From the Napoleonic campaign onwards, European (and North American) engagement with Ancient Egypt was effected through contact with contemporary Egypt, and thus mediated through the colonialist project. The same infrastructure that was applied to maximize Egypt’s economic potential, and exploit its strategic geopolitical position, also made possible the transport of objects, tourist-collectors, and archaeologists, and the organization of an Antiquities Service and a National Museum under French control. Although the British military did not occupy Egypt until 1882, the mechanisms of colonialism were well in place by the mid-1800s (Mitchell 1988). Egypt was a prime locus of the set of relations Said characterized as Orientalism, whereby the West conjured an ‘‘Orient’’ as a mirror in which to identify itself (Said 1978). If Egypt was passive, frozen in time, lazy, and backwards, the West was the opposite and could, therefore, ‘‘discover’’ the country and ‘‘rescue’’ its ancient past. Tales of Western derring-do gripped the public imagination through museums’ collecting methods and the growth of archaeology in the latter nineteenth century, and in popular or quasi-academic publications the discovery narrative still holds sway, even when disguised as an account of the ‘‘rape’’ of a (weak and feminized) Egypt (Fagan 1975; France 1991; cf. Greener 1966; N. Thomas 1995).
As Mackenzie (1995) has observed, the fact that a genuine interest and positive intent lay behind the actions of collectors, archaeologists, and explorers does not negate the effect of such actions, which was ‘‘to reinforce the sheer ‘‘otherness’’ of the cultures represented,’’ in this case both contemporary and Ancient Egypt (Champion 2003a: 162). Museums played a fundamental role in the ‘‘othering’’ process; for collecting, cataloguing, and ordering Egyptian antiquities necessitated control of a physical object, metonymical for control over Egypt. Further, museums had already set the precedent for seeing Egypt as exotic and non-Western. Even after the decipherment of Hieroglyphs enabled scholars to limn Egyptian history and chronology, museums created displays that presented Ancient Egypt cut off from both space and time, like the museum itself. Europeans and North Americans could, if they had the means, travel to Egypt, but the penchant for exhibition made it possible for wider audiences to experience Egypt. Ancient implements, artworks, bodies, and even buildings could be removed from Egypt and reconstituted in a space specifically designed for viewing. Seeing things thus put on display gave viewers a perception of power over the object, and ownership of whatever responses the objects evoked. The object was the crux of a mediation between Ancient Egypt and the present day.
Objects and display were the talk of London in 1851, thanks to the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, and it was in this context that the London Times remarked on the object-phenomenon in 1851: ‘‘We are an objective people now. We want to place everything we can lay our hands on under glass cases, and to stare our fill’’ (quoted in Mitchell 1988: 20). The exhibition imbricated manufacturing prowess and imperial expansion, bringing together ‘‘the industry of all nations’’ with the aim of improving taste as well as design technology. Though plans to open a Museum of Ancient Art alongside the Great Exhibition had foundered, as the Art-Journal reported in 1850, the ancient past, conflated with the ‘‘timeless’’ Arab present, still informed the reception of the displays. In its 1851 issue devoted to the Exhibition, the Art-Journal declared that viewing the exhibition would advance the ‘‘National Taste’’ and delineated Egypt, Greece, and Rome as the ancient cultures that had influenced European culture. In this scheme, however, Egyptian art remained the poor relation of the Classical world:
It is not till we come to Greece that we find the habitual introduction of forms for
Their own sake, purely as ornaments, and this is a very great step in art... [Egyptian
Art’s] great prevailing characteristic, like that of all Oriental Art, is sumptuousness.
(Art-Journal 1851)
Ancient Egypt and contemporary Egypt, recreated at Hyde Park and later Sydenham (from 1854), were thus equivalents - Orientalized others who valued ‘‘grandeur of proportion, simplicity of parts, and splendour or costliness of material: gold, silver, and ivory, precious stones, and colour’’ (Art-Journal 1851) but lacked Western refinement, creativity, and taste. Egypt required colonial control.
In Paris, the Exposition universelle in 1867 included an Egyptianizing pavilion, developed under the aegis of Mariette (on universal exhibitions and world’s fairs, see Reid 2003: 125-30). The Paris pavilion combined a model Egyptian temple and an authentically ‘‘dirty’’ Cairo street, with an Arab-style cafe, and a display of mummies, skulls, and original works on loan from Boulaq. to Mariette, visitors to the
Figure 49.2 HGnGr{: Daumier, ‘‘At the Universal Exhibition,’’ captioned ‘‘The Egyptians weren’t good-looking, were they?’’ First published 1867. Copyright Www. daumier. org.
Paris exhibition could see works of art that became iconic: the diorite-gneiss statue of Khafre, the wooden statue known as ‘‘Sheikh el-Beled,’’ and the recently discovered gold jewelery of queen Ahhotep, which Mariette refused to give to Empress Eugenie (Delamaire 2003: 129, fig. 7:5). A Daumier cartoon captures one possible, mildly horrified response that visitors had to the Ancient Egyptian display, and Daumier gently pokes fun at the idea that Egyptian art ‘‘looked like’’ the Egyptians (figure 49.2). Mitchell (1988) discusses the dismayed reaction of Egyptian visitors to the Paris exhibition, who were startled by the distinctly European practice of creating a false world that yet strove for authenticity, down to the peeling paintwork of the Cairo street. Mariette was not the only Egyptologist directly involved in the world exhibitions: Heinrich Brugsch closed his Cairo school, which had been training Egyptian Egyptologists, in order to organize the Egyptian exhibition for the 1872 Vienna Weltausstellung, and Petrie and the Vienna collector Theodore Graf both exhibited material at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893 (Delamaire 2003). Casts from the Boulaq Museum - but no antiquities - circulated to the Vienna exhibition and to American venues.
The establishment of an Antiquities Service and National Museum in Egypt exemplifies the pervasive role of colonialism in conceptualizations of Ancient Egypt.
Muhammad Ali’s 1835 decree banning the export of antiquities made explicit reference to the new museums of Europe:
It is also well known that the Europeans have buildings for keeping antiquities... such establishments bring great renown to the countries which have them. (Reid 2003: 55-6)
With explicit reference to Europe, then, Muhammad Ali attempted to establish an Antiquities Service and a Museum, the latter to be overseen by the learned Egyptian author, scholar, and official Rifaa al-Tahtawi. European and American interference, as well as Ali’s own actions, ensured that both the export ban and the Museum were failures. It was left to Auguste Mariette, who first went to Egypt as a junior employee of the Louvre, to found an effective Antiquities Service and National Museum in 1858. French political and financial interests in the construction of the Suez Canal helped secure the new arrangement; for Ferdinand de Lesseps had the ear of the new Ottoman governor, Said Pasha (Reid 2003: 99-107). Mariette began to deposit antiquities at an existing building in Boulaq, near the river in Cairo, and, as head of the new Antiquities Service as well, introduced a system of find division, whereby he could make first choice among the antiquities excavated by foreign expeditions.
Remodeled in Egyptian style, the Boulaq museum opened to the public in 1863. The displays were mainly thematic, as in the Louvre, but Mariette acknowledged that he had arranged some displays on ‘‘useless’’ aesthetic grounds that would be more accessible to Egyptian visitors, who could not appreciate or understand schemes based on ‘‘science’’ (Reid 2003: 106-7). Museum building in Egypt picked up pace, with the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria founded - by Europeans - in 1892 (Reid 2003: 159-63; Butler 2007), a Museum of Arab Art in Cairo in 1898, at Lord Cromer’s instigation (Reid 2003: 237-9), and in 1902, Pharaonic antiquities moved to a new, permanent home built in a neo-classical, Beaux Arts style in central Cairo, and called the Egyptian Museum (Reid 2003: 192-6). One of the few Egyptians involved in the new museum in any significant way was Ahmed Kamal, who translated French guidebooks into Arabic, wrote volumes of the Catalogue generate, and helped Mariette’s successor, Maspero, establish regional archaeological museums in the Nile Valley (Reid 2003: 201-4). Otherwise, the Egyptian Museum and the Antiquities Service remained the preserve of the French, even during the period of the British protectorate. Colonial Egypt might have shared certain ‘‘Oriental’’ qualities with Ancient Egypt, but colonized Egyptians were not empowered to participate in any significant way in the museum-based construction of their ancient past. Only the Coptic Museum differed in this respect, having been founded in 1908 by Marcus Simaika, a Coptic politician who had grown up visiting the Boulaq Museum (Reid 2003: 264-78).
In 1841 the American consul in Egypt, George Gliddon, formulated a view that would find sympathy in some corners for years to come, namely that Egyptian antiquities were better cared for outside of Egypt (Gliddon 1841; see Reid 2003: 56-7). Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when museums in Egypt were well established, museums in Europe, North America, and elsewhere benefited from the system of division of finds Mariette had introduced for foreign archaeological excavations in Egypt. Together with the professionalization of museums and universities, this swell in collecting enabled Western museums to create new kinds of knowledge for visitors. Presented with an Ancient Egypt scrutinized by the ‘‘science’’ of archaeology, viewers could absorb more than the curious or the awe-inspiring, as more and more types of objects - predynastic palettes, Middle Kingdom objects of‘‘daily life,’’ Amarna art - entered the gallery space. Established museums needed more space as result, whether for storage or display, and society required more museums to meet this burgeoning need for orderly, consumable, and organized knowledge.
World History
