Appropriate Culture

‘What was all that Egyptian stuff?’ Ruby asks the Doctor in the middle of Empire of Death, a messy, nonsensical Dr Who story I didn’t enjoy at all, but we’ll put that to one side. They’re referring back to The Pyramids of Mars, the Tom Baker tale broadcast in 1975 and whose appalling first-episode cliffhanger is one of my childhood landmarks, where Sutekh, the death-god who is their adversary of the moment, first appears. There, he was trapped in an Ancient Egyptian tomb by an opponent of his own race named Horus, constructed robots that looked like mummies, and prepared a pyramidal spaceship. ‘Cultural appropriation’, the Doctor answers. It’s quite an odd statement: as a comment, albeit a smug and self-congratulatory one, by writer Russell T Davies on his predecessors from 1975, it's fair enough; the great Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes were very capable of making effective TV out of material we wouldn’t dare to use now, and Pyramids isn’t the most egregious example. But as a diegetic utterance within the story itself, it makes little sense. Back in Pyramids the Doctor is clear that Ancient Egyptian religion and art was organised around memories of the struggles of the alien Osirans, not the other way around, and it would have been very odd for an immensely powerful race of alien beings to restructure their activities around a less advanced culture they encountered on a world they happened to drop onto in the middle of their own civil war.

Ruby and the Doctor discuss all this further in one of the little sequences of midrash the BBC occasionally puts out around the main TV story. ‘An Englishman was looting the tombs of the Pharaohs and disturbing the dead’, he explains. I wondered whether that’s how we think of the early Egyptologists now, whether this is the now-established summary of a century of exploration within the context of the old European empires?

For centuries the Egyptians paid little attention to their heritage of antiquities. Neither Copts nor Muslims had any more interest in the culture that preceded them than medieval European Christians had in the monuments of their own pagan past. Occasionally an Arabic travel writer would describe the statues and temples, but they were relics of a world that was long gone, interesting exactly because they felt no connection with it. When Omm Sety first lived in Egypt in the 1930s, she found that, even then, pregnant women in Abydos would touch the belly of a statue of Isis for luck – not that they had a clear idea who Isis was. It was folklore, magic, not a source of national pride. Historically Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled over by foreign governors who had absolutely no interest in encouraging the population to identify with their national past, even had they thought of such a thing.

I don’t know whether anything’s been written about how the Egyptians themselves picked up the significance of their astonishing archaeological inheritance from the Europeans who started investigating them from the early 1800s, but it took a while, that’s clear. The governors of Egypt had as proprietorial a view of antiquities as any rapacious Imperial tomb-digger: there had been an Egyptian Museum since 1835, but in 1855 governor Mohammed Said Pasha gave the entire collection as a present to the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, which is how all that stuff ended up in Vienna. In the heroic age of Egyptology, the epoch of Giovani Belzoni, Wallis Budge and Flinders Petrie, the exploration of Egyptian antiquities may have been marred by Imperial competition played out as rivalries between museums and universities, but the front-line commanders in that effort were also serious scholars who believed in the relevance of the past, not mere tomb-robbers, and it was from them that the Egyptians learned how important their heritage was.

Aida, I thought, there’s a clear example of cultural appropriation, an opera in Ancient Egyptian fancy dress written by an Italian. Except that, I didn’t realise, it was commissioned from Verdi by the Egyptian ruler Ismail Pasha, in response to a suggestion by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette who acted as the opera’s artistic consultant. Although he came from an Albanian dynasty of Ottoman officials, Ismail was keen to stress the independence of the country he governed. Four years after he took over in 1863, the Empire agreed to give him the title Khedive, ‘viceroy’, much classier than a mere governor. Ismail was an ardent moderniser and built a state opera house in Cairo – Aida ended up not being the very first performance there because all the costumes and sets were stuck in Paris while the Prussians besieged the city, but when it finally played in 1871 it was the first great celebration of Egyptian national identity that drew in Pharaonic Egypt. It was Khedive Ismail saying to his people, ‘this is who we are’ – an aspirant modern nation, but one which had given the world its first great civilization too.

Of course, from that point on, it became quite important that Europeans stopped carting everything off to museums in London, Paris and Berlin, or to private collections. The Egyptian Antiquities Department was supposed to control the whole business of excavations and removals, though the Egyptian Museum (under both French and Egyptian directors) derived a valuable income from flogging ‘unimportant’ artefacts in its sale room all the way to 1979, and wasn’t able to stop Howard Carter apparently slipping the odd bit into his pocket while he was cataloguing Tutankhamun’s tomb. Anyway, we carry on with the Egyptians taking more and more charge over their own past until the process culminated in the Golden Parade of the Pharaohs in 2021: 22 royal mummies from the caches of Deir-el-Bahari and the tomb of Amenhotep II were moved in tank-like atmosphere-controlled vehicles from the old Egyptian Museum to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation (a telling title) in a procession of jaw-dropping splendour. You can watch a cinematic treatment of this event on Youtube, simultaneously moving, and slightly terrifying, as these papery bits of desiccated human in their battered sarcophagi are invested with so much grand significance. ‘I cried when I saw Queen Hatshepsut’, says one viewer, ‘because her enemies tried to erase her existence, and this is the glory she deserved’ – and funnily enough I got a bit tearful too, even though we know they didn’t, that Hatshepsut isn’t the star of this show, and she wasn’t even the only female Pharaoh as she was once believed to be: still, she’s not just an Egyptian now, but a feminist as well, a Woman Wronged. The monarchs’ names appear in English and Arabic script, but in hieroglyphic cartouches, while the choir sings in Ancient Egyptian, and the not-terribly-impressive President El-Sisi tries not to look completely out of place amidst the colossal, eclipsing charisma of the dead.

That is the positive story, of how European scholarship rescued the past of an ancient civilisation and ended up giving it back to the people who are its true heirs. It's not untrue, but it is incomplete. Those careful scholars all felt that if they’d dug stuff up it was only logical that they should take it back home with them. That was simply part of the mindset. There was a time when that wasn’t completely unreasonable because nowhere in Egypt could have looked after delicate artefacts very securely, but that wasn’t the justification, and it carried on being the assumption long after the Egyptians did begin developing credible archaeological institutions of their own. Just as Britain and France ended up carving up Africa between them not really because gigantic swathes of African territory were of any use to them, but just to stop each other getting it, the process of acquisition, of tens and hundreds of thousands of objects flowing into great museums, was driven by that rivalry, played out through the work of whiskered scholars scratching trowels in sandy pits. When Howard Carter pilfered the odd pendant from the Valley of the Kings, it’s hard to decide whether the acquisitiveness that made him do it was his own human moral failing situated within the prejudice of Empire, or conversely whether the Imperial looting of Egyptian artefacts was a case of that ordinary, petty greed writ large.

And, in any case, not all the diggers were careful scholars. Some were just opportunists and collectors: the sheer mind-boggling quantity of antiquities in Egypt made ransacking seem less consequential. Looking back at The Pyramids of Mars, perhaps Marcus Scarman, the linen-suited excavator who curses his superstitious native labourers and stumbles into Sutekh’s tomb, is just that: I’ve always thought his Egyptology must be pretty ropey if he thinks the structure is First Dynasty as he claims. Maybe he is nothing more than ‘an Englishman looting tombs and disturbing the dead’.

The respect of the dead, rather than their living descendants, is a separate matter from imperialist looting, material or cultural. I’m the first person to regard how we treat the remains of the dead as an analogue for our attitude towards the living: a dead person – the phrase we often automatically use – is honoured because they represent the individual they were before death, and the web of relationships they were part of. But who do they belong to once they have no identifiable living relatives?

I haven’t been to Maidstone Museum; I must go some time. But in common with many large and not-even-all-that-large museums in Britain, they have a mummy. She is ‘the Lady of the House, Ta-Kush, Daughter of Osiris’, a 25^th-Dynasty woman whose remains came to Britain in the 1820s and eventually found their way via a private collector to the Museum. Once thought to have died at about 14, research in the 2010s showed that she was likely to have been 40 or so, and of Nubian origin. She had poor teeth and osteoporosis. We have a good idea of what she may have looked like thanks to facial reconstruction. Ta-Kush was not well treated when she first arrived here, and whoever owned her waited twenty years before she was even looked at by anyone with any expertise; but now she gazes at us across 2700 years or so, and, to my mind, works more for human sympathy and understanding than she would ever have done undisturbed in the sands of her homeland. An ambassador for fellowship and compassion from the long-distant past: really, that’s not a bad fate to have.