Sarah Bond: Erasing the Face of History

Sarah E. Bond is a lecturer in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

LAST month, a Cairo court ordered that images of the ousted Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, and his wife, Suzanne, as well as their names,be removed from all “public squares, streets, libraries and other public institutions around the country.” Posters and portraits of the Mubaraks are ubiquitous in Egypt. Squares, sports fields, libraries, streets and more than 500 schools bear their names.

This mandated erasure is meant to serve as closure for the Egyptian people after three decades of Mubarak rule. But will it help them heal and move forward? For precedent and possible implications of the ruling, we should look to antiquity.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead directs those traveling to the underworld to confront the demons that guard the gates by telling them, “Make a way for me, for I know you, I know your name,” before continuing on their journey to the afterlife. Names in Egyptian culture have an innate power, and can be a means of control. When the pharaoh Akhenaton tried to institute his own brand of monotheism, he had the name of the rival god Amon stricken from monuments throughout Egypt.

Like gods, rulers were also vulnerable to such erasures. Queen Hatshepsut, a prolific builder who was a regent for her stepson, Thutmose III, was almost obliterated from history after he ascended the throne in the 15th century B.C. Thutmose, and then his son Amenhotep II, systematically removed her image from monuments, reliefs, statues, cartouches and the official list of Egyptian rulers, perhaps in an effort to underline their own legitimacy.

Egypt wasn’t alone in this. The destruction of images by government decree in the Roman world is called “damnatio memoriae.”