EA 58 Free Read: Guest Editorial - Confronting Colonial Legacies

EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY ISSUE 58 • SPRING 2021 • £5.95

Who owns ancient Egypt?

Egypt’s dispersed heritage

Worshipping Amun in Nubia: New work at the temple of Taharqo at Sanam

A brewery, a cemetery and monumental walls: 3,000 years of occupation at the heart of Heliopolis

Repositioning EA Guest editorial

Photo: Heba Abd el-Gawad

Is Egyptian Archaeology magazine part of the Egypt Exploration Society’s colonial practices and legacies? If yes, what role can it play now that the EES is starting to unpack its colonial practices, confront its legacies, and initiate a long overdue honest and healing dialogue with Egyptian and Sudanese communities? In this guest editorial, we were generously invited by EA to reflect on these questions and find some answers.

By Heba Abd el-Gawad, Anna Garnett and Campbell Price.

A wall mural by Moataz at Abdeen Square, Cairo, showcasing Egypt’s intertwined ancient and recent past through the famous Egyptian singer Um-Kalthoum (left) and Tutankhamun and Nefertiti (right).

Right: view of the temple of Sanam in Sudan, located near the fourth Nile cataract.

Sanam (ancient Napata), was the religious and administrative centre of the Nubian state in the mid-first millennium BCE.

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This approach is timely as EA revisits its position within the Society’s current initiative of unpacking colonialism. Based on our recent independent experience with permanent gallery redisplays at our respective museums, and our team experience with the ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’ project, we sought to offer this ‘repositioning’ roadmap to help re-centre past and present Egyptian and Sudanese people in the narrative. This is not intended to be a topdown best-practice model; rather, we strongly encourage EA, and the EES, to openly critique and discuss our proposals with local source communities, the EES membership, and their professional and public international audiences.

Living archaeology The Egypt Exploration Society has long recognised the impor tance of settlement

archaeology for our understanding of lived experience: whether through its publication of the minutiae of archaeological fieldwork, its financial support and advocacy for settlement fieldwork in Egypt or through its educational activities for students and the public. The Society’s periodicals promote a crossdisciplinar y approach to the subject of Egyptology through their wide-ranging thematic scope, but we want to take this further. More can – and should – be done to shed light on the lived experience of both ancient and modern Egyptian communities (image above), and Egyptian Archaeology will be the starting point for this. By moving away from reductively ‘traditional’ Egyptological subjects and closer towards more diverse themes that provide a critical focus on the human story of Egypt over millennia, Egyptian Archaeology will strive to

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REPOSITIONING EA

offer a more transparent, balanced viewpoint of the field of Egyptology.

Central to this approach is the meaningful inclusion of Egyptian voices, both modern and ancient, and greater input from Egyptian scholars.

Through this broader remit, EA readers will now have more of an opportunity to learn from Egyptian authors about the heritage of their own country.

Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology It is also important to recognise that Egypt has never existed in isolation. The Nile Valley has been a corridor for ideas, people and goods for millennia, and therefore the histories and cultures of Sudan and Egypt in particular have long been intertwined. To reflect this reality, it is vital that Egyptian Archaeology’s new broader remit explores this complex relationship moving for ward. Ongoing archaeological fieldwork projects in Sudan both directed and supported by the Society continue to shed light on this fascinating connection, building on the legacies of past EES campaigns in Sudan in the late 20th century (image below). This work reflects a positive extension to the Society’s remit to encompass the study and promotion of the Sudanese Nile Valley, alongside ancient and modern communities in Egypt and Sudan. A commitment to the inclusion of Sudanese research in EA, including by Sudanese scholars, will ensure that this publication reflects more effectively the diverse cultures of the Nile Valley. A broader thematic scope will offer readers more holistic interpretations of the ancient and modern cultures of both Egypt and Sudan, which will significantly benefit our understanding of the history of the Nile Valley as a whole. The articles by Kathryn Howley and Martin Bommas in this issue explore some of the issues raised here.

Photo: Sanam Temple Project

A commitment to unpacking colonialism Like some other long-lived institutions in existence today, the EES has started to take seriously its responsibility to address its past (image next page, top). It is no coincidence that the Society was founded in the same year – 1882 – that Egypt was invaded by Britain. European interference in Egyptian and Sudanese affairs has resulted in a deep and ongoing legacy. The work of the Society has in the past benefited from the colonial apparatus in many ways and these conditions influenced the trajectories of objects – through complex networks of permissions, personalities and patronage – from the field to museums (on this subject,

see also the article by Heba Abd el-Gawad and Alice Stevenson in the present issue).

While EA’s publishing of new results remains vitally important, the Society and its publications must be critically aware of the historical circumstances of previous excavations and of the practical needs of today. Publishing a periodical – whether in print or, increasingly, in digital form – remains a key communication tool for the Society and those undertaking research with its support when we address both members and a broader scholarly, interested community.

Amplifying ethical standpoints Given its relatively wide and more public readership, the EA has a unique and critical responsibility of not only voicing the Society’s mission but equally its values and ethical standpoints. This is, currently, especially important as the Society is gradually unpacking its colonial practices, and their past and present legacies. The Society’s, and subsequently EA’s, ethical commitment and accountability should be towards people of Egypt and Sudan past and present, the EES members and donors, the archaeological practices and policies both in the field and in the museum, and finally towards wider international publics. EA is the Society’s window to reflect on and renew its ethical promises to its local – in Egypt, Sudan, and the UK – and global public and professional beneficiaries and audiences.

Confronting colonialism In this respect, EA can be a platform through which to expose and emphasise in a critical, transparent manner the colonial injustices and exploitations as committed by the Society’s founders, excavators and collectors. There is a public misperception that bringing this history to light is intended to induce guilt in and shame modern successors of colonial empires. EA, as a representative of the custodians of the EES, can clarify and confirm that, contrary to this misconception, the Society has a responsibility to provide full and honest accounts of its history and its practices. This is a public duty. For example, any reference to the contribution of EES founders, excavators and collec tor s should be balanced by emphasising their colonial (mis)practices, be they documented instances of racism, white supremacy or exploitation.

EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY ISSUE NO 58 SPRING 2021

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Centring local communities In the same light, EA should actively recognise the emotional, economic, political and cultural impact of the Society’s colonial practices upon past and present Egyptian and Sudanese communities. This can be done by respecting their local needs and expectations and being responsible for amplifying their voices, visibility and validity. One way to achieve this is by openly acknowledging and crediting each Egyptian and Sudanese mind and hand that has contributed to our understanding in its wider sense, funded or supported by the EES – in both the field and the museum. Similarly, the role of Egyptian and Sudanese individuals in archaeological knowledge production as well as its scale and scope should be named and defined based on their personal preference, rather than passively conceding and recycling the argument of ‘this is how things have always been done’.

by its monuments and artefacts – of any period – is to not only misrepresent but to disenfranchise, displace and discriminate against their living communities. EA should fully reflect Egyptian and Sudanese tangible and intangible heritage: from its pyramids to its modern clothes-lines and shop window displays, and from its monasteries and mosques to the many abandoned chairs in streets and alleys, representing Egypt’s and Sudan’s continuity and change (image below).

Left: The young members of Haytham el-Sayed’s mobile story-telling truck initiative in the Sharqiya governorate during a workshop on ‘Unpacking British archaeological colonialism’, organised by the ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’ Project.

Below: a copper maker’s shop window, displaying his personal family inheritance and showcasing the history of Egypt’s multi-layered people, places, flora and fauna.

Photo: Haytham el-Sayed and ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’ Project, with families’ and children’s permission.

A holistic view of Egyptian and Sudanese heritage The Society’s earlier fieldwork – consciously applying the ‘exploration’ aspect of its name – was undoubtedly conducted to the exclusion of local audiences in Egypt and Sudan, a situation which has more recently been transformed in varied and inspiring ways. Yet previous fieldwork, and its interpretation and presentation, also compounded certain Egyptological judgements of chronological value. Post-pharaonic material has at best been overlooked, at worst suffered incalculable losses, in favour of objects, features and entire sites that date to the Dynastic age. Egyptian Archaeology aims to continue its inclusion of material from the Roman, Christian and Islamic periods to give a broader and more holistic view of Egyptian and Sudanese heritage.

This view should reflect living Egyptian and Sudanese people and places as seen and felt by local communities, both then and now. The Society needs to confront its past, and perhaps present, colonial practices and how it has (un)consciously widely contributed to the current Western imagined construct of ‘ancient Egypt and Sudan’. In this construct, the Nile Valley is a concept ‘frozen in time and place’ rather than a living, multi-layered and multi-ethnic culture where the present and the past are closely intertwined. These layers cannot and should not be divided into isolated historical periods with rigid clear-cut divisions of where the past ends and the present begins. This Western (de)construction is a biased – and to some extent, racist – view of Egyptian and Sudanese cultural continuity and change, one that the platform of EA should be used to challenge.

Heritage is a highly personal and unique experience that means different things to different people at the same, or different, places and times. To focus solely on Egypt’s or Sudan’s tangible heritage as captured

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Photo: Heba Abd el-Gawad with the shop owner’s permission

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Heba Abd el-Gawad is the postdoctoral researcher for the AHRC-funded project ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’. She specialises in the history of Egyptian archaeology, focusing on the collection and distribution of archaeological finds from Egypt, their perception and representation.

Anna Garnett is Curator of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool. She has over a decade of fieldwork experience in Egypt and Sudan. Campbell Price is Curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum and Vice-Chair of the EES Board of Trustees.