Intellectual and actual ownership lies at the heart of how museums construct Ancient Egypt. In intellectual terms, from the cabinets of curiosity to the present day, the material remains of Egypt have been used to construe an Ancient Egypt that was both natural and man-made, that was curious and awe-inspiring, that was exotic, sumptuous, and un-artistic, that was black or not-black (never entirely white), and that was resolutely dead and gone. It has been in the museum’s non-public spaces, hidden from public view, that the museum as an institutional apparatus has decided what to collect and how to categorize, define, and display the collected. The interpretation of Egyptian collections has been an implicit part of the power relationship between museums and their visitors, but as museum visitors become reconfigured as late capitalist consumers, the consumer-driven experience of Ancient Egypt increasingly informs what museums do, and how they do it. In a departure from past practice, today’s museums are no strangers to the focus group and to marketing directives (Schulz 2003). With large sums of money plus the public reception at stake, museums debate the ‘‘popular’’ versus ‘‘educational’’ content of both temporary exhibitions and long-term gallery installations. Recent trends have seen museums offer visitors the opportunity to record personal responses to objects on display, a popular feature of the Egyptian installation opened at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery in 2008 (Weeks 2008). The Egypt Centre at the Swansea University has enabled interested individuals to compose object labels that present alternative interpretations of Egypt. Several museums have sought to bring out the contemporary relevance of their collections by involving contemporary artists, for instance at Bristol, the Bolton Museum and Art Gallery, and the British Museum (Weeks 2008; Hardwick 2008; Walker 2003).
Education has been a central concern of museums since the nineteenth century, and in the first decade of the 1900s, museums in the United Kingdom described their educational efforts in the pages of the Museums Journal. Under the banner ‘‘Education for All,’’ the Education Act of 1902 allowed schools to count museum visits as part of the curriculum, in a political move tied up with attempts to promote a unified national identity in the age of British imperialism (Coombes 1988). The Liverpool Museum was among the first to lend objects to schools for teaching purposes, while the Horniman Museum and the Manchester Museum both focused efforts on hosting school visits, often attracting schools that served lower urban classes (Coombes 1994: 124). In the United Kingdom, recent government initiatives aimed at museum education appear old-fashioned in this light, with their emphasis on social inclusion and ‘‘inspiring learning for all.’’ As crude as such initiatives and their visitor targets may be, however, they do force museums to look outwards and to gain a better understanding of both their existing and potential audiences (Swain 2007: 195-209). Hooper-Greenhill has characterized the ongoing process of re-imagining the relationship between museums, interpretation, and visitors as a movement towards the ‘‘post-museum.’’ In the post-museum the dynamic force of education will be based on museums’ ethical responsibility and will promote the utopian goal of an egalitarian society (Hooper-Greenhill 2007).
In today’s non-egalitarian society, however, consuming Ancient Egypt takes place not only in the museum gallery and gift shop but also in the cinema, cyberspace, toyshop, and bookstore (MacDonald and Rice 2003). Photographs taken in the museum serve to document visitors’ presence there (Walker 2003), as do postcards of Egyptian objects purchased in the gift shop (Beard 1992). The objects selected for replication as museum merchandise - Rosetta Stone tea towels and coffee mugs, or facsimiles of the Gayer-Anderson cat - reinforce the materiality of Ancient Egypt, which is desired and consumed (Meskell 2004: 179-207).The purchase of reproductions operates much like the collecting of antiquities, by collapsing the vast distance of space and time and bringing the present in direct contact with the past. Commodification yields an Ancient Egypt that is accessible in modern terms.
In addition to the popularity of Egyptian-themed products, Egyptian special exhibitions and long-term gallery installations rank among the most popular - and profitable - attractions in museums. The 1970s exhibition of Tutankhamun material, on loan from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, was the original ‘‘blockbuster,’’ and a recent Tutankhamun-based tour in the United States and the United Kingdom repeated this success, combining cultural diplomacy with cash flow. Ancient Egypt’s popularity can be a boon and curse to museum staff, who may be frustrated by the preconceptions that visitors bring to Egyptian displays, for instance, expectations about pyramids, treasure, and mummies, and lack of awareness, or disparaging attitudes, about modern Egypt (Stephens 2008; MacDonald 2003). However, curatorial snobbery towards the visiting public is as misplaced as it is deep-seated. In museums that emphasize their ‘‘fine arts’’ credentials such snobbery has been based on ideas of connoisseurship long-debunked in the discipline of art history itself (e. g. Kozloff 2008b). Never questioning the constructed categories within which they operate, US-based curators, in particular, have wanted to present an Ancient Egypt that visitors would value as a genius of artistic production, rather than a historical civilization. American museums, unlike their European counterparts, have also tended to have departments of Egyptian ‘‘art’’ rather than ‘‘antiquities.’’ Thus Bernard V. Bothmer, writing in the 1970s, could comment that ancient tools and technology had no place in the Brooklyn Museum, which would display ‘‘the best of art, and art alone,’’ and that curators’ pronouncements on aesthetic values should only appear in exhibition catalogues, rather than on labels, so as not to draw public ire (Wedge 1976: 156-8). Whether it was the curator’s role to make such judgements was not in question.
Curatorial judgement is also at stake in the relationship between museums and the art market. Acquiring works with the aim of completing or perfecting a museum’s collection is a practice dating back to ‘‘Young Memnon,’’ but with escalating competition in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the more stringent control exerted by Egypt over the export of antiquities, museums turned to private collectors and antiquities dealers, which poses ethical difficulties. Collectors may influence museums through donations and sponsorship and may seek to increase the value of their own collections by exhibiting them in the ‘‘neutral’’ museum space (e. g. Ortiz 1994). Dealers likewise have a financial stake in the antiquities trade, and curators over-confident of their own connoisseurial prowess, or their dealer’s connections, have purchased outright forgeries or objects of dubious provenance, even if in good faith (e. g. Spanel 2001). Since 1983 Egypt has banned the export of all antiquities, which are state property; a new version of this law, with more stringent penalties, is currently before the Egyptian legislature. Over the past decade Egypt has used security and diplomatic measures to maintain ownership of its cultural objects, including actions to re-home questionably exported material. Not all museums and dealers have welcomed such measures:
There is a certain amount of irony in an archaeologically rich country claiming sole ownership of its treasures at the same time that it raises money from the collector nations for renovation, restoration, and construction ofmuseums and archaeological sites on the grounds that we all share the same heritage. There is also a certain amount of consternation among both public and private collectors who would rather see interesting and beautiful objects exhibited, published, and displayed than reburied in archaeological storerooms. (Kozloff 2008b: 152)
However, the evidence for antiquities smuggling from Egypt, and the inevitable damage to archaeological sites, makes it difficult not to empathize with Egypt’s efforts. In the late 1990s, papyri, sculpture, textiles, and false doors surfaced in the United Kingdom, having been removed from storerooms and tombs in Egypt and exported in the guise of modern reproductions. This ring included New York dealer Frederick Schultz, who was convicted for conspiring to smuggle antiquities in contravention of the 1982 Egyptian law - the first time this law was upheld in an American court. Subsequently, the Supreme Council of Antiquities formed a Department of Retrieving Stolen Artefacts, which has successfully negotiated the return of looted antiquities from Switzerland and Australia. Other disputes are ongoing, such as Egypt’s claim that a New Kingdom mummy mask in the Saint Louis Art Museum was stolen from a storeroom in the 1980s; the Museum believes that it exercised due diligence as required by ethical codes of practice, and that the mask had been in European private collections since the 1950s or 1960s (Waxman 2008; for two differing views of the antiquities trade, see Cuno 2008 and Renfrew 2000).
Hand-in-hand with issues of cultural patrimony is the rapid development that Egypt’s own museums are experiencing. The near future will realize plans to transfer many objects from the 1902 Egyptian Museum to the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, and to build a UNESCO-sponsored National Museum of Egyptian Civilization at Fustat. The shift from the colonial to the post-colonial has seen Egyptian experts spearheading these projects (see the special edition of MUSEUM International 57:1-2, May 2005, ‘‘Heritage landscape of Egypt’’). Museums in Egypt are looking to Western models for examples of best practice, such as conservation and display, educational resources, and the establishment of museum ‘‘Friends’’ groups, although there is the risk that merely grafting such models onto Egyptian institutions is a new form of colonialism not necessarily suited to the country’s needs. Foreign tourism cannot help but be a concern in Egypt’s museum development; for visits to the main antiquities museums - specifically the Egyptian Museum, Nubia Museum, Luxor Museum, and Graeco-Roman Museum - vastly outnumber visits to regional and non-Pharaonic museums, like the Coptic and Islamic museums in Cairo. In the years 2001-4, almost 6.5 million visits were recorded to the four big museums, compared to just over 90,000 to the Coptic Museum and 43,000 to the Islamic Museum (Doyon 2008: 29). Shaped by the Ancient Egypt they have seen in museums at home, it would appear that tourists travel to modern Egypt to see the same conceptualization, none the stranger in an antique land.
World History
