ABSTRACT
Writing to the Philadelphia anatomist Samuel Morton in 1841, George Robbins Gliddon could make the claim, “we, as hieroglyphists, know Egypt better now, than all the Greek authors or the Romans” (emphasis original; Nott and Gliddon 2004, xxvi–xxvii). It is a revealing claim in many ways. What does it mean to “know” ancient Egypt, where did this knowledge come from, and how did Gliddon think such knowledge could be measured and evaluated? Gliddon implies that the ability—still relatively new, in 1841—to read hieroglyphic texts was the key to direct and incontrovertible knowledge of Egypt: its history, culture, and society. A self-styled expert by virtue of his years spent living and working in the country as US Vice Consul, Gliddon adopts an empirical stance that can winnow truth from fiction and fact from myth with all the confidence of the nineteenth-century mind. Yet, in many permutations of Egyptology today, such empiricism is not the Victorian relic it should be: from the narratives of “discoveries” and “truth” that drive popular forums (television documentaries, media and Web coverage, commercial publishing) to the academic discipline’s own emphasis, in both its teaching and research outputs, on establishing “facts,” on documenting texts, objects, and sites, and on limiting its engagement with theory and critique. Similar observations have been made for the cognate discipline of archaeology, where concern for the collection, recording, and interpretation of data overrides what should arguably be the essential counterpart of such practices: critical interrogation of disciplinary histories and methodologies (cf. Gosden 2001, 2004; Liebmann and Rizvi 2008).
