Egyptian overseers over the decades were actually much more important in the success of the digs than people have generally known. Reisner trained Said Ahmed (1890-1926), his first important overseer from the village of Quft, how to do archaeological photography and to manage an excavation carefully and meticulously. Said Ahmed not only recruited and supervised the laborers, did the arduous work of clearing tombs of millennia of sand, and the delicate work of preserving and cataloging artifacts as they were uncovered and removed — he (and his similarly import Qufti successors) also kept an excavation diary in Arabic that tells us much that was not included in the English excavation diary kept by Americans. Said Ahmed’s competence was no secret at the Harvard Camp. One of Reisner’s American assistants confessed (not entirely pleased) that Said Ahmed “would have been quite capable of running the excavation by himself, but as he spoke little English, I went along primarily to keep the records and to be the white man ostensibly in charge (which was thought to be essential in relations with the largely British Sudan authorities).” Manuelian illustrates Said Ahmed’s value to Reisner’s expedition in a letter Reisner sent to the director of The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1918. In this letter, Reisner (who had not mentioned his overseer in his correspondence for nearly twenty years) described how Said Ahmed possessed not only the technical skill and the authority needed to run the excavations but also kept the Arabic diary, “which if it were the only diary of the expedition would be no mean scientific record of our work, illustrated with drawings of tombs and strata of debris, and lists of the finds.” So, as he was doing his exhaustive research into Reisner’s career, Peter began to wonder: He’d used the English expedition diaries kept in Boston. What had become of those Arabic diaries? Peter knew that Reisner shared the common Euro-American sense of superiority to Egyptians, so his effusive praise of Said Ahmed can hardly be taken for granted. The diaries must have been quite valuable. But where were they?
While he was doing his research in Egypt, Peter sought out Said Ahmed’s descendents who were still living near Cairo. He had hoped that they might have photos, letters, even oral histories of their relatives’ work in the Harvard Camp, and as he chatted with some members of the family, one gentleman casually mentioned that there were about a hundred handwritten Arabic diaries on a shelf at his family home. Peter sought permission to study them, which the family immediately granted. And this was the origin of the Arabic Diaries Project in which Peter is engaged. The diaries are now in Cambridge and being analyzed by historians of the Harvard Expedition and experts in Arabic manuscripts and Egyptian Arabic dialects. Peter hopes to publish both the Arabic text and an English translation to provide firsthand insight into the contributions of Egyptians to the success of the expeditions. It’s not necessarily easy to find funds for such work, but there are some younger Egyptologists who share his enthusiasm for the project and Peter hopes to be able to publish in the next few years. Projects such as the Arabic Diaries Project differ greatly from the world of STEM publishing, but they are very important on their own terms. I just hope that Peter has the resources to complete a project that is so important to revealing a truer picture of the history of Egyptology.
References Ismail, Matthew, Wallis Budge: Magic and Mummies in London and Cairo (Rev. Ed., Dost Publishing, 2021). Manuelian, Peter Der, “The ‘Lost’ Arabic Excavation Diaries of the Harvard UniversityBoston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition,” JOURNAL of the American Research Center in Egypt, v. 58 2022: 129-162. Ibid., Walking Among Pharaohs: George Reisner and the Dawn of Modern Egyptology (Oxford, 2022).
Back Talk continued from page 64 Digital Lending, but the concept has merit and at least some prospects. The issue that it addresses remains vital — what Brewster calls the missing 20th century, when large quantities of books published from the 1920s forward, by authors less fortunate than James or Herbert, are slipping from conscious view, because even the Internet secondary market and the worthy libraries can’t help them reach readers and researchers as easily as the technology would allow if we were able to solve the intellectual property problems. (Among other things, a comprehensive collection of digitized 20th century books would be a gold mine for AI-supported research into all sorts of subjects in social, cultural, and intellectual history.)
Against the Grain / November 2023
We’re surrounded by folks these days only too ready to destroy books they don’t like, so I certainly shouldn’t be smug about what I did. But thinking about the way in which the physical copy is not really the book itself and about the ways in which we can ensure preservation and distribution without depending entirely on physical artifacts — that’s work we should be doing thoughtfully and carefully.
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