Ancient Egypt has not only been the focus of serious scholars. Hundreds of thousands of tourists have flocked to Egypt every year to see its monuments, and exhibitions displaying ancient Egyptian art and jewelry are very popular in major museums throughout the world. The widespread fascination with Egyptian mummies is a result of ancient Egyptian mortuary practices, which required well-preserved (but eviscerated) bodies, and the hieroglyphic texts associated with mortuary evidence are believed by many to hold mystical truths.
Because of such finds, ancient Egypt has frequently been the inspiration for fiction (including historical fiction), and films. The aim of most of these works is not accuracy, but entertainment.
Ancient Egypt at the movies includes several films about Cleopatra VII, usually as an exotic seductress. Theda Bara was an early Cleopatra (1917), and Claudette Colbert also played the queen (1932). Vivien Leigh was Cleopatra in a film version of George Bernard Shaw’s play Caesar and Cleopatra (1945; Figure 1.8), but probably the most famous movie Cleopatra was Elizabeth Taylor in the 1963 film, where she made love on and off the sets to Richard Burton’s Marc Antony.
The Ten Commandments, set in part in Rameses Il’s Egypt, has been the topic of two films by Cecil B. DeMille (1923 and 1956), and more recently a feature-length animated film Prince of Egypt (1998). Also from the 1950s are two notable films, The Egyptian (1954), based on the novel by Mika Waltari, and Land of the Pharaohs (1955).
Malevolent mummies, who miraculously come back to life and intimidate the living, have been a topic of fiction since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lot No. 249 (1892). Dozens of films have been made about such mummies, with Boris Karloff as the earliest well-known one (1932 and onward). Less dangerous mummies are found in Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955) and I Was a Teenage Mummy (1962 and 1992). Ramses the Damned, previously Ramses the Great (II), makes his appearance in Anne Rice’s 1989 book The Mummy. In the 1999 film The Mummy and its 2001 sequel, an ancient Egyptian priest is unhappily (and quite impossibly) mummified alive, which creates great havoc several thousand years later.
Figure 1.8 Vivien Leigh as Cleopatra (VII) with Claude Rains as Julius Caesar, in the 1945 film of the George Bernard Shaw play Caesar and Cleopatra. Source: London Films/rGA.
Archaeologists working in Egypt have also been the subject of films. They appear in robin cook’s 1979 book Sphinx, which has nothing to do with sphinxes, and in the 1981 film version. The movie inside the movie of Woody Allen’s 1984 Purple Rose of Cairo begins with an adventurer-explorer (archaeologist?) in an Egyptian tomb, but he is quickly whisked off to Manhattan for a madcap weekend. Perhaps the most famous film archaeologist is Indiana Jones, who in the 1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark takes advantage of his university’s liberal policy on academic leave to keep the Nazis from finding The Ark in their fairly informal excavations in Egypt. Stargate (1994) takes a somewhat naive Egyptologist to the other side of the universe where the Egyptian sun god Ra is up to no good.
The 19th-century Egyptologist Georg Ebers (1837-1898) also wrote novels set in Egypt, but is perhaps better known now for the medical papyrus named after him, which includes prescriptions for treating wrinkles and grey hair. An important novel of Thomas Mann’s is Joseph and His Brothers, published first in German in 1933. Other works of historical fiction set in ancient Egypt include Pauline Gedge’s books, the first of which is a romanticized novel about Queen Hatshepsut, Child of the Morning (1975). Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel Ancient Evenings is a very loose interpretation of Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife.
Agatha Christie’s 1944 mystery Death Comes as the End is based on real letters of an early 12th-Dynasty official named Hekanakht. Christie was married to Max Mallowan, a British archaeologist who worked in the Near East. She also set another of her mysteries, Death on the Nile (1937), in modern Egypt. More recently Elizabeth Peters (the pen name for Egyptologist Barbara Mertz) has published a highly successful series set in
Edwardian England and Egypt, including Crocodile on the Sandbank (1975). Peters’s books revolve around the adventures of Amelia Peabody Emerson, an Egyptologist, archaeologist, and sleuth - and wife of an archaeologist whose character is freely based on Flinders Petrie.
Where do fantasy and fiction end, and how do archaeologists really work in Egypt? That, in part, is the subject of this book.
World History
