This photograph from the beginning of the 20th century is a good illustration of what two centuries of Egyptology were like according to the experts: on the one hand, the Western scientist who discovers treasures alone; on the other, small Egyptian hands absent from the history of the revelation of the secrets of the pharaohs.
Egyptology, born in the colonial era, created “structural inequalities” which “resonate today” still, underlines the British Christina Riggs, Egyptologist at the University of Durham.
But, while the world is celebrating the bicentenary of the deciphering of the Rosetta stone by the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion and the centenary of the discovery of the tomb of the child-pharaoh Tutankhamun by Carter, in Egypt voices are being raised to highlight the contribution of the Egyptians in these explorations.
Way to reclaim their history, in the same way as the preservation of heritage in their country or the restitution claimed of treasures considered “stolen” by Westerners.
The Egyptians who excavated “did all the work” but they “were forgotten”, laments Abdel Hamid Daramalli, head of excavation in Qurna (south) where he says he was born on the tomb of a scribe.
“It’s as if no one had tried to understand ancient Egypt before” Champollion, who on September 27, 1822 announced that he had deciphered the Rosetta stone, agrees the researcher Heba Abdel Gawad, specialist in Egyptian heritage.
– “Anonymous” –
On the famous picture, “the Egyptian, not named, could be Hussein Abou Awad or Hussein Ahmed Saïd”, explains Ms. Riggs.
These two men were, along with Ahmed Gerigar and Gad Hassan, mainstays of Carter’s team for nearly a decade, but no expert today can put a name to the faces photographed.
“The Egyptians remained in the shadows, anonymous and transparent in the telling of their history”, sums up the historian.
A name however emerged, that of Abdel Rassoul.
Hussein first, who then as a child is said to be the one who unwittingly discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb on November 4, 1922, on the west bank of the Nile in the necropolis of Thebes (now Luxor), in Qurna.
Versions vary: he tripped over it, his donkey tripped over it, or he knocked over a jug of water that exposed a stone.
Local mythology also says that his ancestors Ahmed and Mohammed discovered in 1871 the 50 mummies of Deir el-Bahari, including that of Ramses II.
Hussein’s great-nephew, Sayed Abdel Rassoul, whom AFP found in Qurna, bursts out laughing at the stories.
Does it “really make sense” to believe that a kid with a jar of water could make such a discovery?, he asks. Anyway, “some have kept archives but not us”, he says.
Christina Riggs recalls, however, that in the rare cases where a discovery has been credited to Egyptians, it was “children” and “tomb robbers” when they were not their “animals”.
“Archaeology is above all geography,” explains Ms. Abdel Gawad. And in this area, she says, local farmers have a trump card: “They know the terrain and its landforms” and can tell “based on the sedimentary layers if there are any buried objects.”
This is how, from generation to generation, excavation work was passed on to Qurna, where the Abdel Rassoul live, and to Qift, north of Luxor, where in the 1880s the inhabitants were trained in archeology by Britain’s William Flinders Petrie.
Mostafa Abdo Sadek’s great-grandfather was one of them. At the beginning of the 20th century, he settled 600 kilometers north of Qift to excavate the necropolis of Saqqara, near the pyramids of Giza.
He, his children and his grandchildren have, for a century, helped unravel the mysteries of dozens of tombs, tells Saqqara the great-grandson, himself a renowned archaeologist.
But they “have been wronged”, continues Mostafa Abdo Sadek, brandishing photos of his ancestors whose names do not appear today in the history books.
– “Children of Tutankhamun” –
“The Egyptians have been erased from the historical record because of the cultural occupation of Egypt for the past 200 years,” says Monica Hanna, dean of the Aswan College of Archeology.
We must take into account “the historical and social context of Egypt under British occupation”, nuance Fatma Keshk, lecturer at the Institute of Oriental Archeology in Cairo.
At the beginning of the 20th century, against a backdrop of growing anti-colonialism, the pharaonic heritage served to strike the nationalist cord. The cultural battle becomes political.
“We are the children of Tutankhamun”, sings the diva Mounira al-Mahdiyya in 1922 – the year of the discovery of the tomb of the child-pharaoh in the Valley of the Kings and the independence of Egypt.
Through campaigns mocking the stranglehold of foreigners on the national heritage, Cairo managed the same year to put an end to the colonial sharing system which guaranteed Westerners half of the pieces unearthed in exchange for the financing of excavations.
But then, ancient Egypt was dissociated from modern Egypt and from there “considered as a universal civilization” in a world which at the time “summed up in the West”, analyzes Ms. Abdel Gawad.
Tutankhamun remains in Egypt but the country “loses the archives of the excavations”, an essential tool for any university publication, for the benefit of the Carter private collection, relates Ms. Hanna. “We were still colonized. They left us the objects but took away our ability to produce knowledge about Tutankhamun.”
And when Howard Carter’s niece decided to donate these archives shortly after the British archaeologist’s death in 1939, she chose Oxford University rather than Egypt.
Oxford, which is currently offering the exhibition “Tutankhamun: excavation in the archives” to highlight “the Egyptians often forgotten by archaeological teams”.
– A mummy in the house –
In Qurna, Ahmed Abdel Rady, 73, remembers having found, as a child, a mummy’s head in a recess of the house installed in one of the tombs of the necropolis of Thebes where he grew up.
My mother, he told AFP, burst into tears begging me to treat “this queen” with respect. However, he continues, she stored onions and heads of garlic in a granite sarcophagus.
Today, the village is nothing but ruins where, between tombs and temples, the Colossi of Memnon, built more than 3,400 years ago, seem to watch over the dead and the living.
In 1998, bulldozers landed to destroy the small mud and brick houses of the 10,000 inhabitants, under which lay tombs dating mostly from 1,500 to 1,200 BC.
In clashes with the police, four residents refusing to be evicted are killed. It is because they are deeply linked to the pharaonic heritage that the inhabitants of Qurna protested so much against the demolition of their village, assures Abdel Hamid Daramalli.
But the battle for history is also at the expense of the Egyptians, even in spite of the criticisms of Unesco at the time. “It had to be done” to protect the heritage, insists the Minister of Antiquities at the time, Zahi Hawass.
In 2008, almost all of the houses still standing were razed and their inhabitants relocated far from their livelihood around the archaeological sites and the lands of their cattle.
According to Monica Hanna, it was their reputation as “grave robbers” that led the authorities to turn Luxor into an “open-air museum”.
Sayed Abdel Rassoul has suffered from it since a long time ago family members were caught selling archaeological pieces under the coat.
“The French, the British, all were stealing,” says his nephew Ahmed. “And who in the first place told the people of Qurna that they could make money by selling pharaonic coins?”
– “Spoils of war” –
Over the centuries, countless antiquities have come out of Egypt.
Some, like the Obelisk of Luxor in Paris or the Temple of Debod in Madrid, were offered by the Egyptian government to friendly countries.
Others were sent to European museums under the colonial sharing system.
And hundreds of thousands are smuggled to “private collections around the world”, says Ms Abdel Gawad.
This is the new crusade of former minister Hawass, who launched a petition in October for the return of the Rosetta stone and the Dendera zodiac. He has already collected 78,000 signatures and promises a new petition for the bust of Nefertiti. Because these three pieces have been controversial for decades.
The Rosetta Stone, a stele engraved in 196 BC in ancient Greek, demotic Egyptian and hieroglyphics, has been on display at the British Museum in London since 1802 with the label “taken from Egypt in 1801 by the British army”.
A spokesperson for the British Museum assures AFP that it is “a diplomatic gift”. For Ms. Abdel Gawad, it is “war booty”.
The bust of Nefertiti ended up in the Neues Museum in Berlin under colonial partition, Germany claims. For Mr. Hawass, this sculpture, painted in 1340 BC and brought back by German archaeologists in 1912, “was illegally taken out of Egypt”.
The zodiac of Dendera, finally, reached Paris when in 1820 the prefect Sébastien Louis Saulnier sent a team to unseal with explosives this bas-relief of a temple in southern Egypt.
This representation of the celestial vault of more than 2.5 meters in width and height has hung on a ceiling in the Louvre since 1922, while a plaster copy replaces it in Dendera. “It’s a crime,” accuses Ms. Hanna.
What was acceptable then, she adds, is no longer “compatible with 21st century ethics.”
