Project

History of the Project

Since 2006, the collection of 73 large format, bound hardcover notebooks that comprise the Arabic diary corpus has been housed in the archives of the Department of the Art of Ancient Egypt, Nubia, and the Near East at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 2021, the Arabic Excavation Archive project was formed by Prof. Peter Der Manuelian at Harvard University to develop a set of editorial, translation, and digital humanities priorities aimed at publishing and making the Arabic diaries widely accessible. Initial project funding was raised for preliminary planning at Harvard, and with support from the Harvard Deans’ Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship and the Barbara Bell Scientific Archaeology Fund, the first stage of project planning took place in June 2022. Key collaborators Peter Der Manuelian, Wendy Doyon, and Marleen De Meyer, with the help of Harvard Egyptology PhD candidate Nisha Kumar, met in Boston to digitize and catalog the diary corpus in consultation with Egyptologists and MFA curators, Lawrence Berman, Denise Doxey, and Susan Allen. This initial meeting at the MFA resulted in the creation of a basic collection of high-resolution digital images of each diary volume and a basic spreadsheet catalog of associated information, including book sequence, page counts, date ranges, sites excavated, handwriting, and other manuscript and content-related notes.

With continued support from the Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Motsepe Presidential Research Accelerator Fund for Africa in 2022–2023, the second stage of project planning expanded the core group of collaborators to begin studying the material in more detail. Egyptologists Mostafa Tolba, Aya Ibrahim, and Noha Mahran joined the project in 2022, along with Prof. Liesbeth Zack, an Arabic linguist and specialist in the historical dialectology of Arabic manuscripts at the University of Amsterdam. With the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo as a research base, in its first year the team has worked on testing and refining methods of Arabic transcription and translation for the diaries. With the additional support of a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Accelerator Workshop Grant in 2022/23, we organized an intensive two-day workshop focused on assessing the results of our preliminary work and shaping the project’s priorities for research and publication going forward. The workshop took place June 29–30, 2023, at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, MA.

Our first challenge has been the volume of manuscript material, totaling more than 6,500 pages in 73 volumes, representing thirty years of excavation at fifteen different archaeological sites. A particular challenge was the need for an efficient and accurate method of transcribing all 73 manuscript volumes to make the entire collection accessible online, as well as readable and searchable in Arabic. Over the past year, we have worked with the Paris-based company, Calfa, a leading developer of OCR and HCR text recognition for Near Eastern manuscripts, to test and compare the capabilities of computer-based HCR versus human transcription for the Arabic field diaries. In consultation with our team, Calfa produced a customized, machine-learning HCR tool for the project that has resulted in the digital transcription of all 73 volumes at 90% accuracy, along with a customized working database and editing tool for manual human correction. The final stage of our early project development, currently in progress, is a rigorous review process for the HCR transcription results in which each page of computer text is double-checked and corrected against the facsimile page by two members of our editorial team, ensuring 100% fidelity to the entire manuscript corpus.

Books	Years	Site(s)	number of pages
1	1913–1914	Giza	100
2	1915	Deir el-Bersha & Giza	100
2–3	1915–1916	Giza	90
3–10	1916–1919	Gebel Barkal & Nuri	621
11–14	1919–1920	el-Kurru & Gebel Barkal	260
14–23	1920–1923	Meroe/Begarawiya/Kabushiya	862
24	1923	Quft & Giza	21
24–25	1923–1924	Girga & Sheikh Farag & Quft	129
25–27	1924	Semna	186
28–40	1924–1929	Giza	1,180
41–44	1927–1930	Semna & Uronarti	373
45–51	1929–1932	Giza	579
52–53	1931–1932	Saras/Shalfak & Abka/Mirgissa	165
54–73	1932–1947	Giza	2,004
		Total number of pages	6,670

Research

Large-scale transcription of the Arabic diary archive supports the goal of building an online catalog for long-term, open access and ongoing translation and publication of the manuscript materials. The digital catalog and project website will provide permanent access to the entire textual archive for further study, including verified and fully searchable Arabic transcriptions and the built-in capability to add ongoing translation work to the database and to index associated archaeological data linked to each online volume, such as museum objects, photographs, archival documentation, site reports, social networking analysis, and 3D models.

The project’s research aims, currently in the early stages of development, include the scholarly editing and critical translation of select diary volumes for print publication. Annotated translations of select manuscripts, to be published by the Harvard Egyptological Studies series at Brill, will investigate the history, authorship, writing practices, sociolinguistics, and archaeological findings of the diaries in the changing context of archaeological knowledge production in Egypt from the early-to-mid twentieth century. The project also focuses on the biographies of Quftis such as Reis Sayyid Ahmad Sayyid Dirāz who worked for many years with the HU-MFA expedition—as excavation managers, field technicians, photographers, skilled craftsmen, archaeological illustrators, and diary writers—and who, through their individual and collective contributions to fieldwork, helped create the archaeological record upon which our knowledge of ancient Egypt and Nubia is based. With these interdisciplinary aims in mind, the project draws together top researchers in the history of Egyptian excavations and their archives; the role of Quftis and archaeological labor in modern Egypt; the linguistics and historical dialectology of Egyptian Arabic; and the archaeology of the sites described in the diaries.

Sample Transcriptions

Original Arabic diary pages (in facsimile) appear on the left, OCR transcriptions created by Calfa, currently being reviewed and corrected (for all 73 volumes) by the project’s editorial team, appear on the right.