The Poetics of Egyptian Museum Practice
W. Doyon
This essay examines the conceptual development
of Egyptian museums from the mid-nineteenth to the early
twenty-first century. It is particularly concerned with the
narrative themes and poetic structures through which colonial and
postcolonial identities have been negotiated in modern Egypt. Over
the past 150 years, Egyptian museum display has retained much of
its traditional architecture based on Victorian aesthetics, but a
new archaeological narrative has emerged in the past 50 years that
redefines the colonial characterization of Egypt. This narrative
integrates the full span of Egyptian history into a single
identity, and in so doing it joins the independent present to the
indigenous past. To contextualize the Egyptian museum
condition, day-to-day museology and issues of audience are also
addressed, and a directory to the complete museums of Egypt is
included.
The original material for this paper was
gathered with the support of an Associateship at the American
Research Center in Egypt in 2005-2006 and presented as the author’s
M.A. thesis in Museology at the University of Washington in 2007,
under the title Presenting Egypt’s Past: Archaeology and
Identity in Egyptian Museum Practice.
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To reference this article we suggest:
Doyon, W., 'The Poetics of Egyptian Museum Practice’, BMSAES 10
(2008), 1–37
www.britishmuseum.org/research/online_journals/bmsaes/issue_10/doyon.aspx