Eurocentrism

Egyptians today speak Arabic, and people of different cultural backgrounds around the world express strong interest in the ancient past of Egypt. Yet, early twenty-first-century Egyptology remains overwhelmingly a European-language study in institutions of European form: research university and, to a lesser extent, museum.

Eurocentrism makes this condition seem natural, assuming lack of interest by non-European peoples in their own histories (Said 1978; Colla 2007). Internal factors contributed to the emergence of West European studies of the Egyptian past, ahead of Egyptian Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, in the mid-nineteenth century (Mitchell 1988). Current gaps between Arabic-language and European-language production follow most directly from European overseas intervention. Anglo-French control of Egyptian finances after the construction of the Suez Canal opened the way to British invasion of Egypt (1882), with military occupation down to 1952 (Al-Sayyid Marsot 1985; Cole 2000). London-dictated budgets, laws, and university fees and structures, along with Anglo-French agreements on museum directorship and antiquities inspectorate, ensured that Egyptology neither supported Egyptian professionals nor published in Arabic (Reid 2002).

Already from the 1820s, the first people to be called Egyptologists were as European as that word itself. It was they who defined as primary target of study the script area of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic script. That script first became accessible in print publication in French through Jean-Frangois Champollion (1824 Precis, following his announcement in the 1822 Letter to M. Dacier). Inside and outside the discipline, we forget that he was taught Egyptian language (Coptic) by an Egyptian Christian in Paris, Father Hanna Chiftigi (Louca 2006, 89-116), and that numerous Arabic studies on ancient Egypt were written before print by Egyptian and other Arab world geographer-historians such as Makrizi and Abd al-Latif of Baghdad, drawing in part on earlier Muslim scholars such as Dhu al-Nun (El Daly 2004). The endemic historical amnesia maintained by Egyptologists led the contemporary feminist Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi to accuse them of cultural genocide (El Saadawi 1997, 169).