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Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt: A Paradigm Shift in Archaeological Knowledge Production

By Wendy Doyon

The history of Egyptology is overwhelmingly one of French, English, and German-speaking men. The pages of Who Was Who in Egyptology — a standard reference work for the history of the field, now in its 5th edition — are full of well-known archaeologists, such as Auguste Mariette from France, Flinders Petrie from England, Ludwig Borchardt from Germany, and George Reisner from America, among many others.[1] Relatively few Egyptians and Arabic-speakers, about 6% of the total, have so far made it into the pages of Who Was Who. A majority of that 6% are recognized for their historical roles as antiquities dealers or guides, rather than for direct or citable contributions to knowledge production.

The system of knowledge production represented by Who Was Who rests on a very specific type of knowledge, one which is produced in monographic publications: books, edited volumes, festschrifts, journals, catalogs, and dissertations that circulate received knowledge in academic institutions. However, all of this received knowledge in archaeology and Egyptology is also the result of a mode and process of production located in Egypt and the Middle East and dependent on Egyptian, Sudanese, and Middle Eastern labor. In this production process, labor, language, and writing are more than just instruments for communicating the results of research, they are fundamental to the structure of how knowledge is made.

The history of archaeology is not just what we know, but how we know it, through cognitive, linguistic, and extralinguistic modes of knowledge transfer — such as physical excavation techniques and the ability to pass on mental representations of archaeological materials and landscapes through apprenticeship on a complex scale of practice. Once the totality of research labor and skill has been translated into academic monographs, the nature of those labors is often lost in translation. In a closed system of elite consensus-building, successive generations are trained in the institutional practices that reproduce received knowledge. The paradigm shift here proposed is to translate back from that closed body of knowledge and literature to recognize more Egyptian and Middle Eastern subjectivities in the consensus-building process. What does practicing archaeology mean for Upper Egyptians?

A house in Qift, Upper Egypt. Photo by Marleen De Meyer.

Histories of Egyptology and archaeology have focused almost exclusively on their disciplinary development in the West. These disciplinary and intellectual histories have resulted in a kind of methodological nationalism that is enshrined by works like Who Was Who, or the more recent History of World Egyptology, a methodology that erects borders around our knowledge of the past.[2] Belonging within those borders, first and foremost, means knowing how to think in English, French, and German. From the works of early pioneers in the field, we continue to receive biographies, celebratory festschrifts, Who Was Whos, and other encyclopedic histories of Egyptology’s so-called “Golden Age” during the high colonial period of 1882–1922.[3] Such disciplinary history often blinds us to what lies outside the enfranchised borders of wealthy nation-states. It does not break the ceiling of famous names and discoveries or disrupt the knowledge we have received from earlier eras of empire and colonialism.

In another vein of our historiography, early anthropological perspectives in the field have informed the more recent development of postcolonial and Indigenous studies. Beginning with Winifred Blackman’s Fellahin of Upper Egypt (1927), Heinrich Schaefer’s Songs of an Egyptian Peasant (1904), Gaston Maspero’s Chansons Populaires Recueillies dans la Haute-Égypte (1914), and Hans Alexander Winkler’s Die reitenden Geister der Toten (1936), early ethnographers were primarily active in the field through their association with archaeology as a realm of socio-economic privilege that provided access to rural Egypt.

In the case of Winkler, for example, he wrote the first published account by an archaeologist on the people of Qift (known colloquially as Quftis), a small town north of Luxor in Upper Egypt. Winkler’s book was originally written in German in 1936 and later translated into English, in 2009, as Ghost Riders of Upper Egypt.[4] It focused on the folk life and religious practices of Qift, rather than on the Quftis’ scientific work in the field of archaeology as highly specialized archaeological technicians and foremen (rūyasa, sing. rayyis) since 1895. Winkler’s host and first interlocutor in Qift was Muhammad Ahmad al-Sanūsi, a well-known and highly regarded, first-generation Qufti foreman who had trained in excavation methods with Flinders Petrie, James Quibell, and Ali al-Sūayfi beginning in 1893, and who went on to a long career managing German excavations throughout Egypt during the first half of the twentieth century.[5]

Although it had long been home to Egypt’s most elite community of archaeological foremen, who were widely renowned for their advanced knowledge and excavation skills before the turn of the twentieth century, in 1936, Winkler’s Qift instead 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, uneducated peasantry from the South of Egypt. Ghost Riders of Upper Egypt elided the shared, co-constitutive work of Egyptians and Westerners in archaeology and instead gave us a folksy account of Qift from the outside, looking in through the lens of radical difference and otherness.

Since then, and especially since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, historians have been slowly pushing back against the perceived silence and invisibility of Egyptians and Middle Eastern communities in the history of archaeology. Donald Reid’s work was the first to break the ceiling for the history of Egyptian Egyptology, creating an opening for perspectives from postcolonial studies and Indigenous archaeology to enter the history of Egyptology more broadly.[6] The wave of postcolonial research that followed has brought the ‘hidden hands,’ ‘invisible excavators,’ ‘silent laborers,’ and ‘peasants of colonial Egypt’ out of the shadows of archaeological monographs, and into the light of interdisciplinary histories and critiques.[7] Such studies have given us important theories of agency, resistance, and performance, but they have not fundamentally disrupted the stigma that rural communities, including Upper Egyptians, are all part of a single, homogenous class of workers and peasants. Nor have they demonstrated positive interactions between individuals, communities of practice, and the archaeological environment as a multi-layered, consensus-building process of production.[8]

It seems to me that by focusing on the negative attributes of absence and invisibility in relation to the purely academic modes of production that are of value to Western scholars, the postcolonial-decolonizing paradigm only pretends to want the inclusion of Egyptian voices, when what it really wants is the exclusion of traditional Egyptological ones. The different strands of historiography described above share a common background in theories of difference, united by an extractive knowledge economy. Colonialist, nationalist, and postcolonial theories of difference all rest on ideas of cultural otherness, which are central to the academic system of area studies in which many historical paradigms are taught. Moreover, Indigenous paradigms borrowed from histories of archaeology in other parts of the world cannot be applied to diverse culture-historical contexts in the Middle East and North Africa, where there is no consensus on ‘indigeneity’ to begin with. I do not believe these various critiques do enough to translate across, or break down, the borders erected by disciplinary thinking to give us a more globalized history of knowledge production and labor that may productively inform a real paradigm shift.

From Ghost Riders to Ghost Writers

Something else we have inherited from earlier eras of empire and colonialism is an unequal exchange of labor in the global economy. A recent study has shown that while workers in the Global South contribute 90% of the labor that makes up the global economy, they receive only 21% of global income, and that for the 826 billion hours of labor they export each year to wealthier nations in the Global North, Southern workers are paid only 5–13% of the wage value for equal work in Northern countries, where the majority of global wealth — and scientific knowledge — continues to accumulate.[9]

In the case of Egypt and the Middle East, much of the embodied labor that is invisible in archaeological literature is indeed well-documented in archaeological archives. These archives provide a global record of the entire process of producing books and other media based on excavated material. I have found in my research that between 50–65% of the cost of all excavations in Egypt and Sudan (ca. 1850–1950) was spent on wage labor for fieldwork. That means half to two-thirds of all the money invested in archaeological research for this period went into wages, yet the wealth of knowledge that is powered by that labor remains largely inaccessible to most Egyptian, Sudanese, and Arabic-speaking communities. If we take, for example, the citations in Who Was Who as a measure, then more than 90% of the educational value of Egyptology flows away from Egypt to the Global North.

Arabic Diary of Sayyid Ahmad Sayyid Dirāz and Qufti foremen at Nuri, Sudan, 1917. © Archives of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Within the global archive of archaeology created by the past two centuries of excavation in the Middle East and North Africa, a significant portion of archival documents, notes, and photos numbering in the tens and hundreds of thousands form a shadow archive of Middle Eastern history. It documents the knowledge transfer, techniques, craftsmanship, apprenticeship, material studies, and linguistic community of Arabic-speaking co-practitioners and co-producers of archaeological knowledge throughout the region, who emerge as the “ghost writers” of this shadow archive. The global Middle Eastern archive takes many forms. It exists in fragments of field reports, diaries, letters, notebooks, wage lists, payroll and expense accounts, official correspondence, memoirs, songs, and a massive visual archive of photographs and silent films. Although the ghost writers and stories that haunt archaeological archives are diverse, the best documented history by far is the one belonging to several generations of archaeological technicians and foremen from Qift, whose lives, careers, and legacies in the field are overwhelmingly present in these records.

Across this archive, direct written documentation in Arabic is rare and fragmentary, but significant, and there is one collection of Arabic texts that must be highlighted. It is a large corpus of 73 Arabic diary volumes written by two generations of Qufti foremen for the Harvard–Boston Museum of Fine Arts excavations in Egypt and northern Sudan, between 1913 and 1947.[10] This corpus is a uniquely extensive record of excavations that has survived in over 6,500 pages of Arabic manuscript, which are written in a highly complex mixture of Classical Arabic, colloquial Egyptian dialects (Cairene and Upper Egyptian), Middle Arabic (with features belonging neither to Classical nor Egyptian Arabic), and a specialized language of archaeological practice. The 73 diary volumes are all finished manuscripts, not usually autographed, which represent a single, continuous, multi-authored narrative of archaeological discovery and day-to-day life in the field over thirty years. They often contain richer detail than the corresponding English diaries and illustrate how much is lacking in the wider absence of Arabic field records. They are similar in form to Western-authored field diaries, except that they are written in a more collective and socially cognizant voice that speaks of communal production rather than intellectual property.

The first head foreman of these excavations, Rayyis Sayyid Ahmad Sayyid Dirāz and his family, are the “Ghost Writers” par excellence of Upper Egypt. Their first-hand narrative of excavation over thirty years of work in the field is the best documented example we have of the fundamentally multilingual process of archaeological knowledge production in Egypt and Sudan — a process that, in this case, survives in its published form under the single American name of George Reisner.[11]

Language and labor are fundamental conditions of knowledge production. The time has come to shift our perspective on the global archive of archaeology to an active site of translation and co-production; to replace “Ghost Riders” as anthropological subjects with “Ghost Writers” documenting important scientific subjectivities on their own work; and to focus on the history of archaeology as a body of knowledge and a site of production that is situated within a global history of trade, labor, and geopolitics in the Middle East.

Rayyis Sayyid Ahmad Sayyid Dirāz (center) at Nuri, Sudan, 1917. Photo © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Ancient Egypt in the World Economy

To work toward a more globalized history of knowledge production, we must first recognize that archaeological heritage has a socio-economic value, in addition to a cultural value. And we must be willing to look at the historical conditions of how that value was created. Egypt’s integration into the modern world economy centered on the production of cotton for most of the long nineteenth century.[12] The state-building project of Egypt’s nineteenth-century rulers, the Khedives, is well-known for its Ottoman-Egyptian army, its agricultural reforms and monopolies, and for the building of the Suez Canal.[13] The state the Khedives built was powerful enough to conquer the Sudan and Syria. Its ruling class controlled a not-insignificant share of the world’s cotton market, and its wealth created thousands upon thousands of kilometers of roads, railways, telegraph lines, and irrigation canals—plus schools, libraries, scientific institutes, industrial factories, a printing press, and a postal service.[14] All these things relied on a great deal of Egyptian labor. To bring the lands of Upper and Lower Egypt under centralized control and reunify them into a territorial nation-state, the Khedives coerced hundreds of thousands of rural Egyptians every year to dig the irrigation canals that fed its cultivation, and to plant and harvest the cotton and other crops that those lands produced.

In the received narrative of Egyptology, the French invasion of 1798 and British military occupation of 1882 are widely considered the twin pillars of its colonial architecture. The 80 years between these two colonizing events, representing eight decades at the very heart of Egypt’s state-building project, are not generally considered central to the history of archaeology and Egyptology; nor are the latter considered central to the creation of the Egyptian state. A central aim of my research is to bridge these parallel histories, by showing how the creation of Egyptian antiquities land in the nineteenth century, and the regulation of the labor to excavate it, were driving factors in Egypt’s state-building and integration into the global economy.[15]

From the mid-to-late nineteenth-century, the Egyptian state cleared, or initiated clearing, around 30 major archaeological sites from the Delta to northern Sudan, which involved a systematic program of dispossession and displacement of rural communities living in, on, and around many of these sites. With the help of French ministers and engineers, led by the archaeologist Auguste Mariette,[16] Mehmed Ali Pasha and his successors set up a monopoly on the excavation of this newly created antiquities land; coerced huge amounts of Egyptian labor to excavate it; and organized an antiquities administration to regulate and maximize its economic productivity. The most intense period of dispossession and clearance of all the surviving pharaonic temples and royal monuments of the Nile Valley was contemporary with the construction of the Suez Canal during the 1860s. In terms of the volume of earth removed from these sites, and the amount of labor involved in clearing, cleaning, copying, and opening them for tourism, the creation of national antiquities land was very much the Suez Canal of Egyptology.

The class of rural elites that was responsible for regulating antiquities land and its production, including rural labor, for the state included military officers, members of foreign consulates, district superintendents, village shaykhs, site guards, inspectors, and labor foremen (rūyasa). The earliest site foremen employed by the government included men like Rayyis Rūbi Ḥamzāwi who, like his father before him and his son after him, worked in excavations at the site of Saqqara for fifty years until his death in 1904. It was Rūbi Ḥamzāwi’s team, for example, which, in 1869, first gave Egyptology the Arabic word sirdāb to describe the hidden statue chambers of ancient tomb design, a previously unknown feature that was then published by Auguste Mariette and passed down through the literature.[17]

The aftermath of Egypt’s financial crisis in the 1870s forced the state antiquities service to open excavations to foreign capital, which also resulted in attracting more skilled wage labor to archaeological fieldwork. In 1882, Britain’s Egypt Exploration Fund received the first public concession to excavate on Egyptian antiquities land, and the following year, in 1883, they hired the archaeologist Flinders Petrie to run their excavations. A few years later, Petrie and his student, James Quibell, met a skilled foreman from the Fayum named Ali al-Sūayfi and together they built up a seasonal excavation team of skilled workers from Upper Egypt who travelled from site to site each year. This eventually led to the development of new research methods and highly controlled excavation techniques for which Petrie is well known, but which also depended entirely on the participation of skilled technicians from Qift, beginning in 1893.[18]

The networks of skilled technicians and foremen from Qift expanded quickly in the final years of the nineteenth century. When the American archaeologist, George Reisner, arrived in Upper Egypt in 1899 with fists full of money from a wealthy sponsor, Phoebe Hearst, the Quftis’ reputations preceded them. Petrie, Quibell, and Ali al-Sūayfi recommended the names of fifty foremen from Qift to join Reisner’s team, including two brothers, Sayyid Ahmad Sayyid Dirāz and Mahmud “al-Mayyit” Ahmad Sayyid Dirāz. A few years later, they moved their excavations to the Pyramids of Giza with a team of Quftis four times larger and much richer than when they started. Senior Qufti foremen on private expeditions like these earned two-to-five times more than non-Qufti labor, plus benefits, including expense accounts for their furniture, kitchen supplies, entertainment, travel, medicine, and food, including their cigarettes, oranges, coffee, tea, sugar, sheep, and homemade bread to be shipped directly from the ovens in Qift.[19] All this (and especially the bread) was a measure of their status and ties to the global wealth of privately funded, foreign excavations. In 1905, the Hearst Expedition became the Harvard–Boston MFA Expedition and over the next decade they expanded their excavations from Giza to sites in Palestine and Sudan. By 1913, the senior foremen of the Harvard–Boston MFA excavations were also responsible for photography, record-keeping, correspondence, and diary writing in Arabic.

Bodies of Knowledge

In the first half of the twentieth century, the inter-village, family networks and system of apprenticeship dominated by the foremen-technicians from Qift restructured the production of archaeological knowledge across the Arabic-speaking world. Their collective body of knowledge is well documented in the global archive of archaeology and has continued to be passed down through generations of practitioners up to today. The Dirāz family responsible for the collective authorship of the 73 Arabic diary volumes discussed above were not the only Qufti foremen who left first-hand documentation in the archive. Letters and excavation documentation written by many Quftis, such as the fragments of Muhammad Ahmad al-Sanūsi’s correspondence with his German interlocutors, survive in many places around the world; not to mention a vast photographic record by and of professional Quftis. The early twentieth century was a period of intense innovation in archaeological methods and the diversification of skilled technical labor included photography, survey methods, material and landscape expertise, object conservation, archaeological illustration, and other forms of documentary preservation—all of which the Quftis participated in. It is curious, however, that unlike methods of archaeological photography, which have been developed and studied extensively, Arabic field writing did not persist into the late twentieth century.

By shifting our perspective to historical processes of globalization — rather than colonialism, difference, and absence — we can relocate the history of archaeology and Egyptology as a process of production located in, regulated by, and reaching out from Egypt and the Middle East. A global perspective not only helps explain the unequal exchange of archaeological labor in the world economy, but also the establishment of restrictive security regimes for archaeological heritage as state assets; and the prevalence of English, French, and German as prestige languages of global trade and information exchange since the nineteenth century. Understanding the processes of intellectual and linguistic exclusion that have denied many people in the Middle East and North Africa access to archaeological knowledge can help us work toward more equitable participation in the knowledge economy to which their or their ancestors’ labor has contributed.


This essay is based on the author’s postdoctoral research as a EUME Fellow 2024/25 at the Forum Transregionale Studien, and is adapted in part from a talk delivered at the international conference, Bodies of Knowledge: Arabic Language, Egyptian Labor, and Communities of Practice in the History of Archaeology and Egyptology, which was co-organized by the author at the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo, Egypt, 19–21 November 2024. The full program with abstracts in English and Arabic and a large selection of conference photos can be found here.


Notes

[1] M.L. Bierbrier (ed.), 2019. Who Was Who in Egyptology, 5th rev. ed., London.

[2] A. Bednarski, A. Dodson, and S. Ikram (eds), A History of World Egyptology (Cambridge, 2020). Other recent examples include: J. Abt, American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute (Chicago, 2011); M. Drower, Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology (Madison, WI, 1995); K. Sheppard, Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age (New York 2024); J. Thompson, Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, 3 vols. (Cairo, 2015, 2018); T. Wilkinson, A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology (New York, 2020).

[3] The enduring centrality of the Egyptological Festschrift as a publishing phenomenon (not subject to scientific peer review) is a good example of how forcefully the discipline closes epistemic ranks. For example, a search in the Online Egyptological Bibliography for the terms ‘Festschrift’ and ‘Gedenkschrift’ returns 2,148 individual records from 1880 to 2024, https://oeb.griffith.ox.ac.uk.

[4] H.A. Winkler, Ghost Riders of Upper Egypt: A Study of Spirit Possession (Cairo, 2009), translated by N.S. Hopkins from Die reitenden Geister der Toten: eine Studie über die Besessenheit des ‘Abd Er-Radi und über Gespenster und Dämonen, Heilige und Verzückte, Totenkult und Priestertum in einem oberägyptischen Dorfe (Stuttgart, 1936).

[5] W. Doyon, Empire of Dust: Egyptian Archaeology and Archaeological Labor in Nineteenth-century Egypt, PhD diss. (University of Pennsylvania, 2021), https://doi.org/20.500.14332/31388; M. Georg, Deutsche Archäologen und ägyptische Arbeiter: Historischer Kontext, personelle Bedingungen und soziale Implikationen von Ausgrabungen in Ägypten, 1898–1914 (Bielefeld, 2023).

[6] D.M. Reid, “Indigenous Egyptology: The Decolonization of a Profession?” Journal of the American Oriental Society 105 (1985): 233–246; D.M. Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley, 2002).

[7] H. Abd el-Gawad, “Deconstructing Middle Eastern and North African Archaeological Practices: An Indigenous Egyptian Counter-Narrative,” in G. Crouzet and E. Miller (eds), Finding Antiquity, Making the Modern Middle East (London, 2025), 209-222; A. Clément, “Rethinking ‘Peasant Consciousness’ in Colonial Egypt: An Exploration of the Performance of Folksongs by Upper Egyptian Agricultural Workers on the Archaeological Excavation Sites of Karnak and Dendera at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1885-1914),” History and Anthropology 21.2 (2010): 73–100; E.H. Cline, “Invisible Excavators: The Quftis of Megiddo, 1925–1939,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 155.4 (2023): 316–339; E. Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham, NC, 2007); Y. Hamilakis, “Indigenous Archaeologies in Ottoman Greece,” in Z. Bahrani, Z. Çelik, and E. Eldem (eds), Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914 (Istanbul, 2011), 49–69; A. Mickel, Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent: A History of Local Archaeological Knowledge and Labor (Louisville, CO, 2021); S. Quirke, Hidden Hands: Egyptian Workforces in Petrie Excavation Archives, 1880–1924 (London, 2010); C. Riggs, Photographing Tutankhamun: Archaeology, Ancient Egypt, and the Archive (London, 2019).

[8] For more constructive, alternative frameworks, see M. Leighton, “Indigenous Archaeological Field Technicians at Tiwanaku, Bolivia: A Hybrid Form of Scientific Labor,” American Anthropologist 118.4 (2016): 742–754; T.H.J. Marchand, “Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation between Mind, Body and Environment,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16.1 (2010): S1–S21.

[9] J. Hickel, M.H. Lemos, and F. Barbour, “Unequal Exchange of Labour in the World Economy,” Nature Communications 15.6298 (2024): 1-12, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49687-y.

[10] The diaries originally formed part of a large bilingual archive kept on site at Giza until 1947, preserved in Qift until 2006, and currently housed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. See P.D. Manuelian, “The ‘Lost’ Arabic Excavation Diaries of the Harvard University–Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition,” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 58.1 (2022): 129–162, https://doi.org/10.5913/jarce.58.2022.a007; L. Zack and W. Doyon, “DIGlossia: Egyptian Arabic between Rural and Urban Practices in Archaeological Dig Diaries from the Early Twentieth Century,” Linguistics in Amsterdam 15.1 (2024): 164–209, https://www.linguisticsinamsterdam.nl/home?issue=151. See also the “Arabic Excavation Archive from Quft” project, https://quft.fas.harvard.edu, and the “Giza Project at Harvard University,” http://giza.fas.harvard.edu.

[11] G.A. Reisner, A History of the Giza Necropolis, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA, 1942); see also P.D. Manuelian, Walking among Pharaohs: George Reisner and the Dawn of Modern Egyptology (Oxford, 2023).

[12] R. Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820-1914: A Study in Trade and Development (Oxford, 1969); R. Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800-1914, rev. ed. (London, 1993).

[13] E.g., M.W. Daly (ed), The Cambridge History of Egypt, Volume 2: Modern Egypt, from 1517 to the end of the twentieth century (Cambridge, 1998); K. Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge, 1997).

[14] S. Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014); E.R. Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-century Egypt (Cambridge, 1990).

[15] Doyon 2021, and W. Doyon, “Egyptology Under the Khedives: State, Labor, and Antiquities Land in Nineteenth-century Egypt,” in M. De Meyer, V. Oeters, J. Vandersmissen, and H. Willems (eds), Pyramids and Progress: Perspectives on the Entanglement of Imperialisms and Early Egyptology (Leuven), forthcoming.

[16] Auguste Mariette was appointed as a ma’mūr (deputy commissioner) to the Egyptian government, and director of its newly established Service des Antiquités, in 1858.

[17] A. Mariette, “Sur les tombes de l’ancien empire que l’on trouve a Saqqarah,” Revue Archéologique 19 (1869): 14.

[18] W.M. Flinders Petrie, Methods and Aims in Archaeology (London, 1904).

[19] Reisner Letters (R.doc.115, 145a, 1904), Hearst Museum Archives; Hearst Egyptian Expedition Correspondence (72/204 c), Bancroft Library, Berkeley. See also W. Doyon, “The History of Archaeology through the Eyes of Egyptians,” in B. Effros and G. Lai (eds), Unmasking Ideology in Imperial and Colonial Archaeology (Los Angeles, 2018), 173–200; Manuelian 2023.


About the Author

Wendy Doyon is a historian of modern Egypt and Egyptology. She received her PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 and is currently revising her dissertation for a book entitled Empire of Dust: State, Labor, and Archaeology in Nineteenth-century Egypt. She was a CAORC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt 2022–2024, and she co-directs the Arabic Excavation Archive from Quft project at Harvard University. Her research focuses primarily on French, English, and Arabic sources in archaeological archives from Egypt and Sudan and she writes on the history of archaeology from both Egyptian and multicultural/global perspectives. In the academic year 2024/25, she is a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien


Citation: Wendy Doyon, Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt: A Paradigm Shift in Archaeological Knowledge Production, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 18.02.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/55272


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (February 18, 2025). Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt: A Paradigm Shift in Archaeological Knowledge Production. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved March 25, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13c43


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The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien promotes the internationalization of research in the humanities and social sciences. It provides scope for collaboration among researchers with different regional and disciplinary perspectives and appoints researchers from all over the world as Fellows. More...

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