NEIL MACKAY'S BIG READ: ‘Scotland didn’t have empire done to it, Scotland did empire to other people’. Meet the Scots expert on Egypt fighting to ‘decolonise’ history

He’s the go-to guy on British TV when it comes to mummies, Sphinxes and all things Ancient Egypt. But Price isn’t simply concerned about the past, he’s a man on a mission to reshape the future as well. 

Price is at the forefront of the fight to ‘decolonise’ the study of Ancient Egypt and drag it into the 21st century. He wants the discipline to confront its history of racism and empire, and he’s not shy about apportioning a fair amount of blame on Scotland and its own role in Britain’s colonial adventures.

For his troubles, Price has inevitably been attacked as ‘woke’. Not that it worries him much - Price is determined to make the study he loves face up to its dark legacy.

Price’s central concern is this: the study of Ancient Egypt was founded by colonialists from Britain and France in the early 1800s and it still hasn’t shaken off the baggage of the past. There’s a lingering sense that Egyptians are considered unable or incapable of studying their own history without the assistance of white, western academics who are really the people best suited to the discipline. The whiff of racism and a “white saviour narrative” still hangs in the air, he feels.

Price, who’s 38, was raised in Milngavie in Glasgow, where he fell in love with Ancient Egypt during schoolboy visits to Kelvingrove museum. He’s currently Curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum at Manchester University - one of the UK's most significant Egyptology collections. At the moment his ‘Golden Mummies of Egypt’ exhibition is touring the world, and currently in Shanghai.

MALE, PALE, STALE
Campbell says he and other like-minded academics are “pushing against colonial narratives” when it comes to the study of Ancient Egypt.

So what is the ‘colonial narrative’? “There’s this conceit,” he says, “that archaeologists - gung-ho western, bearded, white, elite, cis-gendered, ostensibly heterosexual - go to Egypt and ‘discover’ Ancient Egypt because the people, ordinary Egyptians, are too stupid.” He adds: “Ancient Egypt was never ‘lost’.”

Like many academics, Price and his fellow scholars are uncomfortable about the legacy of their discipline. Many museums are mulling over how to deal responsibly with artefacts looted during the time of Empire. The UK has also, along with many other western nations, been trying to come to terms with its own history of slavery.

The debate has caused anger on both sides of the political divide.
Campaigners pulled down a statue of the infamous slaver Edward Colston in Bristol.

In Scotland there’s furious debate about the statue of Henry Dundas in Edinburgh - a man many see as guilty of slowing the abolition of slavery. The David Hume Tower at Edinburgh University was also renamed due to the Enlightenment philosopher’s comments about race back in the 1700s.

On the flip side, many object to prominent figures from the past being held to the standards of the 21st century, and denounce so-called ‘cancel culture’. Similar debates rage across America, particularly around the issue of statues and flags linked to the confederate slave states of the Civil War.

WHITE SAVIOUR COMPLEX
“Egyptology was undoubtedly founded on something of a 'white saviour complex’,” says Price, “and I think that persists to some extent in the discipline today”.

The way Ancient Egypt was studied in the past makes Price “uncomfortable”. The “standard colonial narrative”, he says, portrays Egypt as “brilliant - a proto-British empire”. Egyptologists used terms like ‘empire’ and ‘viceroy’ to describe the government of the Pharaohs. Students were taught that “the Ancient Egyptians had a ‘Viceroy of Nubia’ - where the hell is the term ‘viceroy’ coming from?” Price asks.

“It’s from the British experience of empire”. This explains why many British academics put Egypt on a pedestal as the greatest of all ancient civilisations.

The famed pharaoh Akhenaten - thought to be possibly the father of Tutankhamun - was “said to have a ‘durbar’,” Price explains. A durbar is a term used to describe the royal court in India. “So the use of this term is an absolute imposition from the British empire in south Asia”.

COLONIAL HIGH NOON
The arteries of Empire also contributed to this ‘colonial’ mindset towards Egypt and its past, Price explains. He points out that in the imperial age when Britons were travelling to India they would go through the Suez Canal. “You might take a few days and go and visit Egypt. So it’s colonial high noon,” he says.

Even though “the British general public don’t think of Egypt as part of the Empire, it absolutely was”, Price adds. In 1882, Britain invaded and occupied Egypt, bringing the country into the British sphere of influence.

“The colonial narrative was: ‘we’, the intelligent west, ‘discovered’ Egypt. Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun, we gave Tutankhamun to the world. We’re owed something. We’ve this intellectual hegemony over Egypt.”

SPOILS OF EMPIRE
British archaeologist Howard Carter led the dig that opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 - an event which turbo-charged interest in Egyptology and had a huge cultural impact on world, even leading to the creation of movies like The Mummy starring Boris Karloff in 1932.

“Some early exhibitions quite literally feel like the spoils of empire,” says Price. “In some cases, it’s literally the spoils - like the Rosetta Stone which was seized from the French.”

The Rosetta Stone was the key to deciphering hieroglyphics. Napoleon’s army took possession of it in 1799 during the French campaign in Egypt. When the British defeated France, the Rosetta Stone was taken to London. It can still be seen at the British Museum.

Price is chair of the board of trustees with the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) - an organisation, he says, which is “doing a lot of work of self-criticism, self-reflection and self-critique”. The EES, which was established in 1882 at the height of empire and just prior to the British invasion, is now “attempting to unpack colonialism in Egypt”.

PATERNALISM
The EES, Price adds, “was founded on this paternalistic idea of ‘we’re going to help save the monuments in Egypt from the ignorance of the locals’.” The EES did also, he points out, want to protect ancient artefacts from “western tourists”.

The society was founded by the Victorian popular writer Amelia Edwards, Price explains. “She wrote a book after she travels there in the 1870s called ‘A Thousand Miles Up the Nile’. That absolutely brings Egypt to the middle classes of Britain, and she founds the society, originally called the Egypt Exploration Fund. She raises lots of money and sends archaeologists out”.

This began a stampede of adventurers travelling to Egypt. Price notes that “the British and French cooked up a system” called ‘finds-division’ or ‘partage’.

“Notionally,” he says, “the best 50% of things that come out of the ground go to the National Collection in Cairo, but then up to 50% of what is thought to be ‘surplus to requirements’ or duplicate can leave with archaeologists. So that’s how Manchester has 18,000 objects from Egypt and Sudan - mostly through finds-division.

It was legal between the 1880s and 1970s, but it was at a time when mostly the Egyptian government was controlled by the British and French, and the Egyptian government had to repay the massive debt of building the Suez Canal.

So the British and French had the proverbial gun to the head of the Egyptian authorities saying ‘we’ll take 50% of stuff, yeah? That ok with you? Yup, fine, good. Job’s a good ‘un’. So that’s colonialism in action. I’m really proud the Egypt Exploration Society has opened up the discussion much more with people in Egypt today to talk about the legacy of colonialism”.

BOOK BURNING
He adds that there’s such a sense of anger over the past that “some people will tell you, some well known Egyptologists, that you should burn copies of ‘A Thousand Miles Up the Nile’ because it contains racist material. But the society is actually working on a critical re-edition, where there’s a new introduction to put the book in context. I firmly believe, and the trustees firmly believe, you can’t just bury the past. You’ve got to try and face it and constructively critique it. I’m not arguing for cancelling anyone. I’m not arguing for trying to ignore it. I’m saying ‘let’s have a conversation’.”

Price notes wryly that during pandemic “western archaeologists couldn’t go out to Egypt and guess what? We found out that the people of Egypt could do projects just as well and on a shoestring budget as we weren’t flying out westerners. It’s a wake-up call”. The idea that “the British went in and we should henceforth be teaching our Egyptian colleagues forever more”, is Price says, “paternalistic”. He adds: “I’ve learned plenty from Egyptian colleagues and they are the ones who are the inheritors of their own heritage”.

Unlike many nations which had art looted by western powers, Egypt “isn’t particularly interested” in the repatriation debate except when it comes to “a few very exceptional objects like Nefertiti’s Bust and the Rosetta Stone”. Price adds:

“Repatriation can sometimes be a bit of an echo chamber for western [people]. It doesn’t necessarily relate always to the concerns of indigenous groups, or people who live in places like Egypt.”

SCOTLAND’S SHAME
Price isn’t letting his homeland off the hook when it comes to colonialism and Egyptology.

“As far as the colonial narrative goes, I’m interested in the history of Scotland in Egypt, being a Scotsman. There’s a funny attitude, where Scots kind of distance themselves and say, ‘oh well, you know, we were colonised first. The English came in, and we’re the victims’. Based on my work on the history of colonialism in Egypt, Scottish people are more than well-represented. They are disproportionately represented in the cogs of the imperial project with Scottish diplomats, engineers and soldiers … There’s a sense that empire was ‘done to’ Scotland, when in fact Scotland ‘did’ empire to other people … We put this stuff on the English and say it was the English … Scots appear surprisingly commonly in the imperial machinery in Egypt.”

Price points out that there’s one section of the Great Pyramid of Giza called ‘Campbell’s Chamber’. It’s named after Major-General Patrick Campbell, the Scottish army officer and diplomat born in Argyll who became consul-general of Egypt in 1833.

TOO WOKE
Although Price says he hasn’t come under too much attack for his calls to ‘decolonise’ Egyptology, there has been some backlash. With the Egypt Exploration Society, he says, “there’s a certain type of person who’d join a society like that. I’m delighted to say the vast majority actively welcome these kinds of conversations … but yes, there has been pushback where people say 'you can’t rewrite the past, people like Emilia Edwards were products of their time’ … So some people will tell you ‘I’m leaving the society because I feel you’re trying to be woke’. But most people are saying it’s good and healthy to have these conversation.”

Price has little time for the use of the word ‘woke’ as an insult, as to him it simply means trying to do the right thing professionally. He adds that he feels “fortunate” that Manchester Museum, where he works, is also having the same “conversations” about confronting the legacy of the past.

EUGENICS
Price turns his attention to Flinders Petrie, often referred to as ‘the father of Egyptian archaeology’. “We remember his name,” Price explains. Yet “we don’t remember the names of the individual [Egyptian] workers” who carried out digs for him. Petrie “was an active and interested eugenicist. It wasn’t just something he passively did - he took a real interest in it.”

British egyptology is “more open” to change, Price says than most other western nations with a history of the discipline. “We’re on the winning side of the argument. The tide has turned. You cannot pretend you can enjoy your secluded cocktail terrace in the middle of Cairo and not expect to hear critical evaluation of colonial experiences.”

THE BIBLE
The impact of the Bible on Egyptology also gets under Price’s skin. The way the Old Testament “casts Egyptians as slave drivers” underpins, he feels, “the bias of colonialism”.

Most of the workers who built the pyramids weren’t slaves - they were paid for their efforts, he points out. The slave stories of the Bible, though, lead to “another form of colonialism - Orientalism”, which depicts the rulers of the east as either exotic and mysterious or brutal and cruel. The notion of “the Oriental despot comes from the Bible: Pharaoh as a despot … The way in the Bible, that the pharaoh is cast as a baddie, reverberates”.

Price is also incensed by the current pseudo-science trend for conspiracy theories claiming that aliens built the pyramids - the type of unfounded material aired on over-the-top documentaries like ‘Ancient Aliens’.

“It’s racist,” he says, “very racist.” He notes that there’s a hashtag on Twitter called ‘CancelAncientAliens’. The wild alien theory is “based on the assumption that ancient people were too stupid to have [built the pyramids] themselves and so it had to be some outside force. So to be clear in the interests of global parity and justice: the ancient Egyptians were an African people who built absolutely stunning monuments. Get over it.”

GUILT
The “decolonisation movement”, Price adds, isn’t about making curators or visitors to museums “feel guilty, rather it’s an opportunity to complicate and enrich historical narratives. There is no simple answer, or history - and I think we insult museum audiences if we assume they want an overly simplified story. ‘Ancient Egypt’ is undoubtedly one of the most popular parts of a museum. By asking questions about how colonialism formed our idea of what ‘Ancient Egypt’ was, not just how it got to be in cities like Glasgow and Manchester, I think we can begin to address questions of global inequality.

“That is what the Egypt Exploration Society has been trying to do, by critically examining its own history and amplifying contemporary Egyptian voices in the debate. Of course, this is part of a wider societal acknowledgement of these issues in the UK [and the west], especially over the last two years - but the general discussion has been happening for decades.

“Egypt more than Greece, Rome or other parts of the world, has existed as both ‘Oriental other’ and ‘western ancestor’ - that is why the colonial dialogue is so intense - and Egyptology is, in a sense, the exemplary ‘colonial discipline’, just as the British Consul Lord Cromer [consul-general in Egypt from 1883] said Egypt should be the exemplary colony.

“Even beginning to understand those legacies is hard work, but I think - and of course I would say this - Manchester Museum, in the UK sector, and the EES, in terms of international organisations most definitely, are leading the way in complicating the narrative. I absolutely emphasise that this is work done by others, I’m just privileged to collaborate on it.”