Visualizing a monumental past: Archeology,Nasser’s Egypt,and the early Cold War

Decolonizing ancient Egypt

Whether accurately or not, the proposals governing what happened at Mit Rahina represented the work as a new type of excavation: one attuned to the era of Egyptian decolonization under Nasser. A now-standard historical narrative illustrates why this argument was possible. ⁷ As in other countries subject to colonial rule, archeological excavation and survey in Egypt had been contentious for decades. Who defined the Egyptian past? Who controlled the institutions and individuals interested in its inquiry? Who could take control of the sites, monuments, and artifacts that excavation and survey helped to constitute and recover? In the era of the so-called New Imperialism and Britain’s (post-1882) occupation and control of the country, these were questions that drove debate in Egypt; a debate heightened by nationalist contention, the presence of foreign archeological concessions, and an Egyptian Antiquities Service placed (because of the terms of the Entente Cordiale) under the permanent directorship of a Frenchman and staffed by many British officials.

After 1922, when the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun coincided with Britain’s granting of – nominal and tightly controlled – independence to Egypt, matters seemed to improve somewhat, at least from a nationalist perspective. A new cadre of Egyptians began to graduate from the country’s growing number of universities with qualifications relating to antiquities. These graduates – often, although not always, trained by Europeans – then used their qualifications to work in the Antiquities Service at the same time as the distribution of Egyptian antiquities abroad (highly desirable to the sponsors of foreign missions) became more controlled. Tutankhamun’s tomb acted as a bellweather in this matter: despite the controversy surrounding this outcome, artifacts from the tomb never left Egypt.

But matters really appeared to change following the Free Officers’ coup of July 1952. The Officers forced King Faruq, the British-backed monarch of Egypt, to abdicate, then in 1954 the turning of Egypt’s political tide led the British government to agree to the withdrawal of its remaining troops in the country. Meanwhile, matters related to Egyptian antiquities themselves became embroiled in these changes. In late 1952, the French director of the Antiquities Service, Étienne Drioton (1889–1961), found himself out of a job. He was replaced by Mustafa Amer (1896–1973), an Egyptian geographer and prehistorian who had been head of Alexandria (formerly Faruq) University. Egypt’s government also reconstituted and renamed the institution that Amer now led. Formerly possessing a remit relating solely to the country’s pharaonic past, the Antiquities Service became the DoA and was tasked with dealing with all facets of Egypt’s pre-nineteenth-century history.

Much in the country also continued as normal. The revolution – and Nasser’s role as its figurehead – started more as a feat of political representation than as a political reality. In the early days of their coup, the Free Officers had planned to return to their barracks; they wanted only to set what they saw as a corrupted Egypt back on a sound national course. Yet increasingly, the regime and the press represented Egypt as revolutionary: particularly after the moment in 1954 when Nasser helped to place Egypt’s first president, his fellow Free Officer Muhammad Nagib, under house arrest. But even then, the revolution often simply developed interwar modernization schemes. As revolutionary rhetoric heightened in conjunction with Nasser’s apparently inexorable rise (in 1956) to the Egyptian presidency, (revolutionary) appearance could often override reality. ⁸

In this political climate, foreign institutions that still wanted to excavate in Egypt saw a need to tread carefully. For example, in the months following the Free Officers’ coup, Britain’s Egypt Exploration Society (EES) was granted a concession to dig at the site of Saqqara “on behalf of, and in collaboration with, the Department of Antiquities.” ⁹ This agreement was almost entirely rhetorical: committee minutes reveal that the ‘collaboration’, suggested by the EES, provided an excuse to continue the earlier work of the British organization’s new field director, the archeologist Walter Bryan Emery (1903–71), who had excavated monumental tombs at the site while working for the Antiquities Service in the interwar period. ¹⁰ The plans for Mit Rahina went further, however, and are therefore worth examining in some detail.

Modernizing ancient Egypt

Initiated after the EES excavations, the program for the Mit Rahina work set out to attend not only to the rhetoric, but also to the slow development of Egypt’s revolution. The dig’s supporters, whether Egyptian or American, promoted the work as a new way of conducting archeology in Egypt. The excavation was to help constitute a novel and altruistic field practice that paid real attention to the modernization policies enjoying a growing currency in the country (and, by extension, in the decolonizing world at large). The dig would implicitly follow such policies as they were promoted by the American government, too. Multiple, competing interests circulated around the Mit Rahina work from the start.

For the Egyptians involved, the proposed work represented the chance both to assert their modernizing credentials and to further the conditions in which those credentials might flourish. Interwar discussions about modernization and the place of Egypt in the world were being absorbed into revolutionary discourse. As the EES work at Saqqara suggests, this discourse did not discount, and in fact often encouraged, various forms of international collaboration. But the Mit Rahina work represented an attempt to take advantage of the currency held by one particular nation; as the Cold War heightened and Britain’s empire crumbled, the United States had moved to gain influence in the Middle East. Interestingly, Egyptian officials appear to have specifically targeted the UM – and not, say, the EES – as a possible, and genuine, collaborative partner for the DoA.

In early 1953, on behalf of Egypt, one Ali R. Ansari held an informal discussion in Philadelphia regarding the possibility of the UM working in the country. The conversation took place with the head of the institution’s Egyptian Section, the émigré German Egyptologist Rudolf Anthes (1896–1985), and the UM’s director, Froelich Rainey (1907–92). Correspondence with Egypt’s Ministry of Education and the Egyptian Embassy in Washington followed and, in September 1953, Mustafa Amer of the DoA himself visited Philadelphia to discuss matters. ¹¹ Amer had first been trained at Cairo’s Dar al-ʿUlum, an institution born of late nineteenth-century reforms that trained future schoolteachers using a hybrid (Arabic-Islamic/European) curriculum. Next, he had attended the University of Liverpool, where he took a BA and an MA in geography. Amer’s course of study had led him to believe in the value of collaborative scientific internationalism for national development. ¹² Now was the right time to put this ideal to work, and the UM appeared to be the right collaborative partner. Meanwhile, in a series of meetings that Rudolf Anthes conducted in Egypt in early 1954, many of the Egyptian archeologists who occupied the upper echelons of Amer’s DoA followed suit in stressing their enthusiasm for collaboration. Many of these practitioners were interwar graduates of Egyptian institutions. They possessed strong nationalist beliefs but, like Amer, they had also become predisposed to scientific internationalism. Working with the UM presented a genuine opportunity to advance this aim and their work. ¹³

These archeologists also had other reasons for supporting collaboration. After his initial visit to Egypt, Anthes selected Mit Rahina as the location of the collaborative work rather than any of the other sites that departmental officials offered him. Work at Mit Rahina suited departmental officials well, because it helped to advance one of the policies adopted under the Free Officers in the early days of their command. In September 1952, the Officers instigated agrarian reform, redistributing land and placing boundaries on its ownership. The measure was limited in size, and was more the product of interwar discussions relating to Egyptian modernization than of any revolutionary fervor. Yet in his final proposal for the Mit Rahina work, Anthes emphasized that digging at Mit Rahina would support Egypt’s new land reform policy: “I should like to stress that… the Egyptian government is immediately interested in its [Mit Rahina’s] clearance; the question is how far this area should be reserved to the Antiquities Department and the rest be given free to the peasants, for cultivation.” ¹⁴

Meanwhile, other novel aspects of the Mit Rahina collaboration were tied up with the interests of the UM and, in particular, with Froelich Rainey. Known for hosting the hit CBS television show What in the World?, Rainey was charismatic, politically active, and promotionally astute. He had worked for the U.S. foreign service, had connections to the fledgling CIA, and was deeply involved in discussions about America’s role in the world during the early Cold War: from the late 1940s onwards, he was a member of the Philadelphia Committee on Foreign Relations. When he took control of a cash-strapped UM after the Second World War, Rainey developed an aggressive program of international fieldwork designed not only to prove attractive to sponsors, but also to sell a positive, altruistic vision of America to enable collaboration with geopolitically strategic countries. ¹⁵

Thus, with (the firmly anti-totalitarian) Anthes appointed as leader, the UM would work in Egypt with these aims in mind. ¹⁶ At Mit Rahina, a program of skill transfer would take place. Embodying the modernization narrative promoted by contemporary American aid programs, the UM pledged to provide experts to help the DoA build technical capacity in the field. Simultaneously, this process would quietly inculcate American values among the Egyptians involved. American aid programs in the early Cold War had developed out of the interwar work of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which sought to develop adherence to national ideals in this Depression-hit area of the American South. To do so, the TVA worked to build liberal rural communities at the same time as conducting agricultural and other reforms. Now, under its new development program, Point Four, the US government rolled out this practice of using agricultural reform to constitute good Americans (or, more accurately, good American allies) around the world. In Egypt in the mid-1950s, for instance, not only did the United States sponsor a winsome-sounding program of ‘Chicken Aid,’ it also created the Egyptian–American Rural Improvement Service. Although not officially linked to these programs, it is perhaps no surprise that Rainey proposed that the work at Mit Rahina should echo such schemes and take place as an “Egyptian–American archeological research program”. ¹⁷ Not only did many Egyptians seem to welcome such initiatives, but work at the site was already tied to issues of land reform. Positive omens aside, though, the success of the Mit Rahina work now relied on the sort of material that the excavation recovered.

Choosing Mit Rahina

The proposals linked to the Mit Rahina excavations meant that the collaboration would be sustained only if it appeared to be making visible the Egyptian past that all the parties involved with the work were concerned with. More accurately, the work would have to materialize just enough of that past, and just enough of the artifacts connected to it, to make sure that everyone would want to continue work at Mit Rahina and not allow the land at the site to return to agricultural use. The site needed to act as a boundary object around which diverse interests could gather. Unsurprisingly, then, Mit Rahina appears to have been chosen by Anthes in order to provide as great a chance as possible of this outcome occurring; the site offered a sense of material possibility that fit with these various desires.

Despite the slow-burning arrival of revolution in Egypt, a particular vision of monumentality had started to coalesce in the country, whether in terms of the remaking of Cairo or in terms of the manner in which the new regime and its institutions represented the national past. These processes had clear, pre-1952 origins, but could now be used to advantage in the quest to construct a modern, revolutionary country. As noted earlier, places like Mit Rahina therefore received new museum structures to house monumental pharaonic sculpture; the colossus of Ramses II displayed within the Mit Rahina building represented the glories that such new structures hoped to revive. Meanwhile, in January 1955, as Anthes arrived at the site to prepare for the first season of excavation, he noted in his diary that “the Minister of Municipal and Rural Affairs visits old Ramses, who shall be carried over to Cairo.” ¹⁸ The Minister, Wing Commander ʿAbd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, had also taken charge of the construction work in the city, and had come to Mit Rahina to visit a second colossal statue of Ramses II. ¹⁹ Plans dictated that the statue should be raised from the ground where it lay and then transported to Cairo’s main railway station, where it would stand outside this gateway to the capital, welcoming passengers to Egypt’s revolutionary future (Figure 1). ²⁰ The symbolism was obvious, and acted as an accompaniment to other, overt acts of pharaonic monumentality; in the Egyptian desert, workmen constructed gigantic pharaonic temples and other sets for the shooting of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. ²¹

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Figure 1.

Revolutionary awakening: Preparatory work on the colossal statue of Ramses II at Mit Rahina due to be moved to the square outside Cairo’s main railway station (Akhir Saʿa, 12 January 1955, p. 11).

A glorious pharaonic past was increasingly visible as part of Egypt’s revolutionary future. Taking place in the midst of these events, excavating at Mit Rahina offered a calculated chance to bolster this visibility and rematerialize Egypt’s former glory. As noted above, the site had long been associated by Egyptologists with Memphis, Egypt’s ‘capital city’ during the so-called Old Kingdom, and the period (c.2686–2125 BC) also defined as the age of pyramid-building. ²² Yet in reality, little evidence of that settlement had been recovered beyond the connected (and highly visible) pyramid and cemetery fields on its neighboring desert escarpment at sites like Giza and Saqqara. The city proper, located in what was now the Nile’s floodplain (or so scholars claimed), had barely been excavated. ²³ Excavating at Mit Rahina therefore offered considerable opportunities.

Anthes bet that the form of archeological skill he set out to transfer could resurrect pharaonic monumentality at the site on a significant scale. He said of Mit Rahina: “in the long run, it promises important discoveries with certainty.” ²⁴ He was confident, because the team was to treat work at Mit Rahina as they might have treated work on a standing structure. Elsewhere in Egypt, where excavation and survey dealt mostly with the sort of temples and monumental tombs that Anthes expected to find, this approach had rendered results. Many of these structures were (or could be made to appear) free-standing, or be helped to ‘emerge’ from within their location on the desert edge (Figure 2). Perhaps more importantly, though, this methodology had also been practiced by Rudolf Anthes with individuals who had developed professional credibility as a result of such work. Using this standard, then, the assumption was that Mit Rahina could become a successful boundary object.

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Figure 2.

A monumental tomb ‘emerging’ at the site of Saqqara, Egypt, after excavation by the Egypt Exploration Society (photo courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society).

Anthes had first gained field experience in Egypt during the 1920s, working for the Imperial German Institute of Egyptian Archeology in Luxor from 1927 to 1929. The institute’s leader, Ludwig Borchardt (1863–1938), “intended to establish his own branch of Egyptology within the field of architectural history.” ²⁵ This process, linked to grand narratives of European civilization, involved surveying ancient structures to provide an architectural account of the phases of ancient Egyptian history. Meanwhile, this process was similar to work in other places embroiled in monumental ancient-historical discourses, suggesting the extent to which Anthes hoped to apply what appeared to be a universal norm of excavation, despite the occasionally problematic connotations of its usage. In Mussolini’s Italy, for instance, Roman archeology was “dominated by topographic approaches whose primary goal was the recovery and reconstruction of specific sites … already recorded in the historical narrative.” ²⁶

The technique investigated and illustrated ancient historical architectural phases using a method of top-down (that is, horizontal) planning. At the same time, philologists like Anthes copied the inscriptions on and around the structures being investigated, analysis of which sources provided evidence of the date of the architecture within ancient Egyptian history. Occasionally, too, practitioners produced sumptuous, near-modernist reconstructions of ancient temples and other monumental structures. For instance, work conducted under Borchardt at the site of Amarna in Middle Egypt and eventually published by Herbert Ricke (1901–76), a friend of Anthes from Luxor, illustrates this set of practices in action. ²⁷ Meanwhile, around Mit Rahina, archeologists excavated sites in a similar manner and, before the dig started, Anthes discussed work with these respected professionals. ²⁸ On the Saqqara desert escarpment a few miles to the west, Emery, whose training was originally as a marine draftsman, made architectural plans and reconstructions of monumental tombs for the EES; his publications also featured the inscriptions connected to these structures. In the low desert across the river at Helwan, one of the first publications of the Egyptian archeologist Zaki Saad’s (1901–82) excavation of the tombs at the site was its plan. ²⁹

In Egypt, one mode of (monumental, modernist, and philologically connected) excavation dominated, cutting across a variety of different national and professional backgrounds. It is little wonder that such work influenced practices at Mit Rahina; not only could the technique make ancient monuments live again as symbols of – in this case revolutionary – modernity, it also constituted a standard that Anthes understood. By 1954, Borchardt’s Imperial German Institute had become the Swiss Institute for Architectural and Archae-ological Research in Cairo. Ricke was now the institution’s director. ³⁰ When Anthes conducted final negotiations with the DoA in early 1954, he had intense discussions with his old friend in an attempt to find an architect for Mit Rahina. Anthes could conduct philological work at Mit Rahina himself, yet he noted that he wanted “to try and get Ricke’s assistant [a trained architect], and an Egyptian student of architecture, in order to take the advantages of the supervised architect and to raise an Egyptian man in this field.” ³¹ Architecture was to be the paramount focus of the dig’s vaunted training element.

This focus seemed all to the good. Excavating at Mit Rahina would uncover monumental remains dating from beyond the Old Kingdom and tie in with the symbolic work being carried out in Egypt around pharaohs like Ramses II. Ramses ruled during the New Kingdom: the period (c. 1550–1069 BC) often defined by Egyptologists as comprising Egypt’s ancient ‘empire’. ³² That empire was now increasingly ripe for reconstitution as Nasser’s pan-Arab ambitions grew. ³³ Accordingly, Anthes noted in the Mit Rahina proposals that the work “should reveal” the “religious centre of Memphis during the Empire.” ³⁴ Excavating at Mit Rahina would uncover the monuments of an imperial past that might now live again. Even if the dig ensured that some land at the site would return to agricultural use, the work would also help to make Egypt’s revolution material by resurrecting ancient Egyptian glories. Some of DeMille’s Hollywood glamor would brush off on everyone involved.

This strategy also encompassed a scientific claim. Beyond revealing a religious center, Anthes hoped that the rather more mundane chance to visualize the “layouts … development, and … relation to other sections” of that center would make the Mit Rahina work self-evidently compelling to both sides involved. ³⁵ For years, Egyptologists had cast doubt about the feasibility of excavating at Memphis; the site’s location in the Nile’s floodplain meant that there was a considerable amount of groundwater to contend with. The British archeologist Flinders Petrie (1853–1942), who excavated at the site in the early twentieth century, stated that “to clear the temple sites alone would take probably twenty years, as it is only possible to work for a few weeks after the water has subsided.” ³⁶ Even the UM had worked at the site and then abandoned it. ³⁷ Worse still, Bernard Bothmer (1912–93), Cairo director of the new American Research Center in Egypt, described the site as “dust” even as the new excavations started. ³⁸ For Anthes, excavating at Mit Rahina was a chance to prove these doubters wrong and advance his discipline’s work. Here, he thought, was the future of excavation in Egypt. ³⁹ If that experiment could be successfully conducted – if Memphis could actually be visualized and made material as a boundary object – then all parties should be interested in continuing the work.

Material success also offered great opportunity for the UM. The institution’s management and financial backers had made clear from the start their wish to export objects excavated from the site to America, despite no real confirmation from the DoA that this outcome would occur. Beyond Rainey, the institution’s Board of Managers was particularly keen on this strategy. Percy Madeira, a Philadelphia banker and the Board’s president, later made this point particularly clear, stating that the work should result in “worth while [sic] discussion of objects.” ⁴⁰ Moreover, as plans for the work progressed, the UM appointed a ‘Project Director,’ John Dimick, “to handle the business management and public relations of the expedition.” ⁴¹ Dimick (as much as, if not more of, a Cold Warrior than Rainey) was only involved in the work because his wife, Marion Tully Dimick, had made a substantial financial gift to the UM. ⁴² Yet nonetheless, he had also been tasked by the UM with seeking out other possible sites in Egypt for excavation. ⁴³ And it is notable in this regard that he once stated that Percy Madeira “never presented himself as an expert, but he knew what was good for the Museum, and when appropriated funds were producing adequate dividends.” ⁴⁴ Those dividends would be the sort of monumental, pharaonic artifacts that could be transported to, and displayed in, Philadelphia and that Mit Rahina, according to Anthes, offered the best chance of securing. The age of the avaricious museum – and the symbiotic relationship of such institutions with the field – was far from over. ⁴⁵

Yet despite the varying interests connected to the excavation, the work at Mit Rahina is now forgotten, and a later project embodying modernization discourses is remembered: the UNESCO-backed archeological salvage campaign that took place in Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia during the 1960s. The Nubian campaign, which took place as a result of the flooding caused by the construction of the Aswan High Dam, involved the work of technical experts from countries located across postwar political divides. Its most famous act was the moving of the monumental temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel. As I have noted elsewhere, currently available histories often make this process of international collaboration in the name of revolutionary modernism appear to have taken place sui generis. ⁴⁶ But considering its thematic similarities, the excavation at Mit Rahina seems to represent a precursor to the later campaign. Why, then, did the worlds of modernization and archeology intersect so convincingly in Nubia but not in the decade beforehand? The rest of this paper addresses this question, making clear the utility of thinking about the Mit Rahina work in terms of boundary objects.

Monumental failure

At Mit Rahina, nothing monumental was to be seen. The network of interests and aims connected to the work broke down as the excavation team struggled to find a method to solve this problem. They could not make the site a boundary object. Beyond her substantial financial gift to the excavation, Marion Tully Dimick worked at the site during the first excavation season. She also wrote a book about ancient Memphis, whose subtitle was The City of the White Wall. Her words illustrate how ill at ease she became with this epithet upon experiencing the site.

Our station wagon stopped but the angry disturbed dust rolled about us in a choking cloud. A quiet scene, palm trees, green stretches of cultivation, a tiny village. This was the site of ancient Memphis. We tried to visualize in comparison with New York, the greatest city of the modern world, teeming with people of diverse nationalities and tongues …. Now wipe it out. ⁴⁷

For Marion Dimick, Memphis had to exist on a monumental visual plane. The problem was that it didn’t. Others echoed her views. John Dimick wrote of Mit Rahina upon his arrival there that “I was not too impressed… lots of holes dug here and there.” ⁴⁸ In his words, a particular visual logic was at work: one that connected the site to ideas of urban (pharaonic) grandeur. Yet Mit Rahina was all “holes”. It was certainly not emblematic of the sort of shiny, New York-style modernity with which ‘the city’ might now be associated, whether in the America from which the Dimicks hailed or in the environs of a Cairo that was being rebuilt on a monumental level.

Nor could the site be made emblematic. The Dimicks were all-American newcomers to Egypt, but their inexperience and unease reflected the more general difficulties that the Mit Rahina excavation team experienced as they attempted to hold together the networks of interest that surrounded the site and make ancient Memphis a tangible, visible, valuable thing. Mit Rahina constituted a field site, a concessionary area of excavation defined by prior agreement. Yet that does not mean that the locale’s status as a ‘site’, meaningful beyond its concessionary identity, was established. Marion Dimick wrote that Memphis only existed “in museums, [and] on library shelves.” ⁴⁹ She was not far wrong. Despite Anthes’ confidence about Mit Rahina’s potential, he and his team now had to work to persuade others that this potential could be fulfilled. He had to make concrete the site’s status as a boundary object.

Moisture formed a significant obstacle to this outcome. The workers employed on the excavation had to constantly pump out groundwater from the bottom of trenches, which took up much of their time and energy (Figure 3). But beyond this inconvenience, the interaction of the water with the ancient material embedded within the site’s ground also created a shifting and confusing morass of strata. Initial plans involved excavation at an area called Kum al-Fakhri, one of the mounds (akwām; sing. kūm) that dotted the site. ⁵⁰ Digging down within Kum al-Fakhri’s various layers, it became clear that elements of the hoped-for monumental remains existed. However, making these remains appeal to interested parties as a boundary object created difficulties, because the modes of visualization that had taken root as part of established Egyptian excavation practice did not appear to do an effective job at making this messy, earth-bound monumentality – and therefore the site or city itself – seem coherent. At Mit Rahina, the standards associated with the coming into being of boundary objects broke down. ⁵¹ Working within the norms of Egyptian excavation practice, the team at the site found representing its monumental remains difficult, if not impossible.

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Figure 3.

Workers pumping out a trench at Mit Rahina (photo courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology).

Anthes had not been able to employ Ricke’s assistant as site architect. Instead, he employed Jean Jacquet, an architect who had previously worked in Iran for the French Délégation Archéologique. Jacquet’s initial practice at Mit Rahina was as desired, a process defined as ‘mapping’. ⁵² This work complemented other activity carried out during the dig’s first season in 1955. Anthes, true to his background, copied inscriptions, and the Dimicks drove around the site, constructing a map of the extant visible remains of Memphis. Meanwhile, the laborers employed on the work excavated in plan: in the various trenches they dug, they progressed downwards in horizontal spits. For example, on the first day of work, the first level dug descended 40cm, and at a point horizontally cross-referenced with “stick 19 of Dimick’s survey.” ⁵³ The excavation aimed to create a small series of horizontal plans within a much larger one, progressive architectural snapshots of ancient Egypt as constituted at Mit Rahina.

Within any trench at the site, then, the team aimed to excavate to a recognizable bottom layer and to plan the features along the way. At the start of the second week of the work, Anthes noted of the initial trench that “a firm floor between two walls is reached.” ⁵⁴ For a long time to come, though, this self-confident practice of characterizing excavated remains would disappear. The team could make little visual sense of the ruins that now appeared in Mit Rahina’s ground. In April 1955, during the first excavation season, Anthes wrote in his diary: “which investigation could I possibly make … in order to find out whether or not this excavation should be continued.” Even after consultation with Ricke, Anthes reflected that “Herbert doesn’t see any [obvious] solution either.” ⁵⁵

Confusion reigned. When the team at the site excavated ‘walls’, they felt confident in giving them this characterization, but could not always suggest what wider role these structures had once played. Nor could they suggest when, exactly, these walls dated from, even in terms of a relative chronology. One structure, excavated in 1955, appeared particularly problematic. The team termed this structure the “4m.-wall” in reference to its width, and later – during the second season of fieldwork, which took place in 1956 – claimed it to be the southern part of a presumed wall surrounding a small temple of Ramses II. Yet a few days after its appearance, Anthes wrote that “I still wonder whether this wall belonged to the temple,” despite Jean Jacquet’s qualified assertion that it probably did. ⁵⁶ To a great extent, this uncertainty seemed to arise because of the various remains that surrounded the structure.

Viewing the wall in plan within these complex accumulations, Anthes and Jacquet found it difficult to make credible claims about the structure’s function. Unable to clearly visualize a monumental structure within the complex earth, the pair could not convince themselves of the parameters of its existence, let alone convince anyone else. The report that Jacquet completed after the end of the 1955 excavation season questioned why the 4m.-wall was not parallel to the structure to its north: the ‘Sanctuary’ of the temple. Jacquet also noted that the wall appeared to be protecting the Sanctuary from later accumulations of domestic and craft structures that had been built to its south. Viewed in plan, the wall did not (as expected) appear to be part of the temple, but rather appeared to be a later structure built to protect a sacred spot from incursion. ⁵⁷ It was little surprise that Anthes, though keen to continue at Mit Rahina, wrote to Rainey that “there is nothing exciting in our work.” ⁵⁸ At the site, the excavation team was finding it impossible to constitute any coherent monument from the earth. As a result, they now faced significant pressure to justify their presence at Mit Rahina to the UM’s leadership. During the 1955 season, Percy Madeira inspected the dig and asked: “did we come all the way to Egypt to find the corner of a wall?” ⁵⁹ At Mit Rahina, (excavated) things were not looking good, and the site’s status as a boundary object looked illusive at best.

People problems

Unfortunately, matters only got worse. In early 1956, as the second season of excavation at Mit Rahina started, the “crater-like excavation” was not the team’s only worry. ⁶⁰ They also had a connected trainee problem. For the most part, the individuals placed in charge of the actual work of excavation under the direction of the UM’s team worked steadily. They constituted a body of skilled archeological journeymen from the village of Quft in Middle Egypt. Originally employed by Petrie, these Quftis, as they had become known, now excavated across Egypt and the Middle East and took charge of the local villagers who were also routinely employed on excavations. Yet true to the stereotypical relationship of Cairene elites with their ‘backward’ southern compatriots (on which topic more below), the Quftis were not the ones to be given further training. ⁶¹ Instead, the opportunity of skill transfer was to be given to selected individuals employed by the DoA whom the modernizers in charge of the institution deemed to be both worthy and capable of development.

The training work at Mit Rahina constituted less a process of general archeological skill transfer, more a process of transferring skills thought necessary to field leadership. But the breakdown in excavation routine meant that the individuals in charge attempted to transfer skills that seemed useless, stretching their credibility to breaking point. The failure to transform Mit Rahina into a boundary object where methodological standards could be successfully transferred meant that the authority of the dig’s leaders hemorrhaged. Indeed, this process had not even been tested during the first season of excavation in 1955. Aside from the many laborers employed at the site, the one non-Qufti Egyptian involved in the field that year was Hasan Bakry. Bakry was departmental inspector to the excavation, and also took the role of Anthes’ assistant. ⁶² This position, in addition to his possession of a doctorate, meant that it proved difficult to suggest that Bakry could be trained. To an extent, then, the dig’s training element failed from the start. But during the second season of excavations in 1956, the DoA had placed an architect named Ibrahim Abdel Aziz at Mit Rahina in order “to help us and to learn from Mr Jacquet.” ⁶³ Now, skill transfer mattered.

Given the team’s problems in the field, this situation did not augur well, although initially events seemed to proceed without trouble. In February 1956, during the first full month of the second excavation season, Anthes noted that “Abd el Aziz [sic] helps Jacquet with surveying”; there are numerous other such dull statements of routine throughout his diary that month. ⁶⁴ Later in the season, though, things started to go wrong. Abdel Aziz could clearly carry out the appropriate sort of work – although not with a better outcome than anyone else at the site – and in fact had worked at a different area of the Memphite ruin field a couple of years previously. ⁶⁵ The dig apparently pointless, he therefore came and went as he pleased. In April, Anthes phoned Mustafa Amer to tell him that “I should like to have him [Abdel Aziz] removed because we do not need him and do not want him any longer.” ⁶⁶ Abdel Aziz turned up irregularly after this call, but never to much more than a frosty reception.

This issue, though, merely reflected wider problems. Anthes complained that Abdel Aziz “does not work in a consistent style. He puts the dig here and there … [and] no certain result has been obtained.” ⁶⁷ But no one else working at Mit Rahina could make a “certain result” materialize either. Meeting with Amer in early May 1956, Anthes implicitly admitted this point. After the meeting he wrote that “first I have to show that good work is done here; then students will come.” As ancient Memphis failed to emerge from the earth, the discourse of development and the authority of the appointed experts lacked force. Mit Rahina’s immanent status as a boundary object started to come undone, even for Anthes. At the meeting, Amer was similarly contrite, suggesting that individuals beyond those of the UM’s team also felt resistance to their authority and that the DoA found the work at Mit Rahina increasingly purposeless. “Amer expressed his regret that the boys [both Abdel Aziz and Bakry] were a failure of sorts,” and he and Anthes “agreed that it would be better to have young men.” ⁶⁸

Meanwhile, departmental officials often visited Mit Rahina to check on the work. The routine aspect of these visits, though, perhaps concealed the official unease already expressed by Amer. Their steady work meant that the Quftis under contract to work at Mit Rahina possessed considerably more authority than anyone else at the site, potentially disrupting established Egyptian social hierarchies and making the constitution of the site as a boundary object harder still. In revolutionary Egypt and before, villagers like the Quftis had become subjects of study and objects of paternalistic reform, but that was meant to be the extent of the intervention. ⁶⁹ Now, though, these objects of reform threatened to transgress the limits of the position that had been established for them. ⁷⁰ Quftis had worked at Mit Rahina before: with Petrie, but also with Anthes’ UM predecessor at the site, Clarence Fisher (1876–1941). And only the Quftis could tell Anthes and his colleagues where these previous excavations had taken place, because extant maps did not clearly point to their location. Fikri, one of the Qufti ruʾasāʾ (foremen; sing. raʾīs) employed on the dig, told Anthes that “hearsay” said that Qufti laborers had planted certain palm trees during Fisher’s excavations to indicate the site of Petrie’s excavations. ⁷¹

In order to dig anywhere at all, the excavation team depended on this Qufti knowledge. And the Quftis – who alone possessed the superior Arabic language skills necessary to communicate with the local villagers employed at the site – seemed aware of their value in this regard. ⁷² Anthes went so far as to complain about one (unnamed) raʾīs being “demanding as often,” and refused a request that the Qufti laborers under this man’s control receive an extra bonus. ⁷³ Yet, quite regularly, the value of the Quftis also forced Anthes into negotiations. During these negotiations, financial matters seemed pressing, suggesting that work only ever existed one pay day away from disruption. ⁷⁴ Worse still, a precedent for such disruption existed: when Fisher had excavated at Mit Rahina, the Quftis employed by him had gone on strike. ⁷⁵ Unless something was done, Mit Rahina’s immanence as a boundary object seemed set to collapse.

Materializing Memphis

The excavation team now attempted to remake Mit Rahina as a place more suited to the sort of excavation supposed to be taking place there. This process was similar to that discussed by Christopher Henke, who studied the practices of scientific farm advisers working with Californian farmers to develop new growing practices. Henke’s study argues that these advisers face a “struggle to control the field and yet still make it appear ‘field-like’.” This struggle occurs because the advisers need to convince farmers that the growing practices they want to implement might be of value to the specific piece of land on which the farmers work. ⁷⁶ Similarly, at Mit Rahina, Anthes and his team adopted a technology designed to help them obtain methodological control over the archeological field at the same time as visually acknowledging the specificity of the time and place in which their excavation occurred. They tried to run a tight ship and materialize a boundary object: an ancient city that would be persuasive to Egyptian and American audiences.

This intervention was accidentally driven by the knowledge possessed by Anthes and others at the site of contemporary developments in archeological method. In April 1956, Anthes recorded in his field diary that “most of the day was spent with reading Mortimer Wheeler, Archaeology from the Earth.” Anthes was impressed, noting that the volume was “extremely good, gives a lot of suggestions for our work.” ⁷⁷ Wheeler (of the University of London’s Institute of Archaeology) had written his book in an attempt to shape archeological practice in the postwar world. Perhaps most notably, he wrote that “to-day, the digger must learn to read his [stratigraphic] sections, or he should be constrained from digging.” ⁷⁸ As Gavin Lucas has noted, earlier archeologists like Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers (1827–1900), Britain’s first Inspector of Ancient Monuments, had used stratigraphy to help place excavated artifacts in evolutionary sequences conceived in terms of a linear Victorian narrative of human social evolution. Now, though, Wheeler claimed that his application of stratigraphy dealt with how understanding the organization of material found in the earth could be used to visually demonstrate the diversity of pasts within a universal human narrative. Through the practice of excavating, examining and – most importantly – depicting the stratigraphic sections formed by the interplay of soil and ancient debris at the edge of archeological trenches, Wheeler claimed that archeologists could demonstrate the relative nature of past worlds across the globe.

In the postwar era, Wheeler’s was a powerful strategy. By changing the way that sections were visualized – if not, perhaps, the way in which they were excavated – Wheeler enabled the illustration of the sort of universalist relativism expressed by UNESCO and other recently founded multilateral institutions (Figure 4). ⁷⁹ His approach also possessed further ordering potential. Emphasizing his military background and experience directing the Archaeological Survey of India, much of the methodology that Wheeler set forward rested on what he saw as the issue of organizing the workers charged with digging archeological sites. ⁸⁰ As a result – and alongside his London colleague Kathleen Kenyon (1906–78) – Wheeler set forward a system of gridded area excavation “capable of preserving for constant reference at a maximum number of points complete vertical sections until the last phase of the excavation.” ⁸¹

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Figure 4.

Wheeler-style stratigraphy, as drawn by Victor Nash-Williams and published in Mortimer Wheeler’s Archaeology from the Earth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), fig. 17 (“Stratification in relation to the external wall of the Roman ampitheatre at Caerleon, Monmouthshire, 1926”). Image reproduced with the kind permission of Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Library.

This system would regiment the places of the workers who labored within this grid (Figure 5), and in turn enable the apparently reliable constitution of multiple trench sections. These sections could then be interpreted in order to put together a comprehensive picture of settlement at any particular site. Furthermore, Wheeler implied that the apparent replicability of these sections would allow their use around the globe in order to build up a relative archeological picture of the past that could truly be characterized as from the Earth. In particular, as formerly colonized countries started to gain independence, Wheeler attuned his discussion of stratigraphic method to the new national pasts that were primed to develop, chauvinistically suggesting that “there is no method proper to the excavation of a British site which is not applicable—nay, must be applied—to a site in Africa or Asia [Wheeler’s italics].” ⁸²

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Figure 5.

Chaos and discipline, as illustrated by Mortimer Wheeler in Archaeology from the Earth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pl. IV (“A. Chaos: excavation in the East, 1935. B. Discipline: excavation at Arikamedu, South India, 1945”). Image reproduced with the kind permission of Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Library.

Wheeler’s strategy possessed obvious applications at Mit Rahina. Given the apparent, and continued, success of the technique in newly independent India, not only might the Wheeler–Kenyon grid system help to order the site’s workers and trainees, but the manner in which the system represented stratigraphic sections would also help to reveal the ancient city that Mit Rahina supposedly contained in a manner appropriate both to the age and, as a boundary object, to the work’s various different audiences. ⁸³ Yet, despite his positive impression of the volume, Anthes also took issue with some of Archaeology from the Earth’s content: he criticized Wheeler’s horror at “a method of recording that not long ago was widespread in the East and may in fact still survive there.” This method involved “the mechanical recording of every object and structure in relation to a fixed bench-level,” the type of horizontal excavation practice used at Mit Rahina. Wheeler claimed that this type of recording made the inconceivable assumption “that all objects and structures at the same level below (or above) datum line were in the same ‘stratum’, i.e. contemporary with one another!” ⁸⁴ In reality, the novelty of the way that Wheeler actually excavated stratigraphic sections is questionable, and in his critique he perhaps protested slightly too much. ⁸⁵ However, his words did rankle in Egypt, where a horizontal field perspective certainly dominated. Anthes wrote that “I think that his [Wheeler’s] criticism of the method is too sharp as our site and our understanding of the method … is concerned,” claiming that recording remains according to a fixed level provided a helpful “Anhaltspunkt,” or reference point, and that “Jacquet has been aware of the … [Wheeler] method but chose the [fixed-level] mapping.” ⁸⁶

Yet continued problems in the field meant that this attitude slowly altered. During the 1956 excavation season, the 4m.-wall had continued to cause confusion. That March, for instance, Anthes seemed uncertain of the wall’s meaning; excavating downwards, he could not understand the construction history of a “tomb Z” that had been built into the structure some time after its initial construction. The tomb appeared to rest upon a layer of debris above the wall, and Anthes could not see that the wall had once existed at the height of the tomb. ⁸⁷ As a result, he also could not see that the wall, as the team had initially presumed, had once surrounded the small temple of Ramses II. By April, this situation changed slightly. Anthes noted that a “[vertical] cut [that is, a section] … shows the 4-m-wall [sic] in a height more considerable than we would have expected.” ⁸⁸ Within the layers of mixed-up debris in this cut, the team at the site could almost see the original height, and the original role, of the wall. That they did so, though, was accidental. During the 1956 season, the trench (trench D) containing the 4m.-wall had already been divided into a western, mostly excavated, and eastern, newly excavated, section. Instigated as an attempt to make the trench more manageable (the cut was named the “relief wall”), ⁸⁹ this division inadvertently constituted the sort of grid excavation system put forward by Wheeler, and forced attention upon the contents of the vertical section in the middle of the trench in a way that the excavation previously had not. Yet even as this change in perspective took place, Anthes still noted that “we have recognized the value of vertical cuts, but I have to restrict myself in view of the time pressure.” ⁹⁰

In June, though, the final clearance of the relief section in advance of its recording by Jacquet inadvertently revealed how the mixed-up structures that were visible in it were related. Like Wheeler’s system itself, the actual practices of excavating this section were little, if at all, different from what had come previously. But the perspective that the relief wall forced was different and, more importantly, could be easily connected to Wheeler’s rhetoric. In the section, the ‘enclosure wall’ of an already well-known temple dedicated to the god Ptah now became visible. Previously, Jacquet had considered that this structure was “built contemporaneously with, or slightly later than, the time when the [small] temple [of Ramses II] … was abandoned.” Anthes considered this event to “have happened at any time later than Ramses II, but probably not long after.” ⁹¹ After removing the baulk, however, a possible date of “not long after” became impossible to conceive; Anthes and Jacquet re-dated the construction of the enclosure wall from the late second millennium BC to a thousand years later or more. This wall could only be Ptolemaic (332–30 BC) or later, because the baulk showed “a cut [was present] sloping down toward [the] Enclosure Wall.” In turn, Anthes and Jacquet interpreted this cut as having been made to construct the enclosure wall, meaning that the structure “was built after all the [nearby] layers accumulated.” ⁹² These layers contained Ptolemaic pottery, providing the date for this act of construction. ⁹³ Perceiving the entirety of the cross section, it thus also became apparent that the 4m.-wall was not constructed to protect the small temple of Ramses II from later incursions. Rather, the structure was the enclosure wall of that temple. Yet until the much later construction cut of the Ptah enclosure wall was viewed in sectional context, this interpretation was impossible: in section, the team could see that, after the small Ramses II temple had fallen into disuse, building had occurred to its north and its south at various points in time. The Ptah enclosure wall had helped to seal debris from this building in place, occluding the 4m.-wall’s original function by compounding the denudation of the structure over time. ⁹⁴

The inadvertent construction of a vertical section in an attempt to deal with material difficulty had given a semblance of order to Mit Rahina. At least for Anthes and his collaborators, a complex ancient settlement had started to cohere. And the team now claimed that the dig presented a huge opportunity: if presented the correct way – if made into a boundary object – fieldwork at Mit Rahina could illustrate the monumental marvel of ancient Egypt. In his end-of-season report, Anthes wrote that “our site now stands in a more significant position with regard to the whole Memphis area than could be realized before,” and that “excavating in Memphis … appears exceedingly worthwhile and important.” ⁹⁵ Moreover, a drawing was made by Jacquet depicting the lucky section in a Wheeler-esque manner (Figure 6). Here was a chance to make excavation at Mit Rahina persuasive again; the section and its illustration constituted the boundary object that might make this act of persuasion possible. Anthes later stated that “we learned by our own experience the fact which is elementary outside of Egypt, that only a coordinated system of horizontal and vertical cuts [in the ground] is adequate for the understanding of a site which has accumulated under changing living conditions ….” ⁹⁶ The question now was whether his words, and Jacquet’s depiction, were persuasive.

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Figure 6.

The Wheeler-esque section drawing from Mit Rahina; plate 6a in Rudolf Anthes’ Mit Rahineh 1956 (Philadelphia: The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 1965). Image reproduced courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Objects of failure

Ultimately, the pair’s claims failed to make much headway. In India, Wheeler’s representations of fieldwork had seemed to take on some authority. But the people who authorized the excavation of Mit Rahina did not take great pleasure in the excavation of this muddy site, even if a city could now be teased out of the ground there. Wheeler’s universal field methodology did not enjoy universal success. The boundary object of the section and the rhetoric surrounding it failed to persuade the relevant audiences. Different geographies of the postwar past started to develop as issues linked to Mit Rahina’s materiality helped to hasten the excavation’s end.

The process of terminating the excavation involved the close-to-symbiotic action of the DoA and UM, and helped to constitute Mit Rahina – and other Egyptian settlement and floodplain sites like it – as near-permanent topics of polemic. ⁹⁷ At the end of the second season at Mit Rahina in June 1956, the UM’s Board approved continuing the excavation. ⁹⁸ Yet during a meeting in April 1957, the Board postponed the proposed third season of work at the site, a move that would later lead to total cancellation. ⁹⁹ The object of the dig constituted one cause of this termination, the objects obtained by digging another. At first, Rainey and the Board had been prepared to give Anthes and his team the benefit of the doubt, despite Percy Madeira’s misgivings. A couple of weeks before the Wheeler-style strategy had been adopted at Mit Rahina, Rainey told Anthes that “I have just had a long talk with Mr Madeira and we have decided that we should, by all means, accept your recommendation for another season.” Yet Rainey also said that “I must honestly admit that I am not at all clear in my mind about the significance of the site.” ¹⁰⁰ Rainey made it clear that the dig needed to become more persuasive. However, the eventual adoption of the Wheeler strategy as a boundary object did not manage to persuade. Claims relating to vertical sections did not even seem to register with the UM’s leadership, despite Rainey’s 1951 statement that “more emphasis should be placed on interpretation and the meaning of field results in terms of the nature of cultural growth and historical process.” ¹⁰¹ In mid-October 1957, Rainey wrote to Madeira after a meeting with the UM’s curators, including Anthes. Rainey stated that, with Madeira’s agreement, the work at Mit Rahina would be cancelled. The type of city that the UM had wanted to excavate was unlikely to coalesce:

Because of the water level at Memphis we cannot excavate ruins of a City dating earlier than 1000 B.C., or late New Kingdom times. Therefore, the only possible excavations at Memphis are an extension horizontally with the object of discovering the plan of the City during the period from 1000 B.C. to the Islamic Conquest. This would be an unlimited type of excavation extending over a long period and would inevitably be at great cost. We do not think that the information to be derived from such an excavation is worth the time and cost. ¹⁰²

The section failed because it represented the continued prospect of further moribund work visualizing the “layouts … [and] development … of the city.” ¹⁰³ The UM wanted the excavation to deal with something more spectacular. Moreover, Rainey’s reasoning made clear other, connected issues. Earlier, I noted Madeira’s concern with “worth while [sic] discussion of objects.” The UM had just remodeled its Egyptian gallery, and was buying objects for its Egyptian collection. ¹⁰⁴ Excavated artifacts constituted an institutional concern. Towards the end of the second season at Mit Rahina, Anthes had told Rainey that, if he cancelled the excavations, “there is the possibility that we get finds for our museum. The choice is not great and our record of starting with much palaver and stopping after two years is not impressive.” ¹⁰⁵ Now, though, Rainey appeared to throw caution to the wind. The possibility of continuing work only to recover objects dating from the late New Kingdom and post-imperial period did not seem “worth the time and cost.” These objects would be as uninspiring as the section drawings that accompanied them, and would certainly not equate to the sort of earlier, hieroglyphically covered monuments that Rainey’s comment implies his institution considered worthwhile. Wider concerns connected to the UM’s Cold War priorities did not even enter the equation.

The UM therefore used the aftermath of the 1956 Suez War as a cover for terminating the Mit Rahina excavation. Minutes from the Board’s April 1957 meeting state that “because of the uncertainty of the political conditions in Egypt,” they had “agreed it was advisable to discontinue work at Memphis.” ¹⁰⁶ Yet ironically, the Suez conflict – and the heightening of revolutionary and non-aligned action that it gave rise to in Egypt – also seemed to strengthen the hand of the DoA, which now felt quite able to inform the UM of its expectations regarding future work in the country. By April 1957, Mustafa Amer had been replaced in his position; first, and briefly, by Abbas Bayoumi (1904–83) and then by Moharram Kamal (1908–66). ¹⁰⁷ Anthes had already warned Rainey that “any loosening of continuity [of the joint work] at this moment would put us in a very wrong [sic] light in the eyes of our [Egyptian] friends as well as the [Egyptian] opponents of the work,” at least partially because “Amer is almost certainly going to retire.” ¹⁰⁸ His prophecy came true. In late October 1957, even before Rainey had managed to write to him to cancel collaboration, Kamal wrote to Rainey to politely but firmly state that the UM’s concession at Mit Rahina was to be terminated. Kamal also asked whether Rainey’s institution could now work in Egyptian Nubia. ¹⁰⁹ Egypt – independent, assertive, and about to start construction of the Aswan High Dam with Soviet backing – would now, at least in theory, call the shots and direct excavation work. Collaboration at Mit Rahina did not matter. But, notably (especially for the UM), collaborative work on monuments elsewhere did. Even if Jacquet’s section drawing illustrated the existence of a city at Mit Rahina, the image’s status as a boundary object failed because the settlement that it illustrated did not show the monumentality required.

Sometime towards the end of 1955, the DoA published a volume entitled Report on the Monuments of Nubia Likely to be Submerged by Sudd-el-ʿĀli Water. The report appeared as plans for the construction of the new Aswan High Dam – the Sudd-el-ʿĀli of the publication’s title – gathered pace, and alarm rose that the reservoir (now Lake Nasser) that would form behind the dam would submerge Nubia’s ancient monuments forever. Dealing with the most high profile of the many modernization schemes now being undertaken in Egypt, the volume was the authoritative word on how ancient Egyptian antiquities should be treated as Egypt’s revolutionary project unfolded. Monumental epigraphy was the watchword. The publication set out how to record the architecture of Nubian monuments, in addition to the inscriptions on them. Sometimes (as in the case of the temples of Abu Simbel), the book also noted how they might be saved from flooding through physical intervention. ¹¹⁰ The report (written in Arabic, English, and French) also noted “the hearty welcome of the Egyptian archaeologists to the assistance of some of their foreign colleagues,” and mentioned “that if UNESCO has any intention of presenting any pecuniary, material or scientific aid to Egypt … we have to thank it deeply.” ¹¹¹

Despite these pleasantries, foreign institutions were mostly uninterested in working in Nubia. For instance, in 1956 Anthes warned Rainey against the possibility due to a presumed lack of interesting objects to excavate in the region, and others took similar measures. ¹¹² Working in Nubia would represent a concession to Egyptian wishes with no potential material benefit. Yet, by late 1957, the DoA hardened its stance against this attitude. International collaboration relating to the recording of Nubian monuments now started to be promoted through the auspices of the UNESCO, which had worked with Egypt’s Ministry of Education to set up CEDAE, the Centre d’Étude et de Documentation sur l’Ancienne Égypte, in 1955. The institution worked to document the Nubian monuments, and in particular to visually replicate them through a process of photogrammetry. It also seemed to represent the future: Anthes told Rainey that “although I should no means recommend striking after a close connection … it seems to be wise to be present at work when the Center fully develops.” ¹¹³ He was correct. The collaboration at Mit Rahina had failed, no ancient city had appeared, and the boundary object created to make future work at the site seem worthwhile – not to mention offering the possibility of ordering unruly laborers – had been rejected. But Egypt had moved on to cooperation around other monumental visual concerns. As Moharram Kamal had made perfectly clear, the question was whether or not institutions like the UM would now heed the DoA’s wishes.

Conclusion: thinking through the postwar past

The material qualities of Mit Rahina and the personnel problems that the site prompted helped to constitute the way the field team working there represented their work. The team used a visual strategy promoted by Mortimer Wheeler; a boundary object around which the interests surrounding the excavation could gather. But representing the site in this way failed. The strategy seemed to offer too little, too late, and the chance to test the methodological possibilities of the Wheeler-esque representation – whether in terms of the future investigation of the site or in terms of ordering the people who worked there – never arrived. This boundary object failed to do its job. Constituting a revolutionary, monumental past elsewhere in Egypt (or taking elements of that past back to America) seemed more important than the visual reconstruction of a mass of muddy archeological strata at Mit Rahina. Their patience tested by what seemed like an uninspiring site and a misbehaving workforce that made the excavation’s already half-hearted training element seem worthless, neither the DoA nor the UM had the patience to see where Wheeler-style methodological claims might lead the work. No ancient city would be unearthed at Mit Rahina.

The constitution of a Wheeler-esque archeological section at Mit Rahina had offered hope to those leading the work there. As the site itself failed to pull together the initial array of interests surrounding the excavation, so the uncovering of the section and the process of its illustration took on the boundary object role that the site might otherwise have played, offering the hope that those interests could gather around the excavation routine that the section represented. Yet the ‘site’ never became one, not even in sectional form. Intermeshed with the struggles of the people who excavated there, the layers of earth and ancient debris at Mit Rahina exerted too strong a force over the interests at hand. Giving the lie to narratives of decolonization and the Cold War that place all agency relating to decision-making in the realm of top-down geopolitics and the global ‘centers’ attached to it, the struggle to work with this complex materiality spread that agency in a dispersed network that fanned out from, but was never permanently centered in, Mit Rahina. Terminating work at the site, the Board of the UM decided that they had other fish to fry. ¹¹⁴ The DoA seemed more concerned with the revolutionary prospects of monuments in Nubia.

Small acts can contribute to large outcomes, and vice versa. The failure of the archeological work at Mit Rahina – and, in particular, the failure of the relief section of trench D as a boundary object – therefore begs questions about how we should think about the making of knowledge about the past in the postwar world. Wheeler wrote Archaeology from the Earth to smooth over the politically complex world that archeologists worked in, even as it acknowledged the existence of wider political realities; the volume existed to produce a visually distinctive postwar past, the constitution of which could, to a great extent, be directed from London. Conditions at Mit Rahina, however, meant that this process of flattening did not take place. The archeological boundary object produced there could not be used to draw together the necessary interests. There were, of course, other programmatic attempts to order the past in this era. Yet if this Egyptian example is indicative of these wider realities, the postwar past and its relationship with wider histories of decolonization and the Cold War was complex, lumpy, and recursively constitutive of what went on around it, rather like the earth at Mit Rahina.

In order to understand this situation and its implications, scholars need to follow the bottom-up processes of making this past in conjunction with the networks of which it formed a part. They also need to think through concepts – like that of the boundary object – that can help to illustrate how these networks came into being or fell apart. For instance, what boundary objects, if any, did manage to draw together the large number of conflicting interests surrounding the making of the postwar past, and why? Did the utilization of such objects help to constitute certain people as credible authorities in the making of this knowledge? To what extent did the discipline of archeology and its relationship with material culture play a role in this situation, and how (if at all) did previous practices relating to the excavation of ancient material change? Asking such questions, scholars will start to understand the postwar past, and the histories like those of decolonization and the Cold War to which it was joined, in new and different ways.