On the Value of Edited Volumes or Prepartum Prologue of a Book to be Born
I recently sent the final version of a c.450-page edited volume entitled “The Nile Delta: Histories from Antiquity to the Modern Period” (you can find the table of content at the end of this post) to Cambridge University Press. As I was reaching the final stage of the manuscript preparation, I was forced to pause and ponder on the journey that led to the gestation and birthing of this book.
There is still a widespread tendency in the Humanities to consider edited volumes as quicker to prepare and of lesser merit than monographs or journal articles/special issues. I beg to differ. My take on this issue was best expressed recently by Anthropologist Dada Docot, who wrote this thread on Twitter (screenshot shared with Dr Docot’s permission):
Like all scholars in the Humanities, historians are storytellers.
No story is born in a vacuum.
Stories are living beings. They stem from and come out of the entertwined experiences and voices of (past, present and future) living beings. Their value is not predicated by the medium through which they are told, but by the integrity of the narrative and the humility of the narrator.
To edit a multi-authored volume means to offer a polyphonic set of stories told by different voices. It also means to actively center, witness, value and care for other voices before our own. It means sharing the spotlight. It is, in a way, the closest we can get to the fundamentally collective, and humbling, nature of knowledge production, and of storytelling.
The Nile Delta volume is due to come out in early 2023, but to me, the hard, at times painful labour is over. For this reason, and also because this book was completed during globally (and in many ways ongoing) traumatic times, I want to honour those who made this project possible now, and here. So I’ve decided to share my Prologue on this platform.
Acknowledgments are the first thing I read when I open a scholarly work. In fact, they are one of my favourite things about nerdy books, because they are a window into the human being(s) behind what is traditionally framed as a body of objective knowledge. To me, ‘objectivity’ is a Eurocentric construct aimed at elevating Enlightened worldviews to the status of universal standard. Don’t get me wrong: History writing is rooted in the weaving of ancient (arte)facts, and this form of storytelling takes lots of time and effort to learn and perfect. But what stories are told, how, by whom, and where, cannot be separated from the (hi)story teller’s own positioning. And this, at the end of the day, is what makes history so relevant, and crucial, a way to decipher the pasts our presents and futures are made of.
***
For Mona Abaza
‛nḫ p3y=s by r nḥḥ rp=f ḏ.t
May her ba live forever. May it rejuvenate for eternity.
-Excerpt from P.Louvre N 3258, first-second century CE, Foy Scalf transl.
This volume was born thanks to a failure. In June 2013, I led the first and only season of the Canadian archaeological project in Thmuis (Tell Timai). Together with the nearby site of Mendes (Tell el Rub’a), the site was the Roman capital of the Mendesian Nome, whose environmental history my 2014 monograph focuses on. This project, though, was not meant to last: The archaeologist colleague who was co-leading the project had to withdraw one month before the start of the season, pulling away by the same token their institutional support. I did manage to make things work, and am grateful to all the members of the team, as well as to the SCA offices in Cairo and Mansurah for granting me the authorization to excavate that year. As we started working on the area of the site we had identified as the potential site of a Late Antique bath, it quickly became clear that it was not a bath and, most importantly, that it had previously been excavated. Our team dug more than three metres deep, all the way to the foundation level. There, after three weeks of work, we found…a piece of plastic. As one of the members of the team put it, this project was unique: For the first time in their career as an archaeologist, they had participated in a dig were no object had been registered! That being said, we did gather some data (including the survey of a nearby zone), and kept our team spirit up despite this absurd situation.[1] When the season came to an end, I received good news: Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) had granted me a substantial grant, enough to finance three more seasons of excavation. Yet given the multiple red flags encountered, as well as differences with the colleagues the concession had been granted to, I decided that it was wiser to move on. I never regretted taking this decision, because it turned out to be the starting point of this book.
***
This volume started as a conference. In the Fall of 2014, I met with CUP’s Michael Sharp in Toronto. During our meeting, Michael suggested I edit a volume dedicated to the “cultural, social and economic/ecological history of the Nile Delta”. I very much liked this idea. Given I had cancelled the Thmuis excavation project the year before, I decided that the best way I could use the money that had been allocated to me was to organise an international conference on this topic, which would act as a preliminary stage to a future volume. Fast forward a pregnancy and a maternity leave: I entitled the conference “Imperial Landscapes: Empires, Societies and Environments in the Ancient to Modern Nile Delta”. My aim was to bring together scholars working on the history of the Nile Delta in the longue durée, and to do so in a way that centres the region’s landscapes and their interconnectedness with imperial routes, from Antiquity to the modern period. The conference took place in March 2017 at the University of Toronto with the financial support of SSHRC and the Department of Classics. It brought together fifteen scholars from North America, Europe and Africa, as well as a large crowd of colleagues and students, and was made all the better thanks to the labour of Warrena Wilkinson, and the help of Zohra Faqiri, Chiara Graf, and Drew Davis. Following the event, I started working on the volume. The idea was not to put together proceedings, but rather to curate a cohesive work that centres the long-term history of the region through the perspective of a multidisciplinary and transnational array of scholars. Accordingly, the final result is substantially different from the conference’s program. Of the eighteen chapters that make the volume, seven are based on papers given at the “Imperial Landscapes” conference. The remaining ones were commissioned, and written, by different scholars. The result offers a wider chronological and disciplinary breadth and, as such, does more justice to the historical significance of the region.
***
This volume came together during a pandemic. As the planet was ongoing waves after waves of infections, suffering, and death; as many of us were trying to cope with lockdowns, homeschooling, trauma and grief; as the utter inadequacy of our governing élites, and the resolve of neoliberalism to prevail over the bodies and lives of the most vulnerable members of our societies, were painfully exposed; as teachers were asked to teach and ‘perform’ online; as many academics — especially carers — were met with little support or care from their institution; as the world witnessed Brexit, and the accelerating rise of fascism, far-right populism, and overt anti-intellectualism worldwide; as anti-Black racism and the genocide of Indigenous Peoples in North America became impossible to ignore by settlers; as hundreds of Black and Brown bodies were found drowned in Mediterranean waters; as the climate crisis was diagnosed to be beyond the point of no return; as Palestinians continued to be dispossessed, dehumanized, and killed in contravention for international law; as the tragedy unfolding in Yemen went on amidst quasi global indifference; as an attempted coup in Washington DC was televised and tweeted live; as ‘freedom’ was used to justify the lawless occupation of Ottawa and several Canadian cities and border crossings for weeks on end; as Russia invaded Ukraine, razed Mariupol to the ground, and deployed an Orwellian narrative to justify its war crimes; as all these things were happening, in addition to what each of them encountered in their personal lives, all the contributors to this volume found the time and the energy to research, write, revise, and submit a chapter. Writing a paper takes a lot of time and mental energy. Writing a paper in the context listed above, with all it can mean in terms of personal dislocation and suffering, is a tremendous feat. Without their trust in this project, without their patience and generosity, this book would not exist. To all the authors who make up this volume: Un immense merci.
***
This volume was edited with the support of many people and places. In addition to all the contributors, I want to thank Michael Sharp for inspiring this project and being supportive at all stages of its gestation. Thank you as well to Taylor Stark, who assisted me during the copy-editing stage of the manuscript preparation, for his invaluable help, and to Katie Idle at CUP for shepherding the book production process. I wrote most of Chapters 1 and 2 in the context of the long periods of lockdown and school closures that took place in Toronto. This was an extremely difficult time in general; one that, for me, triggered a series of depression relapses. While the pandemic has severed the links between many writers and their Muses, in my case, writing was one of the only spaces where I felt I still had control over something and, therefore, was functional. Writing my chapters, and editing the volume as a whole, helped me get through the pandemic. I am immensely thankful to Natalie Rothman, the chair of my home department of Historical and Cultural Studies at UTSC, for supporting me with genuine empathy through these difficult times. My gratitude also goes to the anonymous referees who took the time to read the manuscript in the midst of a pre-vaccine wave; to Deena Mohamed, who created a beautiful illustration for the cover of this book that acts as a contribution in and of itself; to Anass Dakkach, who researched the Arabic sources discussed in Chapter 2; to the community that makes up the virtual writing group “Classics Write” (you know who you are!); to the writings of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Ali Smith, Zoe Todd, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith; to the wisdom of Lee Maracle; to the teaching and care of Jen Bettger, Stephanie Mills, Amanda Montgomery, Katherine Rouleau, and Alissa Santiago; to the generosity of Noha Abou Khatwa, Amro Ali, Usama Ali Gad, Heba Abd El Gawad, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Matt Gibbs, Rachel Mairs, Heba Mostafa, and Anne-Claire Salmas; to Cairo, Port Said, Alexandria, and the lands in between; to Tkaronto’s trees and lake, and to Québec’s snows and river. Lastly, this volume would not have come to life without the unflinching presence, love, humour and support of those closest to me: Auguste, Arthur, Grenadine, Milos, Zeitoun, my parents, Joy, Santosh, and, most of all, Girish.
***
This volume is dedicated to Mona Abaza, who left us way too soon, and whose deep respect and love for the Nile Delta, its Land and its people, will live on for a long time. It was an absolute honour to work with you, even if only remotely. Thank you for your trust and for sending your piece to me so promptly. I am sorry the volume did not come out before you left this world. I hope you are pleased with the final result, and that you are at peace in Aaru.
[1] The season’s report is available here: https://www.academia.edu/4754581/2013_Blouin_K_et_al_Preliminary_Report_of_the_First_Canadian_Mission_at_Thmuis
TABLE OF CONTENT
- Introduction: The Nile Delta, real and imagined
Katherine Blouin
2. Call me by my names: Naming the Delta through time and space
Katherine Blouin
3. The Nile Delta before the Pharaohs
Frédéric Guyot
4. The khetem-border-posts in the Delta during the New Kingdom
Claire Somaglino
5. New land amongst new rivers? Reconstructing the ancient waterscape and settlement history in the Central Northwestern Delta
Robert Schiestl
6. The Mareotis area: Integration of a marginal territory into Egypt through wine production
Marie-Françoise Boussac and Bérangère Redon
7. From Memphis to Alexandria: The Delta within the Persian and Macedonian Empires (end of the sixth to the first century BCE)
Damien Agut-Labordère
8. Growing with the empire? From village to town: Kom Abou Bellou and its urban development
Sylvain Dhennin
9. Mapping the cult of Christian saints in the Nile Delta from the fifth to the ninth century CE
Ramez Boutros
10. Alexandria: A brief overview of the major hydraulics of the city, from its foundation to the Arab Conquest
Isabelle Hairy
11. Imperial power, tribal settlement and fiscal revolts in the early Islamic Delta (seventh to ninth century CE)
Sobhi Bourderbala
12. The Nile as nexus: The nilometer at al-Rawda Island between veneration and mediation in medieval Islamic Egypt
Heba Mostafa
13. Water and prices: A view of the Nile from the Cairo Genizah
Ben Outhwaite
14. Water development in the medieval Western Delta
Wakako Kumamura
15. The Nile Delta in European cartography, 1200–1800
Lucile Haguet
16. Just passing through? The Nile Delta, colonial modernity and the Egyptian tourist economy (ca. 1870–1914)
Rachel Mairs
17. Reclaiming the archive: The contribution of Egyptian women to the archaeologies of the Delta (1880–1924)
Heba Abd el Gawad
18. Short commentary on accounting documents from a vanishing cotton estate (‘izba) in the Nile Delta
Mona Abaza
