Treading on antiquity: anglo-american missionaries and the religious landscape of nineteenth-century coptic egypt

Abstract

ABSTRACTAnglo-American missionaries traveled to Egypt in the nineteenth century in the hopes of revitalizing the Christian minority living under the Ottomans. They quickly realized that the Coptic Church, whose antiquity carried back to the first century, did not welcome or desire assistance from the Protestants. The missionaries were part of a larger colonial movement in the Middle East that drew them into direct contact with a material culture different from their own. The materiality of the Coptic Church, with its icons, Coptic manuscripts, monuments, and valued monastic hierarchy of saints, provided the rhetorical base for missionaries to articulate the deficiencies of the Copts in favor of the enlightened teachings of the Protestants. A complex layer of iconic images of the desolate desert, the lifeless tomb, and fanatics in the monasteries helped substantiate the colonial claim that Coptic Christianity was a ruined monument, akin to the ruined temples of antiquity. Travelogs and narratives of Anglo-American missionaries in Egypt provide a rich selection of evidence to examine the rhetorical strategies employed to legitimize why the Copts should abandon their traditional religion and adopt a new Christian heritage. The most effective image used was the desert as the uninhabited land of the uneducated and illiterate. The desert became an iconographic description to communicate the dire state of the Coptic Church.