Conflicted Antiquities is a rich cultural history of European and Egyptian interest in ancient Egypt and its material culture, from the early nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth. Consulting the relevant Arabic archives, Elliott Colla demonstrates that the emergence of Egyptology—the study of ancient Egypt and its material legacy—was as consequential for modern Egyptians as it was for Europeans. The values and practices introduced by the new science of archaeology played a key role in the formation of a new colonial regime in Egypt. This fact was not lost on Egyptian nationalists, who challenged colonial archaeologists with the claim that they were the direct heirs of the Pharaohs, and therefore the rightful owners and administrators of ancient Egypt’s historical sites and artifacts. As this dispute developed, nationalists invented the political and expressive culture of “Pharaonism”—Egypt’s response to Europe’s Egyptomania. In the process, a significant body of modern, Pharaonist poetry, sculpture, architecture, and film was created by artists and authors who looked to the ancient past for inspiration.

Colla draws on medieval and modern Arabic poetry, novels, and travel accounts; British and French travel writing; the history of archaeology; and the history of European and Egyptian museums and exhibits. The struggle over the ownership of Pharaonic Egypt did not simply pit Egyptian nationalists against European colonial administrators. Egyptian elites found arguments about the appreciation and preservation of ancient objects useful for exerting new forms of control over rural populations and for mobilizing new political parties. Finally, just as the political and expressive culture of Pharaonism proved critical to the formation of new concepts of nationalist identity, it also fueled Islamist opposition to the Egyptian state.

In 1847, Russian military engineer and diplomat Egor Petrovich Kovalevsky embarked on a journey through what is today Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, recording his impressions of a region in flux. Invited by Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ali to look for gold and construct mines in the area between the Blue and White Nile, Kovalevsky captured the social milieu of both elites and ordinary people as well as compiled a rich record of the Upper Nile’s climate and natural resources. A Journey to Inner Africa, masterfully translated into English for the first time by Anna Aslanyan, is both a tale of encounter between Russia and northern Africa and an important document in the history and development of the Russian imperial project.

Contributions by Egor Kovalevsky, Anna Aslanyan, Sergey Glebov, David Schimmelpenninck, Mukaram Hhana, and Michal Wasiucionek

National Geographic magazine is an American popular culture icon that, since its founding in 1888, has been on a nonstop tour classifying and cataloguing the peoples of the world. With more than ten million subscribers, National Geographic is the third largest magazine in America, following only TV Guide and Reader's Digest. National Geographic has long been a staple of school and public libraries across the country.

In Veils and Daggers, Linda Steet provides a critically insightful and alternative interpretation of National Geographic. Through an analysis of the journal's discourses in Orientalism, patriarchy, and primitivism in the Arab world as well as textual and visual constructions of Arab men and women, Islam, and Arab culture, Veils and Daggers unpacks the ideological perspectives that have guided National Geographic throughout its history. Drawing on cultural, feminist, and postcolonial criticism, Steet generates alternative readings that challenge the magazine's claims to objectivity. In this fascinating journey, it becomes clear that neither text nor image in the magazine can be regarded as natural or self-evident and she artfully demonstrates that the act of representing others "inevitably involves some degree of violence, decontextualization, minaturization, etc." The subject area known as Orientalism, she shows, is a manmade concept that as such must be studied as an integral component of the social, rather than the natural or divine world.

Veils and Daggers repositions and redefines National Geographic as an educational journal. Steet's work is an important and groundbreaking contribution in the area of social construction of knowledge, social foundations of education, popular educational media, and social studies as well as racial identity, ethnicity, gender. Once encountered, readers of National Geographic will never regard it in the same manner again.