Dr Doaa El-Masry, on writing slowly from Minya.

I was born in Mallawi, ten kilometres south of the modern town of Minya, in a household where the kitchen window faced the small canal that had been cut, in the late nineteenth century, off the eastern arm of the Bahr Yusuf, and where the back door opened onto a courtyard with a single fig tree. My father, who had read agriculture at Cairo University in the early 1970s and had returned to the Mallawi cooperative to work on the cotton extension service, was the first reader of the small library of museum catalogues that he had brought back, a few at a time, from his trips to Cairo. The catalogues were the first books I read seriously, between the ages of eight and fifteen.

I read archaeology at the University of Minya from 2007 to 2011, with a master's thesis on the painted programmes of the Beni Hasan tombs. I did my doctoral fieldwork at the Theban Necropolis between 2013 and 2017, on the unpublished First-Intermediate-Period material from Asyut held in the storage rooms at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna. I returned to Minya in 2018 as a lecturer in regional archaeology, and I have not, since then, lived anywhere else for longer than three months at a time.

What this journal is

The Middle Quarterly is an academic-literary review of the museums, sites, and field archaeology of Middle Egypt — the long, narrow stretch of the Nile valley between Beni Suef in the north and Sohag in the south, including the cliffs at Beni Hasan, the bare plain at Tell el-Amarna, the tombs at Asyut and Meir, the rock-cut shrines at El-Kab, the late-antique monastic sites at Sohag, and the regional museums at Mallawi, Asyut, and Sohag. Five long essays a season — the spring issue (March), the summer issue (July), the autumn issue (October), the winter issue (January). Each essay is between four thousand and six thousand words. Each is footnoted in the body of the text rather than separately, in the older essayistic register that I prefer to the journal-paper register of the field's principal English-language publications.

The intended reader is the colleague who works on a different region, the graduate student who has not yet committed to a specialism, and — perhaps mainly — the long literary reader who is not an archaeologist but who is willing to read carefully. The journal is, in that sense, a hybrid: it is academic in its sources and its methods, but literary in its sentence-rhythm and its choice of register. I do not apologise for this. The discipline could use more of it.

What this journal is not

It is not affiliated with any institution despite my employment at the University of Minya — the journal is published in my private capacity, on my own time, and the views expressed are mine alone. It is not a peer-reviewed journal in the formal sense; the essays are circulated to two or three colleagues for comment before publication, but they do not pass through a blind-review process. It is not a booking service or a tourism resource. There are no products on this site, there are no prices listed anywhere, and there is no commerce of any kind. If you wish to visit a museum or a site, please contact the relevant inspectorate directly.

How an essay is written

1. I visit the site or the museum, with a notebook, on at least two separate occasions, in different seasons of the year. Some essays — particularly those on the long-running excavation sites — are based on more than a dozen visits over a decade.
2. I read the principal published bibliography in Arabic, English, French, and German. (My Italian is poor; for the Italian-language Egyptology I rely on summaries.)
3. I write a draft that is too long, too footnoted, and too cautious.
4. I cut it by half, which is always more painful than the writing.
5. I send it to two colleagues — usually one in the same period and one in a different region — for substantive criticism. I revise. I publish. I correct as letters arrive.

The discipline does not need shorter essays. It needs essays in which the writing has been allowed to do as much work as the footnotes.

Some background, briefly

I have published in Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts Kairo, in the Bulletin of the Egyptian Museum, and, on the literary side, in Akhbar al-Adab in Arabic. I am the co-author of a 2021 monograph on the post-2013 reconstitution of the Mallawi Museum collection. I am, more relevantly to this journal, a long reader of the literary essays of Yahya Haqqi, Edwidge Danticat, and the late Sonallah Ibrahim — none of whom, I should say, are archaeologists.

Corrections and letters

Errors are inevitable in a journal that publishes long essays without formal peer review. If you find one, please write. Corrections are made within a fortnight and noted at the foot of the corrected essay. The contact page has the address. I am, by Egyptian academic standards, a slow correspondent — please be patient.

— D.E.M., from a desk overlooking the canal in Mallawi