Introduction

The landmass known as Europe has had contact with Egypt for more than 2,000 years. While the land of the Nile can often be dealt with as an historical unit, as a country, as the hub of an empire, or as a province, the area defined as Europe cannot. The many different cultures, languages, and perceived national identities within this area simply do not allow for it. This lack of social and political cohesion hamstrings anything more than general attempts to discuss cultural and intellectual exchanges concerning ancient Egyptian civilization and Europe as a whole. In order to assess properly how elements of Egyptian civilization were received in individual European countries those countries need to be studied in isolation first. This concept of country-specific reception studies has a long historical tradition (Glick 1974; Porter and Teich 1981), and I have previously argued for its adoption in the study of the history of Egyptology (Bednarski 2005). It is also important to remember that contact between cultures can take a multitude of forms: from literary influences, to architectural developments, to the adoption or adaptation of philosophical constructs, to changes in material culture. With the difficulties of studying an area as large and as diverse as Europe in mind, this chapter will deliver a very brief sketch of points of contact between Europe and Egypt. Similarly, armed with the awareness that it is impossible to deal with all the forms that such contact has taken, this chapter will focus primarily on aspects of European interest in Ancient Egypt from antiquity to the nineteenth century. On one level, therefore, this chapter may be read as a very broad history of European Egyptology from a largely British perspective. As part of the discussion on the nineteenth century I shall break from the loose narrative to explore one institution within one European nation, in an attempt to view directly the institution’s interaction with ancient Egypt. After this brief discussion, the historical narrative will resume to discuss European interest in ancient Egypt through the twentieth century.