When a British expedition was excavating at Qusseir by the Red Sea in the 1990s, it found that some members of the local public were not familiar with the site or its importance, causing them to downplay the need to protect it because they did not understand its real value.

Members of the expedition then decided to establish an information centre, something like a community centre, to provide local people with information about the site and its historical importance. Visits were held to the site for local people, providing both children and adults with information about the ancient ruins and the Islamic monuments in the city as a practical example of public engagement with heritage.

While the centre was later closed, according to professor of maritime archaeology and founder of the Alexandria Centre for Maritime Archaeology and Underwater Cultural Heritage Emad Khalil, “the concept has remained with us. The idea of sharing knowledge with the community is a very old one, and, if done correctly, it can allow the public to be part of protecting archaeological sites after they have learned how valuable they are.”  

Public engagement has been promoted over recent decades in the form of community archaeology, Khalil said. “Once the work of archaeologists is done at a specific site, they may not have the tools to fully protect it. This opens up a role for the wider public and local community, who are the most capable of preserving and protecting the site, even more than the archaeologists themselves or security guards employed to do so,” he added.

“There are more community members, and they are residents of the city or neighbourhood concerned, which makes it easier for them to be part of the protection of the heritage, particularly if they feel connected to it as part of their culture or identity. There may also be something in return, some sort of payback to the community, as some museums will allow free entrance or parking for community members or free nurseries for children where they learn about history. These initiatives, in place at many heritage sites abroad, are examples of how community members can be part of protecting archaeological sites.”

 For Khalil, “the protection of archaeological sites is in fact also a ‘social’ responsibility of the community in the area.” As a result, when archaeological projects take place, there should be a plan to illustrate and explain them to community members, dealing with questions such as what the historical value of the site and its importance are, how people can benefit from it, and how it can be protected and preserved.

“All these questions should be raised as part of any archaeological site plan,” Khalil said. “However, community archaeology and public engagement are still not that common in Egypt, meaning that the public as a whole is still not that concerned with archaeology and the need to protect it.”

Things are changing, however, as awareness campaigns around the country are engaging the public more and more through exhibitions, field trips, and outreach programmes including taking artefacts to schools, clubs, or community centres and explaining them to children and their parents. “Instead of going to museums, the museum goes to them. In the UK and France, many museums have portable collections including original artefacts that they take to school exhibitions,” Khalil explained.

Something similar is happening in Egypt, and for Khalil it is part of a wider movement. In the early times of archaeological discoveries, researchers were often not concerned about engaging the public, but this changed when there was a need to explain the importance of such discoveries to the public.

Public engagement became a social duty to the extent that studies were conducted on how to engage the public in archaeology and how best to do so.

EDUCATION AND ENGAGEMENT: But while there is a growing consensus today of the need to engage the public more fully in protecting heritage, who are the public? The word refers either to those working in archaeology-related fields but are not archaeologists, historians, for example, or any other person having nothing to do with archaeology.

Public engagement does not only mean educating the public or providing it with information. It is not necessarily narrowly educational but is designed to broaden perspectives on the topics presented. Public engagement can therefore be more fun than education, and it can be more effective in creating enthusiasm about the subject at hand. Another important aspect of public engagement is its ability to make people more in touch with their surroundings, culture, and history, which in the long run will lead to more awareness and will help to preserve it.

People will not care about what they do not understand. If they get to know the real value of their surroundings, they will be keen to conserve them, whether the items concerned are buildings, artworks, or even underwater monuments that cannot easily be seen but are there for people to explore should they wish to do so.

 In other words, public engagement typically works to create a heritage cycle, first through excitement and enjoyment, creating “a thirst to understand”, and then, through that understanding, producing an urge to take care of artefacts and monuments that have been invested with this value.

 Another aspect of public engagement is the creation of context, and here Khalil gives the particular example of underwater heritage. “How do you create context about something that is mostly out of sight,” he asked. “The Great Pyramids are things people can relate to, as they are unmissable and are symbols of ancient Egypt and its great civilisation. There is a whole set of concepts engraved in people’s minds. But how do you create similar concepts when it comes to underwater heritage, which cannot easily be seen?”

A first step, he added, is correcting some misperceptions that people may have. “When you tell someone about underwater heritage, they may think about gold, treasure hunting, and a whole list of images coming from the media and Hollywood movies,” Khalil said.

“But if you want to engage the public in protecting that heritage it is essential to create a platform by which the public is in direct contact with the underwater archaeology, be it through touch, smell or sight. There is a need to create a sense of personal, emotional, and physical connection with the object of interest, all of which leads to establishing a sense of cultural and physical ownership and leading the public to sense that the underwater cultural heritage is theirs and they have a responsibility towards it.”

This sense of ownership can be produced in various ways, said Ziad Morsi, a lecturer at the Alexandria Centre of Maritime Archaeology and Cultural Heritage. “Public outreach is what any archaeological or scientific institution does to reach out to the public, with the main target of making heritage and archaeology easily understood by everyone whatever their background, social class, or level of education,” he said.

“In Egypt, most institutions have their own public-outreach team,” including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria. The Bibliotheca’s Planetarium team goes to schools and sometimes also shopping malls to engage directly with families and others. In addition to workshops in schools, the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities also has online courses that members of the public can attend.

ALEXANDRIA INITIATIVES: Many heritage initiatives routinely take place in Alexandria, with even venues such as cafes, antique shops, and restaurants presenting cultural heritage to the public and serving as a method of raising awareness.

A case in point is Bahar, a project inspired by the Discovery Buses run by the Maritime Archaeology Trust in the UK. Alexandria resident Nada Kamel, founder of Bahar, spent a month with a heritage Discovery Bus as part of field training she attended in England. “The Bus was a true example of public outreach,” she said, as it went from city to city in the UK to raise awareness about underwater cultural heritage. Bahar in Alexandria is based on the same concept, working in cooperation with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

 The first phase of the project started in 2018, targeting children from five to 16 years old and a total of around 800 children. “We start by defining what archaeology is in general, and then we move on to underwater archaeology,” Kamel said. “There are questions such as, what is an artefact? What do the children know about it? Who is in charge of archaeology and who works in the field? What should we do if we find an artefact underwater? The children are distributed to different workshops, one explaining what diving equipment is, another delivering information about documentation, and another explaining how to preserve an underwater artefact.”

All in all, the project provides workshops for children that are informative and fun. Virtual reality goggles are used to bring home the look of the sites, and a portable museum includes replicas of different artefacts.

The first children’s book in Arabic about underwater cultural heritage in Egypt was one of the outcomes of the first round of Bahar, published by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The children received a copy of the book along with a certificate after the completion of the workshop, Kamel said. Funded by the Honor Frost Foundation, the second phase of Bahar will kick off in January 2022.

Photographer and documentary filmmaker Hazem Al-Attar has started a number of initiatives within the framework of public engagement with heritage. Inspired by an exhibition he worked on with INmagazine on the historic gardens of Alexandria in 2018, al-Attar takes people on “literal” walks down memory lane by taking them to the actual gardens that still exist today in Alexandria, such as the Al-Shalalat, Al-Nozha (now the Alexandria Zoo), and Antoniados Gardens.

He aims to present displays of what life in Egypt looked like during the ancient Greek, Roman, and 19th-century eras, concentrating on how people dressed, ate, and spent their daily lives. “It is an unforgettable experience for children to wear the costumes of each era and get a real feel of what daily life looked like at the time. Each Garden presents a different era — the Antoniados, for instance, presents the ancient Greek era, while the Montazah Garden is the perfect stage for the Mohamed Ali era and the modern history of Egypt.”

Al-Attar is currently working on two documentary series, In the Depths of the City and Walls of the Past. In the first series, various episodes present some of the most popular stories of the city most Alexandrians are familiar with but do not really know the origins of, such as the girl of Nabi Daniel Street and the serial killer of Karmouz, both popular stories many Alexandrians grew up hearing. His idea is to dig deeper and bring real historical information to the table.

HERITAGE DAYS: The Alexandria Heritage Days were held on the ground this year, after a one-year pause when they were held online because of Covid-19 restrictions. The annual event is now marking its 12th year and has been celebrating the heritage of Alexandria since 2008 with a special emphasis on public engagement.

Along with acknowledging the coastal city’s rich history and aiming to help preserve its heritage, this year’s event, which took place from 12 to 20 November, was under the title “The Alexandria that Was and the Alexandria that Will Be”.

“This year we were trying not just to bring up nostalgia for the past, often seen as a feature of heritage, but also to portray the future of the city,” said Marwa Abdel-Gawad, head of outreach at the Alexandria Centre for Studies (CeAlex), an NGO.

“Alexandria does not have the Pyramids, or many ancient Egyptian monuments, but it has a rich cultural atmosphere that always has a lot to offer. It is our goal not just to make people see the places they already know. Our aim is to dig deeper into places people do not know and give them the knowledge that comes with that,” she said.

The event was especially marked by the attendance of families, with young and old and children with their parents and even grandparents seen on tours. In collaboration with NGOs and other organisations, such as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the ministry of tourism and antiquities, the Goethe Institute in Alexandria, the French Institute in Alexandria, and the Jesuit Culture Centre, the Heritage Days saw a tour that followed UK author E M Forster’s path in Manshiya a century ago, a tour of the Kom Al-Nadora lighthouse site, and a theatre performance by Islam Shabana on the ancient water system of Alexandria, some of which still exists today.

A photographic collection from the German traveller Ernst von Sieglin’s visit to Alexandria from 1898 to 1901 was presented to the public for the first time, including photographs of the Karmouz district, the Mahmoudiya Canal, and early attempts at building the Corniche. There is also an exhibition called “Alexandria 1921: the City and the People” by Mohamed Adel Dessouki, a professor of architecture, and Mahmoud Said, an architect and artist, that will continue until 9 December.

This is divided into three main sections, the first on Forster’s description of Alexandria 100 years ago. This part contains archival material and maps from the same era, creating a visual display to accompany Forster’s book Alexandria: A History and a Guide.

“The exhibition was supposed to start last year, but it paused because of Covid-19. It is the outcome of more than a year’s work and shows what the city looked like and reflects on the changes that have occurred and why they took place. Some buildings have completely disappeared; some have been reconstructed; and others have had their features completely transformed. We want this exhibition to make people reflect on what happened and to draw their own conclusions,” Said said.

Another activity in this year’s Heritage Days is the Visit Alexandria mobile application, expected to be fully launched by late December, that is an outcome of the “Love Alexandria” campaign established in 2015 by INmagazine founders Osama Moharam and Ahmed Ezz, also on the development team along with Mahmoud Adnan.

The Love Alexandria campaign started with a series of brochures and maps to support tourism in the city, and now these have been transferred to a mobile app. “Exploring Alexandria is the theme of the application, and it is not just a tourist application telling visitors where to go. It is more like a way of moving around the city and exploring its different landmarks, not just well-known spots,” Moharam said.

The app does not only present the user with information about landmarks and how to visit them, but also presents information about Alexandria in general, including old streets, old buildings, and hidden gems.

During the Heritage Days, “we focus on history and heritage-related subjects not mentioned in schoolbooks and present information from research that is almost never presented to the public. Our goal is to present all this in a simple way through exhibitions, music, theatre performances, lectures, book launches, and walking tours,’’ Abdel-Gawad said.

As such, the Alexandria Heritage Days are a clear-cut model of public engagement with heritage and one that it is to be hoped will be replicated elsewhere in Egypt and not just once a year. The well-organised celebration presents a series of events, all of which educate the public in an indirect manner as part of a fun and exciting experience.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 2 December, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.