target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Figure 8:Gustaf Adolf, the crown prince of Sweden, with Simaika at the museum (La Bourse Egyptienne, November 1930)
Figure 9:Simaika (fourth from left) with Prince Omar Tousson (on his immediate left), patron of the arts, at the Coptic Museum (1942)
Figure 10:“This Man Created the Coptic Museum” (La Bourse Egyptienne, 1943)
Figure 11:The unveiling of the bust of Marcus Pasha Simaika at the Coptic Museum by Abdel Razek Pasha el-Sanhoury in the presence of the Coptic patriarch Pope Yousab II, Tewfik Pasha Doss, and other dignitaries (Al-Ahram, February 1947)
Figure 12:King Umberto II of Italy with Youssef Simaika, Marcus Simaika’s eldest son, at his right, in front of the Roman eagle in bronze discovered in the large central guard room of the Fortress of Babylon (1948)
Figure 13:Bust of Marcus Simaika by Boris Frödman-Cluzel (Professor of Sculpture, School of Fine Arts) in front of the Coptic Museum
INTRODUCTION
Donald M. Reid
Marcus Simaika’s eighty-year life from 1864 to 1944 spanned the careers of half a dozen or more Egyptian rulers, British proconsuls, Egyptian nationalist leaders, visiting western heads of state, and French directors of Egyptian antiquities—from Khedive Isma‘il to King Farouk, Lord Cromer to Lord Killearn, Ahmad Urabi to Saad Zaghlul, ex-president Theodore Roosevelt to Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III, and from Auguste Mariette to Etienne Drioton. Simaika’s memoirs—a veritable who’s who of the Egyptian scene for more than fifty years—recount his personal interactions with many of these leaders and comments on nearly all of them. Had Patriarch Cyril V not reigned for an astonishing fifty-two years (1874–1927), Simaika might have interacted with half a dozen Coptic popes as well. Simaika also parleyed with the most powerful Coptic politicians of his day, from Prime Minister Boutros Ghali to the influential Wafdist Makram Ebeid and Tewfik Doss, a confidant of King Fuad.
When Simaika was born in 1864, Egypt had yet to see the British occupation, the Suez Canal, the Aswan Dam, the Mixed Courts, a parliament, the Paris-on-the-Nile district of Cairo, al-Ahram newspaper, the national library, a state university, Thomas Cook’s tourist steamers, Baedeker guidebooks, or railways south of Cairo. Mariette’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Bulaq was only a year old, and Egypt’s Greco-Roman, Islamic, and Coptic antiquities still languished in neglect. Copts could not yet attend state schools, lacked a seminary to train their clergy, and had no community council (Majlis al-Milli) to give laymen a voice in administering Coptic religious endowments (waqf), schools, and personal-status law. Across the Atlantic, the Civil War had not quite yet sealed the fate of slavery in the United States, and in the wealthy Cairo household where Simaika grew up, female African slaves still did the housework.
If many of the familiar features of modern Egypt were still missing when Simaika was born, changes over the century before 1864 had nevertheless been far reaching. The Mamluk military households that had effectively wrested Egypt from Ottoman control in the later eighteenth century succumbed to the successive blows of Napoleon’s French invasion in 1798 and Muhammad Ali’s (r. 1805–48) consolidation of power. Muhammad Ali paid for his new European-style army of peasant conscripts by recentralizing tax collection and establishing a state monopoly on cotton as a cash crop for export to Europe. New textile mills, arms factories, professional schools, a printing press, and a translation bureau primarily served his army at first. Muhammad Ali’s rebellion against the Ottoman sultan collapsed at the end of the 1830s, when European intervention forced him to relinquish his Arabian and Syrian conquests, retreat to Egypt and Sudan, and drastically reduce the size of his army.
After a lull, the pace of change picked up under Muhammad Ali’s son Said (r. 1854–63) and grandson Khedive Isma‘il (r. 1863–79). Born thirteen months after the accession of Isma‘il, Simaika grew up amid a whirl of new reforms and increasingly threatening European colonial penetration. A French company completed the Suez Canal, and Egypt built up extensive railway, telegraph, and postal systems. State schools (separate from the religious schools capped by al-Azhar) expanded rapidly, Cairo acquired a Paris-inspired new district, and a tripartite court system (Mixed, National, and Sharia courts) was organized. Egypt acquired its first parliamentary body, a national library, an antiquities service, the Egyptian Museum, a geographical society, and an opera house. Bankruptcy cost Isma‘il his throne in 1879, and in 1882—the year Simaika turned eighteen—the British defeated Ahmad Urabi’s proto-nationalist revolt and occupied the country.
Some sixty years later, Marcus Simaika dictated the unpublished memoirs on which—another sixty years after that—his grandson Dr. Samir Simaika, with co-author Nevine Henein, would base their fascinating biography. They have also drawn insightfully on other documents and photographs from the Simaika family archive. This book, based on Marcus Simaika’s “Reminiscences,” deepens our understanding of at least four important themes of modern Egyptian history: the founding of the Coptic Museum and the development of Coptic archaeology and heritage studies, Egyptian–British interactions during the colonial (1882–1922) and semi-colonial (1922–52) ages, shifting balances in the interaction of clergymen and the lay Coptic community, and the ever-sensitive evolution of relations between Copts and their Muslim countrymen.
Marcus Simaika is now remembered almost exclusively for the first of these themes—his great achievements in Coptic archaeology, especially the founding of Cairo’s Coptic Museum.
Egypt’s other three main historical museums—the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities (mainly pharaonic), the Museum of Arab (now Islamic) Art, and the Greco-Roman Museum—all had European rather than Egyptian founding directors. The Coptic Museum came into being just in time to form a critical link between the Islamic era and Egypt’s Greco-Roman and pharaonic pasts at the very time when modern Egyptians were reemphasizing their pharaonic past as an inspiration for their modern struggle for revival and national independence.
Simaika was not a professional archaeologist, an excavator, or a specialist scholar of Coptic language and literature. His claim as “father of Coptic archaeology” lies instead in his achievement as a visionary administrator who used his status as a notable to pursue relentlessly his dream of preserving endangered monuments, founding a Coptic museum, rescuing decaying monastic and church libraries, and promoting love of the Coptic heritage among his fellow Copts and Muslim compatriots, and in the world at large.
Simaika and Henein recount in illuminating detail how Marcus Simaika won the cooperation of the Coptic patriarch, British authorities, and the international historic preservation movement in pursuit of his goals. The authors also bring out Marcus Simaika’s leading role on the Committee for the Preservation of Arab Art (“the Comité”) and in organizing and preserving the libraries of Coptic churches and monasteries. As chairman of the Comité’s “technical section” for a decade, Simaika—a Copt—presided over the permanent body that executed the Comité’s works, the great majority of which were on Islamic monuments.
In addition to these achievements in the field of Coptic heritage, Simaika and Henein bring back into public view Marcus Simaika’s largely forgotten activities in the fields of British–Egyptian relations, relations between Coptic laymen and the clergy, and interactions between Copts and their Muslim compatriots. In the fall of 1882, the dust of battle from Urabi’s defeat at Tell al-Kebir had hardly settled before eighteen-year-old Simaika’s knowledge of English, enterprise, and connections found him work as translator to Viscountess Strangford, a British volunteer who organized care for wounded soldiers.
