The One Egypt and the Many Egypts in the Twenty-First-Century Museum

My first year in Egypt, in 2005–2006, was one of the happiest of my life. I spent that year (as an MA Research Associate at the American Research Center in Egypt) visiting as many Egyptian museums as possible, from the Citadel to Tahrir, Gezira to Giza, and Alexandria to Aswan. My idea was to learn the grand museum narrative of all Egyptian history as told by its postcolonial present. I documented many kinds of museums, both old and new, and showed how the continuity of material life in Egypt from prehistory to the present was the narrative force that unified Egyptian museum practices at the turn of the twenty-first century (Doyon 2008). The summer after I left Cairo, in August 2006, the colossal statue of Ramesses II that had defined the landscape of downtown Cairo since 1955 was transferred from its home in Midan Ramsis back across the river to Giza, where it has presided for almost two more decades over the monumental construction of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). My own journey across those two decades found me back in Cairo in the fall of 2022, this time as an ARCE Postdoctoral Research Fellow. While living in Cairo these past two years, I have reflected often on the changing museum landscape in Egypt since my first visit nearly twenty years ago and have tried to revisit as many of those museums as possible.By a happy coincidence, the American University in Cairo also hosted its first AUC Tahrir Culture Fest in April 2024, which included two events that I was fortunate to attend. The first was a panel discussion on “Museums and Heritage: Past, Present, and Future,” a discussion that, significantly, took place in Arabic and whose poster happened to feature the statue of Ramesses II now displayed at the GEM. The second was a screening of Amr Bayoumi’s beautiful 2019 film ramsīs rāḥ fayn? (Where Did Ramses Go?), a personal and historical reflection on that statue’s journey through, as Bayoumi put it, “a new immortality” in our time. The film’s footage of Ramesses II slowly making his way through the streets of downtown Cairo in the summer of 2006 moved me to reflect on our relationships to powerful objects over the course of a single lifetime. The power of museum narratives to shape and change those relationships can sometimes be overstated. Museums hold objects, but the objects are what hold us to time. An object’s power often lies in a person’s relationship to it as something more than a symbol of national, religious, or elite cultural (including museological) discourse. Objects transcend the boundaries of the physical spaces that claim them. We should not lose sight of that power in our discussions of changing museum practices both within and outside Egypt.Alice Stevenson’s book, Egyptian Archaeology and the Twenty-First Century Museum, is about the creation and critical transformation of a museum culture around ancient Egypt. Its primary aim is to show how museum practices, like other archaeological field practices, have shaped and continue to shape our core ideas about ancient Egypt. Understanding the fundamental importance of museum assemblages in shaping modern interpretations—and stressing the assembled nature of both collections and exhibitions—allows us, she suggests, to reimagine new ways of knowing ancient Egypt in the postmodern digital age.Section 1 introduces key interpretive concepts for deconstructing and reconstructing the twenty-first-century museum. These concepts seek to make visible the apparatus of museum interpretation in need of rebuilding. They include moving from object-centered descriptions to multidirectional interpretation, from linear narratives of colonial accumulation to non-Eurocentric reference points, and from the colonial-era museum trope of an ancient Egypt frozen in time—what she calls the “exotic chronotope” of Egypt (6)—to an ancient Egypt that can be seen from many perspectives. In this introductory section, Stevenson lays out the argument for “multi-directional curatorship” (inclusive, rather than authoritative, ways of seeing and presenting objects) that she will return to in the final sections, and she sets interpretation as the twenty-first-century museum’s highest priority.Section 2 presents the ways in which historical narratives about ancient Egypt have been formed through specific collecting practices in the West, such as (1) periodization, meaning the ideological control of time periods and their relative importance; (2) acquisition by partage and the problems caused by dispersing ancient Egyptian material culture around the world (using case studies drawn heavily from Petrie-era British excavations, ca. 1880–1940); and (3) the colonial cataloging systems (also Petrie-era) that were foundational to the museum and database infrastructures of today. Section 3 deals with the types of materials considered essential to museum interpretation and their evolution from the nineteenth century to today. Where once material typologies, chronologies, and objects of high art were enough, now paper archives, photographic archives, replicas, and digital objects must also be integrated into the processes of museum interpretation.Section 4 on “Space and Place” is at once the most interesting and frustrating part of the book. It discusses the important role of architecture and geography in creating the idea of what we might call the One Egypt—ancient, pharaonic, fixed, and unchanging—that underlies the museum culture Stevenson describes. This section brings together ideas from the previous sections about the role of museum collections in Egyptological knowledge production and epistemology. It shows us (as with Section 3) the assembled landscape of display and design that we often take for granted when we think about ancient Egypt. It includes a discourse on “Egypt in Africa” (51–56), which touches on questions of ethnicity, Afrocentrism, and the display of mummified remains in Western museums. The techniques and frames of reference museums use to make certain objects and spaces “essentially” Egyptian (such as tombs, temples, mummies, and art canons) are social constructs that, Stevenson rightly argues, should be subject to debate, revision, and remaking. Such “reassembly,” moving away from traditional typologies toward experimental research, is the subject of the following Section 5.However, this central part of the book leaves a vital question unasked: Where is the twenty-first-century museum located and what are the social conditions of its development? Who are the people that fund, manage, interpret, narrate, and visit it? These questions call for critical examination, toward which I offer here some preliminary observations on changing museum practices in Egypt. While Stevenson presents many interesting case studies that illustrate collecting histories in the UK and a handful of other places, with brief remarks on the construction of new museums (primarily for tourists) in Egypt, she never explicitly states whether the twenty-first-century museum exists in the West, in Egypt, or globally. If the latter, what then would be the “universal” values of the global, twenty-first-century museum? And who would determine them? Part of this ambiguity may lie in the premise that: “Beyond the centres of Cairo, Alexandria, and Luxor, Egyptological material has historically been more widely spread and more accessible outside of, rather than within Egypt itself” (50). This assertion seems, rhetorically, to shift concern for twenty-first-century museum practices outside Egypt, avoiding both the depth of internal museum transformation and the breadth of archaeological material curated within Egypt. Egyptian collections in the West, though often better funded and more visible than those in Egypt, are only the tip of the archaeological iceberg. Modern Egypt is now and always has been the epicenter of Egyptological material and knowledge production. Egyptian collections from all archaeological eras excavated and curated in-country are only less visible and less accessible if their visibility is judged by Western standards of museum curation, academic publication, and digital economy. The distribution and exhibition of material in Egypt should be considered integral to, rather than separate from, the wider history of Egyptology.Egypt has one of the richest, proudest, and perhaps most underappreciated museum cultures in the world. The creation and development of its first national antiquities museum as a nineteenth-century Ottoman-Egyptian institution, from al-Azbakiyya to Bulaq to Giza to Tahrir, was specifically intended to secure Egyptian antiquities for the territorial state and institution-building of nineteenth-century Egypt (Doyon 2021). The Egyptian antiquities service and its museum development—among the earliest archaeological institutions outside the West—was spear-headed and funded by the khedival Egyptian state, one of several cultural and educational institutions organized in cooperation with the French. Because of the French involvement in implementing and managing a large part of Egypt’s institutional reforms during the 80 years between the French and the British military invention (in 1798 and 1882, respectively), the Egyptian museum and its early fieldwork are often presented as a corollary to European colonial history without reference to nineteenth-century khedival state-building. However, during those 80 years (just as today), the Egyptian army and government were in full control of the state and its resources, including archaeological institutions, collections, and excavations. The history of Egyptological collections everywhere is as much, if not more, a nineteenth-century Egyptian history as it is a Western or European one.Given the richness of Egypt’s own museum heritage, its importance to the underlying structures of knowledge production since the nineteenth century, and its narrative transformation in recent years (Bruwier 2020; Keshk and Amin 2024; Rashed 2015, 2017), it is surprising to find Egyptian institutions less than prominent in this (or any other) volume dedicated to Egyptian archaeology and the twenty-first-century museum. Egypt’s museum narrative has indeed changed in the past twenty years. Where in 2005 we found remnants of a colonialist-nationalist narrative that centered the pharaonic within a constellation of Greco-Roman, Coptic, Islamic, and modern elements, today we find an imperialist-nationalist narrative that decenters the pharaonic to foreground the khedival nineteenth century. Ancient Egypt appears now to have a higher commodity value for tourists and the rich, and at the same time, a less pronounced but still significant national value in Egyptian museums. This represents a cultural shift with major implications for the social value of Egyptology in Egypt.The results of an influx of state museum funding and redevelopment from 2011 to 2016, including a narrative pivot from pharaonic to khedival nationalism, are manifest in many new museum practices, chiefly those relating to exhibition development. Personal communication with staff during museum site visits made by the reviewer in 2023–2024 spoke to a period of intensive renewal and increased state support for museum infrastructure between 2011 and 2016, while Arabic plaques installed at the entrances to redeveloped museums attest to their official reestablishment and reopening after 2016.The Egyptian National Postal Museum (established in 1934–1940, remodeled in 2019), the National Railways Museum (established in 1933, remodeled in 2016), the National Military Museum (established in 1993, redeveloped in 2021), the National Textile Museum (established in 2010), the Royal Carriages Museum (established in 1993 as part of the Citadel collections, moved to a new location in the restored royal stables of Bulaq in 2020), the Rokn Farouk Museum (established in 2009–2016), the Nile Museum in Aswan (established in 2016), and the extraordinary Suez Canal Museum in Ismailia (established 2024), for example, all present recently updated, well-funded, and professionally curated exhibits centered on the role of Ottoman-Egyptian material culture in nineteenth-century state-building. These exhibits are visually linked to earlier stages of Egyptian history through time, drawing an unbroken line from the pharaonic to the khedival. The archaeological and historical collections featured in these museums—along with well over 150 other public museum spaces in greater Cairo and Egypt (e.g., Ismail 2019)—make a staggering amount of Egypt’s collective heritage accessible, in principle, to anyone. Egyptian museum culture does not make a hard-and-fast distinction between archaeological and historical collections; rather, they are two aspects of a shared cultural space, which helps explain why notable archaeological material is often found (and worth searching for) in unlikely museum contexts. Both the main gallery and the textile hall at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (established 2021) link Egyptian arts and crafts through time from the pharaonic era to the khedival period in the nineteenth century. The NMEC textile hall, for example, displays textile arts from pharaonic, Greco-Roman, and Coptic Egypt on the lower level, with an upper gallery featuring a well-curated collection of Turkish and Egyptian clothing and regalia from different classes of nineteenth-century society that overlook the ancient past. Metaphorically, these displays reclothe and reanimate the mummified kings of ancient Egypt who lie in state below the custom-built modern pyramid that adorns the roof of the museum building outside.In addition, a series of khedival house museums and palaces have recently (re)opened or are in development from Shubra to Manial, Giza to Helwan, and Alexandria to Abdin. Also in active development are the museum of the New Capital and the Giza Zoo, and there is the long-awaited reopening of the Agricultural Museum in Doqqi, which has, since its inception in 1920–1938, built a grand narrative around the rural foundation of Egyptian state and society that links pharaonic antiquity to khedival modernity. The Ethnographic Museum (established in 1895) at the Egyptian Geographical Society, though not recently updated, preserves the original template for this state-building narrative with exhibit halls featuring the results of state-sponsored African exploration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an exhibit on the construction of the Suez Canal, and rooms stuffed with models and artifacts of Egyptian folklore and traditional life. The new Suez Canal Museum in Ismailia was inaugurated in 2024 in the original headquarters of the Suez Canal Authority (established in 1858–1869), which was damaged by fire in 2011 and restored, primarily with funding from the current Suez Canal Authority, between 2013 and 2023. The interpretive architecture of this museum—its physical and narrative structure, spaces, didactic languages (Arabic, French, English), and attention to storytelling methods that link archaeology to the historical present—perhaps more so than any other Egyptian museum to date, convincingly demonstrates that the state’s investment in museum redevelopment is not simply rhetorical. It is real and material, and it is responding to an apparent cultural shift in Egyptian society that has not garnered much interest or attention from Egyptology in the West, where decolonizing contests often appear divorced from developments in Egypt (El Shazly 2024).All this is to say nothing of the development of high-profile regional archaeological museums at, for example, Sohag and Sharm el-Sheikh; the grand reopening of the modernized Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria; an ever-growing constellation of Islamic, modern, literary, and creative arts museums (not to mention biographical, scientific, children’s, and university museums); the building of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza; and the impressive fossil site and museum of paleontology and climate change at Wadi al-Hitan in the Fayum. Beyond the well-known sphere of archaeological tourism touched upon briefly by Stevenson (Section 4.2, 49–51), the lesser-known and striking variety of Egyptian museums, and the vast, centralized collections system of which they are a part, are, I would argue, fundamental not only to the past but also the future of Egyptological research. Egypt’s complex, interministerial system of national and regional museums and magazines belongs at the center, rather than the periphery, of discussions about global museum practices and twenty-first-century interpretation.New and remodeled Egyptian museums across the country mix innovative and traditional forms of museum interpretation, such as combining material typologies with thematic, archival, and interactive displays. They also, like the historical collections mentioned above, feature libraries, special collections, and educational spaces that increasingly foreground—for in-person visitors—Arabic archives, Arabic didactics, and Arabic-speaking tour guides; socialized ticket prices for Egyptians; and educational programs that promote the growth of internal tourism. Another largely unacknowledged but semi-socialized aspect of Egyptian museum practice is the redistribution of material among regional storage magazines and local museums in a way that is different, and more collective, than the privatized museum culture of the West. In Egypt, the material in state collections is often moved and transferred according to internal curatorial priorities (such as display themes, material types, and geographic regions), which are, however, difficult to trace without publication and often in tension with the archaeological site context necessary for researchers.The level of state resources invested since 2011 in bringing these spectacular nineteenth-century collections out of the shadows and curating them on a par with pharaonic and post-pharaonic material culture is dramatic and far-reaching enough to a shift in national museum This shift a historical of the and its on modern It that are of their heritage when that heritage all not the of the but the of the as Coptic, Islamic, and from the nineteenth century to today. Egyptian museums of all kinds this archaeology to rural and the antiquity of and its are the central of museum storytelling Egypt. Egyptian narrative lies in the of and past Egyptian cultures within interpretive spaces where Egyptian is between state and The apparent importance of this narrative of the as which and after is an rather than a to a this is by the growth of tourism that rather on Western as well as narratives that on the pharaonic Egypt, the of use and from late antiquity to to the present. post-pharaonic history from archaeological narratives and the between two museum global and the national, the and the the One and the the that the history of Egyptology is separate from the history of modern Egypt. Egyptian objects have or will the underlying structures of Egyptian archaeology in any century are in Egypt, not the West. Egyptian collections in the twenty-first century, should we not less time at the of Western society and more time at objects and histories in Amr Bayoumi’s narrative about the and of objects within Egypt, about how they transcend time by living and and for how we should think about these objects Stevenson’s book and by on the of the in museum Section us to in the museum as a of making an important case for the use of the including its collections, archives, and as an active site of knowledge a place where different can be discussions of collecting and experimental methods (such as digital replicas, and that shift interpretive for the multidirectional of in the should Egyptology to take new and with collections (Section all the sections it, Section an of current museum by one of most museum This volume can be considered a for of critical museum and I I had had such a book twenty years I also it would have told then or to as much time about Egyptian Egyptian Egyptian and Egyptian in Egypt as