Historians have recently started listening to the past, contributing to what David Howes has described as a “sensorial revolution in the humanities and social sciences.”Footnote ¹ In the same way that all five senses are relevant to our daily understanding of the world around us, they should be vital to our understanding of historical events. Interpreting how peoples of the past sensorially experienced their world makes possible a richer, more comprehensive grasp of historical events. A sensorially grounded historical narrative is an embodied history that is connected to everyday people and lives. Historians of the Middle East, however, with few exceptions, are still largely producing soundproof, devocalized narratives of the past.Footnote ²

In order to pursue a more sounded approach to history, historians can learn from anthropologists and media studies scholars, whose recent studies on contemporary Middle Eastern media rely in varying ways on sounded sources.Footnote ³ Most of these studies focus on contemporary societies, however, meaning their authors are able to listen to the sounds and soundscapes that they are studying. Historians usually do not have that luxury; we must use different strategies to cull and tease out sound from our sources, which are mostly textual. Also, most of these studies only deal with music, television, and film, and not with noise, street sound, and soundscapes. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is twofold. Along with the other members of this roundtable, I hope to begin a long overdue conversation among scholars of the Middle East about the importance of researching sounds and soundscapes of the past. In the process, I attempt to demonstrate the importance of sound in studying history and suggest some research strategies for uncovering these soundscapes, especially before the introduction of recording technologies. In the second half of the essay I will present some of my preliminary research on the calls of Egyptian street hawkers in 1920s and 1930s Cairo. This research is part of an ongoing book project on the changing soundscapes of Egypt in the first half of the 20th century. As I hope to demonstrate, there is much to be discovered by incorporating sound and soundscapes into our methodological toolkit for understanding the past. Before continuing our discussion, we must address some common misconceptions about the nature of sound and its suitability for historical study.

For contemporary events, or for many historical events that occurred in the second half of the 20th century, sound and audiovisual recordings are available for examination. But how can researchers fill in the sensory gap when writing about historical periods before the invention of recording technology? The obvious solution to this problem can be found in the same texts that historians have been using all along, or, as R. Murray Schaffer has eloquently stated, historians “will have to turn to earwitness accounts.”Footnote ⁴ Not only have scholars been hard of hearing when examining historical sources, but they have generally assumed that the available primary texts were written by authors who were deaf and mute. Because historians silently read texts (visually) in the archive does not mean that the original writers were depicting only visual “observations.” People acquire content, meaning, and information from their physical environment using all five senses. Lest we forget, the very act of writing is as much tactile as it is visual, and the information being conveyed will no doubt be full of multisensory content.

Historians have no problem accepting the visual observations made within archival texts, yet written documentation of sound and noise is often neglected. By attuning ourselves to the sounds described within historical texts, we can inevitably see, or rather “hear,” the perspective that the original author has conveyed regarding the sounds, noises, and words that she may have heard. Moreover, writers do not just record what they have seen and heard—depending on the events they are covering and the context of the document they are writing—they can also detail olfactory, tactile, and gustatory information.Footnote ⁵

Each historical time and locale has its varied natural, animal, and human sounds that play an important role in defining the place to its inhabitants. These sounds and noises have an assortment of economic, environmental, social, and cultural implications that are vital to a well-rounded historical understanding of the past. In Egypt, coffee shops were (and continue to be) an extension of the street in that their spatial (and sonic) boundaries usually expanded beyond their officially “enclosed” space. Weather permitting, most Egyptian cafés sat more people outside on the sidewalks and on the pavement than inside, with obvious sonic implications for the neighborhoods that surrounded them. This meant that passersby, be they paperboys, street vendors, entertainers, or simply pedestrians, could observe and listen to, if not participate in, the coffee shop experience. As newer, louder technologies such as gramophones and radio sets were introduced, the acoustic imprints of coffee shops must have dramatically increased. Commercial activity was (and still is) loudly conducted in the sidewalks of these cafés as dozens of street hawkers took advantage of the already seated and hence captive cliental.

In interwar Egypt, street hawkers did not just sell their wares to coffee shop clientele. A surprising variety of these hawkers had regular routes in most urban residential neighborhoods. The loudness and pitch of their calls was essential to reaching inside the homes and apartments of their intended consumers. More than just the actual words being sounded, it was the unique inflection, tone, and pitch of a particular seller's voice that signaled from quite a distance the exact product being sold; the astute listener could even approximate the distance and time of arrival of the salesperson, thus anticipating when to walk down the stairs and conduct the transaction. For some products, vocalization by the seller was not even necessary. Butane tank merchants, who are still heard throughout Egypt, could signal their arrival to an entire neighborhood without uttering a single word. Striking their metal butane cylinders with a wrench, they produced a familiar, loud and rhythmic clanking that sonically carried for several city blocks signaling the arrival of the truck or horse drawn cart. For smaller items, customers did not even need to descend to the street for the transaction to occur. Most households had handy wicker baskets attached to long ropes with which they could send down cash from the windows or balconies of their apartment buildings and bring up change and purchased goods. In these scenarios, of course, both the buyer and seller shouted the details of the transaction for all to hear.

In the interwar period, the plethora of calls and cries from street merchants dwarfed what they are today. A contemporary observer in mid-1930s Cairo documented 165 distinct calls and cries by street hawkers, and that was just for the sellers of produce and other food items.Footnote ⁶ The sellers loudly and melodically emphasized the freshness, ripeness, taste, size, or geographic origins of the foods they were selling. Comparisons, often amusing or exaggerated, were sometimes used to drive the point home to buyers. Tomatoes, for example, could be the size of pomegranates or as red as roses. Because Egyptians preferred small cucumbers, they were often likened to kidney beans. Some of the more unusual sale calls declared that their dates were as good as lamb. Pistachio sellers compared their product to roasted game birds, and sellers of barbequed corn announced that their corn was as tasty as roasted chicken. If the tenderness of the food items they sold was important, the sellers would chant loudly that “even the toothless can eat them.”Footnote ⁷ Upon seeing a child playing in the street, candy vendors would yell out ʿayaṭ li-ummak yā wād, or “cry to your mother little boy,” urging the young child to beg his mother for money in order to buy candy.Footnote ⁸ In part because of the transitory nature of the street hawkers, their relationship with the Egyptian state was (and still is) often adversarial and rife with tension. Unsuccessful attempts at regulating, documenting, and taxing them began in the late 19th century and continue to this day. As my preliminary research has shown, these regulations often attempted not only to dictate where and when these merchants could sell their wares, but also to control their hygiene, the smells and expirations of their food, the volume of their calls, and the number of times per day they could make them.

Sometime before the mid-20th century, as indoor plumbing and water faucets and pipes became pervasive in urban Egypt, the calls of the saqāyīn (sing. sāqa), or water sellers, disappeared from the urban soundscape. This process was gradual. It began in the late 19th century in new and well-to-do areas of Cairo, and spread in the mid 20th-century to the rest of the city. The saqāyīn crooned aloud the traditional chant yiʿawaḍ Allāh (God will compensate) to advertise their arrival to a neighborhood. Because the profit margin for transporting water was minimal and it was expected that customers should tip the sāqa, especially if he delivered the water to an apartment that was several floors up, the chant “God will compensate” was in part intended to remind the customer that a generous tip was needed and appreciated.

Of all the street hawkers we discussed, the water sellers in particular deserve a closer look. As I just alluded to, by the early 20th century it was well understood that the entire sāqa profession was becoming obsolete. Gradually, though consistently, the sounds of the water sellers’ calls disappeared from the urban soundscape. As with many of the changing social and cultural realities of early 20th-century Egypt, the ordeals of the Egyptian water sellers are captured and memorialized—though with typical lighthearted comedic flair—by the music compositions of Sayyid Darwish and the lyrics of Badiʿ Khayri. As I discuss in more detail in Ordinary Egyptians, Darwish and Khayri were particularly adept at mimicking and amplifying the sounds and feelings of the Egyptian streets.Footnote ⁹ The Water sellers’ song, appropriately called “Yiʿawad Allah,” was written only after extensive research, with both Darwish and Khayri sitting for hours in a coffee shop near Harat al-Saqayin (the water sellers’ quarter) in Cairo. They spoke with and interviewed the water sellers and, more importantly, listened to and copied the tone and pitch of their calls. In the song, after repeating the chorus line “God will compensate,” the singing water sellers begin to list their complaints and grievances while acknowledging the inevitable obsolescence of their profession. The song then turns to comic relief as the water seller insults the foreign-operated water company, accusing it of poisoning the water and suggesting to the listeners to go home and smash their faucets:

Egyptians did not go on mass and smash their water faucets, but the song resonated with many of its listeners because, through the lens of the water sellers, it captured the reality (uncomfortable to some) that Egypt during the 1920s and 1930s was a society very much in transition. Despite its farcical nature, the song has an undertone of collective nostalgia as it documented and acknowledged a disappearing way of life. In just a couple of decades, the street cries of the traditional water sellers would be lost for good.

Sound studies scholar R. Murray Schaffer appropriately asks: “Where are the museums for disappearing sounds? Even the most ordinary sounds will be affectionately remembered after they disappear.”Footnote ¹⁰ Perhaps in this case, Sayyid Darwish's song, recorded in 1920, serves as an imperfect commemoration of the saqāyīn’s way of life, preserving at least the memory if not the pitch and tone of his calls.

There are many more historical dimensions to be discovered if we are open to considering sound as a serious path of inquiry for understanding the past. Sound historian Jonathan Sterne accurately declared that “there is always more than one map for a territory, and sound provides a particular path through history.”Footnote ¹¹ With few recent exceptions—including of course the contributors to this roundtable—historians of the Middle East have yet to fully explore that path, making the past seem silent, devocalized, and one-dimensional.Footnote ¹² By calling for the incorporation of sound, noise, and aurality in writing history, I am not suggesting the neglect of the visual, or for that matter any of the other senses. I do not propose that listening and sound are more important than the observed and the visual; yet if we are to ever give a more balanced reflection (or, more aptly, echo) of the past, we must open our ears as well as our eyes. In order to begin this process, we must look beyond our discipline toward anthropology, ethnomusicology, and even, as I have shown elsewhere, architectural and acoustic engineering.Footnote ¹³ By finding and interpreting new auditory data, historians can add new sensory dimensions to their historical analyses, transforming how we understand the past. As this IJMES roundtable and the growing field of sound studies have shown, comprehending the daily experiences of ordinary people requires us to listen more to the past.