Chapter 10 examines the rediscovery, between the early 1920s and the 1950s, of the Graeco-Roman Near East, particularly Egypt. It considers the writings and activities of archaeologists, explorers, modernist writers, and journalists, who experienced and represented Near Eastern remnants of a Hellenism associated with the short-lived world empire of Alexander the Great and its Ptolemaic successors. After briefly considering writings on Graeco-Roman Transjordan, the chapter looks at the imagining and representations of Ptolemaic Alexandria, focusing on the writings of E. M. Forster, Mary Butts, Henry Vollam Morton, and a host of British, American, and Egyptian intellectuals, authors, and explorers. These authors perceived and experienced modern Alexandria as a Greek rather than an Egyptian city and comprehended it by invoking a cosmopolitan Graeco-Roman past. Alexandria served as a launching board to revivals of Alexander’s travels in Egypt’s Western Desert, to the oasis of Siwa, reputed place of his deification. The chapter traces re-enactments of classical texts on Alexander, as a form of appropriation by repetition and interpretation, of an imperial Graeco-Roman past. It demonstrates how imperial visions and itineraries were coupled with technologies of mechanized mobility in the desert in specially developed desert automobiles, iconized as emblems of imperial mobility and modernity. It thus showcases the relationship between the rediscovery of antiquity, technologies, and imperial defence. These are illustrated in the activities of explorer and military man and physicist Ralph Alger Bagnold. Some of the writings examined here expand beyond the formal end of British rule in the Near East, indicating the persistence of British imperial presences in the region immediately before and after the formal end of empire.
Making Home(s) in Displacement