Abstract This article investigates how commemorating practices are deployed to fix and affirm sovereignty and its ordering. Through conceptualizing commemorating practices as ‘national symbolic order’, this article focuses on Cairo’s monument of the Unknown Soldier as a tangled cluster of shifting attempts to signify urban space. Built shortly after the 1973 war, the monument expressed an approach to nationalist symbolism that was in line with how the Sadat regime came into its own because of the war. The article traces the influences on the style of the monument and the narrative of its construction. Ironically, six years later, the same monument became the resting place of Sadat after his assassination on the same site. How is urban space implicated in the construction of a national symbolic order? How is politics as death and mortality navigated and scripted in city space? In answering these questions, the article relies on interviews with the designer of the post-independence Monument of the Unknown Soldier conducted in 2015 and 2016, and his photographic collection. It proceeds in four sections discussing the significance of the October war of 1973 in shoring up the legitimacy of Sadat, imagining the monument, constructing the monument and, finally, the monument’s mediation of death and sovereignty. From the materiality and entanglements of one site, the article analyzes ‘state-making’ via ‘city-making’ after 1952 and well into 1970s. Ultimately, it follows the hesitations of deploying a national symbolic order in post-independence Egypt and of attempts at shoring up a shaky state apparatus in a common political space.

中文翻译：

---

过渡国家：1970年代开罗的纪念活动，城市空间和国家象征秩序

摘要本文研究了如何运用纪念活动来修复和确认主权及其秩序。通过将纪念活动概念化为“国家象征秩序”，本文将重点放在开罗的《无名战士》纪念碑上，这是表示城市空间的各种尝试的错综复杂的集群。这座纪念碑建于1973年战争后不久，表达了民族主义象征主义的态度，这与萨达特政权因战争而产生的方式是一致的。文章追溯了对纪念碑风格及其建筑叙事的影响。具有讽刺意味的是，六年后，同一座纪念碑在萨达特遇刺后成为了萨达特的安息之地。城市空间如何与国家象征秩序的建设联系起来？政治如何随着死亡和死亡在城市空间中导航和脚本化？在回答这些问题时，本文依赖于对2015年和2016年进行的独立战争后纪念碑的设计师的采访以及他的摄影作品集。它分为四个部分，讨论了1973年十月战争对增强萨达特合法性，构想纪念碑，建造纪念碑以及最后纪念碑对死亡和主权的调停的重要性。本文从一个地点的重要性和纠缠性出发，分析了1952年之后至1970年代的“国家决策”和“城市决策”。最终，