Classics and Colonial Presences in Egypt, with Heba Abd el Gawad and Usama Ali Gad

Abstract

Egypt’s history since the fall of the Ptolemaic dynasty in 30 BC has been one of continual invasion and reinvasion. During the nineteenth century, when France and Britain began to take notice of this lucrative and strategically placed Ottoman territory, there was a corresponding boom of European interest in ancient Egyptian culture, fed by the ready availability of well-preserved ancient papyri and objects in Egypt. This week, Shivaike Shah talks to Dr Heba Abd El Gawad from University College London and Dr Usama Ali Gad from Ain Shams University in Cairo about the colonisation of Egyptology and its legacy in the modern museum and university. While Western museums have been eager to highlight what the many Egyptian objects in their possession tell us about the ancient civilisation, those objects’ continued presence reveals more about the modern colonial relationship between Egypt and Europe than their connection in the classical past.

Bibliography

open-source

Usama Ali Gad, ‘The Digital Challenges and Chances: The Case of Papyri and Papyrology in Egypt’ (Cairo: Ain Shams University, 2016)

Usama Ali Gad, ‘Decolonizing the Troubled Archive of Egyptian Papyri’, Everyday Orientalism (2019)

Usama Ali Gad, ‘Papyrology and Eurocentrism: Partners in Crime’, Eidolon (2019)

Katherine Blouin, ‘Wonder how Male & Eurocentric your Antiquity-Related Field is? Try the Committee Test!’, Everyday Orientalism (2018)

‘Imagined Community’, Wikipedia

Korshi, ‘Looking at the Coptic Magical Papyri XIV: Modern Collections’, The Coptic Magical Papyri: Vernacular Religion in Late Roman and Early Islamic Egypt (2020)

paywalled

Hussam R. Ahmed, The Last Nahdawi: Taha Hussein and Institution Building in Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021)

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.