Journal of History and Cultures: Issue 10
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Issue | 201 ISSN 2051-221X 10 Nov 9 JOURNAL OF HISTORY AND CULTURES A peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to pioneering new research in history and cultures ] University of Birmingham historyandcultures.com [email protected] Journal Editor: Nichola Tonks Special Issue Editors: Sara Woodward & Liam McLeod JOURNAL OF HISTORY AND CULTURES MYTH AND MAGIC: INTERDISCIPLINARY READINGS OF THE RECEPTION OF ANCIENT EGYPT Illustrator: Hannah Needham Issue 10 | 2019 @hannahneedham__ ISSN 2051-221X Nov Journal of History and Cultures (10) 2019 ISSN 2051-221X Contents Editors’ Note i Preface ii-iv Articles The Myths of Tiye and Nefertiti: the early historiography of the Amarna Period and its popular legacy Aidan Dodson (University of Bristol) 1-21 ‘Older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx’: Egypt and the Mythic Past in Alternative Egyptology and the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft Jeb J. Card (Miami University) 22-44 ‘Birmingham Ware’: Ancient Egypt as an Orientalist Construct Nolwenn Corriou (University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) 45-66 Tea with King Tut at The Winter Palace Hotel Kathleen L. Sheppard (Missouri University of Science and Technology) 67-88 The Conjuror’s Greatest Show: Belzoni and the Egyptian Hall Lizzie Glithero-West (The Heritage Alliance) 89-121 Ezekiel, Magic and Midwives: A Feminist Biblical Reading Rosalind Janssen (University College London) 122-142 A Biblical Prophecy and the Armour of Horus: The Myth of Horus and Seth in Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation Maiken Mosleth King (University of Bristol) 143-164 The Museum of Lies: Incorrect facts or advancing knowledge of ancient Egypt? Katharina Zinn (University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter) 165-190 Reviews Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt, by Chris Naunton Alice Baddeley (University of Liverpool) 191-193 Contributor Information 194-196 Journal of History and Cultures (10) 2019: i-i. ISSN 2051-221X Editors’ Note Conceptions of ancient Egypt do not exist in a vacuum. Throughout the centuries, the West’s perception of Egypt’s history have morphed and changed to suit the contemporary dynamics of its beholder, producing a body of knowledge which blends historical ‘fact’ with fiction and mysticism. It is at the intersection of these perspectives that attitudes towards colonialism, race, gender, class, and indeed historiography are revealed. Through interdisciplinary research, combining the fields of Egyptology, literature, history, and theology, a broad- ranging examination of what ancient Egypt is and what it means is made possible. In 2015, Stephanie Moser suggested that ‘representations of prehistoric and ancient worlds play an important part in generating interpretations of the past, yet we still know little about how they relate to the archaeological process of creating knowledge’. Recent scholarship on ancient Egypt has widened the field of reception studies, allowing for more enriched understandings of the way Egypt has been used throughout history. This encompasses scholars from the fields of Egyptology, History, English literature, Biblical studies, and, most recently, game studies. This special issue responds to the challenge of exploring the complexity of ancient Egypt’s past and how this complexity has shaped the way it is viewed today. It is born out of the discussions begun in the 2017 and 2018 Tea with the Sphinx conferences and thus provides an important cross-section of engagement with ancient Egypt from numerous disciplines. As such, this issue joins the thriving field of publications by Jasmine Day, Roger Luckhurst, Eleanor Dobson, Nichola Tonks, Maria Fleischhack, Erik Hornung, Elliott Colla, David Gange, Christina Riggs as well as many of our own contributors. All are concerned with tracing the ways in which ancient Egypt has been rediscovered and represented. The temporal and geographical boundaries of this special issue are broad in order to display the breadth and depth of fascination with ancient Egypt by both scholars and the peoples they study. This issue came together through the hard work of our phenomenal contributors, dedicated peer reviewers, and many passionate colleagues. We are indebted to the general editors of the Journal of History and Cultures for giving us an interdisciplinary platform for this discussion. Sara Woodward & Liam McLeod Page | i Journal of History and Cultures (10) 2019: ii-iv. ISSN 2051-221X Preface The intimate relationship between present and past – or, rather, the past as perceived by those in the present – is to be seen in a wide range of human endeavours. At one extreme, the past can be a justification or confirmation of political policy, with the potential of condemning millions to their deaths. At the other, the past can be a playground in which the artist can set his or her characters, to interact with each other in a way not necessarily possible in the present. Yet the past is not only a ‘foreign country’ where ‘things are done differently’ (to paraphrase L.P. Hartley in The Go-Between), but also a place that, unlike a real foreign country, one cannot visit or observe directly. All that we can do, through surviving written material and material culture, is to steal glimpses of the past through an ever-moving and distorting mirror. Indeed, as we move back in time, we do not even have a tolerably complete mirror, but one long-ago shattered into fragments, only a few of which have yet been found – or even still exist – and are still capable of reflecting light. Thus, the past has to be built up from distorted glimpses. The gaps – sometime vast – have then to be filled in by the modern observer from indirect sources, ranging from logical extrapolations and credible parallels, to what may be little more than deep-seated, often unrecognized, personal prejudices. The ‘past’ as thus-created is often in reality no more than a working – and sometimes extremely tentative – hypothesis that needs constant testing against fresh glimpses of the ‘real’ past as revealed by ongoing research. Such testing may indicate that the current working hypothesis needs revision or even complete replacement. However, the nature of scholarship and its transmission to, and reception by, broader audiences means that such superseded working hypotheses may not die but take on a zombie-like life of their own. Such ‘zombie hypotheses’ can then endure long after further research has eclipsed generations of replacement reconstructions. In some cases, this is simply the result of a scholar sneaking out a retraction of previously widely-announced ‘findings’ in an obscure footnote, leaving even their less- observant peers unaware that things have moved on (or back!). In others, especially if the idea is of a more-or-less sensational kind, it may be swept up by the popular media and, perhaps embroidered by non-specialists, to become in the wider mind a ‘fact’ – rather Page | ii Journal of History and Cultures (10) 2019: ii-iv. ISSN 2051-221X than simply the working hypothesis it had hitherto been (and of course remains). From then onwards, its true ‘zombie-life’ may move apace, gaining further embellishments, and taking on an all-but-assailable status, unchallengeable in the public arena even by deep specialists aware of the zombie’s true status, and its relationship to the current working hypothesis (or hypotheses) regarding the point in question. Not only this, but modern popular hyperbole can further spice the mix, alleging that these are not only ‘facts’, but ones that have endured as such for centuries or even millennia. For example, one reads or hears statements along the lines that ‘the memory of the beauty of Queen Nefertiti has endured for thousands of years’ – yet in reality her existence, let alone appearance, was utterly forgotten for over three millenia. Indeed, as I point out in my contribution to this volume, she only re-emerged as a definable individual late in the late nineteenth century AD – rather a long way from her last documented sighting in the late fourteenth century BC. Zombies can thus gain the sheen of alleged age-old tradition, making them yet more difficult to kill. Accordingly, our historical zombies make up many of the ‘facts’ that ‘everyone knows’ about ancient Egypt – alongside others actually taken directly from fiction, often further distorted through the lens of Hollywood. They are thus an important element of Egypt’s ‘myth and magic’, the subject of this volume and its precursor conference, held at the University of Birmingham in June 2018. Contributors have mined rich seams to address a wide range of such areas in which modern (and some ancient) myths of ancient Egypt and the magic often held to infuse its civilization have manifested themselves in the modern world. My own is a case-study in the way that two historical individuals emerged from the shadows of oblivion, to be the focus of numerous historical zombie-facts. The perceived otherworldly aspects of Egypt are discussed by Jeb Card through the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Ancient Egypt re- imagined for the West is explored by Nolwenn Corriou through the writings of Sax Rohmer, and Kathleen Sheppard looks at how Howard Carter controlled information about Tutankhamun from Luxor’s Winter Palace Hotel. Lizzie Glithero-West considers Egypt as an architectural inspiration in the form of the famous Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, and Rosalind Janssen attempts to unravel the meaning behind the representation of Egyptian midwives in a particularly knotty Biblical passage in light of third-wave feminist biblical criticism. A relatively new popular mode of the reception of ancient Egypt is to be seen in video games, and Maiken Mosleth King explores an example Page | iii Journal of History and Cultures (10) 2019: ii-iv. ISSN 2051-221X of the melding of archaeology and ancient myth in this context. Finally, Katharina Zinn considers the way that modern stories can be consciously woven around ancient artefacts as a way of presenting them to a wider audience.