The Unsung Heroes of Egyptian Archaeology
Kenzy Fahmy
When we talk about the history of archaeology in Egypt, it’s names like Carter, Petrie, Champollion and Belzoni that tend to take up most of the space in conversation, names of European men. Since the early days of ‘modern’ archaeology, the field has been dominated by foreigners. But there is an essential element of archaeological excavation that has received little to no credit over the years, the local workforce.
When Howard Carter made his momentous discovery in 1922, the excavation made headlines around the world and his name immediately went down in history. Carter was hailed for being the one to finally uncover the long-sought-after tomb of Tutankhamun, still sealed and protected. There was no mention of course of the many Egyptian workers without whom the discovery would not have been possible.
Egyptian foremen, or Rayes, and local excavation workers, once called ‘basket boys’, have been at the heart of excavations here for centuries, passing down their skills and expertise from one generation to the next. Many of these men, and sometimes women, came from villages that were situated near archaeological sites and were already familiar with them. Two Upper Egyptian villages in particular have been known to produce the bulk of the local archaeological workforce: Qurna, which lies on the West Bank right at the foot of the Theban Necropolis, and Quft, an East Bank village just north of Luxor.
In 1893, British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie began training men from Quft, teaching them the delicate process of digging and unearthing precious artifacts. He even took his Qufti workers with him to Palestine. People from the village still work on excavation sites around Egypt, although there are far less of them now. Like so many other skilled professions, the younger generation has moved onto more modern lifestyles and is less interested in learning the tricks of the trade from their parents.
Qurna’s story, however, is a little more complicated. The location of the village placed it right at the heart of the country’s biggest archaeological sites, with the Valley of the Kings on one side and Luxor on the other. It was the Qurnawis who helped Carter discover Tutankhamun’s final resting place, as they had done with countless other archaeologists before him. Their proximity to so many sites meant that, not only were they familiar with much of what lay under the sand still, but many of their homes were actually built right on top of ancient burial grounds, some villagers even lived inside the tombs.
The arrival of European collectors and government representatives looking to fill up museums meant that a new market had opened up, a very lucrative one. The collectors saw a way to benefit from the Qurnawis, who had access and were willing to dig up precious antiquities, from jewelry and pottery to entire mummies, and the Qurnawis in turn saw a way to profit from the foreign visitors; a perfect recipe for widespread looting and the unchecked trade of ancient Egyptian heritage.
Between the 1940s and the 1990s, the Egyptian government, seeking to curb the damage being done to the tombs and monuments in the area, began to put into action a plan to vacate the village of Qurna. The famous Egyptian architect, Hassan Fathy, was commissioned to design a new village for them, what would become New Qurna, but this endeavor turned out to be a failure and the Qurnawis refused to move. It was only during the 90s that the government succeeded in its plan, providing the locals with alternate housing and forcing them to finally move out. By 2009, the old village had been for the most part razed to the ground. Qurna now serves as a great lesson in the importance of including and educating the local communities in archaeological missions.
Local labor has historically gone unmentioned, excluded from non-manual tasks like documentation, analysis and publication, their contributions rarely credited, even though it’s often them who help train new archaeologists in field work. Only recently have people begun to shine a spotlight on them. More and more research is being done today to discover and document the Egyptians who worked behind the scenes to excavate Egypt’s archaeological sites.
Egypt is trying to turn the tables, educating and training a new generation of archaeologists and Egyptologists. After independence was gained from the British in the early 20th century, Egypt began asserting more control over its archaeological sites, installing local supervisors in an attempt to limit the number of artifacts that left the country. We quickly realized we needed to better educate and train those supervisors and inspectors, and eventually, during the 1990s, the first field schools began to pop up.
Today, there are more and more Egyptian archaeologists working in the field, more and more local specialists. The gaps between the manual and non-manual processes are being bridged so that the local members of the mission can be more involved and can contribute in more ways. Efforts are being made to distance ourselves from the antiquated colonial attitudes once held towards local workers and become more inclusive, giving credit where credit is due, and rewarding fairly those who contribute to the field. We would be nowhere without the Egyptian men and women who’ve worked tirelessly to uncover our ancient heritage; thankfully, this fact is finally making its way into the mainstream.