Pharaoh’s new clothes. On (post)colonial Egyptology, hypocrisy, and the elephant in the room

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Abstract

Since the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script by Jean François Champollion 200 years ago Egyptology has seen an impressive evolution from the pastime occupation of a small group of European savants to a globally practiced academic discipline. In recent years, the scholarly debates reflecting on this history have also taken into view the less glorious aspects of Egyptology’s past such as its entanglement with Western colonialism. Strangely absent from these discussions, however, is the fact that Egyptology’s problematic past has not been overcome but has turned into a problematic present, which entails turning a blind eye to the social and political contexts in which its knowledge production is embedded. The implicit contradictions of this present cast a shadow over Egyptological practices at large and threaten to render attempts at the discipline’s decolonisation futile or even hypocritical. As this article highlights, Egyptology’s ‘elephant in the room’ is its continuing cooperation with an autocratic military regime that disregards basic human rights and has proved time and again that it considers academic freedom a dispensable concept. By means of several examples it is argued that Egyptology still finds itself entangled in a mesh of colonial power relations it has helped to create. Therefore, it remains an outrightly political discipline, and its practitioners cannot help but be active protagonists in a game at the intersection of archaeology, politics, and ethics.