Contesting Antiquity in Egypt

Archaeologies, Museums, and the Struggle for Identities from World War I to Nasser

Donald Malcolm Reid

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781617979569
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

The history of the struggles for control over Egypt's antiquities, and their repercussions, during a period of intense national ferment The sensational discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamun's tomb, close on the heels of Britain's declaration of Egyptian independence, accelerated the growth in Egypt of both Egyptology as a formal discipline and of 'pharaonism'—popular interest in ancient Egypt—as an inspiration in the struggle for full independence. Emphasizing the three decades from 1922 until Nasser's revolution in 1952, this compelling follow-up to Whose Pharaohs? looks at the ways in which Egypt developed its own archaeologies—Islamic, Coptic, and Greco-Roman, as well as the more dominant ancient Egyptian. Each of these four archaeologies had given birth to, and grown up around, a major antiquities museum in Egypt. Later, Cairo, Alexandria, and Ain Shams universities joined in shaping these fields. Contesting Antiquity in Egypt brings all four disciplines, as well as the closely related history of tourism, together in a single engaging framework.Throughout this semi-colonial era, the British fought a prolonged rearguard action to retain control of the country while the French continued to dominate the Antiquities Service, as they had since 1858. Traditional accounts highlight the role of European and American archaeologists in discovering and interpreting Egypt's long past. Donald Reid redresses the balance by also paying close attention to the lives and careers of often-neglected Egyptian specialists. He draws attention not only to the contests between westerners and Egyptians over the control of antiquities, but also to passionate debates among Egyptians themselves over pharaonism in relation to Islam and Arabism during a critical period of nascent nationalism.Drawing on rich archival and published sources, extensive interviews, and material objects ranging from statues and murals to photographs and postage stamps, this comprehensive study by one of the leading scholars in the field will make fascinating reading for scholars and students of Middle East history, archaeology, politics, and museum and heritage studies, as well as for the interested lay reader.

Part One

Egyptology and
Pharaonism to 1930

1

Egyptology and Pharaonism in
Egypt before Tutankhamun

Sailing home to France for the last time in July 1914, retiring director general of the Egyptian Antiquities Service Gaston Maspero could look back with satisfaction on 116 years since Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, ninety-two since Jean-François Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphs, fifty-six since Auguste Mariette’s founding of the Egyptian Antiquities Service,¹ and thirty-three since first taking up his own post in Cairo. The French could perhaps be pardoned their sometime boast that Egyptology was a French science.²

This chapter begins with a brief review of the development of Western Egyptology over the long nineteenth century from 1798 to 1914. In addition to the French, scholars and archaeologists from Britain, Germany, Italy, and other European countries all participated in constructing the discipline. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Americans joined in. National and personal rivalries often subverted ideals of scientific objectivity and international collaboration, and Egyptology remained resolutely Eurocentric. The rather conventional sketch of the history of nineteenth-century Egyptology in the next few pages sets the stage for a central theme of the book: bringing in modern Egyptians—both those who struggled to establish Egyptology as a scholarly specialty and those who promoted ancient Egypt among the wider public. The career of Ahmad Kamal Pasha epitomizes the struggle to develop Egyptian Egyptology, and Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid stands out among the intellectuals who campaigned to popularize it in modern Egypt in the decade leading up to World War I. The chapter then turns to the critical years of World War I—a trying time for British and French colonizers, Egyptians, and all archaeologists alike. The hopes and disappointments of the Egyptian uprising of 1919 (‘revolution’ in nationalist terminology) come next. The chapter concludes with an overview of the substantial evidence of pharaonism among the public on the eve of Tutankhamun’s bursting on the scene in November 1922.

French and British Egyptology from Champollion and Thomas Young to Maspero and Petrie

Until Champollion’s breakthrough toward decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822, what Europeans knew about ancient Egypt was gleaned from the Bible; classical works by writers such as Herodotus and Manetho; and travel accounts by medieval and later European travelers—including crusaders, pilgrims, and merchants. From the Renaissance through the European Enlightenment, comparing classical accounts with on-the-ground observations in Egypt emerged as a new method of research. Humanist rediscovery of the classical texts of Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica and the Corpus Hermeticum also fed mystical fantasies of pharaonic Egypt as the fount of occult wisdom. Such traditions passed underground from humanists to Rosicrucians and Freemasons and on to New Age circles today.

In 1798, Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt opened up a new era. British, Ottoman, Mamluk, and popular Egyptian resistance quickly turned the expedition into a military disaster, but the accompanying French savants managed to salvage a scholarly triumph—the encyclopedic Description de l’Égypte. French soldiers digging fortifications also chanced upon the Rosetta Stone, which bore inscriptions in three scripts—hieroglyphs, demotic, and Greek. Seizing the stone as spoils of war, the British ensconced it in the British Museum, but their scholars, led by polymath physician Thomas Young, made little progress in deciphering its hieroglyphic text. A Frenchman won the honor instead: in 1822 Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) announced his breakthrough toward deciphering hieroglyphs. By the time of his death ten years later at only forty-two, Champollion had published a grammar of ancient Egyptian, founded the Egyptian Department at the Louvre, led an archaeological expedition to Egypt, urged Egyptian governor Muhammad Ali to preserve antiquities, and inaugurated academic Egyptology through the chair created for him at the Collège de France.

Picking up on Champollion’s legacy after a lull, Auguste Mariette (1821–1881) discovered the Serapeum—the tomb of the Apis sacred bulls—at Saqqara in 1850. Four years later, the accession of Muhammad Ali’s son Said Pasha opened the door to Ferdinand de Lesseps’s project to dig the Suez Canal. With French influence in Egypt riding high throughout Napoleon III’s reign (1851–1870), Said appointed Mariette director of antiquities in 1858 (see fig. 8). Mariette obtained a monopoly on excavation and filled the museum he opened at Bulaq in 1863 (the Egyptian Museum) with pharaonic antiquities. He achieved at least partial success in stemming the frenzied outflow of antiquities to Western museums and private collections.

In 1880, Gaston Maspero arrived in Cairo to found what soon became the Institut français d’archéologie oriental du Caire (IFAO). This put him on the spot to keep the directorship of the Antiquities Service in French hands when Mariette died in January 1881. Khedive Ismail’s (r. 1863–79) bankruptcy and deposition at the hands of European creditors had opened the way for Col. Ahmad Urabi’s revolt against European encroachment, Khedive Tawfiq (r. 1879–92), and Egypt’s Turkish-speaking Ottoman elite.³ In 1882, the British bombarded Alexandria, defeated Urabi, and occupied the country. During his two terms directing the Egyptian Antiquities Service (1881–86, 1899–1914), Maspero’s adroit diplomacy managed to keep it in French hands despite the British occupation. In 1899, Maspero negotiated an informal archaeological entente which prefigured the famous Anglo–French Entente of 1904. He welcomed British officials into the Antiquities Service, and in the 1904 Entente agreement, Britain formally recognized France’s claim to direct the Egyptian Antiquities Service.

8 Auguste Mariette’s sarcophagus and statue, garden of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. Photo: D. Reid.

Two months before Maspero sailed from Egypt for the last time in June 1914, his British contemporary Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) wound up his usual winter excavations and headed home to England. Petrie spiritedly continued the British–French rivalry over Egypt and Egyptology, which went back to Admiral Nelson’s sinking of Napoleon’s fleet at the Battle of the Nile, Champollion’s trumping Thomas Young in the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone, and British consul Henry Salt’s (1780–1827) contest with French consul Bernardino Drovetti (1776–1852) in collecting pharaonic antiquities for European museums. Britain was far behind France (as well as Germany) in establishing Egyptology as a university specialty and a profession. With only scant and sporadic state support, British Egyptology long remained the domain of private patronage and amateurs. Tomb copyist Gardiner Wilkinson (1797–1875) and his Orientalist friend Edward W. Lane (author of Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians) were neither university nor museum based.⁴ As an official at the British Museum for nearly fifty years, Samuel Birch (1813–1885) came closer to being a professional Egyptologist. He was also a sinologist, however, and never ventured out to see Egypt for himself. Birch’s successor, E.A.W. Budge (1857–1934), kept the British Museum active in Egyptology through the Maspero–Petrie era.

Petrie was thus not atypical in arriving in British Egyptology by a nonacademic road. This contrasted with his contemporary Maspero, who also first set foot in Egypt in 1880. Maspero came up through the elite schools of Paris and excelled as an academic, administrator, and museum curator. Petrie, on the other hand, was a self-taught field archaeologist with almost no formal schooling. He worked out meticulous techniques of excavation and record keeping, paid close attention to everyday objects, and published his results promptly. He refined stratigraphic excavation and established relative chronologies, especially with pottery, through seriation. Never lingering at any site for long, he dug all over Egypt and in Palestine, sometimes for the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) but more often for his own Egyptian Research Account and British School of Archaeology in Egypt (BSAE). Archaeologists today are less impressed with some of Petrie’s other successive enthusiasms: believing in secret wisdom encoded in the architecture of the Great Pyramid, attempting to prove the literal historical accuracy of the Bible, and seeing races and racial conquests as the critical determinants of the history of civilizations.⁵

Alongside and sometimes overlapping with Petrie, the EEF (since 1919 the Egypt Exploration Society, EES) was another key force in British Egyptology in the 1880–1914 era.⁶ Novelist Amelia Edwards (1831–1892) and British Museum numismatist and Orientalist Reginald Stuart Poole took the lead in organizing the privately funded EEF in 1882. Britain’s conquest of Egypt in the very year of the EEF’s founding formalized an imperial antiquities regime privileging Westerners. David Gange has emphasized the centrality of religion in shaping nineteenth-century British interest in ancient Egypt. Until after midcentury, apocalyptic sermons, literature, and paintings depicted it as a monstrous pagan land cursed by God for persecuting Moses and the chosen people. In the 1870s and 1880s, the emphasis shifted as Biblical literalists embraced archaeology as a scientific ally they hoped would discredit higher criticism of the Bible and skepticism of scriptural truths.⁷ The EEF’s early public appeals highlighted its search for the lost Biblical cities in the Nile Delta associated with Moses and the Exodus. The EEF soon broadened its horizons, and in 1892 a bequest in Amelia Edwards’s will first propelled Egyptology into a British university. She endowed a chair of Egyptology at University College London. As she had wished, Petrie became its first occupant.

The pharaonic emphasis of the January 1914 set of Egyptian postage ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map
• Figures
• Tables
• Abbreviation
• Transliteration
• Acknowledge
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Notes
• Bibliography