Histories of EgyptologyInterdisciplinary Measures

Edited by William Carruthers

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Histories of Egyptology : interdisciplinary measures / edited by WitliamCamrthers.

pages cm. - (Routledge studies in Egyptology ; 2)Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Egyptology-History. 2. Egypt--Civilization-To 332e.c.-Historiography. 3. Eglpt-Antiquities-Historiography. 4. Excavations(ArchaeologyfEgypt. I. Camrthers, William, 1982-editor of compilation,author. II. Series: Routledge studies in Egyptalogy ;2.

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Contents

FiguresAcknotuledgmentsA Note on Transliteration

1 Introduction: Thinking about Histories of EgyptologyW]LLIAM CARRUTHERS

PART IThe Creation and Isolation of an Academic Discipline

2 The Obiect of Study: Egyptology, Archaeology, andAnthropology at Oxford, 1860-1960ALICE STEVENSON

3 The Anglo-Saxon Branch of the Berlin School The InterwarCorrespondence of Adolf Erman and Alan Gardiner andthe Loss of the German Concession at AmarnaTHOMAS L. GERTZEN

4 The Cursed Discipline? The Peculiarities of Egyptologyat the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

JUAN cARros MoRENo cencie

5 Interdisciplinary Measures: Beyond Disciplinary Historiesof EgyptologyDAVIDGANGE

ixxi

xiii

1,9

34

50

64

vi Contents

PART IIKnowledge in the Making

6 Beyond Travelers' Accounts and Reproductions: UnpublishedNineteenth-Century'Works as Histories of EgyptologyANDREWBEDNARSKI

7 Studies in Esoteric Syntax: The Enigmatic Friendshipof Aleister Crowley and Battiscombe GunnSTEVE VINSON AND JANET GUNN

8 Margaret Alice Murray and Archaeological Tiainingin the Classroom: Preparing "Petrie's Pups"KATHLEEN L. SHEPPARD

9 Discussing Knowledge in the Making 1,29

CHRISTINA RIGGS

PART MColonial Mediations, Postcolonial Responses

10 On Archaeological Labor in Modern EgyptWENDYDOYON

11 Remembering and Forgetting Tutankhamun: Imperial andNational Rhythms of Archaeology,1922-'1972 157

DONALD M. RE]D

t2 The State of the Archive: Manipulating Memory in ModernEgypt and the Writing of Egyptological Histories 1.74

HUSSEIN OMAR

13 Histories of Egyptology in Egypc Some ThoughtsMARWAELSHAKRY

81

96

1L3

t41

18s

Contents vii

PART IVRepresenting Knowledge

14 Thomas "Mummy" Pettigrew and the Study of Egypt inEarly Nineteenth-Century BritainGABR]EL MOSHENSKA

15 Repeating Death: The High Priest Character inMummy Horror Films 215JASMINE DAY

16 What's in a Face? Mummy Portrait Panels and Identityin Museum Display 227DEBBIE CHALLIS

17 Legacies of Engagement: The Multiple Manifestations ofAncient Egypt in Public Discourse 242STEPHANIE MOSER

Postscript

18 The Old and New Egyptian Museums: Between Imperialists,Nation4lists, and Tourists 255MOFIAMED ELSHAHED

201,

ContributorsIndex

271

275

10 On Archaeological Laborin Modern Egypt.Wendy

Doyon

Visitors to the Egyptian galleries at the University of Pennsylvania Museumof Archaeology and Anthropology (University of Pennsylvania Museum)have the rare privilege of exploring the ceremonial throne room of the earli-est royal palace known to us from Egypt's ancient capital city of Memphis,located in what is today the Goyernorate of Giza. The reconstructed throneroom, with its monumental gateways and decorated columns, was the ritualcenterpiece of a royal palace belonging to the pharaoh Merenptah, son ofRamses II. Visitors to the Museum's Egyptian gallery may also notice a walllabel announcing the "Excavation of the Palace of Merenptah," accom-panied by a photograph of the University of Pennsylvania Museum exca-vations in progress at the site in 1915 (fig. 10.1). This photograph nicelyillustrates the stratigraphy of Memphis, with the palatial New Kingdom col-umns in situbeneath the ruins of a Roman building surrounded by the cul-tivated fields of the nearby village of Mit Rahina. 'What many visitors maynot notice so clearly however, is the group of Egyptian workers activelyexcavating the palace. They are young men and boys from the local village,paid by the day to haul dirt, a foreman from the town of Qift, Upper Egypt,standing in the middle of the group, and a young girl looking up at thecamera, who was perhaps bringing food for her father, brother, or uncle onsite the day this photograph was taken.l As a visual record of the archaeol-ogy of Memphis, these local people, who excavated hundreds of thousandsof cubic feet of dried mud to make this archaeological perspective possible,were not really meant to be seen in the photograph at all.

Instead, as Egyptology entered the twenty-first century, the Egyptianspictured in this very photograph to illustrate The Oxford Encyclopedia ofAncient Egypt's entry for "Archaeology" in 2001, were associated only withthe "insidious forces" threatening archaeological sites today (Weeks 2001,109). In this entry's five pages, no mention is made of modern Egyptians orthe local context of archaeological practice at all. The workers in the pho-tograph, mid-conversation, have been silenced by the larger archaeologicalcommunity that is positioned "behind the lens," so to speak, and whoseaesthetic choices have insisted on a juxtaposition between archaeologicalworkers and a mute archaeological record. 'Sfhether intentional or not, this

On Arcbaeological Labor in Modern Egypt 143

excavation by European archaeologists-methods also shaped by new polit-ical engagements with Egyptian, Arab, and Turkish nationalism, in additionto American interests in the Middle East (Colla 2007;Doyon in press; Petrie1904,1932; Reid 2002; Trigger 1984,1,989). In another sense, it is also astory about the role of archaeology in the modern world economy during itstransformation to an integrated world market with an international divisionof labor after 17 50.

With the expansion of the French and British trade empires into Asia,Africa, and the Americas, European capital investment reached inland fromports to railways, roads, canals, and communication networks, as well as

to scientific activities like surveys, specimen collecting, and archaeologicalexcavations (Jasanoff 2005; Schaffer et al. 2009). In particular, the invest-ment of British capital in ports and shipping from India to the Middle Eastand East Africa, which coincided with the age of abolition, has been cred-ited with the partial transformation of the Indian Ocean economy fromslavery to wage labor. In contrast, the expansio\ centralization, and com-mercialization of regional empires that invested little in wage labor, such as

Mehmed 'Ali Pasha's dynasty in Egypt, instead resulted in the creation ofnew kinds of slavery for low-status and dispossessed village communities(Campbell 2005; cf. Ahuja 2002;Ewald 2000).

Between 1810 and 1830, Mehmed 'Ali Pasha, Ottoman governor ofEgypt from 1805 to 1848, launched an industrial state-building project,which featured major institutional reforms, land and property redistri-bution, the conscription of an Egyptian army, and a corv6e labor policyto implement the construction of dams, canals, and factories (Baer 1962;Fahmy 1997;Hunter 1984; Mikhail2011; Reid 2002). This combinationof forced labor, land redistribution, and tax reform created a large, newclass of low-status peasant laborers, whose labor then became a form ofprivate property for the state and an expanding class of high-status land-owners. Because many of the Pasha's institutional reforms were modern-izing and in some sense

'Westernizing, traditional social institutions suchas Islamic schools and courts received less and less state patronage, whileEuropean institutions, such as consular courts and land concessions foreconomic development, received a greater share of legal protection. TheOttoman treaty privileges known as capitulations-which granted a spe-cial legal status to non-Muslim foreigners in Muslim territories, primarilymerchants but also European consuls and collectors-came to representincreasingly independent commercial concerns that were protected, inan extraterritorial sense, by French and English civil law.2 Thus, duringthis period, the Pasha's institutional and land reforms gradually erodedthe traditional authority of Islamic institutions, alienated the status ofhis Muslim subjects, and increasingly privileged the civil status of a newupwardly mobile class of wealthy, educated, \Testernized, and landowningelites traditionally excluded from the Turkish upper classes (now includingEuropean patrons with concessions for land development). This process

1,44 Wendy Doyon

occurred at the expense of the majority of Egyptians not protected by theshifting state patron age of civil, as opposed to Islamic, law.

As Maya Jasanoff (2005) has shown, after Napoleon's Egyptian expe-dition in 1.798, French and British consuls in Egypt under Mehmed 'Ali'sadministration began to pattern their investments in Egyptian antiquitiesafter imperial collectors in India, thus becoming the first generation of Egyp-tian collectors, whose privileged status in Egypt enhanced their social mobil-ity in Paris and London. In a broader sense, as she and others have shown,archaeology and its claims to scientific objectivity in the nineteenth centuryserved to reproduce the upper-middle class interests of mostly Europeanmen (Bailkin 2004; Thomas 2004; Trigger 1989). As British and Frenchconsuls and their clients holding archaeological concessions began to receive

a greatff share of protected legal status relative to the majority populationof Egypt, it can be suggested that the class privileges associated with collect-ing in nineteenth-century Egypt gave Egyptologists a certain, if potentiallyillegitimate, claim to moral authority and a right to produce knowledge tothe exclusion of then "second-class" Egyptian citizens. Moreover, as JulianThomas (2004) has shown, a universalizing belief in scientific objectivitytends to free anything labeled as science from ethical consideration. Thus,because the use of the scientific method is one of many ways that archae-ology claims moral authority as a way of knowing, it often appears to be

separate from concerns of an ethical or political nature, whereas the moralauthority of archaeology is, in reality a struggle for social and politicallegitimacy rather than an absolute right. For this reason, the class status ofEgyptologists within Egyptian society is an issue of historical significance.

The production of archaeological knowledge should perhaps be under-stood in terms of political economy as much as it is understood in terms ofintellectual history. In Egypt and the Middle East, for example, the largescale of archaeological excavations, both systematic and unsystematic, has

always determined the kinds of questions that archaeologists have been

able to ask, and therefore indirectly shaped the nature of the archaeologicalrecord there. To understand how the social structure of archaeology has inpart determined the archaeological record, we must examine the economicrelations that have reproduced archaeological interests in Egypt, which gen-

erally fall into four distinct periods.The early nineteenth century, from 1800 to 1850, was characterized by

Mehmed 'Ali's state-building project, land reform, and corv6e labor policyand the exploitation of these circumstances by men like Henry Salt, Ber-

nardino Drovetti, Lord Elgin, Dominique Vivant Denon, and Jean-FranEoisChampollion, who established archaeological spheres of influence withclaims to property rights in land and labor on behalf of Britain and France

fiasanoff 2005; Manley and R6e 2001,). The next period, from 1850 to 1880,was characterized by French dominance in the Egyptian Antiquities Service,

archaeological corv6e, and the rising class tensions of Egyptian national-ism during the reign of the Francophile Khedive Isma'il (1863-1879). The

On Archaeological Labor in Modern Egypt 145

following period, from 1880 to 1900, was defined by British administrationof the Egyptian government after 1882, increasing privatization of archaeo-logical excavations following the establishment of the Egypt ExplorationFund the same year, the intensification of British-French rivalry in the Egyp-

tian Antiquities Service administration, and increasing popular support forthe Egyptian nationalist movement. Finally, the period from 1900 untilt922 signaled Egypt's move for national independence and liberalization,the rise of American interests in Egyptian archaeology, and the strengthen-ing of Egyptian nationalism through Egyptology, culminating in the discov-ery and nationalization of the tomb of Tutankhamun (Reid 2002).

Modern class relations have often been cast as a dialectical struggle

between workers and peasants against the state (for example, in Marxist,postcolonial, and subaltern analyses).3 Beyond conventional class analysis,

Philip Curtin (1984) was among the first contemporary historians to sug-

gest that centralized control of political economies tends to be overstated,while the social interactions of trade and cultural constructions of value,independent of state authority, have been understated. It was Curtin's view,followed here, that merchants, traders, and other go-betweens create politi-cal economies that reproduce their own status and class interests, whilestate expansion and contraction is only one sphere of interaction amongmany in the modern world economy. In this context, Curtin and othershave identified the existence of cross-cultural communities of traders and

other political economies independent of state authority (Bang 2003; Bose

2006; Jasanoff 2005; Schaffer et al. 2009; White 1991). Additionally, inthe context of the transformation of the modern world economy from slav-ery to wage labor, labor brokers and go-betweens representing traditionalcommunities often built new partnerships with foreign capitalists, whoseprivileged status could in some sense be shared by the new power brokersand perhaps diversified along more traditional lines, such as religion andkinship, within new spheres of trade and cultural exchange (Ahuja 2002;Ewald 2000; Raj 2007).

Thus, in Egypt, as Mehmed'Ali's centralizing empire expanded into the

countryside during the first half of the nineteenth century, suddenly bring-ing many independent household, village, and tribal communities into his

sphere of authority, legally protected European spheres of investment, such

as archaeological concessions, were bound to create new forms of social

mobility, refuge, and security, at least for some. As archaeological excava-

tions began to create a partial wage labor economy in Egypt, a new class ofgo-betweens with a kind of diplomatic status-represented by the figure ofthe ra'u, or foreman-emerged during the early part of the century, became

cetfiralized in the middle part of the century, diversified toward the end

of the century, ar,.d in a sense became industrialized in Qift by the turn ofthe twentieth century. Thus, in exchange for reliable labor, the protectionenjoyed by archaeologists came to be shared with the rd"ts, whose positionshifted from a marginalized to a special status over time and whose dual

146 Wendy Doyon

social status probably also worked in the other direction to legitimate the

property claims of archaeologists in the eyes of many Egyptians.

ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE RA'IS-SYSTEM INEGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY, C. 1800_1895

Prior to the establishment of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, archaeologi-cal concessions in Egypt were decentralized, and available labor was insome sense owned by landlords and other patrons with control over debts

and taxes. Early in this period of decentralized authority, village shaykhs

near Gtza and Thebes, on behalf of Mehmed 'Ali and his cadre of Otto-man goyernors, routinely levied hundreds of men, women, and children (as

young as the age of five) as daily laborers to excaYate for French and Brit-ish consuls atmaior sites in these areas (Belzoni 1835; Usick and Manley2007; Vyse 1840). In the region of Giza, men were paid by the day to clear

dirt and stones, boys called "basket carriers" to haul the dirt, and womento carry water. Each day several locally appointed foremen, usually skilledin masonry or quarry work, were contracted to oversee the excavations. Atypical workforce might have had one rals for every twenty-five to thirty-five workers (Vyse 1840). Men and boys were expected to supply their ownbasket and turiyya (or hoe) for excavating; women contributed, if indi-rectly, by supplying food and water and helping the children with the bas-

kets. In rural, nineteenth-century Egypt, domestic households represented

the basic economic unit of all paid, taxed, and indirect labor, from whichlarger labor networks were constructed via multi-household family groups(Tucker 1.985; Zilfr 2004).In terms of the sexual division of fieldwork,female labor in the region of Giza and Memphis was more direct than inUpper Egypt, but less direct than in the Nile Delta, where both men and

boys excavated and girls carried the baskets, even substituting for boys inthe lighter excavations on occasion (Petrie 1,904,1.932; Vyse 1840).

'S(hile the observation that men excavated, boys and gids carried dirt, and

women carried food and water is in many ways a prosaic one, it is nonethe-

less important to point to the social construction of archaeological fieldworkin an Egyptian context, such as the familiar and oppressive ways that manyEgyptians have experienced archaeology, in order to contrast this experience

with the social construction of knowledge in a disciplinary context, such

as may occur in the institutional settings of archaeology outside Egypt. As

in the photograph taken at Memphis in 1915 (fig. 10.1), the disciplinaryframe in which Egyptians often appear takes for granted a certain naturalrelationship between Egyptian peasants and the ruins of ancient Egyptian

civilization. \X/ithout recognizing the historical context of these images and

the many unacknowledged tensions of race, class, gender, and cultural differ-ences that are present in archaeological archives, such images risk continuingto reproduce the racism of colonial power structures (Shanks 1'997).

ItOn Archaeological Labor in Modern Egypt 147

Under Sa'id Pasha's administration (1854-1853), the Frenchman AugusteMariette Pasha won a vast archaeological concession over all of Egypt,which he brought under centralized control with the establishment of theEgyptian Antiquities Service and Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo.'$7ith this concession, which had its parallel in the Suez concession grantedto his French contemporary Ferdinand de Lesseps, Mariette Pasha wasgranted the power of direct archaeological corv6e (Reid 2002). Thus, in the1860s and 1870s, a new network of Museum foremen with highly central-ized authority controlled the pivotal point of security between householdnetworks on the one hand and state interests on the other. In this system,the ra'rs carried orders to local villages for a certain number of workmen,anywhere from one hundred to one thousand, and selected from those whocould not afford to pay a tribute (Petrie 1932).

By strengthening his ability to collect tribute and to impose the whip,or kurbdj, on excavations, Mariette Pasha enhanced the coercive power ofthe ra'-s, though certainly the question of the legitimacy o{ the ra's in thiscontext is another matter. There is some evidence, however, that this legiti-macy may have derived in part from another kind of class status, known as

baraka, or religious authority. In Sufi traditions, such as those that shapedmost rural social relations in nineteenth-century Egypt, baraka refers toboth the possession of spiritual wealth and its translation into worldly status(Bang 2003;

'S7inkler 2009).In one sense, baraka is a kind of cultural com-modity, which can be acquired in many different ways and which appearsto haye been used by some foremen to perform dhikr a kind of meditativepractice, literally a "remembrance of God," on French excavations in UpperEgypt toward the end of the century (Maspero 1,911, 1914). Dhikr wasone of many purposes served by the adaptation of traditional folksongs onexcavations throughout Egypt, which were also used to keep time, to pro-test working conditions, and perhaps to recreate the boundaries of a morefamiliar social universe in the midst of a strangers' world (cf. Cl6ment 2010;Poppe 2011; Schaefer 1904). Thus, the extent to which the legitimacy andsuccess ol the ra'rs in running archaeological excayations depended on hisSufi credentials is an open, and significant, question.

The 1860s and 1870s were in many other ways also a period of indirectFrench control of the Egyptian economy under Khedive Isma'il, but by 1880,things had changed dramatically. In 1875, the establishment of the MixedCourts brought French, English, and Islamic law into one sphere of civilauthority-an awkward policy, which though it continued to protect thelegal status of foreigners and their extraterritorial privileges at the expenseof Egyptians, also permanently disrupted the administratiye authority ofthe French in Egypt (Hunter 1984). Anti-Turkish class tensions that hadbeen brewing within the Egyptian army and popular nationalist moyementsfor years also boiled over with Isma'il's oyerthrow in1879,leading to thenationalist'Urabi rebellion followed by the British occupation in 1882. Inthe midst of these crucial turning points in Egyptian government and society,

1,48 Wendy Doyon'S7illiam Matthew Flinders Petrie arrived in Egypt to set archaeology on anew course (Drower 2004). Also in 1882, the Egypt Exploration Fund was

established in Britain, allowing Petrie the private sponsorship to invest innew, more systematic, methods of archaeological fieldwork through whichhe could compete independently with the central French administration(Petrie 1.904,1,932).

Petrie began his Egyptian career by working with permanent foremen

from the network of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities to recruit and orga-

nize local workforces. However, before long he began negotiating directlywith local shaykhs, deliberately circumscribing the coercive practices of the

Museum foremen, offering regular and competitive wages and managing his

accounts and employment records directly. By creating a priYate, wage labornetwork independent of the Museum, Petrie also created the possibility-indeed the necessity-of diversification within that network to legitimize his

own authority. In 1887, he began appointing multiple foremen to act as lead

excavators for the regular work crews, usually comprising one to two hun-

dred excavators and a similar number of basket carriers. By 1891, Petrie had

formed a permanent team of six experienced foremen from Egypt's Fayum

region, led by one 'Ali al-Suayfi (Drower 2004; Petrie 1,904, 1932; Quirke2010). The impact of Petrie's methods-which emphasized the systematic

control of excavations with attention to find context-on the development

of archaeological thought owes much to the specialized class of foremen thatjoined his excavations during this period and trained others to excaYate.

AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL INDUSTRY IN QIFT, C.1895-7920

In 1893, Petrie and his team arrived in the town of Qift, located on the

ancient site of Koptos, where they began raining local excavators. After the

first two seasons of excavation, that training quickly expanded and diversi-fied into a local industry, and, by the turn of the century, the Quftis (as theycame to be known) came close to forming a monopoly on the market forskilled archaeological labor. The reasons for this sudden specialization and

expansion are unclear. Stephen Quirke has recently suggested that 'Ali al-Suayfi's first wife Fatima, whom he met while excavating for Petrie during1893 to 1895, may have hailed from the "Qift area," or, more specificallSNaqada (Quirke 2010,235,301). If it can be substantiated that the house-

hold network of Qift did in fact have a sphere of influence extending toNaqada at this time, then we might imagine that this factor played a role inthe expansion of those Qufti households into archaeology. Another factor,

however, was the arrival of another foreign "privateer" in Qift, just a few

short years behind Petrie. This man was the American archaeologist George

Reisner, who began his Egyptian career excavating at Koptos in 1899 on

behalf of the Hearst Expedition of the University of California (Reisner

1905). The importance of Reisner's career-long association with Qift, and

On Arcbaeological Labor in Modern ESyPt 149

the subsequent influence of the Quftis on the methods and research ques-

tions developed by (among others) upper-class Egyptian, American, British,and German archaeologists, has been crucially overlooked.

George Reisner and his American prot6g6 Clarence Fisher took up andelaborated Petrie's systematic methods of excavation-a radical departurefrom the unsystematic practices of the French-led Egyptian AntiquitiesService, with its focus on the clearance of tombs and monuments and theacquisition of museum pieces-by emphasizing stratigraphic context andcomplete methods of site documentation in their work.a \(/hile it has beenrecognized that the "American Method" practiced by Reisner, Fisher, anda few of their contemporaries had come to characterize best practice by the1920s (Davis 2004), it has not been concomitantly recognized that suchdetail-oriented, high-cost objectives would have been almost impossible tomeet without the skilled and large-scale specialization of the people of Qift,whose indispensability to these methods was reflected in their involvement,at considerable cost, in American expeditions to Palestine and the Sudanduring the early part of the twentieth century.s The Arabic field diaries keptby the most senior foremen on American expeditions from this era leaveno doubt as to the senior Quftis' unacknowledged status as specialists inexcavation, documentation, illustration, keen observation, and sometimescontextual interpretation. By the end of 'World 'War I, the responsibilitiesof senior Quftis on American-sponsored excavations up and down the NileValley extended far beyond excavation and site documentation to the man-agement of internal accounts, transportation, communication, and socialwelfare networks, involving not just foremen and excavators, but clerks,porters, tailors, and craftsmen from Qift, and sometimes even women tomake and ship bread for men in the field.

Clarence Fisher arrived in Egypt on 18 December 1.914-the very day thatEgypt's nominal Ottoman dependency was replaced by a British Protectorate-as the new Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum's Eckley B.

Coxe, Jr. Egyptian Expedition. A student of George Reisner, trained for sev-

eral years prior in Egypt and Palestine, Fisher was met on his arrival bya previous associate from Qift, ra-ts Mahmud Ahmad Sa'id al-Ma1yit, thesecond foreman on Reisner's excavations at Giza, then sponsored by Har-vard University and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Ra'rs Mahmudand his brother ra\s Sa'id Ahmad (the head foreman at Giza) most likelyhailed from the village of al-Qal'a in Qift, where they had worked with Petriein 1898. Since beginning their work at Giza in 1905, George Reisner andra'\s Sa'id Ahmad had built one of the largest labor networks operating inEgyptian archaeology at the time, which they hoped to expand by forginga partnership with the Coxe Expedition. The Expedition's first concessionwas a minor cemetery at Giza, donated by Reisner, and carefully excavatedby rals Mahmud and a crew of sixty transferred from Reisner's excava-tions that winter. Thus, as Director of the Coxe Expedition, Fisher became

one of Reisner and the Quftis' most important clients. By March 1915, a

On Archaeological Labor in Modern Egypt 151

from Qift to Mit Rahina, and by the followingyea\ a special allowance hadbeen set aside to meet the cost of making and shipping the Quftis' bread,from which $325 was drawn in 1917 and $210 in 1918. For the first threeseasons, the Quftis claimed more than half of the Coxe Expedition's totalfield expenses, and by 1,919, a time of extreme deprivation for most Egyp-tians during the anti-British struggle that year, a special overnight rail carhad been commissioned to transport the workforce from Qift to Memphis,"reserved for [the Expedition's] men and . . . switched off at Badresheinstation [as] a great convenience to the men, [who] always have a lot of lug-gage and would have difficulty in finding places on the crowded express."8All of these benefits were in contrast to the low-status, unskilled labor of theso-called basket boys hired from the local villages for two or three piasters(ten to fifteen cents) per day, to haul debris fifty meters back and forth fromthe trenches to the dumpsite all day long. The special status of the Quftis,relative to peasant wage laborers, was reproduced by foreign investments inthe celebrations, travel, and hospitality expenses associated with their workas power brokers because the Quftis' role in negotiations between agricul^tural and archaeological land use (such as access to sabakh, or fertilizer), forexample, was key to the legitimacy of archaeological land claims at the time.

In many ways, Reisner built his reputation with the senior Quftis and theirspecialized labor network by reinforcing traditional forms of patronage andlegitimacy. At Giza, for example, practices such as seasonal crew rotation,worker substitutions, workers'accounts, and loans, were internal Qufti affairsunder the authority of the ra-ts, who in turn ensured the reliability of the work-force on the whole. The authority to control loans and debts among the work-force was a fundamental form of legitimacy for Qufti foremen and,e havingworked for Reisner for fifteen years, rals Mahmud naturally brought thisethic to his work with him at Memphis. Fisher, however, felt that Reisner'sstrategic flexibility placed too much power in the hands of the Quftis, and thispoint became a deep source of mistrust and resentment on his part. Fisher'ssuspicion of the Quftis betrayed a commonly held attitude of his time, whichhe shared, that while Egyptians may have been essential to the work of archae-ology, they were considered racially and culturally inferior with regard to theproduction of knowledge in any meaningful aesthetic or scientific sense (see,

e.g., Becker 2005; Petrie 1904,1,932; Reid 2002; Trigger 1989).In a departure from Reisner's management style, Fisher instead decided to

pursue the unconventional strategy of alienating the initial crew of sixty, ledby ra-ts Mahmud, from their larger network of peers and kin. His aim wasto create a permanent and independent workforce, loyal to the University ofPennsylvania Museum and its generous, perhaps extravagant, benefits. From191,5 to 1918, the Coxe Expedition alternated between excavating Memphis,a wet site that was inundated and unworkable in the fall, and Dendera, a

dry site in Upper Egypt that was workable during the winter months, for anexhausting seyen to eight months instead of the more typical three- to four-month season.

'When, after their first successful season at Memphis, ra1s

1,52 Wendy Doyon

Mahmud proposed to expand his financial duties by taking charge of the

Expedition's accounts and bookkeeping at Dendera, Fisher responded by cut-

ting off all of the ral,s's financial responsibilities and giving them to an English

assistant instead. Fisher's aggressive imposition of highly bureaucratic prac-

tices thus robbed the rals of his full authority, and he was forced to take

advances on his own pay to make loans to the workers and maintain controlof the excavations. When Fisher became aware of rals Mahmud's act, he

took it for a betrayal and a threat to his own authority and began makingloans to the workers out of the Expedition's regular budget. Thus, in spite ofhis various concessions to the Quftis, Fisher undercut rais Mahmnd's legiti-macy and caused a deep division within the Coxe Expedition.

Still confident in his vision and emboldened by the allocation of half a

million dollars to the Expedition's endowment in1.9L6, Fisher continued tostoke tensions with the ra-rs over the next tvvo seasons, until the struggle

over labor management between these two different cultural systems-the shared authority of the Harvard Expedition and the more centralizedapproach of the Coxe Expedition-broke down relations in1917. Demoral-izedby his struggle with Fisher, rais Mahmud began to openly defy Fisher's

authority and to decrease the efficiency of the excavations. He began to sulkand avoided work-on two occasions he refused a work order and on at

least one he turned his back to Fisher. Finally, ra?s Mahmud deliberatelyflaunted a taboo that marked the class boundary between them when he

openly smoked a cigarette in front of Fisher. Also in many respects a moralboundary, here smoking marked the limit of a man's status with respect tohis superiors, including the authority of a rals with respect to his mudtr(director).10 Ultimately, this act cost Mahmud al-Maryit his job, but as rela-

tions broke down and he left the Expedition in May L917,he took most ofthe workforce with him on strike, leaving for Giza in a fury of condemna-

tion against Fisher, the Expedition's standing in the village, and the team'spremeditated replacement from a rival village in Qift.

At Giza, Reisner was ultimately unwilling to dismiss ra-ts Mahmud insolidarity with Fisher, since such an action would amount to an attack onrals Sa'id and lead to a strike on Giza. Thus, rals Mahmud's actions caused

a split between the two archaeologists, which, though it was later resolved,

showed a crack in the intellectual foundation of the discipline, where social

motivations rather than ideas can create the conditions of archaeologicaldiscovery. Through this crack, let us take another look at the photographfrom Memphis to find the limits of Egyptology with respect to Egyptians and

to ask: how can we look at the o'Excavation of the Palace of Merenptah" in191,5 and not see the Egyptians standing inside of it?

CONCLUSION

In some ways, one could say that the relationship between archaeologicalmeaning and value, in an Egyptian context, is based on an unequal division

On Archaeological Labor in Modern EgyPt 153

of labor between highly educated, upper-middle-class archaeologists-withplenty of real and moral capital to invest in the reconstruction of ancientworlds reflecting their own interests and cultural values-and unskilled,low-status agricultural workers with an interest in the value of their manuallabor on the antiquities market. This conception, however, misses some-thing fundamental about the cultural construction of meaning and valueand the shared nature of authority and power in political economies.

Taking into consideration the role of the archaeological rals, whoselegitimacy draws from his complex relationship with both workers andarchaeologists, both the nature of the archaeological record and the moralauthority to interpret it become complicated by the point he (or anyone inan analogous position between value-systems) represents.

'We know now,for example, that the pharaoh Merenptah probably once stood in his royalthrone room, at the height of Egypt's imperial power, to enact the sacredpractices that held the Egyptians' universe together through divine kingship(O'Connor 1,991). However, this knowledge does not exist independent ofthe fact of the palace's excavation in 1915. Thus, evidence of the nature ofthat excavation and the lived experience of archaeological labor-the girllooking directly at the camera, identifying herself and her place in Egyptiansociety, the Sufi beliefs once embodied by the young men as they excavated,the role of the ra-ts as power broker-show clearly that archaeological con-texts are not just buried with the past, they are constructed in the present(cf. Thomas 2004).

For this reason, as in other contexts where archaeologists'subject-positionsand interpretive biases have been identified and questioned (Preucel andMeskell 2004;Trrgger 1980; \7ylie 2002), it is quite possible that modernclaims about the nature of power in ancient Egypt, for example, have beenoverly determined by relations of power in the Egyptological present. If so,this structure may indicate a historical bias in the archaeological record-namely that of the special class status of archaeologists with respect to land,labor, and cultural property in modern Egypt. Because the legitimacy ofthose claims has depended in some part on the interests of the ra-ts, hisplace in Egyptian society is also crucial to understanding the economic rela-tions that have reproduced the moral authority of Egyptology and to rescu-ing the unacknowledged interests of Egyptian communities inherent to theconstruction of archaeological meaning and to the preservation of Egyptianheritage.

NOTES

1. The town of Qift (or, Quft), which is located approximately five hundred kilo-meters south of Cairo in the Governorate of Qina, has since the turn of thetwentieth century been home to Egypt's largest and most successful networkof archaeological foremen, known as Quftis. The Arabic term raTs (sing.; pl.ru'asa'), when used to refer to an archaeological foreman from Qift or else-where, denotes a social status on a par with boat captains and other master

154 Wendy Doyon

tradesmen in rural contexts-in contrast to urban contexts, where it may beused more generally by middle-class professionals to address uneducated orunskilled workers (cf. Parkinson 1985, 145).

2. On the capitulations, see Inalcik (199a); for Egyptian context, cf. Baer (1,962),

Hunter (1.984),Jasanoff (2005), and Reid (2002).3. For important postcolonial and subaltern perspectives in relevant Egyptian

contexts, see Cl6ment (2010), Fahmy (1,997), Mikhail (201L), and Mitchell(1e88).

4. On the Petrie method, see Davis (2004,28-31.) and on the Reisner-Fishermethod, see Davis (2004,59-51,).

5. This discussion draws on the field records of the Eckley B. Coxe, Jr. EgyptianExpedition to Giza, Memphis, and Dendera (ftom 19L4 to 1.923) at the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania Museum Archive (see Fisher 19'J.7, 1.924) and on theadministrative records of the Museum's Egyptian Section for the same period,as well as the field records of the Harvard University-Museum of Fine Arts,Boston Expeditions to Egypt and the Sudan (particularly the period from 1909to 1976) at the Giza Archive, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. For access tothese materials, I am especially grateful to Mr. Alex Pezzati at the Universityof Pennsylvania Museum Archive and to Dr. Peter Der Manuelian at HarvardUniversity.

6. Coxe Egyptian Expedition (Fisher Diary, Memphis, 11 March 1915).7. Ibid. (Fisher to Gordon, 10 May 1915).8. Ibid. (Fisher Diarg Memphis,26 September 1919).9. Giza Archive, Arabic Diary B, p. 48 (Giza,4 January 1916).

10. University of Pennsylvania Museum Archives, Egyptian Section (Fisher toGordon, 14 December 1917; Reisner to Gordon, 11June 1918).

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