I’m Marwa Elhosary, an MA Cultural Heritage Management student at the University of York and Chevening Scholar. I previously trained as an archaeologist and tourist guide at Alexandria University and have more than ten years expierence in Egypt’s heritage and tourism administration.
All my research turns on one question: How can Egyptian heritage be returned to Egyptians in our own voice and language?
Vernacular Repatriation, the title of this project, builds on that question. It explores what happens when heritage is interpreted by the people and communities it belongs to, not just the institutions that hold it. I use audio, language and storytelling to engage Egyptian audiences in the language we speak at home.
Working from the !كل العيون عليها / All Eyes on Her! display at the Horniman, I chose to focus on the Egyptian women whose voices had been pushed aside, and took three belongings related to them.
Choosing the belongings: a woman’s life in three stages
I wanted to speak about the life of the Egyptian woman through its different stages, so I looked for three belongings that each carry a deep story of their own: motherhood, celebration, and death.
1. Statue of Isis nursing Horus
This is a small copper-alloy figure of the goddess of Isis nursing her son Horus. Looking at the statue and reading the story of Isis, I found in it the story of every Egyptian mother today, for example, the mother who does the impossible to hold her home and her children together. That impression was not mine alone. In the interviews I asked people what they would say if they were describing this statue in their own words, and several of them reached the same place with no prompting from me. For them, Isis is every Egyptian mother, and the statue is a symbol of motherhood.
Listen to the retelling of the Statue of Isis nursing Horus below:
2. Bone Clappers
This is a pair of small clappers carved from bone and shaped as two women’s hands. Here, I wanted to evoke the aspect of a woman’s life associated with joy and celebration, and to connect it with traditions that continue today. These clappers are not far removed from the sagat, the finger cymbals still played in Egypt, and their place remains the henna night and the Egyptian wedding, where women gather to clap, sing, and trill.
Listen to the retelling of the Bone Clappers below:
3. Coffin of the priestess Peta-Amen-Net
This is the coffin of the priestess Peta-Amen-Net. It carries the painful and difficult side of a woman’s history. The Museum’s description deals with her body as a mummy, or as a specimen for study, and passes over the fact that she was a person with a name and a whole life. What I wanted, above anything else, was to give her back her name and to treat her as a human being rather than as a piece put on display to be looked at.
Listen to the retelling of the Coffin of Priestess Peta-Amen below:
A hope for the future
I hope this is a real beginning, one that starts at the Horniman and reaches every Western museum holding an Egyptian collection. I would like to see the idea applied widely and lastingly, on one condition: that it is in Egyptians’ voices, and that the writing of the texts is a joint production. I hope to see, one day, genuine collaboration between Egyptian and British museums, and a digital platform that brings Egypt’s dispersed heritage together in one place.
What I take from all of this is that language is not the wrapping around an interpretation; it is part of what is being given back. Told in ʿammiyya, these belongings stopped being things behind glass and became ours again, and that happened without anything moving. What language cannot do is fill the gap in the record. How these belongings left Egypt is still unknown, and closing that gap is the Museums’ work, not language’s.
A word of thanks
Thank you to the Horniman Museum and Gardens for making space for Egyptians to speak about their heritage in their own voice. It is a real and meaningful step in the decolonising work museums are taking on today. A particular and heartfelt thank you to Heba Abd El Gawad, Senior Curator of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum and Gardens, who opened this door for me and gave me steady, generous support at every stage. And thank you to the eleven Egyptians, in Egypt and in Britain, who gave me their time and their thinking. Their words are the substance of this work.
