Lisa Anderson
212 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
conceptions o time that may be “im-
possible... to be grasped by the modern
mind.” But it also obscures the fact that
Hessler himsel did not arrive in Egypt
until October 2011—eight months after
Mubarak’s overthrow and after the
intense protests against army rule that
followed during the spring and summer
o 2011. As a consequence, the book
focuses not on the revolt and its after-
math but on the subsequent election
campaign, which resulted in the presi-
dency o Mohamed Morsi (a leader o
the Muslim Brotherhood); Morsi’s one
year in oce; the coup that deposed
him; and the early days o the tenure o
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the general who
led the coup and has ruled the country
ever since—a tenure that seems likely to
continue for a long time to come.
This was a fascinating and tumultu-
ous time. But for many Egyptians, it was
aftermath, a struggle to right a ship that
had almost capsized. Hessler joins the
story midway through and doesn’t always
manage to distinguish enduring features
o the country from the aftershocks o a
revolution. He admits, as he contemplates
leaving Egypt, that he has found his
life there “dicult,” but it is never clear
whether this was born o life in Egypt
in general or reÇected a postrevolutionary
hangover. (Imagine someone who relo-
cated to New York City in the months after
the 9/11 attacks. To what degree would
his or her impressions have captured
the city’s essence, or would they instead
have reÇected the eects o a recent
collective trauma?)
Hessler remarks that compared with
China, Egypt seemed disorganized:
“This was one grim lesson I had learned
in Egypt: Unstructured authoritarian-
ism is worse than structured authoritari-its chaos, is still a magnet for migrants from
the countryside and now home to some 20
million people. Hessler’s talks with the
Chinese entrepreneurs he meets yields a
similarly provocative insight. Although
they profess little interest in Egyptian
politics, they are keen analysts o what
they saw as Egypt’s halÙearted revolution:
China, after all, “had experienced truly
revolutionary change throughout the span
o the twentieth century, for better and
for worse, and they believed that the
Egyptians had never committed them-
selves to such a wrenching transformation.”
But there are puzzling omissions in
Hessler’s book. Perhaps most surprising,
given that the book purports to be “an
archaeology o the Egyptian revolution,”
there is relatively little about the 2011
uprising that brought down President
Hosni Mubarak. Hessler starts with a
sweetly funny and captivating story about
the repercussions o the revolt at the
Upper Egyptian archaeological site that
provides the book with its name, “an
ancient necropolis that villagers refer to
as al-Madfuna: the Buried.” The site
manager grew concerned that the sudden
lack o police was emboldening grave
robbers and looters. So he constructed a
large wooden box, painted it black,
added Çashing lights and a siren, and
mounted it on his truck every night: “In
the dark the vehicle was a strikingly good
imitation o the armored personnel
carriers that are ubiquitous at any Egyp-
tian tourist site.” Soon, there were
“rumors in the village that the police
were active again.”
This story permits Hessler to muse
about disorientations o time and space:
Upper Egypt is the south o the country,
as visitors are always surprised to learn,
for example, and ancient Egyptians had