The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Cross-Cultural Comparison in Egyptology

Abstract

As a discipline, Egyptology has been frequently critiqued for its insularity. In this wide-ranging talk, I address these critiques and the manner in which insularity and its perceived correlate—irrelevance—have contributed to the dire state of this field in American universities. At the same time, however, Egyptologists have always utilized the present to think with the past, for good and ill, just as politicians in Egypt routinely plumb the past in order to inflect the present. In recent decades, following Bruce Trigger’s lead, Egyptologists have increasingly engaged in targeted cross-cultural comparisons. Such efforts, while not above critique, are helping to combat notions of Egyptian exceptionalism both within the field and beyond it. As a scholar who resorts to both frontal and lateral comparisons with relative frequency, I argue that they prove particularly valuable in imparting fresh perspectives when a lack of new evidence has resulted in a scholarly impasse.