Jill Kamil, Labib Habachi: The Life and Legacy of an Egyptologist.
The American University in Cairo Press. 2007.
 (ISBN 978 977416 061 5)

Morris L. Bierbrier reviewed the above book in
EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY:
The Bulletin of the Egypt Exploration Society,  No. 32, Spring 2008

            In every generation one Egyptian Egyptologist seems to acquire a pre-eminent reputation among his fellow Egyptologists and the international community at large. In the middle part of the twentieth century that man was Labib Habachi, although his countryman Ahmed Fakhry ran him a close second. Now Jill Kamil has written his biography, based in part on his own recollections.

The book begins with a summary of the growth of Egyptology in Egypt, written from a challenging Egyptian point of view. Labib Habachi was born in 1906 and Kamil describes his early life in the Delta as a younger son of a Coptic merchant, and his studies, especially at the University of Cairo, where he was among the first intake of the Department of Egyptology. As there were no Egyptians teaching the subject, he was educated by the leading foreign scholars in the country and then joined the Antiquities Service.

Here he came across the prejudice that was to dog his whole career in Egypt. He was continually discriminated against, partly as a Copt, partly because of his academic standing, which earned him the jealousy of his colleagues, but largely, as the author points out, because of his modest social background, which did not give him, in the class-ridden Egyptian society of the time, the right ‘character’. Indeed in one sense his opponents were right since he lacked the formal, bureaucratic hierarchal mindset of his contemporaries. He was instead modest, genial, and ever helpful to friends, colleagues, and the general public and so earned the respect and admiration of his foreign fellow scholars, but not of most of his Egyptian contemporaries in the subject.

The author outlines his career in the Service, where he was continually transferred from site to site, so gaining an unrivalled appreciation and knowledge of ancient monuments. She devotes a large section of the book to his great discovery in 1946 of the sanctuary of Heqaib at Elephantine which Habachi obviously regarded as the highlight of his career. This is somewhat disproportionate to the account of his other activities, but one presumes that the source materials for other excavations are lacking or unavailable since the author obviously did not have access to the Service archive itself. Habachi’s reward for his discovery was to have his manuscript of the dig embargoed and his participation in the 1960s Nubian rescue campaign almost sidelined but for the offers from foreign missions. His career in the Service was hampered by the authorities until he resigned in disgust. He then made a new life for himself as an independent scholar, popular writer and lecturer.

While mentioning his visit to America and Canada in 1966, the author fails to indicate the impressive size of the public audiences to whom he lectured and indeed one such lecture in Montreal inspired this reviewer to take up Egyptology. The author also gives due credit to Habachi’s formidable wife Atteya.

It is unfortunate that Habachi’s major works on the excavations at the sanctuary of Heqaib and at Qantir were published only many years after his death in 1984. This well-written account of a good and great scholar should help to give him some of the recognition he was denied in his lifetime

                                                                        MORRIS L. BIERBRIER