Who Gets to Tell the Story of Ancient Egypt?

[reader]

From The Smithsonian

By Lauren Keith

From the glint of Tutankhamun’s solid gold death mask, striped with bands of royal blue glass, to the famous pyramids and the weathered Great Sphinx of Giza, the magnetic lure of Egypt is eternal.

Images of this ancient culture have long been both ubiquitous and instantly recognizable. But 2022, a year marked by a series of monumental Egyptian anniversaries, ushered in a revival of Egyptomania not seen since British archaeologist Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutankhamun 100 years ago.

A cradle of civilization, the lands surrounding the Nile River Delta witnessed some of the earliest developments in writing, art, religion and government. The ancient culture’s story spreads far beyond Egypt’s modern-day borders, spanning more than 3,000 years. (For context, the reign of Cleopatra, in the first century B.C.E., is closer to 2022 than the construction of the Great Pyramid around 2500 B.C.E.) It is humanity’s story, a shared narrative of societal progress.

The museum's design was inspired by the pyramids. Courtesy of the Grand Egyptian Museum

Egypt’s riches have drawn colonizers and foreign treasure hunters since as early as 332 B.C.E., when Alexander the Great founded his namesake city on the delta. Wars with history’s biggest empires—the Romans, the Persians, the Arabs, the Ottomans and finally the British—have filled the 22 centuries since; in 1798, Napoleon also led a comparatively short French invasion that led to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which opened Western Europe’s eyes to Egypt and started an undammable flow of ancient heritage leaving the country.

As the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) prepares to open its doors in Giza in 2023, some archaeologists, Egyptologists and museumgoers are calling for Egyptian antiquities to be returned to their homeland. Arriving amid a growing push to decolonize American and European museums, these campaigns ask a crucial question: Who gets to claim these artifacts as their own?

“People were asleep for years, and now they’re awake,” says Egyptologist Zahi Hawass. “I’m sure [Westerners] have nightmares of what happened: taking the history and the heritage of Africa to their countries with no right. There is no right for them to have this heritage in their country at all.”

Continues with photos

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/who-gets-to-tell-the-story-of-ancient-egypt-180981263/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

[gay_world_traveller]

Thank you for posting; absolutely fascinating. 

I look forward to the Grand Egyptian Museum finally opening!