The men who arrived that day to unearth the Pharaonic tombs of Thebes were Gaston Maspero and Émile Brugsch. From the twelfth century onwards mummified remains were extracted and sold to the West to produce medical concoctions and pigments. But in the nineteenth century, Europeans decided that Egyptian remains were not to find their final resting place in their oesophagi and canvases, but in the looted collections of their museums. Maybe this change of heart was related to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 which made hieroglyphs intelligible via ancient Greek and thus granted identificatory worth to the indecipherable civilisation.
The urge to excavate and display is distinctly European; the sites of antiquity had expressed no wish to unbury their dead.
The urge to excavate and display is distinctly European; the sites of antiquity had expressed no wish to unbury their dead.
Walking through the ancient cities, only the European conqueror thought of mutilating the sculptures of the Acropolis and the walls of Darius’ palace. It was the French, the German and the British who dreamt of glass menageries. Archeological reports of the time describe these efforts as heroic rescues of ancient kingdoms from the regions’ ignorant natives. So goes the tale of the Enlightenment; vested the power to interpret, marginalise and criminalise.
Memory postponed; memory delivered. Wanys walks through the narrow lanes of the silent temple, among inscribed pillars and their stone faces who have been childhood friends. Even in standard Arabic distance seeps through the dialogue; every moment is full of silence, every drop of life sealed inside a closed hand. Monumental stasis through the dunes of time separating Kmt from Misr. To be of the land is to be of its pain and grief.
By daybreak the effendi are carrying the dead out of their hiding place, each wooden coffin covered with a white sheet. The pharaohs who have retrieved their names are joining the funeral procession and eyes, ancient and present, turn towards the empty space punctuated by the Colossi of Memnon. In the Valley of the Kings, Wanys, son of Sheikh Selim, is watching silently.