Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0520240693
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520240698
- Pub. Date:
- 11/01/2003
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0520240693
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520240698
- Pub. Date:
- 11/01/2003
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I / Edition 1
Paperback
Buy New
$31.95Buy Used
$22.23-
-
SHIP THIS ITEM
Temporarily Out of Stock Online
Please check back later for updated availability.
-
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520240698 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2003 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 424 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
| Lexile: | 1410L (what's this?) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Whose Pharaohs?
Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War IBy Donald Malcolm Reid
The University of California Press
Copyright © 2001 Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-24069-3
Introduction
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 how to appreciate them. Antiquity is a garden that belongs by natural right to those who cultivate and harvest its fruits. Captain E. de Verninac Saint-Maur, Voyage de Luxor (1835)It is indeed a matter of deep regret that the monuments should be ours and the history should be ours, but that those who write books on the history of ancient Egypt should not be Egyptians.... Nevertheless we cannot avoid expressing admiration for Professor Selim Hassan on his archaeological skill and his continuous finds, the last of which was the fourth pyramid. The Arabic newspaper Al-Balagh, 26 February 1932
This book examines the evolving uses that Egyptians-mostly nationalists-and Europeans-mostly imperialists-made of various eras of the long Egyptian past between Bonaparte's conquest in 1798 and the outbreak of World War I. European archaeology in Egypt began in earnest during the Frenchexpedition. French soldiers uncovered the Rosetta Stone by accident in 1799, and twenty-three years later Jean-François Champollion's decipherment of its hieroglyphic text opened the door to modern Egyptology. In the half-century between 1858 and 1908, Europeans played key roles in the founding of the Egyptian Antiquities Service and four historical museums-the Egyptian Museum (for the pharaonic period), the Greco-Roman Museum, the Coptic Museum, and the Museum of Arab (now Islamic) Art. During those same fifty years, Western imperialism-fueled back home by the industrial revolution, the demand for imported cotton and other raw materials, the quest for overseas markets and investment opportunities, the exigencies of emerging mass politics, and intra-European rivalries-firmly fastened its grip on Egypt. Archaeology and imperialism seemed to walk hand in hand.
Learning about archaeology primarily from the Europeans, Egyptians gradually came to realize that it could be turned to their own ends. Once persuaded of the vital role archaeology could play in shaping their modern national identity, Egyptians began searching for ways to train their own archaeologists. This set the stage for nationalist challenges both to European control of Egypt's archaeological institutions and to Western imperialists' interpretations of its history.
Geopolitical considerations alone would have impelled nineteenth-century Westerners to try to control Egypt, but fantastic visions of its long past powerfully reinforced the impetus. Westerners stepping ashore variously imagined themselves entering the world of the pharaohs, the Bible, the Greeks and Romans, and the Quran and the Arabian Nights. Florence Nightingale evoked all four worlds in a single sentence: "Here Osiris and his worshipers lived; here Abraham and Moses walked; here Aristotle came; here, later, Mahomet learnt the best of his religion and studied Christianity; here, perhaps our Saviour's Mother brought her little son to open his eyes to the light."
These were not the only prisms through which Westerners viewed Egyptian encounters. Heirs of Hermeticism saw Egypt as the fountainhead of occult wisdom; belief in mystical "pyramid power" persists today. Others imagined themselves returning crusaders, though this was more usual in Syria-Palestine-General Allenby entering Jerusalem in 1917 or General Gouraud, Damascus in 1920. Romantics grieving for a lost preindustrial world at home looked for noble savages or "natural aristocrats" in the Bedouin. Anglo-Indians saw in Egyptians generic Orientals who could be ruled with techniques honed in India. Since no one arrived a tabula rasa, the only question was which preconceived filters one used and how these affected encounters with Egyptian realities.
Two French visions aptly symbolize Western engagement with Egyptian antiquity across the long nineteenth century-the frontispiece of the Napoleonic expedition's Description de l'Égypte and the building of the Egyptian Museum, inaugurated in Cairo in 1902 and still in use today. In the frontispiece, a richly decorated frame invites the viewer into a nostalgic Nile landscape stretching from Alexandria to Aswan. This is an antique land, abounding in pharaonic ruins. There is no sign of Islamic monuments, Cairo, or modern inhabitants. Atop the frame, a nude Bonaparte in the guise of Apollo or Alexander brandishes a spear from his chariot as Mamluks go down before him. Twelve Muses in the hero's train return the arts to Egypt, their legendary land of origin.
A century later, in 1902, the facade of Cairo's Egyptian Museum and the garden monument to its founder, Auguste Mariette, honored heroes of European Egyptology since Napoleon. The list of founding fathers on the facade celebrated six French Egyptologists, five Britons, four Germans, three Italians, a Dutchman, a Dane, and a Swede. There were no Egyptians. Another plaque affirmed the classical gateway through which the West had long viewed ancient Egypt, interposing Herodotus, Eratosthenes, Manetho, and Horapollo between plaques commemorating ancient rulers and those honoring the modern scholars.
Goddesses personifying Upper and Lower Egypt flanked the portal. The "wet drapery" look of late classical Greek female sculpture revealed their bodies at a time when upper-class Egyptian women lived in seclusion and wore face veils when they ventured out. Putting the name of the hapless khedive Abbas Hilmi [II] in the inscription over the portal was normal but not much of a concession to local sensibility (see figure 6). The text was in Latin, which not one Egyptian in a thousand could read. No Egyptian government school of the day taught the language. Adding the Islamic (Hijri) date alongside the a.d. one hardly counted as a concession, either, for it was doubly disguised in the Latin language and Roman numerals: anno Hegirae MCCCXVII. To Egyptians, the facade may well have said: "Egyptology is a European science which has rediscovered the greatness of ancient Egypt, a forerunner of Western civilization. Modern Egyptians are unworthy heirs of ancient ones and incapable of either national greatness or serious Egyptology."
In both politics and archaeology, Egyptians had different visions. The front-page scene of an 1899 issue of a short-lived Arabic magazine for schoolchildren put ancient Egypt at the center of a modern national renaissance. The sun beams down "The Light of Knowledge" on a traditionally dressed woman who directs her children's attention to the Pyramids and Sphinx. Abbas II-not Napoleon-presides over this scene, and four additional inset portraits honor reformist officials, scholars, and educators, three of whom (Rifaa al-Tahtawi, Mahmud al-Falaki, and Ali Mubarak) figure prominently in this book. Thus by the turn of the twentieth century, seeds were already being sown for the flowering in the 1920s of national pride in both the pharaohs and Egyptian Egyptology.
It was not only to the pharaonic era that Western scholars and their publics implicitly laid claim. Europeans took the lead in founding two other museums in Egypt-the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria and the Museum of Arab (now Islamic) Art-and they inspired the Egyptian who founded the Coptic Museum. Like the Egyptian Museum, which displayed the fruits of Egyptology, each of these three museums represented both an emerging scholarly discipline and an era or aspect of Egypt's long past. With these museums and their fields of study too, Egyptians felt the need to train experts who could lend credibility to nationalist insistence that they must manage and interpret the remains of all eras of their national past.
The three museums with European founding directors remained largely European-dominated until the 1950s. The separate origin, institutional affiliation, and evolution of each of the three fragmented what nationalists came to insist was a unified Egyptian past.
The sequence in which the museums came into being also reflected European more than Egyptian priorities. The Egyptian Museum (for pharaonic antiquities) came first because Europeans were rediscovering ancient Egypt and following the ancient Greek example in appropriating it as a forerunner of their own Western civilization. The very words "Egyptian Museum" and "Egyptology" still echo the primacy that Westerners accorded to the pharaonic era. Logically, Egyptology should include the study of any era of Egypt's past, but the term crystallized in the mid-nineteenth century to mean only the study of ancient Egypt, with the Greco-Roman and Coptic eras often tacked on as a postscript. This usage slights Islamic and modern Egypt and seems to imply that somehow "Egypt ceases to be Egypt when it ceases to be ancient."
Cairo's Museum of Arab Art was founded next, a byproduct of the Committee of Conservation of Monuments of Arab Art (hereafter simply "the Comité," from the French name by which it is generally known: Comité de conservation des monuments de l'arte arabe), founded in 1881. The Comité and this museum, which opened to the public in 1884, reflected not the West's search for its roots but the fascination of some Westerners with an exotic "Oriental other."
The Greco-Roman Museum followed in 1892, situated, appropriately, not in Cairo but in the former Ptolemaic and Roman capital of Alexandria. Europeans identified far more easily with Greece and Rome than with ancient Egypt or Islam. Many denied any Greco-Roman debt to ancient Egypt or saw it as merely a stepping stone to the greater glories of Greece and Rome. With classical museums flourishing all over Europe, another one in Egypt did not seemed urgent at first. By 1892, however, with many of the British elite who were ruling Egypt having been classically trained, and with large European colonies planted there, it was time for a Greco-Roman museum. In Italy, the upper classes had been mining the ancient Roman heritage for legitimacy since the Renaissance, and nationalists proud of the reunification of Italy during the nineteenth century renewed the impulse. Three successive Italian directors of Alexandria's Greco-Roman Museum staked out the cultural claims of their homeland on this former province of Rome.
The Coptic Museum of 1908 was the last of the four museums to be founded. The Protestants and Catholics of the West had long denounced the Coptic Church for heresy and for reflecting the presumed defects of its "Oriental" environment. But Western Christians-and later Jews-eager to "prove the Bible" in the face of secularism, scientism, and the higher criticism also turned to archaeology to bolster their case. They probed Palestine and the rest of the Fertile Crescent for supporting archaeological evidence, and could hardly ignore the land of the Nile, with its associations with Joseph, Moses, Jesus and Mary, and Saint Mark. Copts traced their church back to Mark and had practically invented Christian monasticism. By the 1890s, a few Europeans were turning their attention to Coptic art and architecture, and it was their enthusiasm that inspired Marcus Simaika to found the Coptic Museum. The museum was unusual, having an Egyptian founding director and being under communal Coptic rather than state control.
The primary purpose of this book is to write modern Egyptians into the histories of these four museums and the institutions and disciplines associated with them-Egyptology, classical studies, Coptic studies, and Islamic art and archaeology. Western histories of these disciplines usually downplay the imperial ethos of the day, and even those that highlight it relegate Egyptians to the margins. This book also examines more popular perceptions of the Egyptian past, in both Egypt and the West, tying them to issues of imperialism, nationalism, and Egyptian identity.
These developments in Egyptian archaeology and museology were part of a global process in which states and peoples, over the course of the nineteenth century, struggled to define themselves as modern nations. It made a vast difference whether or not one was a citizen of the Western great powers-Britain, France, Germany, and eventually the United States-which were caught up in the worldwide contest for political, economic, and cultural influence. In colonized lands such as Egypt and India, museums and archaeology became significant arenas in the struggle for national independence. In independent but semiperipheral countries such as Greece, Italy, imperial Russia, and Mexico, efforts to harness the study and display of the past to national purposes variously reflected features of archaeology in both the dominant and the colonized countries.
This book attempts synthesis on five levels. First, it juxtaposes the relatively familiar history of Western archaeologists with that of their neglected Egyptian counterparts. Even after Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and the revival of Antonio Gramsci, positivist assumptions about progressive, objective, "scientific" knowledge still underlie much writing about Egyptian archaeology. Champollion, Richard Lepsius, Auguste Mariette, Gaston-Camille-Charles Maspero, Adolf Erman, Flinders Petrie, Howard Carter, James Breasted, and George Reisner strut heroically across the stage. Egyptians flicker in the shadows as trusty foremen, loyal servants, laborers, tomb robbers, antiquities dealers, obstructionist officials, and benighted nationalists. Unconventional juxtapositions-Champollion and Rifaa al-Tahtawi, E.{ths} W. Lane and al-Tahtawi, Maspero and Ahmad Kamal, Max Herz and Ali Bahgat-are used in this book to challenge such narratives. The point is not to belittle Western achievements or to exaggerate similarities between Egyptians and Europeans but to point up the inequalities of power, challenge assumptions that "never the twain shall meet," and show that disciplinary histories should be more than Western monologues into Egyptian silence.
The first edition of the indispensable reference work Who Was Who in Egyptology (1951) omitted the pioneering Egyptian Egyptologist Ahmad Kamal altogether. The second and third editions of this British work made good the slight, but the third edition (1995) accorded Kamal a scant 20 lines to Maspero's 82 and Petrie's 134. Maspero and Petrie were indeed giants, but Kamal's low profile cries out for contextual explanation. Works such as Who Was Who tend to abstract science from its sociopolitical context and downplay national and personal rivalries. This makes it impossible to understand Egyptology as these scholars lived it. The reign of English, French, and German as the international languages of Egyptology was just one of many factors that gave Europeans an overwhelming advantage.
A second strand of synthesis is the insertion of the history of archaeology and museums into the mainstream history of modern Egypt.
Continues...
Excerpted from Whose Pharaohs? by Donald Malcolm Reid Copyright © 2001 by Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.