EGYPTOLOGY: A SELF-MARGINALIZING DISCIPLINE?

ARCE April 2016, Atlanta

Edmund S. Meltzer

Pacifica Graduate Institute

I’m not actually going to talk about that. It’s just something I wrote to get you all

here. I’m really going to be talking about 301 examples of the sDm.n.f. Just

kidding!

One cannot read Juan Carlos Moreno García’s essay “The Cursed Discipline? The

peculiarities of Egyptology at the turn of the Twenty-First century,” in W.

Carruthers, ed., Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures (London:

Routledge 2014) pp. 50-63, without being impressed by how articulate it is and

how urgently and forcefully it issues a “wake-up call” to Egyptologists, initiating

what I hope will be a fruitful dialogue, in which I hope I am participating. At the

same time, I have to confess to having something of the feeling of being present

when Chairman Mao (allegedly) launched the Cultural Revolution by writing a

“large character poster” with the slogan, “Fire Cannonballs at Headquarters!”

Moreno García’s urgency about the direction of the field is well-intentioned and

well-taken, but, to cut to the chase, I think he sees the glass as far emptier than it

is, and that he undersells or undervalues a lot of the interdisciplinary work being

done by Egyptologists and the interdisciplinary involvement of Egyptology and

Egyptologists in the Academy. As someone who has frequently worked, and is

presently working, in departments and institutions with a strong interdisciplinary

focus, and who (for instance) did and studied American archaeology before going

to Egypt for the first time, I was more than a little taken aback by what I have to

characterize as a rather one-sided view. I myself have presented some (albeit

embryonic) reflections on the history and the ideological and social aspects of

Egyptology in my article “Egyptology” in OEAE vol. 1 pp. 448-458, and my

introduction to Thomas Schneider, et al., Egyptology from the First World War to

the Third Reich (Leiden: Brill 2013) pp. 1-11.

I would like to say at the outset that I have found working in interdisciplinary

contexts, and collaboration with scholars in many other fields who share

Egyptological interests, extremely productive and positive, and I have found my

colleagues in a variety of disciplines consistently welcoming, receptive and, in a

word, collegial.

One immediate observation that I have (which I also make in my OEAE article) is

that the alleged isolation of Egyptology and Egyptologists is often overstated, and

I have to assert that it does not correspond at all to my own experience. It is an

allegation that sometimes gets thrown in our face by people who frankly should

know better. I was very disappointed to encounter a totally gratuitous rant on

the same theme in Cyrus Gordon’s otherwise extremely genial memoir on The

Pennsylvania Tradition of Semitics. In this regard I would also note James

Hoffmeier’s response to similar sentiments expressed by William Dever in the

debate over the destructions at the end of Middle Bronze: “Some Thoughts on

William G. Dever’s ‘Hyksos’, Egyptian Destructions, and the End of the Palestinian

Middle Bronze Age,” Levant 22 (1990) 83-89; Hoffmeier debunks the “outdated

cliché” of Egyptological isolation and notes that inter alia the entry of American-

trained archaeologists into the Nile Valley starting in the 1960s resulted in the

introduction of significant improvements in archaeological method. I also recall

vividly an occasion on which, as a University of Chicago undergraduate, I went to

a legendary scholar in a field other than Egyptology to ask a comparative question

relevant to Egyptology. When I introduced myself as an Egyptology student, this

individual (whom I shall not name – or in the manner of Groucho Marx in his

autobiography Groucho and Me, since I don’t want to name him I’ll call him

Delaney – and for whom I have great respect) said very emphatically, “I hope you

do not ask me about Egyptology except where I disagree with the Egyptologists.”

I was especially surprised to read Dr. Moreno García’s claim that the absence of

Egypt from quite a number of thematic treatments of Topic X or Y in “the Ancient

Near East,” i.e. the failure to invite an Egyptologist to participate in the relevant

conference or publication, is due to a sense that Egyptology has nothing

meaningful to contribute or that the contributions of Egyptologists to such

discussions are bound to be too trivial to be worth the effort. In this case I am

forcibly reminded of Yehuda HaLevy’s great philosophical-theological treatise

Kuzari, in which the King of the Khazars says that he is only including a Jew in the

grand debate as kind of a grudging afterthought. I think of the Egypt-less

treatments of “the Ancient Near East” as the “Music Minus One Soprano”

approach to Near Eastern Studies, or perhaps as reflecting a map of the Ancient

Near East that stops abruptly at the Sinai, where there is a sheer drop and

apparently everyone falls off the edge. I think this phenomenon has other and

prior roots to those envisaged by Moreno García; it predates the theoretical

debates highlighted by his discussion and goes back for decades and decades. In

some paradoxical ways it embodies what might be called the flip side of aspects

of the relationship between Egyptology and neighboring disciplines that he points

to, but it seems broader to me. I think it stems in part at least from competing

perceptions of disciplinary affinities and genealogies that might be described as

Egypto- or Mesopotamio-centric, or, to focus on the Bible, which defined the field

for many scholars over a long time, Abraham of Ur vs. “A people come out of

Egypt” (the quotation used in the title of a notable article by Ronald J. Williams).

In other words, which “pole” of the Ancient Near East is most defining for Biblical

Studies and the understanding of ancient Israel, and how do the constituent loci

of civilization influence the history and understanding of the Ancient Near East?

And which Ancient Near Eastern languages and textual traditions are closest to

and shed most light on the Hebrew Bible? In some obvious ways, the Hebrew

Bible aligns most closely with Syro-Canaan and Mesopotamia, but, as with the

political and cultural constellations of the Near East itself, there are complex

relationships and forces pulling in opposite directions. If Egypt is not to be

considered part of the Ancient Near East at all, that clearly provides one way to

cut the “Gordian Knot.” One can even wonder, somewhat speculatively, whether

the pioneering vision of James Henry Breasted, who did so much to place the

Ancient Near East on the map as a fundamental and integral part of human

history and culture, and of the Academy, paradoxically bears some responsibility

for the attempts to exclude Egypt from that cradle of civilization (and by

extension from what he called the “New Past”). One wonders whether the image

of the Ancient Near East which Breasted so enthusiastically and passionately

promoted, giving a central or even dominant place to Egypt, including

considerable priority and influence in comparative Biblical issues and the

development of morality (as in his book The Dawn of Conscience), could have

sparked a degree of backlash, a tendency to devalue the importance of Egypt.

This could also be seen (not very charitably, to be sure) as the consequence of a

misplaced and stereotypical perception of the alleged isolation or insularity of

Egyptology and Egyptologists, referred to above, an attitude which, as we have

seen, affects or infects the work of otherwise admirable scholars. Egyptologists in

our turn may suspect that some of our sibling disciplines feel (at least on some

subliminal level) that we have a disproportionate share of “iconic” monumental

remains and “name recognition,” like our “poster boy” Ramesses II – and that, as

the stereotypical image of Ramesses II would have it, we too haven’t done

enough to earn it. In other words, they might be suspected of suffering from

“Pyramid (or Obelisk) Envy.”

To step down a bit from this perhaps somewhat polemical soapbox, and perhaps

to mount another, the tendency or temptation to operate with an Egyptless

concept of “the Ancient Near East” might owe something to disciplinary

specializations, and academic traditions of which subjects are studied in a given

specialty, and might be more characteristic of those who have less focus on

Egyptology and whose institutions and training include less involvement with that

field. It can even be seen as providing an (implicit) justification for the failure of

those institutions, and perhaps some scholars, to include or engage Egyptology. It

would then be a defense of, or rationalization for, the priorities of those

institutions and perhaps those scholars.

So far we have been focusing largely on factors that seem to pit Egyptology

against its sibling disciplines or vice versa, or on what might be thought of (in a

rather alarmist fashion) as a “divide and rule” scenario. I think it’s at least equally

important to look away from those seductive blandishments at least for a

moment, and devote some attention to perspectives that would sideline the

Ancient Near East as a whole, Egypt along with Western Asian civilizations, and

relegate it to at least borderline irrelevance, or in effect firewall it from a

meaningful and integral involvement in the rise of vigorous, forward-looking

“Western” civilization. Thus in his plenary address on “Biblical Archaeology Today:

The Biblical Aspect,” at the 1984 International Congress on Biblical Archaeology,

Frank Moore Cross states that “Two dynamic societies, Israel and Greece, rose

from the ruins of the ancient Near Eastern world” (J. Aviram et al., ed., Biblical

Archaeology Today [IES/ASOR 1985] pp. 9-15, at p. 13), as if “the ancient Near

Eastern world” were already consigned to the past, rather than itself rising from

the ashes and vigorously reincarnating in new configurations, of which the

developing societies of Israel and the Aegean were themselves a part. He

accompanies this with the familiar but nonetheless grossly overblown claim that,

with the proliferation of the alphabet, “Literacy spread like wildfire” (p. 13). Just

over the past couple of weeks, this claim has been resuscitated with regard to

ostraca discovered in Israel. Without commenting on that material in detail, I

would note that a strong argument has been made that mass literacy was sparked,

not by the alphabet, but by the printing press and the mass production of

affordable books in Renaissance Europe by printers such as Manutius. It can also

be noted that Chinese, using a script that is the very reverse of alphabetic, has

had no problem in achieving mass literacy in a huge population.

One of Moreno García’s assessments of Egyptology is that “Broadly speaking,

‘spiritual’ subjects (religion, art, literature) are privileged, while others, more

‘materialist’ (economy, sociology, habitat) are neglected” (p. 51). Like many

attempts at compartmentalization, the dichotomy of spiritual vs. materialist

subjects doesn’t hold up all that well upon critical examination, and the decisions

about which subjects belong in one or the other box aren’t very airtight.

Archaeology certainly is “privileged” or at least omnipresent, and is a highly

material pursuit intimately linked to environmental and physical concerns and

modes of analysis. Art has its “spiritual” and its material and even materialist

aspects, and is inextricably linked with areas such as the economy, the habitat,

the use of space, the functions of art in the society, patronage and power

relations – I think sociology has reared its head – etc. The study of literature or of

any texts cannot be limited to a “spiritual” dimension, but begins with the

examination and study of objects, namely papyri and all other artifacts, surfaces,

natural features etc. that are inscribed, as has been discussed by other presenters

at this conference. That in turn gets us back to consideration of landscapes and

habitats, the environment and its modification. In the case of religion, I feel that

the label of a “spiritual” field is extremely simplified and even stereotypical and

mirrors some problematic attitudes toward the place of religion in the wider

academy. How can religion be described adequately as a “spiritual” study, given

that it embraces psychology, ethology, sociology, archaeology, anthropology, yes,

economy and many shades of material analysis? Moreno García is of course

justified in pointing out omissions in the recent book Egyptology Today, but he

does not discuss the absence of a chapter on “Religion,” while there is a chapter

on “Religious Texts.” This does not square very well with the supposedly

“privileged” position of religion in Egyptology. I remember as a student being

very frustrated by the unavailability of courses in “Ancient Egyptian Religion,”

rather than this or that genre or category or period of texts (a reminiscence which

some may find surprising from one who is perhaps often seen as a philology

addict). Thus I have to at least register a strong caveat to the claim that religion is

a “privileged” subject in Egyptology – but very briefly I wish to turn to the place of

religion in the Academy at large. As one who has been very much involved in that

discipline, I would have to observe that the legitimacy, integrity and autonomy of

the academic study of religion are sometimes questioned, and it is perhaps only a

tad dramatic to say that it is at least potentially under siege from different

directions, or being pulled in different directions by colleagues with strongly

differing visions and priorities, but that is perhaps a topic for another paper and

another meeting.

I think it’s time to get away from these potentially polarizing topics and say

something about Afrocentrism. In her open letter on Egyptology and

Afrocentrism serialized in the ARCE Newsletter about 20 years ago, Ann Macy

Roth expresses some perceptions somewhat analogous to Moreno García’s

regarding the precarious place of Egyptology in the Academy, suggesting that it is

risky for Egyptology to be too closely associated with Afrocentrism, and that this

could further erode the already ambivalent position of Egyptology and provide a

pretext to exclude it, or not to take it seriously, or to taint the field as a whole as

“fringe.” Unfortunately, he does not cite her somewhat convergent reflections.

In a paper recently posted on the Academia website, “Black Complexity along the

Nile: Contextualizing Black Identity in New Kingdom Kemet,” Tristan Samuels

presents a perspective quite different from Roth’s, making a case that Egyptology

jeopardizes its credibility as long as it does not fully and critically engage the issue

of race and attendant complexities of identity. I think that Egyptologists haven’t

been entirely asleep at the switch in this regard, as seen for instance in an

excellent discussion by Kara Cooney (“Zwischen Ägyptologie und Afrozentrismus,”

in Maat 2 [2005]), as well as educational initiatives undertaken in Britain, as

discussed by Sally-Ann Ashton (“Curating Kemet, Fear of a Black Land?” in Karen

Exell, ed., Egypt in Its African Context, BAR International Series 2204,

Archaeopress 2011). Samuels points to Ashton’s work as a salutary example.

Also very significant in these interactions is Jan Assmann’s highly laudatory

preface to Maulana Karenga’s book Maat, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A

Study in Classical African Ethics (Routledge 2003). Altogether, as is by now

abundantly clear, I see far less justification for Moreno García’s dire assessments

than he does, and I think that he does not succeed entirely in his avowed aim of

avoiding caricature in his characterization of our common field.

All of these ruminations lead to a double-barreled conclusion. When everything

has been said, the “bottom line” is that, like the world itself, all of our somewhat

arbitrarily- and fuzzily-divided disciplines, which really constitute a sprawling

Venn diagram rather than a list – Egyptology, Assyriology, Biblical Studies, Classics,

Mediterranean Studies, Religious Studies etc. – work best and accomplish most,

and our understanding grows most markedly in depth as well as sheer volume,

the more we work together, look for common questions and resonances, and

bring our diverse data and disciplinary backgrounds and perspectives together to

illuminate questions that would not even be asked without this type of joint effort,

which I am encouraged to see in much of the academic activity in which we are

increasingly involved today. And – the second barrel –

At the end of my Oxford Encyclopedia article on Egyptology, I pose to our field

Daniel Webster’s question, “How stands the Union?” (read “Egyptology”), to

which he demanded the answer that she “stands as she stood, rock-bottomed

and copper-sheathed.” I am more convinced of that answer now than I was when

I wrote the article; in fact, with apologies to Emily Dickinson, I am “as certain of” it

“as if a chart were given.”