Papyrology and Eurocentrism, Partners in Crime
Special Issue on the Papyrus Thefts
Professor Obbink’s case is not news. His (alleged) theft of papyri cannot be dismissed as unrelated to what I called Eurocentrism in papyrology. On the contrary, this situation is yet another symptom of the chronic disease of Eurocentrism.
It is true that he has dismissed the allegations as a malicious attempt to harm his reputation and career, asserting that he “would be fully exonerated.” But it is equally true that “Oxford University is now investigating, with EES help, the removal from University premises and alleged sale of EES texts.” The specific details and trajectories of these incidents do not concern me. My colleagues, including but not limited to Roberta Mazza and Brent Nongbri, have done an excellent job of following the minute details of these incidents since 2011, and more recently in analyzing the news of the ongoing investigations in a special issue on Eidolon.
I am concerned with the bigger picture, the theoretical framework, that has provided the necessary justifications and coverage to these incidents. None of this would have happened without the historical narrative that justified two hundred years of European dominance over Egypt’s space, time, and objects, a phenomenon that we in the social and/or human sciences call Eurocentrism. I have been trying to dissect Eurocentrism in papyrology in order to figure out how we could get rid of it since October and November 2015, but since that time other symptoms have been discovered and reported, confirming that we are dealing with a chronic disease. Obbink’s case is, at least to me, an alarm that we have to be careful in treating this issue; there is always something lurking in the darkness.
Some of my European and American colleagues think that papyrology as practiced in the US and Europe is problem-free. They think that papyri in European collections, museums, and art markets belong not to Egypt but to Europe and it is assumed that they are well cared for. Egypt, the backyard of Europe, is to them a source land of cultural raw materials, but never a source land of scholarly input or products. The raw materials were, and continue to be, shipped to European and Western academic institutions to be processed by experts, who have maintained a monopoly on the process of knowledge production about everything Egyptian. In those manufacturing processes, the product was true to Western standards to the extent that nobody in Europe paused for a moment to think about the origins of these artefacts, to ask where these raw materials came from and what the costs of their externalities were.
Egyptians, however, have never stopped asking these difficult questions.
What follows is an attempt to contextualize this single incident, or series of incidents, in the wider matrix of eurocentrism in papyrology. It’s easy to point the finger at a specific person or an institution. It’s harder to offer critical analysis that starts at the rim, but never stops unless it reaches the epicenter. The solution I offer at the end is not a carte blanche for anyone, including myself, but an expression of a personal commitment to the theoretical and practical search for solutions to the current dilemma.
First, some facts:
- There is no antiquities market in Egypt. Rather, “trade, sale or commerce in antiquities, including all antiquities held as private property, [is] prohibited.”
- Egypt is a source land of antiquities and will continue to be.
- Egyptian papyri and manuscripts are one of the main cultural objects at risk.
- The European/Western market requires a continuous flow of original artefacts.
- The antiquities trade encompasses a global (bidirectional) network of interests.
- European expertise in antiquities is not transcendent. It is one of the main historical products of imperial Europe. Its coloniality is undeniable.
- Egyptians came to, or more precisely have been allowed to enter, the field (Classics, archaeology, and papyrology) in fact very late, when rules and standards were already fixed, and the classical tradition established. The Western canon is “authoritative.”
- Working international archaeological projects in Egypt and research centers exercise a great deal of authority and power. The legal rights they possess on archaeological sites, and the topoi they study, are not as simple as one thinks.
- Decolonization is both financially and morally costly.
- Two hundred years of colonization and externalities cannot be undone in a few years.
Keeping these facts in mind, let’s now turn to diagnosing the current situation, not to find an easy cure, but to understand the complexities of the present moment, how it is historically rooted in the past two hundred years and how the choices we made today will shape our global tomorrow.
National and International Papyrology: The Labels and Concepts
Papyrology is a subfield of Classics. Its main object of study is the Egyptian manuscripts called papyri. By virtue of this definition, almost every single fragment of a text that is of interest to papyrologists, whether biblical or classical, was found in colonized Egypt. Western scholars, in imperial Europe, have worked hard over the past century to fulfill the prophecy of the German Nobel Laureate and Roman historian Theodor Mommsen. Earning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902 for his monumental book Römische Geschichte (History of Rome), Mommsen is quoted as saying that “just as the nineteenth century had been the century of epigraphy, so the twentieth would be the century of papyrology.” “Papyrology,” then, is seen as a European academic doctrine, with a noble German origin. It is a culturally and socially constructed field of study. It deals with made-in-Europe knowledge and Eurocentric institutionalized expertise about Greek texts inscribed on papyri. The texts, constructed as ancient and classical, are the main focus in this field, but the objects that carry those texts are considered marginal and peripheral, even as collecting them is an imperial and colonial enterprise.
And so, the current makeup of made-in-Europe papyrology, whether it wanted to or not, contributed to the present dilemma. Yes, direct and indirect participation in the illicit trade and sale of unprovenanced papyri is condemned by American and European learned societies of papyrology. Yet, a critical and complex question remains unanswered: to whom do the papyri belong — to Europeans, to Americans or to the Egyptians?
The Egyptian Association of Papyrologists (AEP), inaugurated by Magdy Ismail, is clear in saying that artifacts from Egypt belong to Egypt, and refuses to grant any kind of tolerance to international scholars working in papyrology. The American and European position on Egyptian scholars must be discovered indirectly. For a typical Western European answer, look no further than the Latin motto of the international society of papyrologists (AIP), the so-called “amicitia papyrologorum.” This is a motto that dates from the dark ages of interwar Europe when the falcon could not hear the falconer, the center could not hold, and the ceremony of innocence was drowned, as William Butler Yeats described the horrific situation after World War I. Amicitia papyrologorum, or the “Friendship of Papyrologists,” has been in place since 1933, its meaning is “assumed but rarely defined” and remains so up to the present moment. But in practice, it seems this friendship is for Europeans only.
On the American level, the ASP “acknowledges that indirect participation is a complicated matter with varying degrees of complicity; it therefore leave the determination of appropriate behaviour to the prudential judgment of its individual members.” There is no doubt that the “prudential judgment” of our American colleague Andrew Connor, of Monash University (who appended a thorough discussion of the provenance of the piece he published in BASP) is fundamentally different than the “prudential judgment” of the American papyrologist and Oxford professor Dirk Obbink (who may have stolen papyri and who definitely published an unprovenanced fragment of Sappho in ZPE)! The current situation has surely put Obbink’s reputation and career at stake, but it has also put papyrology’s future on shaky ground.
In addition to the existing financial and epistemological challenges, we are now facing a serious ethical and professional crisis. What is valuable in papyrology, the text or the context? The context is equally as important to me, an Egyptian, as the text. I cannot understand any literary or documentary text without asking the most difficult questions about how it came into “our” possession. The traditional answer that “it is an ancient/biblical/classical text from somewhere in Egypt where the Europeans went, saw and collected” is not satisfactory to me. So how do Egyptian papyri make their way into the possessions of European and/or American institutions today? There is an interesting story to be told here.
As one of those few Egyptians who practice Classics and papyrology and one of the fewest among the few who were able to make it into this community, I am posing difficult questions and will continue to do. No matter what I am reading in papyrology or Classics, I will write modern and recent history, not a remote and ancient one.
Eurocentrism in papyrology is a given fact of modernity. In the four volumes that have been published so far celebrating the story of papyrology from 1745 to 2012, only one Egyptian is portrayed — though there are many Egyptian classicists, ancient historians, Egyptologists and many other practitioners of papyrology in Egypt who could be featured in this encyclopedia. And when they are featured, they are given short shrift: the biography of Abdallah Hassan el-Mosallamy (1934–1998) of Ain Shams University (ASU) in Cairo, Egypt, in two pages (357–358) of the first volume of “Who’s Who in Papyrology” is dwarfed by the biographies of seventy six hermae of Western papyrology.
Eurocentrism is an ideology that has nothing to do with being Western or living in the East. It is an ideology that has to do mainly with the colonial and imperial legacy of industrial Europe. Those in Europe can barely perceive the mechanism of this ideology. In Egypt, however, Eurocentrism is unveiled. As an Egyptian, I have had the privilege of what sociologists call “distanciation” — because of my background, I see how Eurocentrism works and the trauma it creates. And from my point of view, the need to decolonize the troubled archive of Eurocentrism in papyrology and Classics has never been more pressing.
In 2015 I gave a talk in which I outlined the customary Eurocentrism of papyrology — a field of study that contains a paradox, given that its practice should be contextualized within the overall historical tradition of classical studies, but its object of study (texts) come from Egypt. I also highlighted the fact that papyrological Eurocentrism mainly stems from publication practices; digitization opens up possibilities for breaking through the Eurocentric nature of papyrology.
This talk was well received by a substantial number of my colleagues working in the West. That talk and a post by Franziska Naether triggered a discussion among colleagues criticizing Western-centrism from inside. In the main, however, my views were considered unacceptable. In October 2015, as a homo novus coming from Egypt into the realm of European papyrology, my words were dismissed as a rant. And the reactions to my talk only taught me more about Eurocentrism.
One commentator on Facebook, who is part of the papyrological community, wrote the following: “Rant or not rant [this] is not the question. It is quite amazing to see how the Egyptian point of view in papyrology is immediately dismissed as illegitimate […] his […] question commanded one formal reply followed by deafening silence […] Important issue, though. Epigraphy could go along in there too.”
And indeed, this person was right to include epigraphy, as I was not writing — nor am I writing now — only about Greek and Latin manuscripts. Rather, I meant to implicate all classical text-bearing artefacts found in Egypt, which are by definition Egyptian and not Greek to me. All of these objects belong to Egypt, not the “West.”
Despite my talk, the field of papyrology remained as Eurocentric as it ever was. At the 28th International Congress of Papyrologists in 2016, where Roberta Mazza demanded in a speech that the Egyptian official language (i.e. Arabic) should be a congress language just like English, French, German, and Italian, the collective response to her call was, unfortunately, silence. This reaction made me realize what European papyrology understands to be “Egyptian.” Europe understands Egypt as ancient — it’s a source land of antiquities, not a place of continuity. Therefore, in the words of Donald Malcolm Reid, “Egypt ceases to be Egypt when it ceases to be ancient.”
Those threatened by my words seem preoccupied with Europe and the cause of Europe. To them, Egypt and Greece are nothing but peripheries of the center. Even Greece ceases to be Greece when it ceases to serve the cause of Europe and to be ancient.
When critics dismissed me as a ranting Egyptian they were participating in the tired Orientalist cliché that Egyptians are ignorant and Europeans are the custodians of knowledge and saviors of culture, civilization, and history. And indeed, despite the fact that papyrology should belong to Egyptians too, the field is overwhelmingly constructed to be European. Katherine Blouin recently documented the makeup of the International Congress of Papyrologists (ICP), showing how male and Eurocentric international committees of antiquity-related fields of studies are. Despite the fact that there are Egyptian papyrologists too, the 2019 conference was the fourth in a row to be held in Europe. The 2022 conference will be in another major European metropole: Paris.
In Everyday Orientalism, I, Katherine Blouin, and Rachel Mairs, sometimes separately and in many cases jointly, have been systematically analyzing many other incidents and academic events in papyrology. Speaking for myself, I would say that I came to the same conclusion that Dan-el Padilla Peralta came to regarding Classics: Classics will thrive not by complacency, but by personal and collective initiatives and learned projects aiming at overcoming the mistakes of the past, decolonizing the curriculum, and opening it up to underrepresented groups.
This long and costly process is called in German Vergangenheitsbewältigung and involves, in the case of papyrology, coming to terms with the colonial past; forgiving but not forgetting. Dismissing every case of illicit papyrus acquisition and sale as an individual pathology confuses symptoms with causes and will provide us with no solutions and more perplexity. Those interested in understanding more about the interconnectedness of what we are doing in Classics and papyrology, in print or digitally, with the wider communities’ quests for justice and equality in the Global South and North, can tune in to an extensive discussion involving me and several other colleagues here.
The Need for a Paradigm Shift
Before the twentieth century there was no such thing as a body of knowledge labeled “papyrology.” Now, after more than one hundred years of hard work, papyrology is taught and practiced in Cairo, Oxford, London, Paris, Heidelberg, New York, and Michigan–just to name a few of the most prominent collections of papyri and centers of study for papyrology.
Yet I would argue that the papyrologist as a profession doesn’t exist, except in university halls (i.e., as a professorship). A degree in papyrology will not bring you security, unless you have a university job. In a perfect world, you would get a tenured or a tenure-track position, but in most cases the best you can get is a temporary contract. It’s difficult to promote professionalism as the profession itself is dwindling.
After no less than ten years of stressful and extremely expensive academic study of papyrology (BA, MPhil, DPhil) you are either a professor of papyrology, with tenure or without, an archivist, a curator–or nothing! You might sleep almost every day on an empty stomach, but in your sleep, if you get any, you dream of money and fame beyond imagination. Alexandre Afonso of King’s College London wrote that academia works very much the same way that drug gangs work. This is also true in papyrology. It is a dangerous business, and the possibility of dying by your own hand, if not by that of others, is high. This is not a place where professionalism thrives, it’s a place where the lucky few are kings over their domain.
Herbert C. Youtie, who was a leading American professor of papyrology at Michigan, and whose works are often considered a “first read” for any one who is “interested in the techniques and technicalities of editing papyri” (p. 46) wrote in 1962 that a papyrologist is an artificer of fact, not a university professor. This answer romanticizes “the papyrologist” and, by placing him on such a pedestal, imbues people like Obbink with too much power.
Seven years ago in 2011, Dr. Dirk Obbink was an American expert working in Oxford University, a “legend” and “Genius & Passion!!!” as two viewers of his interview with Classics Confidential commented. He talked in this video about the most advanced imaging techniques and algorithms of his project “Ancient Lives”. In 2014 Prof. Tim Whitmarsh, then Professor of Ancient Literatures at Oxford University, described him as the one who made “Sappho Sing Again.” On March 1st, 2016, World Monuments Fund Britain welcomed Obbink to the Royal Geographical Society in London, where he gave a lecture about the project, naming it “The World’s Largest Archeological Project.” A public comment on this video reads, “This is jaw dropping.”
Why did Obbink do what he seems to have done? Because he could.
The need for a paradigm shift is urgent, but how can we move forward?
In a talk that I gave in November 2015, I made some suggestions regarding what we should be doing in order to get over Eurocentrism and this dilemma in papyrology. More recently, in my last talk at the most recent International Congress of Papyrology in Lecce, Italy (which has also been published in Everyday Orientalism in Arabic and in English), I revisited the topic once again and stressed the need for a proper dialogue between academic and non-academic stakeholders in Egypt and in Europe to get out of this historical, pedagogical, and epistemological dilemma that leads to this Gordian Knot of papyrology and Classics. The main focus of my talk was knowledge and power struggles over Egypt and the Egyptians. In the English version I stated clearly that “Without a proper dialogue and conversations between Egyptian scholars, representing Egypt, and Western scholars, representing Europe and its American offshoot, there is no future for papyrology in the twenty-first century.”
Yet, as one of my best friends said, “It it is impossible to suggest partnership and solutions to those who do not want to listen.” I can’t help but agree with him. The archive of Egyptian papyri and artefacts in European and American academic and cultural institutions is the most widely dispersed cultural heritage of a country in the world. The time has come for Western states to admit their full responsibility for the nationalistic modernity in which we are living now and the great damage they inflicted upon the historical national archive of the first nation-state in human history. This is a responsibility that brings with it an obligation for a comprehensive decoloniality.
Usama Gad is an Egyptian classicist, papyrologist, and digital humanist at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt, and a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Studies at the University of London.
He is also a columnist in several Cairo- and London-based newspapers, active twitterist and blogger at Everyday Orientalism and Classics in Arabic. His writings, in English and Arabic, cover a wide range of topics pertaining to Egyptian classical antiquity and modernity.
