Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt: Arabic Archaeological Diaries and Archives
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 (‘peasant farmers’) of southern 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. But while Ghost Riders showed the traditional side of village life, Qift was also home to Egypt’s most elite community of skilled archaeological foremen and technicians, known professionally as Quftis.
Whereas networks of academic production by foreign archaeologists in Egypt and Sudan are well-known and often studied, little is known about the Arabic excavation networks underlying archaeological research since the nineteenth century. This project brings together a large database of primary sources collected from archaeological archives, field reports, and correspondence within and outside Egypt. The letters, notebooks, diaries, photographs, films, drawings, reports, account books, and other documents in this database form a shadow archive in the history of archaeology. This shadow archive includes a significant portion of materials written in Arabic, such as a unique and unpublished corpus of 73 Arabic excavation diaries (approx. 6600 manuscript pages) written by archaeological foremen from Qift during the first half of the twentieth century, which are the subject of my ongoing research as an affiliated EUME Fellow.