Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, Volume 1: From Antiquity to 1881

By Jason Thompson

The discovery of ancient Egypt and the development of Egyptology are momentous events in intellectual and cultural history. The history of Egyptology is the story of the people, famous and obscure, who constructed the picture of ancient Egypt that we have today, recovered the Egyptian past while inventing it anew, and made a lost civilization comprehensible to generations of enchanted readers and viewers thousands of years later. This, the first of a three-volume survey of the history of Egyptology, follows the fascination with ancient Egypt from antiquity until 1881, tracing the recovery of ancient Egypt and its impact on the human imagination in a saga filled with intriguing mysteries, great discoveries, and scholarly creativity. Wonderful Things affirms that the history of ancient Egypt has proved continually fascinating, but it also demonstrates that the history of Egyptology is no less so. Only by understanding how Egyptology has developed can we truly understand the Egyptian past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781617976360

Jason Thompson

Jason Thompson is an instructor at Ashford University, American Public University, and Rutgers university, as well as dissertation chair, committee member, and associate faculty at University of Phoenix. He also has a very wide variety of corporate experiences in financial services and the insurance industry.

Book preview

WONDERFUL THINGS

WONDERFUL THINGS

A HISTORY OF EGYPTOLOGY

1: From Antiquity to 1881

Jason Thompson

The American University in Cairo Press

Cairo New York

This electronic edition published in 2015 by

The American University in Cairo Press

113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018

www.aucpress.com

Copyright © 2014 by Jason Thompson

First published in hardback in 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 977 416 599 3

eISBN 9781 61797 636 0

Version 1

To the memory of Susan Howe Weeks, artist, Egyptologist, friend, and neighbor

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Jaromir Malek

Chronological Outline of Ancient Egyptian History

Introduction

1.  Egyptology in Antiquity

2.  A Medieval Hiatus

3.  Ancient Egypt in the Renaissance

4.  Ancient Egypt in the Age of the Enlightenment

5.  The Discovery of Ancient Egypt

6.  The Decipherment of the Hieroglyphs

7.  Lifting the Veil

8.  Egypt Itself

9.  Arrested Development

10. Consolidation

11. Preservation and Depredation

12. Taking Possession of Egypt for the Cause of Science

13. Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Art, Photography, and Literature

14. Mariette’s Monopoly

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

So many people and institutions have been helpful in this project that I hesitate to mention them for fear of leaving any out, but I must try to acknowledge my gratitude to friends, colleagues, and fellow workers who have helped me find my way. By resorting to alphabetizing, I seek to avoid any suggestion of favoritism. First there are those whom we have lost in recent years. Those include Vivien Betti, Gaballa A. Gaballa, T.G.H. (Harry) James, Jacobus (Jac) Janssen, Jean Leclant, Robert Lucas, and Susan Weeks.

Those who, thankfully, do not yet fulfill the final qualification for entry into Who Was Who in Egyptology include Jeffrey Abt, Lawrence M. Berman, Morris L. Bierbrier, Peter A. Clayton, Lorelei H. Corcoran, Agnieszka Dobrowolska, Helen Dorey, Stephen Edidin, Elizabeth Fleming, Éric Gady, Jocelyn Gohary, Diane Harlé, Zahi Hawass, Marsha Hill, Olaf Kaper, Joanna Kyffin, Rosalind Janssen, Janet H. Johnson, Michael Jones, Jack Josephson, Roger O. de Keersmaecker, Peter Lacovara, John Larson, Briony Llewellyn, Julian Lush, Diana Magee, Deborah Manley, Anthony J. Mills, Chris Naunton, Hana Navrátilová, Yvonne Neville-Rolf, Edward O’Reilly, Patrizia Piacentini, Patricia Podzorski, Stephen Quirke, Caroline M. Rocheleau, John Ruffle, Edna R. Russman, Jiřina Růžová, Mona Sadek, Wafaa el-Saddik, Helmut Satzinger, Sarah Searight, Caroline Simpson, Patricia Spencer, John H. Taylor, Emily Teeter, Eric Uphill, Patricia Usick, Marie-Paul Vanlathem, Miroslav Verner, and Emily Weeks.

I also want to thank the students in my History of Ancient Egypt classes at Colby College and Bates College for many inspiring moments that contributed to this book.

Scholars and writers who have read all or part of the manuscript and contributed to it in other ways include Neil Cooke, Abdalla Hassan, Jill Kamil, Peter Der Manuelian, Stephanie Moser, Andrew Oliver, Margaret Ranger, Maarten J. Raven, and Kent R. Weeks.

My wife, Angela, was my companion and sometimes coworker on several archival expeditions. My nine-year-old son Julian was an able research assistant in the field, although I might here complain that it was sometimes hard to keep pencil and paper since he was constantly appropriating them to make notes of his own at every site. I am more grateful to Angela and Julian for those shared experiences than I can express.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to Jaromir Malek, the person who is assuredly the most qualified to write a history of Egyptology. Without his approval, encouragement, and advice, I would never have undertaken to write one myself, nor would I have persevered in the effort.

At the American University in Cairo Press, Mark Linz, who also must be acknowledged in memory, and Neil Hewison were encouraging, supportive, and infinitely patient from the first in an undertaking that grew much larger and took much longer than we anticipated at the outset. Mark was enthusiastic about this project from the start. I might never have attempted it otherwise. I also wish to acknowledge the project editor, Johanna Baboukis; the copyeditor, Nell McPherson; the proofreader, Eva Abdin; and the indexer, Ælfwine Mischler. But none of the above should be considered guilty by association. I am fully responsible for all mistakes and shortcomings.

Institutions that have provided materials for this book include—in no alphabetical or preferential order—the Griffith Institute of the Ashmolean Museum, the Bodleian Library, the Cambridge University Library, the British Library, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, the Epigraphic Survey of the University of Chicago, the Egypt Exploration Society, the American Research Center in Egypt, the New-York Historical Society, the Archives of the British Museum, the Archives of the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum, the Department of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dakhleh Oasis Project, the Oriental Museum of the University of Durham, the Archives du Musée Nationale at the Musée du Louvre, the Sir John Soane Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, the Egyptian Museum of Cairo, the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the University of Memphis, and the Department of Egyptian, Nubian, and Near Eastern Art at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Kairo, and the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale.

Awards from the American Research Center in Egypt, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Bates College Faculty Development Fund provided valuable support for portions of my research.

Note

Spellings of pharaonic names are primarily followed from those in John Baines and Jaromir Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt. Transliterations of Arabic names and words are generally given in simplified form without diacritics or ayns. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are by the author.

Foreword

Jaromir Malek

Some years ago I gave a small talk to a group of Egyptologists at an old and famous German university. The subject was the Egyptological archive of the Griffith Institute in Oxford, the largest of its kind in the world, of which at that time I had the honor and pleasure of being Keeper. The thesis which I tried to promote in my lecture was that the maturity of a scholarly subject can be judged by how it treats and looks after its sources of information. For Egyptology, these may still be in situ in Egypt or be removed to museums, collections, laboratories, and storerooms, but they also include archive records, such as early copies of inscriptions and representations on tomb and temple walls, photographs, tracings, squeezes, and descriptions of sites and monuments. In this respect, I ventured to suggest, Egyptology had not yet fully matured. After the talk the professor of Egyptology at that university, a brilliant and much respected scholar, came to me and said, There is one other thing by which the maturity of a subject can be judged, and that is whether it has a written history. These words have remained with me ever since. And indeed, Egyptology has in this respect been wanting. A comprehensive history of Egyptology has until now not been attempted. The main reason, no doubt, has been the huge and immensely varied amount of material with which one would have to come to terms and the almost encyclopedic knowledge required for controlling it.

It is therefore good to see the first volume of a work which promises to take us a long way toward the fulfillment of our wish. Its author, Jason Thompson, is eminently suited for the task. He has contributed to various aspects of the history of Egyptology on many occasions in the past. His monographs on E.W. Lane and Sir John Gardner Wilkinson take pride of place in the literature dealing with this subject, and he has also written on, among others, Sir William Gell, Frederick Catherwood, and Donald Thomson, alias Osman Effendi. Most importantly, his training in history enables him to place various advances in the subject unerringly in the overall geopolitical context of the period in order to present a broader view of the trends, results, and missed opportunities.

The current publication is a remarkable achievement: a scholarly work packed with facts, but one that is also genuinely readable. It is ambitious in its scope and detail. To follow the growth of an arcane but also a highly romantic branch of learning becomes in Thompson’s book something close to an adventure. The author successfully conveys his infectious enthusiasm for the subject, but writes with a degree of detachment which allows him to be refreshingly and occasionally almost ruthlessly trenchant and critical. This may provoke controversies when long-held beliefs are being challenged and tribal feelings rubbed in an unorthodox way. Egyptology has never lacked in headstrong personalities, and their mutual interactions, often punctuated by acrimoniously personal and sometimes nationalistically biased exchanges, provide for fascinating reading. The attitudes of foreign Egyptologists of the past toward the preservation of Egyptian heritage and the development of home-grown Egyptian Egyptology mirrored the attitudes prevailing at each given time and have justifiably been accorded special attention in this book.

Famously, James Henry Breasted’s A History of Egypt is said to read like a novel, and the same is true of this account of the history of Egyptology. And I suspect that, having read it, many more will be pecked by the Egyptian duck, as Auguste Mariette would have put it. Jason Thompson’s book throws down a gauntlet to future researchers and challenges them to look at individual aspects of the development of Egyptology in even greater detail. That will be the best recognition of this fine work.

Chronological Outline of Ancient Egyptian History

¹

Predynastic Period, ca. 5300–2950 BC

Early Dynastic Period, ca. 2950–2613 BC

First through Third Dynasties

Old Kingdom, ca. 2613–2160 BC

Fourth through Eighth Dynasties

First Intermediate Period, ca. 2160–2055 BC

Ninth through Eleventh Dynasties

Middle Kingdom, ca. 2055–1640 BC

Eleventh through Fourteenth Dynasties

Second Intermediate Period, ca. 1640–1550 BC

Fifteenth through Seventeenth Dynasties

New Kingdom, ca. 1550–1069 BC

Eighteenth through Twentieth Dynasties

Third Intermediate Period, ca. 1069–715 BC

Twenty-first through Twenty-fifth Dynasties

Late Period, ca. 715–332 BC

Twenty-fifth through Thirty-first Dynasties

Ptolemaic Period, 332–30 BC

Roman Period, 30 BC–fourth century AD

Coptic or Byzantine Period, fourth century AD–AD 641

When Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, Can you see anything? it was all I could do to get out the words, Yes, wonderful things.

—Howard Carter, opening the tomb of Tutankhamun

Introduction

Egyptology: The study of Egyptian antiquities, of the ancient Egyptian language and history.

—Egyptology, Oxford English Dictionary

Shortly before her death, Amelia Edwards, the Queen of Egyptology, wrote:

It may be said of some very old places, as of some very old books, that they are destined to be forever new. The nearer we approach them, the more remote they seem; the more we study them, the more we have yet to learn. Time augments rather than diminishes their everlasting novelty; and to our descendants of a thousand years hence it may safely be predicted that they will be even more fascinating than to ourselves. This is true of many ancient lands, but of no place is it so true as of Egypt. . . . The interest never flags—the subject never palls upon us—the mine is never exhausted.¹

Those words are as true now as they were when Amelia Edwards wrote them. The volumes of Wonderful Things are intended to explore the consequences of that unflagging interest, examine why the subject of ancient Egypt never grows stale, and show how that inexhaustible mine has been exploited in ways that resulted in the science of Egyptology.

A number of issues are involved in approaching the history of Egyptology. For one thing, there is the question of when professional Egyptology actually began. The answer is as much a matter of taste as demonstrable fact. Many date the beginning with precision to the publication of Champollion’s Lettre à M. Dacier in September 1822. Others consider Egyptology to have originated with Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798. A good case could be made for somewhere in the second half of the nineteenth century with the development of sustained institutional study of ancient Egypt. Etymology only adds to the confusion. The earliest citation for the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is 1859, though slightly earlier English uses can be attested. The French égyptologue was coined as early as 1827, and égyptologique was in use by 1856.² Wonderful Things takes a somewhat longer view, recognizing that the scholarship of ancient Egypt has existed since antiquity itself.

The very term ‘Egyptology’ is problematic because if it were taken literally it would mean the study of all aspects of Egypt: climate, geology, languages, culture and society, and the history of the land—not just its ancient history but all of its history, from the earliest discernible times to the present day. What Egyptology actually means, though, is the study of ancient Egypt, from the beginning of Egyptian recorded history until—and here it becomes really tricky—the first Persian Conquest, or the advent of the Greco-Roman Period, or the end of the Classical Period, or perhaps even somewhere in the Late Antique Period. As such, the term ‘Egyptology’ carries the additional implication that the rest of Egypt’s past is not particularly worthy of study.

Even if the broadest of those time frames is accepted, the question of what Egyptology actually is poses more complex problems than might be first imagined. Egyptology is not just one discipline but rather a collection of two dozen or so disciplines moving in loose formation, sometimes with surprisingly little reference to each other beyond the fact that they all have something to do with ancient Egypt. An Egyptologist might be a specialist in ancient Egyptian history, or language, or art, or climate, or archaeology, or many other things. And even within those subdisciplines lie different areas of expertise, so that, for example, specialists in Old Kingdom history might be far out of their depth in New Kingdom or Greco-Roman matters, while those working in the Predynastic Period often seem to inhabit a world of their own. Since the early days of the twentieth century, an Egyptologist who knows a great deal about all of Egyptology has become quite rare—a statement intended not to slight the scholarly attainments of Egyptologists but to recognize the depth of their specialized knowledge, for they are among the most thoroughly trained and highly skilled members of the academic world.

But by no means is everyone who has studied ancient Egypt an Egyptologist. If asked to name the most famous Egyptologist of the twentieth century, most of the general public would probably say Howard Carter. But Carter was not an Egyptologist, a fact of which he was uncomfortably aware: he was an artist and, later, an archaeologist. Artists and archaeologists are usually not considered to be Egyptologists. Nor are researchers who study ancient Egyptian prehistory, the vast expanse of time before the pharaonic period. One well-placed prehistorian characterized the relationship between prehistorians and Egyptologists as that of third cousins.³

Egyptologists are sometimes vague about what exactly distinguishes them from other students of ancient Egypt, but a common factor usually mentioned is philological training, the study of the ancient Egyptian language. Even there the boundary can be arbitrary, for Greco-Roman scholars who specialize in Demotic, one of the later stages of Egyptian language and script, are usually—but not always—grouped with the classicists, not the Egyptologists. For the purposes of this book, everyone involved with ancient Egyptian studies in one way or another may be subsumed within the story of Egyptology.

Ancient Egypt is not the exclusive property of scholars, however, for as Amelia Edwards observed, there is no other past civilization that has exerted such a powerful allure on the popular imagination. Wonderful Things recognizes that Egyptology has an unusually large popular constituency; indeed, that is one of the reasons for Egyptology’s extraordinary vitality. There is something intrinsically fascinating about ancient Egypt. Children often seem to be drawn to it almost instinctively. Egyptomania recurs and spreads like a highly infectious, incurable disease. A headline about a new discovery, or even a radical new theory about ancient Egyptian civilization, invariably draws attention far beyond the academic community. When Howard Carter created a sensation by discovering the tomb of Tutankhamun, some Assyriologists were annoyed at the obsessive attention given to the burial of an insignificant boy king in Egypt while Mesopotamian archaeological discoveries of the greatest importance were largely ignored.

Sometimes the ancient Egyptians seem almost to beckon to us from the past. Every time I taught a class in the history of ancient Egypt, it promptly filled and over-enrolled until it became necessary to turn people away because of room size limitations. Naturally I would have liked to believe it was the instructor’s legendary prowess that attracted so many students, but most enrolled because of a deep, abiding fascination with ancient Egypt and anything connected with it. They knew the subject would be interesting, and they invariably found it so. On those rare occasions when my own enthusiasm flagged, or I momentarily lost my way, they always took up the slack. Never did they let me down, nor did the subject matter ever fail them.

Considering the major role it has played in intellectual history and popular culture, and its importance in its own right, Egyptology has been surprisingly late in developing its own historiography. Little of a retrospective nature was published during the nineteenth century, and efforts during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century were few. R.A.S. Macalister set an unpromising tone in the Cambridge Ancient History in 1920 with his pronouncement that it is impossible to give any complete survey of the history of Egyptian excavation. Nevertheless, James Baikie produced a narrative overview of the subject in 1923 with A Century of Excavation in the Land of the Pharaohs, but much more remained to be said.

Yet several worthy contributions were made during the past hundred years or so. Some bore fruit and laid the foundations for the history of Egyptology as a distinct field of inquiry. If there was a single founding figure, it was Warren R. Dawson (1888–1968). His Charles Wycliffe Goodwin (1934), besides being a good biography of that lonely pioneering British Egyptologist, addressed many broader issues in Egyptological history. But Dawson’s greatest contribution by far to the history of Egyptology was his biographical dictionary of Egyptologists, Who Was Who in Egyptology, which appeared in its first edition in 1951. Now in its fourth edition, WWW,⁴ as it is sometimes called, is fundamental to almost any inquiry in the history of Egyptology. This work would have been impossible without it.

But it should be noted that Dawson accomplished this valuable feat despite lack of encouragement. Even before publishing his book about Goodwin, he envisioned Who Was Who in Egyptology. For some time I have been in the habit of collecting biographical data of Egyptologists, he wrote to Francis Llewellyn Griffith in 1933. It has occurred to me that this might be carried further and a biographical dictionary of Egyptologists prepared. . . . The history of Egyptology will one day have to be written, and such a dictionary would form a contribution to the materials. What did Griffith think of its chances, Dawson inquired. Not much, Griffith responded, so that a chastened Dawson wrote again, You are quite right about the biographical dictionary—no publisher would touch it so I shall not waste time preparing it for publication.⁴

Fortunately, Dawson carried on anyway, and the first edition of Who Was Who in Egyptology was published by the Egypt Exploration Society in 1951, much to the benefit of scholars. But Dawson realized that even more potential lay in his materials and dreamed of publishing a comprehensive history of Egyptology. This time he received rather more encouragement. Cyril Aldred wrote in 1953 to inform him that such a work would be of inestimable use for teaching purposes and that no one anywhere is better equipped to do this than yourself.⁵ It was not to be. A few years before Dawson’s death, John A. Wilson wrote to him and expressed real regret that you feel you have had to abandon this purpose and we can only thank you for all you have done and wish you years of health to enjoy the memory of a good career.⁶

There were other notable contributions to the historiography of Egyptology during the first half of the twentieth century. Karl Giehlow made a thoughtful foray into Renaissance Egyptology with his extended essay Die Hieroglyphenkunde des Humanismus in der Allegorie der Renaissance in 1915. H.R.H. Hall showed the possibilities in archival research with his articles, also in 1915, about letters from Egyptologists to Sir William Gell. But it was during the second half of the twentieth century that the history of Egyptology gained momentum. Pierre Montet’s Isis: Ou à la recherche de l’Égypte ensevelie (1956) recounted many important developments in French archaeology in Egypt from Mariette’s discovery of the Serapeum until 1956. John A. Wilson’s Signs & Wonders upon Pharaoh: A History of American Archaeology, published in 1964, ranged far beyond Egyptology in the United States. The Discovery of Egypt (1966) by Leslie Greener, though concise and unannotated, contained an astonishing amount of information, effectively synthesized and presented, about the progress of Egyptology from antiquity until the death of Auguste Mariette in 1881. Greener’s manuscript for a succeeding volume was lost, along with the rest of his papers, when his house in Tasmania was destroyed by bushfire a few years before his death. F. Gladstone Bratton’s A History of Egyptian Archaeology appeared in 1967. The immensely popular Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs (1964) by Barbara Mertz, though primarily designed as an introduction to Egyptology, contained many historical asides and showed that fairly complicated issues in Egyptological history, such as Sir Flinders Petrie’s invention of sequence dating, could be explained to an interested general readership in comprehensible terms. Also highly popular were Brian Fagan’s The Rape of the Nile (1975) and The Rediscovery of Ancient Egypt (1982) by Peter A. Clayton. Serge Sauneron’s initiative to publish the accounts of early travelers to Egypt made much important material more readily available to scholars.

Biographies of Egyptologists began to appear somewhat earlier. Outstanding examples from the late nineteenth century are Georg Moritz Ebers’s study of Richard Lepsius and Gaston Maspero’s biographical sketch of Auguste Mariette. Many of the obituaries of Egyptologists that have appeared in Egyptological journals almost from their earliest days are significant biographical essays. There was a hiatus during the midtwentieth century when Egyptology could be said to have been in its doldrums, but the art of Egyptological biography recovered during the second half of the century, as did the historiography of ancient Egypt in general. Stanley Mayes’s lively account, The Great Belzoni, showed just how interesting the lives of the pioneers could be. During recent decades the pace has quickened with studies of Petrie, Carter, Breasted, and others, with yet more at press or in progress. Harry James was working on a biography of Sir Alan H. Gardiner at the time of his death. I am probably the only Egyptologist who still knew Gardiner personally, he once said.⁷ Now Harry is gone, and with him not only his knowledge of Gardiner but also the experiences of his own long career.

That loss and many others underscore the need for more work in oral history to record memories before they fade and vanish forever. There is no doubt that W. could tell a good story, Cyril Aldred wrote twelve years after the death of Herbert Winlock, who was at the center of many Egyptological developments between the First and Second World Wars. I wish he had put more of them on paper.⁸ Dows Dunham was said to have been such a good raconteur that, like the Eloquent Peasant, people would work to keep him talking. One wishes that Aldred had put his memories of Winlock’s stories on paper, and that someone had recorded Dunham’s, but this writer is just as guilty. I now regret not taking opportunities to inquire further and record more when I enjoyed the privilege of talking to Jean Leclant, Gaballa A. Gaballa, Jac Janssen, and others who are now no longer able to tell their tales. The Egypt Exploration Society has recently pointed the way ahead by establishing its oral history program.

The lives and works of some of the major figures in the history of Egyptology are now much better understood because of biography, but there is more to do, and across a broader spectrum. Belzoni has proved irresistible to several biographers, but not much additional archival material has emerged, so there is little new to be said about him. Éric Gady pointed out at a recent conference that there has been a profusion of studies about Champollion while other major figures in French Egyptology have been neglected. Another Champollion book is likely to pay diminishing returns at best, and may add further confusion to controversial issues, while a study of Pierre Lacau or Étienne Drioton would illuminate many aspects of Egyptological development that are still poorly understood. The lives of the less renowned should also be written, for their contributions were also valuable, and their perspectives reveal otherwise obscure aspects of Egyptology.

As recently as 1998 Eric Hornung could accurately observe in his bibliographic survey of major Egyptological works that a history of Egyptology is still missing,⁹ but although a comprehensive history of the discipline was indeed lacking, the history of Egyptology as a general field of study was well established by the beginning of the twenty-first century. Publications continued to increase. It has been possible to cite only a portion of them in this work; omission does not indicate deprecation or lack of appreciation. Numerous museum exhibitions were devoted to aspects of the history of Egyptology. Several international conferences were held. Egyptological archives expanded. A major new one recently opened at the University of Milan. Online resources burgeoned. Things have progressed so far that a writer recently suggested a structure for the standard histories of Egyptology, beginning with a colonial enlightenment narrative and moving on to a colonial rape narrative and a national enlightenment narrative, in a manner reminiscent of the Old Kingdom–Middle Kingdom–New Kingdom paradigm. He even posited a Late Period counterpart, an antagonistic narrative.¹⁰ I would suggest that identifying emerging trends in the history of Egyptology is a useful exercise but also that it is too soon to distinguish clearly between traditional histories of Egyptology and other avenues of inquiry and analysis. New perspectives such as those offered by literary theory and the postmodern critique should be welcomed but applied with caution because of the inherent problems in selective application of powerful theoretical models to incomplete data sets in a field that has yet to reach maturity.

Having stated above that Egyptology has been late in developing its historical dimension, I should also note that Egyptology has long contained intrinsic retrospective elements that lend themselves to its historiography. Indeed, a certain amount of historiography became built into Egyptology almost from the beginning. When British archaeologists took to the field in the late nineteenth century, they carefully studied the works of their predecessors in the century’s earlier years. The production of ever-increasing numbers of books and articles demanded ways of keeping track of them and the ideas they contained. After some monuments in Egypt were discovered several times over, it became necessary to know who had seen them, when they were there, what they saw, and what they accomplished. These necessities resulted in projects of fundamental importance such as the Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Reliefs, Statues and Paintings that will be described in the final volume of Wonderful Things. Books about various ancient Egyptian subjects often begin with a historical retrospect of pertinent previous work and are prefaced with a chronological paradigm.

Egyptologists also displayed an early and persistent inclination to write their autobiographies, thereby providing absolutely irreplaceable sources for the history of Egyptology. Notable examples from the nineteenth century came from Heinrich Brugsch and Archibald Sayce. Sir E.A. Wallis Budge and Adolf Erman offered their perspectives in the early decades of the twentieth century. The process continued with contributions by John A. Wilson from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and I.E.S. Edwards at the British Museum. Gertrud Thausing’s Tarudet: Ein Leben für die Ägyptologie (1989) may be a classic. The recent memoir by Christiane Desroches Noblecourt provides valuable information about Egyptology during the 1950s and early 1960s, especially Egyptian Egyptology, as well as insights into mid-twentieth-century French Egyptology.

There are many other Egyptological autobiographies, each with its unique point of view and strong sense of place, and there would have been yet more but for the tragic brevity of human existence. Autobiographers generally begin too late, Sir Richard F. Burton wrote, shortly before dying with his own autobiography just begun. That was the case with Percy E. Newberry, whose involvement with Egyptology spanned more than six decades, during which he became acquainted with most other Egyptologists and obtained an intimate knowledge of sites and issues. I am much interested to hear you are putting your collection of material together to form volumes of Studies, Aylward Blackman wrote to him in 1937. [Eric] Peet always used to say that half the unknown History of Egypt is stowed away in your notebooks.¹¹

Warren Dawson urged Newberry to go a step further, writing to him in March 1949:

I wish I could persuade you to write your Reminiscences. You know so much that is vitally interesting and in your long connection with Egypt you have been personally acquainted with so many persons that are scarcely more than names to others. As you have been a free lance and not attached to any museum or institution you would be free to speak of so many things that an official person could not mention.¹²

Newberry took Dawson’s words to heart and set about arranging his papers but, like Richard Burton, he began too late. Five months after receiving Dawson’s letter, he was dead.

Much has been lost, but with so many resources at hand and with the history of Egyptology approaching maturation as a discipline, this is an appropriate moment to attempt a comprehensive survey of the development of the study of ancient Egypt. In fact, several such efforts are presently underway. How should it be done? There is no single, proper approach. To borrow the words of the poet Shelley, The path of its departure still is free, but certain issues of perspective, concept, and organization must be confronted at the outset.

Wonderful Things is a single-authored work. I am not an Egyptologist but rather a historian of the British Empire and the Middle East. My primary research and writing area has been the western encounter with the east, both ancient and modern. The anthropologist Claude Lévy-Strauss once observed that in studying an alien culture it is important to establish the correct distance. I certainly have distance, although I have enjoyed the friendship of and interaction with many Egyptologists and have visited most of the major and many of the minor sites in Egypt over the course of many years. My view of Egyptology is from the outside, seeing it as an event in intellectual and cultural history—and as an experience in cross-cultural encounter, an encounter with the Egyptian past but also with the present, for Egyptology has never been practiced within a time warp where the present is irrelevant, although some of its practitioners have been unaware of that reality.

It is from that encounter with ancient (and modern) Egypt that the science of Egyptology has emerged through processes of discovery, both in the field and in the library. But it has been more than discoveries of the objective reality of the past. The picture of the Egyptian antiquity that we possess today is not something handed down to us through the ages from the ancient Egyptians. The ancient Egypt that we know is to a large degree the creation of the modern and postmodern imaginations, mostly assembled during the past two centuries. That ancient Egypt once existed in its own right and on its own terms, and for thousands of years, is a matter of incontestable fact, abundantly attested by material remains, but it has been defined by modern scholars and articulated in ways that are intelligible and accessible to us, yet would have appeared incomprehensible, even wrongheaded, to the ancient Egyptians who experienced their own reality.

This is not to say that Egyptology is an altogether subjective enterprise. Far from it. The development of knowledge about Egyptian antiquity moves in ever-increasing magnitude and pace toward the ultimately unattainable goal of fully knowing the ancient Egyptians as they really were. But ingrained in our very ways of conceptualizing them are terms and implied value judgments that are more products of our time than theirs. Egyptologists have imposed a chronological structure on the Egyptian past that the ancient Egyptians would have found problematic at best. While some ancient Egyptian sites retain distant echoes of their original names—Asyut and Saqqara, for examples—others are often known now not by their ancient names but by Greek and Arabic toponyms, Hierakonpolis instead of Nekhen, Thebes instead of Waset, and so on, imbuing those places with a tinge that is distinctly not ancient Egyptian. It is the same with terminology where we apply the French word ‘cartouches’ to the ovals enclosing royal names or the Arabic term ‘mastabas’ for the bench-shaped tomb superstructures of Early Dynastic times and the Old Kingdom. The New Kingdom guidebook to the next world, known to the Egyptians as the spell for going forth by day, takes on an altogether different shade when referred to by its modern name, the Book of the Dead, coined by the German Egyptologist Richard Lepsius in the mid-nineteenth century.

There are the problems in describing the ancient Egyptians themselves. They seem so much like us in certain ways, but they operated within a mindset that is utterly different from any known today. That leads to the ethnographer’s conundrum: to describe an alien culture in its own terms is to make it incomprehensible to present-day readers, whereas to represent it according to concepts familiar to us is to misrepresent it in fundamental ways. Wonderful Things recognizes the magnificent accomplishments of Egyptology in the recovery of the Egyptian past, but it also acknowledges the role of Egyptology in creating that past.

The first organizational problem in writing about the history of Egyptology is where to begin. As noted above, the beginning of modern Egyptology can plausibly be dated anywhere between 1798 and the late nineteenth century, but the study of ancient Egypt began much earlier, even during antiquity itself. Those early inquiries, however naive they may seem nowadays, were just as valid within their own contexts as those of modern and postmodern times. They also profoundly affected the subsequent development of Egyptology. The chapters devoted to antiquity through the eighteenth century are therefore offered not merely as a preface to the history of Egyptology but as a component of it.

The organizational approach in Wonderful Things is essentially a chronological narrative with internal thematic structures; but it quickly becomes apparent that many narratives are involved, not just one. There is the story of the discoveries that provided the materials for Egyptology. Egyptological ideas also have their own histories as they are born, mature, and sometimes die. So do institutions. Every site has its own history. Every person involved has his or her story. Even the ancient Egyptians, far from being merely passive objects of study, have a way of making themselves participants through their distinct voices, their vivid images, their poignance, and their apparent capacity for change and growth in response to our constantly evolving interpretations of them. The history of Egyptology can be uncannily strange at times. All of the threads must be identified and followed. Sometimes they intertwine to form a rich tapestry, but they also entangle and ensnare. Nevertheless, chronological narrative is a sturdy frame not only for telling the history of Egyptology as an ongoing story but also for reflection and analysis.

Then there is the issue of selectivity. What should be included? Or, more to the point, what should be left out? Egyptology is a very rich field indeed, and only a small portion of the harvest can be brought in. An account of the great archaeological discoveries alone would easily fill a large volume, as indeed it recently did.¹³ The fourth edition of Who Was Who in Egyptology is precisely six hundred pages in length. The bibliographies of many of the great Egyptologists run to hundreds of entries. Ideas are in a constant state of development and revision, resulting in thousands of books, articles, and Internet postings every year. Things have a way of becoming ‘slightly dated’ very quickly in Egyptology, and I have occasionally despaired of finding two Egyptologists who agreed on anything.

But in the end, the story of Egyptology is the story of the people who created Egyptology. It has been essential to provide substantial biographical information for many of the great Egyptologists. The people whom