Dr Melanie Pitkin, Professor Ronika Power, Dr Daniel Soliman and Craig Middleton, 9 May 2024
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Good evening, everybody, and welcome. My name is Craig Middleton and I’m a Senior Curator here at the National Museum of Australia. And lucky enough to have worked as one of the coordinating curators on the Discovering Ancient Egypt exhibition, along with my colleague, Dr Lily Withycombe, who’s here, and Dr Daniel Soliman, who we have with us tonight as well. I’ll introduce him shortly.
Just a note to say we’re keeping the doors open for a little bit just in case we have some people wandering in. Let’s be kind to them as they wander in a bit late. But before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge that we’re meeting on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri Kamberri people, the traditional owners of this place that we are lucky enough to gather on, think on, share on and engage together on. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. And extend this respect to any others who have ancestral connections to this country and to all First Nations people who may be with us here tonight. This acknowledgement holds an important place in the work of the Museum. We’re very privileged here to be able to connect with and share the ideas, cultural practices and material culture of diverse people and communities in Australia and around the world. In many cases, we share cultural histories and heritages that are not our own.
So, with that in mind, I’d like to acknowledge the Egyptian–Australian communities who have contributed to and consulted on this exhibition, Discovering Ancient Egypt, which is associated with this event, and thank them for their support in our approach to sharing their rich cultural heritage.
So, the exhibition that some of you may have seen, hopefully all of you, but if you haven’t, don’t worry, it is still on until September. Discovering Ancient Egypt is on loan to us from the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, also known as the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities, which is located in Leiden, the Netherlands. And this museum is the custodian of one of the most significant collections of ancient Egyptian and Nubian material culture outside of Egypt. So, the exhibition we have is a very special one.
So, tonight’s panel discussion associated with this exhibition is part of our Spotlight conversation series here at the Museum, which aims to have robust, sometimes challenging, but always productive conversations that amplify our exhibition programs. We began in February with ‘Why does ancient Egypt fascinate us?’, which was an interrogation of the global appeal of ancient Egypt. And we moved on to a very thoughtful conversation about ‘Enduring Egypt’ in March, in which we considered the interconnections between different faiths in Egypt and the ongoing legacies of ancient Egypt in contemporary religious and faith practices.
And most recently in April [... Welcome come on in ...] we reconvened for ‘Living Egypt’, which explored expressions of culture, identity and creativity through contemporary Egyptian cultural expression, including art, film, television, theatre, feminism and more. And tonight marks our fourth spotlight conversation focused on Egypt. And the topic is a juicy one: ethics.
As custodians of cultural heritage, ethics is at the heart of the work we do, but what does that actually mean and how does it manifest in the work we do with objects, material culture, stories and communities? Artefacts from Egypt form a major part of historical collections around the world and museums are increasingly recognising the ongoing connection that the people of Egypt today have with their dispersed cultural and ancestral heritage. With all this in mind, tonight’s conversation will explore issues such as historic collecting practices, evolving approaches to interpretation and display and the ethics of archaeology and museology. I would like to pause at this moment to state that tonight’s conversation will include explicit discussion of deceased people and their bodies. If at any point you feel uncomfortable, please feel free to leave. My colleagues, Jessi and Graeme down the front, are very happy to escort you out. And honestly, if you feel uncomfortable, please do leave. We respect your decision.
Now, it’s my great pleasure to introduce our amazing panellists who I’ve been very excited and intimidated to bring to the National Museum tonight. Very excited, mostly, but to my far left, I have Dr Melanie Pitkin, an Egyptologist and Senior Curator of the Nicholson Collection of Antiquities and Archaeology at the University of Sydney. She completed her PhD on the history and chronology of First Intermediate Period Egyptian stelae at Macquarie University which is now published as a monograph and was a Postdoctoral scholar in the Egyptian Antiquities Department at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Melanie has more than 15 years of professional experience working in museums in Australia and the UK and providing support to museums in Egypt. She’s been very generous to us here at the Museum, offering her advice and support as we work to present this exhibition, Discovering Ancient Egypt. So thank you for that.
Next, we have Professor Ronika Power, who is a Professor of Bioarchaeology in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, and Director of the Centre for Ancient Cultural Heritage and Environment. Ronika’s research platform aligns with biocultural archaeological approaches – there’s lots of big words – whereby data derived from scientific analysis of the human body is interpreted in conjunction with all other forms of archaeological and historical evidence to provide meaningful insights into the demography, health, diet, environment, lifeways and world views of individuals and groups from past populations.
And coming to us live from Cairo, I believe, Daniel is someone who many of you may have already encountered throughout our public program. Dr Daniel Soliman who is an Egyptologist researcher and renowned expert in ancient Egyptian history. Since 2019, Daniel has been Curator of the Egyptian and Nubian Collection at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities, conducting research and creating and contributing to exhibitions on ancient Egypt, including Discovering Ancient Egypt, which we have with us here at the National Museum. Among his interests are the histories of collecting Egyptian antiquities and the many ways in which ancient Egypt is interpreted in contemporary pop-culture. Daniel is also Co-Director of the excavations carried out at the ancient side of Saqqara in Egypt by the Dutch Museum and its partners. It is a pleasure to have the three of you with us tonight. Now, we have about an hour or so of conversation and then hopefully 10 to 15 minutes for questions at the end. So let’s get started.
Ethics is a term that can be understood in a myriad of ways. So my first question is – sounds simple, but it’s a pretty big one – but I hope what it will do is to help us frame some of the other discussions we have tonight. So, I am really asking each one of our panellists, what does ethics mean to you? And I’d like to start with you, Melanie.
MELANIE PITKIN: Thank you, Craig. Hi everyone. To me, ethics is about responsible behaviour. So how you morally conduct yourself when faced in a situation of being conflicted about what’s right or wrong. So if I think about myself as a curator, who am I responsible to? I’m responsible to our collection, to different museum publics, to communities in particular, the communities of origin from whom our collections come from, the past, and also the present and truth telling through both of those, and also to my colleagues in the museum and the university who I work for. So there are the minimum standards for ethics, which we have through ICOM – International Council of Museums – ICOM code of ethics and codes of conduct from the university and the museum that we work for.
But as a curator, I have my own bespoke set of guidelines, I guess, that I follow myself. I won’t go through all of those right now, but a few that really are very important to me is to confront past practices, to own up to past collecting practices and provenance issues, past decision-making practices and other colleagues even in recent times, to take on the really hard stuff. The Human Remains Project is a really good example of that, which we’ll get to. I think it’s my responsibility to not let things go by the wayside. So if there is something to confront, we need to do that. And also to be prepared to unlearn.
So yes, I’m a knowledge holder, but I’m only one knowledge holder. There are so many others that we have to think about and to see things from other people’s different points of view. Because ultimately, we come to the role with our own prejudices, our own biases, but we have to strip those away in the role of curator to try and facilitate discussions and get people to see things from different perspectives.
RONIKA POWER: Perfect.
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Yeah, perfect. Exactly, that was beautiful. Thank you so much. I’ll hand …
MELANIE PITKIN: Help to go first.
[laughter]
RONIKA POWER: Yeah, that’s a hard gig. It’s a hard gig and that’s a hard response to follow. Hello, everyone. Hello, Craig. Thank you so much for being here this evening and hello to Daniel. So good to see you. Yeah, so exactly. If I could say ditto to everything that Melanie said and potentially expand on it from a couple of different perspectives.
So for me personally, ethics answers the question or helps to approach the question of what do I do? What should I do in a given aspect of life? And that obviously includes professional practice. Some of the tension with regards to ethics comes from its potential crossover and some of the grey areas between the concepts of morals and the concept of ethics and as a pocket guide to the way that we can potentially navigate some of those definitions, and I will say I defer to the expert in the room, Dr Serrin Rutledge-Prior is here from the Australian National University who’s an expert on ethics, so we can potentially join her in the conversation a bit later.
So, for me, morals can be considered as these ideas that we hold as individuals and groups about what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong. People refer to a moral compass, and often if you are pressed, you can’t remember how you learned morals. They are cultural, they are traditional and they’re heavily situated in culture. Ethics, on the other hand, are an alignment between values, principles and purpose that help us to understand those questions that Melanie was discussing in her professional life. And of course, they apply to our personal life as well. But in our professional context, what do I do in this moment? This is incredibly important for the discipline of archaeology and in the context of museums. Because first and foremost, in the context of archaeology, we have to remember that by definition, archaeology is destruction, and the excavation of any given context is effectively to destroy it.
So, what ethics does is, it helps us to answer or to respond or to approach that question of what do I do now that I have chosen to do this act of excavation and destruction. So, we can return to what some of the implications of that are. In museums, that question is equally important because there are many dimensions that flow on to those questions of what do I do now that this material has been excavated, now that it’s context has effectively been destroyed, now that in some cases it has been expatriated from its original home or original context.
For me as a bioarchaeologist, the question of ethics is just as critical from the perspective that I am dealing with human remains and they are real people. They’re not objects, they’re not artefacts, they are real people. And so those questions of ethics are incredibly important for me at every stage of my engagement with human remains or with excavations that will contain human remains that help me address those questions. Then the beautiful crossover between myself and Melanie, how does bioarchaeology meet these museum contexts, I think is something that we’re going to explore a bit further tonight.
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Absolutely. Thank you. I’m going to come back to much of what you just said very shortly. I think you’ve made some very salient points already that we should unpack more. But before we do, I want to throw over to Daniel with the same question. What does ethics mean to you?
DANIEL SOLIMAN: Well, first of all, welcome and I hope you can hear me. I am working with a not fantastically stable internet connection, so I hope that you can hear me at any rate. It’s very difficult to follow these very elaborate responses to your question, Craig. What I can hopefully add to this is that ... well, I reiterate much of what Melanie said. Museums are public facing institutions and so they hope to have good relations with a variety of different communities. Those communities should be able to trust the museum. The audiences of the museums should be able to trust the museum to do what is right. But as there are varieties of communities, that will also be varying ideas about what is right, what feels right beyond that which is legal beyond these ethical codes that Melanie already referred to for museums.
So, in addition to what has already been said, maybe I can say that it stands to reason that this is an ever-developing practice, obviously. So, something that may have felt okay to do for a museum 10 years ago may at this point be already outdated. And that’s a very difficult thing for museum professionals to keep up with, but certainly also for audiences, and maybe that’s another thing that I can add to this conversation. When we talk about ethics in the museum practice, this is something that we as experts, as knowledge holders, as Melanie said, we are constantly trying to engage with, but it shouldn’t just be something that we in our ivory tower do ourselves. It’s also very important for us to keep in touch with how communities feel and include them in these discussions. But also explain them, make them visible in the museum space so that if a certain decision is made, the audience understands why it is done that way.
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Thank you so much. Already super interesting. Right? So much to think about already, but even just from all of those responses, we see that ethics is dynamic. It’s a noun, it’s a verb and a lens that we can apply to many different contexts and practices. All of our panellists are trained in archaeology and all are still active in this space in some way. And when it comes to excavation and work in the field, there’s surely a great consideration of ethics as you’ve already began to articulate. And this is partly because of the history of the discipline when approaches to it, as Daniel has already mentioned, and others, were very different than they are today.
So, I’m going to throw back to you, Ronika. First up, when I started talking to you and I was introduced to you and your being, this term bioarchaeologist fascinated me. It was something I’d never heard about before. So, I’d like you to first explain that to us and then articulate maybe how that differs to being an archaeologist or not.
RONIKA POWER: Yeah, sure. So, a bioarchaeologist is somebody who deals with any element of the past that was once living, is a good catchall phrase. So that will include people who work with plants, people who work with animals. We’ve got Dr Mary Hartley here who – from Macquarie University – who’s a zoo archaeologist, expert zoo archaeologist. And then you have people like me who work with human remains. We also have colleagues from the environmental sphere who are working with inorganic elements of the archaeological record who can also be bioarchaeologists as well. Within that umbrella however, my specialty goes even further. And that is that I am what we call a biocultural archaeologist. And what a biocultural archaeologist does, what I do is to focus on data that’s derived from the study of archaeological human remains, but then to integrate that data with every other available aspect of the archaeological record.
I’m incredibly greedy, so I will take it all. Give me your tombs, give me your temples, give me your artefacts, give me your eco facts. I’ll take it all. And then pull all of it together so that we end up with a much more holistic view, very importantly, of the lived experiences of individuals and groups from the past. And it’s important to focus on that idea of lived experiences because a misconception is that bioarchaeologists or biocultural archaeologists are only interested in dead bodies for them being dead. No, we want to know how they lived. We want to know all the diverse facets as much as we can access about their lives and about their experiences, about their relationships, about all of the things.
So that is my role. And the beauty of the body in that context is that it translates. And I’ve worked across many different cultures, contexts, time zones, for this purpose, of course, including Egypt. So, to return to the second part of your question, and by the way, yes, it is the coolest discipline ever. And yes, please come and study with me at Macquarie University. You’re officially invited. So, to return to the second part of your question with regards to ... refresh my memory, it was about?
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Well, how it differs to being an archaeologist, but I might just also throw in there …
RONIKA POWER: Yeah, throw it all in. I’ll take it. Upsize the meal deal.
CRAIG MIDDLETON: … while you are articulating these differences, thinking through the particular ethical considerations in the field and beyond the field.
RONIKA POWER: Yeah. I think that’s a really great question. So, all bioarchaeologists are archaeologists, but not all archaeologists are bioarchaeologists. So, it is a sub-discipline of the discipline of archaeology, and it requires a lot of extra study that is particular and dedicated towards that, that discipline. Certainly, bioarchaeologists and archaeologists must work hand in hand, particularly when it comes to the field, in many contexts. Obviously archaeologists can certainly excavate human remains, but only bioarchaeologists really can study them to a degree of expertise. But one of the really important things I think that’s also nice to note about Egypt is that Egyptian teams will excavate in the field in Egypt. But often it will be bioarchaeologists, including of course Egyptian bioarchaeologists, who will excavate the bodies. It is a specialist role.
The really important thing to think about and I think one other thing that I would pick up in terms of our definition between the three of us co-creating this discussion is it can also be helpful to think of ethics in terms of an overarching set of … you can call them rules, you can call them principles, you can call them anything that govern our professional practice. So many of you would be familiar with the ethical requirements for doctors, for lawyers, for police – many different professions have a code of ethics. Melanie talked about ICOM, but where our work comes in is that ICOM is actually sadly lacking when it comes to the ethics of working with human remains. It is present, but it is vague and it is not useful neither in terms of the museum context, which understandably that’s the audience it’s speaking to, but also importantly with regards to the field.
At the moment, there are ethical guidelines that exist for certain individual institutions. For example, the British Association of Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology have a set of ethics. But there is little attention to that with regard to excavating in the field. So certainly in terms of analysis, but one of the things that we have talked about and we have also discussed as possibilities for the future are actually working on ethical guidelines for approaching excavations.
We absolutely believe that it should be a consideration before you even think about picking up the trail. Your ethical approach to every aspect of the excavation, not just the human remains, but every aspect of the excavation, particularly human remains, requires consideration of ‘what should I do in this space?’ You are exhuming someone’s burial ground. You are exhuming what was thought to be their final resting place. Why are we doing this? How do we approach that? What are the cascading set of steps that are going to follow that have changed the course of that person’s posthumous experience forever? So, there are so many lacunae, there are so many gaps in ethical approaches in archaeology. And certainly, Melanie and I are here to actually start trying to get it right, trying to put some resources in place, and we can talk about that more.
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Absolutely, and we will. Did you want to add anything, Melanie, to that?
MELANIE PITKIN: I’ve got lots I could say, but let’s see where you want to take the direction.
[laughter]
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Let’s keep going. We will turn to the very important topic of human remains in the context of museum collections and Egypt. But I’d like to shift gears a little bit. Thinking about ancient cultures or any museum collecting. The antiquities market has played a significant role in not only the collecting, but the circulation of collections, antiquities and ancient material culture. I’m going to throw to you, Daniel, because the museum in which you work, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, has several collections credited to antiquities dealers, traders as well as diplomats. So, I am hoping you can share a bit about how the Egyptian and Nubian collections at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities came about. And also how you as a curator of this museum collection grapple with your contemporary perspectives and this kind of complex collecting history. If that’s not too much of a big question.
[laughter]
DANIEL SOLIMAN: It’s a huge question, Craig. But it’s an incredibly interesting question and it’s difficult to say where to start with answering this question, because it’s good to understand, I think, that antiquities – Egyptian and Nubian antiquities – have been circulating for basically already in antiquity. Good famous examples are obelisks from Egypt, these needles to say, constructed by Egyptian kings that were taken out of Egypt by Roman emperors to be placed in Rome, for example. There are numerous other examples of antiquities that have been circulating already in antiquity. And during medieval times, for example, antiquities have been circulating. And on the topic of dealing with ancient Egyptian human remains, we know of course that bodies were being excavated already in early medieval times in Egypt by Egyptians, by other people with the sole purpose of understanding – well, not the sole purpose – with the purpose of understanding why they were buried. But also from the belief that the oils and unguents and materials being used to mummify these individuals held certain properties that could heal people.
So, the bodies were considered to have medicinal powers. And for that reason, they were traded also with people in Europe. And to our surprise nowadays, sometimes they were ground up and actually being sold … being traded as medicine. Just to say that the interest in bodies is very old, it goes back to medieval times. The history of the collection of the museum in Leiden is somewhat connected to this practice because a very early collection of Egyptian antiquities was in Leiden as part of the Leiden University already in the early 17th century. Because the university had this anatomical theatre as part of the faculty of medicine where they studied the human body for doctors, for surgeons. And as part of this theatre had also a collection of human remains from the contemporary times from the Netherlands, but they started also to become interested in bodies of people from the past.
So, at some point in the early 17th century, the director of the theatre started to collect through a contact, a merchant in Syria, ancient Egyptian bodies. And with those bodies, they also collected a number of objects to explain life in ancient Egyptian times, to explain life in biblical times. So, a set of objects, a set of bodies, were already in Leiden, as I mentioned, in the early 17th century. And that essentially was the core of the collection, the Egyptian and Nubian collection of the museum that was to be founded in 1818.
Now 1818, this is the early start of the museum where at the beginning of the 19th century, there is this race between European museums to have a grand, beautiful collections. This is really this competition between European powers to show how much they know about antiquity. The museum starts to acquire huge collections at the time, basically from three individual private collectors. These are Europeans that at the time live in Egypt, which is then under Ottoman rule. And under this Ottoman rule, Europeans are invited to come to Egypt to help modernise the country.
So European influence in Egypt at the time is very huge and they have permission through the Ottoman rulers to also start looking for antiquities themselves. This is just after basically the birth of the scientific discipline that we call Egyptology. In the early 19th century, huge strides are made in reading ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and this discipline of archaeology, of Egyptology, really starts to bloom, and there’s a huge interest in ancient Egyptian artefacts. So, it’s in this context that these individuals are able to start looking for antiquity themselves or through agents, sometimes Egyptian agents at various sites, and they get permission from the Ottoman rule to shape these collections, but also to export them.
So, they are able to sell their collections to museums like the one in Leiden, like the one in the British Museum, like the one in London – I mean the British Museum – like the Louvre in Paris, etc. in Turin, for example. So this is the time when huge collections are forming in Egypt. And I would add that this is also the start of a rather exploitative, let’s say, branch of archaeology where the scale on which antiquities are collected is expanding. And where it was maybe a bit marginal in the past, it becomes really a large, large trait. And this trait can flourish because of an uneven power balance, so to say. Again, Egypt is first ruled by the Ottoman Empire with a great European influence. Later the British take over in Egypt, they conquer Egypt for a while and rule Egypt between the 1880s and early 20th century.
And as part of this uneven power balance they continued their exploitative practices of collecting antiquities. And with the spread of these antiquities in Europe, you get also great private collections in Europe, art dealers who have many Egyptian antiquities that they sell. So the circulation of artefacts in the west is something that continues for decades, and that’s very, very complex. It’s a complex situation to describe. It’s a complex situation to explain also. It’s also a practice in which many Egyptians were involved, but again, it’s part of these uneven power balances. That is the difficulty with museum practices nowadays … might be you are happy to have these collections, we can tell fantastic stories … I think … in museums with these collections about antiquity. But we also want to acknowledge, we hope, the context in which these collections were formed and to acknowledge the unevenness in the power of relations.
So how do we do that? As you said, how do we grapple with this? This is a difficult topic. I personally think that the first thing is to acknowledge these histories, to make them visible in the museum space and to create awareness with the audiences that this had happened. And it’s not really to point fingers towards guilty parties or anything. It’s really trying to add a layer of knowledge about what it is that we are doing. And I think this is an important point for our discussion. In my opinion, and I’m sure many of you will agree with me, antiquity is not isolated from our time now, from our era. Right? Antiquity is a construct, and it’s always related to how we think nowadays. So the antiquity that we have now in museum collections is present because of those histories. So we have to make room for those histories also and share those histories with our audiences, talk about it. And it’s really through discussions like these, I think, that we get space for this.
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Thank you so much. No, I am not going to say that. I’m going to move on because I don’t want to take up too much time with my thoughts. But closer to home, the Chau Chak Wing Museum, a recent amalgamation of three of the University of Sydney’s collections – the Macleay Collection, Nicholson Collection, and the University Art Collection too – has its roots in the antiquities trade. So I’m asking Melanie now to share with us a bit about the Nicholson collection of Egyptian antiquities, how that was formed. And again, a very similar question to you about how you as a relatively new staff member to this museum, how and the work you’re doing alongside Ron, how you grapple with those complex histories.
MELANIE PITKIN: Sure. Thanks, Craig. And I thought that was really nicely said, Daniel. So the Nicholson Collection has its origins in the mid-19th century with a man called Sir Charles Nicholson, after who our collection is named. So already right there heroising a British medical doctor who ended up moving to Australia and was a very important person in the early colony in Sydney. And he wanted to set up a teaching collection at the University of Sydney. He was also one of the co-founders of the university, which is on par with the great universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, because he thought that would help to civilise people here in Sydney. So he travelled to Egypt in 1856 to 1857 on his first trip. He acquired around 400 Egyptian antiquities, and this formed the foundation of our antiquities collection. His house burned down in a great fire, so we don’t actually have the archives of the ins and outs of who he acquired from, but we do believe they were predominantly dealers.
But again, we’ve been approached by media before about, but how can you prove that these objects aren’t stolen? And as Daniel mentioned, there was a large trade already happening within Egypt, and tomb robbery happened in antiquity. We also have to remember about the ethics in the ancient world as well in this conversation. And through this collection that Nicholson brought together, he was very much focused on trying to get representative objects to the collection for teaching purposes. So our human remains predominantly came through Charles Nicholson at that time. He then went on to Italy and collected some more antiquities and then to the British Museum. So everyone was very connected at this time as well. And there was Samuel Birch at the time who did some work on the collection and translations. They were all prepared for display, placed on mounts, and then sent back to Sydney, ready to go straight into the museum.
Nicholson went back again in 1862 and acquired a few further antiquities, but never came back to Australia. So they were sent back to Sydney, and then the collection grew exponentially from there. So in 1882 when the Egypt Exploration Fund, now the Egypt Exploration Society was formed, a branch in Sydney was also established to help finance excavations in Egypt. So we actually spent one guinea per year. And as a result of that, there’s a system of partage, so anyone that helped to finance excavations could receive a portion of those finds. So we do have a fairly significant collection of archaeologically excavated objects in the collection from sites like Abydos and Tell el-Amarna. So from an archaeologist point of view, that is ideal to work with provenance histories.
But of course, Daniel touched on some of the laws and the regulations that governed what was coming out of Egypt. And we have to remember that Egyptian laws were introduced from 1835. We work predominantly to the UNESCO Act on the illicit movement of cultural property from 1970, but there are also local regulations in other countries as well that we have to abide by. And when it comes to the permits, the Egyptian Museum used to issue permits between the early 1900s and the 1970s. So we also need to make sure that we have that paperwork as well. And a lot of the time we don’t.
Now, we would not acquire anything that doesn’t have that paperwork, and we need to consult with the authorities. So I’m jumping around a bit here, but after the Egypt Exploration Fund, alumni from the University of Sydney who travelled to Egypt or who served in the First and Second World Wars, would also acquire antiquities and bring them back to Australia and give them to the museum. And then we have the odd private donation and also the odd art market purchase.
But something that … I don’t know – I’d love to hear from Daniel on this too actually – but that I’m often ethically conflicted by is the number of private collections that exist out there where someone will come forward to us and offer it to the collection. But there’s no ownership history, there’s no proof of legal entry into Australia, and we can’t acquire it. But what happens, and this has happened for a long time in other museums I’ve worked in as well, we just say we can’t take the object and it stays with the person, with the family. And that ends up either going to a private dealer to sell on or it stays and becomes the burden. I’ll say it’s a burden of someone else in that family.
And this is something where I have a really important meeting – tomorrow actually – with the ambassador, the Egyptian ambassador, to talk about this because there are a lot of shabti figures out there. And someone will look in our online database, will come to the museum and they’ll see a shabti that came to the collection before 1962. We don’t know how it came. And they’ll think, "They collect shabtis, so I can give my shabtis to the museum”, but we can’t take it. So, this is something that I think it requires a national body to step in to help with these types of liaisons because ultimately the responsibility rests with the person who owns that object. We can help to influence them, but they have to want to be involved in either returning the object or coming up with another solution with us and the authorities.
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Yeah. That’s fascinating. And I think it just demonstrates where personal, professional and wider ethics come into play. Because of course, we’re talking about complex histories of the antiquities market and then by not accepting a donation potentially that remains on the market and feeds the market. So I don’t know if you wanted to respond to Melanie in that regard, Daniel?
DANIEL SOLIMAN: Yeah, sure. I very much recognise what you described, Melanie. I think this is a case speaking of ethics and morals, where our current legislation and codes do not really accommodate a problem that we have. Because we say in these regulations that we don’t want to collect objects if the provenance is unclear, if we don’t know exactly what their collection history is, because we don’t want to be implicit in illegal practices. But at the same time, it will effectively mean that these objects will go into the trade, get lost, get damaged, and we lose an opportunity to care for these objects. So a part of the answer, I believe, is in changing legislation there. And secondly, I think as you mentioned, crucial will become, I think and hopefully already is, these discussions with Egyptian communities as you’re talking to the Egyptian ambassador, I think that’s the next step forward.
I believe also, and this is the last thing I’ll say, that these legislations and discussions so far revolve around the idea that an object in a museum collection is meant to stay there. It’s its final destination, which of course it doesn’t have to be. And if you can work in a model where something being in a museum is there to be taken care of and can then move to another community if needed, then that should be more fluid, I suppose.
MELANIE PITKIN: Collections managers will hate to hear that.
[laughter]
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Totally. I just want to jump around a bit, because you mentioned in your brief story about the Nicholson and the fire and Ronika, and I was just talking in the exhibition space about this insatiable desire for archaeologists to dig. And I’m wondering if you could reflect on that in the context of keeping records and ...
RONIKA POWER: Yeah, certainly. And also within an ethical space. And Daniel is disrupting all of the curations managers, which I love. And I’m always happy to disrupt anyone. But in this particular case, archaeologists, that the ethical questions behind excavations include, should we do this? Have we excavated enough? Of course, my surrogate mother, Marian Gifford, was saying in the exhibition, she sees all of this and she says, ‘How could there be all of this and there still be more?’ And that insatiable desire, the trowel twitch, as I call it, drives archaeologists to the point of addiction – in some cases – it’s habitual. But the ethical part of that is what happens then?
And I think the audience would probably be surprised to know one of the ethical obligations, in fact, the ethical obligation of excavation is that you need to share those what you have learned, what you have destroyed with the world in order to restore it. Yet that happens in not a significant percentage of the time. The desire to dig means that people are returning to the field every year and excavating more and more and more, but not publishing to the degree that they’re excavating. And in many cases, some celebrated. I mean, I didn’t even know that Melanie was going to tell that story, where records, field notes have been subject to acts of deities and demons, floods, fire, pestilence, tidal waves, locusts. I’m sure someone’s dog ate it. This further destruction and in that way, when the archive is lost, everything is lost. So this is beyond the kind of stories that Melanie and Daniel are talking about. This is actually at the core of the discipline. We really need to be thinking about that and ethically that this needs to be part of the dialogue in archaeology is, have we dug enough? There are some cases, and I hasten to add, where rescue archaeology is very important, where there are sites that are threatened for various reasons. And yes, of course that’s critical that archaeology is engaged in these spaces.
But in many areas, including – I have done a lot of work in Malta – the Maltese, the Superintendents of Cultural Heritage in Malta and Heritage Malta, are actively saying to sites where we know there are significant remains in situ, in the ground and not enough. We need to leave more for next generations. We need to publish what we have excavated, and we also need to leave space for technologies to advance. Who’s to say there might not be opportunities in the future where the same level of destructive excavation needs to take place? So there are even in the concept of, should I dig is an ethical question. You with me? Awesome.
[laughter]
CRAIG MIDDLETON: So interesting. My mind is blowing over here. So let’s leave everybody with that mind-blowing question and we’ll move on a bit because I don’t want to lose some other topics we want to get to. Because the next one I think is one that people are going to be interested in. And I know all of our panellists have worked in this space, and that is around the discourse and ethics of ancient Egyptian human remains or Egyptian human remains. I will stay with you, Ronika, because I want you to talk about your work and you can jump in too Melanie.
RONIKA POWER: Yeah, this is my tag team.
CRAIG MIDDLETON: on the Egyptian Mummies Exploring Ancient Lives exhibition.
RONIKA POWER: Yeah. Actually, I’m going to throw to you immediately because you approached me.
MELANIE PITKIN: I did. So in my previous life before I worked at the Chau Chak Wing Museum and somewhere else – I’ll get to that later – I worked at the Powerhouse Museum, and in 2016 I was the Coordinating Curator – like Craig is on this exhibition – and it was Egyptian Mummies Exploring Ancient Lives, and it came from the British Museum. So, there were six mummified human remains on display that were wrapped fully covered, and their digital visualisations from their 3D CT scan. And I had a fabulous intern student working with me at the time, Jacinta Carruthers, who’s now a collaborator with us on this work, who really wanted to undertake an audience evaluation on visitors to the exhibition. So, we had 100 visitors who participated in the survey. It was predominantly open-ended, and we wanted to bring the data up to date because it hadn’t been since the mid-90s with a woman called Jasmine Day from Perth who had actually published on survey data from visitor expectations around seeing human remains and also how they responded to seeing the display of human remains.
RONIKA POWER: In Australia?
MELANIE PITKIN: In an Australian context. That’s right. So there are a few documents out there such as the 2003 Department of Culture, Media and Sport Publication in the UK, which uses statistics to justify decision-making around displaying human remains. And it comes back to how questions are structured. If it’s a closed yes or no response, are you comfortable seeing human remains on display? And from that publication, they indicated that the majority of visitors expect to see human remains on display. We wanted to challenge that with our own open-ended research to see where that took us. And it confirmed actually that most people also did want to see human remains, but with conditions attached to that. For example, I’m comfortable seeing human remains on display so long as consent has been given. So who is giving consent around the display of the human remains? So long as they’re done respectfully and in a dignified fashion. And this is what the ICOM Code of Ethics also says around human remains. There is no cultural specificity, so it doesn’t distinguish how to display human remains from ancient Egypt as opposed to Roman Britain or wherever.
So I guess we did the survey, that data came back, and then I moved around, I came back to the Chau Chak Wing Museum in a more senior position. And just to give some context, when I arrived, it was a brand-new museum. So it’s very unusual in anyone’s career to really be able to step into a brand-new building, a brand-new space, 18 new exhibitions. And I was quite surprised, given that I was already involved in these discussions to see that in a very new exhibition, they had made the conscious decision – and they said an ethically informed decision – to display mummified body parts. And this included a pair of infant’s legs inside of a bell jar, a severed head, a foot in an Arnotts biscuit tin and some hands.
And the context to that though is around, and what I think someone has already mentioned before around historical attitudes towards human remains, I think Daniel spoke about that, sorry. And I guess from that I’m like, this is a really good opportunity to see, okay, let’s do a really holistic, rigorous research project here and get the empirical data as well to help make informed decisions going forward. Because we’ve learned from other museums in the past, like Manchester Museum, that being reactionary is not the way to go. Anecdotally, I had people saying to me, "This is really offensive. Why is the museum doing this?" But the wrong thing in following my ethical guidelines would’ve been to suddenly take them off display. Even though, especially when media got involved, that question comes a lot. ‘Why have you taken so long to do anything about it?’
So we used the same model of the survey we used on the British Museum exhibition. So we had comparative data and then in late 2022, we surveyed 200 visitors to the exhibition. And again, the data came out saying that people are casing the display of human remains, again, with conditions attached to it. But what we have to remember is the way that museums construct these expectations and have normalised the experience around seeing human remains on display. And this goes all the way back to the British Museum in the 1830s when they had their first display of Egyptian mummified human remains in the galleries. And newspaper reports at the time, they captured the popularity and how people were fascinated. It’s that morbid curiosity as well. When travel started to open up and this is why people were acquiring souvenirs in the form of body parts, there was a huge trade around this. And again, as Daniel mentioned, Egyptians are also involved in this trade as well. So there’s so much more I can say.
[laughter]
RONIKA POWER: What I would say to add to Melanie’s incredible summary there, I think that the really important difference in our work is the extent to which we involve stakeholders. And this can be a segue into talking about your incredible engagement with …
MELANIE PITKIN: It’s my anchor point right there. Thanks.
[laughter]
RONIKA POWER: But I just think from my, if I may just put on my lecturer boots for a second, for the audience’s benefit. This is actually a really important part of knowing and understanding what ethics is and the process of ensuring that you are arriving at decisions about what is right and what is good involve consultation with stakeholders. And stakeholders are everybody who has something to gain or lose or experience as part of the subject, whatever it is that you are approaching. And this is really important as our work has addressed, is that really there has not been any extended updated research done on precisely these questions in Australia. And more than that, the audience may be quite shocked to learn that there are actually very few museums in Australia that have any ethical guidelines that are specifically dedicated to the curation, display, care, scientific analysis of archaeological human remains, including but not limited to, ancient Egyptian mummified individuals in whole or part.
So, this is the kind of work that we are doing to develop that ground mass and engage in the stakeholder consultation that can ensure that we are considering the viewpoints, the perspectives, the experiences of as many of our audience as possible. This is particularly important in the Australian context because we must remember that everything we do, we are doing on stolen land. You’re supposed to cheer.
[laughter]
Right? Everything that we are doing, we are doing on stolen land. And what our work does is also seek to consider what our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewpoints might be with regard to the curation and display of the bodies of people from other ancestral or descent groups on country.
MELANIE PITKIN: That’s okay. Very well put. So concurrent to the survey, we’ve also launched back in 2022, an ongoing Egyptian community engagement initiative. And I mean, I was already doing a lot of Egyptian engagement work when I was at the Fitzwilliam Museum in the UK and briefly at the Powerhouse. But I guess when I came to the new museum, the narratives were both very eurocentric. We have one gallery that’s dedicated to the way Egyptian collections have come to Australia, and I’m sure you might have come across the term decolonisation. So, I might ruffle some feathers in the room when I say this. I’m not a complete proponent of decolonisation, I’m a proponent of multiple histories. So, I believe we still need to tell the stories of how the antiquities came here and that narrative, but by layering it from the perspective of Egyptians as well. So, we’ve been working very closely with the Egyptian diaspora, and in September 2022 we held a weekend of really intensive focus groups with 17 members of the community from Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.
We brought out Professor Alice Stevenson, who is a professor at UCL in London. She leads with Dr Heba Abd El Gawad, the Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage Project. So we have been quite influenced by their work. But something else that – and again, I’d like to hear Daniel’s feedback on this – but in terms of the ethical role of a curator, I think it’s to try and implement and put things into practice that are also being discussed in the academic discourse. So it’s been talked about for quite a while about the way Egyptians have been sidelined from their heritage and the storytelling of their past for a long, long, long time. And it’s very interesting that when we speak with Egyptians, not a lot of them actually think they have the ability to contribute to that, or they don’t know they have the possibility to do that. And it’s very empowering when you start speaking to them, they rethink things and knew because of that.
So there are a few key themes that we talked about in the focus groups looking at Egyptian identity and what it’s like to be Egyptian in Australia. Because there are different generations where we have those that were born in Egypt, particularly like Coptic Egyptians, who then came out in large migration waves to Australia. And they very much have their Egyptian cultural values and live an Egyptian way, but still have adapted to an Australian lifestyle. And then you have those that are born in Australia to Egyptian parents. They might be able to speak Arabic, but they can’t read or write it. They might not have ever been to Egypt. And those people are not captured in the sense that it’s very hard to put a figure on and how many Egyptians there are in Australia.
And we also talked about the display of human remains, and this is where the main impetus for the decision to recently remove the mummified body parts from display has come from. We are doing this incrementally though and still testing audience feedback. And also we are still doing work with Egyptian communities because it’s a shifting debate and people’s opinion can change. But the overwhelming sentiment from the group was that they felt offended by the display of the Egyptian mummified body parts and that it was unnecessary. We didn’t react immediately to that because there’s 17 people in that group and there are more Egyptians to speak with, and also to get feedback from Egyptians in Egypt and elsewhere.
So we arranged like a meet and greet to also raise awareness around our collection because it was quite remarkable to see how many Egyptians weren’t even aware that we had the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities in Australia. So we’ve held three of these now. We’ve invited large groups of Egyptians into the museum, and we’ve had brief talks with them. We’ve organised lunches and given them tours of the collection. And then afterwards they complete a very in-depth survey for us about how we can work together and what they think museums could be doing better to help with their voices, their community, and the representation of Egypt. Because something that I’m always thinking about is what do people take away about Egypt when they leave the museum?
And right now, there is an absence of people both in antiquity, but mostly present people, and the ancient Egyptians are always glorified and revered. And what is the stereotype around Arabs today? I don’t even need to answer that question. It’s like the Sham en-Nessim that has just happened, and that relates to the ancient Egyptian Sham festival that happened. And it’s called, hikaye which means our stories, and there’ll be an audio guide for the exhibition too. So that’s our first layering experience.
We also had an Egyptian culture day that we co-developed with the Australian Egyptian Forum Council last November. And it was so amazing to see so many Egyptians in the museum. They were delivering floor talks and speaking to the displays. There was Egyptian music and cuisine, and it was very much a pilot because these things can also seem, not tokenistic so much, but like a flash in the pan. But the work we’re trying to do is really integrative. I’m very deeply involved in Egyptian communities here and events, and I see myself … I’d love to … I identify with Egyptian community very closely, even though I still have a lot to learn and my Arabic’s not as good as it should be, things like that. And we’ve also employed an Egyptian curatorial assistant to provide cultural guidance and to show how committed we are in this space.
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Amazing. We can see how passionate you are. So, thank you so much for sharing that. I’m curious to bring Daniel into the conversation now, because the exhibition that we brought here to Canberra includes five mummified people, the young woman Sensaos, the man Harerem and the woman Ta(net)kharu, or Tadis, an unknown man and an unknown woman. So I’m wondering if you could reflect on some of the practices that the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden take when they approach the display of mummified human remains and bring to bear some of your perspectives in response to what Melanie and Ronika have been talking about.
DANIEL SOLIMAN: Well, first of all, let me applaud the work that Ronika and Melanie have been doing, which is so important and fascinating. And I’m happy that this type of work is being done, got so much space, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about it. Well, the human remains in the exhibition, I think it all comes down to negotiating and ethics into a great deal, I think, is negotiating. So as Melanie said, when you consider all these different perspectives, if you decide to go one particular way, it also means sometimes negotiating the other perspective; that’s always difficult. So at the end of the day, it’s still a museum that makes a decision that’s curating. That’s what we do. So I also agree with Melanie. I think when you say decoloniality only brings you so far because at the end of the day, we are working in museum spaces, which at least in its origin, they are Western concepts that emerged in a particular context with particular ideologies behind them.
So we work still within that space, even though of course it’s changing very much and we listen to other communities, we involve other communities. The idea of what the museum is constantly changing, but we still operate, at least from the idea that there is someone like a curator, like a museum board who gets to decide. So, this is also how the exhibition Exploring (sic) Ancient Egypt came about. Of course, in a very traditional way, we had decided to include the bodies of five ancient Egyptians, and we wanted to do so to tell the story, well, value of the afterlife in ancient Egypt, but also to tell their individual stories. These bodies have been studied in archaeology, in fact, in hospitals in the museum where they were CT scanned and studied by Egyptologists and by doctors to tell more about what we to try to see on the basis of their bodies can say something about their lives, which in itself, of course is fantastic.
What we aim to do in the museum is to tell stories about ancient lives. This of course, also means that we have these literally invasive methods to do so without the consent of these individuals. We make pictures of their internal organs, of their skeletons, and we discuss these. So, this is the dilemma of archaeology close as supposed what Ronika concerns about archaeology being destruction. Archaeology also means taking the decision to go against someone else’s original wishes, but you do so in order to better understand them. Right? So that’s the dilemma. That’s really the ethical question. The moral question.
Maybe it’s interesting to note that because these Egyptian bodies that are in the care of the later museum travelled to Australia, me and my colleagues and colleagues at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra have been having discussions about how to talk, how to address, how to think about ancient Egyptian human remains, which have been incredibly inspiring and informative. And especially I’d like to acknowledge my discussions with Dr Shona Coyne, if I’m pronouncing her name correctly, from the repatriation unit of the Museum with whom we had been having discussions.
Well, let me first say there is something in the vocabulary that she and her colleagues use when talking about human remains that is completely lacking in the language usually of Egyptologists and archaeologists. So human remains, she calls, for example, ancestors, which reveals this connection between the present and the past. There is a really emotional, humane way in which she and her colleagues talk about human remains, and that can also be applied to ancient Egyptian human remains. There is an attempt, which to visit these human remains, how fragile or incomplete they may be to talk to them, to greet them, to treat them as humans. Again, this is very much an emotional, personal connection to the ancestors that is lacking in our current practices, I think, which again, are rooted in archaeology, Western disciplines Egyptology, Western disciplines.
And this is a perspective that can be very, very useful, I think, to the way we curate our exhibitions. I’ll say one more thing. As part of the bodies arriving in the National Museum of Australia here in Canberra, there were ceremonies that took place to welcome the bodies again, including these bodies, really in what we are doing in a way that normal museum practices in the West would not address these persons. So, bringing that individuality, bringing that personal touch, I think opens lots of ways of how we can make exhibitions, how we can maybe encourage people to talk to these individuals. They have through our collection histories ended up at least for the moment in the care of this particular museum. And be that as it may, we can still treat them as individuals, acknowledge their lives, but also acknowledge their personalities. And I feel there are ways to do that thanks to the discussions I’ve been having here in Canberra.
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Thank you so much. Thank you for those reflections and what Daniel is referring to, and I think it links into this conversation about consultation stakeholders and consent. And consent is a really interesting idea when we’re talking about ancient cultural material. When we welcomed the human remains, the bodies of these five people to Canberra, we consulted with many different groups including Egyptian–Australian communities through service organisations. But also, right here in Canberra, there’s a large Coptic community here in Canberra and we consulted with them on how to respectfully acknowledge and display their cultural heritage and ensure that they were comfortable with us displaying these people in the first place.
And alongside that, being in Australia, we do have a responsibility to First Nations communities and protocols. So we worked with the local traditional owners to perform a number of ceremonies, welcome ceremonies and protection ceremonies around the arrival and display of these people. So, I think we learned a lot from each other. Daniel, your perspectives on Egyptology and archaeology and bringing to bear this particular unique Australian context. We are going to run out of time.
RONIKA POWER: Are you serious?
CRAIG MIDDLETON: I know.
RONIKA POWER: Where did it go?
CRAIG MIDDLETON: It went quick, that’s for sure. I do want to bring the conversation to consultation a bit more because I think working with people is where we’re ultimately arriving in this conversation. And we’ve talked about the project of the Chau Chak Wing and I’m wondering if you have anything else to bring to this conversation in your particular line of archaeological work and how you work with descent communities. And I’ll say I’d love you to unpack that word, that term for me. When I was in email conversation with Ronika, you used the word “source community”, and she said, ‘I prefer this’, and I’d like you to unpack that for me. It was illuminating to me.
RONIKA POWER: Yeah. I’m going to just touch on three things there if I may. So, the use of the term descent communities has been a recent evolution for me too. As Daniel has said, this ground is constantly evolving and that means that we are constantly learning. And the learning on that particular point again came from our colleague, Dr Heba Abd el Gawad, who came to Sydney, was it last year? 2022. Gosh, yet I haven’t aged a day. Yeah. I think I’ve got some of the secrets of the ancient Egyptians. And Heba, I asked that question directly, ‘What is the best way to refer to the communities, the stakeholders, the communities from whence these cultures, these individuals have descended from? What’s the best way to approach that?’
And there’s been many ways that has happened in the discourse. But Heba shared with me that their preferred, along with Professor Alice Stevenson, is descent communities because it actually embeds that concept you were talking about, ancestors within that space in acknowledging that there is both cultural but also biological continuity and that there is that link and that connection directly there.
MELANIE PITKIN: Can I just jump in for one second because we put this question also to the focus participants under our survey and they’re happy with the term descent, but in the context for the textbooks and they kept emphasising, I’m Masri, I’m Egyptian, I’m not Arab, I’m not North African, I’m Masri. So in personal conversation it’s Egyptian or Masri, but for academic literature.
RONIKA POWER: Yeah, for academic literature. And that is important and that captures some of that ephemeral cultural connection that we are trying to capture. Another point that I think is really important to raise in this discussion from an intellectual point of view are the concepts of emic and etic. So quick definition time. When we are thinking about emic perspectives, as I was talking to Robina about before we got started, emic perspectives try to situate what we are doing from within that cultural perspective. And we have considered descent groups, but to think about emic perspectives goes a step further – or perhaps you can consider that it goes a step very far back in time to actually situate what we are doing in the temporal moment of wherever these individuals are from – and it is applied in many different ways in thinking and talking about the past.
Etic is us, the outside view, and there has been so much, as Daniel and Melanie have alluded to, both in terms of the changing time that has elapsed since then, the changing cultures, the different geopolitical locations we’re operating from, and also the way that our own cultures have evolved to consider what those emic perspectives were like from an etic point of view. So, a really great example of this, if I can unpack it.
We have another brilliant scholar here in the audience tonight, Hannah Vogel, who is doing her PhD on experiences of disability in the past and this is a really great example of those emic and etic perspectives because of course there were disabled people in the past. Of course, it is part of human variation, it is part of the human experience and it’s also not a fixed position. We will all be at some point of our lives, disabled, mobility issues, etc., hearing loss, all of these things. Just a couple of examples to name a few. And if you look for disabled people in the past, in the most cases they don’t seem to exist. Hannah says, ‘I don’t think so. I’m not buying that.’ And her work seeks to address, identify and remediate that etic histories that have been written have wiped away disabled people from the past. And that’s super interesting. So, we can think about that and certainly disability studies come into the purview of bioarchaeology, but another really important point of talking about ethics is to think about emic and etic perspectives.
The third point and final point is yes, of course thinking about ancestors, thinking about descent groups, thinking about emic and etic perspectives all comes into my work and could not have a more poignant manifestation than working in Malta. Because I am working with direct descendants of the ancient Maltese people. In my particular case, I have had the great privilege to work with the individuals from the Xaghra Circle who built what is amongst the oldest freestanding stone architecture in the world, the Neolithic temples in Malta. And these are the descendants of the people who built those temples. They want to know who their ancestors are and we are guided by them.
And I think that the important point to come from that in thinking about working with descent groups is again about consultation, but it is also about having the respect as people who are in operating in colonial legacies to surrender to their leadership and be guided by them. And this is a really important perspective. And also to never assume homogeneity in the response of any cultural group. In itself, that’s an act of colonial violence and we must make space for those differences as we are approaching all of these extremely diverse and often conflicting questions involving ethics and archaeology.
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Thank you. I think we have run out of time, but it was a nice point to end on. We must be guided by them, but I do have five minutes and I would like to open up to one, maybe two questions if that was possible. And my colleagues, yes, we’ll manage that.
RONIKA POWER: Thank you for sitting so still and being so polite. I would’ve been throwing things by now. Yeah, how we go?
[laughter]
Robert: Okay. My question is …
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Can you identify yourself?
Robert: My name’s Robert. I’m an ancient history teacher.
RONIKA POWER: Hey Robert.
Robert: Having been to Egypt recently, I’m particularly aware the great Egyptian Museum is about to open the incredible impact that Egyptology has on the Egyptian economy. That’s the word I’m after. And I’m thinking, what part does ethics play when it’s, well, big business in a poor country?
RONIKA POWER: I’m happy to start answering that question, Melanie, and I will try to be brief. Great question, Robert. I wish I was one of your students. So of course, the economy plays a hugely significant role in decision making. The question that you’ve asked is so important because it’s actually a case study that I present to my own students for precisely those reasons. I understand that, I think it was Anwar Sadat who removed the mummified bodies of the pharaohs from the display – Daniel’s nodding, Melanie is nodding, I’m in good standing here – in the 1980s for ethical reasons. However, the profits of the museum absolutely plummeted and the decision was reversed.
So, I present this as an ethical dilemma to my students and ask them to discuss this and understand the various stakeholder groups, understand the ethical dilemma. And also a really important part of what I think Daniel has touched on at one point is an understanding that I think many of us don’t sit comfortably and is that it’s actually, it is actually okay to hold two opposing positions in your mind at one time. And this is very much the case about those questions of to display, to not display. We can recognise some of the ethical problems within those decisions, but we also need to recognise that the Egyptians have a country to run and it is absolutely their decision. Part of the International Observed rights of Indigenous Peoples is to absolutely let them take the lead, acknowledge their sovereignty, and to understand and respect the decisions that they make in these spaces.
MELANIE PITKIN: I think I can probably say that Ronika and I actually planning to go to Cairo in October to have some roundtable discussions precisely around this and around current attitudes towards display of human remains in Egypt because we are very aware of the things you just pointed out.
RONIKA POWER: Yeah. And it is indeed not straightforward. And again, we cannot assume homogeneity in the responses of Egyptian people regarding that issue itself. A very recent example was the parade of the Pharaohs that was made and that was televised when they were being moved from one museum to the new museum. And there was a huge division in the country about whether or not that was ethically an appropriate thing to do. So, these conversations are hot, they’re live, they’re wired. And I think the really important thing to note is that it’s not an easy space to actually step forward in to understand that there aren’t any easy, hard black and white answers. Ethics makes its name in the grey areas.
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Would you like to add anything, Daniel?
DANIEL SOLIMAN: I’ll be very brief. I think with these questions it’s very important to keep in mind who is in charge and who is making decisions and who does not have a voice. And secondly, I’ll say if you ask me as an individual, as a person, for me, ethics will be the first thing to discuss. And I think if you tell a good enough story, you can also economically, financially benefit from it.
RONIKA POWER: Yeah. And I think that what’s really important, and something that I’d love to discuss with you offline, Daniel, and even potentially to the colleagues here about the way that the current exhibition here has made decisions around the display and potentially what some ideas might be as to how to do that differently in its next iteration that could potentially address some of the work that Melanie and I are seeing in our research.
DANIEL SOLIMAN: We would love that.
RONIKA POWER: Awesome. Bring it on.
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Bring it on. It has now hit 7.30pm, so I am deeply apologetic. We only got one question, but it was a good question.
RONIKA POWER: Yeah. Thank you. Robert.
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Please give a round of applause for these amazing people. Thank you so much, Melanie, Ronika, and thank you Daniel for joining us on a holiday, not a work holiday, a holiday-holiday, to part of this conversation. So, thank you so much. Thank you all for being here.
[applause]
RONIKA POWER: Thank you, Craig. Round of applause for Craig and to Graeme.
[applause]
CRAIG MIDDLETON: And to Graeme and to Jessi.
RONIKA POWER: And to Aaron who has the best beard in Canberra.
[laughter]
CRAIG MIDDLETON: Look, thank you so much. I wouldn’t do my job if I didn’t say, please sign up to our e-Bulletin, which you can find on the website to find out information about more of these kinds of conversations. They may not be focused on Egypt, but we’re going to have a lot more conversations throughout the year. But thank you again and have a great evening.
[applause]
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Date published: 05 September 2024