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 Drawing on published travel narratives and correspondence by Lucas and Sicard and unpublished records from the French National Archives, this paper attempts to recover traces of the Egyptians who made possible the early modern archaeological exploration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.