Egyptian Interlocutors in the Archaeological Work of Paul Lucas and Claude Sicard, 1700 - 1725 (20 min)
Presenters
Jennifer Westerfeld, University of Louisville
Abstract
Thanks to the recent work of
scholars like Wendy Doyon, Donald Reid, and Stephen Quirke, a picture has begun
to emerge of the roles that Egyptian laborers and informants played in the
field of Egyptian archaeology during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. However, the role of such Egyptian interlocutors in the discipline’s
development prior to the Napoleonic expedition of 1798 remains much less
well-known. The work of two French explorers active in the first quarter of the
eighteenth century, Paul Lucas (1664–1737) and Claude Sicard (1675–1726),
offers the opportunity to extend this line of inquiry back in time and to
consider the varying forms of engagement between Egyptian informants and
European scholars at the dawn of Egyptology.
The two men brought different
levels of education and expertise to their projects of exploration and survey
archaeology. Sicard, a Jesuit missionary with a robust classical education,
spoke Arabic and was thus able to travel independently and communicate directly
with his Egyptian interlocutors. Lucas, trained primarily as a physician and
naturalist, was dependent on the services of dragomen (interpreter-guides) to
mediate his encounters with the local population. Each author thus cast his
Egyptian informants in a different light. Drawing on published travel
narratives and correspondence by Lucas and Sicard and unpublished records from
the French National Archives, this paper attempts to recover traces of the
Egyptians who made possible the early modern archaeological exploration of the
Nile Valley. It also explores the nascent hierarchies of Egyptological
knowledge production that simultaneously depended upon and marginalized
Egyptian voices.
AIA-5F