Early archaeology treated living Arabs as invisible to their enterprise

Evidence

The Arabs who lived in the shadows of those ruins were more or less invisible to these scholars. Cyriac of Ancona (1391-1456) travelled through Turkey, Greece and Egypt noting down inscriptions and collecting antiquities. He proclaimed that the goal of archaeology was to ‘wake the dead’ — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 110

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete foreshadowing of Said’s central thesis that Orientalism rendered actual living Orientals invisible — Irwin gives it an early, archaeologically concrete instance.
• SEED: Article angle: how ‘waking the dead’ as a scholarly mission required rendering the living invisible — the erasure at the heart of archaeology-as-revival.