Scales of Paperwork: UNESCO’s International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia and the Making and Remaking of Decolonized Pasts

Throughout the 1960s, archaeologists, engineers, and architects from around the world descended upon neighbouring parts of Egypt and Sudan to take part in UNESCO’s International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia. Many remember this work for its spectacle: as the floodwaters of the Aswan High Dam submerged ancient remains, so the participants in the Nubian Campaign famously cut apart and reassembled colossal monuments like the temple of Abu Simbel. The Campaign, though, allowed for more than a spectacular practice of monument salvage. The unprecedented scale of the work—its length, the spatial reach of its archaeological survey, and the coordination of the huge number of people and institutions involved in it—also generated an unprecedented amount of paperwork and printed matter relating to the pasts under investigation. This presentation discusses this paperwork, the practices surrounding it, and the pasts that it helped to generate as Egypt and Sudan became decolonised nation-states.

Officials involved with the Nubian Campaign intended its paperwork to have two results: the accounting of events that took place in Egypt and Sudan and the closure of files relating to the pasts that had now been investigated there. Yet the culture of paperwork that grew up around the Campaign had the opposite effect. Rather than stabilising Egyptian and Sudanese pasts, doing paperwork allowed individuals and institutions from across political borders to continue to intervene in the two newly independent nation-states in the name of understanding their pasts better. Far from filing discussion of these pasts under lock and key, the practice of paperwork—in addition to the cultures of bureaucracy and expertise surrounding it—allowed these pasts to become constant objects of moral and material speculation. As decolonisation took shape, so, too, did the scales of time and space across which paperwork mattered.