Response to D. B. Redford. Egyptology at the Dawn of the first-Twenty-Century Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Egyptologists Cairo, 2000. 14 mai 2003. Vol. 2, n°History, Religion, p. 12–14. (original) (raw)

all the subdisciplines into which Egyptology is divided, history (and history writing) has long had to suffer the status of poor cousin. While other Egyptologists bring to the field of enquiry up-to-date interests and techniques from such trendy pursuits as economics, linguistics, anthropology, literary theory, art history, or even the applied sciences, the historian has seldom updated his attempts by examining and learning from the ongoing debate among so-called "professional" historians. It may be too late in any case: if the post-modern endists' are correct, and history is at an end1 after the "down-and-up" of the last 250 years,2 Egyptological historians may find themselves left to chew over yesterday's irrelevancies, using a mode of discourse which is obsolete and even dangerous. 3 We also labor in a vineyard in a part of the world which is under a cloud in some quarters. Since the 1960s sub-Mediterranean or 'African' history has suffered the indignity of a condescending, if not downright demeaning, attitude on the part of European historians. H. R. Trevor-Roper in 1965 characterized the history of Africa as nothing more than "the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant quarters of the globe."4 Others have pointed to the lack of a "sense" of history-in an Hellenic tradition, of course-among African communities, or to the paucity of written sources. The oral nature of historical tradition and transmission,5 it is argued, undermine attempts to write serious history, thus leaving the breach to be filled by more suitable investigators, say, anthropologists.