Vanishing Nubia Following Botanists in Egypt

As the Nasserist state built a large hydroelectric dam in the south of Egypt in the early 1960s, Egyptian botanists undertook salvage surveys of the area to be flooded behind the dam, known as historic Nubia. Scientists in these surveys searched for a type of palm tree (Medemia argun) well documented in ancient Egyptian tombs but unrecorded “in living condition” since the late eighteenth century. Gathering written and photographic accounts in memoirs, archives, and botanical tracts, this essay charts the documentary traces of the search for Medemia argun and the affective responses that surface along the margins of texts to show how debate over the potential absence or extinction of a “flagship” endogenous plant coincided with two important shifts in botanical knowledge production: transitions in botany as a discipline that employed new research methodologies and located Egypt “geobotanically” as the temporal and spatial origin for world flora; and transitions in botany as an arena of scientific expertise during postcolonial nationalism's reordering of the Egyptian academy. Building on extinction and destroyed landscape studies, this article explores ecological lexicons of absence and practices of “following” in botany.