Egyptomania

The hippies of the 1960s adopted the ankh, an Egyptian symbol for eternal life, as a symbol of their movement. A new wave of Egyptomania swelled in the 1970s when objects from Tutankhamun's tomb toured world museums. Millions of visitors waited for hours to see the solid gold coffins, jewelry, and other treasures.

Recent reexamination of a mummy found in a tomb in 1898 has led some Egyptologists to suggest it may be the famous beauty Nefer-titi. This startling announcement, along with a Discovery Channel special about the queen, has already set off a new wave of Egyptomania.

Many computer games use Egyptian motifs and themes. Mail-order catalogs sell CD cabinets and wine closets shaped like Tutankhamun's coffin. You can buy lamps in the form of the goddess Isis, pedestals and end tables shaped like temple columns, jewelry boxes decorated with copies of tomb-wall paintings, and figurines of the Egyptian deities Bastet, Sekhmet, Isis, Osiris, and Anubis. Scarabs and Egyptian cats are popular jewelry items. You can visit web sites that translate your name (or any text) into hieroglyphics, and buy rings and pendants with your name, in hieroglyphics, in a royal cartouche.

Egyptomania. Denon’s books gave European scholars their first close look at images of Egyptian objects and inscriptions, and helped speed up the process of decoding the hieroglyphics. They also alerted potential looters. Egyptian tourism skyrocketed.

Another huge wave of Egyptomania erupted after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun (popularly known as King Tut) in 1922. Egyptian design, with its elegant, angular lines and geometrical forms based on idealized plants and flowers, had a tremendous influence on the art movement of the time known as Art Deco.

Hollywood quickly picked up on the popular myth of a “curse” on King Tut’s tomb. An endless series of “curse of the mummy” movies followed. Epic films “documented” the building of the pyramids and the life of Cleopatra, taking extreme liberties with the facts.

Egypt becomes more fascinating with each passing year, each new archaeological discovery, each television special, each old mystery solved, each new mystery that emerges. In many ways, the modern world is Egypt’s long-delayed “successor community.” We do not worship Egyptian gods and goddesses or write in hieroglyphics. But no other ancient civilization holds such intense fascination for us.