Electronic Egypt: the shape of archaeological knowledge on the Net.

Electronic Egypt: the shape of archaeological knowledge on the Net. Unlike many regional archaeologies the study of Egypt has always hadwidespread appeal, from archaeologists to Afrocentrists, orientalists tooccultists. According to one web-site, 'Egypt dominates the historyof the world.' This ever-popular fascination has spilled over intothe electronic media since the inception of the Internet. Thus, Egyptproves to be a telling case-study in net politics and potentialities.Simply typing the word 'Egypt' into a Web searcher elicitsover i million sites, and the content of that material runs the gamutfrom scholarly resources closely matching those known in print to fringesites and sci-fi web pages. This makes electronic Egypt an intellectualand ethical minefield for the uninitiated, especially as there provesoften little to differentiate between this panoply of sites in terms ofpresentation and professionality. It palpably illustrates thehomogenization homogenization(həmŏj'ənəzā`shən), process in which a mixture is made uniform throughout. Generally this procedure involves reducing the size of the particles of one component of the mixture and dispersing them evenly of knowledge on the net and prompts us to consider theconstruction of archaeology and archaeological knowledges.To begin with, there are some excellent academic resources availableon the Net which offer up-to-date information from Egypt, bibliographicresources, current papers index, plus a full listing of Egyptologicalinstitutions and Egyptologists. Some highly successful, user-friendlysites are the ABZU project from the University of Chicagohttp://www.oi.uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/ RA/ABZU/ABZU_DIRECTORY_INDEX.HTMLthe Annual Egyptological Bibliography from Leidenhttp://www.leidenuniv.nl/nino/aeb.html HTMLin full HyperText Markup LanguageMarkup language derived from SGML that is used to prepare hypertext documents. Relatively easy for nonprogrammers to master, HTML is the language used for documents on the World Wide Web. the Griffith Institute at theAshmolean Museum, Oxford http://www.ashmol.ox.ac.uk/ Griffith.html andEgyptology Resources in Cambridge http://www.newton.cam.ac.uk/egypt/nomap.html Thanks to the tireless efforts of individuals likeCharles Jones, Terry Wilfong and Nigel Strudwick, these sites provide aninvaluable resource for all, though they are primarilyuniversity-oriented.Other sites have a more fluid profile, straddling academic andalternative audiences. One pertinent example is the Centre forComputer-aided Egyptological Research (CCER CCER China Center for Economic Research (Peking University, Beijing, China)CCER Centre for Computer-Aided Egyptological ResearchCCER Catholic Commission for Employment Relations (Australia)) http://www.konbib.nl/basisclas/Rl5/15.33-isbd/ ccer.isbd.html Its links rangefrom the Egyptology sites specializing in virtual reconstruction ofmonuments to the Guardian's web page, and this has links to sciencefiction, UFO UFO:see unidentified flying objects. (United Functions and Objects) A programming language developed by John Sargeant at Manchester University, U.K. , and health-and-fitness pages. These have ever-more-extremelinks to sites featuring crop circles, close encounters,Extra-Terrestrials. You can be examining Egyptian architecture at onemoment, and at the next learn that aliens built the pyramids! Theselinkages from site to site to site facilitate the homogenisation Noun 1. homogenisation - the act of making something homogeneous or uniform in composition; "the homogenization of cream"; "the network's homogenization of political news"homogenizationblending, blend - the act of blending components together thoroughly ofknowledge; they promote a sense that all knowledge is somehow equal.Though only 3315 people had visited the site at the time of writing tosee an alien Egypt, some 47,474 had actually made it to theGuardian's main site (and it had won an award!)http://guardians.net Does this reflect the postmodern ethos - a pasticheof cyber-Egypts? Or is it a harmless - or an actively good -dissemination of different forms of knowledge? Self-publishing may be aliberating and democratic process, yet it also creates a murky melange m����langealso me��lange ?n.A mixture: "[a]building crowned with a m��lange of antennae and satellite dishes"Howard Kaplan. of information of uneven value. Traditional publishing arenas, such asjournals, provide specific hooks upon which we can hang our information.These locations each have an individual profile - whether it beAntiquity, KMT KMT Kuomintang (Taiwan's Political Party)KMT KemetKMT Kinetic Molecular TheoryKMT Kiss My TeethKMT Key Management and Distribution Toolkit , or the Ley Hunter - from which we can make certainassessments about the nature and merits of the contributions within.With the net those hooks have been removed, for better or worse.An Atlantic divide noticeably demarcates the character ofinstitutional web sites featuring Egyptian material. Very generally,American university web sites tend to more links with private home-pagesand fringe sites. That far larger number of direct links betweenacademic and non-academic sites unfortunately cannot be controlled bythe institutions themselves. The American courts are at present testingthe current habit, that any site is free to make links to another site,without the need to have permission from the linked-to. Personalhome-pages are often aesthetically pleasing contributions by dedicatedEgyptophiles, frequently presenting individual preferences, opinions,artworks and humour. Again there is no cause for quality control - ormeans to do so if one wished - in this arena; an 'anythinggoes' sentiment reigns. North American sites also provide more fun,when that's what you're seeking. The Royal Ontario Museum The Royal Ontario Museum, commonly known as the ROM (rhyming with Tom), is a major museum for world culture and natural history in the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. http://www.rom.on.ca/ eeducate/muml.html offers on-line advice formaking your own mummy - no body needed, they assure. Many educationaland entertainment opportunities offer Egypt on the Net; based within theUSA particularly are many commercial links, selling ancient Egypt in theform of paintings, replicas, books, holidays - and more worryingly,antiquities themselves. That ancient Egypt, commodified on many levels,is within reach of any net surfer.North America also takes its Internet very seriously, and this hashad marked impacts upon archaeology as a discipline. In early 1997 Ihappened to be visiting University of California The University of California has a combined student body of more than 191,000 students, over 1,340,000 living alumni, and a combined systemwide and campus endowment of just over $7.3 billion (8th largest in the United States). Berkeley in thedesignated CyberSemester http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~cybersem/ andfound that courses in anthropology/archaeology were now devoted to CMC (Common Messaging Calls) A programming interface specified by the XAPIA as the standard messaging API for X.400 and other messaging systems. CMC is intended to provide a common API for applications that want to become mail enabled. 1. (Computer Mediated Communication (messaging) Computer Mediated Communication - (CMC) Communication that takes place through, or is facilitated by, computers. Examples include Usenet and e-mail, but CMC also covers real-time chat tools like lily, IRC, and even video conferencing. ), specifically the net and hypertext:http://www.qal.berkeley.edu/~anthro2 Students had an acute awareness ofthe power of the media and the implications for a new millenniumarchaeology. In the US there is a genuine feeling that net-relatedissues are valid areas for original archaeological research, leading toa number of archaeological dissertations.It is now axiomatic that not all pasts are equal, as we see in thestory of the Ancient Near East (ANE) bulletin board, closed down by itswebmaster at University of Chicago in July 1996 due to its inundation INUNDATION. The overflow of waters by coming out of their bed. 2. Inundations may arise from three causes; from public necessity, as in defence of a place it may be necessary to dam the current of a stream, which will cause an inundation to the upper lands; byfringe inquiries and submissions: Egypt plays a major role in thisforum. After three years of service it was declared that the ANE list nolonger served the function for which it was intended. Although the exactincidents were not articulated explicitly there were implicitsuggestions that it had ceased to be a useful, interesting andproductive means of communicating ideas on the ancient Near Easternworld. At present a resurrected ANE is a moderated list with a set ofrules ane@oi.uchicago.edu where transgressors are removed from the listif they berate or offend other participants, or if they press sensitiveissues repeatedly (cf. Younger above, p. 1052). Over Christmas 1996religion, ethnicity and history erupted almost as violently as theincident Christmas remembers, some 2000 years ago. The new rules barunfavourable comment about the abilities, morals, training, parentage,bathing habits, etc. of other contributors. UFOlogy and modern occultreadings of the texts are not deemed appropriate, with personalvisionary and revelatory experiences and modern sectarian or politicalagendas similarly discouraged. Although there is some definitionalambiguity, eccentric ideas are also cautioned against: on ANE not allideas are equal. Since some ANE subscribers feel this an impediment tofree speech, upholding that idea of an ideal has proven fraught withproblems of an equally sensitive nature. Some might see these asnecessary teething problems associated with a powerful new medium likethe net, and yet a real resolution still seems distant.Egyptian sites by the hundreds (and by the thousands) make itabundantly clear that the evocative aura of ancient Egypt has stimulateddeployments and interpretations of an esoteric or religious nature. Thesites run from alien intervention to Mormon teachings (the Joseph Smithpapyri) and prophecy fulfilment. Under the neutral title INSTITUTESbegins the tirade, 'for the girding of the loins and binding themround with a dead skin signifies that he bears about the mortification MORTIFICATION, Scotch law. This term is nearly synonymous with mortmain. of those members in which are contained the seeds of lust andlasciviousness Lewdness; indecency; Obscenity; behavior that tends to deprave the morals in regard to sexual relations.The statutory offense of lascivious Cohabitation is committed by two individuals who live together as Husband and Wife and engage in sexual relations without the , always knowing the command of the gospels.... 'Egyptian history and archaeology provides a platform for a plethora ofreligious, political and social movements which draw upon(re)constructed pasts. Often fictionalised, unsubstantiated accounts,they are presented in the conventions of the scholarly format, repletewith footnotes, references and bibliographies. Just as one can do with aprinted book, one can see what the site offers on some much-contestedmatter, or what is said about an aspect one knows very well oneself, andthereby rapidly come to a view as to its reliability and attitudes. Onemay notice, as for a book, a reliance on out-of-date or disreputablepublications, many from decades (or centuries) passed or - wearily -notice some old confusion once more presented to distract from betterunderstanding. In fact, electronic text marks the next major shift ininformation technology after the development of the printed book. Itpromises (or threatens) to produce effects on our culture - education,criticism, scholarship - as radical as those produced byGutenberg's innovation (Landow 1992: 19).One can riffle rapidly through a book, while the net-surfer has towait for the electronic word to load laboriously, single screenful byscreenful. (After an hour of surfing, one's resistance often hits aslump.) The web-site 'Pharaohs and Kings'http://www.netally.com/lds/rohl.html is about pharaohs and kings; at thesame time it is a forum for the views of David Rohl, who aims tosubstantiate the Bible through Egyptian material: his work is notaccepted by mainstream Egyptologists on the basis of his scholarship,rather than any anti-religious sentiment. At the time of writing,ironically, a heated discussion of his work is a prime subject of theANE bulletin board.I conclude by recentring the word 'net' and itsmetaphorical associations: an open framework, a lattice ofinterconnections, a web which can cover or protect or tangle or catch.All these associations are apt. Yet given the cultural politics of thenet, we should not conflate con��flate?tr.v. con��flat��ed, con��flat��ing, con��flates1. To bring together; meld or fuse: "The problems [with the biopic]include . . real life with net.life. What exists now isa hybrid culture in which the net combines both virtual and realexperience. New forms of debate, education, recreation, even sexualityare now created and sustained through virtual culture, as well asdistinct modes of writing and interpretation (see Barrett 1989; Landow1992; Porter 1997; Taylor & Saarinen 1994; Turkle 1996); thisimpacts upon archaeological praxis. Also by the notion of a net, somecontributions do indeed follow the lines whilst others fall in between,in the interstices. Following the lines might provide worthwhileexperiences and new ways of knowing, whilst plunging into theinterstices offers different avenues to diversity. The domain ofinformation is also the domain of (mis)information and this is furthercomplicated by the recognition that all sites are located within anuneven, ever-shifting intellectual terrain. These subject positions,fluid and difficult to classify, persuade us that this new site ofknowledge creation and reproduction is contingent and temporallyspecific (access to the net is still in the hands of an elite minority).Time, space, identity, anonymity collapse on to each other, as wegrapple for the conceptual tools to make sense of all this connectedness- which harks back to the term internet itself.It is true that the net represents a new site of culture - a cultureof electronic fragments that seems as hard to interpret as our ownfragmentary archaeological record. This culture of simulation reflectsthe Zeitgeist, offering a plural, postmodern network facilitatingdifference, heteroglossia In linguistics, the term heteroglossia describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single linguistic code. The term translates the Russian raznorechie and alternative voices. It disseminatesdisembodied and decontextualized information, prompting us critically toexplore new ways of being in a virtual world. At this new frontier,truth and reality have fuzzy borders. Is this to be a newhyperrelativism? Or is Rorty (1982:166-7) right to assert there is inactual practice no such thing as relativism? Given the libertarianpolitics of computing culture, we still need to consider how we asarchaeologists and disciplinary practitioners assume a position,disseminate our information and reconcile the oppositional tensions ofnew knowledge potentiality and an ethereal, hyperreal Hyperreal may refer to: Hyperreality, a term used in semiotics and postmodern philosophy Hyperrealism, a school of painting Hyperreal numbers, an extension of the real numbers in mathematics that are used in non-standard analysis cyberspace.Indeed, the global village is more a set of imagined communities(Anderson 1983: 6); as such, knowledge societies - the suburbia ofcyberia - may one day replace traditional groups and communities. Turkle(1996: 178) calls electronic interaction a form of retribalization.Perhaps the only certainty is that the Internet will continue to presentus with untold possibilities for human interaction and this remains oneof the key issues for an archaeology of times past and future.Acknowledgements. I thank, for their time and enthusiasm, ChrisChippindale, Carol McDavid, Eduardo Serafin, Ruth Tringham, TerryWilfong.ReferencesANDERSON, B. 1983. Imagined communities. London: Verso.BARRETT, E. (ed.) 1989. The society of the text: hypertext,hypermedia, and the social construction of information. Cambridge (MA):MIT MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.LANDOW, G.P. 1992. Hypertext: the convergence of contemporarycritical theory and technology. Baltimore (MD): Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University,mainly at Baltimore, Md. Johns Hopkins in 1867 had a group of his associates incorporated as the trustees of a university and a hospital, endowing each with $3.5 million. 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