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Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, by Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, editors
7. Nationalizing the Pharaonic Past
Egyptology, Imperialism, and Egyptian Nationalism, 1922-1952
Donald Malcolm Reid
| Science neither has nor should have a country, for it is the fruit of efforts made by human thought for the welfare of humanity. It must have no geographical boundaries and must be free from local or national prejudices. 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. . . . 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. |
| --al-Balagh, 1932 1 |
The writer of these lines was proud of pioneering Egyptologist Selim Hassan and believed it urgent to reclaim the pharaonic past from the Westerners who had rediscovered and appropriated it during the nineteenth century. He felt compelled, however, to follow the convention of wrapping his particularist nationalism in the rhetoric of universal science. In this he had plenty of company, for British, French, and German Egyptologists had long been declaring their devotion to objective science and to their countries in almost the same breath, suppressing any misgivings that the two might be incompatible.
This article examines the ways in which Egyptian Egyptologists 2 "nationalized" their field between 1922 and 1952. To do this, they had to struggle on two fronts. On the first front they gradually dismantled foreign control over the Egyptian Museum, the Antiquities Service, excavations, and the export of antiquities. This paralleled, and was part of, the simultaneous fight to win complete national independence from Britain. In order to strengthen their case for national control in archeology, Egyptian Egyptologists engaged in an uphill struggle to establish their credentials in a discipline created, defined, and dominated by Westerners. On the second front Egyptologists worked to persuade their compatriots to take pride in ancient Egypt as an essential component of modern Egyptian identity. This effort paralleled, and was part of, the national struggle to rally the entire public behind the demand for full independence. Egyptian Egyptologists succeeded, but only in a qualified way, on both fronts.
Like their Western colleagues, Egypt's Egyptologists often felt misgivings when nationalist readings of ancient Egypt slipped over into chauvinism. Egyptologists not could afford to ignore either the "imagined communities" of the nation states in which they lived or the universal fellowship of their discipline. Though in fact deeply nationalistic, German professorial "mandarins" struck a responsive chord in Europe, the United States, and Egypt with their invocation of "science for science's sake." 3 Belief in Egyptology as an objective, progressive, and universal "science" was more than lip service. For Egyptians, the dilemma was this: if they embraced universal standards and values in Egyptology, how could they escape a hegemonic Western discourse that might well doom them to perpetual inferiority? 4 How could they ever hope to compete as equals in a field whose international languages were--and still remain--English, French, and German? "For the native," complained Frantz Fanon, "objectivity is always directed against him."
Insiders often idealize their profession or discipline, suppressing scandals and rivalries, whether national or personal, which might tarnish the "noble dream" 6 of objectivity. Eulogists produce sanitized histories of selfless saints as unconvincing at one extreme as debunking biographies, retailing scandal for its own sake, can be at the other. Dawson's and Uphill's indispensable Who Was Who in Egyptology, for example, omits or minimizes national and personal feuds. This may be justifiable in a reference work, but it makes for sanitized and misleading cultural history. Their entry on Selim Hassan conveys nothing of the lively mix of personal ambition and nationalism that brought him into conflict with the French Antiquities directors or of the charges that tragically derailed his career. 7 John Wilson's carefully nuanced accounts, while still suppressing a good deal, do better. While taking national feuds in Egyptology into account, he suggests that competition for jobs in Egyptology may have made feuds within nations even worse than those between them.
The 1922-1952 period serves our purpose well. Nineteen twenty-two represents the chance conjuncture of partial Egyptian independence and the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb; Egyptology and nationalism became more tightly intertwined than ever before. British excavator Howard Carter looked to Britain for imperial support of his claims, while the Egyptian government insisted on Egypt's total control of the tomb and its treasure. The discovery hastened the establishment of Egyptology in the Egyptian (now Cairo) University and intensified demands for national control of the Antiquities Service, excavations, and the export of antiquities. Thirty years later in 1952, national politics and Egyptology just as clearly converged when the Free Officers' revolution abruptly ended ninety-four years of French domination of the service.
In Egypt and around the world, nationalists who rallied the people against Western imperialism expected to continue to lead after independence. Similarly, Egyptian Egyptologists set out to persuade their countrymen that pharaonic remains were more than treasure troves of buried gold, quarries for building stones and fertilizer, charms to cure infertility, relics of an idolatrous past, and lures for Western tourists. Pharaonic discourse redefined antiquities as sacred relics of a glorious past, priceless evidence for modern science, and inspiration for a national renaissance. If this discourse carried the day, Egyptologists would be indispensable in the new order of things.
Anthony Smith notes that modern national pride in ancient Greece, Egypt, and Iran appealed to intellectual elites in the three countries, while Orthodox Byzantium, Arabism, and Islam respectively had more popular appeal. Gershoni and Jankowski have traced the rise of "pharaonicist" nationalism in the 1920s and early 1930s among the Westernized Egyptian elite and its waning thereafter before a more populist Arab and Islamic discourse. While generally valid, the thesis may underestimate the persistence and perhaps even the social depth of an admittedly watered-down pharaonism. The 1930s and 1940s saw the permanent establishment of Egyptian Egyptology as an academic and professional field; an irreversible drive to Egyptianize the Antiquities Service; and the rewriting of Egyptian history, which gave the pharaonic past a seemingly permanent place in school textbooks.
A century before the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, Jean François Champollion opened the door to hieroglyphics. By 1900 scholars in France, Germany, and Britain led the emerging discipline of Egyptology, Italy and smaller European countries had joined in, and Russia and the United States were waiting in the wings.
In the West, popular accounts of Egyptology play up flamboyant personalities and the romance of excavation, while scholarly accounts trace the steady accumulation of positive knowledge and highlight the occasional dramatic breakthrough. Neither the popular nor the scholarly accounts linger long on the imperialist context within which Egyptology grew up. The imperialist context of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the production of the great Description de l'Egypte is unmistakable, of course. But less attention is given, for example, to the imperial context within which Auguste Mariette founded the Egyptian Antiquities Service, Flinders Petrie excavated, and Frenchmen dominated the service for ninety-four years.
Western imperialism sometimes put on a monolithic face, with Europeans joining together in self-congratulation on their civilizing mission or white man's burden. In the rarified world of Egyptology too, scholars and excavators relished their membership in an avowedly international--but in practice long exclusively Western--fraternity. (The fraternity also long remained exclusively male, with females such as Amelia Edwards 10 being accepted only in supporting roles.) Western Egyptologists encountered modern Egyptians as officials, laborers, and servants but could hardly imagine them as potential colleagues.
Behind the facade of international science, Western Egyptology seethed with national rivalries. The Anglo-French Egyptological rivalry, which was bound up with the two powers' imperial ambitions in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean, spanned the nineteenth century and persisted well into the twentieth. Franco-German Egyptological rivalry was already taking shape by the time of the two nations' fateful clash on the battlefield at Sedan in 1870. By the turn of the century, Americans had begun bringing their own national and scholarly perspectives to Egyptology. 11
These intra-European Egyptological rivalries were not mere petty sideshows to the onward march of science and progress; they were integral to the manufacture of knowledge itself. They are important to this study not only because they show that Egyptians had plenty of company in infusing nationalism into the discipline but also because these Western rivalries opened up cracks within which Egyptian Egyptology tried to grow. Similarly in national politics at the turn of the century, Anglo-French imperial rivalry led some Frenchmen to encourage Mustafa Kamil's nationalist movement in Egypt despite the dangerous im- plications of this for France's relations with its own colonized Muslims and Arabs.
It was just such a crack in Western solidarity that gave Ahmad Kamal (1849-1923) his start on the road to Egyptology. Such cracks were narrow, however, and he alone of his generation managed to parlay that start into a full career in Egyptology. 12
Egyptology was not high on the agenda of Egypt's sovereigns in the century leading up to 1922. To Muhammad 'Ali (r. 1805-1848), antiquities were bargaining chips with the British and French consuls as he pursued military and political ambitions. Nevertheless, one potentially fruitful result was his antiquities decree of 1835. Following up on a suggestion by Champollion, it outlawed unauthorized digging and export of antiquities, named an antiquities inspector, and provided for Rifa'a al-Tahtawi to collect antiquities in a Cairo storehouse. Tahtawi had discovered the lure of ancient Egypt while studying in France, where he visited the collection Champollion had organized at the Louvre.
European cupidity and Egyptian indifference aborted this embryonic antiquities service and museum, and in 1855 Sa'id (r. 1854-1863) presented the remnants of the collection to Archduke Maximillian of Austria. Auguste Mariette, fresh from the discovery of the Serapeum at Saqqara, played on imperial rivalries in persuading Sa'id that France, in the person of Prince Napoleon, deserved an equivalent gift. In 1858 the francophile Sa'id, deeply enmeshed in Ferdinand de Lesseps' Suez Canal project and eager to ingratiate himself with Napoleon III, authorized Mariette to create and direct an antiquities service and museum.
A decade later, in the fall of 1869, even as French influence in Egypt peaked with the opening of the Suez Canal, Prussia got a toe in the door with Heinrich Brugsch's appointment as director of a tiny School of Egyptology ("School of the Ancient Language") to train Egyptians in Cairo. 13 Mariette, the French Director of the Antiquities Service, feared the School as a possible German wedge to challenge his control of antiquities. To Egyptians, the School of Egyptology was one facet of a cultural florescence under Khedive Isma'il (r. 1863-1879), which included rapid expansion of schools and literacy, the birth of a private press, the founding of the National Library and Khedivial Geographical Society, an opera house, and urban renewal la Parisienne. Minister of Education 'Ali Mubarak, who like Tahtawi took a lively interest in an cient Egypt, worked out the arrangements for the Egyptological school with Brugsch.
Twenty year-old Ahmad Kamal leapt at the chance to join nine other Egyptians in studying Arabic, French, German, Egyptian, Coptic, and Ethiopic at the new school. But the school collapsed after several years. Ignoring the German-French tension, Brugsch lamented:
| The Viceroy was highly satisfied with my work, the minister of education was delighted, and the director of government schools almost burst with envy. . . . my old friend Mariette worried that it might lead the Viceroy to have it up his sleeve to appoint officials who had studied hieroglyphics to his museum. No matter how much I tried to set his mind at ease, he remained so suspicious that he gave the order to museum officials that no native be allowed to copy hieroglyphic inscriptions. The persons in question were thus simply expelled from the Temple. 14 |
Mariette refused to hire Brugsch's graduates, and Kamal and his colleagues had to fall back on jobs as teachers, translators, and clerks. A later nationalist wrote,
| With foreigners wanting to monopolize Egyptian antiquities, the former students of the School of hieroglyphics had to enter teaching like Ahmed Bey Naguib and Mohammed Effendi Ismat or teach calligraphy like Ibrahim Effendi Naguib. . . . All these Egyptians passed like shadows. Unfortunately they were Egyptians. 15 |
With Britain occupying Egypt after 1882 and Germany concentrating on Istanbul rather than Cairo in its Ottoman policy, Anglo-French rivalry occupied center stage in Cairo, both in Egyptology and in general affairs. Furious at losing Egypt to the British, the French fought a long rearguard retreat as the British tried to whittle away at their influence in the Antiquities Service, the Mixed Courts, and the schools. In 1899 the French were disappointed at being forced to admit two British inspectors into the Antiquities Service. 16 Five years later they were relieved when the entente cordiale formally recognized French directorship of the Antiquities Service.
With French fears of a German archeological coup in Cairo allayed, Maspero proved to be more cordial than Mariette had been to the alumni of Brugsch's school. With the backing of the Egyptian prime minister (Riyad Pasha) himself, Ahmad Kamal first obtained a post as secretary-translator at the museum, then joined the regular cadre of the service as an assistant curator. Maspero encouraged Kamal to relaunch the school of Egyptology by teaching five Egyptians at the museum.
During an interim when Maspero was absent in France, Kamal's peti tion for promotion over less senior Europeans was rejected, 17 and one of the French directors even tried to fire him. Over the years Kamal worked on the museum's published catalogue, translated Maspero's guidebook into Arabic, published short notices in the service's ASAE, taught at the private Egyptian University, and worked on a huge twenty-two-volume Egyptian-Arabic dictionary. His stress on the Arabic-Semitic affinities of ancient Egyptian had obvious nationalist implications. Kamal had not advanced beyond assistant curator when he retired in 1914, with no prospect of an Egyptian successor in sight. Arrangements to publish his dictionary fell through after his death.
Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun a few months after Britain's unilateral declaration of limited Egyptian independence in 1922 set the stage for a showdown between British Egyptologists and Egyptian nationalists over control of the find. American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted, a coworker and ally of Carter's, had nothing but contempt for the nationalists. His son and biographer, Charles Breasted, conveyed the prevailing British and American view:
| To the Egyptians in general the significance of Tutenkhamon's tomb was entirely political and financial. It was further proof of their past and present glory, and it offered a superlative excuse for another burst of crowing over their newly acquired independence. Most important of all, it contained golden treasure and attracted great crowds of tourists to be bled of their cash. This was something the Egyptians could understand; whereas the proper salvaging of the objects in the tomb, the solicitude of the entire scientific world, and the legal rights of the discoverer and his late patron were wholly academic matters which they neither comprehended nor cared about. 18 |
Herbert Winlock of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose staff assisted Carter on the tomb, held similar views. He would "certainly not" take an "educated, high class Egyptian" on a dig because millennia of foreign rule had made "an intellectual facility to twist facts . . . an integral part of the Egyptian character." Although they would not steal [!], and "many of them are delightful, cultivated people," the problem was "intellectual gymnastics,"
Winlock clinched his case by ridiculing Sa'd Zaghlul's deviousness in Anglo-Egyptian negotiations. 19
Ignoring the imperial context that had influenced Egyptology for a century, Carter and his Anglo-American team presented the struggle over Tutankhamun's tomb as one of selfless Western science against greedy and ignorant Egyptian nationalists. The prevailing practice had been a fifty-fifty split of most archeological finds between the foreign excavators and the (foreign-run) Antiquities Service. Before his sudden death in the spring of 1923, Carter's patron Lord Carnarvon had insisted on his share of the finds. He also angered the Egyptians by awarding the London Times exclusive press coverage of the tomb without consulting them.
The Tutankhamun affair also reopened the old Anglo-French rivalry, which worked to the Egyptians' advantage. With no Egyptologists of their own who could speak with scholarly authority after Kamal's death, the nationalists found a perhaps unexpected ally in Pierre Lacau, Maspero's successor as director-general of the Antiquities Service. In January 1924, Sa'd Zaghlul's proudly nationalist Wafd government had come to power, and Lacau had to answer to it. Lacau peppered Carter in Luxor with instructions for work on the tomb and for receiving official dignitaries. Two American and two British Egyptologists helping Carter warned Lacau in an open letter: "you, as Director General of Antiquities are failing completely to carry out the obligations of your high office to protect scientific procedure in this all important task." 20
The last straw for Carter was an order from Lacau's superior, minister of the interior Murqus Hanna, forbidding Carter to show his coworkers' wives and families the tomb. Carter locked the tomb in a fury, returned to Cairo, and sued the government in the Mixed Courts. Zaghlul's government struck back--canceling Carter's concession (held in the name of Carnarvon estate) and dispatching Lacau to saw off the locks and seize the tomb. Carter had foolishly chosen as legal counsel the very lawyer (F. M. Maxwell) who had demanded the death penalty in prosecuting Murqus Hanna and other imprisoned Wafdists not long before! Maxwell denounced the government for breaking into the tomb "like a bandit" and all negotiations collapsed.
Treating the tomb as a national shrine, Murqus Hanna led parliamentarians on a pilgrimage there in March 1924 to celebrate the inauguration of Egypt's new parliamentary era. In the Arabic press only Muhammad Husayn Haykal's Liberal Constitutionalist al-Siyasa, sharply at odds with Zaghlul and the Wafd, bucked the nationalist tide to side with Carter. The Wafdist al-Balagh flung the Western rhetoric of selfless science back in Carter's face: "European and American archaeologists should work for the sake of science, and not expect profit or fame," it intoned: "Egypt has suffered enough from this foreigner, who, under the nose of the Egyptian public and of a high official of the Government, closes the tomb of Pharaoh as though it were the tomb of his own father." 21
The nationalists won, and the undivided contents of the tomb went to the Egyptian Museum. But the antiquities law that Lacau helped draft and the parliament passed in these circumstances was so draconian that it largely dried up foreign excavation in Egypt for a generation. Even the French government distanced itself from Lacau, noting that he had been acting only in his capacity as an Egyptian official. 22
In January 1925, however, the Ziwar government quietly readmitted Carter to work on the tomb. In November 1924 the British had seized on the assassination of Sir Lee Stack (the Sirdar, commander of the Egyptian Army and governor-general of the Sudan) to dismiss the Wafd and install Ziwar's compliant palace government. Carter blamed the service for having left Tutankhamun's unique pall out in the sun all summer, ruining it: "Mr. Carter was profoundly moved, but managed to restrain his comment to 'Well, anyway, it's your pall.' " 23
It was in this overheated atmosphere that the Rockefeller Foundation's offer of a magnificent $10,000,000 new antiquities museum for Cairo foundered. The University of Chicago's James Henry Breasted was the moving spirit behind the proposal, which might have established American dominance of Egyptology. The fatal flaw proved to be a proposed international board that would control the museum during a thirty-year transition while Egyptians were being trained to take over. Egypt, Britain, France, and the US would each have two seats on the board. Those who read archeology as politics variously perceived a scheme to perpetuate Western control at Egyptian expense, a bid for American leadership in Egyptology, and a blow to entrenched French interests in the service. Eighty years later the old Egyptian Museum has yet to be replaced. 24
Ahmad Kamal undertook to explain the significance of Tutankhamun's tomb in the Arabic press, but his death the summer following its discovery left Egyptians profoundly embarrassed at their lack of Egyptologists. Two of Kamal's former pupils, his son Hasan Ahmad Kamal and Selim Hassan, wrote about the tomb in Arabic, 25 but the former was a medical doctor and the latter had only recently resumed Egyptological studies. All the professionals on Carter's Tutankhamun team were foreigners, which was usual at the time.
It had been Westerners who forced the three schools of Egyptology with which Kamal had been associated to close. Kamal's passing in 1923 after fifty years in Egyptology went unremarked at the time in the service's Annales. Shortly before his death, Kamal pled with Lacau--twenty-four years his junior--to hire Egyptians. Lacau retorted that few besides Kamal himself had shown any interest. "Ah, M. Lacau," came the reply, "in the sixty-five years you French have directed the service, what opportunities have you given us?" 26
Yet the tide was already turning. In 1921 Kamal had persuaded Sultan Fu'ad (r. 1917-1936, king from 1922) to arrange for the selection and training of three Egyptian assistant curators for the museum. 27 Taha Husayn, then professor of ancient history at the private Egyptian University, recommended making the selection from graduates of the higher schools under the age of twenty-six, apprenticing them at the museum, then sending them to Europe for advanced study. 28
The three winners became the core of Egypt's scant second generation of Egyptologists (counting Kamal's largely lost generation as the first). In the event, none of the three--Selim Hassan (1886/87-1961), Sami Gabra (1893-1879), and Mahmud Hamza--was under twenty-six. Hassan and Hamza had studied at Kamal's 1910-1912 Egyptology school before drifting off to teaching; Gabra held a licence and doctorate in law from Bordeaux. Now Hassan headed for Paris to study Egyptology, while Gabra and Hamza studied at Liverpool before moving on to Paris. They returned to the Antiquities Service about 1928 and published their first articles in its ASAE shortly thereafter. 29
Meanwhile, Egypt's fourth school of Egyptology had begun molding a third generation of Egyptian Egyptologists. In 1923--reportedly on the day Kamal died--a decree founded Egypt's fourth school of Egyptology. Kamal was to have been its director. Like its prewar predecessor, the school began as a section in the Higher Teachers College. With Kamal gone, European professors were the only option; they directed the program until World War II. Vladimir Golénischeff, an elderly expatriate Russian nobleman who divided his time between Nice and Cairo, was the first. 30
In 1925 the Egyptology program was transferred to the new, state-run Egyptian University. Lord Cromer had vetoed a university as a likely center of nationalist unrest, but his successor, Sir Eldon Gorst, allowed the small private Egyptian University to open in 1908. (Kamal taught an Egyptology course there one year). By 1914 the British had decided to allow a state university and appointed a University Commission to draft a plan. Lacau, Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale (IFAO) director G. Foucart, and Ahmad Kamal sat on a subcommittee for archeology, which recommended chairs in Egyptology and Islamic archeology, with chairs in ethnography (Foucart's enthusiasm) and Coptic archeology to be added later. Instruction via English and French was prescribed to discipline student minds, as Greek and Latin were presumed to do in Europe. German was also required, but Arabic was mentioned only as a medium for lectures to the general public. 31
The postwar independence movement derailed the University Commission, and in 1925, with the Wafd in eclipse, King Fu'ad and the Liberal Constitutionalists designed the new Egyptian University. The Egyptological section at the Higher Teachers College was upgraded into a department in the new Faculty of Arts. In the early 1930s K. A. C. Creswell took up the new chair of Islamic archeology, and a graduate-level Institute of Archeology replaced the undergraduate department. Despite France's long archeological presence in the Antiquities Service and IFAO, the British managed to exclude them from University chairs in archeology. The British had no objections to letting Golénischeff occupy the Egyptology chair at first; Russian influence in Egypt was nil, and he was an emigré in any case. Another Russian expatriate who never received a chair, Victor Vikentiev, also taught Egyptian there.
Labib Habachi, a member of the third generation that began graduating from the Egyptian University in 1928, had begun archeology at the Higher Teachers College and followed the program into the University. He regretted never having met Ahmad Kamal but reminisced about studying hieroglyphics with Golénischeff, Arabic literature with Taha Husayn, and Coptic and a little demotic with Georgi Sobhy and Ahmose Labib (also a Copt, and one with a pharaonic name, Habachi pointed out). 32 Sobhy served as advisor to the students' Egyptology club, which brought out several issues of a magazine, al-Qadim, in 1925.
Tutankhamun's tomb quickened the interest of upper- and upper-middle-class Egyptians in the pharaohs. "Prince of Poets" Ahmad Shawqi and Khalil Mutran composed patriotic odes on Tutankhamun. 33 In 1933 Tawfiq al-Hakim's Return of the Spirit used the resurrection of Osiris from the Book of the Dead as a metaphor for Egypt's "awakening" in 1919 and Zaghlul's return from exile and prison. Hakim has a French archeologist lecture a skeptical British irrigation engineer on how the fellahin retained the deep intuitive wisdom of the ancients throughout centuries of invasion and foreign rule. 34
In 1929 the shift of the Antiquities Service from the ministry of public works to that of education suggested a wider mission than shoring up monuments and excavating dirt; schools would educate modern Egyptians about their pharaonic heritage. School field trips to sites such as the Giza pyramids and Luxor impressed Husayn Fawzi (the author of Sindibad Misri [1961]) and future sociologist Sayyid 'Uways, whose headmaster always plied his pupils with dynastic charts of the pharaohs. 35
The paintings of Mahmud Sa'id, the sculptures of Mahmud Mukhtar, and neopharaonic architecture of the 1920s caught the same mood. Mukhtar's granite "Awakening of Egypt," now in front of Cairo University, shows a sphinx rising as a peasant woman removes her veil. Mukhtar's monumental statures of Sa'd Zaghlul in Cairo and Alexandria include pharaonic motifs, and Zaghlul's mausoleum epitomizes the pharaonic revival in architecture. Secularist Muslims and Copts won out in the pharaonic design for the mausoleum; others had advocated a traditional mosque-tomb for the national hero. Isma'il Sidqi's palace government mockingly packed Zaghlul's unfinished tomb with royal mummies from the Egyptian Museum, but in 1936 the Wafd returned to power and triumphantly reburied their hero in the finished tomb. 36
Liberal Constitutionalists and their forerunners among the intellectuals and landlords of the Umma Party tended to be even more pharaonist than the Wafd. As the editor of the Umma's al-Jarida before 1914, Lutfi al-Sayyid implored the youth to visit pharaonic and Islamic sites and the Egyptian Museum, "For the truth of the matter is that we do not know as much about the stature of our fatherland and its glory as tourists do!" 37 As university rector after 1925 he nurtured the Egyptology program, yearned for the day when Egyptians could learn about their ancient forebears from fellow countrymen, and approved the addition of "Arab archeology" at the university. Lutfi's protégé Muhammad Husayn Haykal, editor of al-Siyasa, became the leading political-literary pharaonist in the 1920s. The Watani Party of the late Mustafa Kamil included a sphinx's head in the statue of their founder, and Ahmad Husayn's Young Egypt began with a strong pharaonist tint.
King Fu'ad harnessed pharaonism to his pursuit of legitimacy and royal power. Shawqi's Tutankhamun ode presented Fu'ad as a benevolent constitutional monarch(!) and worthy heir to the pharaohs, countering Western depictions of them as brutal oppressors. 38 Seven of nineteen stamps issued during Fu'ad's reign (1922-1936) used pharaonic motifs. On one set, the god of wisdom Thoth carves "Fu'ad" in a hiero glyphic cartouche. Neopharaonic buildings in Egypt peaked in the late 1920s. Yet when occasion demanded, King Fu'ad posed as a pious Muslim, courting al-Azhar and aspiring to be caliph.
On a practical level, tourism and work with archeological expeditions gave many Egyptians a material stake in the pharaonic legacy. For over a century and a half, Alexandria, Cairo, Luxor, and Aswan have presented opportunities for guides, guards, donkey boys, felucca sailors, carriage or taxi drivers, archeological laborers, hoteliers, and peddlers of real and fake antiquities. The as yet unwritten histories of the town of Luxor and villages such as Qurna (opposite Luxor), Mit Rahina, Saqqara, and Nazlat al-Samman (at the foot of the Giza Sphinx) would have been totally different without Western Egyptology and tourism. A multigenerational biography of Qurna's 'Abd al-Rasul family, who discovered the cache of royal mummies at Deir al-Bahri about 1871 and mined it for a decade before being caught, could make an illuminating social history. So could the century-old guild of skilled archeological laborers from Quft whom Petrie first recruited in the 1890s.
An incurable romantic, Egyptologist Sami Gabra believed that "The poor villages of Egypt, near the excavations, have never forgotten the solicitude of these great foreign masters so humane to the peasants and their offspring." 39 But Western exploration, archeology, and tourism were immensely destructive of local customs and economies. Benedict Anderson remarks that "the reconstructed monuments, juxtaposed with the surrounding rural poverty, said to natives: Our very presence shows that you have always been, or have long become, incapable of either greatness or self-rule." 40
Qurna villagers met eighteenth-century Western travelers with stones, and Bonaparte's savants surveyed Egypt only at bayonet point. To many nineteenth-century villagers, archeology meant unpaid forced labor (corvée) for European consul-collectors and later for Mariette's Antiquities Service. Archeology cleared the way for excavation and tourism by evicting villagers from homes in the temples of Luxor and Edfu. In the 1940s the inhabitants of Qurna sabotaged a project to move them from amongst the Tombs of the Nobles down to Hassan Fathi's utopian "New Qurna" in the floodplain; and they are currently resisting another scheme to transfer their village. The uneven personal and regional benefits and costs of tourism, the tensions between insensitive tourists and conservative villagers, folk-beliefs about the fertility-inducing power of antiquities, and the antipharaonism of Islamist purists are all pieces of an as yet little-known puzzle.
Britain began its long and intermittent retreat from domination of Egypt in 1922. The nationalization of the Egyptology and Islamic archeology at the Egyptian University and the Antiquities Service were similarly drawn out. Sometimes the ideal of scholarly internationalism smoothed the transition; at others the inherent conflict between imperialism and nationalism made the change more abrasive. Personalities, on both sides of the Egyptian-Western divide, also helped at times to account for the difference between friendly accommodation and outright confrontation.
Egyptology in those days held special appeal for Copts. The great German Egyptologist Adolf Erman had first greeted Sami Gabra with a hearty "You are a Copt . . . of the blood of Amenophis III, that dear Pharaoh whom I would like to see in another age." 41 Copts latched onto the Western belief, often couched in the racialist idiom of the day, that they were the truest descendants of the ancient Egyptians. Claudius Labib (1868-1918), who ran the press at the Coptic Patriarchate and taught Coptic and some Egyptian, gave his children pharaonic names and insisted they speak only Coptic--a dead liturgical language--at home. His son Pahor Claudius Labib (b. 1905) followed him into Egyp-tology and Coptology, becoming director of the Coptic Museum. George Sobhy (1884-1964) joined his surgeon colleague Elliot Smith in dissecting mummies at the Cairo School of Medicine and taught Coptic and demotic on the side. Sobhy's student Girgis Mattha (d. 1967) succeeded him as the University's demotic and Coptic specialist. Copts constituted only 6 to 10 percent of Egypt's population, but two of seven graduates in the first Egyptology class of 1928 (Mattha and Labib Habachi) were Copts, as were over 40 percent of the Egyptologists graduated between 1928 and 1950. 42
For Sami Gabra the 1930s were "the golden age" of Egyptian archeology, as savants from all over the West dug away "under the desert sky." Lacau had hand picked Gabra in 1929 to excavate a site at the Coptic Village of Deir Tassa, near Gabra's hometown. After years of American, French, and British schooling, Gabra was so Westernized that he wrote his memoirs in French instead of Arabic. He relished scholarly congresses in Europe and welcomed Western colleagues who visited his excava tions at the Greco-Roman necropolis at Tuna al-Gabal. Even his Egyptian nationalism had a gallic twist, as when he praised Lacau's determined resistance to attempts to enrich European museums at Egypt's expense. Gabra hailed "the first pioneering genius" Champollion and the "noble line of his successors: Mariette, Maspero, Loret, Lacau, Drioton. One cannot forget these noble figures, these men always ready to serve science and Egypt with rectitude and modesty." 43
In national politics too, many Copts would look back on the 1920s and early 1930s as a golden age. The Western-educated upper and upper-middle classes--like many of their Muslim counterparts--felt at ease in the cosmopolitan circles of Cairo and Alexandria. For Copts who took their nationalism seriously, the relative secularism of the Wafd offered a chance for full participation unmatched in either the nineteenth century or after 1952.
Congenial as Gabra was to Westerners, he lived in a cosmopolitan world that not many Egyptians could share. Selim Hassan was less at home in English and French, his personal ambition and his nationalism put him at odds with the French Antiquities directors, and his prickly personality compounded the friction. in 1912 Maspero had blighted Hassan's career for a decade by refusing to hire Kamal's Egyptology students. When unforeseeable events opened an apprenticeship to him in the Antiquities Service a decade later, he resented having to pay his own way to attend the Champollion centennial celebrated in Grenoble in 1922. R. Engelbach, Chief Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt, reportedly barred him from Tutankhamun's tomb until Carter intervened. 44
Cracks in the solidarity of Western Egyptology, along both national and personal lines, helped Selim Hassan advance his career. British Egyptologist P. E. Newberry, who had succeeded Golénischeff, welcomed Hassan to the Egyptian University, but his most important patron was Hermann Junker, an Austro-German Egyptologist from the University of Vienna. In 1929 Junker had reopened the German Archeological Institute in Cairo under Austrian auspices. Founded in 1907 under Ludwig Borchardt and sequestered during World War I, the Institute remained frozen until 1929 because of charges that Borchardt had smuggled Nefertiti's famous bust out of Egypt. 45 When Hassan switched from the Antiquities Service to the Egyptian University (about 1931), Junker took Hassan under his wing, providing him with a three-month archeological apprenticeship digging at Giza, offering advice when Hassan began his own excavations for the Faculty of Arts, and guiding him to a University of Vienna doctorate in 1935.
Hassan also benefited from friendly advice from an American, George Reisner, whose Harvard-Boston Museum of Fine Arts expedition was also excavating at Giza. Reisner had broken with his American colleague Breasted, siding unequivocally with the Egyptian government in the Tutankhamun affair. 46 Reisner also endeared himself to Egyptians by training them as archeological photographers and record keepers, treating them as much like colleagues as possible, and helping arrange schooling for sons of his crew. 47
Nearly fifty when he obtained his doctorate in 1935, and with mandatory retirement looming at sixty, Hassan was a man in a hurry. He set his sights on replacing Lacau as director-general of Antiquities. Lacau had considered retiring as early as 1923 but was warned that the English, Americans, or Germans might snatch up his post. 48 He soldiered on for another dozen years "at head of this service so important for science and for French influence." 49 Georges Foucart, director of IFAO from 1915 to 1928, failed to groom a French heir apparent to Lacau. 50 No help could come from the University either, where a bid to slip Raymond Weill into Junker's chair in 1934 failed. 51
The gratitude Lacau earned from Egyptian nationalists for his role in the Tutankhamun affair was short-lived. In 1930 nationalists in the Egyptian parliament denounced his six-month summer leaves. 52 In the mid-1930s the nationalist press blamed both Lacau and Pierre Jouguet, Foucart's successor at IFAO, when antiquities from an IFAO dig at Deir El Medina surfaced for sale abroad. Jouguet wondered if Hassan, Newberry, or Junker might be the insider fueling the attacks, but he could not rule out disgruntled French scholars such as Mme. Gauthier-Laurent, who was rumored to have put Selim Hassan's Paris thesis into French. 53
Early in 1936 Lacau retired at last, and Miles Lampson, the British High Commissioner, hoped that in the absence of an obvious French successor, Chief Curator Engelbach might move up: "My own inclination is to get such things for our own people whenever we properly can! It's always a little galling to me that the Antiquities here should be French run."( (54 ( A dozen years earlier Lord Allenby had worried instead that an Egyptian, "however incompetent," might follow Lacau. 55 But when the French did settle on a candidate, the Abbé Etienne Drioton from the Louvre, Lampson felt bound by the 1904 entente to support him.
Egypt had not been a party to the entente cordiale, of course, and the nationalists demanded an Egyptian director. Hearing that Gabra might be named, Mahmud Hamza scrambled to present his own credentials. 56
But it was Selim Hassan who emerged as the Egyptian candidate. Presumably because of personal rivalries, Gabra mentions neither Hassan nor Hamza in his memoirs.
Nahhas's new Wafdist government was nationalist enough, but an Egyptian director of Antiquities was not its top priority. Anglo-French solidarity prevailed and Drioton won out, though the French Ambassador reported: "Nahhas pacha (whom I suspect of not knowing very well what the "Rosetta Stone" is) answered me that the nomination of the Abbé Drioton was decided in principle six weeks ago . . . but that in view of public opinion the Wafdist govt. was obliged to create for Selim Hassan a post as sub Director." 57
The Liberal Constitutionalist al-Siyasa hailed Drioton, but other Arabic papers protested: "l'Abbé Drioton au Service des Antiquités. Une colonisation française perpetuelle" and noted the irony of "the [Wafdist] Government of the people" appointing "this French priest," a mere "assistant conservator" at the Louvre with credentials allegedly inferior to Hassan's. 58
In their private dispatches the French and British embassies closed ranks and vilified Hassan. Conceding only his skill in excavation, the French dismissed him as "a rather mediocre student of the Abbé Drioton" 59 with "merely elementary" education. The Rosetta Stone itself would done him no good since he lacked Greek and Latin, whereas "L'Abbé Drioton himself, knows--like Champollion--besides Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic." 60 The British Embassy was equally vicious:
| For a number of years he [Hassan] has been employed by the Egyptian University who, nonetheless, dislike him cordially. . . . Selim has always been disliked by the majority of Egyptians who regard him as an ignoramus and self-advertising humbug but [he] seems to be feared and is said to be able to count on the support of Nokrashi Pasha. |
| Selim is the creation of Professor Ne wberry who has now left Egypt for good. Like his master Selim was always bitterly anti-French who [sic] in his opinion had not appreciated his merits as the one and only Egyptian savant. . . . |
| He is, I think probably a little mad and most certainly dangerous and malevolent. If unchecked he will end by wrecking the department. 61 |
At the museum, the atmosphere turned poisonous. As deputy director-general, Hassan leap-frogged Secretary-General Gauthier, who left the fray by retiring at sixty in 1937. Lampson approved Drioton's tactic of giving Hassan "enough rope to hang himself." Drioton warned Lampson that he was afraid to go on summer leave before the con tracts of his European subordinates were renewed; Hassan might fire them. Lampson marched straight to the prime minister himself to obtain the renewals. 62
As the June 1939 expiration date of Drioton's three-year contract neared, press attacks on the Europeans in the service intensified. Hassan might have won, wrote the French ambassador,
| if archeological science and its representative in Egypt [Drioton] had not found an unexpected, determined, and persistent champion, in the person of King Farouk. . . . He inherited from his father the conviction that Egyptian antiquity is one of the key sources of modern Egyptian brilliance, and that without foreigners, Egyptians are not yet capable of conserving and bringing it to light. 63 |
The Sovereign of Egypt and the able Canon of the Nancy Chapter [Drioton], successor of Mariette and of Maspero," 64 had hit it off on a royal tour of Upper Egypt. Frustrated by Selim Hassan's poor English--so the gossip went--the princesses of the party had turned with relief to Drioton's French. (Ironically, Arabic was not even considered for these communications between Egyptians.) Hassan reportedly had confused the Apis Bull with the sacrificial bull, and at Asyut he authenticated as ancient a modern necklace presented to Faruq. 65 With the British, the French, and the king in his corner, Drioton stayed on until 1952. One necessary price was silence when antiquities vanished into Faruq's palace collections.
With his 1939 contract renewal in hand, Drioton turned on Hassan, who was suspected of embezzling funds, smuggling out antiquities to Germany, and pulling strings to avoid prosecution. When the royal jewels of Psusennes were stolen in 1940, the British suspected that Hassan had the incident "deliberately framed in order to discredit and expel all Europeans from the Service." 66 Drioton scoffed that though Hassan had charged 26,000 objects were missing from the museum, an inventory showed only three or four mislaid since 1914. "I agree with Selim Bey Hassan," declared Drioton wryly," on the necessity of protecting Egyptian antiquities, not only from foreign hands, but from Egyptian hands as well!!!" 67
Gershoni and Jankowski have shown that pharaonism faded before more populist Arab and Islamic themes in the 1930s and 1940s. Pharaonic revival buildings became rare, and Haykal dropped the winged sun from the masthead of al-Siyasa al-Usbu'iyya. 68 Only six of thirty-six stamp sets issued under Faruq had pharaonic motifs, compared to seven of nineteen under Fu'ad.
Yet the retreat of pharaonism was not a rout. As a youth Nasser had thrilled to the pharaonist patriotism of al-Hakim's Return of the Spirit. Young Egypt continued to extol pharaonic as well as Arab and Islamic greatness. In the late 1930s and early 1940s Najib Mahfuz set his first three novels in ancient Egypt, and four of eighteen novels in the Arabic Language Academy's 1941 "best novel" competition had pharaonic settings. 69
The "Unity of the Nile Valley" slogan appealed across the political spectrum in the 1940s and 1950s, for Egyptians feared Britain's intentions for the Sudan with its vital Nile waters. The slogan had no Arab or Islamic appeal but fit well with pharaonism. Egyptian Egyptologists, historians, geographers, and Africanists rushed to make the case for Egyptian-Sudanese unity. 70 If white Westerners erred in whitening the ancient Egyptians and distancing them from black Africa, American Afrocentrists in our own day often go too far in the opposite direction. Neither position much interests modern Egyptians, whose proverb simply declares Egypt (or Cairo) Umm al-Dunya--the Mother of the World.
Nationalists of the 1930s and 1940s might have written the Antiquities Service off as a foreign institution dealing with an alien pre-Arab and pre-Islamic past. Instead they made its nationalization, like the retention of Tutankhamun's treasures and the return of Nefertiti's bust, a touchstone of national pride. With each passing year the small but steady output of Egyptology graduates enlarged the reservoir of professionals with a vested interest in ancient Egypt.
The Museum of Egyptian Civilization, opened in 1949, presented an official version of a secular worldview that still attracts many educated middle-to-upper-class Egyptians. The distinguished modern historian Shafiq Ghurbal, who had begun as a student of Ahmad Kamal's, oversaw the project. The Egypt-centered dioramas progress from prehistory through the pharaonic, Greco-Roman, Coptic, Arab, and Ottoman eras. The French Expedition marks the start of the modern era. The sections on "the modern age," including one on Egyptian expansion into the Sudan, glorify the Muhammad 'Ali dynasty. 71 If one elides the prehistoric stage into the pharaonic, follows the progression through the Greco-Roman and Coptic eras, folds the Ottoman into the Arab (or Islamic) period, and marks off the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the modern period, the result is a five-stage paradigm of Egyptian history still popular today. It is often trumpeted as "7,000 years of civi lization." Each of Egypt's four main historical museums (the Egyptian Museum, the Greco-Roman and Coptic museums, and the Museum of Islamic Art) represents one period of the first four in the paradigm.
The retreat from the exaggerated pharaonism of the 1920s helped the more far-sighted members of the Westernized elite keep in touch with the more pragmatic religious leaders of al-Azhar and with the middle and lower-middle classes in the burgeoning towns. Perhaps because no political group of the old regime staked its fate on pharaonism as the Pahlavi dynasty had on ancient Iran, the 1952 revolution felt no need to assault the pre-Islamic past as did Iran's Islamic revolution of 1979. Current Islamist challenges to the Mubarak regime may reopen the question, however.
While Drioton's political skills and scholarly stature kept him in office until 1952, Egyptianization proceeded around him in the University and the Antiquities Service. When the British finally drove Junker out of the Egyptian University (for his alleged Nazi sympathies), they were embarrassed to find that they could not come up with a British replacement. The British never had an archeological base in Egypt comparable to IFAO (they were less committed than France to a state-supported mission civilisatrice), or even one to rival the German Institute or the American's Chicago House at Luxor. (The British School of Archaeology was merely Petrie's name for his camp wherever he was digging). Sami Gabra became the first Egyptian director of the university's Institute of Archeology by default. 72
As for the Antiquities Service, Muhammad Husayn Haykal as minister of education almost continuously from 1938 to 1942, searched for a compromise. He proposed placing a single Egyptian administrator-general over the museums of Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Coptic, and Arab Art and reclassifying Drioton and other Europeans as "technical" or "scientific" advisors. 73 The British Embassy, Drioton and the French, and the king joined together to scuttle the plan, but the Psusennes theft gave the government the opening to reclassify Chief Curator Engelbach in 1942 as a technical advisor, with Mahmud Hamza becoming the first Egyptian chief curator. A British maneuver to move in a British understudy to Assistant Curator Guy Brunton failed, so Engelbach's death in 1946 and Brunton's retirement in 1948 quietly ended nearly half a century of British presence in the service. 74
H. W. Fairman sounded the despairing cries often heard as colonial officials depart: Mahmud Hamza was a "lazy, ignorant intriguer," and
| [t]here are a crowd of Egyptian excavators working at Sakkara, ruthlessly opening tomb after tomb, and leaving no record of their work except the obvious. Many will not be published, some will only be published inadequately and all are rigorously prohibited to the Egyptologist to visit. Egyptology has been built up by the efforts of scholars of all nations and has been a truly international science, with the exception that the Egyptian contribution has been nil. 75 |
Engelback found Fairman's charges exaggerated and unfair to Hamza, who had turned against the French only because of Drioton's "hatred." Engelbach also defended the scholarship of his Egyptian colleagues, saying that he corrected their manuscripts only for English.
Meanwhile the third generation of Egyptians were moving up. Abdel Moneim Abu Bakr, Labib Habachi, Girgis Mattha, and three future directors of the Coptic Museum (Togo Mina, Pahor Labib, and Victor Girgis) were among those who earned their B.A.s between 1928 and 1933. Thereafter undergraduate Egyptology was dropped at Cairo University until 1957 and replaced with a graduate-level Institute of Archeology. During the 1930s Abu Bakr, Pahor Labib, and Ahmad Badawi overcame the language barrier and earned Egyptology doctorates in Germany; Ahmad Fakhry and Anwar Shukri were on the same course when World War II forced them to return home. Shukri received Fu'ad I (formerly the Egyptian) University's first Egyptology doctorate in 1942; Fakhry and seven others had followed him by 1966. 76
Nationalist pressures had the upper hand in 1945, when Chief Curator Hamza issued a list of American institutions, including the Oriental Institute, which had not returned objects loaned for study. The implication was that new permits for archeological work would not be forthcoming until their return. French Egyptology had difficulty healing the wounds of the Vichy/Free French divide, and the Cold War produced new challenges to scholarly internationalism. The International Association of Egyptologists, which met in 1947, was still-born, though Dutch scholars salvaged an important annual international bibliography, which still appears. 77
Drioton was summering in Europe in 1952 when the revolution came. The friend of the king knew he could not return, and ninety-four years of French domination of Antiquities Service came to an end.
Early in 1953 Mustafa 'Amr (1896-1973) was brought in from the outside to become the first Egyptian director-general of the Antiquities Service. He had come up through the Higher Teachers College (although not its Egyptology section) and taken a geography M.A. at Liverpool. As a geography professor in the 1930s he excavated a prehistoric site at El Maadi. Moving into administration, he had reached the rectorship of the University of Alexandria by the time of the revolution. 78
Gabra reluctantly retired from the university at sixty in the spring of 1952 and paid a nostalgic visit to the deposed Drioton in France that summer. In 1954 Gabra and medievalist 'Aziz 'Atiya reaffirmed their Coptic roots by founding the Institute of Coptic Studies at the Patriarchate.
Selim Hassan spent his last twenty years struggling to rehabilitate himself. His ten-part Excavations at Giza runs over 3,000 pages! In Arabic his works include a two-volume Literature of Ancient Egypt, and a six-volume history of Ancient Egypt from Prehistoric Times to the Age of Rameses II. In the 1950s he advised on the Nubian salvage campaign and an inventory at the museum. After his death in 1961 he was honored with a commemorative volume of ASAE and a bust in the pantheon of Egyptologists enshrined behind Mariette's garden monument. The street before the museum was renamed in his honor. A full and fair critical assessment of his career has yet to be made. 79
Nasser's turn toward Arabism and the rise of Islamism under Sadat and Mubarak has overshadowed the persisting interest of modern Egyptians in the pharaohs. Muhammad Husayn Haykal did shift from pharaonist to Islamic themes in the 1930s, but his daughter Fayza Haykal became an Egyptologist. Nasser's regime erected one of the Memphis colossi of Ramses II in the vast square before the Cairo train station, and the square and the street linking it with Maydan al-Tahrir still bear that proud pharaoh's name. For a few years the sphinx replaced King Faruq's portrait as the national symbol on coins. Eighty years before, the pyramids and sphinx on Egyptian postage stamps had reflected European ideas of what should symbolize Egypt. But Europeans, the wealthy, and the government were the early patrons of the postal system, and stamps hardly touched the lives of most Egyptians. It was quite another thing in the 1950s to affirm the sphinx as a national symbol on coins, which circulated daily through the hands of nearly every Egyptian.
Patriots were proud that it was Egyptian archaeologists who made the twin sensational discoveries of 1954--the boats south of the Great Pyramid and Sekhemkhet's unfinished pyramid at Saqqara. Egyptologist Gamal Mokhtar took charge of rewriting school textbooks in an "our ancestors the pharaohs" vein, 80 and Husayn Fawzi's autobiographical Sindibad al-Misri (1961) glorified the pharaonic past its author had treasured since the 1930s.
With the confidence born of full independence and control of its Antiquities Service and museums, Egypt reached out for indispensable international aid to salvage the antiquities of Nubia from the waters of Lake Nasser. Even as he rode the crest of Arab nationalism, Nasser appealed to internationalism through the UNESCO-sponsored salvage campaign, declaring that the High Dam would be for the benefit of Egypt but that the antiquities were the heritage of all humanity. 81 Foreign institutions were allowed to keep half of their Nubian finds and became eligible to excavate elsewhere later on the same generous terms. The rancorous Egyptological feuds of the interwar years faded as expeditions from around the globe joined the international campaign.
Retreating from the disappointments of Nasser's Pan-Arabism, Sadat promoted both local pride in Egypt's civilization through the ages and Islamic revival. A current of identification with ancient Egypt, which Egyptology and pharaonism sometimes extravagantly promoted, seems to have become an independent and self-sustaining element of modern Egyptian identity. Saddam Husayn's Iraq and Asad's Syria, more Arab nationalist and secular then Sadat's Egypt, similarly stressed the pre-Islamic civilizations that had flourished within their modern boundaries. Territorial patriotism, Arabism, and Islamism are incompatible only in the abstract and unreal world of ideal types. What does it mean that Sa'd Zaghlul, an alumnus of al-Azhar, lies in a pharaonic mausoleum and that Nasser, a pragmatic secularist, is buried in a mosque-tomb? Or that "believer president" Sadat, who fostered Islamism but perished at the hands of assassins who shouted "we have killed Pharaoh," rests beneath a pyramid-shaped monument decorated with a Qur'anic quotation?
This essay has stressed the clash of Egyptian nationalism with Western imperialism in Egyptology while keeping in view the persistence of an internationalist ideal of objective scholarship. Internationalist rhetoric often cloaked Western imperialism, but cracks in the solidarity of Western Egyptology sometimes gave Egyptian Egyptology a chance to sprout. Some Western Egyptologists freely shared their expertise with Egyptians, and some Egyptian Egyptologists acknowledged their debt to the West without sacrificing their nationalism. In independent Egypt today, a street bears the name of Selim Hassan, but Champollion, Mariette, and Maspero also live on in the names of Cairo landmarks. 82 Near the end of a lifetime in Egyptology, John Wilson wrote: "We still say wistfully that matters of culture should not be affected by politics. We must continue to act in that hope so that it may be partially true." 83
My research in Egypt in 1987-88 was funded by grants from the Fulbright Hays Faculty Research Abroad program and Georgia State University. It was sponsored by the Fulbright Binational Commission, the American Research Center in Egypt, Cairo University, and Ayn Shams University.
Notes:
Note 1: Quoted in translation in the Egyptian Gazette, February 26, 1932. Except where otherwise indicated, translations from French and Arabic are mine. Back.
Note 2: Having seen an Egyptian interviewee wince at the term "indigenous Egyptology," I use the more awkward "Egyptian Egyptology" here. For him, the condescending connotation of the French indigne (comparable to "native" in English) apparently carried over to its more neutral English cognate. Back.
Note 3: William Pfaff, The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism (New York, 1993), 14, 34, and Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge, 1969), especially 109-10; F. S. L. Lyons, Internationalism in Europe, 1815-1914 (Leiden, 1963); Joseph Ben-David, Centers of Learning: Britain, France, Germany, United States (New York, 1977). Back.
Note 4: For Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony, see T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 567-593. Back.
Note 5: As quoted in Said, Culture of Imperialism, 162. Back.
Note 6: Novick, That Noble Dream. Back.
Note 7: Warren R. Dawson and Eric P. Uphill, Who Was Who in Egyptology (2d ed.; London, 1972), 133-34. Dawson also ignores such painful facts as that: World War I forced Borchardt and Junker out of Egypt as enemy aliens, the Nefertiti affair prevented Borchardt from ever excavating in Egypt again, Junker's replacement of Borchardt as director of the German Institute embittered the latter, Borchardt emigrated to escape the Nazis while Junker went along with them, and the British forced Junker out of his University chair at Cairo. Other well-known feuds across national lines included Salt vs. Drovetti, Brugsch vs. Maspero, Carter vs. Lacau, Budge vs. Grébaut, and Naville vs. Sethe. Intranational, or personal feuds included Champollion vs. Jomard and Breasted vs. Reisner. Back.
Note 8: John A. Wilson, Thousands of Years: An Archaeologist's Search for Ancient Egypt (New York, 1972), 123. See also his Signs and Wonders Upon Pharaoh: A History of American Archaeology (Chicago, 1974). Back.
Note 9: Smith, Ethnic Origins, 168; Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt and Egyptian Nation. Gershoni and Jankowski do note the continued pride in ancient Egypt in the works of "integral nationalists" Ahmad Husayn, Fathi Radwan, and Sulayman Huzayyin. Back.
Note 10: Dawson and Uphill, Egyptology, 95-96. Back.
(New
Note 11: Preliminary treatment of these national rivalries is found in Donald M. Reid, "Indigenous Egyptology: The Decolonization of a Profession?" Journal of the American Oriental Society 105 (1985): 233-246. Back.
Note 12: On Kamal, see Muhammad Jamal Mukhtar, "Salim Hasan ka-Munaqqib wa 'Alim Athar," al-Majalla al-Ta'rikhiyya al-Misriyya 19 (1972): 73-87; Zaki Fahmi, Safwat al-'Asr fi Ta'rikh wa Rusum Mashahir Rijal fi Misr (Cairo, 1926) 1:331-336; Dia M. Abou-Ghazi, "Ahmed Kamal 1849-1923," Annales du Service des Antiquités de l'Egypte 64 (1981): 1-5; Tawfiq Habib, "Ta'rikh al-Kashf," al-Hilal 32 (November 1, 1923): 135-141; al-Muqtataf, 63 (November 1923): 273-77; Gamal El-Din El-Shayyal, A History of Egyptian Historiography in the Nineteenth Century (Alexandria, 1962), 60-63; Wilson, Signs, 193-194; Dawson and Uphill, Egyptology, 3. Back.
Note 13: On the School of Ancient Languages, see Dar al-Watha'iq al-Qawmiyya (Egyptian National Archives), Cairo (hereafter, DWQ)/Mahfuzat Majlis al-Wuzara, Nazarat al-Ashghal, Maslahat al-Athar, Alif/3/4, 1879-90; A. Rouchdy, "Note au Counseil des Ministres"; al-Muqtataf 63 (November 1923): 275-76; and Habib, al-Hilal, 32 (November 1, 1923): 139. On the second Egyptology school, see DWQ/ Mahfuzat Majlis al-Wuzara, Nazarat al-Ashghal, Maslahat al-Athar, 1/4 Matahif 1879-1914, Folder: Madrasat al-Athar, 1881-86. On the third school of 1910-12, see Jam'iyyat al-Mu'allimin, "Dirasat 'Ilm al-Athar al-Misriyya bi-Madrasat al-Mu'allimin al-'Ulya," al-Kitab al-Dhahabi li-Madrasat al-Mu'allimin al-'Ulya 1885-1935 (Cairo, 1935). Tawfiq Habib, "Dars al-Athar fi al-Jami'a al-Misriyya," al-Muqtataf 72 (1928): 438-443, reviews the history of all four of the Egyptology schools up to 1928. Back.
Note 14: Heinrich Brugsch, Mein Leben und mein Wandern (Berlin, 1893), 282. Back.
Note 15: Ruz al-Yusuf, March 21, 1936. My English translation from the French translation enclosed in "Repatriated" Archives of the French Embassy in Cairo, Ministre des affaires étrangres, Nantes (hereafter, MAE)/AMB Le Caire, Enseignement égyptien, Service des antiquités, Carton 174, Dossier 53/2: "Succession M. Lacau." Back.
Note 16: MAE/AMB Le Caire, Enseignement Egyptienne (1892-1941), Carton 174bis, Cogordan to Delcassé, November 20, 1899. Back.
Note 17: DWQ/Mahfuzat Majlis al-Wuzara, Nazarat al-Ashghal, Maslahat al-Athar 1891-1907, B/3/4, Ahmad Kamal to Pres., Council of Ministers, October 28, 1892. Back.
Note 18: Charles Breasted, Pioneer to the Past: The Story of James Henry Breasted, Told by His Son Charles Breasted (New York, 1947), 368. Pp. 327-49, 358, 360-73, describe the work on the tomb through the eyes of the author's father. For Carter's view, see Howard Carter and A. C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut.Ankh.Amen Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, vol. 1, and Carter, vols. 2 and 3 (New York, rpt. 1963). See also "The Amazing Luxor Dispute," Egyptian Gazette, February 16, 1924, 3, and Archives of the Foreign Office (hereafter, FO), U.K., Public Record Office, London, F0371/10055/E1407, February 1, 1924, Alan Gardiner to PM. Back.
Note 19: Grace Thompson Seton, A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt (New York, 1923), 132, 134. Back.
Note 20: "The Amazing Luxor Dispute," Egyptian Gazette, February 16, 1924, 3. Back.
Note 21: As quoted in the Egyptian Gazette, "The Deadlock at Luxor," February 18, 1924, 2. Al-Ahram, al-Akhbar, and al-Mahrusa similarly opposed Carter in the dispute. Back.
Note 22: MAE/AMB Le Caire, Enseignement égyptien, Service des Antiquités (1892-1941), Carton 174bis, Dossier 53/3: Fouilles, September 7, 1925, Gaillard to MAE. Back.
Note 23: Egyptian Gazette, January 26, 1925, 3. Back.
Note 24: Wilson, Signs, 181-183; Breasted, Pioneer, 374-397; FO371/10897/J1797, June 27, 1925, Murray to Lloyd. French reactions are reflected in MAE/AMB Le Caire, Enseignement égyptien, Service des antiquités 1897-1940, Carton 174, Dossier: "Don de Rockfeller [sic]," April 6, 1926. Back.
Note 25: Ahmad Kamal, al-Muqtataf, January 1, 1923, 62, 1-5; Hasan Ahmad Kamal, al-Muqattam, February 20, 1924, 2, and later numbers in February and March; Selim Hassan, "Kanz," al-Ahram, January 1, 1923, reprinted in al-Ahram, Shuhud al-'Asr 1876-1986 (Cairo, 1986), 80-88. Back.
Note 26: Wilson, Signs, 192-193. Back.
Note 27: al-Muqtataf, 63 (1923): 276. Back.
Note 28: Cairo University Archives (hereafter, CUA)/Université Egyptienne, Carton 5, Dossier 296: Missions to Europe of Princess Fatimah Hanum. July 9, 1923, Taha Husayn to Wakil of University. Back.
Note 29: Except where otherwise noted, information on Gabra is from his Chez les derniers adorateurs de Trismegiste: La Nécropole d'Hermopolis Touna El Gebel (Cairo, 1971). See also notices on him in Bulletin de la Société d'archéologie copte 24 (1979-82): 128-130, and al-Kitab al-Fiddi li-Kulliyyat al-Adab, 1925-1950 (Cairo, 1951), 58-59. On Selim Hassan, see Mukhtar, al-Majalla al-Tar'ikhiyya al-Misriyya, 19 (1972): 73-87; Dia Abou Ghazi, "Selim Hassan: His Writings and Excavation," ASAE 58 (1964): 62-84; al-Kitab al-Dhahabi, 125-126; Dawson and Uphill, Egyptology, 133-134; Wilson, Signs, 193-194, 230. I have not found a biographical sketch of Hamza, who is mentioned in passing here and there. Back.
Note 30: On the first years of this fourth Egyptology school, see Habib, Hilal, 140-141; Habib, Muqtataf, 438-443; and MAE/AMB Le Caire, Enseignement égyptien, Carton 170, (52), Université 1907-1940, Dossier 4, Sousdossier "Ecole égyptienne d'archéologie," January 26, 1924, Cairo to MAE. On Golénischeff, see Dawson and Uphill, Egyptology, 118. Back.
Note 31: MAE/AMB Le Caire, Enseignement égyptien, Carton 170, (52) Université 1907-1940, Dossier 4, Sousdossier Ecole égyptienne d'archéologie, "Rapport de la commission d'archéologie," (Summer 1920): 1-4, signed Lacau, Kamal, Abdel Hamid Mostafa, G. Foucart.'Ali Bahgat, director of the Museum of Arab Art, had resigned his seat on the subcommittee for unknown reasons. Back.
Note 32: Labib Habachi, interview, Cairo, June 22, 1983. Back.
Note 332: al-Muqtataf, February 1, 1923, and al-Hilal, 32 (June 1, 1924): 912. Back.
Note 34: Analyzed in Paul Starkey, From the Ivory Tower: A Critical Study of Tawfiq al-Hakim (London, 1987), 84-87, 119, 122-125. Back.
Note 35: Husayn Fawzi, Sindibad Misri (Cairo, 1961), and Sayyid Uways, L'Histoire que je porte sur mon dos: Memoires, trans. Nashwa al Azhari et al. (Cairo, 1989), 86. Back.
Note 36: For the Zaghlul mausoleum affair, see Ralph Coury, "The Politics of the Funereal: The Tomb of Saad Zaghlul," Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 39 (1992): 191-200. Back.
Note 37: Charles Wendell, The Evolution of the Egyptian National Image: From Its Origins to Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (Berkeley, 1972), 272. Back.
Note 38: S. Somekh, "The Neo-Classical Arabic Poets," in M. M. Badawi (ed.), Modern Arabic Literature (Cambridge, 1993), 69-71. Back.
Note 39: Gabra, Trismegiste, 15. Back.
Note 40: Anderson, Imagined Communities, 180. Back.
Note 41: Gabra, Trismegiste, 14. Back.
Note 42: On Claudius Labib and his son Pahor Labib, I have relied on W. E. Crum, "Bibliography: Christian Egypt," The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 5 (1918): 215; Ramzi Tadrus, al-Aqbat fi-l-Qarn al-'Ishrin (Cairo, n.d.), 4, 135-139; interview, Pahor Labib, Cairo, October 22, 1987; and Martin Krause (ed.), Essays on the Nag Hammadi Texts in Honour of Pahor Labib (Leiden, 1975), 1-3. On Sobhy, see Bulletin de la Société d'archéologie copte, 19 (1967-68): 315-16; 20; (1969-70): 1-3. On Mattha, see al-Athar al-'Ilmiyya li-Ada Hayat al-Tadris bi-Jami'at al-Qahira, (Cairo, 1958), 75-76. Statistics on Egyptology graduates are calculated from the lists in al-Dalil al-Dhahabi lil-Asatidha wa Khariji al-Athar, Jami'at al-Qahira mundhu Sanat 1925. Back.
Note 43: Quotations from Gabra, Trismegiste, 14-15, 150, 19. Back.
Note 44: Mukhtar, "Selim Hassan," 78. Back.
Note 45: On Newberry, see Dawson and Uphill, Egyptology, 216. On Junker and the German Institute, see ibid., 154-155; FO924/547/LC4763, September 1946, Egypt Exploration Society, "The Future of British Archeology in Egypt." On the Nefertiti affair, see Wilson, Signs, 155-157; FO 371/53375/J2263, May 20, 1946, Egyptian Ambassador (London) to FO. Back.
Note 46: Reisner to Hawes of Boston Museum of Fine Arts, October 9, 1924, as quoted in Nicholas Reeves and John H. Taylor, Howard Carter before Tutankhamun (New York, 1992), 161. Back.
Note 47: Wilson, Signs, 149. Back.
Note 48: MAE/AMB Le Caire, Carton 178: Personnel, Immeubles, Dossier: Personnel, September 4, 1926, Briand (MAE) to Cairo. Back.
Note 49: MAE/AMB Le Caire. Enseignement égyptien, Service des antiquités, Carton 174/bis, Dossier "Personnel franais," October 30, 1923. Pres. du Conseil, MAE to Gaillard. Back.
Note 50: MAE/AMB Le Caire, Enseignement égyptien, Service des antiquités 1892-41, Carton 174bis, Dossier: Personnel franais, September 24, 1925, French Minister, Alexandria to Briand; and Gaillard to MAE, November 19, 1923. Back.
Note 51: MAE/Service des Oeuvres fran aises à l'étranger, Série D. - Levant, Carton 365: Egypte: Facultés égyptiennes, Dossier: Facultés égyptiennes, June 4, 1934, Rector of Academy, Paris, to MAE. Back.
Note 52: MAE/AMB Le Caire, Enseignement égyptien, Service des Antiquités 1892-1941, Carton 174bis, Dossier: Personnel franais, Gaillard to MAE, February 18, 1930. Back.
Note 53: MAE/Service des oeuvres fran aises a l'étranger, Série D - Levant, Carton 365: Egypte: Facultés égyptiennes, Dossier: Institut d'archéologie, June 6, 1935, Dir. of Education supérieure, Ministre d'éducation nationale to Marx; Service des Ouevres, Série D - Levant, Carton 178: IFAO Personnel, Immeuble, Foucart to Jouguet, 4; al-Jihad, March 19, 1936, translation enclosed in MAE/AMB Le Caire, Enseignement égyptien, Service des antiquités, Carton 174, Dossier 53/2: Succession M. Lacau. Back.
Note 54: FO371/19094/J3355, July 15, 1935, Lampson to Oliphant. Back.
Note 55: FO371/10897/J1411, May 6, 1925, Allenby to Chamberlain. Back.
Note 56: al-Balagh, May 26, 1936. Back.
Note 57: MAE/AMB Le Caire, Enseignement égyptienne, Service des antiquités 1892-1941, Carton 174, Dossier 52/3: Succession M. Lacau. Back.
Note 58: Ruz al-Yusuf, June 9, 1936, French translation in MAE/AMB Le Caire, Enseignement égyptienne, Service des Antiquités 1897-1941, Carton 174, Dossier 53/2, Succession M. Lacau. Back.
Note 59: MAE/AMB Le Caire, Enseignement égyptien, Service des antiquités 1897-1941, Carton 174, Dossier: Succession M. Lacau, June 1, 1937, French Minister in Egypt to Delbos, quoting al-Balagh. Back.
Note 60: MAE/AMB Le Caire, Enseignement égyptien, Service des antiquités 1897-1941, Carton 174, Dossier 53/2: Succession M. Lacau. Back.
Note 61: FO395/550/P2759, "Memorandum by Sir Robert Greg on the General Cultural Position in Egypt," enclosed in Lampson to Eden, June 11, 1937. Back.
Note 62: MAE/AMB Le Caire, Enseignement égyptien, Service des Antiquités (1897-1941), Carton 174, Nov. 17, 1937, Witasse to MAE. Back.
Note 63: MAE, Service des oeuvres fran aises à l'étranger. Série D - Levant, Carton 266, Egypte: Facultés égyptiennes and Institut d'archéologie, Dossier: Institut d'archéologie, June 27, 1939. Back.
Note 64: . MAE/AMB Le Caire, Enseignement égyptien, Service des antiquités, 1897-1941, Carton 174, Dossier 53/2: Succession M. Lacau, French Minister, Cairo to Debos, March 10, 1937. Back.
Note 65: FO371/321585/J1626, Lampson to Gaselee, March 20, 1942; F0371/31585/J1048, April 14, 1942, Lampson to Eden. Back.
Note 66: F0371/31585/J678, extract of letter, Dec. 12, 1941, Fairman to Gardiner. Back.
Note 67: Akhir Sa'a, Feb. 12, [1940?], French translation enclosed in MAE/AMB Le Caire/Enseignement égyptien, Services des antiquités, 1892-1941, Carton 174bis, Dossier: Personnel franais. Back.
Note 68: Gershoni and Jankowski, Egyptian Nation, 63. Back.
Note 69: J. Brugman, An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature (Leiden, 1984), 297-98. Back.
Note 70: For example, Egyptian Kingdom, Presidency of Council of Ministers, The Unity of the Nile Valley: Its Geographical Bases and Its Manifestations in History (Cairo, 1947), with contributions by Abbas Ammar, Ibrahim Noshi, Ahmad Badawi, Mohammed Shafik Ghorbal, and Abdel Rahman Zaki; Muhammad Fu'ad Shukri, al-Hukm al-Misri fi al-Sudan, 1820-1885 (Cairo, 1947); Pahor Labib, "Wahdat Wadi al-Nil fi al-Ta'rikh al-Qadim," in his Lamahat min al-Dirasat al-Misriyya al-Qadima (Cairo, 1947), 12-22. Back.
Note 71: Based on visits to the museum and al-Sijill al-Thaqafi Sanat 1954, Jumhuriyyat Misr, Wizarat al-Tarbiyya wa al-Tal'im, Idarat al-'Amm lil-Thaqafa (Cairo, 1956), 7, 594. Back.
Note 72: FO371/41352/J92, Jan. 6, 1944, Killearn to FO; FO371/ 41352/J1902, Glanville to Scrivener, May 23, 1944. Creswell, however, headed the Islamic Archeology section until the dismissal of all British employees of the Egyptian government in December 1951. Back.
Note 73: Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Mudhakkirat fi al-Siyasa al-Misriyya (2 vols., Cairo, 1953), 2, 121-124; MAE/Service des oeuvres franaises à l'étranger, Série D - Levant, Carton 366: Egypte: Facultés égyptiennes et Institut d'archéologie, June 27, 1939, Fr. Ambassador, Cairo to Bonnet. Back.
Note 74: FO371/31585/J1948, April 10 and 14, 1942, Lampson to Eden; and Dawson and Uphill, Egyptology, 43-44, 97-98. Back.
Note 75: FO371/31385/J3014, Fairman to Alan H. Gardiner, June 3, 1942, enclosed in Gardiner to Gaselee; FO371/31585/J678, December 27, 1941, Fairman to Gardiner; Fairman to Smart, April 23, 1942, enclosed in FO371/31585/J2493/J2493, May 7, 1942, Lampson to Eden, which also includes Engelbach's assessment. On Fairman, see Who Was Who, 8 (1981-1990): 244. Back.
Note 76: al-Dalil al-Dhahabi. In 1970 the Department of Archeology left the Faculty of Arts to become the independent Faculty of Archeology. Back.
Note 77: Wilson, Thousands, 148. Back.
Note 78: M. S. Gallab, Bulletin de la Société royale de géographie d'Egypte, 43-44 (1970-71): 1; Kitab al-Fiddi, 31. Back.
Note 79: Mukhtar, "Selim Hassan," offers the strongest defense of Selim Hassan. 'Aziz 'Atiya and Kamal El Mallakh offered opposite opinions on the validity of the embezzlement charges against Hassan. Interviews with 'Atiya, Salt Lake City, March 29, 1986, and El Mallakh, Cairo, October 14, 1987. Back.
Note 80: Gerard Coudougnan, Nos Anctres les Pharaons: L'histoire pharonique et copte dans les manuels scolaires égyptiens (Cairo, 1988). Back.
Note 81: Wilson, Thousands, 148. Back.
Note 82: Hassan's street is the short one in front of the Museum. Mariette street alongside the Museum is still so named on maps, although I have not seen street signs to that effect in recent years. Champollion Street runs off Maydan al-Tahrir to the northeast, and Maspero's name survives as a stop for the Nile ferry. Back.
Note83: Wilson, Thousands, 122. Back.
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