It’s one of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century: British archaeologist Howard Carter inspecting Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus in 1922 while an Egyptian member of his team crouches in the shadows nearby.

It’s also an apt metaphor for two centuries of Egyptology, full of tales of brilliant foreign explorers unraveling the mysteries of the pharaohs while the Egyptians are sidelined.

“The Egyptians have been erased from the historical narrative,” lead archaeologist Monica Hanna told AFP.

Now, with the 100th anniversary of Carter’s earth-shattering discovery – and the 200th anniversary of the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone that revealed the ancient hieroglyphs – they are demanding that their contributions be recognized.

The Egyptians “did all the work” but were “forgotten,” said chief excavator Abdel Hamid Daramalli, who was born “on top” of the tombs at Qurna near Luxor and is now in charge of the excavations.

Even the birth of Egyptology in the colonial era – neatly credited to the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion, who cracked the code of the Rosetta Stone in 1822 – “glosses over history,” according to specialist researcher Heba Abdel Gawad, “as if there had been no attempts until then.” would have given to understand ancient Egypt the Europeans came.”

The “unnamed Egyptian” in Carter’s famous painting is “maybe Hussein Abu Awad or Hussein Ahmed Said,” according to art historian Christina Riggs, a Middle East specialist at Britain’s Durham University.

The two men were pillars of Carter’s excavation team for nine seasons alongside Ahmed Gerigar and Gad Hassan. But unlike foreign team members, experts can’t name the faces in the photos.

“Egyptians go unnoticed, unnamed and virtually invisible throughout their history,” Riggs pointed out, arguing that Egyptology’s “structural injustices” still reverberate to this day.

But one Egyptian name rose to prominence as the alleged accidental discoverer of the tomb: Hussein Abdel Rasoul.

Although the waterboy story does not appear in Carter’s journals and journals, it is presented as “historical fact,” Riggs said.

On November 4, 1922, a 12-year-old boy – widely believed to be Hussein – found the top step of the tomb, allegedly because either he had stumbled, his donkey had tripped, or his water jar had washed away the sand.

The next day, Carter’s team uncovered the entire staircase, and on November 26 he peered through a small crack in the tomb door into a room full of golden treasures.

According to an oft-repeated tale, half a century earlier, two of Hussein’s ancestors, brothers Ahmed and Mohamed Abdel Rasoul, found the Deir el-Bahari lair containing more than 50 mummies, including Ramses the Great, when their goat fell into a crevasse.

But Hussein’s grandnephew Sayed Abdel Rasoul laughed at the idea that a goat or a boy with a water jug ??was behind the breakthroughs.

Riggs reiterated his skepticism, arguing that on the rare occasions that Egyptology credits the Egyptians with great discoveries, they are disproportionately either children, grave robbers, or “four-legged friends.”

The problem is that others “kept records, we didn’t,” Abdel Rasoul told AFP.

Local farmers who knew the contours of the land “could tell by the layers of sediment if there was anything there,” Egyptologist Abdel Gawad said, adding that “archaeology is mainly concerned with geography.”

In Qurna – where the Abdel Rasouls live – and in Qift, a small town north of Luxor where the English archaeologist William Flinders Petrie first trained local people in the 1880s, profound excavation knowledge and skills were passed down through the generations.

Mostafa Abdo Sadek, a lead excavator of the Saqqara Tombs near Giza whose discoveries were celebrated in the Netflix documentary series Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb, is a descendant of those excavators in Qift.

His family moved 600 kilometers north at the turn of the century to excavate the vast necropolis south of the Pyramids of Giza.

But his grandfathers and great-uncles “were wronged,” he explained, holding up their photos.

Their contributions to a century of discoveries at Saqqara have remained largely undocumented.

For decades, while the French controlled the country’s antiquities service, they were barred from studying Egyptology and Egyptians “always served foreigners,” archaeologist and former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass told AFP.

Another Egyptologist, Fatma Keshk, said we need to “remember the historical and social context of the time when Egypt was under British occupation”.

The struggle for the country’s cultural heritage became increasingly political in the early 20th century as Egyptians demanded their freedom.

“We are the children of Tutankhamen,” sang the diva Mounira al-Mahdiyya in 1922, the year the intact tomb of the young pharaoh was found.

That same year Britain was forced to grant Egypt independence and the hated partage system, which gave half of the finds to foreign missions in exchange for funding excavations, was ended.

But just as Egyptians’ “sense of ownership” of their heritage grew, ancient Egypt was appropriated as a “world civilization” that had little to do with the modern country, argued Abdel Gawad.

“Unfortunately, this world seems to be the west. It is their civilisation, not ours.”

While the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb remained in Cairo, Egypt lost Carter’s archives that were considered his private property.

The notes, key to academic research, were donated by his niece to the Griffith Institute for Egyptology at the University of Oxford, UK.

“They still colonized us. They left the objects behind, but they took away our ability to do research,” Hanna added.

This year, the Institute and the Bodleian Library in Oxford are hosting the exhibition Tutankhamun: Excavating the Archive, which they say sheds light on the “often overlooked Egyptian members of the archaeological team.”

In Qurna, 73-year-old Ahmed Abdel Rady recalls finding a mummy’s head in a cave of his family’s adobe house, built into a tomb.

His mother kept her onions and garlic in a red granite sarcophagus, but she burst into tears at the sight of the head, berating it that “this is a queen” worthy of respect.

For centuries, the people of Qurna lived in the ancient necropolis of Thebes, one of the former capitals of the pharaohs, dating back to 3100 BC. Chr., and dug them out.

Today, Abdel Rady’s village is a mere rubble among the tombs and temples, the twin colossi of Memnon – built nearly 3,400 years ago – that watch over the living and the dead.

Four Qurnawis were shot dead in 1998 while trying to stop the authorities from tearing down their homes as part of a resettlement program.

About 10,000 people were eventually relocated when almost an entire hill of adobe houses was demolished despite protests from UNESCO.

In the now deserted lunar landscape, Ragab Tolba, 55, one of the last remaining residents, told AFP how his relatives and neighbors were relocated to “inappropriate” homes “in the desert”.

The Qurnawis’ stubborn resistance was sparked by their deep connection to the site and their ancestors, said Qurna-born excavator Daramalli.

But controversial celebrity archaeologist Hawass, then head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said “it had to be done” to preserve the tombs.

However, Egyptologist Hanna said the authorities were determined to turn Luxor into a sanitized “open-air museum… a Disneyfication of heritage” and used ancient tropes about the Qurnawis as grave robbers against them.

Sayed Abdel Rasoul’s nephew, Ahmed, hit back at what he described as double standards.

“The French and the English stole everyone,” he told AFP.

“Who even told the people of Qurna that they could make money from artifacts?”

Countless antiquities have come from Egypt over the centuries.

Some, like the Luxor Obelisk in Paris and the Debod Temple in Madrid, were gifts from the Egyptian government.

Others were lost to European museums through the partition system of the colonial era.

But hundreds of thousands more have been smuggled out of the country into “private collections around the world,” according to Abdel Gawad.

Former Antiquities Minister Hawass is now leading a crusade to bring back three of the great “stolen” treasures – the Rosetta Stone, the bust of Queen Nefertiti and the Dendera Zodiac.

He told AFP news agency he plans to petition in October to demand their return.

The Rosetta Stone has been housed in the British Museum since 1802, “given to the British as a diplomatic gift,” the museum told AFP.

But for Abdel Gawad it is “a spoils of war”.

The 3,340-year-old bust of Nefertiti made its way to the Neues Museum in Berlin via the partage system a century later, but Hawass insisted it was “stolen illegally, as I have proved time and time again”.

Meanwhile, the Frenchman Sebastien Louis Saulnier had the Dendera Zodiac blown up from the Hathor Temple in Qena in 1820.

The celestial map has hung on a ceiling in the Louvre in Paris since 1922, and a plaster cast has remained in its place in the southern Egyptian temple.

“This is a crime that the French committed in Egypt,” Hanna said, behavior that “is no longer compatible with 21st-century ethics.”