Zahi Hawass and the Nationalization of the Past

Zahi Hawass is the kind of person for whom I have a visceral dislike, and the New Yorker article by Ian Parker only confirms the impressions and anecdotes I have picked up from elsewhere. About a dozen incidents could be lifted from this article to illustrate what I mean, but take just this minor example:

I saw his frustration with the inexpert Egyptian waiters at a showy Japanese restaurant on a riverboat in Cairo—a place where Hawass’s order is, simply, “The Zahi menu!”

Well, I have little patience with people who don’t have patience with an Egyptian waiter who’s expected to act as if he’s an expert on Sushi or American food. I’ve got riverboat stories myself, such as the waiter who explained in all seriousness to a puzzled friend that quesadilla’s don’t have cheese on them (queso?). But patience is the only way to respond since the absurdity is not in the waiter who does not understand the nature of a quesadilla, but in us sitting in an American-style restaurant floating on the Nile. Hawass evidently can’t remember the difficulty that comes from managing the demands of a foreign culture.. in your own country! And who can’t see the absurdity—and outsize ego—of someone ordering food by making reference to “The Zahi Menu!”

But these are personality matters, and I try not to judge people too harshly based on personality. What’s really important and substantive to understand about Hawass is the way he is nationalizing the study of ancient Egypt. By that I mean he is conflating the accomplishments and heritage of ancient Egypt with those of the modern nation state Egypt. The institution of the nation state is a beggar when it comes to heritage; it has to invent a past since its roots are so shallow. This means defining as heritage the accomplishments of past cultures whose productions happen to fall within the modern borders of a state. This is happening everywhere, from Indonesia to England to Albania. The nation state must have a heritage and something to be proud of!

This issue was nicely addressed a few years ago by Kwame Anthony Appiah, in an essay for the New York Review of Books:

But what does it mean, exactly, for something to belong to a people? Most of Nigeria’s cultural patrimony was produced before the modern Nigerian state existed. We don’t know whether the terra-cotta Nok sculptures, made sometime between about 800 BC and 200 AD, were commissioned by kings or commoners; we don’t know whether the people who made them and the people who paid for them thought of them as belonging to the kingdom, to a man, to a lineage, or to the  gods. One thing we know for sure, however, is they didn’t make them for Nigeria.

Appiah gets our minds off of literal lineage and onto participation in a culture. Even if Nigerians share a certain amount of DNA with the creators of this art (not at all clear), they obviously do not belong to the same culture.. which disappeared long ago. Those ancient works of art are under the protection of the Nigerian government, and may constitute a tourist attraction, but it is not “Nigerian” art. The same thing has to be said about the pyramids and everything connected to ancient Egypt. It is not art “belonging to the modern nation state of Egypt.” Ugly things start to happen as soon as one connects works from the distant past to a modern nation state. To begin with there is a strong pull toward dishonesty since the honor of ancient Egypt is the honor of contemporary Egypt.

In the case of Zahi Hawass, his self-centeredness is only matched by his nation-centeredness (in fact, these are clearly correlated in his personality). Artifacts of the ancient past are trophies for himself and his modern nation. The destruction left by this approach on the remains of ancient Egypt become evident in the conclusion to the  New Yorker article. Hawass’s search for an unknown tomb in the Valley of the Kings is described. In the search to locate this tomb, the valley floor is being stripped down to bedrock, so as to better spot that unknown entrance. The willingness to massively change the Valley of the Tombs in pursuit of a tomb that might make him the next Howard Carter signals his priority. It’s not about understanding the past.. or thinking through a different culture.. or preserving a meaningful landscape. It’s about the things that will bring him and his nation glory. In this case glory should be translated as “international media spotlight.”