Kathleen Sheppard's account of Egyptology's social networks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a vital addition to histories of archaeology. The author draws on approaches from the history of science to argue that Egyptologists at the turn of the twentieth century represented ‘dynamic cognitive topographies’ of knowledge, while hotels and boats in Egypt were ‘truth spots’ for the creation and diffusion of scientific knowledge. The volume focuses explicitly on the experiences of Western archaeologists and Egyptologists as they sought to begin, or consolidate, their careers through conversations in public spaces such as hotel terraces, in the privacy of rented boats on the Nile, or while walking and exploring cities such as Alexandria and Cairo with friends, colleagues and funders. The book provides an important and innovative contribution, expanding the narrow definition of who called themselves archaeologists or Egyptologists, and who is recalled today as such. Couples such as Emma Andrews and Theodore Davis, or Margaret Benson and Janet Gourlay receive as much treatment as more prominent and better researched archaeologists such as Howard Carter or James Henry Breasted. Sheppard is equally careful to discuss the exclusion of Egyptians from these physical spaces, as well as from Egyptology as a discipline at the time. “Egyptology is social”, Sheppard rightly asserts, and “the social is political” (p. 14–15).
The chapters follow the progress of the typical journey of Western visitors to Egypt, beginning in Alexandria, before focusing on Cairo, the Nile and finally Luxor. Sheppard includes extensive information from both Baedeker's and John Murray's travel guides to recreate a sense of the traveller's experience. This is a helpful device for readers unfamiliar with a typical trajectory at the time, but there is an overreliance on these publications. Chapter 1 especially is largely a repetition of information found in these guidebooks. Several hotels in Alexandria are mentioned but there are very few instances of conversations or other social interactions. This is surprising after the Introduction, which contextualises the volume so well, situating it within previous scholarship and explaining the methodological underpinning to how sciences develop outside of universities, museums or laboratories. Sheppard sets out her parameters very clearly in the Introduction and does not claim to provide a history of either Egypt or archaeology in Egypt; nevertheless, relying almost exclusively on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travel guides leaves the reader with the impression that very little work has been undertaken on Alexandria in the last 120 years.
Chapter 2, set in Cairo, affords Sheppard more material, although the overreliance on period guidebooks continues throughout the volume. Travellers spent more time in this city than in others and wrote extensively about it, both in publications and in letters and diaries. There is, for example, a useful overview of James Henry Breasted's experience in the city, both before and after the First World War, including his role in tightening the British grip over Iraq. This has been documented previously, but Sheppard does a good job in highlighting how vital informal encounters between Breasted and British colonial and military administrators were to this process. Hotels (Shepheards, the Grand Continental and Mena House at Giza) and archaeological sites offered the spaces, either public or private, required for these meetings. What exactly was discussed and how Egyptology or archaeology as disciplines profited from these ‘truth spots’ is, however, not explored in great detail. Conversations are, of course, by nature ephemeral, unless committed to a diary or letter after the fact, but exactly what “significant scientific work” (p. 87) was undertaken in hotels in Cairo would have merited further critical analysis, as would a contextualisation of ‘the political’ mentioned in the Introduction.
Sheppard is an excellent and entertaining writer. Her synthesis of archaeology in its social context before and after the First World War paints a vivid picture for the reader, but the political context is only ever briefly alluded to, and the timeline tends to jump back and forth between various decades. Cairo was the centre of British military intelligence in North Africa and Southwest Asia during the First World War, yet the central role played by archaeologists remains largely unexplored. There was, of course, little archaeological fieldwork during the war years. That does not, however, mean that archaeologists did not work in other ways or make the most of the privileged positions afforded them by experience gained before the conflict, through which they were able to continue expanding their social networks despite, or perhaps because of, the military conflict.
The volume really comes into its own in Chapters 3 and 4. Dahabeas (house boats) are convincingly described as spaces where James Henry Breasted developed the Chicago House Method (still used to this day) to record inscriptions, where artefacts were stored, studied, photographed and shown to visitors and officials, and where social encounters helped to develop arguments later published in research articles or excavation reports. The ways in which Benson and Gourlay used their hotel rooms at Luxor for their work, or the importance of Emma Andrews's diary (written in hotel rooms and on luxury boats) in reconstructing her partner Theodore Davis's destructive excavation methods are particularly good examples of how Egyptology and archaeology profited from the exclusivity of these colonial spaces.
It is a pity that the image quality, especially of the maps, lets down the illustrations; the writing is often out of focus and sometimes illegible, while the images lack contrast and appear rather flat. The brief biographical details in the Cast of Characters, however, as well as the currency conversion tables and travel itineraries, are useful references for readers new to the history of archaeological and philological research in Egypt, and to the period.
Read in conjunction with more historically and politically anchored histories of the discipline, the book makes an important contribution to our understanding of how archaeology and Egyptology function as disciplines and in practice.
