Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt: Arabic Archaeological Diaries and Archives in Translation
In the early part of the twentieth century, a German archaeologist named Hans Alexander Winkler lived briefly in the southern town of Qift (near Luxor), where he wrote an ethnographic account of spirit possession among the so-called ‘fellahin,’ a term still often associated in popular culture with a traditional and uneducated peasantry from the South of Egypt. Originally published in German and later translated into English as Ghost Riders of Upper Egypt, Winkler’s study focused on the folk life and religious customs of rural Egypt. While Ghost Riders showed the traditional side of village life, Qift was also home to Egypt’s most elite community of archaeological foremen and technicians, known professionally as Quftis. Renowned for their advanced skills and expertise in archaeological excavation since the end of the nineteenth century, many Quftis also left behind letters, accounts, notebooks, and photos that form a shadow archive within the global archive of archaeology. This project pieces together the historical record of the Quftis’ work through fragments of Arabic manuscript material scattered across archaeological archives, including a unique corpus of Arabic diaries documenting the Harvard–Boston Museum of Fine Arts excavations at fifteen different archaeological sites in Egypt and northern Sudan during the first half of the twentieth century. The diaries are written in a mixture of Classical Arabic and two dialects of Egyptian Arabic, from Cairo and Upper Egypt, as well as a special language of archaeological practice created by the Quftis who wrote them. My work as a EUME Fellow focuses on the translation challenges presented by the diaries and their collective authorship, aiming to make the Quftis’ work as Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt properly citable in archaeological literature.