In cooperation with the BEYONDREST Research Group.
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. Hans Alexander Winkler’s Ghost Riders of Upper Egypt (originally published in 1936) showed the folksy side of village life, but Quft was also home to Egypt’s most elite community of archaeological foremen (rūyasa) known as Quftis, renowned for their advanced knowledge and skills in archaeological excavation since 1895. In this talk, I will present an overview of the Quftis’ historical record as “Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt”: skilled foremen and field technicians whose embodied knowledge lurks behind the monographic publications that make up our body of modern literature about ancient Egypt, the Sudan, and the Middle East. As part of the Quftis’ unpublished written record, the talk will focus on the production of a large archive of Arabic excavation diaries documenting archaeological work in Egypt and Sudan in the first half of the 20th Century. The main corpus of this material includes over 6,500 unique manuscript pages in 73 diary volumes, which form part of archaeological archives at Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. These diaries were written by two generations of Egyptian foremen in a mixture of Classical, Cairene, and Upper Egyptian Arabic. The presentation will cover aspects of their collective authorship, dialects, narrative voice, challenges of translation, and trans-archival context.
Wendy Doyon received her PhD in Middle East History at the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 with a dissertation entitled “Empire of Dust: Egyptian Archaeology and Archaeological Labor in Nineteenth-century Egypt.” Since then, she has been living and working in Cairo as a CAORC Fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt, before joining the Forum as a EUME Fellow in 2024/25. Her work as a postdoc includes two projects: the publication of her dissertation as a book, which looks at the role of archaeology in Egyptian state-building and society in the 19th Century; and as co-director of an international research project to study and publish the “Arabic Excavation Archive from Quft.” She has written several articles on the history of Egyptology, archaeological labor, and Egyptian museums, and has participated in excavations at Abydos in Upper Egypt for many years.
Ilona Regulski is a curator at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, where she oversees part of the Egypt and Sudan collections. Her scholarly interests lie in ancient scripts and languages, with a particular emphasis on ritual narratives and the transmission of texts. Ilona studied Egyptology at the universities of Leuven (Belgium) and Münster (Germany), earning her PhD from Leuven University in 2007. Her professional journey includes research fellowships at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels (2002-2004) and a tenure as assistant director of the Dutch-Flemish Institute in Cairo (2005-10). She also served as a guest lecturer at Yale University in 2011 and held a Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2012-13. From 2014 to 2023, Ilona was the Curator of Egyptian Written Culture at the British Museum, where she was responsible for the papyrus collection and other inscribed materials, including the Rosetta Stone.
Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.
This event is part of the conversation series Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm of the BEYONDREST Research Group. “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge” (BEYONDREST) is an ERC-funded, five-year research project at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Project No. 101045661). More information on the project and the conversation series can he found here.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the speaker(s) and author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union, nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.