Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt: Arabic Archaeological Diaries and Archives in Translation
In the early part of the twentieth century, the rural community of Quft, Upper Egypt, provided the setting for an ethnographic account of spirit possession among the so-called “fellahin,” a term often associated in popular culture with a traditional and presumably uneducated peasantry from the South of Egypt. Ghost Riders of Upper Egypt (Winkler 2009 [1936]) showed the folksy side of village life, but Quft was also home to Egypt’s most elite community of archaeological foremen (ruyasa) known as Quftis. Renowned for their advanced knowledge and skills in archaeological excavation since 1895, many Quftis also wrote accounts, letters, and other kinds of documentation that survive in fragments of archaeological archives. This project examines a unique collection of Arabic diaries documenting the Harvard–Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Wellcome excavations at seventeen archaeological sites in Egypt and Sudan, ca. 1913–1940. These diary manuscripts were collectively written by Qufti ruyasa in a mixture of Classical, Cairene, and Upper Egyptian Arabic, and none have ever been published in Arabic or in translation. My work as a EUME Fellow this year focuses on the translation challenges presented by the Mixed Arabic and collective voice of this diary corpus, as well as the relationship between authorship, language ideology, and collective knowledge production in the Quftis’ writing. Selected manuscript translations aim to make the Quftis’ work properly citable, helping to shift the paradigm for Egyptian communities in archaeology from “ghost writers” to authors.