Wendrich 2010 Eternal Egypt Deconstr

15
Epilogue
Eternal Egypt Deconstructed
Willeke Wendrich
History is extremely visible in Egypt, not only in the form of relief- covered
temple walls, and impressive engineering feats such as pyramids and monolithic
obelisks, but also in artifacts of organic materials startlingly well preserved in
the arid desert climate. Eternity and death are closely linked in the accidental
or mediated preservation of bodies, while tomb interiors, such as that of Kha,
which appear to preserve a complete elite household, including bed sheets, cloth-
ing, and food provide a very tangible link to the distant past (Schiaparelli 2008).
Temples have been transformed into churches, monasteries, and mosques,
forming the religious centers for worship of the gods of ancient Egypt,
Christianity, and Islam, creating a sense of continuity in the ever - changing cul-
tural landscape. Egyptians have always expressed awe for their long history and
very visible historical remains. Egyptians own their past and consider it to be
something distant and wondrous and at the same time very much part of their
present. The seeming continuity has led to the myth that Egypt is unchanged
and to this day represents an endless, perpetual culture. It is a sentiment typi-
cally expressed in grand sweeping statements and overview works. “Eternal
Egypt” is an enticing concept that has been selected as the title of a book rep-
resenting Egyptian history from prehistory to Alexander the Great (Montet
1969), as a catalogue of a selection of objects from the British Museum (Russmann
and James 2001), and for an online assortment of information on ancient Egypt
created by IBM, the Center for the Documentation of Cultural and Natural
Heritage (an Egyptian non-profit organization), and Egypt’s Supreme Council
of Antiquities.
Especially in popular literature, ancient Egypt is often presented as a mono-
lithic society, without differentiation or change. Statements that “the ancient
Egyptians” considered, performed, thought, made, knew, or did certain things
are very common. Egyptian history is, however, an amalgamation of 5000 years
of development and change, with regional and social variation (Lehner,
Grajetzki, this volume), which cannot be compressed into one people (“the
Egyptians”), or one era (“ancient Egypt”). Such a wholesale characterization of
EPILOGUE: ETERNAL EGYPT DECONSTRUCTED 275
Egypt’s uniqueness, homogeneity, and continuity is a selective representation of

the cultural expressions and the sources from which we attempt to construct
these. Considered up close, there are several forms of Eternal Egypt, which
partly overlap, but have been devised through a naïve application of Egyptological
and ethnoarchaeological approaches stressing a simple form of cultural
continuity.
Much of the myth of Eternal Egypt is created by Egyptologists, who have taken
ancient Egyptian sources at face value, without critically considering the audience
and purpose of texts and visual culture. The statue which graces the cover of this
volume is a case in point. It is a Late Period bronze, 26 cm high (British Museum
EA 11498), depicting a divine being, one of the Bau of Pe, sporting the body of
a youthful man and the head of a falcon. The figure is depicted kneeling, with a
clenched fist in the air, and the other one in front of the chest, in the celebratory
henu position. Together with the jackal-headed Bau of Nekhen, the Bau of Pe are
the ancestors of the king and the gesture is used to greet the newborn sun god,
or, in mythical parallel, the king at coronation. The statue dates to the Late Period
(probably after 600 bce), but reflects a concept that is known from the Old
Kingdom Pyramid Texts (Frankfort 1978:93 – 95), as well as, for instance, the New
Kingdom coronation of Ramesses II (Shorter 1934). As highlighted by Richards
and by Wilson (this volume), the emphasis on cultural continuity in Pharaonic
Egypt was in many cases closely linked with legitimation. The permanence of
power is represented as an inevitable continuity of the same fundamental struc-
tures of Egyptian kingship. It brings to the fore that recent developments to
incorporate more explicit theory and methods into literary studies is needed to
identify an author’s objectives and the audience that is addressed (Loprieno 1996).
Similarly, the representation of Egypt as surrounded by chaos and potentially
adverse powers serves the great emphasis on maintaining order, the ideological
foundation of kingship (Schneider, this volume). Most of the textual and visual
sources have been created for and were received by a specific social class, involved
in the cultural center of the country, and reflect the ideal of durability and per-
manence of power.
Cultural continuity is also the central consideration in efforts of present- day
Egyptians to celebrate their great ancestry. Copts especially have embraced ancient
Egypt, as expressed by fi rst names such as Isis, Ramesses, or Nefertiti, and often
the not so subtle claim that the Coptic minority represents the true Egyptians,
while the Muslim majority derives from the invading, and thus foreign, force.
Another often-heard assertion is that the “true” heirs of ancient Egypt are the
fellahin (famers) of Upper Egypt, witnessed by their physique and their backward
way of life. There have been many attempts to trace cultural continuity in present-
day Egyptian culture. An early explicit comparison was made by Winifred
Blackman (1927) in a chapter following her ethnography of the fellahin, in which
she systematically compares ancient and modern phenomena, such as those
between the concept of ka and the kareen/kareena mentioned in Chapter 11. The
method is problematic, because it compares the ethnographic description with a
“flattened history,” devoid of any historical development or social variation. At
the same time, Blackman stresses the similarities, but is silent about the many
differences. More importantly, neither the ancient, nor the modern phenomena
276 WILLEKE WENDRICH
are considered in their historical context. Efforts to compare ancient and modern
religious phenomena such as the ancient Opet Festival, in which the bark shrines
with the gods Amun, Mut, and Khonsu were carried by priests, and the present-
day Mulid of the Islamic saint Abu Hagag likewise stress the similarities of the
two festivals without regarding their context, the 2000 years of development of
the Opet Festival, and the changes within Islam in a period of almost 1400 years.
The suggestion of continuity, two religious festivals in the same geographical
location both involving the carrying of boats, is not more than that. In an article
on ancient Egyptian survivals in Coptic Christianity, Naguib (2008) gives a well-
balanced account of the development of the study of “survivals,” from tracing
formal similarities, to stressing both continuity and change, to considering tradi-
tion as fluid, in constant flux and development, in which the meaning changes,
even if the form might be the same. Interesting studies, such as those by Haikal
(2007) on the survival of ancient Egyptian words or rituals, through Coptic into
Arabic, and El- Shohoumi’s (2004) comparison of the organization of present- day
Islamic cemetery workers with the ancient Egyptian priesthood responsible for
treating the dead, gain in value if constructed within a theoretical framework such
as offered by Naguib.
The discussions on the use and abuse of ethnoarchaeology equally bear on the
image of Eternal Egypt. When applied to a specific research question, the study
of modern- day society from an archaeological perspective is extremely useful, but
has obtained a negative reputation because of naïve and overly simplistic applica-
tions (David and Kramer 2001; Wylie 1985). This is mostly due to either a too
formal, or a too simplistic use of analogy, without taking into account the histori-
cal and cultural contexts (Wylie 2002). As soon as similarities are considered as
static “remnants” of an equally frozen ancient society, the comparison leads us
astray, rather than helps our understanding of the variability in ancient, as well
as present- day, society. The “direct historical approach” has been used as an
excuse to propose that continuity is more prevalent than change, a stance that
negates development and denies the inhabitants of both ancient and present- day
Egypt the agency for differentiation and transformation.
If we accept that tradition is in constant flux, and is reinterpreted and under-
stood differently depending on the circumstances, then we should interpret our
Egyptian sources within their specific contexts and refrain from fi lling in the
gaps with more explicit sources from much later periods. That is what the more
recent approaches in Egyptian archaeology do quite explicitly and effectively, as
is reflected in the chapters in this volume. The result is, on the one hand, an
increase in academic doubt: the oblique references to the Osirian cycle from the
Pyramid Texts cannot be interpreted in the light of the lengthy and explicit late
New Kingdom narratives of the Contendings of Horus and Seth (Papyrus
Chester Beatty I). On the other hand this approach forces us to work in a much
more interdisciplinary fashion in which archaeology has its own voice within the
different approaches. Rather than being ancillary to historical or textual inter-
pretations (Andrén 1998; Kemp 1984), archaeology has its own narrative, as
demonstrated in the previous chapters. Rather than the powerless claim that
“archaeology” supports an argument, the authors, who all have extensive
experience in interpreting material culture in its context, have shown that the
EPILOGUE: ETERNAL EGYPT DECONSTRUCTED 277
archaeological interpretation regularly is at odds with, and sometimes completely

contradicts, other sources of information. These different results are important,
because they give us a means to tease out the dynamics of social and intellectual
change. Archaeology provides a steady stream of historical modifications, the
excavations of the workers’ cemeteries at Amarna being a sobering case in point
(Rose 2006). In Chapter 1 I outlined that not only ancient Egyptian culture,
but also the interpretive layer of our understanding of segments of the society
are in constant flux. This depends on the “available” information, and for the
larger part on our particular interest and questions. The recent, often grudgingly
acknowledged attention to multivocality, which gives voice to non-scholarly
debates and the interests of the local population, non-professionals, tourists, and
other stake -holders, illustrates vividly that alternative viewpoints are always
present, albeit often suppressed. In the case of ancient Egypt, where the percent-
age of literacy was an estimated 2 percent, archaeology has proven the only
means to fi nd traces of villagers, children, women, farmers, and foreigners. In
a sense they provide us with a glimpse of ancient multivocality, where most of
the textual sources, even those of the privileged villagers of Deir el-Medina,
represent a very particular point of view.
REFERENCES
Andrén, A. 1998 Between Artifacts and Texts: Historical Archaeology in Global

Perspective. New York: Plenum Press.
Blackman, W. S. 1927 The Fellahin of Upper Egypt. Cairo: The American University in
Cairo Press.
David, N., and C. Kramer 2001 Ethnoarchaeology in Action. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
El- Shohoumi, N. 2004 Der Tod im Leben: Eine vergleichende Analyse altägyptischer und
rezenter ägyptischer Totenbräuche. Vienna: Verlag der Östereichischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften.
Frankfort, H. 1978 Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as
the Integration of Society and Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haikal, F. 2007 Spiritualité égyptienne: Transmissions et évolution. Bulletin de la société
française d’égyptologie 168:12 – 48.
Kemp, B. J. 1984 In the Shadow of Texts: Archaeology in Egypt. Archaeological Review
from Cambridge 3(2):19 –28.
Loprieno, A. 1996 Ancient Egyptian Literature: History and Forms. Leiden, New York:
E. J. Brill.
Montet, P. 1969 Eternal Egypt. D. Weightman, trans. New York: Praeger.
Naguib, S.-A. 2008 Survivals of Pharaonic Religious Practices in Contemporary Coptic
Christianity. In UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology. J. Dieleman and W. Wendrich, eds.
Los Angeles: UCLA . http://repositories.cdlib.org/nelc/uee/1008.
Rose, J. C. 2006 Paleopathology of the Commoners at Tell Amarna, Egypt, Akhenaten’s
Capital City. Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro 101(Supll.
II ):73 –76.
Russmann, E. R., and T. G. H. James 2001 Eternal Egypt: Masterworks of Ancient Art
from the British Museum. London: British Museum Publications.
278 WILLEKE WENDRICH
Schiaparelli, E. 2008 The Intact Tomb of the Architect Kha in the Necropolis of Thebes.
Rome: Adarte. (Originally 1927.)
Shorter, A. W. 1934 Reliefs Showing the Coronation of Ramses II. Journal of Egyptian
Archaeology 20:18 –19.
Wylie, M. A. 1985 The Reaction against Analogy. Advances in Archaeological Method
and Theory 8:63 –111.
Wylie, M. A. 2002 Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

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15

Egypt’s uniqueness, homogeneity, and continuity is a selective representation of

archaeological interpretation regularly is at odds with, and sometimes completely

Andrén, A. 1998 Between Artifacts and Texts: Historical Archaeology in Global

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