Histories of Egyptology in Egypt

When we think about the history of Egyptology against the history of Egypt, we are also invited to consider the various claims, global and local, that these histories formed a part of. After all, the professional rise of Egyptology coincided with the nineteenth-century age of empires, and hence the very disciplinary and material context of this rise reflected the various and often competing political geographies at stake. A border discipline among others that took shape in the crucible of empire—including history, archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, and comparative philology and mythology— Egyptology rested upon geopolitical networks as the material and political filiations that moved artifacts across borders. ¹ As the chapters in this section show, the history of Egyptology in Egypt was deeply bound up with the politics of knowledge, affecting all aspects of the discipline in practice, whether in terms of links to imperial diplomacy or to colonial labor policies (Reid and Doyon). This point is especially evident when one brings together different historical sources, whether from or beyond the archives of the colonial and postcolonial Egyptian state (Omar). These chapters thus focus on reading European archaeology in light of Egyptian histories—whether intellectual, labor, or diplomatic—and they make it clear that archaeological artifacts, as much as the knowledge these artifacts gave rise to, were part of multiple political geographies: national as well as imperial and colonial (cf. Trigger 1984).