Location and relocation is a translation!
"For the first time . . . when many of them are involved in a secret or declared war, all nations are called upon to save the works of civilization that belong to none of them."
Andre Malraux, French Minister of Culture
The Voices of Silence by Andre Malraux - the first part of which has been published separately as The Museum without Walls where he describes the radical enlargement of our world of art as the emergence of the “first universal world of art”, that includes the impact of photography.
The Abu Simbel temples are two massive rock temples at Abu Simbel (أبو سمبل in Arabic), a village in Nubia, southern Egypt, near the border with Sudan. They are situated on the western bank of Lake Nasser, about 230 km southwest of Aswan (about 300 km by road). The complex is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site known as the "Nubian Monuments," which run from Abu Simbel downriver to Philae (near Aswan).
The twin temples were originally carved out of the mountainside during the reign of Pharaoh Ramesses II in the 13th century BC, as a lasting monument to himself and his queen Nefertari, to commemorate his victory at the Battle of Kadesh. Their large external rock relief figures have become iconic.
The earliest photograph of Abu Simbel taken by John Beasley Greene in 1854
Photographs preserve the past, and looking for the past is the very job of the archaeologist. What are we looking at in an archaeological photograph? Archaeological photography is often largely deserted, to be scanned with a forensic gaze, towards finding evidence of what once took place. These photographs of excavated sites and artefacts, whilst revealed ancient works, have become works of art.
The complex was relocated in its entirety in 1968, on an artificial hill made from a domed structure, high above the Aswan High Dam reservoir. The relocation of the temples was necessary, or they would have been submerged during the creation of Lake Nasser, the massive artificial water reservoir formed after the building of the Aswan High Dam on the Nile River.
In 1959, an international donations campaign to save the monuments of Nubia began: the southernmost relics of this ancient human civilization were under threat from the rising waters of the Nile that were about to result from the construction of the Aswan High Dam.
The salvage of the Abu Simbel temples began in 1964 by a multinational team of archaeologists, engineers and skilled heavy equipment operators working together under the UNESCO banner; it cost some $40 million at the time. Between 1964 and 1968, the entire site was carefully cut into large blocks (up to 30 tons, averaging 20 tons), dismantled, lifted and reassembled in a new location 65 metres higher and 200 metres back from the river, in one of the greatest challenges of archaeological engineering in history. Some structures were even saved from under the waters of Lake Nasser.
Today, a few hundred tourists visit the temples daily. Guarded convoys of buses and cars depart twice a day from Aswan, the nearest city. Many visitors also arrive by plane, at an airfield that was specially constructed for the temple complex. The complex consists of two temples. The larger one is dedicated to Ra-Harakhty, Ptah and Amun, Egypt's three state deities of the time, and features four large statues of Ramesses II in the facade. The smaller temple is dedicated to the goddess Hathor, personified by Nefertari, Ramesses's most beloved of his many wives.
But, is Abu Simbel a fake . . .
. . . or heritage theme park?
The physical translation of the Abu Simbel temples from their original riverside mountain location to their installation in a "fake" mountain situated above the water line of the newly created reservoir, was an exemplary example of engineering and conservation inventiveness and ingenuity.
Sometimes, however, things are likely to be both "lost and found" in translation.
Travels in hyperreality?
This video shows something of the way "world heritage" is now a part of a complex set of industries, interests and ideologies. For the tourists we see in the video "the world is their oyster".
For many Egyptians there is something here to be proud of, and something to benefit from economically, but how many Egyptians are able to board the planes that take tourists from Aswan to Abu Simbel?
Faith in Fakes
Translation was an abiding fascination for the Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco.
Things and meanings are lost and found in translation.
Il costume di casa (1973) and Sette anni di desiderio (1983) were then translated into English in 1986 as Faith in Fakes and later updated as Travels in Hyperreality in 1995, a collection of articles from mainly Italian newspapers and magazines about the wider subject of human consciousness, including Eco's own subject of semiotics. The subjects of the main essay includes modern Americana such as wax museums, Superman and holography, and the other articles discuss a number of other subjects, including football, the Middle Ages, Jim Jones and the People's Temple, and tight jeans.
In the New York Times 1986 Review of Eco's Travels in Hyperreality the reviewer, George Garrett has some fun too!
IN ''Reports From the Global Village'' - falling roughly halfway through the sequence of essays and articles which Umberto Eco has gathered together under the general title ''Travels in Hyperreality'' - the wily and witty Italian philosopher, historian, semiotician and author of the best-selling novel, ''The Name of the Rose,'' offers a surprising proposition:
''All the professors of theory of communications, trained by the texts of twenty years ago (this includes me), should be pensioned off.''Mr. Eco is only kidding, of course; and the reader who has followed him that far knows it instantly, being already experienced in the rhetorical stances, several kinds of ambiguity and stylistic fun and games Mr. Eco employs to consider almost everything under the sun - holography, wax museums, ''The Return of the Middle Ages,'' Superman and ''Casablanca,'' Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, the survival of ancient African religious sects and cults in contemporary Brazil, Jim Jones and his murderous temple, the Red Brigades and terrorism in general, Marshall McLuhan and Charles Manson, Woody Allen and St. Thomas Aquinas, the social and personal implications of snug-fitting blue jeans and the secret meaning of spectator sports.
The Real Egypt?
In the Books section of the Guardian on Sat 2 Aug 2003 Edward Said adapted the introduction to the new edition of Orientalism that was to be published at the end of August 2003 arguing for a the necessity of a revived form of humanist understanding in a globalised world. The Article was introduced by the headline:
Western scholars helped justify the war in Iraq, says Edward Said, with their orientalist ideas about the 'Arab mind'. Twenty-five years after the publication of his post-colonial classic, the author of Orientalism argues that humanist understanding is now more urgently required than ever before.
It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar.
But this has often happened with the "orient", that semi-mythical construct which since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in the late 18th century has been made and remade countless times.In the process the uncountable sediments of history, a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures, are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sandheap along with the treasures ground into meaningless fragments that were taken out of Baghdad.
My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, so that "our" east, "our" orient becomes "ours" to possess and direct.And I have a very high regard for the powers and gifts of the peoples of that region to struggle on for their vision of what they are and want to be. There has been so massive and calculatedly aggressive an attack on contemporary Arab and Muslim societies for their backwardness, lack of democracy, and abrogation of women's rights that we simply forget that such notions as modernity, enlightenment, and democracy are by no means simple and agreed-upon concepts that one either does or does not find like Easter eggs in the living-room.
The breathtaking insouciance of jejune publicists who speak in the name of foreign policy and who have no knowledge at all of the language real people actually speak, has fabricated an arid landscape ready for American power to construct there an ersatz model of free market "democracy".
jejune
adjective
adjective: jejune
1.
naive, simplistic, and superficial.
"their entirely predictable and usually jejune opinions"
2.
(of ideas or writings) dry and uninteresting.
insouciance
noun
noun: insouciance
casual lack of concern; indifference.
synonyms: nonchalance, unconcern, lack of concern, indifference, heedlessness, relaxedness, calm, calmness, equanimity, coolness, composure, casualness, ease, easy-going attitude, airiness, carefreeness, frivolousness, carelessness.
Twenty-five years after my book's publication, Orientalism once again raises the question of whether modern imperialism ever ended, or whether it has continued in the orient since Napoleon's entry into Egypt two centuries ago.Arabs and Muslims have been told that victimology and dwelling on the depredations of empire are only ways of evading responsibility in the present. You have failed, you have gone wrong, says the modern orientalist. This of course is also VS Naipaul's contribution to literature, that the victims of empire wail on while their country goes to the dogs. But what a shallow calculation of the imperial intrusion that is, how little it wishes to face the long succession of years through which empire continues to work its way in the lives say of Palestinians or Congolese or Algerians or Iraqis.
Think of the line that starts with Napoleon . . .
Think of the line that starts with Napoleon, continues with the rise of oriental studies and the takeover of North Africa, and goes on in similar undertakings in Vietnam, in Egypt, in Palestine and, during the entire 20th century, in the struggle over oil and strategic control in the Gulf, in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Afghanistan. Then think of the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, through the short period of liberal independence, the era of military coups, of insurgency, civil war, religious fanaticism, irrational struggle and uncompromising brutality against the latest bunch of "natives". Each of these phases and eras produces its own distorted knowledge of the other, each its own reductive images, its own disputatious polemics.
My idea in Orientalism was to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison us. I have called what I try to do "humanism", a word I continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated postmodern critics.
By humanism I mean first of all attempting to dissolve Blake's "mind-forg'd manacles" so as to be able to use one's mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding.Moreover humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist.
Thus it is correct to say that every domain is linked, and that nothing that goes on in our world has ever been isolated and pure of any outside influence. We need to speak about issues of injustice and suffering within a context that is amply situated in history, culture, and socio-economic reality.I have spent a great deal of my life during the past 35 years advocating the right of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, coexistence, and not further suppression and denial.
As a humanist whose field is literature, I am old enough to have been trained 40 years ago in the field of comparative literature, whose leading ideas go back to Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I must mention too the supremely creative contribution of Giambattista Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher and philologist whose ideas anticipate those of German thinkers such as Herder and Wolf, later to be followed by Goethe, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer, and finally the great 20th-century Romance philologists Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Robert Curtius.
To young people of the current generation the very idea of philology suggests something impossibly antiquarian and musty, but philology in fact is the most basic and creative of the interpretive arts. It is exemplified for me most admirably in Goethe's interest in Islam generally, and the 14th-century Persian Sufi poet Hafiz in particular, a consuming passion which led to the composition of the West-östlicher Diwan, and it inflected Goethe's later ideas about Weltliteratur, the study of all the literatures of the world as a symphonic whole which could be apprehended theoretically as having preserved the individuality of each work without losing sight of the whole.
There is a considerable irony to the realisation that as today's globalised world draws together, we may be approaching the kind of standardisation and homogeneity that Goethe's ideas were specifically formulated to prevent.In an essay published in 1951 entitled "Philologie der Weltliteratur", Auerbach made exactly that point. His great book Mimesis, published in Berne in 1946 but written while Auerbach was a wartime exile teaching Romance languages in Istanbul, was meant to be a testament to the diversity and concreteness of the reality represented in western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf; but reading the 1951 essay one senses that, for Auerbach, the great book he wrote was an elegy for a period when people could interpret texts philologically, concretely, sensitively, and intuitively, using erudition and an excellent command of several languages to support the kind of understanding that Goethe advocated for his understanding of Islamic literature.
Positive knowledge of languages and history was necessary, but it was never enough, any more than the mechanical gathering of facts would constitute an adequate method for grasping what an author like Dante, for example, was all about. The main requirement for the kind of philological understanding Auerbach and his predecessors were talking about and tried to practise was one that sympathetically and subjectively entered into the life of a written text as seen from the perspective of its time and its author.
Rather than alienation and hostility to another time and a different culture, philology as applied to Weltliteratur involved a profound humanistic spirit deployed with generosity and, if I may use the word, hospitality.Thus the interpreter's mind actively makes a place in it for a foreign "other". And this creative making of a place for works that are otherwise alien and distant is the most important facet of the interpreter's mission.
The terrible conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics such as "America," "the west" or "Islam" and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and must be opposed.We still have at our disposal the rational interpretive skills that are the legacy of humanistic education, not as a sentimental piety enjoining us to return to traditional values or the classics but as the active practice of worldly secular rational discourse. The secular world is the world of history as made by human beings. Critical thought does not submit to commands to join in the ranks marching against one or another approved enemy.
Rather than the manufactured clash of civilisations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together.But for that kind of wider perception we need time, patient and sceptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.
Humanism is centred upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and authority. Texts have to be read as texts that were produced and live on in all sorts of what I have called worldly ways. But this by no means excludes power, since on the contrary I have tried to show the insinuations, the imbrications of power into even the most recondite of studies. And lastly, most important, humanism is the only, and I would go as far as to say the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.
And so . . . meanwhile, an ancient Egypt and its monuments are safely located in a past that is conveniently, and functionally, able to resist the actuality of these present realities.
The painting reads “‘Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eye first.’
‘إن أراد أحد أن يبصر نور الشمس، فإن عليه أن يمسح عينيه’” Photo Credit — Hannah Porter
eL Seed is a French/Tunisian artist whose intricate compositions call not only on the words and their meaning but also on their movement, which ultimately lures the viewer into a different state of mind. Working primarily with subjects that seem contradictory, eL Seed's art reflects the reality of mankind and the world we live in today.
Are Egyptologists interested in Egypt and Egyptians?
Is ancient Egypt, this so-called 'shared' heritage, a complex edifice more akin to a vast cultural, ideological and psychological landscape that is in fact a fantastic projection?
The preservation and re-construction of world heritage sites is as much about a shared projection as a set of scientific, archaeological, universalist and humanist understandings. So:
Who is complicit in this sharing?Is Egyptology to Egyptians what ornithology is to birds and aesthetics is to artists?
Who are the actors?
Who are the conjurors?
Who are the image makers?
Who is writing the bucket-list for us?
Marketing?
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