LAUSR

From the surge in black market antiquities occasioned by the war in Syria, to the heated public debate surrounding artifact repatriation from western museums to their countries of origin, we are once again reminded of the intimate relationship between archaeology and politics in the Middle East. From the perspective of scholarship, this intersection is emerging as an interdisciplinary field in its own right, but accounts of archaeology’s role in the encounter between empire and nationalism in the Arab region remain rare. This makes the contributions of Donald Malcolm Reid on the politics of antiquities in Egypt all the more significant. Reid’s first book on the subject, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (University of California Press, 2002), remains seminal in the field. It is pacey, artfully constructed, and meticulously researched, offering unique insights on the emergence of professional archaeology in Egypt during an age of European imperial expansion. Crucially, it writes Egyptian archaeologists and museum curators back into a narrative which had focused almost exclusively on their European counterparts, and makes the important argument that the material culture of Egypt’s distant past came to play a significant role in the construction of its modern national identity. This is the premise taken up and further developed in Contesting Antiquity in Egypt: Archaeologies, Museums and the Struggle for Identities from World War I to Nasser. It is the second book in what is intended to be a trilogy, ultimately tracing archaeology’s role in the evolution of modern Egypt from the late eighteenth century all the way to the late twentieth. Contesting Antiquity draws on the framework and themes which Reid first outlined in Whose Pharaohs?. The book is organized with reference to the four main archaeological museums founded in Egypt between the