Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity - Hardcover

Colla, Elliott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822339757 ISBN 13: 9780822339755

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Conflicted Antiquities is a rich cultural history of European and Egyptian interest in ancient Egypt and its material culture, from the early nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth. Consulting the relevant Arabic archives, Elliott Colla demonstrates that the emergence of Egyptology—the study of ancient Egypt and its material legacy—was as consequential for modern Egyptians as it was for Europeans. The values and practices introduced by the new science of archaeology played a key role in the formation of a new colonial regime in Egypt. This fact was not lost on Egyptian nationalists, who challenged colonial archaeologists with the claim that they were the direct heirs of the Pharaohs, and therefore the rightful owners and administrators of ancient Egypt’s historical sites and artifacts. As this dispute developed, nationalists invented the political and expressive culture of “Pharaonism”—Egypt’s response to Europe’s Egyptomania. In the process, a significant body of modern, Pharaonist poetry, sculpture, architecture, and film was created by artists and authors who looked to the ancient past for inspiration.

Colla draws on medieval and modern Arabic poetry, novels, and travel accounts; British and French travel writing; the history of archaeology; and the history of European and Egyptian museums and exhibits. The struggle over the ownership of Pharaonic Egypt did not simply pit Egyptian nationalists against European colonial administrators. Egyptian elites found arguments about the appreciation and preservation of ancient objects useful for exerting new forms of control over rural populations and for mobilizing new political parties. Finally, just as the political and expressive culture of Pharaonism proved critical to the formation of new concepts of nationalist identity, it also fueled Islamist opposition to the Egyptian state.

About this title

About the Author

Elliott Colla is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University.

From the Back Cover

"Written in an engaging, thoughtful, and provocative style, "Conflicted Antiquities" provides a unique perspective on the 'consumption' of ancient Egypt. What makes it distinctive is Elliott Colla's focus on Egyptian readings of the ancient past, an area which has been greatly neglected. Colla has much that is fresh and new to contribute, especially since the resources on which he draws are not widely known nor easy to get hold of."-- Stephanie Moser, author of "Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum"

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Conflicted Antiquities

EGYPTOLOGY, EGYPTOMANIA, EGYPTIAN MODERNITYBy Elliott Colla

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3975-5

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................ixIntroduction: The Egyptian Sculpture Room....................................................11 The Artifaction of the Memnon Head.........................................................24Ozymandias...................................................................................672 Conflicted Antiquities: Islam's Pharaoh and Emergent Egyptology............................72The Antiqakhana..............................................................................1163 Pharaonic Selves...........................................................................121Two Pharaohs.................................................................................1664 The Discovery of Tutankhamen's Tomb: Archaeology, Politics, Literature.....................172Nahdat Misr..................................................................................2275 Pharaonism after Pharaonism: Mahfouz and Qutb..............................................234Conclusion...................................................................................273NOTES........................................................................................279

Chapter One

The Artifaction of the Memnon Head

According to the curator's report, the head of the statue of the younger Memnon was elevated onto its pedestal in the Egyptian Sculpture Room in early January 1819. Perhaps, by the end of this day, when it was set among other Egyptian antiquities in the British Museum, the Memnon head had become that special kind of modern object known as an artifact. Yet it is highly doubtful whether the act of elevation in and of itself transformed the object into the museum artifact. More reasonably, one might recognize it as merely one event in a long chain of events in the biography of the object. Fortunately, much of this narrative is available by way of travel accounts and the correspondence between the collectors in Egypt, the officers of the British Museum, and their go-betweens in the navy and the diplomatic corps. Thus the Memnon head's movements can be traced with surprising precision. In late July 1816, a work team removed the head from its location in the complex of ancient Theban ruins called at the time the Memnonium. On August 12, 1816, it arrived on the west bank of the Nile, opposite the town of Luxor. On November 21, it was loaded onto a flat-bottomed river barge. It arrived in Cairo on December 15, and in Rosetta on January 10, 1817. Four days later, British military engineers unloaded it at the pasha's warehouse in the port of Alexandria. By this time, the museum trustees had been notified many times over by travelers and diplomatic agents that the colossal statue was on its way to London. The head then waited in Alexandria as the British Museum and the Foreign Office arranged transportation with the British Admiralty. In October 1817, it was loaded onto the British naval transport Minerva bound for Malta, and in December 1817 it was transferred at Malta to the storeship Weymouth. In March 1818, the Admiralty and the Foreign Office announced its arrival in England. On April 10, the Memnon head and the other antiquities which accompanied it arrived at the customs office, which deemed them, as gifts for the British Museum, free from import taxes; on April 17, the British Museum asked to use the Office of Ordnance's crane for unloading the Memnon head at London's Tower Wharf. Throughout the period the head was en route, announcements of its "discovery" and imminent arrival appeared in the European press. Inspired by the news, the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Horace Smith competed with one another in composing sonnets on the theme of the colossal statue.

What does this paper trail reveal? First, it illustrates that the act of installing the Memnon head in the Egyptian Sculpture Room was but the culmination of a long, deliberate process involving many sets of actors acting in various capacities. In this way, the dates and locations of the object's transshipment not only indicate events in the life of the Memnon head, but also mark nodes in a network of actors and organizations. As we shall see, in itself, the first task-moving the colossal statue fragment from its original site to the banks of the Nile-involved complicated and tense labor as well as diplomatic and imperial negotiations. The collectors, working as agents of the British consul, contracted local peasants, interacted with regional and local officials of the nascent Egyptian state, and competed with antiquities collectors working for the French government. Transporting the Memnon head down the Nile, exporting it through customs, and unloading it in London involved equally complex sets of relationships and more dispersed organizational networks, including the port authority of Alexandria, the British Foreign Office, the Admiralty, customs officials, and finally the trustees and officers of the British Museum.

Besides mapping the networks of the actors involved, however, the paper trail is itself a segment of the process by which the Memnon head became a museum artifact. This is part of the significance of the travel accounts, the letters, and the curators' reports that have always been attached to the statue during its museum life. Together, these documents form the Memnon head's provenance, the story of its movements from the field to the museum. The provenance is not just a record of the events that occurred during the transport of the Memnon head ex situ to the place where it became a museum piece. The provenance certainly chronicles these processes. But the creation of a textual record of the object's biography was fundamental to the very process of artifaction itself. Indeed, many of the actors involved in collecting the Memnon head made a conscious effort to create and organize an archive of their work. Likewise, for their part, the officers who installed the head in the museum and who cared for it afterward collected and preserved these texts because their existence was understood to be vital to the meaning of the object. Because of their efforts, we are able to read about the journey of the Memnon head in the same detail-particular names, dates, and places-we find in the accounts of human travelers from the same period. The paperwork attached to the Memnon head thus performs two functions: on one hand, it tells the story of how the Memnon head became a museum artifact; on the other, as an archive attached to the object, it plays a central role in the process by which the Memnon head became an artifact.

The invention of the Pharaonic artifact, of which the Memnon bust is most exemplary, marks a turning point in the modern European view of Egypt. Part of the novelty was that the agents who helped bring the Memnon bust to London were acquiring objects not for private collections but for the young national museum of Great Britain. The new form of the museum entailed new modes of collecting, such as collecting antiquities as unique pieces rather than as more or less interchangeable objects. Moreover, they sought them out on a scale never before attempted and marshaled unprecedented levels of private and public resources to accomplish their goals. This innovation was not of their own invention, however, but rather a result of new arrangements between Mehmed 'Ali, the pasha of Egypt, and the European powers concerning excavation in Egypt. At the same time that the rules discouraged individual Europeans from undertaking excavations around antiquities sites, they granted consular agents unprecedented freedom to pursue collection activities. The arrangement that emerged by the mid-1810s was that the diplomatic representatives of the European powers with the closest ties to the Egyptian state-the French and Austrian consuls-had a near total monopoly in the antiquities commerce. If we are to trust the accounts of European travelers at the time, their only competition was the Upper Egyptian village of Gurna, which, given its location and organization, had long been a powerful player in the commerce of sculpture, papyrus, and mummy.

The collectors who removed the Memnon head from Egypt were acting in the name of the new British consul. Moreover, they claimed that they sought that object neither for personal gain nor for political profit. But this is not the whole story: while it is true that the Memnon head was collected as a gift for the British Museum, it is also true that the other antiquities collected during the same expedition were meant to be sold to the highest bidder. Yet it was the Memnon head's value as a museum piece, not as a commodity, that motivated the activities and rhetoric of the collectors who brought the colossal bust to London. It was this rhetoric also that informed its reception into the museum. To be clear: the new set of values did not change the basic patterns by which antiquities were removed from Egypt. Indeed, the traffic continued apace and even increased. However, the meaning of that traffic changed with the emergence of artifact discourse. Excavation and transport now took place in the name of disinterested management and study, that is, "acquisition." This new way of speaking about and treating Pharaonic antiquities enabled Europeans to gain control over antiquities sites throughout the nineteenth century, and its logic expanded British and French power and profit even as it disavowed both. Once generalized, the discourse of the artifact gave both shape and substance to later forms of colonial discourse about managing all the resources of modern Egypt.

This chapter traces the artifaction of the Memnon head as a set of processes. In speaking of artifaction as a process, I am employing terms and concepts not usually associated with this period of antiquities collection in Egypt. To clarify: the normative sense of the artifact refers to a particular scientific method divorced from most of the aesthetic and historical debates described in this chapter. My point in widening the concept of the artifact is to show that the moment in which the Memnon head was collected marks the beginning of a new era of treating Egyptian antiquities, one deviating significantly from older antiquarian habits, even if it does not fully resemble the kind of scientific archaeology normally associated with the term "artifact." In this regard, one might ask, At what point did the colossal antiquity become that modern object peculiar to the institutions of art history and archaeological sciences? Did its life as an artifact begin the moment it was elevated on a pedestal at the museum? When it was excavated? Or was it already an artifact in its ancient resting place? The answer to these questions is that there is no originary moment, but rather a series of events in an ongoing process. Moreover, the truths of these events depend on the perspective from which they are viewed. Thus the story of artifaction may well convey a sense of how an object becomes an artifact, but it does not begin to explain the unique significance such objects have once their status as artifacts is obtained. This last point is the focus of this chapter's conclusion, where I argue that it is most precise to define the artifact not in terms of its intrinsic qualities, but rather by way of the tensions and contradictions which permeate and link it to intense political, social, and cultural conflicts.

EXCAVATION AND REMOVAL

The great head of Memnon will please, and when you contemplate its grandeur, recollect that Thebes has at present the remains of thirty-seven statues of equal dimensions: many greater.-CHARLES LEONARD IRBY AND JAMES MANGLES, Travels in Egypt

In 1816, Henry Salt, the British consul in Egypt, contracted the services of the Paduan Giovanni Belzoni "for the purpose of raising the head of the statue of the younger Memnon, and carrying it down the Nile." Salt had more than one reason compelling him to acquire the Memnon head. He had read about the colossal bust in numerous travel accounts and had also received direct reports from colleagues such as John Lewis Burckhardt. More immediately perhaps, Salt had only recently arrived at his post in Cairo and began to realize that his official salary was seriously deficient. Looking to supplement his income, he did what other European consuls in Egypt did at the time: he engaged in the commerce of antiquities.

As for the Memnon head, it was part of a complex of ruins that had long been a pilgrimage site for Western explorers, tourists, and writers. Diodorus Sicilus had identified the site as belonging to Ozymandias, a corruption of "User-maat-Re," one of Ramses II's names. Diodorus's description of the site and citation of the inscription ("King of Kings am I, Ozymandyas. If any would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works") would be echoed in Shelley's poem "Ozymandias." An earlier traveler, Strabo, had referred to the site as the Memnonium, after Memnon, the Egyptian king said to have joined in the siege of Troy. In modern times, travelers visited the site and compared what they saw to how the places were described by the ancients. In the process, they replaced a long-standing deference to the accounts of the ancients with a new style of travel writing based on empirical experience. The English traveler Richard Pococke visited the site in 1737. His description of the Memnonium follows Diodorus but also notes that ages had passed since the ancient traveler visited the place. His narrative includes a number of images of the Memnonium ruins, including one that appears to have been of the statue of which the Memnon head was a part. That same year, the Danish traveler Frederick Lewis Norden visited the site, described what he saw, and produced drawings considered the most accurate until the turn of the nineteenth century. James Bruce visited the site in the late 1760s, commenting on the Memnon head in glowing terms. During their short occupation of the country at the end of the eighteenth century, the French referred to the site as the Memnonium and studied it at length. Vivant Denon's account of his travels in Upper Egypt during the occupation even further fixed the Memnonium-and Ozymandias-as one of the most prominent monuments in this literary and pictorial tradition of describing Egypt. Published in 1802, Voyages dans la basse et la haute gypte went through forty editions during the next century and was not just an essential component of libraries but effectively functioned as a guidebook for European tourists until the twentieth century. At the same time, the encyclopedic Description de l'gypte (1809-20), composed by Napolon Bonaparte's savants, depicts the Memnonium in massive plates that were considered the most accurate even after the invention of photography.

These depictions only encouraged more visits, and more depictions. William Hamilton's oft-cited Aegyptiaca (1809) lingers at the Memnonium and declares it "the most beautiful and perfect piece of Egyptian sculpture that can be seen throughout the whole country." Hamilton noted that the French had apparently used explosives in an attempt to move the colossal head. Local villagers repeated this claim to the Swiss-Anglo traveler John Lewis Burckhardt. Burckhardt, known as Sheikh Ibrahim because he traveled through Upper Egypt in 1813 in the guise of a Muslim cleric from Hindustan, was told that years earlier the French had failed to move the Memnon head but had drilled a hole in it while trying. In 1814, Henry Light, traveling through Egypt and the Red Sea, visited the Memnonium and commented that the colossal head could be moved if one could employ the labor of local villagers. In 1815, a wealthy English traveler, William John Bankes, took ropes and pulleys to the site in the hope of moving it but was unsuccessful. That same year, Burckhardt attempted to persuade Mehmed 'Ali to send the colossal head as a present to the prince regent in England, but the pasha did not consider stone an appropriate gift. Meanwhile, in England, the study of hieroglyphics continued among antiquarians, who were as anxious as ever for more texts on which to practice their linguistic theories. By 1816, Hamilton was secretary of the Africa Association as well as undersecretary of state at the Foreign Office. In a memorandum from the previous year, the Foreign Office had urged its diplomatic agents to collect for the British Museum, promising recompense no matter the outcome: "Whatever the expense of the undertaking, whether successful or otherwise, it would be most cheerfully supported by an enlightened nation, eager to anticipate its Rivals in the prosecution of the best interests of science and literature." The British Museum had good cause to worry about the activities of rival acquisitionists, especially in Egypt, where the French consul, Bernardino Drovetti, had been using his position to corner the market in antiquities ever since he had been installed in 1802. Apprised of the importance of Egyptian antiquities that could be brought to England, the most active trustee of the British Museum, Joseph Banks, advised the newly appointed Consul Salt to use his diplomatic position for the museum's benefit. Likewise, Salt's former patron, Lord Mountnorris, requested Salt to collect Egyptian antiquities on his behalf.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822339757
• ISBN 13: 9780822339755
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 360