People to Know — Peter Der Manuelian: Excavating the History of Egyptian Excavators

Column Editor: Matthew Ismail (Editor in Chief, Charleston Briefings; Founder, Dost Meditation) <matthew@dostmeditation.com>

This column is a bit different. Normally, I talk about issues around technology and scholarly communication. Now I will talk about a publishing project in the humanities that particularly interests me — and I have no need to apologize for my lack of background! This project takes place in an environment that is the opposite of the STEM publishing world, with its $8,000 APCs in a space with enormous technical infrastructure. This column is about a recovery project dear to the heart of a prominent Egyptologist which reminds us that there’s more to publishing than articles and monographs. Sometimes the story of a publishing project is an essential part of the project, itself.

The discipline of Egyptology has an uneasy relationship to modern Egypt and modern Egyptians. Ancient Egyptians had long been a presence in Western historical awareness. Biblical narratives of Moses confronting Pharaoh and his magicians and the flight of the Hebrew people from Egypt through the parting Red Sea — such biblical stories have been foundational for Western ideas about the ancient world and the origins of the West. Similarly, any Westerner over the centuries who learned Greek and Latin was immersed in depictions of Ancient Egypt in classical authors such as Herodatus, Plutarch, or Pliny, to say nothing of Shakespeare and others who wrote on Anthony and Cleopatra.

Yet it was not until European scholars deciphered Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 1820s — about 25 years after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by French soldiers — that modern Europeans were able to study Ancient Egypt based on its own texts, rather than at one or more removes in Greek and Latin sources. After Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered, European scholars of Ancient Egypt became obsessed with uncovering ever more hieroglyphic texts and artifacts under the soil of modern Egypt — soil upon which, of course, pesky modern Egyptians lived.

The study of Ancient Egypt was, to Westerners, conceived to be a deep dive into their own cultural origins — very much wrapped up in questions about the historicity of biblical narratives — and they pursued these excavations with an energy comparable to the passion with which they sought out Greek and Roman artifacts. The goal of these 19th century Western excavations in Egypt was to export as many of these finds as possible to the great collections at national museums such as the British Museum, the Louvre, or the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Western museums competed against each other to build the best Egyptian collections, and a culture of smuggling and deception emerged as a result. These Westerners, having created this international market for antiquities, often turned to Egyptians with no training in archaeology to dig for antiquities. These local diggers would then sell their collections to Western museums or to international collectors.

And, of course, as the 19th century progressed, and nominal Ottoman rule in Egypt gave way to outright British conquest in 1882, the relationship between the Europeans who studied Ancient Egypt and the Europeans who ruled modern Egypt ominously converged. In short, the study of Ancient Egypt emerged among Europeans in the context of 19th century European imperialism and cannot be separated from it. And, indeed, the relationship of modern Egyptians to Ancient Egypt also emerged in the context of British and French imperialism — a relationship mediated for modern Egyptians by their status as “natives” and supposed cultural inferiors in a conquered nation dominated by Christian foreigners.

Now, it bears repeating that Egyptians for most of the 19th century were not particularly interested in Ancient Egypt. The system of Muslim education in modern Egypt remained stubbornly traditional for most of the century, centered on memorizing the Quran, learning Classical Arabic, and absorbing the various traditions of Quranic interpretation and the sayings of the Prophet and his closest associates. Ancient Egypt was, among the traditionally educated, a part of what was known as the Jahaliya, or the era of pre-Islamic ignorance, and thus mostly studied in scattered cautionary tales related to quranic narratives and commentaries.

It was at the end of the 19th century, among educated Egyptians (both Muslim and Coptic) who had absorbed Western notions of nationalism and self-determination, that modern Egyptians began to see Ancient Egypt as their own ancient forebears. But when we see that the study of Ancient Egypt was dominated by Germans, Frenchmen, Americans and Englishmen who were closely associated to the British dictatorship, and that Egyptians were excluded from the study of Egyptology for many decades until they managed to seize enough power to demand their place at the table, it’s hard to argue otherwise than that the discipline of Egyptology was an aspect of Western imperialism.

It is in this context that Peter Der Manuelian’s very interesting new project has emerged. Peter is the Barbara Bell Professor of Egyptology at Harvard University and the Director of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. His newest book is the excellent Walking Among Pharaohs: George Reisner and the Dawn of Modern Egyptology (2023), an overdue and exhaustive biography of the pioneering American Egyptologist, George Reisner (1867-1942), who excavated in Egypt for about 40 years after the turn of the 20th century.

I came to know Peter a bit because I had also written a biography of an Egyptologist, Wallis Budge: Magic and Mummies in London and Cairo (Rev. Ed., 2021), and while nothing could be more different than Peter’s position at Harvard and mine as an itinerant independent scholar, we nonetheless have much to say to each other about a topic that is dear to Peter’s heart: recovering the involvement of Egyptians in the emergence of Egyptology.

Egyptians, it turns out, did have a role in the emergence of Egyptology: as laborers and overseers. As Peter discovered while writing his biography of George Reisner, Reisner’s various 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).