EIGHT
COUNTING THE YEARS
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EIGHT |
The painted plaster bust of queen Nefertiti has become a fluid symbol, signifying ‘ancient Egypt’ in contexts from body art to the art gallery – and recently in the art of protest, too. In September 2012 the Egyptian street artist El Zeft applied a new sticker to the wall of protest graffiti along Mohammed Mahmoud Street in downtown Cairo. The street gives out onto Tahrir Square, site of the January and February 2011 demonstrations that ended the thirty-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak. On Mohammed Mahmoud Street and elsewhere in the city graffiti mocked Mubarak and the Egyptian military, vented frustration as the aims of the revolution were stymied by the army’s continued sway, and commemorated men and women killed during the protests.1 The sticker El Zeft applied to the wall that September, nearly two years after the Tahrir occupation, showed Nefertiti in her distinctive flat-topped crown, eyes straight on under lowered brows – and a gas mask covering her lower face. In a Facebook post announcing the new work, the artist described it as a tribute to the women who had played such an important part in the revolution. Nefertiti represented Egyptian women, ancient and modern, girded for protest with her tear gas protection, although the mask covering the queen’s mouth could also be seen as a muzzle or stifling gag. Presumably because the ancient bust the sticker mimics was so instantly recognizable around the world, versions of El Zeft’s artwork were taken up by protesters not only in Cairo but in Amman, Berlin and Seoul. Amnesty International used the image several times in its protests against state suppression of the Egyptian revolution, and it also appeared in international demonstrations against the sexual harassment and assaults that women protesters and journalists faced during the uprising. If Nefertiti looks angry, with her confrontational gaze, she has plenty of reasons to be.
El Zeft’s sticker-graffito Nefertiti in a Gas Mask, Cairo, 2012.
Icons of ancient Egypt – Nefertiti and Tutankhamun, the pyramids and the sphinx – have long been incorporated into contemporary Egyptian life, from postage stamps and currency notes to revolutionary graffiti like El Zeft’s. But how these icons resonate in Egypt differs in some ways from the associations they have outside the Middle East. For a start, Egypt has many other cultural phenomena and influences on which to draw, not least its rich heritage under the Umayyad Caliphate and in the Fatimid era; the Ottoman period represented by Mohamed Ali and his successors; and twentieth-century accomplishments as the country gained its independence and became a key (if sometimes controversial) player in northeast African and Middle Eastern geopolitics. To expect today’s Egyptians to identify only with the ancient past would be akin to thinking everyone in Britain should be fervently and exclusively interested in Stonehenge or the Avebury ring. Some people in Britain are interested in stone circles, perhaps because they live near them, or study them, or self-identify as pagans and see these monuments as sacred sites. However, most people in Britain pay little attention to stone circles on a day-to-day basis, although they would no doubt recognize an image of Stonehenge and express alarm or outrage if it were threatened with destruction, so deeply have these monoliths become part of the nation’s cultural memory since the eighteenth century, when the antiquarian William Stukeley helped to popularize them.
In Egypt how modern citizens might think about and experience the ancient past is made more complex by the experience of colonialism. Like many other colonized countries whose archaeological remains attracted Western attention, Egypt has found itself in the peculiar position of having its own past re-classified, represented and often simply just removed by foreigners. The country’s Ottoman governors also used Egyptian antiquities for diplomatic exchanges with Western powers, in a gifting network that helped Mohamed Ali and the later khedives augment their own prestige while securing what they saw as benefits for Egypt’s modernization and infrastructure. Mohamed Ali gave obelisks to Britain and France (now on the Thames Embankment and the Place de la Concorde); Said pasha showered the future King Edward VII, while he was Prince of Wales, with coffins and other antiquities during his 1862 tour of Egypt; and the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef I was rewarded for his visit to the opening of the Suez Canal with three temple columns, which now help hold up the Egyptian galleries in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. Large quantities of ancient Egyptian objects left Egypt for Western museums under the division of finds that the French-run antiquities service operated for almost a century, which was meant to recompense foreign archaeologists for the excavations they undertook in Egypt, with government permission. Today some Egyptians describe a sense of displacement when they visit museums in Europe or North America and see so many Egyptian antiquities on display: is this a good thing, promoting Egyptian culture around the world? Or is it a reminder of how Egypt’s past has been appropriated for so many other purposes, rather than entrusted to Egyptian hands?
This chapter considers just some of the ways in which modern Egyptians have engaged with archaeology and ancient Egyptian culture. First, it looks at the contributions Egyptians made to excavations up and down the country – and at the barriers that faced Egyptians who wanted to study Egyptology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The credit given to Western archaeologists for their discoveries ignores the crucial roles that Egyptians played on many levels in excavations, and continue to today. Second, when Egypt gained a limited independence from Britain in 1922, it was amid a cultural movement known as Pharaonism, which – like the Harlem Renaissance or Négritude – looked to the past to cultivate pride in the present and hope for the future. In the wake of the 1952 revolution, moves towards decolonization and Pan-Arab unity ultimately gave way to the Camp David peace agreement and free-market reforms that further allied Egypt to the United States, a shifting geopolitics that complicated even more the relationship between Egypt’s citizens, its state and the use of the ancient past. Like El Zeft, creator of the Nefertiti graffito, some Egyptian contemporary artists have turned to motifs from ancient Egypt to comment on the country’s modern troubles, suggesting that degrees of connection to – or disconnection from – Egypt’s ancient heritage not only characterize aspects of Egyptian selfidentity today, but help to draw attention to issues within Egypt that should be of global concern.
Too many books, classes and documentaries about the history of Egyptology start with what they call the ‘discovery’ or ‘rediscovery’ of Egypt by Europeans, as if Egypt were as devoid of human presence as the frontispiece to the Napoleonic Description imagined (for illustration, see Chapter Two). The choice of words implies that Europeans were finding something for the first time, or locating something they had lost. However, we have seen in this book that when, where and how Western culture remembered, or forgot about, ancient Egypt depended on many factors. Egypt was never lost, as the people who lived there knew perfectly well. Over the centuries Egyptians had their own ways of remembering and forgetting antiquity: turning temples into churches or mosque sites, recycling ancient stelae into buildings, or puzzling over pyramids and hieroglyphs, as al-Baghdadi and Ibn Wahshiya did in the Middle Ages. When Europeans began to travel to Egypt in the early nineteenth century and record its antiquities, they dismissed practices like recycling stones or building mosques and houses over temples as wilful destruction, proof that ‘the Oriental’ did not appreciate the ancient past in the way a ‘civilized’ European could. But seen from a different perspective, these practices constituted other ways of preserving antiquity, repurposing it in ways that suited the local population and that often acknowledged the ancient significance, for instance, by maintaining a site’s religious use.
Besides which, an archaeological site only became an archaeological site once ‘archaeology’ itself existed: the word gained currency in the 1840s to distinguish emerging practices for studying and interpreting the past from earlier, antiquarian approaches. An ‘antiquity’ or an archaeological ‘object’ also had to be defined as such, first through the practice of archaeology and later through laws that defined certain things as ‘antiquities’ and changed who could own them and what could be done with them. Rather than see these as developments that were simply imported from Europe to Egypt, and that were inherently superior to what went before, it is both more accurate and more useful to see them as developments that took place within Egypt and as part of broader trends in land use, finance and diplomacy. In 1835 Mohamed Ali passed a declaration that no antiquities would leave the country and established his own museum, inspired by what his adviser, Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, had seen during his studies in France.2 Al-Tahtawi was an imam, a scholarly translator and a prolific writer, who later authored textbooks for Egyptian schools that emphasized the accomplishments of ancient Egypt. Nonetheless, the American consul in Egypt, George Gliddon (co-author of the racist Types of Mankind), excoriated Mohamed Ali as a despot who was responsible for the wholesale destruction of Egyptian antiquities, echoing the widespread European belief that ‘Orientals’ were lazy, greedy and untrustworthy.3 Mohamed Ali’s ineffectiveness at controlling the export of antiquities was in part a function of the tremendous pressure from European interests competing with each other to form prestigious collections – and to create commercial opportunities for themselves in Egypt. Mohamed Ali’s collection of antiquities also fell prey to diplomatic motives: his immediate successor, Abbas I (ruled 1848–54), gave part of it to the Ottoman Sultan Abd al-Aziz, and his son Said (1854–63) gifted the remainder to Archduke Maximilian of Austria.4
Despite giving away what was left of his father’s collection, Said was ready to take up the challenge of keeping more of his country’s antiquities in Egypt: in 1858 he established a Service des antiquités (antiquities service) in the ministry of public works, to coordinate archaeology in the country. He also re-established a museum, at Boulaq in Cairo, to house objects discovered by the new excavations.5 Said hired the Egyptologist and one-time curator at the Louvre museum, Auguste Mariette, to direct the Service, and Mariette spent the rest of his career in Egypt, in the employ first of Said, and then of Ismail (ruled 1863–79) and Tawfik (1879–82). In addition to organizing his own excavations and running the museum, Mariette began to license the work of other excavators, using a permit system. He also helped present the accomplishments of Egyptian archaeology abroad, for instance organizing the Egyptian pavilion at the 1867 Exposition universelle in Paris, which included antiquities lent by Egypt and displayed in a replica Egyptian temple.
In Mariette’s day, able-bodied men, as well as women and children, were expected to contribute labour on government-sponsored projects (the Suez Canal was one notable example), facing financial penalties or corporal punishment if they refused. Expanded under Mohamed Ali, the corvée system was pervasive in the 1850s and 1860s, and it supplied much of the labour for archaeological clearance projects at this time, as well. The social memory of excavation in Egypt may thus include memories of hardship and exploitation, as the lyrics of labourers’ work-songs of the time suggest.6 By the 1880s the corvée was on the decline, since methods of year-round farming and paid employment proved more productive for the new, large-scale agricultural estates and factories. Archaeological labour followed this trend, which went hand-inhand with the increasing specialization that excavation required. Archaeology had begun to present itself as a rational, scientific discipline requiring specific techniques, and archaeologists like Flinders Petrie (active in Egypt from the 1880s to the 1920s) and George Reisner (from the 1900s to the 1940s) gave some of their Egyptian staff limited training in fieldwork and recording methods. This was not because scholars like Petrie or Reisner wished to encourage Egyptians into the archaeology profession. Both men were typical in assuming that Egyptians lacked the intellectual capacity and logical reasoning such scientific work required. Training selected Egyptian staff in certain skills simply made for a more efficient dig, besides which, paying ‘natives’ was cheaper than hiring a student or junior academic from overseas.
In 1869 Khedive Ismail’s reformist minister for education, Ali Mubarak, opened a School of Egyptology in Cairo, appointing the German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch as its director.7 It may have been only a small part of Mubarak’s wide-scale reorganization of public education, but it was an important one in that Mubarak felt strongly that Egyptians should understand, and take pride in, their ancient past, which meant integrating Western scholarship into Egyptian education. One hope in setting up the School was that it would train Egyptian men to contribute to the work of the antiquities service, which was rapidly expanding – as was the Egyptian upper middle class, which had the Western-style education needed to follow Brugsch’s curriculum in German and French. The new School attracted several excellent students from this milieu, including Ahmed Kamal, a near-contemporary of Petrie. When Kamal and the other students completed their training, however, they found it impossible to secure work as Egyptologists: Mariette refused to hire them in the Service and the School of Egyptology was closed just five years after it opened. Kamal spent several years teaching and translating German instead. Only when Mariette was dying, and the more liberal-minded Gaston Maspero, a French Egyptologist, was in line to replace him, did Kamal secure his first appointment in Egyptology, in the Boulaq Museum – although tellingly, it was not as a curator, but as a translator.8
Kamal took inspiration from Ali Mubarak and his old teacher Heinrich Brugsch to establish a training programme in Egyptology at the museum for his fellow Egyptians. Though it ran for only five years, several of Kamal’s students went on to careers in the antiquities service. In the 1900s Kamal also lectured at the newly founded Egyptian (now Cairo) University and developed an Egyptology course for the Higher Teachers College. Well into the twentieth century, however, career opportunities for Egyptians in Egyptology and archaeology remained limited. Despite his copious publications, in both French and Arabic, and his knowledge of ancient and modern languages, Kamal was passed over for promotion within the antiquities service throughout his career, seeing younger European scholars appointed over him. For all the frustrations he himself faced, Kamal was an influence and inspiration for later generations of Egyptian Egyptologists, and an important contributor to the first, and most dramatic, discovery made under Mariette’s successor, Maspero. High in the Deir el-Bahri cliffs at Luxor, Kamal – a Cairo-born sophisticate, with little experience outside the classroom – was about to come face-to-face with his rural, southern countrymen and with the mummies of ancient Egypt’s most famous kings.
Maspero took up the directorship of the Service in the spring of 1881, a tense time for the country. For several years Britain, France and Italy, whose banks held most of Egypt’s national debt, had been managing the country’s affairs from behind the scenes. Britain had forced Khedive Ismail out of office in 1879 (he abdicated in favour of his son Tawfik), and the European powers implemented severe funding cuts and increased tax collections, which hit the country’s poor the hardest. The same upper middle-class milieu from which Ahmed Kamal originated had begun to chafe against European dominance of Egypt’s affairs, and Ottoman sway as well. Most of the highest-ranking offices in the government and military were held by people of Turco-Circassian origin. Egyptian-born ministers such as Ali Mubarak, who was also a military officer, were the exception. In the late 1870s the Egyptian politician and army officer Ahmed Urabi emerged as leader of a popular rebellion that aimed to throw off European control and depose Tawfik – and in the summer of 1881 it looked like Urabi’s supporters might succeed.9
In Qena, the province where Luxor was located, the governor (mudir) was an Urabi supporter, but he was also an official with a job to do. Taking up the Service directorship in the spring of 1881, Maspero identified an antiquities dealer named Ahmed Abd er-Rassul as a potential source of rare objects that had been trickling onto the market, objects that could come only from previously unknown royal burials of the 21st Dynasty. As a government official himself, Maspero submitted a request for the mudir of Qena, Daoud pasha, to arrest Abd er-Rassul and one of his brothers. The men were taken to the government offices in Qena and beaten in the presence of a local antiquities service inspector, trying to extract a confession about the unknown tombs, without success. The experience seems to have divided the Abd er-Rassul family, which lived in the village of Gurna on the West Bank of the Nile, among the ancient tombs. A third brother, Mohamed Abd er-Rassul, turned informant in July 1881 and Maspero immediately sent Ahmed Kamal and another museum employee, Emil Brugsch (younger brother of Heinrich), to Luxor to investigate. Abd er-Rassul led Kamal and Brugsch to an opening concealed in the cliff face between the village and the site known as Deir el-Bahri. A narrow, twisting corridor led more than 60 metres into the rock, lined with coffins, mummies, boxes of shabti-figures and vessels. Not only did this cleverly hidden tomb contain the burials of the high priests who ruled as kings in the Third Intermediate Period, but it contained the reburials of some of the most famous rulers of the New Kingdom, including Ramses II and his father Seti I. The priests of Amun had rewrapped and reburied these kings in secret after their tombs in the Valley of the Kings were violated, almost five hundred years after their deaths in some cases. Inscriptions on the new shrouds and recycled coffins detailed what the priests had done: these mummies were sacred objects, after all, and rewrapping and moving them was an act of reverence.10
Kamal and Brugsch could scarcely believe it. Maspero later recalled Brugsch telling him that it was like being in a dream. With the location of the tomb no longer the Abd er-Rassul family secret, however, Brugsch, Kamal and their colleague Tadros Moutafian had to snap out of the dream and act quickly to clear the tomb and move its contents to Cairo. Within 48 hours they had organized the clearance of the entire team, supervised by an experienced reis (in the context of archaeology, a chief of works or foreman). Daoud pasha, the mudir, conscripted three hundred local men to carry the coffins and crated antiquities (some 6,000 objects in total) down the cliffs and more than 5 miles across the valley to the Nile, in the ferocious summer heat. The overland journey took eight hours, with some of the coffins and their resin-rich contents so heavy that it needed a dozen men to lift them. At the river, the Boulaq Museum’s steamboat arrived to carry the cargo to Cairo, where the museum would be the new resting place of these pharaohs and their families. As the boat made its way downstream, Maspero wrote, women came to the shore to wail like mourners at a funeral.
Conventional histories of Egyptology often repeat Maspero’s account as if these mourning women had stepped out of the funeral processions on ancient Egyptian tomb walls, and Maspero himself might have made the same connection, looking for ‘survivals’ of ancient culture among Egyptian peasants in the nineteenth century. This was a common assumption, that peasant life was largely unchanged since ancient times, but it was (and remains) a mistaken one. Egypt’s peasants were as much a part of 1881 as Maspero and Kamal, their lives shaped by colonial capitalism’s shift towards large-scale agricultural estates and monopolist industries, and by acts of rebellion that would come to a head in 1882, when the British invaded by land and sea to crush Urabi’s challenge. Maspero seemed to think the weeping women were mourning the ancient dead, the ‘freight of kings’ the steamboat carried.11 But what if they were mourning some other loss instead? Not least the forced removal of the mummies – and the self-determination (and source of income) they represented – from Qena province to the distant capital.
The mummies from the Deir el-Bahri cache were eventually unwrapped and put on display in Cairo. When the museum moved in 1902 to its new, specially designed building in Tahrir (then Ismailiya) Square, the royal corpses were one of the highlights for foreign tourists. At times the galleries of royal mummies have been closed to public view, notably for part of the 1920s and 1930s, when the mummies were moved to the (then unused) pharaonic-style mausoleum of nationalist hero Sa’ad Zaghloul, and in the 1980s, after President Anwar Sadat visited and expressed dismay at the undignified display of the dead.12 Since the late 1980s, however, the so-called ‘mummy rooms’ have been reopened to visitors, with numbers restricted (and funds raised) by separate admission tickets. The rooms have been refitted with dimmer lighting and state-of-the-art vitrines, and the bared bodies are covered from neck to ankle by sheets in what is always characterized as a ‘respectful’ form of display. Whether the display of the dead in this way can ever be ‘respectful’ remains a point of debate, however, in Western museums and in Egypt as well. One outspoken Egyptian tour guide, Bassam el-Shammaa, launched his own campaign in 2013, calling for the royal mummies to be returned to the Valley of the Kings. He bases his argument in part on Islamic teachings, which say that burial is how one honours the dead: ‘Shouldn’t we hold our great kings in respect?’, el-Shammaa has said in interviews. ‘This should under no circumstances happen to our forefathers.’13
The pharaohs as forefathers of modern Egypt is one way in which Egyptian cultural memory links the country’s present and its past, but not without ambivalence. The pharaoh can also be a figure of despotism, as he is in the Quran and the Bible: when Islamist military officers assassinated Anwar Sadat during a military parade in 1981, one of them is said to have shouted ‘I have killed pharaoh!’ Moreover, some of the tensions of the 1881 discovery have continued to echo down the decades, such as the frustrated anti-colonial ambitions of the Urabi movement; the link between archaeology, state power and Western intervention in Egypt’s affairs; and the estrangement between urban elites in the north and the rural poor in the antiquities-rich south.
In 1969 director Shadi Abd al-Salam’s film al-Mumiya (The Mummies) dramatized the Deir el-Bahri discovery with Ahmed Kamal as one of the lead characters, whose foil is a character representing Mohamed Abd er-Rasul (‘Wanis Harbat’).14 Known in English as ‘The Night of Counting the Years’, after an ancient Egyptian text intoned by the Maspero character in the film’s opening scene, the film was only released in Egypt in 1975 after earning prizes in European festivals and praise from foreign critics, who admired its cinematic form. Western critics and academics, including Egyptologists, have tended to interpret the film as an unproblematic call for Egyptians to cherish their ancient heritage. Abd al-Salam himself spoke of the film as a story of two Egypts, the educated, progressive Egypt of the Cairene and Alexandrian elite and the uneducated, backwards Egypt of the rural south. With his effendi status, tarboush (or fez, worn by Ottoman civil servants), and state employment, Ahmed Kamal in the film (and arguably in life) represents the former. As a representative of the government, he ventures south to rescue antiquities and, in doing so, to rescue Egyptian peasants from their purported ignorance. Kamal, the film character, is spiritually enriched by his encounter with the ‘authentic’ Egyptian culture the rural poor represent, while the poor, like Wanis, benefit from recognizing the true significance of the antiquities they have been plundering – a significance that is predicated on the values of modern, rational, Western laws and science. Those Egyptian critics who praised al-Mumiya tried to reconcile its themes with the politics of the post-Nasser era, which were more ambivalent and less triumphalist about national identity following Israel’s defeat of an Egyptian-led coalition in the 1967 war. The film could be read, for instance, as an account of how colonialism alienated Egyptians from their ‘authentic’ culture, but this relies on the nationalist idea that the ancient past is the most ‘true’ expression of an innate and inalienable Egyptian identity. There was, and is, a striking parallel between this nationalist view and Orientalist views of Egypt, which likewise place an idealized peasant in timeless connection to the past, as if modernity only happened elsewhere.
Engraving (probably based on a photograph) of visitors viewing the royal mummies in the Giza Palace antiquities museum, around 1890.
Egyptian nationalism had gathered pace between the 1882 British occupation that defeated Urabi (who was exiled to Sri Lanka for twenty years) and the limited independence Britain granted Egypt in 1922, after years of campaigning, resistance and an abortive revolution in 1919. As the new nation state found its bearings, its cultural and political leaders, most drawn from the upper middle classes, enlisted ancient Egyptian symbols to imagine a future for Egypt that could draw confidence from the country’s past. Al-firawniya – interest in the pharaonic past, or Pharaonism – was a popular literary and artistic phenomenon in the 1920s. The real Ahmed Kamal lived just long enough, until August 1923, to witness the first independent election of an Egyptian parliament, and to follow news of the discovery of a new royal burial on the West Bank of Luxor: the tomb of Tutankhamun.
In the hopeful mood that accompanied Egyptian independence, the discovery of an intact burial in the Valley of the Kings could not have come at a better time for the country’s new government, led by prime minister Sa’ad Zaghloul. Pharaonic motifs were already part of the nationalist iconography of Zaghloul’s political party, the Wafd, and the 1919 revolution helped inspire a generation of artists and writers who would explore what it meant to be Egyptian by using imagery from ancient times. The painter Muhammad Nagi, who came from an elite Turco-Circassian family in Alexandria, studied fine art in Florence and with Claude Monet at Giverny, but Nagi also spent time at Luxor, copying tomb paintings on the West Bank. After the 1919 revolution he began a painting he called Nahdat Misr, the ‘Reawakening of Egypt’ or ‘Revival of Egypt’. Finished by 1922, when it won a prize in Paris, the painting was chosen to decorate the parliament building inaugurated in Cairo in 1924.15 It shows the goddess Isis in a chariot pulled by water buffalo, leading a procession of Egyptians in peasant dress: one man plays an oud, another holds an ancient bull statuette and women carry agricultural products. Children are naked, as in ancient Egyptian art, and a lush Nile Valley landscape extends along the background. As in Shadi Abd el-Salam’s later film, these idealized Egyptian peasants symbolize the ‘true’ Egypt that can progress to modernity by looking to its own antiquity.
Mahmoud Mukhtar, Nahdat Misr, red granite statue, Cairo, 1928 – seen here in its present position near Cairo University, where it was moved in 1955.
Nahdat Misr was also the name given to another Pharaonist work of art, by the sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar.16 Mukhtar, who came from a village in the Delta, began art studies at the newly established School of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1908, then went on to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he lived for several years. While in Paris he made a marble statue called Nahdat Misr, which represented Egypt as a peasant woman lifting her face veil, standing next to a sphinx raising itself on its forelegs. After it won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1920, a nationalist newspaper raised money in Egypt to fund a larger-scale version. Mukhtar returned to Egypt after a nine-year absence to oversee the monumental work, which he decided to execute, with a team of assistants, in the distinctive pink or red granite of Aswan – a favourite stone of ancient sculptors, for whom it symbolized the rosy light of the rising sun. Although it took several years to complete the statue, and for politicians to agree where to place it, the iconography of the sphinx and the peasant woman proved memorable with its clean, modernist lines and for the way it evoked other modernizing aims of the age, such as the Egyptian feminist movement’s call to abandon the white face veils that upper-class, urban women had donned in public under the khedives.17
If sphinxes, goddesses and peasants could all be counted on to evoke an ‘authentic’ Egyptian cultural identity in the 1920s, so too could Tutankhamun, as the tomb’s treasures began to emerge into view. The clicking shutters of cameras, belonging to both tourists and the world’s press, captured the spectacle outside the tomb. Guarded by Egyptian soldiers, Howard Carter and his team carried inlaid boxes, alabaster vases, chariots and other marvels to a more spacious tomb (the ‘laboratory’) nearby, which the antiquities service had given over for storage and work space. However, inside the tomb of Tutankhamun and at the ‘laboratory’ tomb where the objects were repaired, only official photographer Harry Burton took pictures of the excavation’s work (see Chapter Six). Before his premature death in April 1923, the sponsor of the excavation, Lord Carnarvon, had signed a contract with the London Times giving the newspaper priority coverage and exclusive access to Burton’s photographs.18 Carnarvon hoped that proceeds from reselling the photographs would defray the mounting cost of the dig. It was a diplomatic misstep, to say the least: Egyptian newspapers were outraged that they were expected to rely on second-hand reports for news that was taking place in their own country. The Times’s British and American competitors were none too pleased, either.
There was also a widespread worry in Egypt that Carnarvon, his heirs and Howard Carter planned to claim the contents of the tomb for museums overseas, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (whose staff, like Burton, were helping with the work), and for their own private collections. Carter had dealt in antiquities for years, and Carnarvon had a large collection of his own, formed with Carter’s help. Rumours that some objects from the tomb had already been secreted out of the country were not groundless, and after Carter’s death in 1939 Burton, as co-executor of his will, helped arrange the return to Egypt of several small objects found in Carter’s possession, which Carter may have extricated from the Carnarvon collection after the Earl’s death.19 Of greater concern was the question of dividing the Tutankhamun finds with the Egyptian antiquities service, since this practice remained unchanged. Maspero’s successor, Pierre Lacau, believed that more antiquities should stay in Egypt and that the Service should take a stronger lead in the division of finds with foreign archaeologists. In the case of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the division should have been straightforward, since the excavation permit stated that the contents of intact tombs or tombs of special significance would remain the property of the antiquities service, hence of the Egyptian government. Dividing antiquities favourably with foreign archaeologists had become such an expected practice, though, that Carter persisted in staking a claim – and in sticking to the controversial Times agreement.
Egyptian novelists, poets and playwrights, as well as the popular press in Egypt, had no doubt where and to whom Tutankhamun belonged. The timing of the discovery meshed not only with the creation of a new state but with a formative period in Arabic literature, as writers experimented with prose fiction and abandoned classical poetic themes in favour of modern ones: like the Harlem Renaissance in America, Pharaonism was very much a Modernist movement, in literature as in the fine arts of Nagi and Mukhtar. The poet and playwright Ahmad Shawqi, who returned to Egypt in 1920 after years of exile in Spain, wrote a number of works inspired by Tutankhamun. Shawqi used the historic context of the boy-king’s reign, which had restored the cult of Amun after its denigration under king Akhenaten, to draw parallels with Egypt emerging from British imperial tyranny. ‘Pharaoh, the time of selfrule is in effect, and the dynasty of arrogant lords has passed,’ ran part of the longest poem Shawqi wrote on this theme.20 In the same poem Shawqi addressed worries over the fate of the tomb’s objects head-on:
Our forefathers, and their greatest [Tutankhamun], are an inheritance that we should be careful not to let pass into the hands of others.
We refuse to allow our patrimony to be mistreated, or for thieves to steal it away.21
Of Turco-Circassian, Greek and Kurdish descent himself, and a onetime courtier of Khedive Abbas II, Shawqi might have seemed an unlikely nationalist, but in the face of the long British occupation, nationalism was a unifying cause, at least for a time. The Nahda, or renaissance, of Egyptian culture went hand-in-hand with the country’s own rebirth, and writers like Shawqi and the young novelist Naguib Mahfouz found a rich seam of images through Pharaonism that they could make speak to their contemporary hopes – even, or especially, where these hopes overlay inequities and anxieties among the broader populace.
Howard Carter and an Egyptian co-worker carrying part of a carved couch out of the tomb of Tutankhamun, early 1923.
Howard Carter, who had lived and worked in Egypt since he was a teenager, had miscalculated what the changed political landscape meant for archaeologists, who for so long had been accustomed to dealing only with other Europeans for the administration of their work. Under Pierre Lacau, the antiquities service was still run by Europeans, and would be until 1952. But for the first time it answered to an elected Egyptian minister for public works. Infuriated by what he saw as government interference in the excavation, Carter downed tools after the second season of work at the tomb in February 1924, leaving the sarcophagus lid hoisted in midair over Tutankhamun’s coffins. Lacau changed the lock on the tomb, which, after all, was government property. Only after a year of cooling-off on both sides – and a change of government in Egypt, effected under pressure from Britain when Egyptian activists assassinated the British governor of Sudan – did Carter return to finish the work. The Times of London no longer had exclusive access to news of the tomb; like other papers, they made do with regular bulletins issued (in Arabic, no less) by Egyptian officials. Carter continued to negotiate over the now-abandoned division of finds. In 1930 he secured a payment of almost £36,000 from the Egyptian government to the Carnarvon family, as compensation for the excavation expenses. Carter funded much of the rest of the work out of his own resources.
Transported to Cairo at the end of each season, the artefacts buried with Tutankhamun became the other star attraction of the Cairo museum, next to the royal mummies Ahmed Kamal had helped recover a generation earlier. The gold mask and coffins, the massive shrines and life-size guardian statues, and the hundreds of pieces of jewellery, clothing, sculpture, vases and furniture that made this minor pharaoh seem so significant, yet accessible, to a worldwide public, filled several galleries and attracted consistent crowds. As of this writing, they are being prepared for display in the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, whose development was interrupted by the 2011 revolution. Tutankhamun’s own unwrapped mummy remained in his tomb, just as Carter and Carnarvon had promised it would, though its fragile, fragmented state (it has been interfered with several times, starting with the 1925 unwrapping) makes for a poignant finale to his once-trumpeted rebirth.
Dreams of reawakening Egypt through its ancient past fuelled the Pharaonist cultural revival of the 1920s, but from the 1930s onwards, and in particular after the upheavals of the Second World War, nationalist symbols like Tutankhamun came to seem outdated, almost quaint. Tutankhamun fell from fashion in Egyptology as well, as if the glitzy finds and their political fallout were an embarrassment best moved on from swiftly. In the post-war era, and especially after the 1952 revolution, Pan-Arab unity and full decolonization came to matter more. During the presidency of Anwar Sadat in the 1970s, Egypt began to introduce free-market reforms aligning it more closely with Western economies, rather than the Soviet sphere of influence. Most controversially, Sadat signed the Camp David Accords recognizing Israel’s right to statehood and earning Egypt the backing of the United States, notably in military aid. Under first Nasser and then Sadat, the treasures of Tutankhamun entered politics again, but this time as a diplomatic exchange to curry favours, rather than a colonial tug-of-war. Nasser’s government agreed to lend fifty objects from the tomb to the British Museum in London in 1972, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery. In the late 1970s Sadat agreed to let objects from the tomb tour again, this time to several American cities and later to the Soviet Union. It was the birth of the blockbuster exhibition, as queues for admission circled around city squares and street blocks: Tutankhamun has launched a mini-industry of TV programmes, exhibitions, books, museum merchandise and tourist trinkets ever since.
The recognizable gold-and-blue striped headdress of Tutankhamun’s mummy mask, like the flat-topped crown of Nefertiti, helped turn both of these icons into useful symbols for revolutionary protest during the Tahrir Square uprising, and beyond. Like Nefertiti, Tutankhamun also turned up wearing a gas mask in Cairo’s anti-government graffiti, and an Egyptian supporting the uprising at a demonstration in Paris donned a striped nemes-headdress for maximum visibility. Unlike the nationalism of the 1920s, or al-Mumiya in the 1960s and 1970s, these calls upon the ancient past seem as much outward-looking as inward-facing, drawing the West’s attention to the problems facing modern Egypt, many of which are arguably of the West’s continued making.22
Khaled Hafez, panel from the multimedia installation Tomb Sonata in Three Military Movements, 2010.
A generation of Egyptians is once again stymied by the country’s political situation, but when this generation turns to ancient Egypt as an expressive medium it does so with the intervening century in mind. For the Cairo Biennale in 2010, artist Khaled Hafez (b. 1963) debuted his multimedia work Tomb Sonata in Three Military Movements (And Overture), which recreates the spaces of an ancient tomb. The Sonata combines music, painted canvases and light projections.23 Scenes inspired by ancient art (sacred cows, goddesses, Anubis) merge with silhouettes of tanks, planes and snipers drawn from contemporary media coverage of conflict in the Middle East. The artist has said that the composition relies on viewers’ visual memory of Egyptian art, with its distinctive arrangement of part-profile figures in ordered horizontal registers. At first sight the military motifs blend in like so many hieroglyphs, but a second glance makes evident the juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern. This is not the timeless Egypt of Orientalist fantasy or nation-building myth. Unlike the modernist painters of the early twentieth century, who used ancient styles to depict idealized peasants, Hafez explores the explicit divisions and dichotomies of history, which are created in our own time through mass media and commodification as much as the ever-present triangle of military, political and industrial authority. As Hafez recreates it, the tomb brings ancient and modern, East and West, into a space and time that they share – but not without a struggle that echoes the struggles that have riven the Middle East in the past half-century. The tomb itself embodies the duality that Hafez’s work relies on: it is both a place of death and a place where hopes of renewal are kept alive.
