Unruly Appreciations: How Contestation Shapes the Value of Pharaonic Things
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How have Egyptian struggles to repatriate and retain Pharaonic artifacts shaped the value and meaning attributed to these iconic but contested objects?And how have these public struggles influenced museum practice from the time of its modern origins?This dissertation works against the archival grain to trace a popular history of three Pharaonic objects (or collections thereof) around which highly-visible campaigns for ownership have been waged: Tutankhamun's treasures, The Bust of Nefertiti, and the obelisk typically titled the 'Paris Needle'.Each chapter examines the contestations through which these objects have gained a foothold in Egyptian liberatory projects and in the global imaginary, from the 18 th century to the present day.Colonial expeditions in Egypt represent some of the earliest ventures in modern archaeological collection and museology, generating a foundation upon which many of the world's most authoritative museums have constructed their legacies as part of broader nation-building projects.In the case of the 'Tutmanias' of the 1920s and 1970s, media representations leverage public conceptions of ancient history to consolidate Western geopolitical power in the Middle East.Mass media plays a similar role with the Bust of Nefertiti, whose ownership becomes the focus of frenzied publicity in Weimar Germany, reflecting and reproducing the racial, geopolitical, and gendered anxieties of the era.The obelisk's transport from Luxor to Paris produces and mediates the public square in a different way, erasing Egyptian labour while glorifying the feat of its transport to substantiate its value as a trophy.Finally, this dissertation looks to the relocation of Gurna -a supposed "world capital of thieves" atop the Theban Necropolis -as a case This project is deeply indebted to the patience, kindness, support, and guidance of my brilliant co-supervisors, Ming Tiampo and Monica Eileen Patterson.Your personal and intellectual generosity has been a life raft and a model.Thank you for believing in my work, and for the time, energy, and rigour you have dedicated to my advancement.This project owes its successes to you (although any errors are entirely my own).I also want to
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".