Egyptian Antiquity, Imperial Politics, and Modernity

Chapter 8 draws the web of relations between Egypt’s antiquity, empire, modernity, and internationalism from the outbreak of the First World War to decolonization. It focuses on the era between Britain’s unilateral granting of formal independence to Egypt in 1922 and the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement of 1936, and sets the imperial preoccupation with ancient Egypt in national and international contexts. The chapter fills a lacuna in the historiography of Egyptology and Egyptomania which has focused on the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 and has largely overlooked the internationalist angles of the interwar obsession with ancient Egypt. The chapter maps the expansion of interest in Egypt beyond the pharaonic past and considers its extension to prehistoric Egypt. It relates Egyptology to the modernization of travel and speed technologies, and to popular representations of Egypt as a centre of globalized travel in a connective empire. The chapter further considers the roles of the global media in mediating between discoveries and transnational audiences. Following on the theme of the internationalization of Egypt’s past, it considers the presence of Egypt in material culture, particularly in eclectic styles and design which were associated with modernity, such as Art Deco architecture and fashion. One main argument of the chapter is that the interwar discovery of Egypt’s multiple pasts was characterized by an internationalization apparent in the politics of archaeology, the spread of the new regime of antiquities and cooperation between Egyptian nationalists and internationalist bodies, and in the mass production and consumption of Egyptiana.

Lachish

Focusing on one archaeological mound, Tell ed-Duweir, in the lowland region of Palestine, in the vicinity of Hebron, identified as biblical Lachish, the fortress city in the kingdom of Judah, Chapter 4 moves between London, the Tell, and its neighbouring villages. The chapter is a history of a landmark excavation, which uncovers the variety of its archaeological, biblical, anthropological, social, and political layers. Drawing on a wealth of written and visual materials at the Wellcome Institute, the British Museum Archives, the Israel Antiquities Authority, the National Archives, as well as on the press and archaeologists’ records, the chapter relates the identification of the Tell as Lachish, the discovery of the famous Lachish Letters (in pre-Exilic Hebrew), and their effect on Biblical Archaeology and epigraphy, to the rise of new fields of knowledge such as physical anthropology and anthropometrics. The chapter argues that the excavation project was regarded by archaeologists as a means of modernizing rural Palestine and the lives of Palestinian peasants and labourers. It recovers the modernizers’ daily life on the Tell and their representations of it in writing, photography, and documentary films. It also recoups the process of the Tell’s expropriation, as a historical monument, by the mandate authorities. Alongside the reports of archaeologists like James Leslie Starkey (who was murdered on his way from the Tell to the opening of the new Rockefeller museum in Jerusalem), Olga Tufnell, and Charles Inge, the chapter recovers the voices of villagers as they are heard through their petitions to the government about their denied access to the excavated land.

Mandated Pasts

Chapter 1 examines the new definitions of antiquity that emerged after the First World War and relates them to the new post-war imperial order and international system. It tracks the shift from a perception of ancient objects and monuments as the loot of victors, through their handling within the framework, which had first emerged in the nineteenth century, of laws of war, to their treatment as a part of policies of an imperial peace in the Middle East—in peace treaties and the new mandates system. The chapter follows the internationalization of the discourse on antiquity and the formation of a new “regime of antiquities”, a term referring to international and local mandatory legislation on archaeology and to practices of its monitoring. It offers a view “from above” of the new regime and its formulation by internationalist experts, within the League of Nations and its organizations for intellectual cooperation, such as the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) and International Museums Office (OIM), and of internationalist apparatuses, as well as considering the implementation of the regime “on the ground” by the antiquities’ administrations in mandate A territories, formerly under Ottoman rule (Palestine and Transjordan, and Iraq), and the nominally independent Egypt. The chapter demonstrates how the internationalist pull and discourse seeped to colonial rhetoric but conflicted with notions of imperial sovereignty and the power of the mandatories to implement policies on the ground. At the same time, visions of regional cooperation amongst archaeologists and national rights to patrimony were adopted by local archaeologists and nationalists.

Conclusion

In February 1979, Gerald Lankester Harding’s ashes were flown to Jordan for a second and final funerary service. His body had been cremated in London but, following the behest of the Royal House of Jordan, the ashes which had been deposited by the undertakers in an ungainly plastic box were placed in a sealed coffin and made their way to Amman. To hide the plastic the box was wrapped in lush black velvet and laid on a hearse at Jordan’s University Hospital, then transported to Jerash, Lankester Harding’s object of study, restoration, and development, and sometimes his home. After a short speech by Prince Hassan of Jordan and a brief ceremony, Jordan’s Director of Antiquities solemnly carried the improvised urn to a Byzantine chapel where it was put in a niche....

The Road to Alexandria, the Paths to Siwa

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.

Murder in Mesopotamia

Chapter 6 examines the diffusion of ancient Near Eastern history and its archaeological discovery to popular culture. It focuses on the archaeological murder mysteries of Agatha Christie, one of Britain’s top-selling writers and a popular modernist. An amateur archaeologist, Christie took an active part in excavations in Iraq and Syria for nearly three decades, working with her husband, archaeologist Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan. The chapter considers her domestication of the remote past and role as a mediator between archaeology and Mesopotamian antiquity, and a broad and mainly middle-class readership of her “whodunnits”. It draws on her seven imperial archaeological novels set in the Near East, especially in mandate territories, particularly Murder in Mesopotamia, An Appointment with Death, espionage thriller They Came to Baghdad, and archaeological autobiography Come Tell Me How You Live, as well as on other autobiographical and archival material. The chapter demonstrates Christie’s comparison between archaeology and detective work, the archaeologist and the sleuth, and between deciphering a murder and the interpretation of clues to the past. The chapter considers the impact of archaeological imagery and practices on the classical detective story whose heyday coincided with that of the new culture of antiquity, examining Christie’s adaptation of the overarching image of the Tell, or man-made mound, built of layers of human habitation and destruction, as the unifying image in her writing. At the same time as domesticating antiquity, Christie related it to modern technologies of transport and industrialization.

Illustrating the Bible

Chapter 2 is the first of three chapters that explore the resilience of a biblical culture of antiquity and the scriptural framework that served to comprehend the Near Eastern past. Scriptural visions of Palestine and Transjordan (a part of the Palestine mandate) were given new lease of life during the First World War. The Bible, the oldest and longest surviving framework for interpreting the Holy Land and the territories bordering it, shaped modes of writing about and experiencing them, as well as offering a narrative of the past and a scriptural temporality. The chapter demonstrates that notwithstanding the professionalization of archaeology and its adoption of scientific practices, the Scriptures remained dominant in discussions of the ancient past, and that archaeological discovery of a material Near East served to illustrate and corroborate scriptural texts. However, biblical culture—including research, travel-writing, and tourism—was adapted to modern technologies of transport and tourism, particularly to railways, cars, and aviation. The chapter examines the modernization of biblical narratives and of the physical experience of scriptural landscapes by considering a broad repertoire of writing: guidebooks for tourists, manuals and timetables, popular writings by archaeologists, and visual and material representations of the biblical past in metropolitan colonial exhibitions and in Palestine’s Museum of Archaeology. The chapter demonstrates how the modernization of uses of the Bible suited the mandate’s own rationale and agenda of modernization and development, and was endorsed and sometimes sponsored by officials.

Introduction

In the archaeological seasons of 1937 and 1938, 34-year-old Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan excavated on Tell Brak in north-eastern Syria. Apprenticed at the lucrative archaeological expeditions to Ur and Nineveh, Mallowan was beginning to make a name for himself as an expert on Mesopotamia’s prehistory and as an efficient organizer. “The mighty mound” of Brak took a hold of his imagination and excited him....

“Nefertiti Lived Here”

Chapter 9 anchors the history of the rediscovery of ancient Egypt in the archaeological site of Tell el-Amarna (Tall al-ʿAmarnah), Pharaonic Akhetaten, the city of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV), abandoned after his death, together with his religion and cult of the Sun Disc. Excavated before the First World War by German Egyptologists, Amarna was reclaimed by British Egyptological institutions after it. It had a special hold on the archaeological imagination, on visual culture, as well as on the contemporary political imagination. Amarna and its ruler were associated with modernity in discussions on topics ranging from urban and suburban planning and living, through the modern family, to anti-war politics. Amarna’s ephemeral existence was interpreted as a failure of a utopia and as an imperial crisis at the heyday of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty, analogous to the imperial crisis of the 1930s and to issues of Britain’s imperial defence. The chapter, which focuses on the excavations under the directorship of J. D. L. Pendlebury, follows representations of Amarna in popular and professional publications, as well as the material history of the findings and their circulation which reflected the economics of Egyptology. The chapter traces the exchange of Amarna objects for financial support, by museums in the USA (mainly the Brooklyn Museum) and in Belgium. The materiality and mobility of Amarna objects are connected to their value and uses, and their emotional value for collectors and archaeologists. The chapter also offers a history of the feelings towards ancient Egypt, demonstrated in the writing of archaeological workers like Mary Chubb.

Prehistories for Modernity

Chapter 7 considers the discovery, after the First World War, of the prehistoric Near East and explores its far-reaching impact on discourses on the origins of humans, their migrations, and the migration of civilizations, on time and its scale, and the relationship between recorded history and prehistory. The chapter focuses on two sites of excavations: the Middle and Lower Stone Age hangouts of the Wadi al-Mugharah on Mount Carmel in Palestine, situated near the developing town of Haifa, and the late Neolithic Tell Arpachiyah in northern Iraq, bordering Mosul. Both engendered considerable scholarly, popular, and political attention, and both demonstrate the variety and scope within prehistory and its immense stretch, covering at least 500,000 years. Near Eastern prehistory relativized senses of time, dwarfed history, and contested biblical narratives and temporality. The chapter examines the excavations in the Carmel caves against the backdrop of mandatory development policies and modernization. It demonstrates how discoveries of rich Palaeolithic tool cultures spurred comparisons between modern humans and hominins. It sets the representations of Neanderthals in broader debates on prehistoric people and their humanity, paying special attention to the attitudes of prehistorians such as Dorothy A. Garrod who conducted the Carmel excavations and Jacquetta Hawkes, a popularizer of prehistory in her poetry and autobiographical writing on prehistoric women. Neolithic Arpachiyah, too, spurred analogies by its excavators, chiefly Max Mallowan, between prehistoric and contemporary Mesopotamia and the multi-ethnic population of the newly independent Iraq, and of Syria.