Hélène Aboul-Naga, sur deux siècles d'égyptologie française.
Historian of Egyptology, IFAO research associate, on the long French presence and its post-GEM moment.
Mon parcours
I am a French-Egyptian historian. I was born in Cairo to a French mother and an Egyptian father, took my secondary education at the Lycée français du Caire, my licence at the Sorbonne, my agrégation in history in 1998, and my doctorate at the EPHE in 2007 on the nineteenth-century French presence in Egypt. Since 2010 I have been a research associate at the IFAO, where I work on the history of Egyptology as a discipline.
La voix française
French Egyptology has, since Champollion's lettre of 1822, been one of the principal national traditions in the discipline, alongside the German, the British, and (in the twentieth century) the American. To write 'as a French voice' is not to claim any superiority for the French tradition; it is simply to recognise that traditions exist, that they have their own habits of mind, and that the GEM is being read differently in different traditions.
L'IFAO
The IFAO is my institutional home. The Institut occupies a beautiful building in the Mounira district of central Cairo, built in 1907, with a long colonnaded courtyard and a magnificent library that is, in its holdings on French Egyptology, unmatched. The reader of these chapters should imagine them written, mostly, in that library.
Pourquoi en anglais
I have chosen to write the chapters in English, with French paragraphs where the French tradition cannot be rendered in another language, because the readership for a small website on Egyptology is, in 2026, a global readership that reads in English. A French edition will follow if there is demand for it. The decision to write in English is not, I want to be clear, a decision against French.
Sources
The chapters are written from the published literature on the history of French Egyptology (Élisabeth David's work on Mariette is foundational), from the IFAO's own archival publications, and from the standard histories of the discipline (Jean Leclant's posthumous synthesis among them). The bibliography for each chapter is available on the contact page.
Ce que ce n'est pas
Ce n'est pas une histoire complète de l'égyptologie française — that would take three volumes and an unfunded research decade. C'est une lecture en six chapitres, écrite à l'occasion de l'ouverture du GEM, par une historienne qui se trouve être à la fois française, égyptienne, et cairote.
To write 'as a French voice' is not to claim any superiority for the French tradition; it is simply to recognise that traditions exist, that they have their own habits of mind.
— H. A.-N., Mounira