 15 December 2013. http://www.benaki.gr/? lang=en&id=20205&sid=19 ———. b. Byzantine Art. Accessed 15 December 2013. http://www.benaki.gr/index. asp?id=1010102&lang=en Bierbrier, M. 1997. “The Discovery of Mummy Portraits.” In Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt, edited by S. Walker and M. Bierbrier, 23–24. London: British Museum Press. Cannadine, D. 2007. National Portrait Gallery: A Brief History. London: National Portrait Gallery. Challis, D. 2013. The Archaeology of Race: The Eugenic Ideas of Francis Galton and Flinders Petrie. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Conlin, J. 2006. The Nation’s Mantelpiece: A History of the National Gallery. London: Pallas Athene. Cormack, R. 2008. “46: Mummy Panel with the Portrait of a Woman.” In Byzantium, 330–1453, edited by R. Cormack and M. Vassilaki, 389. London: Royal Academy. Damaskos, D. 2008. “The Uses of Antiquity in Photographs by Nelly: Imported Modernism and Home-Grown Ancestor Worship in Inter-War Greece.” In A Singular Antiquity: Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in Twentieth-Century Greece, edited by D. Damaskos and D. Plantzos, 321–36. Athens: Mouseio Benaki. Doxiadis, E. 1995. The Mysterious Fayum Portraits: Faces from Ancient Egypt. London: Thames and Hudson. ———. 1996. “The Fayum Portraits: Greek Painting in Ancient Egypt.” Minerva 7 (3): 17–23. Drandaki, A. 2005. “From Late Antiquity to Medieval Byzantium: The Ecumenical Empire Under Divine Providence.” In Greek Treasures: From the Benaki Museum in Athens, edited by E. Georgoula, 94–97. Sydney, Australia: Powerhouse. Drower, M. (1985) 1995. Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology. Reprint. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ebers, G. 1893. The Hellenic Portraits from the Fayum At Present in the Collection of Herr Graf with Some Remarks on Other Works of This Class at Berlin and Elsewhere. New York: Appleton and Company. Edwards, A. B. 1891. Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers. London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. Egyptian Collection. 2008. Ancient Egypt Collection. Athens: National Archaeological Museum. Fenton, J. 1997. “The Mummy’s Secret.” The New York Review of Books 44 (July 17): 57–61. Filer, J. 1997. “If the Face Fits: A Comparison of Mummies and Their Accompanying Portraits Using Computerised Axial Tomography.” In Portraits and Masks: Burial Customs in Roman Egypt, edited by M. Bierbrier, 121–26. London: British Museum Press. Forbes-Robertson, J. 1889. “Graeco-Roman Portraiture in Egypt: A Recovered Page in the History of Painting.” The Magazine of Art 12: 177–80. Günther, H. F. K. 1927. The Racial Elements of European History. Translated from the German by G. C. Wheeler. London: Methuen. ———. 1930. Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes. München, Germany: J. S. Lebmanns Verlag. Malraux, A. 1954. The Voices of Silence. Translated from the French by S. Gilbert. London: Seckler and Warburg.

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Montserrat, D. 1998. “Unidentified Human Remains: Mummies and the Erotics of Biography.” In Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human Body in Antiquity, edited by D. Montserrat, 162–97. London: Routledge. Mourelatos, D. 2008. “The Debate over Cretan Icons in Twentieth-Century Greek Historiography and Their Incorporation into the National Narrative.” In A Singular Antiquity: Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in Twentieth-Century Greece, edited by D. Damaskos and D. Plantzos, 197–207. Athens: Mouseio Benaki. National Gallery. 1994. The National Gallery Annual Report April 1993–March 1994. London: National Gallery. Newhouse, V. 2005. Art and the Power of Placement. New York: Monacelli. Newman, N., and L. Harrison. 2009. “Finding Solutions for Mounting Ancient Egyptian Funerary Portraits: A Project Update.” News in Conservation 15: 4–5. Opper, T. 2008. Hadrian: Empire and Conflict. London: British Museum. Østergaard, J. S., ed. 2009. Tracking Colour: The Polychromy of Greek and Roman Sculpture in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Copenhagen: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Perl, J. 1997. “Drastic Realism.” Modern Painters (Summer 1997): 38–40. Petrie, W. M. F., selected and collated by P. C. Roberts and S. Quirke. 2007. “Extracts from the Petrie Journals.” In Living Images: Egyptian Funerary Portraits in the Petrie Museum, edited by J. Picton, S. Quirke, and P. C. Roberts, 83–110. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Picton, J., S. Quirke, and P. C. Roberts, eds. 2007. Living Images: Egyptian Funerary Portraits in the Petrie Museum. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Plantzos, D. 2008. “Archaeology and Hellenic Identity, 1896–2004: The Frustrated Vision.” In A Singular Antiquity: Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in TwentiethCentury Greece, edited by D. Damaskos and D. Plantzos, 11–30. Athens: Mouseio Benaki. Pontikos, D. 2009. “Racial Type of the Ancient Hellenes.” Accessed 24 May 2010. Formerly available at http://dienekes.50webs.com/arp/articles/hellenes/ Prag, A. J. N. W. 2002. “Proportion and Personality in the Fayum Portraits.”British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan 3: 55–63. Ray, J. 1996. “On the Way to Osiris.” Times Literary Supplement 4878 (27 September): 36. Roberts, P. C. 2007. “An Archaeological Context for British Discoveries of Mummy Portraits in the Fayum.” In Living Images: Egyptian Funerary Portraits in the Petrie Museum, edited by J. Picton, S. Quirke, and P. C. Roberts, 13–57. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Whitehead, C. 2009. Museums and the Construction of Disciplines: Art and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London: Duckworth.

17 Legacies of Engagement The Multiple Manifestations of Ancient Egypt in Public Discourse Stephanie Moser

The relevance of studying representations of ancient Egypt for understanding the history of Egyptology cannot be overemphasized. Indeed, the study of any discipline’s history cannot be divorced from the ways in which the subject has been presented and received outside the scholarly realm. Egyptology, perhaps more than many other disciplines, is concerned with subjects that have attracted a great deal of public attention and have generated a variety of forms of public engagement. For this reason alone, it is important that we consider the extent to which the more creative responses to ancient Egypt may have affected both the emergence of the discipline and subsequent developments in Egyptology. Further justification for investigating the representation of ancient Egypt throughout the centuries stems from the fact that cultural historians and specialists in reception have demonstrated that the portrayal of academic subjects in the public domain influences how these fields have been defined. Major studies on the reception of ancient cultures have shown the extent to which particular civilizations have come to be known through their representation outside academic discourse (e.g., Bohrer 2003; Curran 2005; Moser 2006, 2012a and b; Nichols 2014; Seymour 2013). As is now widely known, a rich and mature disciplinary history does not restrict itself to the celebration of discoveries, the writing of biographies of key figures, and the evaluation of major publications in the field but rather considers all kinds of activities associated with the development of the subject. Indeed, there are many important chapters that remain to be told in the history of Egyptology, and of these, the complex relationship between the West and ancient Egypt as expressed in representations of this culture requires far more attention. The range of factors and forces that have contributed to the formation of Egyptology are especially broad because of the extent to which various audiences have engaged with the subject since the Renaissance. More significant, perhaps, is the fact that Egyptology was formally established as a discipline at a time when the public interest and consumption of the ancient world within the West was at its greatest. As Jeffrey Richards (2009, 1) states, “in the nineteenth century both Britain and the United States were obsessed with the Ancient World.” Accordingly, the public response to ancient Egypt coalesced with and simultaneously fed into

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the development of the discipline of Egyptology. It is significant that histories of Egyptology are increasingly taking into account the impact of these wider cultural dimensions on the establishment of the discipline as opposed to treating studies in “Egyptomania” as separate from and irrelevant to the delineation of disciplinary priorities (see, e.g., Colla 2007). The papers included in the “Representing Knowledge” section of Histories of Egyptology reflect the growing interest in investigating nonacademic engagements with Egypt. Each of the authors—Challis, Day, and Moshenska— considers how Egyptological materials and topics were treated in contexts beyond the traditional walls of academe. While Challis and Day build on existing work that documents how museum displays and film have contributed to defining ancient Egypt as a particular type of culture, Moshenska addresses how the involvement of particular individuals in the subject through more performative interactions played a part in the development of the discipline. Together, their papers demonstrate how nonacademic audiences engaged with ancient Egypt in ways that were meaningful and significant to the contemporary understanding of the subject. Above all, their work makes an important contribution to documenting the coexistence of multiple identities for Egyptian antiquities. THE EVOLUTION OF EGYPTOMANIA STUDIES The topic of Egyptomania is a well-established field of research pioneered by individuals like Jean-Michel Humbert and James Stevens Curl, who together with other scholars have documented the vast variety of Egyptian inspired artworks and architecture produced since the Renaissance (Clayton 1982; Conner 1983; Curl 1994; Humbert 1989, 1996; De Meulenaere et al. 1992). The important exhibition on Egyptomania that was shown in Paris, Ottawa, and Vienna in 1994 and for which the excellent catalog—Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art, 1730–1930—was published (Humbert et al. 1994), demonstrated the extent to which Egyptian antiquities had inspired creative output in many areas of Western art. In the period of two hundred years covered by the exhibition, hundreds of leading painters, architects, and designers were shown to have been deeply inspired by the distinctive aesthetic qualities of Egyptian monuments and antiquities. The artworks, buildings, and designs generated by such individuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries expressed a fascination for Egyptian motifs, schemes of ornamentation, use of color, and creation of architectural features. These artistic responses to ancient Egypt are often assumed to have been of little consequence to the establishment of Egyptology; they are seen as by-products of the Western discovery of Egypt in the eighteenth century rather than as a central part of that very “discovery.” Egyptian-inspired works of art and design, however, were effectively interpretations of Egyptian art and antiquities, and they had an impact on research and ideas about ancient Egypt.

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While more recent works on Egyptomania have continued to focus on art, architecture, and the decorative arts (e.g., Curran et al. 2009; Esposito 2003; Humbert and Price 2003; Jeffreys 2003; Macdonald and Rice 2003; Whitehouse 1997), the field has expanded to address other aspects of how ancient Egyptian material culture have impacted cultural practices, particularly the formation of cultural and national identity both in and outside Egypt (e.g., Colla 2007; Reid 2002; Trafton 2004). While such works may be considered to fall outside the remit of traditional Egyptomania studies, they are relevant to the development of this field because they address how visual representations play a key part in the process of defining identities. Other studies on the reception of ancient Egypt that go beyond the realm of art include Montserrat’s pioneering Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt (2000), which reflects on mythical appropriations of Egyptian icons, Day’s The Mummy’s Curse (J. Day 2006), which scrutinizes the ramifications of “mummy mania” on conceptions of ancient Egypt, my Wondrous Curiosities (2006) and Designing Antiquity (2012b), which consider the impact of museum displays and public exhibitions in defining the culture of ancient Egypt, and Bednarski’s (2005) study on the British response to the Description de l’Égypte. Together, these works suggest that there is a lot more scope to investigate Egyptomania and that this investigation need not be restricted to the inspiration of Egypt in art. A crucial difference between the earlier works on Egyptomania and more recent scholarship on the engagement with Egypt is the epistemological emphasis that distinguishes the latter. Egyptomania, as it has more recently evolved, is not simply concerned with the impact of ancient Egypt on European cultural imagination and artistic expression but also considers the influence of these expressions on the formation of ideas about ancient Egypt. More specifically, scholars are exploring the two-way knowledge exchange between “formal” or academic characterizations of ancient Egypt with more creative or popular reactions to the subject. This development is related to wider developments in humanities scholarship, which, since the 1990s, has become increasingly interested in the way receptions of a subject feed back into and influence understandings of that subject. Accordingly, in fields such as classics and archaeology, scholars have produced work addressing how the portrayal of the past informs the construction of knowledge about the past (Moser 2008). A focus for study here has been visual representation (Cochrane and Russell 2007; Holtorf 2007; Smiles and Moser 2004), museum display and public exhibitions (Challis 2008; Hales 2006; Moser 2006, 2012a and b; Nichols 2014; Whitehead 2009), and cinematic portrayals (Cyrino 2005; K. Day 2008; Joshel et al. 2001; Nisbet 2006; Paul 2010; Solomon 2001; Theodorakopoulos 2010; Winkler 2004, 2007; Wyke 1997). Of the areas covered in such studies, it is cinema that has attracted the greatest deal of attention. The influence of cinema in shaping understandings of the past by celebrating certain events, themes, characters, and periods of history has encouraged historians and classicists

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to examine how ancient cultures like Egypt are depicted in film very seriously. Research here, together with studies in exhibition and display, has brought new interest to the fields of classics and archaeology, encouraging both disciplines to expand their remit to include questions of representation among more traditional research topics. THE MANY MEANINGS OF MUMMY PORTRAIT PANELS In her contribution to Histories of Egyptology, Challis examines how exhibitions of mummy portrait panels have drawn on different sets of interpretive themes over time. She demonstrates how changes in emphasis in the museum narratives or explanatory contexts for presenting Greco-Roman mummy portrait panels have been significant in defining those panels’ place in the disciplines of archaeology and art. First displayed in London in 1888 to highly receptive audiences, the portrait panels were initially valued as artworks relevant to the history of Western art. Accordingly, a set of these objects was sent to the National Gallery, where they were thought to be in good company alongside the products of Renaissance art. Functioning here as visual testimony of the connection between the art of Renaissance Europe and that of the ancient world, the panels had already assumed a particular kind of identity as archaeological objects. However, this was certainly not the prevailing lens through which the artifacts were seen and understood. Challis’s account of mummy portrait panels in Georg Ebers’s book of 1893 and Amelia Edwards’s volume of 1891 reveals another layer of meaning assigned to the mummy panels. As opposed to representing exemplars of early “Western” art, here in the works of Ebers and Edwards, the panels are treated as representatives of racial types where the majority of individuals portrayed are perceived to exhibit Greek attributes, while some are assigned Egyptian and Jewish identities. Challis’s assertion that this kind of attribution reflects the way in which mummy portrait panels were received in the nineteenth century and that contemporary audiences should avoid “attributing personalities and identities to them” is a point that she has expanded on in her recent book The Archaeology of Race (2013). A third dimension in Challis’s account of how mummy portrait panels have been presented and interpreted takes us to the 1930s when these objects were removed from display at the National Gallery and put on exhibition in the British Museum. No longer defined as artworks with Western “credentials,” the panels assumed a new status as historical documents of great relevance to understanding the later period of ancient Egypt. The narrative then jumps to 1997, when these returned mummy portraits were featured in the British Museum exhibition Ancient Faces. Once again, the context for viewing these objects was altered, this time with an emphasis on how they were connected to other sets of ancient Egyptian material culture. Having highlighted the archaeological context of the panels, however,

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the Museum still emphasized the sentimental or personal dimensions of the objects. Challis shows how this latter element was picked up on in reviews of the exhibition, which focused on identifying character types in the portraits such as “overweight yuppies” and “proud soldiers.” As they are currently exhibited in the British Museum today, the panels now assume a clearer connection with past cultural practices, particularly funerary ones. Challis compares this display to the response to the mummy portrait panels as exhibited in Greece, where they are portrayed as representing a stage in the evolution of Greek art. Again, though, we see how claims are made for the ethnic identity of the individuals portrayed in the panels, revealing a prevailing theme in their interpretation. As Challis concludes, the mummy portrait panels have a multifaceted identity—they are both artworks and archaeological objects at the same time—and neither “identity” should preclude over the other. This account demonstrates the importance and impact of the settings in which objects are presented. Reception of the mummy portraits reveals how audiences picked up on and responded to the implicit messages in the displays. Challis’s account makes an important contribution to our knowledge of the extent to which a particular set of ancient objects continue to take on new layers of meanings as they are presented for public consumption. MUMMY UNWRAPPINGS AND DISCIPLINE BUILDING Gabriel Moshenska’s chapter in Histories of Egyptology draws our attention to a forgotten figure in the history of Egyptology, showing lesser-known characters in the study of ancient Egypt played an important role in the formation of the discipline. The British physician Thomas Joseph Pettigrew is revealed here to be a more complex and significant individual than previously thought. With the mummy unrolling performances that he carried out in the first half of the nineteenth century, Pettigrew is shown to have significantly contributed to the wider public presentation of ancient Egypt. Alongside other important “events” in the portrayal of ancient Egypt, such as the creation of major museum installations and public exhibitions, mummy unwrappings played a role in promoting understanding of Egyptian antiquities. Such events were not simply sensational shows with little depth or implication for advancing scholarly insights. As Moshenska demonstrates, Pettigrew was an active participant in archaeological and Egyptological circles, devoting some time to the study of ancient Egypt. His activities in mummy unrolling may have been perceived as a sensational endeavor, yet they were a vital component of Pettigrew’s interest in investigating Egyptian antiquities. His book A History of Egyptian Mummies (1834) is certainly testimony to this point, and by listing other activities pursued by Pettigrew, such as his close friendship with John Gardner Wilkinson, his work on an unpublished encyclopedia, and his involvement with archaeological

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societies, Moshenska provides a convincing argument for Pettigrew’s place in the study of ancient Egypt. Like many other characters involved in the history of Egyptology in the nineteenth century who did not travel to Egypt or make original recordings of the monuments and antiquities, Pettigrew is not hailed as a pioneer or significant contributor to the discipline. While the discovery of the monuments and their documentation is clearly a critical factor in the establishment of the subject, there are a host of “subsidiary” activities that contribute to the development of the discipline and that also warrant attention. Plenty of characters took part in researching ancient Egyptian material and presenting Egyptian antiquities to audiences beyond the “gentlemanly circle” of the time. In this field, Pettigrew was certainly very active, and his contribution to the wider public dissemination of ideas about Egypt through his mummy unrollings is an important part of the history of Egyptology. For Pettigrew, mummy unwrappings were not simply spectacles. Instead, these unwrappings served to fulfill his investigative aims. Indeed, the scientific dimension to mummy unwrappings is often overlooked, and Pettigrew’s place in the history of Egyptology is significant because of his 1834 publication on the subject that contributed to an understanding of how this knowledge could be contextualized. Moshenska’s account shows how Pettigrew’s involvement in unwrapping mummies represents a nexus between public performance and scholarly inquiry and that this nexus was part of the Victorian construction of science. Furthermore, the practice of unrolling mummies can be seen as being intimately connected to the wider movement in nineteenth-century Britain that combined entertainment and enlightenment. CRUCIAL CHARACTERS IN THE CINEMATIC INCARNATION OF ANCIENT EGYPT Jasmine Day’s contribution to Histories of Egyptology examines the mummy horror films of mid-twentieth-century cinema, focusing on the “evolution” of the High Priest character in the films made subsequent to The Mummy of 1932. Specifically, she shows how the series of mummy films from the 1940s take the priest-turned-mummy character of the classic 1932 film and split it into two distinct characters—a High Priest and a mummy. Interestingly, the High Priest character and the mummy figure adopt an interchangeable role as doppelgangers of each other. Day’s account offers a discussion of this doppelganger role and what it signifies in defining aspects of ancient Egypt. She shows how the two characters are mutually dependent on each other and that there are parallels in the fate of both characters. For instance, the downfall of the High Priest predicts the same fate for the mummy. Day’s argument is that this duality/partnership between the two characters reflects how mummies function as a vehicle for addressing how Self and Other are juxtaposed and coexist. She notes, however, that the symbolism in the

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creation of these two distinct yet mutually dependent characters is very complex. The characters, for instance, function as a filmmaker’s device in that they enable issues such as sexuality to be addressed as a subtext within the wider narrative. The critical point that she makes is that in each of the films there is no clear or obvious formula, which reveals how the films provide opportunities to engage with wider, often unspoken, social concerns. Analyses of this kind are important because they demonstrate the extent to which ancient Egyptian themes, icons, and material culture are manipulated in the realm of popular consumption. While other studies of mummy movies present a general account or survey of extant films (e.g., Cowie and Johnson 2002), Day probes deeper into the central characters of such films, seeking to ascertain what they represent and symbolize. Since Maria Wyke’s book Projecting the Past was published in 1997, numerous other studies have been produced that demonstrate the great imaginative power of cinema to shape our perceptions of the past (see references above). While many focus on how films have created vivid pasts that are intimately connected with present interests, others discuss how the characterization of the past in films goes far beyond entertainment, encouraging audiences to understand the ancient world in particular ways. Thus, accounts such as Day’s are critical in showing how popular engagements with ancient Egypt are complex, functioning on a variety of levels to address social and political concerns and cultural interests. Research into some of the manifestations of historic mummy movies, for instance, makes us aware that ancient Egypt is neither simply used as an exotic backdrop for great cinematic effect nor only as a source of creepy stories to entertain horror fans. The examples discussed in Day’s chapter show how ancient Egypt provides a unique opportunity for filmmakers to reflect upon “deeper” psychological themes that have haunting symbolic connotations. As such, we learn how film functions on different levels to create meaning about ancient Egypt, and the creation of “partnered” characters like the High Priest and mummy becomes a way of characterizing the Egyptian past. Indeed, since the first mummy horror movie was made—Vengeance of Egypt in 1912—the creation of mummy movies has consistently fostered strong ideas about ancient Egypt as the most mysterious and dark of all the ancient civilizations. VISUAL ENGAGEMENTS WITH ANCIENT EGYPT My research on the representation of ancient Egypt complements and broadens the chapters in this section of the volume. I am concerned with the question of how this highly consumed ancient civilization came to be understood through the wider interest in portraying ancient worlds in nineteenth-century Britain (Moser 2006, 2012b). I have explored the way in which people recreated the Egyptian past in museum displays, public exhibitions, and artworks, showing how these practices impacted research and were translated

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into a form of knowing ancient Egypt. The premise of my research is that the process of seeing the Egyptian past via visual representations involves a complex interaction between documentation, interpretation, and imagination. Ancient Egypt is an important and powerful case study for untangling and describing this fascinating aspect of knowledge production. I believe that a vital part of investigating the history of Egyptology is to continue to explore the ways in which public responses to ancient Egypt and scholarly knowledge are deeply connected. For instance, the way we engage with or react to ancient objects contributes to our understanding of them in the sense that we see antiquities through a lens—a lens that is created by the form or manner in which those antiquities are presented and that strongly affects the way we perceive them. France is typically credited with “discovering” ancient Egypt at the beginning of the nineteenth century when, from 1798 to 1802, French savants carried out a large-scale expedition in the country as part of the Napoleonic campaign: that expedition would lead to the Description de l’Égypte. The British, however, also had an important engagement with ancient Egypt, which intensified in 1801 and lasted throughout the course of the nineteenth century. The Victorians responded to ancient Egypt in major public displays and in doing so defined this civilization in their own terms as a particular type of ancient culture. Indeed, the British response to ancient Egypt in the form of museum displays, public exhibitions, artworks, and mummy unwrapping events was critical to the formation of a wider understanding of what the distinctive culture of ancient Egypt was like. In 1808, for example, when the important Egyptian sculpture collection seized by the British after their defeat of the French campaign in Egypt was finally installed in a purpose built gallery in the British Museum, the Egyptian antiquities were instantly given a new context, a new identity, and a new set of meanings (Moser 2006). Visitors were enthralled with the gigantic sarcophagi and slabs of stone with strange imagery. Their initial introduction to ancient Egypt through mummy cases and small Egyptian “curiosities” was now complemented with an entirely new experience of this culture because of the context in which it was presented. While the British Museum displayed real relics, large-scale reconstructions of ancient Egyptian monuments were made for public display at the Crystal Palace in 1854 (Moser 2012b). With these reconstructions, an entirely different image of ancient Egypt was created. A striking and vivid conception of this culture was created by the designer Owen Jones, who created a series of ten historical courts to tell the story of the history of art. Jones was not a dry scholar, an archaeologist, or a classicist; he was a designer, known for his passion for ornament and color. Accordingly, every surface of the Egyptian Court was decorated with ornate patterns rendered in red, blue, yellow, and green. While some critics detested the plaster reconstructions, labeling them as fake and gaudy, others felt that for the first time they were seeing what ancient Egypt was really like. With this pioneering and innovative installation at the Crystal Palace, the Victorians saw and

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thus conceived ancient Egypt to be a lively and colorful culture, accomplished in the production of ornamental art. No longer typecast as a somber civilization that was preoccupied with death, ancient Egypt was redefined as a society that rejoiced in life. The impact of this public presentation was highly significant in influencing scholarly views of ancient Egypt. In particular, it brought about the recognition of the central role of ornament and decoration within the wider scheme of Egyptian art. My current project on the representation of ancient Egypt centers on the rich tradition of Victorian history painting of the second half of the nineteenth century (Moser in prep). This was a time when the passion for all things ancient culminated and when artists became deeply involved in capturing the beauty and vitality of the ancient world. The Dutch-born artist Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who moved to London in 1870, was a key figure in the artistic movement that saw ancient Egypt resurrected and defined in another compelling way. With his powerful visions of the Egyptian past, a fully inhabited ancient Egyptian world is presented. From the objects that were displayed in the British Museum to the colored reconstructions that were created for the Crystal Palace, now audiences were presented with a “living” scene, where ancient ancestors were featured inhabiting the monuments. With such visions, a third dimension had been added to the way ancient Egypt was seen. Inspired by the Egyptian collections in the British Museum and the displays at the Crystal Palace, Alma-Tadema was famous for the attention he paid to archaeological details. However, his paintings have an emotive element that encouraged people to see ancient Egypt in an evocative and “familiar” way. For example, in his Death of the First Born of 1872, a deeply emotional and captivating account of ancient Egypt is offered. Based on the Story of Exodus and the Tenth Plague, the painting features an ancient Egyptian ruler holding the body of his dead son. While the abundance of meticulously rendered Egyptological motifs is impressive, it is the deep sense of grief that lends power to this compelling image of ancient Egypt. CONCLUSION During the course of the last five centuries, ancient Egypt has endured an eventful journey in the realms of Western public imagination. From its characterization as an exotic and strange land from which curious items found their way into the cabinets and collections of Europe, Egypt was “reassigned” many other identities, all of which were designed to service agendas specific to the time, place, and context within which they were manufactured. In all these interpretations, we can see how ancient Egypt addressed a wide variety of needs. At the very least, it functioned as a source of curious delight and interest, but it also served as a critical means of evaluating the attributes of other ancient civilizations such as that of Greece and Rome while offering a vehicle for addressing religious themes and providing a “motif” through which national identity could be articulated. There are many other such

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“uses” that can be identified in addition to these. The critical point is that these appropriations of ancient Egypt, far from being irrelevant or inconsequential, contributed to the course that Egyptology took as it formed as a discipline and as it continued to develop. Representations of ancient Egypt have informed scholarship, and they still influence the way we think about the past today. The chapters in this section therefore help to illustrate why.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bednarski, A. 2005. Holding Egypt: Tracing the Reception of the Description de l’Égypte in Nineteenth-Century Great Britain. London: Golden House. Bohrer, F. N. 2003. Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Challis, D. 2008. “Modern to Ancient: Greece at the Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace.” In Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851, edited by J. A. Auerbach and P. H. Hoffenberg, 172–90. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. ———. 2013. The Archaeology of Race: The Eugenic Ideas of Francis Galton and Flinders Petrie. London: Bloomsbury. Clayton, P. A. 1982. The Rediscovery of Ancient Egypt: Artists and Travellers in the 19th Century. London: Thames and Hudson. Cochrane, A., and I. Russell. 2007. “Visualising Archaeologies: A Manifesto.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 17 (1): 3–19. Colla, E. 2007. Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Conner, P., ed. 1983. The Inspiration of Egypt: Its Influence on British Artists, Travellers, and Designers, 1700–1900. Brighton, UK: Brighton Borough Council. Cowie, S. D., and T. Johnson. 2002. The Mummy in Fact, Fiction and Film. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland. Curl, S. J. 1994. The Egyptian Revival: Ancient Egypt as the Inspiration for Design Motifs in the West. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Curran, B. A. 2005. The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Curran, B. A., P. O. Long, and B. Weiss. 2009. Obelisk: A History. Cambridge, MA: Burndy Library. Cyrino, M. S. 2005. Big Screen Rome. Oxford: Blackwell. Day, J. 2006. The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-speaking World. London: Routledge. Day, K., ed. 2008. “Celluloid Classics: New Perspectives on Classical Antiquity in Modern Cinema.” Arethusa 41 (1): 1–9. Esposito, D. 2003. “From Ancient Egypt to Victorian London: The Impact of Ancient Egyptian Furniture on British Art and Design 1850–1900.” Decorative Arts Society Journal 27: 80–93. Hales, S. J. 2006. “Re-Casting Antiquity: Pompeii and the Crystal Palace.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 14 (1): 99–133. Holtorf, C. 2007. Archaeology is a Brand! The Meaning of Archaeology in Contemporary Popular Culture. Oxford: Archaeopress. Humbert, J.-M. 1989. L’Egyptomanie dans l’art occidental. Paris: Editions ACR. ———., ed. 1996. L’Egyptomanie à l’épreuve de l’archéologie. Paris: Musée du Louvre. Humbert, J.-M., M. Pantazzi, and C. Ziegler. 1994. Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art, 1730–1930. Paris and Ottawa: Musée du Louvre and National Gallery of Canada.

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Humbert, J.-M., and C. Price, eds. 2003. Imhotep Today: Egyptianizing Architecture. London: UCL Press. Jeffreys, D. G., ed. 2003. Views of Ancient Egypt since Napoleon Bonaparte: Imperialism, Colonialism and Modern Appropriations. London: UCL Press. Joshel, S. R., M. Malamud, and D. T. McGuire, eds. 2001. Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. MacDonald, S., and M. Rice, eds. 2003. Consuming Ancient Egypt. London: UCL Press. De Meulenaere, H., P. Berko, and V. Berko. 1992. L’Égypte ancienne dans la peinture du XIX siècle. Knokke-Zoute, Belgium: Berko. Montserrat, D. 2000. Akhenaten: History, Fantasy, and Ancient Egypt. London: Routledge. Moser, S. 2006. Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2008. “Archaeological Representation: The Consumption and Creation of the Past.” In The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology, edited by B. Cunliffe and C. Gosden, 1048–1077. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012a. “Archaeological Visualisation.” In Archaeological Theory Today, edited by I. Hodder, 292–322. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2012b. Designing Antiquity: Owen Jones, Ancient Egypt and the Crystal Palace. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. ———. In prep. The Beauty of Antiquity: British History Painters and the Allure of Ancient Egypt. Nichols, K. 2014. Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain, 1854–1936. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nisbet, G. 2006. Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture. Bristol: Phoenix Press. Paul, J. 2010. “Cinematic Receptions of Antiquity: The Current State of Play.” Classical Receptions Journal 2 (1): 136–55. Pettigrew, T. J. 1834. A History of Egyptian Mummies, and an Account of the Worship and Embalming of the Sacred Animals by the Egyptians, with Remarks on the Funeral Ceremonies of Different Nations, and Observations on the Mummies of the Canary Islands, of the Ancient Peruvians, Burman Priests &c. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman. Reid, D. M. 2002. Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Richards, J. 2009. The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Seymour, M. 2013. Babylon: The History of a Legend and its Afterlives. London: I. B. Tauris. Smiles, S., and S. Moser, eds. 2004. Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Solomon, J. 2001. The Ancient World in the Cinema. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Theodorakopoulos, E. 2010. Ancient Rome at the Cinema: Story and Spectacle in Rome and Hollywood. Bristol: Phoenix Press. Trafton, S. 2004. Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Whitehead, C. 2009. Museums and the Construction of Disciplines: Art and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London: Duckworth. Whitehouse, H. 1997. “Egyptomanias.” American Journal of Archaeology 101 (1): 158–61. Winkler, M. M., ed. 2004. Gladiator: Film and History. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. ———., ed. 2007. Troy: From Homer’s Iliad to Hollywood Epic. Oxford: Blackwell. Wyke, M. 1997. Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History. New York: Routledge.

Postscript

Mohamed Elshahed’s chapter provides a fitting postscript to this volume. The chapter—a reworking of a piece written in the aftermath of the events of January 2011 in Egypt—criticizes plans for the Grand Egyptian Museum currently being built next to the Giza pyramids. Elshahed’s critique takes issue with these plans both for their link to particular Egyptian and international policies and also for the way in which they serve to increase the historical alienation of Egypt’s population from the country’s past. Yet, Elshahed also suggests ways in which this alienation could cease, among them the use of the existing (and soon perhaps to be empty) Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as a space telling not only the story of Egyptology but also an institution relating the discipline’s complex political history. The nuanced history of Egyptological work could finally be related in the location where the recognition of the discipline as a (still latent) transformative force perhaps matters the most: Egypt. Mohamed Elshahed’s suggestion might never transpire, but it would be a powerful moment if it did.

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18 The Old and New Egyptian Museums Between Imperialists, Nationalists, and Tourists Mohamed Elshahed1 As Egypt undergoes political turmoil and social transformations that place questions of identity and history at their forefront, the Egyptian state and international agencies, such as UNESCO, carry on building two major museums to exhibit Egyptian artifacts and to narrate Egypt’s history. Put simply, it is business as usual. The Grand Egyptian Museum and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization are the latest additions to a series of museums in which the long Egyptian past has been used, manipulated, constructed, edited, consumed, displayed, and exploited. Over a century after the opening of the Egyptian Museum (actually the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, a point discussed further below) in central Cairo in 1902, the institutions currently concerned with establishing new museums for Egyptian antiquities seem uncritical of the history of Egyptology and its relationship to imperialist and nationalist projects. In his examination of the uses of archeology and museums by Europeans and Egyptian elites, Donald Reid labeled the Egyptian Museum as a “monument to Western Egyptology” (Reid 2002, 4). This chapter builds on Reid’s analysis to question how the Grand Egyptian Museum in particular, currently under construction to the west of Cairo in Giza, is any less of a monument to Western Egyptology, as equally removed from its social and cultural contexts as its predecessor. A MODERN MUSEUM FOR AN ANCIENT NATION? Since at least the period of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt (1798–1801), ancient Egyptian material heritage has been under the scrutiny of the Western gaze. As a result of the expedition, ideas about the paradigm of European history were revisited. Ancient Egypt became a European object of study, and Egyptology was slowly founded as a science exclusively dedicated to its understanding. Buildings, temples, statues, and a variety of objects were documented and often transported back to Europe. Meanwhile, as Donald Reid (2002, 3) observed, the contemporary context in which ancient Egyptian material heritage was discovered was airbrushed out of reality: the engraved frontispiece of the Napoleonic expedition’s Description de

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l’Égypte shows no sign of modern Egyptians, no Islamic monuments, and no reference to Egyptian cities. Contemporary Egyptians were not perceived as the inheritors of this ancient cultural history; rather, they came to be seen as a nuisance to it. They were savage, ignorant, and unworthy of the antiquities among which they lived. Travel writing from the early nineteenth century, such as Captain Raymond de Verninac Saint-Maur’s Voyage du Luxor (1835), clearly illustrates this point: France, snatching an obelisk from the ever-heightening mud of the Nile, or the savage ignorance of the Turks . . . earns a right to the thanks of the learned of Europe, to whom belong all the monuments of antiquity, because they alone know to appreciate them. Antiquity is a garden that belongs by natural right to those who cultivate and harvest its fruits (de Verninac Saint-Maur, quoted in Reid 2002, 1). Concurrent with the discovery of Egyptian antiquity, public museums were beginning to emerge across European cities. The Louvre opened its doors in 1793, and private collections owned by wealthy individuals had also been made accessible to the middle and upper classes in major European cities since the eighteenth century (Laveissière 2004, 7). Access to such collections by a greater public was seen as one of the engines of European and national enlightenment. Soon after the establishment of these spaces, artifacts from Egypt were showcased to a European public. Moreover, with the emergence of public museums came new approaches to art history that considered the views of the beholder rather than only the viewpoint of the artist. New fields of knowledge such as Egyptology became essential to deciphering the unfamiliar past because museums were spaces where national identities were negotiated through the ritual of viewing untouchable objects (Anderson 2003). This combination of events stimulated further European travel to, treasure hunting in, and exploration of destinations such as Egypt throughout the nineteenth century (Colla 2007). As the number of European travelers and explorers there increased, the rulers of Egypt, the family of Mehmed ʿAli, also established facilities, managed by Europeans, for the study and display of Egyptian material culture (Reid 2002, 39). This action appears to have been both a reaction to the European presence but also a way of employing European expertise as part of a process of translating modern statecraft to the Egyptian context. Mehmed ʿAli issued a decree in 1835 in which he stated “foreigners are destroying ancient edifices, extracting stones and other worked objects and exporting them to foreign countries.” However, the decree continued by stating that “it is also known that the Europeans have buildings dedicated to the care of antiquities; painted and inscribed stones, and other such objects are carefully conserved there and shown to the inhabitants of the country as well as to travelers who want to see them.” The decree went on to forbid the export of antiquities and “to designate in the capital a place to serve as

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a depot” and to display such objects to travelers who visited the country (decree quoted in Reid 2002, 21). Following this decree, both the ruling family and wealthy individuals collected items that would fill the museums that were subsequently established in Egypt. These new museums, mostly located in Cairo, were produced by the mediation of a nineteenth-century European understanding of Egyptian history within the context of the pseudo-nationalist efforts of the Mehmed ʿAli dynasty. This understanding still persists and divides the Egyptian past into four discrete entities: the pharaonic (whose artifacts are housed in the Egyptian Museum), the Greco-Roman (dealt with by the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria), the Coptic (linked to the Coptic Museum), and the Islamic (whose related collections are housed in what is now the Museum of Islamic Art). Until today, Egypt’s four leading museums each focus on one of these eras in the absence of an institution that crosses these constructed and discrete historical phases. The Egyptian Museum is emblematic of the elitist context in which these museums operate. This context is one in which the vast majority of contemporary Egyptians have consistently been ignored. Originally located in the then-wealthy Cairo district of Azbakiyya, it was later moved to multiple other locations within the privileged districts of the city. Its current Tahrir Square, salmon-colored edifice (the “monument to Western Egyptology” described by Reid, above) opened in 1902, in what was emerging as Cairo’s frontier in urban speculation and high-end development. Since then, the Museum’s history has been complex, tied to the politics of Egyptian archaeology described by Elliott Colla (2007) in Conflicted Antiquities. The Museum was the location where newly discovered objects were stored or displayed within Egypt, yet European (and also American) explorers dominated Egyptian archaeology as well as work within the Museum itself. The Egyptian population was, in general, alienated from its past. After the 1952 coup d’état led by the Free Officers, this dynamic did not undergo significantly long-lasting change. An Egyptian Ministry of Culture was established and, accordingly, pharaonic Egypt captured the national imagination until Nasser’s regime fully focused on Pan-Arabism (Crabbs 1975). During these brief early years, the state directly manipulated Egypt’s cultural history and material legacy to fit a nationalist narrative. Certain personalities and episodes were celebrated, such as Menes, the king who first unified Egypt at the beginning of the third millennium BC. This Nasserist celebration of the heritage of ancient Egypt was further illustrated in 1955 by the placing of a colossal statue of Ramses II at the heart of one of Cairo’s main squares, just outside its central train station. Meanwhile, films, exhibitions, photography books, home decorations, and fashion were inspired by ancient Egypt, and urban reconstruction meant that Tahrir Square became the center of Nasser’s Cairo. At the center of the Square sat the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, and the symbolism of its location was inescapable. However, the Nasserist Egyptianizing of this and other

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institutions responsible for the unearthing, study, and display of Egyptian antiquities did not translate into a fundamental reconsideration of the artifice of Egyptology or museums. While the Egyptian state took increasing control of the past, it merely began to establish a group of native middlemen in the place of direct foreign control (Reid 1985, 245). With the onset of Anwar al-Sadat’s post-1970 infitaa¯h. economic reforms (essentially linked to free-market ideals of economic “liberalization”), the Egyptian state, part of Sadat’s “corrective revolution,” was no longer the primary patron of culture in the country (Winegar 2006, 150). Spending on cultural institutions as had occurred in the time of Nasser was no longer possible. Yet, the state did not move to find new and alternative ways for cultural institutions to be financially independent. The centralization of cultural institutions—museums included—continued while budgets were tightly controlled and mostly went into paying wages rather than maintenance, programming, and development. Simultaneously, Egypt entered a new phase in the development of its tourist industry, which would became largely privatized, yet also dominated by a few businessmen close to the ruling regime (Gray 1998). The new business model was one of package tourism targeted at middle-income Europeans and Americans. Indeed, by this point, the economic gap between Egyptians and international tourists had widened significantly, privileging the international tourists who began to flock to Egypt with the advent of more accessible air travel. Resultantly, five-star hotels began to line the Nile, and tour operators bused flocks of international tourists between Cairo’s main attractions. The exclusion of the local population remained a prominent theme. Indeed, in 1979, when Jihan al-Sadat hosted a three-day fundraiser featuring a performance by Frank Sinatra beside the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx, guests were promised unrestricted access to ancient Egyptian sites, and the Egyptian Museum was closed to the public to allow for their private visit (BBC 1981). Few Egyptians were invited to this event, which carried the hallmarks of Egypt’s refashioned tourism industry. Making matters worse, in the following decades, the Egyptian Museum would become heavily guarded. It began to function more as an unmaintained storage facility catering to package tourists than as one of the most important public museums in Egypt and the world (Hawass 2006). Any institutional orientation toward Egyptian audiences was lost. A SECURE MUSEUM FOR WHOM? The Egyptian state has now been firmly in control of both archaeology and the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities for several decades. Since 2011, this control has been in the form of the Ministry of State for Antiquities; prior to that it was manifested in the work of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, a branch of the Ministry of Culture. Egypt’s first Minister of Antiquities,

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Zahi Hawass (previously the Secretary General of the Supreme Council, and originally appointed to the post in 2002), personified the state’s notion of appropriate Egyptian control over an ancient heritage previously dominated by Europeans until he left (or was perhaps forced to leave) the job only a few months after accepting it. This control has translated into securityoriented management of Egyptian artifacts to protect them from theft and vandalism. Meanwhile, lesser-known museums have been closed for long durations—sometimes over a decade—for renovations, and other Ministrycontrolled sites have been walled and severed from their urban contexts. For example, in sites such as the Museum in Tahrir Square, Egyptians must pass through a multilayered security system before entering. These practices have widened the gulf between Egyptians and Egypt’s historic sites and museums while simultaneously making them available to tourists. The state has not capitalized on Egypt’s material legacy as a cultural resource that could be central to discourses either on national identity and heritage or to stimulate domestic tourism and local economies. Instead, the main goals of the Supreme Council and the Ministry of State for Antiquities have been security, not accessibility, and mass tourism, not culture or education. In this context, the Egyptian Museum has been, and still is, a space of white privilege. Indeed, not unlike museums in Europe, the institution is about the white men whose names adorn the façade, who made possible the deciphering of (ancient Egyptian) civilization, and whose work left behind the objects on display inside. The Museum is also a space of white privilege in that the Museum management, working within the current tourism paradigm, sees its target audience to be European tourists. While no official policy forbids or limits the access of Egyptian nationals to the Museum, the institution lacks any active outreach programs: whether to increase numbers of Egyptian visitors, to engage with the Egyptian public, or to educate Egyptians about the contents of the Museum, the history of ancient Egypt, or the history of Egyptology. Few efforts have been made locally to increase Museum visitorship, while advertising campaigns, documentary television specials—and, before 2011, media appearances by Zahi Hawass himself— have mostly targeted European and American audiences and exploited ancient Egypt as a major international tourist attraction. The reduced entry fee for Egyptians (two Egyptian Pounds) is a passive effort that alone fails to make the Museum an educational or leisure destination for them. Furthermore, for Egyptians entering the Museum individually—and in particular young males—identification is requested at the security checkpoint. The Museum’s local audience is deemed a threat and undesirable. Indeed, the purpose of the Egyptian Museum is purely touristic. Personal observation shows that the Egyptian Museum’s demographic is primarily European middle- and upper-class families. With the exception of Egyptian art and archeology students, Egyptian families are seldom seen at the Museum. In particular, while the Museum keeps no detailed statistics of its visitors, it can be observed that the institution does not attract a sizable local

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middle-class audience, typically the target audiences of such museums in places like the United Kingdom (Longhurst et al. 2004, 121). This situation reflects the failure of Museum policy to attract locals rather than a reflection of local populations’ disinterest in museums, history, or culture. Egyptian museums in general have become fortified storehouses for badly labeled, disorganized artifacts consumed purely as objects with little historical significance besides their apparent old age. In the context of the current economic model, tourists are meant to be the prime consumers of these objects. Meanwhile, the displays in the Egyptian Museum, often lacking proper labels and basic information, neither tell a story nor convey a coherent narrative, national or otherwise. Instead, the organization of displays is sometimes by theme, such as the famous room of mummified animals, or by a period or a person, such as King Tutankhamun. What is lacking is not a manipulation of objects for the purpose of a nationalist narrative but rather evidence of any curatorial logic, let alone a reflective and critical perspective on the Museum and its contents. At present, the Museum’s organization is a priori. Egypt’s top public Museum passively demonstrates the greatness of ancient Egyptians simply by making some of their art available, but the Museum also demonstrates the near absence of the fields of public history, museum studies, and art history in today’s Egypt. Even the most studious visitor will not leave the Museum with a better understanding of the historical evolution of ancient Egyptians’ lives. Nor do displays confront the history of Egyptology, the modern history associated with not only the exploration but also the exploitation of ancient Egyptian art and its fluctuating position in the formations of national and colonial identities in Egypt and in Europe. Because Egyptian tourism is dominated by the package tour variety, most visitors experience the Museum as part of a large group herded around by a tour guide. These guides are trained to showcase certain pieces on display while simultaneously breezing by the rest. The antiquities authorities apparently fail to realize that the majority of tourists who visit the Museum have been to museums in their own countries, often with their own collections of Egyptian antiquities, which are often better maintained and differently organized. Therefore, many visitors leave the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities distraught by its poor state and out-of-date displays and organization. When it comes to Egypt’s museums and cultural sites, few visitors will be inclined to make a return visit. Most importantly, though, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, like others around the country, has little or no connection to the general public. During the uprising in Tahrir Square, when Egyptians formed a human shield around the Museum, it was to protect it from other Egyptians (elAref 2011). Those who see the historical and national value of museums are a minority due to state policies that have disenfranchised the public and reduced Egyptian culture into easy-to-consume clichés that target foreigners. Meanwhile, while he was still in office, Zahi Hawass’s power reached far beyond his area of expertise to include Egypt’s entire historical heritage

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from the pre-pharaonic period to the twentieth century and everything in between. Hawass was the de facto director of all of Egypt’s museums and historic sites (Vannini 2010). These museums and their organization, linked to a particularly Eurocentric understanding of Egyptian history, have not been reconfigured to fit an alternative narrative beyond the neat four-part division conceived a century earlier. The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities became known as The Egyptian Museum, as if the Greco-Roman, Coptic, and Islamic Museums are any less Egyptian. An Egyptian has colonized Egyptian heritage. Adding insult to injury, during the Tahrir Square protests of 9 March 2011, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities became known as a salakhana: a torture chamber. Due to its secure location, military police used the Museum as a command center where they held, interrogated, and tortured protesters (Mohsen 2011). The single most important museum in the country, containing Egypt’s most valuable artifacts, was transformed into a place where Egyptians were beaten and humiliated. TOWARD A NEW MISSION FOR THE EGYPTIAN MUSEUM To illustrate what Egypt’s own Museum of Egyptian antiquities could do to engage the public, the Egyptian Museum in Turin (Roccati 1991) offers a clear counterpoint. The displays in the Museum are simple and immaculate. The labeling is clear, and the organization is well conceived. The lighting and temperature controls are accurate. However, what is most impressive about the Egyptian Museum in Turin is its utility for the education of school children. On school trips to the institution, children are told interesting stories about the artifacts contained within it, about ancient Egyptian society and religion, and about the historical value of the material they view there in general. It appears as though Italian school children learn more about ancient Egyptian history than Egyptian school children do. Applying this example to Egypt, the relevant idea would not be to bring Egyptian school children to the country’s museums and direct them to learn one version of history or another. Currently, Egyptian school children’s brief encounter with the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities occurs in the form of the passive viewing of objects or in the drilling of certain clichés, such as the story of King Menes, which are to be accepted via the practice of rote memorization. However, applied in the Egyptian context, the Turin example would cultivate the values related to museums that are apparently not currently present in Egypt. Respect for history, historical objects, and buildings would be fostered in order to cultivate a sense of ownership, while museums could also act as spaces that stimulated the wider value of critical thinking. However, such values are currently very far from being implemented. The Egyptian Museum’s management has failed to maintain the institution’s facilities despite the large ticket revenues that tourists once provided. Basic management and maintenance issues such as cleaning and painting have not

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been implemented systematically. Indeed, peeling paint and missing artifacts replaced by hand-written notes stating in Arabic “under restoration” or “in a traveling exhibition” are inexcusable. However, these conditions also occur due to misguided state policy. The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities is in need of serious remodeling and expansion and a new management approach that aims at increasing visitors—both local and foreign. This process will surely be expensive, and this important institution of world heritage is therefore in need of a grand vision that will transform and update it appropriately. In this context, European (and, by extension, American) museums with significant collections of Egyptian antiquities still affirm Captain de Verninac Saint-Maur’s statement that it is to “the learned of Europe, to whom belong all the monuments of antiquity, because they alone know to appreciate them.” For instance, in terms of the size of its collection, the Egyptian Museum in Turin is second in the world after Egypt’s own, and Italian children are taught that this huge collection is part of their national cultural heritage. Busts of Italian explorers are displayed alongside descriptions of their contributions to Egyptology, and children learn not only about ancient Egypt but also about the Italians who unearthed the objects, studied them, brought them to Italy, and carefully displayed them. A similar positionality takes place at Berlin’s Neues Museum, where the bust of Nefertiti excavated by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft at Amarna shares a grand room with another bust placed in the shadows of one of the space’s corners. With its gaze fixated on the prized Egyptian female head, the bust of James Simon, the man who funded the excavations (see Gertzen this volume, for Simon and for references to Nefertiti), asserts his ownership of Nefertiti. Visiting these museums of Egyptian antiquity in Europe is therefore a reenactment of a colonial civilizing ritual that rests at the core of their mission. For example, the Neues Museum’s refusal to return or even loan Nefertiti’s bust, or the British Museum’s refusal to repatriate the Rosetta Stone to Egypt (two extremely well-known cases), both illustrate the contemporaneity of this conflict of interests regarding Egyptian antiquities. While Western museums disassociate their histories from the colonial past through which they acquired many of their treasured items from ancient lands, they continue to reformulate the same logic of safeguarding such treasures from the incompetence of locals in the place where such treasures were unearthed. This history has colored recent museum policy in Egypt. Zahi Hawass engaged in a theatrical tug-of-war with European and American institutions as he pursued the return of Egypt’s iconic objects by promoting Egyptian museums as proper facilities for their maintenance and display. However, by doing so, both Hawass and others appointed to key positions in charge of heritage, culture, and antiquities have failed to confront the systematic challenges and corruption facing Egypt’s heritage institutions. They have failed to fill the knowledge gaps in the institutions responsible for the exhibition of Egyptian antiquities, largely due to a reliance on international experts and consultants. For example, there is currently neither an institute of museology

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nor a world-class monument conservation school training Egyptian technicians (although a museology institute was recently discussed and the new Grand Egyptian Museum will have conservation labs (JICA 2012)). Egypt’s tourism institutes instruct service and hospitality to students while lagging behind on the matters of history, art history, and archeology that are often central to the Egyptian tourist experience. All these missed opportunities for development have meant that international institutions, experts, museums, and missions have continued to be favored over Egyptian archeology students and other local professionals in the field when work is carried out. An appropriate local solution to the problems of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities has not been formulated. THE GRAND EGYPTIAN MUSEUM In 2002, a foundation stone was laid near the pyramids of Giza, far from the center of Cairo, to mark the decision to initiate construction of the Grand Egyptian Museum. The new Museum is the Egyptian state’s response to European museums’ claims that Egypt is unable to care for iconic objects. Meanwhile, the new Museum’s official Web site proclaims that its establishment announces “that Egypt is committed to build a significant cultural monumental building, and sending a global message that the Egyptian Civilization will always be a source of enlightenment to the whole world” (Grand Egyptian Museum 2013). The intended audience of this new project is clear, and it is not Egyptians. The new Museum’s Web site is only in English, and only minimal information about the project is available in Arabic. Indeed, the Egyptian public who live and work near the current Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in downtown Cairo learned about the building of the new Museum when, in 2006, the red granite colossus of Ramses II that has adorned central Cairo since 1955 was removed to a storage facility at the city’s edge in preparation for its eventual display at the new institution (elAref 2006). Yet, public museums are fundamentally tied to their metropolitan contexts. The mere visibility of Paris’s Louvre pyramid and inside-out Pompidou Center or New York’s Metropolitan Museum within their urban settings is as important as the contents of these world-famous buildings. The current Museum of Egyptian Antiquities is forever associated with its Tahrir Square location, especially after the well-photographed and documented protests that took place at its doorstep in early 2011 and beyond. Why construct the new Grand Egyptian Museum outside of this urban context? Could it have been possible to invest in renovating and expanding the Egyptian Museum at its current location? Placing the Grand Egyptian Museum in a desert location outside Cairo’s city center serves the current priorities of security and tourist exclusivity. The winning design by the Irish architectural firm Heneghan Peng is depicted in published renderings as a grand building in the middle of a desert

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(Heneghan Peng n.d.). However, a new extension of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities could have been built directly adjacent to the existing building in the heart of the city and therefore have catalyzed downtown Cairo’s urban regeneration. A large swath of land in the heart of Tahrir Square was available immediately adjacent to the current Museum building. In 1947, the army barracks along the Nile south of the Museum were demolished to eventually make way for the Nile Hilton hotel (currently being remodeled as the Ritz-Carlton) and the Arab League. The parade grounds for the barracks, the area immediately south of the Museum (currently a construction site for underground parking), became public land and were transformed in 1954 into a public garden at the heart of the city. Parts of this land were taken away and made into a bus station, then a parking lot, during the era of Anwar al-Sadat. Meanwhile, for much of Husni Mubarak’s presidency, this large area was fenced off and remade as a permanent construction site, although little progress was visible after over a decade. The land was still available (Elshahed 2011a). However, building an extension to the Museum in Tahrir Square itself would have clashed with the Mubarak-era anti-urban policies that made such permanent construction sites possible. Mubarak’s governments favored exclusive gated developments and desert sprawl over integrated urban projects (Sims 2010, 82). As a result, when rebuilding elite urban institutions, the regime favored removing such buildings from their original contexts. The earliest example of these policies was the 1985 decision to build Cairo’s new Opera House in a gated campus on the island of Zamalek (located on the Nile in Cairo) rather than rebuild it in its original location at the heart of Cairo’s Opera Square, by then no longer an elite part of the city. The Grand Egyptian Museum follows this alienating precedent. The new Museum is located at the edge of Cairo in a location, near the Giza Plateau, currently surrounded by unplanned or poorly planned residential areas, with no civic center to speak of. Costing over 550 million dollars, the project has been funded with over 350 million dollars in loans that Egyptians will have to pay back for decades (MENA 2011). Yet, who is this new Museum’s main beneficiary? In the context of Cairo’s current insufficient public transit system, and without plans to have the city’s Metro reach the new Museum by the time of its scheduled opening in 2015, Egyptians will be further alienated from their own ancient heritage. For many, the Museum will be out of sight and thus out of mind. The project fails to incorporate a larger urban planning program that will create a new civic center and insert some much-needed structure to Giza’s informal urban periphery. Creating a civic urban museum experience is not the objective of this project. Meanwhile, the fate of the existing Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, a monument in its own right, is unclear. There has been no official statement as to what will occupy the Tahrir Museum (as it is now referred to in order to distinguish it from the Grand Egyptian Museum). Public interest was never taken into account when planning this move. The state treated the new Museum as a capitalist development project, a kind of shopping mall or amusement facility for antiquities rather than a civic, national, or cultural

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center. The available plan published on the Museum’s Web site shows a touristic complex of restaurants and gardens walled and secluded from its urban context (Grand Egyptian Museum 2013). Furthermore, the ostentatious name of the “Grand Egyptian Museum” reinforces colonial divisions of Egyptian history, equating antiquity with Egyptianness at the expense of Egypt’s intertwining heritages. In the last sixty years, most Egyptians have experienced heritage either as it was fed to them by the state or as a tertiary, unimportant element of life, particularly given the extent of poverty in the country with “60 percent of households earning between LE 740 to LE 1, 350 per month” (Sims 2010, 41). As the plans for the Grand Egyptian Museum emphasize, it will be hard to engage this disenfranchised population if such institutions continue to function with a security-minded, touristcentric approach that incorporates no programs and initiatives to attract the public to inaccessible peripheral locations. Under Husni Mubarak’s rule, two men, Faruq Husni and Zahi Hawass, single-handedly dominated matters of Egyptian culture, heritage, and archaeology. All other positions in the institutions managed by the Ministry of Culture and the Supreme Council of/Ministry of State for Antiquities have become merely symbolic and possess neither power nor independence in decision making. All other positions, including those at the head of various museums, follow centrally conceived orders prescribed by the personal preferences of the minister in charge. The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, alongside the rest of Egypt’s many museums, is in serious need of an institutional overhaul that divides powers, insures financial sustainability, allows museums to be integral parts of the community, and guarantees the safety but also continued relevance of Egypt’s heritage and cultural memory. Therefore, the case against the plans for the Grand Egyptian Museum is not limited to the choice of its location. Rather, the critique presented here is rooted in the missed opportunity presented by the project to revisit the managerial system that operates within Egypt’s museums in general. These museums have latent potential to attract visitors from Egypt and abroad, generate income, regenerate their urban contexts, and occupy a key position in Egypt’s current political debates. In the case of the Grand Egyptian Museum, it is unclear whether the institution will have a director with independent authority or if there will be a board of trustees with a mandate to make decisions. In light of Egypt’s unfolding desire for revolutionary change, the Grand Egyptian Museum could have led the way for reform within Egypt’s museum and culture sectors. CONCLUSION In 2010, the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibition was hosted at the De Young Museum in San Francisco (Winn 2008). The entry ticket was over thirty dollars; thousands flocked to the institution and patiently stood in line. The exhibition began by having visitors entering a

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rather claustrophobic room with dim lights to watch a short video starring Zahi Hawass. After meandering through the exhibition, one was confronted with a colossal four-meter-tall image of Hawass in his typical Indiana Jones costume. Under the portrait were books by Hawass and Suzanne Mubarak, in addition to a collection of souvenirs. Needless to say, the overpriced exhibition under delivered. While it promised an encounter with King Tut, the misleading promotional material never made clear that the golden sarcophagus promised in posters was in fact a miniature rather than the real thing. The traveling exhibition was as much about Hawass as it was about King Tut. Not unlike James Simon’s relationship to the bust of Nefertiti, or the various Egyptologists whose names adorn the Egyptian Museum, Hawass was asserting his relationship to the ancient Egyptian objects on display. The dominance of individuals such as Hawass over matters of Egyptology or Egypt’s antiquities museums has not remedied the Western orientation of Egyptology. The Egyptian public continues to be marginalized. Even Egypt’s other new museum, the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, has not earned its title as a “National” institution: the Egyptian public has not participated in its making, and in the two decades since the project begun, there has been no public discourse about it. Indeed, the touristic commodification of Egyptian heritage has had dire consequences for Egypt’s material culture. Anything that cannot be packaged easily for touristic consumption has not been studied, documented, or protected. While there are some initiatives in this direction—such as the American Research Center in Cairo’s Museum Registrar Project to digitally inventory and list collection content at the Egyptian Museum—such initiatives are not part of a comprehensive holistic vision for the entire museum sector (ARCE 2013). International agencies cooperating with the Egyptian state have turned a blind eye to corruption and lack of transparency. Neoliberal economic policies, implemented in cooperation with the Egyptian government, have further alienated Egyptians from their past. As protesters continue to demand social and economic justice, a cross section of Egyptian society representing religious and class communities have come together on multiple occasions in Egypt’s public squares. A shared sense of belonging and solidarity exhibited at such gatherings developed despite the minimal appropriation of Egyptian historical heritage by the state to enshrine a sense of national community. While there are factions that relate to Egypt’s past (and particularly its ancient past) differently, there appears to be a dominant middle ground in Egyptian society eager to embrace a diverse yet unified Egyptian understanding of the collective past. Since the initial protests of 2011, there has been a visible increase in Egyptian families visiting the Egyptian Museum, which they rediscovered only by participating in the protests at the Museum’s doorstep. Downtown Cairo is also witnessing an increased interest from the middle class, which has long abandoned the area. Egypt’s diverse museums are therefore not

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only essential for Egyptians as potential recreational spaces but also as cultural nodes where citizens can contemplate the past, discover shared history, reclaim and reconfigure national identity, and develop critical views of the objects and the institutional settings in which they are placed. For a country at a transitional and critical moment in its history, museums can function as places of artistic and political inspiration. As Elliott Colla states: “during the early days of the French Revolution, Ancient Egypt served as inspiration for a secular symbolic order designed to replace the church” (2007, 21). Yet, what role could Egypt’s ancient past play in Egypt? The plans for the Grand Egyptian Museum are the product of Mubarakera cultural policies, which view Egyptian antiquities as a commodity in the service of a neoliberal economy. Yet, despite political turmoil, the museum project and the ministries involved continue without reconsideration of their work. Meanwhile, more recent events foreshadow the continuation of Mubarak-era economic and cultural policies, which have asserted a topdown dominance of all aspects of culture and economy. It is yet to be seen if the state, in light of the events of the revolution but also the subsequent collapse of tourism, will reconfigure the relationship between Egypt’s material heritage and Egyptian society. Concepts such as the need for the integration of museums and historic sites into their local social contexts in order to safeguard them have yet to infiltrate the state’s top echelons, although planners, archeologists, and conservators have discussed them since the revolution began. In a 2012 New York Times interview with Hawass, he stated: “I’m not a politician, I’m an archaeologist for everyone. What is more important, above anything else, is not me or the people, it’s the monuments” (Halime 2012). Ultimately, however, Egyptian antiquity will only be protected when a two-century-old Egyptological tradition regarding the position of contemporary Egyptians vis-à-vis ancient Egypt is reversed, allowing all Egyptians access to their history. Although there have been disparate episodes since the 1950s in which some have attempted to bridge the gap between ancient and contemporary Egypt, they have failed. The construction of the Grand Egyptian Museum is already underway, and making some drastic policy decisions to reintegrate ancient Egypt into the lives of Egyptians today could make it into a revolutionary museum. The Tahrir Museum, however, may be saved by finally realizing its potential as a Museum of Egyptology focusing not on the artifacts of ancient Egypt but on the science and cultural politics that surrounded them for the past two centuries.

NOTE 1. This chapter expands upon an article first published online on Jadaliyya (Elshahed 2011b).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, R. G. W., ed. 2003. Enlightening the British: Knowledge, Discovery and the Museum in the Eighteenth Century. London: British Museum Press. ARCE. (2011) 2013.“Revolution at the Egyptian Museum: Collections Management in the 21st Century.”Originally published in print form elsewhere. Accessed 5 January 2014. www.arce.org/main/revolution-egyptian-museum El-Aref, N. 2006. “Farewell to Ramses.” Al-Ahram Weekly On-Line 796. Accessed 5 January 2014. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/796/fr2.htm ———. 2011. “UNESCO Director General Tours the Egyptian Museum.”Ahram Online. Accessed 5 January 2014. http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/ 9/44/14301/Heritage/Museums/UNESCO-director-general-tours-the-EgytianMuseum.aspx BBC. 1981. Why Was Cairo Calm? BBC television documentary. Accessed 5 January 2014. www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/sadats_dat Colla, E. 2007. Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Crabbs, J. 1975. “Politics, History, and Culture in Nasser’s Egypt.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 6 (4): 386–420. Elshahed, M. 2011a. “Tahrir Square, a Collection of Fragments.” The Architect’s Newspaper (online). Accessed 5 January 2014. http://archpaper.com/news/arti cles.asp?id=5201 ———. 2011b. “The Case Against the Grand Egyptian Museum.” Jadaliyya (online). Accessed 5 January 2014. www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/2152/thecase-against-the-grand-egyptian-museum Grand Egyptian Museum. 2013. The Grand Egyptian Museum. Accessed 5 January 2014. www.gem.gov.eg Gray, M. 1998. “Economic Reform, Privatization and Tourism in Egypt.” Middle Eastern Studies 34 (2): 91–112. Halime, F. 2012. “Revolution Brings Hard Times for Egypt’s Treasures.” New York Times (online). Accessed 5 January 2014. www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/world/ middleeast/revolution-brings-hard-times-for-egypts-treasures.html?_r=0 Hawass, Z. 2006. “Dig Days: Egyptian Museums.” Al-Ahram Weekly On-Line 818. Accessed 5 January 2014. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/818/he3.htm Heneghan Peng. n.d. Heneghan Peng Architects: The Grand Egyptian Museum. Accessed 5 January 2014. www.hparc.com/work/the-grand-egyptian-museum/ JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency). 2012. The Project for the Conservation Center in the Grand Egyptian Museum. Accessed 5 January 2014. www. jica.go.jp/project/english/egypt/0702247/index.html Laveissière, S. 2004. Musée du Louvre. Paris: Musée du Louvre. Longhurst, B. J., G. Bagnall, and M. Savage. 2004. “Audiences, Museums and the English Middle Class.” Museum and Society 2 (2), 104–124. MENA (Middle East News Agency). 2011. “Grand Egyptian Museum to Open on Schedule in 2015.” Egypt Independent (online). Accessed 5 January 2014. www. egyptindependent.com/news/grand-egyptian-museum-schedule-open-2015 Mohsen, A. A. 2011. “Egypt’s Museums: From Egyptian Museum to ‘Torture Chamber’.” Egypt Independent (online). Accessed 5 January 2014. www.egypt independent.com/news/egypts-museums-egyptian-museum-torture-chamber Reid, D. M. 1985. “Indigenous Egyptology: The Decolonization of a Profession?” Journal of the American Oriental Society 105 (2): 233–46. ———. 2002. Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Roccati, A. 1991. The Egyptian Museum in Turin. Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zeccadello Stato.

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Sims, D. 2010. Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Vannini, S. 2010. Inside the Egyptian Museum with Zahi Hawass. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Verninac Saint-Maur, R-J-B, de. 1835. Voyage du Luxor en Égypte: entrepris par ordre du roi pour transporter, de Thèbes à Paris, l’un des obélisques de Sésostris. Paris: Arthus Bertrand. Winegar, J. 2006. Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Winn, S. 2008. “King Tut to Make Triumphal Return to S. F.” San Francisco Chronicle (online). Accessed 5 January 2014. www.sfgate.com/news/article/King-Tut-tomake-triumphal-return-to-S-F-3266458.php

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Contributors

Andrew Bednarski is a historian and Egyptologist working for the American Research Center in Egypt. He is the editor of The Lost Manuscript of Frédéric Cailliaud: Arts and Crafts of the Ancient Egyptians, Nubians, and Ethiopians (The American University in Cairo Press 2014), a nineteenth-century encyclopedia on ancient and modern Nile civilizations. William Carruthers will take up a Max Weber postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in September 2014. He recently submitted his doctoral dissertation (“Egyptology, Archaeology and the Making of Revolutionary Egypt, c. 1925–1958”) to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Debbie Challis is the Audience Development Officer at the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. Her research deals with the reception of Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome within visual culture, as well as the use of the ancient past in ideas about race and social class. She has written two books: From the Harpy Tomb to the Wonders of Ephesus: British Archaeologists in the Ottoman Empire 1840–1880 (Bloomsbury 2008) and The Archaeology of Race: The Eugenic Ideas of Francis Galton and Flinders Petrie (Bloomsbury 2013). Jasmine Day is an anthropologist and teacher at Curtin University, Perth, Australia. Author of The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the Englishspeaking World (Routledge 2006), she studies the sociocultural history of Egyptian mummies in popular culture and that history’s impact upon museum visitor responses to mummy exhibits. Wendy Doyon is currently writing a PhD dissertation on the social history of archaeology in modern Egypt for the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Contributors

Mohamed Elshahed is a Cairo-based scholar and researcher completing his doctoral dissertation in the Middle East Studies Department at New York University. His dissertation, Revolutionary Modernism? Architecture and the Politics of Transition in Egypt, 1936–1967, focuses on architecture and urban planning in Egypt during the period of political transition around the 1952 coup d’état. Mohamed has a bachelor of architecture from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and a master in architecture studies from MIT. Marwa Elshakry teaches history of science at Columbia University. Her first book, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2013. David Gange has been Lecturer in History at the University of Birmingham since 2010. He is author of Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford 2013) and editor with Michael Ledger-Lomas of Cities of God: The Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge 2013). He is currently working on a monograph about new visions of death after 1890 and a beginner’s guide to nineteenth-century Britain. Thomas L. Gertzen studied Egyptology and the history of science. His PhD, entitled École de Berlin und “Goldenes Zeitalter” (1882–1914) der Ägyptologie als Wissenschaft, das Lehrer-Schüler-Verhältnis von Ebers, Erman und Sethe, appeared in 2013. He is currently engaged in research projects relating to the history of Egyptology at UBC, Vancouver, and the University of Leipzig, Germany. Juan Carlos Moreno García is senior researcher at the CNRS (University Paris IV-Sorbonne). He received his PhD (1995) from the École pratique des hautes études de Paris, has published extensively on pharaonic administration and socioeconomic history and has also organized several conferences on these topics. Janet Gunn is the granddaughter of the Egyptologist Battiscombe Gunn and the daughter of the physicist J. B. (Iain) Gunn. She is currently working on her family’s history. Stephanie Moser is a specialist in the representation and reception of the past. Her publications address the ways in which knowledge about the past has been constructed through museum displays, exhibitions, illustrations, and artworks. She argues for the epistemological significance of non-academic/scholarly modes of inquiry, and her main books include Ancestral Images (Cornell 1998), Wondrous Curiosities (Chicago 2006), and Designing Antiquity (Yale 2012).

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Gabriel Moshenska is Lecturer in Public Archaeology at UCL Institute of Archaeology. His research interests include the history of archaeology, material cultures of childhood, the archaeology of twentieth-century conflict, Egyptian mummies in European cultural history, and the early reception of Milton’s theological writings. Recent publications include The Archaeology of the Second World War (Pen and Sword Archaeology 2013). Hussein Omar is a doctoral student in the history of modern Egypt at Merton College, Oxford. His research focuses on the private family archives of a number of Egyptian nationalist figures of the early twentieth century. Donald M. Reid is Professor Emeritus of History (Middle East) at Georgia State University and Affiliate Faculty, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, University of Washington. His books include Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (University of California Press 2002) and Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge University Press 1990). His current research is on issues of archaeology and Egyptian identity since World War I. Christina Riggs is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History and World Art Studies, University of East Anglia. She is the author of Unwrapping Ancient Egypt (Bloomsbury 2014). Kathleen L. Sheppard is Assistant Professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology in the History and Political Science Department. She is the author of The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman’s Work in Archaeology (Lexington Books 2013). Alice Stevenson is the Curator of the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. Her research and publications have primarily utilized museum collections and archives to explore a range of themes in prehistoric archaeology, including burial rituals, social identities, long-distance exchange and material engagement, but also as a basis for studying the history of the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. Steve Vinson is Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University Bloomington. He specializes in Egyptian literature of the Greco-Roman period.

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Index

Abaza, Fikri 161 Abt, Jeffrey 5, 8 Abu el-Haj, Nadia 6 Abusir and Saqqara (conference) 57 Abydos 122 Academy (journal) 228 Actor-Network Theory 131 aesthetics 227–39; and Egyptology 51–2 Aitken, Georgina 122–3 Al-Ahram (newspaper) 161–2, 166 Allen, Grant 66 Allenby, Lord 165 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence 228, 250 Al-Alsun, Cairo (School of Languages) 188, 191 Amarna (archaeological site) 34–6, 70, 262 Amarna tablets 40 American Research Center in Egypt 83–4; Museum Registrar Project run by the 266 anatomy 201, 204–7; see also mummies Ancient Egypt (journal) 124 Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (book) 53 Ancient Egypt: A Social History (book) 53, 58 Anis, Muhammad 180–1 Anthropological Society of London 20 anthropology: comparative anthropology 25; history of 19–30, 66; material anthropology 21–2, 26; relationship of anthropology to Egyptology 19–30, 66–8; social anthropology 27, 68 Antinoopolis 237 antiquarian book market, Cairo 177, 180

antiquarianism 90 anti-Semitism 231–2 archaeology: and the state 133–4; classroom training in 113–25, 134–5; gender in the history of archaeology and Egyptology 113–25, 174–83; the field in the history of archaeology 113–14; history of 1–13, 19–30, 113; male heroism in the history of archaeology 113, 115; relationship of archaeology to Egyptology 19–30, 37–8, 50–60 architecture: and Egyptology 40 “archival turn,” the 179 archives: at ʿAbdin Palace, Cairo 174–6; Daftirkhane, Cairo 174–5; Dar al-Mahfuzat, Cairo 174–5; Dar al-Wathaʾiq al-Misriyya (National Archives of Egypt) 175–7, 179–81, 183; epistemic status of sorts of archive 174–83; in Egypt 174–83 Arnold, Olney 39, 40 Assmann, Jan 71 Assur (Iraq) 42 Assyriology 50, 58 astronomy 72 Aswan dams: Aswan Dam 67, 157; Aswan High Dam 20, 167 audiences and Egyptology 64, 201–12 Aumonier, William 164 Balfour, Henry 26–7 Banks, Dorothy Georges 106–7 baraka (religious authority) 147 Barakat Pasha, Fathallah 174–5 Baring, Evelyn (Lord Cromer) 134, 189 Barsanti, Alexandre 40

276

Index

Belzoni, Giovanni Battista 204 Benaki Museum of Greek Civilization, Athens 234–5, 237–8 Bennett, Tony 74, 131 Bent, Algernon 229 Berlin ancient Egyptian dictionary see Wörterbuch biblical narratives, Egyptological connection to 52, 209, 250 biography 131 Birch, Samuel 207–8, 210 Blackman, Aylward Manley 23–5, 68 Blackman, Winifred 25, 68 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna 96, 99 Bloch, Marc 69 Bologna Process 59 Borchardt, Ludwig 39–40, 45, 70 boundary work 7; see also disciplinarity Breasted, James Henry 5, 72, 165 British Archaeological Association 203, 209–10 British Association for the Advancement of Science 23 British Empire Exhibition, Wembley 163–4 British Museum 4–5, 36, 87, 108, 117, 120, 135, 189, 207–8, 232, 234, 238–9, 245, 249–50, 262; 1972 Tutankhamun exhibition at 4, 169–70; Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Ancient Egypt exhibition at 232–4, 245–6; Hadrian: Empire and Conflict exhibition at 237 British School of Archaeology in Egypt 22, 26, 28, 124–5 Broome, Myrtle 122 Brugsch, Émile 103 Brunton, Guy 121–2 Brunton, Winifred 121–2 Budge, E. A. Wallis 108, 135, 189 Bulaq Museum, Cairo 103, 161, 190 Bunsen, Carl Josias von 72 Burton, Sir Frederic 229 Burton, Harry 165 Bury, J. B. 69 Byzantine Museum, Athens 236 Byzantine studies 236 Cailliaud, Frédéric 81–4 Cailliaud’s: Recherches (or Arts and Crafts) 83–4, 89–93, 132–4 Cairo: Downtown Cairo 257, 266; Tahrir Square 257, 260–1, 263–4

Calverley, Amice Mary 122 capitulations, the (Ottoman treaty privileges) 143 Carnarvon, Lady 165 Carnarvon, Lord 157, 159–60, 166–7 Carter, Howard 6, 157–62, 164–7 Cayce, Edgar 136 celibacy 216–18, 221–2; see also sexuality Černý, Jaroslav 29 Champollion, Jean-François 187 Chaney, Jr., Lon 216 Charing Cross Hospital, London 205–6 chronicles, Arabic 190–1 cinema 215–23, 244–5, 247–8 City Philosophical Society see Philosophical Society of London civilization: ideas about 22, 193–5 class 134, 141–53 classics 66, 90, 206; Classical period and Greco-Roman Egypt 227–39 Colla, Elliott 7–8, 12 collecting 82, 144, 204–5; in anthropology 22; in Egyptology 53 collections: as a teaching tool in archaeology and Egyptology 118–20 colonialism 8, 130–3, 185, 187, 260, 262 concessions, archaeological 34–46, 53, 70, 144–5, 147 conversaziones 203–5 Cook, Thomas (and Son, Ltd.) 21 Coolidge, Calvin 165 Coptic Museum, Cairo 257, 261 Crompton, Winifred 123–5, 134–5 Crowley, Aleister 96–109, 135–7 Cruikshank, George 206 Crum, Walter Ewing 36 Crystal Palace, Sydenham 249–50 cultural identity 244 Dar al-Kutub (Egyptian National Library, Cairo) 180 Dar al- ʿUlum (Teachers’ Training College, Cairo) 195 Davis, Theodore 165 Dendera 151; Dendera Zodiac 188, 191 Deny, Jean 175 Derry, Douglas 163 Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft 40, 42, 262 diffusionism 26, 69 disciplinarity 20, 50–60, 70, 146, 185 discourse 8, 131, 136

Index doppelganger, concept of the 215, 217–22, 247–8 Doxiadis, Euphrosyne C. 234–7 Doyle, Arthur Conan 216 Doyle’s: “Lot No. 249” 216; “The Ring of Thoth” 216 Drioton, Étienne 167 Ebers, Georg 34, 70, 230, 245 economy, political-economy: global economic transformations from 1750 onward 143–6 Edwards, Amelia 117–34, 229–31, 236, 245 Edwards, I. E. S. 4, 159, 168–70 Edwards Professorship of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology (or Edwards Professor of Egyptology) see University College London Egypt: 1919 revolution in 151, 159; 1922 granting of nominal independence to by Britain 157, 159; 1952 revolution in 167, 180, 257; 1956 move to full independence 157, 167; antiquities legislation in 12, 133–4, 161, 188–9, 256–7; British occupation of 135, 147, 189; economy of, economic policy in 11, 143–6, 255–67; educational curricula in 194–5; governance of 7–8, 11–12, 69–70, 133–4, 143–6, 159, 185, 187, 189, 255–67; independence struggle in 158–9; January 2011 revolution and aftermath 11, 181–3, 255, 260–1, 263, 265–7; labor in 143; nationalism and the writing of Egyptian history 175–6; nationalism in 7, 45, 70, 143–5, 147, 164, 195, 257, 266–7; relationship with Ottoman Empire 175–6, 185–7; planning policies in 255–67; role of Egyptians in, and their interactions with, Egyptology 141–53, 157–71, 174–83, 185–96, 255–67; sovereignty over 185–6; ʿUrabi revolution, 1882 147 Egypt at its Origins (conference) 57 Egypt Exploration Fund 26, 145, 148, 189; see also Egypt Exploration Society

277

Egypt Exploration Society 35, 41–4, 46, 53, 70, 122, 134; see also Egypt Exploration Fund Egyptian Antiquities Service 42, 121, 134, 144–5, 147, 149, 157, 161, 167, 186, 189–90 Egyptian Gazette (newspaper) 162 Egyptian Hall, London 204, 228 Egyptian Literary Association 209 Egyptian Museum, Berlin 34–5, 40; see also Neues Museum, Berlin Egyptian Museum, Cairo see Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, Cairo Egyptian Museum, Turin 261–2 Egyptian University, Cairo (now Cairo University) 195 Egyptological exceptionalism 51, 54–5, 58, 60, 64 Egyptology and the Social Sciences (book) 51, 58 Egyptology Today (book) 51 Egyptomania 242–51 Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art, 1730–1930 (exhibition) 243 empire 38, 41, 45, 69, 135, 143–6, 157, 185–7, 255 empiricism in Egyptology and archaeology 129, 136 encyclopedic projects 5, 25, 81–93, 132–4, 209–10, 246–7 English Patient, The (movie) 50 Engelbach, Rex 121–2 Entente Cordiale, the: and its role in Egyptian antiquities legislation 189 Erman, Johann Peter Adolf 34–46, 57, 70 eroticism 136 esotericism, non-mainstream belief systems: and Egyptology 96–109, 135–7, 187 essentialism 136 “Eternal Egypt,” concept of 52, 57, 64 ethnicity 235–6, 246 Evans, John 22 evolution: cultural evolution 22, 25; social evolution 25 excavation: method in 149; seasons in Egypt 159 experts, expertise (particularly in the Egyptian context) 12, 70–1, 129, 133, 174, 189, 256, 262

278

Index

facticity, fact making 130–1, 135–6 Fahmy, Khaled 180, 183 Farr, Florence 99–101 Faruq, King 167 Faulkner, Raymond 123 Fayum, the 228 Fayum portraits see mummies: mummy portrait panels feedback loops in the construction of knowledge 244 fieldwork 141–53; living arrangements in the field 150–1 Fisher, Clarence 148–52 folksongs 147 Foreign Office (Britain) 166–7 Foucault, Michel 20, 73, 130–1 Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Berlin 34–5 Fuʾad I, King 174–5 Fustat 182 Galison, Peter 10 Gange, David 9 Gardiner, Alan Henderson 28, 34–46, 68–70, 96, 103–4, 108 Garrod, Dorothy 115 Garstang, John 23, 26, 68 Gautier, Théophile 216, 221 Gautier’s: Le Roman de la Momie (novel) 216, 221 Gayer-Anderson, Major R. G. 229 gender 134, 146, 174–83; see also archaeology; see also memory Gentleman’s Magazine, The 206 geology 72, 118 Getty Villa, Malibu 227 Gieryn, Thomas F. 7 Giza 146, 149, 152, 264; expedition of Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to 148, 152 Glanville, Stephen 119 Gliddon, George Robbins 129 global histories 185–96 global politics 185–6 go-betweens and power brokers 141–53 Graeco-Roman Museum, Alexandria 257, 261 Graf, Theodor 230 Grand Egyptian Museum, Giza 255, 263–5, 267 Grapow, Hermann 38–9, 46 Grenfell, Bernard 23

Griffith, Francis Llewellyn 19–30, 36, 65–6, 70 Guardian, The (newspaper) 233 Gunn, Battiscombe George 27–8, 96–109, 135–7 Gunn’s: The Instruction of Ptah-hotep 100–1 Günther, Hans F. K. 231–2, 236 Habachi, Labib 4 Haggard, Henry Rider 135–6, 217, 221 Haggard’s: Cleopatra 217; “Smith and the Pharaohs” 216–17, 220–1 Hamdi, Salah 163 Hamilton, Duke of (Alexander) 210–11 Hammer Studios 216, 220, 222 Hammer Studios’s mummy movies: Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971) 216; The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964) 216; The Mummy (1959) 216, 220; The Mummy’s Shroud (1966) 216 Hanna, Murqus 162 Harris, Frieda 107–8 Hassan, Ahmad 193 Hawara 227–30 Hawass, Zahi 179–80, 182, 258–62, 265–7 Haworth, Jesse 124, 229 Hekekyan, Joseph 88–93, 188 Hellenic identity, Hellenicity 234–7 Hellenocentrism 233 Heneghan Peng 263–5 Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 100–2, 135–6 Hierakonpolis Expedition 53 higher education reform and private enterprise 59 High Priest (film character) 215–22, 247 Al-Hilal (newspaper) 166 historicism 192–5 history: and construction of knowledge 64–75, 129; Annales School of 69; cultural history 9, 66–7, 179, 242; cultural histories of Egypt 177; empiricism in 178–9; historical consciousness of the Egyptian past in Egypt 190–6; history and sociology of science 9; labor history 174–83; microhistory 58; reception histories and Egyptology 64–5, 90;

Index relationship of history to memory 174–83; relationship of social and economic history with Egyptology 50–60; relationship of history with World War I 69; social history 179; universal histories 190–95; Whiggish history 131, 178, 201 Hogarth, David 65 Hunt, Arthur 23 Husni, Faruq 265 Hussein, Taha 195 Imperial German Institute for Egyptian Archaeology 35, 39–40 imperialism see empire Independent and Rectified Rite, the 101 Indiana Jones 51 infitāḥ, the (opening of Egypt to private investment in the 1970s) 258 Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale 53, 189 interdisciplinarity 2, 9–10; and Egyptology 50–60, 64–75 international agencies 255, 266; see also UNESCO International Congress of Egyptology 57 Ismaʿil, Khedive 144, 147 Jay, Griffin 217, 219 Jeffreys, David 88–9; Jeffreys’s: The Survey of Memphis (book) 88–93 Jones, Owen 249–50 Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, The 43, 46, 70, 107, 124 Journal of Egyptian History 3 Kamal Pasha, Ahmad 163, 189–90, 193, 195 Kamil, Jill 4 Karloff, Boris 215–17, 219, 222 Karnak 182, 188 Kawin, Bruce 218–19 Kharis (film character) 216–19 Knox, Robert 67 labor: relations in Egyptology and archaeology 141–53, 174–83, 187–8; see also history Lacau, Pierre 42–3, 45, 70, 161–2, 164–5

279

Lahun 121–2 Lampson, Miles 166–7 Lane, Edward William 84–6 Lane’s: Description of Egypt 84–6, 89–93 Latour, Bruno 9, 74, 131 learned societies, relationship to Egyptology 53, 209–10, 246–7 Leemans, Conrad 207–8 Lehner, Mark 136 Lepsius, Karl Richard 34, 70, 72, 187–8 Livingstone, David 113 Al-Liwaʾ (newspaper) 160 Loon, Hendrick van 69 Louvre, the 168–70 Luxor 182 Mace, Arthur 23, 165 Magazine of Art, The 228 Man (journal) 23 Manchester Museum 123–5, 130, 134–5 Mandler, Peter 66–7 Manetho, use of by Arabic writers 191–3 Manley, Deborah 86–7, 89–93 Mariette, Auguste 134, 147, 161, 186, 188–9 Maspero, Gaston 37, 161 materiality 74, 195; “material turn,” the 74 Al-Mayyit, Mahmud Ahmad Saʿid 149–52 Al-Mayyit, Saʿid Ahmad 149–50 media (the), relationship with Egyptology 54, 58 Medical Society of London 202 medical uses of ancient Egyptian material 131, 239 Mehmed ʿAli 88, 132, 143–5, 161, 175, 185–8, 191, 256–7 Meir (archaeological site) 25 memory 174–83; see also history Memphis 141–53 Merton, Arthur 160–1 Meskell, Lynn 74 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 165, 233 Miller, Phoebe (or Phoebe Miller Cohn) 106–7 mineralogy 90

280

Index

Ministry of Culture, Egypt 177, 181–2, 257–8, 265, 267; Committee for the Writing of Egyptian History of 177 Ministry of Education, Egypt 190, 193, 195 Ministry of Interior, Egypt 176 Ministry of National Guidance, Egypt 176 Ministry of Public Works, Egypt 162, 190 Ministry of State for Antiquities, Egypt 12, 179–82, 258–60, 265, 267 Mitchell, Timothy 70, 131 Mit Rahina 141–53 Mixed Courts, the 147, 162 modernism (artistic and literary) 234–5; in Greece 235–7 modernity 71–3, 132–7, 142–6, 153, 174–83, 185–96 Mond, Ludwig 229 Montserrat, Dominic 230 monuments, monumentality 186–8, 195 Moser, Stephanie 5, 8, 248–50 Moss, Rosalind 25 Mubarak, ʿAli 191 Mubarak regime in Egypt: activities related to archaeological sites and museums 182, 264–7 mummies: autopsies of 204–7; mummification 90, 206; mummification of modern figures 210–11; mummy films 215–23, 247–8; mummy portrait panels 227–39, 245–6; unrolling/unwrapping of 204–8, 246–7 Al-Muqattam (newspaper) 163 Murray, Gilbert 108–9 Murray, Margaret 67–8, 72, 108, 113–25, 134–5; Murray’s “Gang” at University College London 120–5 “museum era,” the 28, 68 Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, Cairo (the “Egyptian Museum”) 27, 45, 103, 121–2, 147–8, 157, 161, 165, 255, 257–67 Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo 257, 261 museums: and Egyptology, relationship of 50–60, 256; as a tool for teaching archaeology and Egyptology 118–21; in Egypt

255–67; museum practices and changing strategies of display 227–39, 245–6, 255–67 Museums and Gallery Act, 1992 (UK) 232 Al-Muwaylihi, Ibrahim 193 Myres, John 23 Nahḍa, the (Arabic cultural renaissance) 194 Najib Bey, Ahmad 190, 193 Napoleonic expedition to Egypt and the Description de l’Égypte 255–6; as Egyptological foundation myth 132, 186, 249 Nasser and Nasserism 176, 180–1, 257–8 National Archaeological Museum, Athens 237 National Bank of Egypt 167 nationalism, national identity 143–4, 185–6; 244, 255; in Egyptology and archaeology 34–46, 55, 69–71, 133; in Greece 236–7 National Gallery, London 229, 232–3, 245 National Museum of Antiquities, the Netherlands (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden) 207–8 National Museum of Egyptian Civilization 255, 266 Naqada 148 natural history 82–3 Nefertiti, bust of 40, 262, 266 Nelly, Nelly’s (photographer) 236 networks (research and personal) 34–46, 129, 131, 134–6, 207–8 Neues Museum, Berlin 262; see also Egyptian Museum, Berlin Newberry, Percy 23 Nile Delta 26, 58, 146 Noblecourt, Christiane Desroches 168–70 Nott, Josiah 129 Nubia 67, 167, 169 numismatics: serial numismatics 22 Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen: Tracking Colour project 238–9 ontology 215, 219, 221, 223 Ordo Templi Orientis 102 Orientalism and the history of Egyptology 73–4, 132–4, 136

Index Outlook (journal) 162 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 98 Owen, Richard 66 painting: Victorian history painting 250 Pan-Arabism 257 pathologization see medical uses of ancient Egyptian material Peet, Thomas Eric 27, 68, 70 Pendlebury, John 72 performance and performativity 201–12 Petrie, William Matthew Flinders 6, 21–4, 27, 36, 38, 40, 66–8, 72–4, 113–25, 134, 136, 148–9, 227–30; “Petrie’s pups” 117–18 Pettigrew, Thomas Joseph 201–12, 246–7 Pettigrew’s: History of Egyptian Mummies 206–7, 246–7 pharaonism 167, 195 philology: relationship to Egyptology 19–30, 37–8, 50–60, 68–9, 133; language study in the Egyptological classroom 118–21 Philosophical Society of London 202 Pinero, Arthur 100 Pirenne, Henri 69 Pitt-Rivers, Augustus Henry Lane-Fox (General Pitt-Rivers) 21–2, 66–8 Pontikos, Dienekes 236 Poole, Reginald Stuart 65 popular culture and Egyptology 53, 72 portraiture 232 positivism in Egyptology 136 postcolonial era 157–71 postcolonialism, postcolonial studies 130–1 postmodernity and Egyptology 58–9 prehistory and Egyptology 66 Prestige and Interest: International Relations in the Near East ca. 1600–1100 B.C. (book) 53 professionalization 28, 131, 134–5, 185–6, 195 public, the: and Egyptology 50–60, 64–75, 242–51 publication, publishing practices in Egyptology (including of archival material) 81–93, 133 Punch (magazine) 163–4 purification 3–6, 211

281

Qift (town of) 141–53 Quftis 141–53 Quirke, Stephen 6, 8 race, racial discourse 66–7, 130, 146, 151, 209, 230–2, 236–7, 245 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred 27, 68 Raiders of the Lost Ark (movie) 50 raʾīs (in this context archaeological foreman) 141–53 Randall-MacIver, David 23, 26 Reid, Donald Malcolm 7, 255 Reisner, George Andrew 148–52 religion and Egyptology 51–2, 66 Rencontres Assyriologiques Internationales 57 representation, representation studies 227–39, 242–51; color and ornament in representations of the ancient world 249–50 Rijksmuseum van Oudheden see National Museum of Antiquities, the Netherlands Rivers, W. H. R. 67 Rosetta Stone 170, 262 Royal Academy, London: Byzantium, 330–145 exhibition 237–8 Royal Anthropological Institute 20–1, 23 Royal Humane Society 202 Royal Prussian Academy of Science 35 Saʿid Pasha (Khedive Saʿid) 147, 187–8 Al-Sadat, Anwar 258 Said, Edward 73–4, 130, 136 Salt, Henry 86–7, 144 Salt’s: Memoir on Pyramids and Sphinx 86–7 Sayce, Archibald 21, 23 Schneider, Thomas 3 science, scientific claims 69, 144, 151, 187, 190, 247 security, apparatus and culture of in Egypt 176–7, 259–60, 263, 265; link to colonial antiquities discourse 262–3 Sethe, Kurt 37 Sewell, Brian 233 sexuality 108; Victorian sexuality 220–22; see also celibacy Shakespear, Olivia 99, 135–6 Sharubim, Mikhail 193 Shawqi, Ahmad 163

282

Index

Shinnie, Peter 27 Sholkamy, Hania 183 showmanship and spectacle 211, 247 Shrine of the Golden Hawk, The (play) 99–100 Simon, James 40, 262, 266 site formation, archaeological 28, 68 Skene, Henry 106–7 Smith, Grafton Elliot 26, 67, 69 Smyth, Charles Piazzi 69, 136 Société Française d’Egyptologie 53 Society of Antiquaries of London 209–10 Society of Biblical Archaeology, London 210 sovereignty, issues of 185–6 specialization and isolation within Egyptology 50–60 Spek, Kees van der 12 Spencer, Herbert 21 Steindorff, Georg 3 Sturges, Mary d’Este 106 Al-Suʾud, ʿAbd Allah 191 Al-Suayfi, ʿAli 148 Al-Suayfi, Fatima 148 subaltern studies 72 Sudan Government Service 25 Sufism 147 Sunday Times, The (newspaper) 169 Supreme Council of Antiquities, Egypt 179–82, 258–9, 265 “survivals,” anthropological concept of 25 Syro-Egyptian Society of London 210 see also Society of Biblical Archaeology Tahrir Square, Cairo see Cairo Al-Tahtawi, Rifaʿa Rafiʿ 186, 188, 191–5 technology, technopolitics 71, 131, 187–8 theology 66, 72 theory and Egyptology 73–4, 129 theosophy 96, 99, 100 Times, The (newspaper) 159–61, 165–6, 207, 228–9 Thompson, Jason 84–6, 89–93 Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Statues, Reliefs and Paintings, The 25 tourism 159, 165–6, 182, 258–63, 265–7

trading zones 10 travelers to Egypt, travelers’ accounts 81–93 Trevelyan, G. M. 69 Trigger, Bruce 6 Tutankhamun, tomb of 27, 68, 145, 157–71; replica tomb at British Empire Exhibition, Wembley 163; Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibition 265–6; Tutankhamun’s Treasures exhibition 167–71 Tyler, Tom 216–17 Tylor, Edward Burnett 22, 25–6 typology 22 ʿUkasha, Tharwat 168–9 UNESCO 20, 167–8, 255; see also international agencies Universal Pictures 215–16, 220, 222 Universal Pictures’s mummy movies: The Mummy (1932) 215–17, 219, 222, 247; The Mummy (1999) 220, 222; The Mummy Returns (2001) 222; The Mummy’s Curse (1944) 216–19; The Mummy’s Ghost (1944) 216–18; The Mummy’s Hand (1940) 216–19; The Mummy’s Tomb (1942) 216–17 University of Chicago: Oriental Institute at 165 University College London (UCL) 65, 67, 70, 113–25, 134–5; Certificate in Egyptology at 118–20; Edwards Professorship of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology (or Edwards Professor of Egyptology) at 24, 36, 113–25, 134, 169; Egyptology department at 113–25 University of Liverpool 70 University of Oxford 19–30, 65, 70; anthropology at 19–30, 68; Ashmolean Museum at 19, 24, 238; Faculty of Oriental Languages at 24; Griffith Institute at 6, 168; graduate diploma in anthropology at 24, 26–7; Institute of Archaeology at 29; Pitt Rivers Museum at 25–6;

Index

283

Victorian response to ancient Egypt 248–50 Vikelaia Municipal Library, Heraklion: From the Portraits of Fayum to the Beginnings of the Art of Byzantine Icons exhibition 234–5

Webb Loudon, Jane 220 Webb Loudon’s: The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century 220 Weigall, Arthur 160, 164 Wells, H. G. 67, 72 Wheeler, Mortimer 28, 68 Who Was Who in Egyptology (book) 5, 98 Wilkinson, John Gardner 207–9, 246–7 Wisdom of the East, The (book series) 101 Wörterbuch (the Berlin ancient Egyptian dictionary) 35, 37–9, 46, 57 Woolley, Leonard 159

Wafd Party, Egypt 161 Wainwright, Gerald Averay 26 Waite, Arthur 100–2 Warburg Institute, University of London 99 Watani Party 160

Zaghlul, Saʿd 161, 165, 177 Zaidan, Jurji 193–4 Zaki, Husayn 193 Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 35 Ziwar, Ahmad 165

Queen’s College 37; Readership/ Professorship in Egyptology at 19–30, 96 University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology 27, 141–53; Eckley B. Coxe, Jr., Egyptian Expedition of 141–53 Ur (site in Iraq) 159 Usick, Patricia 86–7, 89–93