Histories of Egyptology

Interdisciplinary Measures

William Carruthers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135014568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Égypte antique

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 histories, and what (or who) are they for? This volume addresses a variety of important themes, the historical involvement of Egyptology with the political sphere, the manner in which the discipline stakes out its professional territory, the ways in which practitioners represent 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 they construct ancient Egypt, and how that construction interacts with much wider concerns: of society, and of the making of the modern world.

1 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, 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 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 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 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 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 Ins...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Transliteration
• 1 Introduction: Thinking about Histories of Egyptology
• Part I The Creation and Isolation of an Academic Discipline
• Part II Knowledge in the Making
• Part III Colonial Mediations, Postcolonial Responses
• Part IV Representing Knowledge
• Contributors
• Index