Colonised Fragments: Collecting Christian & Classical Books from Egypt

The Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, Cairo is one of the largest museums of antiquity in the world, if not the largest. Among its treasures is the papyrus collection which tells the story not only of Greco-Roman Egypt, but also of the (mostly) Westerners responsible for the collection from its first inception until the formal end of colonialism. Reading through archives and the legacy data of colonial and postcolonial collecting means not only (re)writing the disciplinary history of papyrology and Egyptian archaeology, but also the history of the book and its people.

Dr Usama Gad is a tenured Lecturer of Papyrology and Greco-Roman Studies at Ain Shams University (Cairo, Egypt),

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