ABSTRACT
Mohamed Elshahed’s chapter provides a fitting postscript to this volume. The chapter—a reworking of a piece written in the aftermath of the events of January 2011 in Egypt—criticizes plans for the Grand Egyptian Museum currently being built next to the Giza pyramids. Elshahed’s critique takes issue with these plans both for their link to particular Egyptian and international policies and also for the way in which they serve to increase the historical alienation of Egypt’s population from the country’s past. Yet, Elshahed also suggests ways in which this alienation could cease, among them the use of the existing (and soon perhaps to be empty) Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as a space telling not only the story of Egyptology but also an institution relating the discipline’s complex political history. The nuanced history of Egyptological work could finally be related in the location where the recognition of the discipline as a (still latent) transformative force perhaps matters the most: Egypt. Mohamed Elshahed’s suggestion might never transpire, but it would be a powerful moment if it did.
