Decolonising ancient Egypt?

In Classics, much discussion has been taking place recently about the field's problematical roots, which are deeply entangled with colonialism.For example, several authors, including Denise McCoskey and Dan-el Padilla Peralta, have unpacked the relationships between Classics and European notions of superiority and coloniality.McCoskey (2012) has demonstrated how ancient Greek and Roman approaches to the 'Other' have shaped modern racial ideologies.Similarly, Padilla Peralta (2022: 159) has shown how Classics as a field "is a bustling performance site for racecraft", which engenders a racialised version of Antiquity that affects multiple communities and politics today.These two examples together demonstrate how European coloniality projected its own ideas of superiority onto evidence from the Ancient World in a way that was echoed in ancient distinctions between 'civilised' and 'barbarians', paving the way to various justifications of European superiority amid colonialism during the Modern Era (c.AD 1500-1800) (McCoskey 2018).By exploring the intricacies of European colonialism and how classical scholarship was used by colonial powers to justify their ideology and actions, these scholars are providing guidelines towards the decolonisation of knowledge and epistemic reconstitution of their field.Other fields of knowledge concerned with the Ancient World have been equally dominated by, and often worked for, European colonialism and its attached notion of European superiority.In Egyptology, like in Classics, decolonising discourse has been limited and has taken shape in recent times mostly as historiographical analyses of how ancient Egyptians and Nubians were viewed by early scholars (e.g.Matic2018).Critical works such as Reid's Whose pharaohs?(2002) and El Daly's Egyptology: the missing millennium (2005) reflect earlier historiographical attempts to unpack the field's Eurocentric and colonial roots and legacies.Equally, critical opinions on the ongoing enactment of Egyptology's colonial legacies, which have made Egyptian inputs to Egyptology largely invisible in theory and practice, have also pushed discussion forward (Hanna 2025).Rune Nyord's Yearning for immortality consists of a major step forward in the decolonisation of the study of ancient Egypt, despite not being an explicit example of