The ancient Greeks and Romans were interested in the history of pharaonic Egypt. In the 5'h century bc Herodotus, a Greek historian who wrote a nine-volume History, visited Egypt and narrated its history, including its natural history, in his Book II and part of Book III. The accuracy of some of Herodotus’s account has been questioned by historians, and he also suggested some fairly fanciful explanations. But when writing about the period in which he lived and the Persian conquest of Egypt Herodotus provides a vital source of information. In late Ptolemaic times Egypt was the subject of historian/geographer Diodorus Siculus’s Book I, and Strabo, who visited Egypt
Figure 1.1 The Rosetta Stone, 196 bc, in hieroglyphic and demotic scripts with a Greek translation at the bottom. Granite, 118 cm x 77 cm x 30 cm. EA 24 London, British Museum. Photo: akg-images
Shortly after the Roman conquest, provides detailed information about Alexandria, as well as other sites in the country.
After about ad 400 the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic scripts ceased to be used and were gradually forgotten, although the ancient language continued to be
Spoken as Coptic, written in the Coptic alphabet (an extension of the Greek alphabet). In late antiquity, when Christianity spread throughout Egypt, ancient Egyptian culture, with its pagan temples, became increasingly discredited. Christian hermits occupied isolated Dynastic tombs and temples fell into disrepair as their sites were taken over for churches. Christian communities and monasteries continued to exist and use Coptic after the Muslim conquest of Egypt in the 7*h century ad, but pharaonic Egypt receded into the legendary past - with its language gradually replaced by Arabic.
It was not until the late 16th and 17th centuries that scholarly travelers from Europe began to take an interest in ancient Egypt. Among them, John Greaves (1602-52), an astronomer at Oxford University, made measurements of the Giza pyramids and cited Arab sources in his 1646 publication Pyramidographia. Although most of his papers did not survive, Claude Sicard (1677-1726), a Jesuit priest and missionary in Egypt (1707-26), was the first European traveler to describe the monuments at Philae, Elephantine, and Kom Ombo in southern Egypt. The Reverend Richard Pococke (1704-65), who also reached Philae, published two volumes about his travels in lands of the eastern Mediterranean (1743-45), with detailed descriptions of a number of Egyptian sites and monuments. The well illustrated travel volume of Frederick Ludwig Norden (1708-42), a Danish naval officer, was published posthumously and was reprinted throughout the later 18*h century. The Scot James Bruce (1730-94), who traveled through Egypt, northern Sudan, and northern Ethiopia (published in his Travels in 1790), excavated the tomb of Rameses III in the Valley of the Kings - which is still sometimes called “Bruce’s Tomb.” Although he did not travel to Egypt, the Danish scholar Georg Zoega (1755-1809), who worked on Egyptian material in Rome, published his great work on obelisks in 1797. Zoega compiled a corpus of hieroglyphic signs, and his catalog of Coptic manuscripts was published posthumously.
Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt was mainly for military purposes, especially to gain control of the route through the Red Sea to the Middle and Far East, but he took with him a mission with much broader goals. Along with his army, which invaded Egypt in 1798, Napoleon brought French savants, scholars and scientists from different disciplines, as well as artists, cartographers, and engineers, to study and record the evidence of ancient and Islamic Egypt, and the country’s natural history. Dominique Vivant, Baron de Denon (1747-1825), a diplomat under the last two French kings, survived the French revolution and later introduced Napoleon to Josephine, who became his mistress and then wife. In Egypt Denon recorded ancient monuments, sometimes under fire from the retreating Ottoman provincial army, which Napoleon’s army was pursuing up the Nile. In 1802 he published A Journey to Lower and Upper Egypt, while the Description de I’Egypte (Description of Egypt), the multi-volume study of the Napoleonic expedition, which was edited by Jomard, appeared later with drawings by Denon and many others.
Publications which resulted from the expedition created great public interest in ancient Egypt, in Europe and North America. After the hieroglyph script had been deciphered, and texts were translated and the structure of the language became better known from around 1850 onward, much more information about the civilization also became available. Inspiration from ancient Egypt appeared in many forms, for example in the
Box 1-A The Napoleonic Expedition to Egypt
After major victories in northern Italy in 1796, Napoleon Bonaparte had more grandiose plans. His army of 25,000 invaded Egypt in 1798, ostensibly to overthrow the oppressive provincial rule of the Ottomans, but his longer range plans were to disrupt British control of the sea route to India and farther east, and build a canal through Suez (which was only accomplished seven decades later).
With Napoleon’s army in Egypt was a group of 165 savants (scholars and scientists), as well as engineers, cartographers, and artists, who were to study, record and publish as much as possible about Egypt’s natural, ancient, and modern history and culture. They came well equipped, with boxes of scientific instruments and a library of books about Egypt. While some of the scholars stayed in Cairo at the newly founded Institute of Egypt, others accompanied the army up the Nile. Reaching Aswan a year after landing at Alexandria, they had by then recorded
Most of the major monuments they excavated along the way.
Although Napoleon managed to escape from the British naval blockade of Egypt, which began not long after the invasion, and returned to France, his Commission of Arts and Sciences remained in Egypt with the army. Eventually the British allowed the French scholars to leave Egypt with an enormous quantity of records and specimens. But the Rosetta Stone, found in the Delta early in the Egyptian campaign, was surrendered to the British.
The result of Napoleon’s scientific expedition in Egypt was much more successful than his military one. Twenty-four volumes of the Description de I’Egypte were later published. Ten of these volumes consisted of plates with over 3,000 illustrations. These investigations and their publication provided a major impetus to the incipient field of Egyptology, the systematic and scholarly study of ancient Egypt.
1816 sets designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel for Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute (see Figure 1.2).
Decorative arts, including furniture and porcelain (especially from the Sevres and Wedgwood factories), were embellished with Egyptian motifs, and architecture was designed with Egyptian elements. Temple gateways called pylons, seen in Egypt in the New Kingdom and later, were built at the Highgate Cemetery in London, as well as at the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While gravestones in the shape of small Egyptian-style obelisks had already become common, real Egyptian ones were brought from Egypt to cities in northern Europe and America, including Paris, London, and New York.
At the same time, the great Egyptian collections in the Louvre, the British Museum, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden in the Netherlands, and the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, were being amassed by Europeans acting in Egypt as consuls and agents - as well as by various adventurers and explorers. One of the most colorful of these Europeans was the Italian Giovanni Baptista Belzoni (1778-1823), who began his foreign career as a strongman in a London theater. In 1815 he traveled to Egypt where the British consul, Henry Salt (1780-1827), appreciated his prodigious physique (Belzoni was 200 cm - 6’7” - tall) and hired him to collect Egyptian monuments,
Figure 1.2 Set for the opera, The Magic Flute, Act I, scene 15, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Stage design by Karl Friedrich Schinkel for the 1816 production at the Berlin Opera. Aquatint by C. F. Thiele after K. F. Schinkel. Photo: akg-images
Including a 7.5 ton statue of Rameses II now in the British Museum. But Belzoni was not a tomb robber. Exploring the Valley of the Kings, where he found four royal tombs (in 12 days), Belzoni recorded the very impressive tomb of Sety I, with its well preserved paintings, in watercolors. At Rameses II’s rock-cut temple of Abu Simbel in Nubia he copied inscriptions and made a to-scale plan.
Scholarly expeditions to Egypt were also conducted in the earlier 19*h century. Jean-Franpois Champollion (1790-1832), and Ipollito Rosellini (1800-43) from Pisa, recorded Egyptian monuments in the 1820s. A Prussian named Carl Richard Lepsius (1810-84) traveled up the Nile as far as the site of Meroe, in northern Sudan, and published his 12-volume Denkmaeler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien (Monuments of Egypt and Ethiopia) from 1849 to 1859. This great work is still the most important 19*h-century record of Egyptian monuments. John Gardner Wilkinson (1797-1875) spent the years 1821 to 1833 in Egypt, as well as making later visits, and recorded many tomb and temple scenes and inscriptions in great detail. He traveled not only to the major ancient sites in the Nile Valley, but was also the first to record some remote sites in the desert.
While the results of these expeditions were experienced mainly in Europe, the situation in Egypt began to be reversed when Franpois Auguste Ferdinand Mariette (1821-81) first went there in 1850 to acquire Coptic and Ethiopic manuscripts for the Louvre. Excavating at Saqqara, he found the important tomb of the 5*h-Dynasty official Ti and the huge underground gallery called the Serapeum, where the sacred Apis bulls of Memphis were buried (see Figure 9.8). Mariette believed that Egypt’s ancient
Figure 1.3 Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778-1823). Engraving, The Art Archive/Bibliotheque des Arts Decoratifs Paris/Dagli Orti
Monuments should not be removed wholesale from the country, and in 1858 he entered the service of the Khedive (ruler) of Egypt. Seeking to protect Egypt’s monuments, Mariette founded the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Antiquities Service. His works include extensive publication of his excavations, as well as supplying an initial scenario for Verdi’s Egyptian opera Aida (first performed in Cairo in 1871).
Mariette’s successor as Director of the Egyptian Museum and Antiquities Service was Gaston Camille Charles Maspero (1846-1916), who received the first doctorate in Egyptology in France in 1874. Maspero did restoration work in the temples of Luxor and Karnak, and copied the earliest known royal mortuary texts, called the Pyramid Texts, found in late Old Kingdom pyramids. His truly monumental accomplishment, however, was to organize and catalogue the artifacts in the Cairo Museum. He published over 1,200 works!
Early methods of excavating were developed at Thebes by Alexander Rhind (1833-63), a Scottish lawyer who visited Egypt in the 1850s. Most of the antiquities that he acquired in Egypt are now in the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh. While many of the excavators in Egypt in the later 19th century were interested in clearing
Figure 1.4 British archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) with pottery he excavated in southern Palestine, exhibited at University College London ca. 1930. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS
Ancient monuments and tombs, and finding art and hieroglyphic inscriptions, archaeological methodology was in a rudimentary stage. Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) greatly advanced the methods of archaeology in Egypt and made important and original contributions to it.
Petrie first went to Egypt in 1881 to do a detailed survey of the Giza pyramids, and he continued to work there and in Palestine for almost 60 years, excavating more sites in Egypt than any other archaeologist. He soon began to excavate for the newly founded Egypt Exploration Fund (later the Egypt Exploration Society), based in London. Petrie trained and carefully supervised his Egyptian workers. He recorded a broad range of the excavated finds, not only impressive works of art, but also pottery of all types, and his field notes contain information about the contexts of excavated finds.
Some of the important sites where Petrie excavated in Egypt include Abydos, Tell el-Amarna, Coptos/Quft, Lahun, Memphis, and Naqada. Every year he published detailed accounts of his excavations for the Egypt Exploration Society and later the Egyptian
Research Account. In the field Petrie had a reputation for keeping a very spartan camp, and later excavators have sometimes claimed that they found unused cans of food which Petrie had buried for the next field season. A chair of Egyptology was created for Petrie at University College London by the novelist Amelia Edwards, who was also a founder of the Egypt Exploration Fund. The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology is now located at University College London.
Another important archaeologist who pioneered advanced field methods in Egypt was George Andrew Reisner (1867-1942), Professor of Egyptology at Harvard University and Curator of the Egyptian Department of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reisner realized the importance of field photography, as well as keeping detailed records, maps, and drawing books of everything he excavated. In his early years in Egypt he excavated the large cemeteries at Naga el-Deir, and also at the sites of Coptos/Quft and Deir el-Ballas.
Then from 1907-9 Reisner was director of the Egyptian government’s Archaeological Survey of Nubia, to record sites when the first Aswan High Dam was heightened. Reisner later excavated at the impressive Nubian sites of Kerma (see 7.12 and Box 7-D), Gebel Barkal, el-Kurru, Nuri, and Meroe (see Figure 9.5, Figure 10.5). After Egypt, the early Nubian civilizations are the oldest ones in Africa; hence Reisner was a pioneer in developing an entirely new field of studies, of ancient Nubia. After World War I Reisner continued excavating in Nubia, at Egyptian forts built during the Middle Kingdom (see 7.10), and a second archaeological survey of Nubia was conducted under the direction of British archaeologist Walter Emery. In 1930 Emery and Lawrence Kirwan discovered the important cemeteries at Ballana and Qustul, where Nubian kings of a culture called the X-Group or Ballana culture were buried in the 4*h-6*h centuries ad.
In Egypt Reisner is best known for his excavations at Giza (see 6.8). Finds from his work at Giza and in Nubia are in the Cairo and Khartoum museums, as well as in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which has one of the most impressive collections of ancient art in North America. His excavations at the third Giza pyramid complex of Menkaura, especially in the mortuary and valley temples, unearthed a great wealth of royal sculpture (Plate 6.5). At Giza Reisner also discovered a rock-cut chamber at the bottom of a ca. 33 meter shaft with gold-covered furnishings, jewelry, and other artifacts belonging to Queen Hetepheres (see 6.8 and Figure 6.13), Khufu’s mother and wife of Sneferu (who built not one but three royal pyramids), as well as the tomb chapel of another 4*h-Dynasty queen, Meresankh III.
Another important Egyptologist and contemporary of George Reisner was James Henry Breasted (1865-1935), who was the first American to earn a PhD in Egyptology, from the University of Berlin in 1894. Breasted was also the first to teach Egyptology at an American university. As Director of the Haskell Oriental Museum (now the Oriental Institute Museum) at the University of Chicago, Breasted established Chicago House, the university’s research center in Luxor, Egypt, with funding from John D. Rockefeller. Recording ancient inscriptions and reliefs, especially endangered ones, the Oriental Institute’s expedition at Luxor has produced impressive publications, including the entire temple of Medinet Habu, built in the 20th Dynasty by Rameses III. Using his work in
Berlin on an immense dictionary of ancient Egyptian (the Worterbuch der agyptischen Sprache), Breasted published his Ancient Records of Egypt, a compilation of translations of texts spanning about 2,500 years, along with his commentary. His popular book, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times down to the Persian Conquest, was based on these studies.
German scholars were also making significant contributions to Egyptian archaeology at this time. In 1907 Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt (1863-1938) founded the German Institute of Archaeology in Cairo and was its first director, a position he held for 21 years. Borchardt excavated Old Kingdom pyramids at Abusir as well as the best preserved example of a 5*h-Dynasty sun temple at Abu Ghurab (see Figure 6.14). His excavations of houses at Tell el-Amarna included that of the sculptor Thutmose, where the famous head of Queen Nefertiti was found. Trained first as an architect, Borchardt made important contributions to the study of ancient Egyptian architecture, both monumental and domestic.
Undoubtedly the most famous archaeological discovery in Egypt in the 20*h century is the tomb of Tutankhamen (see Box 8-B), uncovered by the British archaeologist Howard Carter (1874-1939). Carter was a skillful artist and first went to Egypt to copy Middle Kingdom tomb scenes at Beni Hasan. Appointed Inspector General for Upper Egypt by Maspero in 1899, he made important discoveries, including the tomb of Mentuhotep II, who unified Egypt through conquest and became the founding king of the Middle Kingdom (Plate 7.3). First hired in 1908 by Lord Carnarvon (1866-1923), it was not until 1917 that Carter began systematic investigations at Thebes in the Valley of the Kings. After five frustrating field seasons looking for Tutankhamen’s tomb, Carter’s discovery in 1922 created a sensation in the world press. A careful investigator, Carter then spent ten years recording and clearing the tomb, and conserving its artifacts. Although it has popularly been reported that the tomb contained a curse, this is not true. Carter died in England in 1939, 17 years after the tomb was opened.
Major European countries also founded research institutes or sponsored expeditions in Egypt, many of which continue to the present. In the 20th century ancient settlements also became the foci of archaeological investigations, though compared to tombs and temples many such sites have been poorly preserved. Long-term excavations at Tell el-Amarna (by the Germans, 1911-14; by British archaeologists for the Egypt Exploration Society, 1921-36 and 1977 to the present, under the direction of Barry Kemp) have provided information about a unique royal city of the 18*h-Dynasty king Akhenaten (see 8.4). Excavations at the workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina by the French Archaeological Institute, Cairo, from 1917-51, under the direction of Bernard Bruyere, have provided much information about daily life as well as death in Egypt during the New Kingdom (see Figure 8.21 and Box 8-E). At Tell el-Dab’a in the Nile Delta, excavations by Manfred Bietak of the Austrian Institute, Cairo (1966-9 and 1975 to the present) have yielded much new information about the rulers of foreign origin who controlled northern Egypt between the Middle and New Kingdoms (see 7.11). In southern Egypt, on Elephantine Island, Werner Kaiser of the German Archaeological Institute, Cairo has directed excavations at a border town that was occupied for ca. 4,000 years, including the remains of one of the oldest temple shrines in Egypt, originating ca. 3200 bc.
With so much archaeological and textual evidence being unearthed in Egypt, Egyptologist Adolf Erman (1854-1937) of the University of Berlin first conceived of a work to reference these data. The project was later taken up by Oxford professor F. Llewellyn Griffith (1862-1934), who engaged Bertha Porter (1852-1941), a bibliographer who had studied with Erman and Griffith, and her assistant and successor Rosalind Moss (1890-1990). Beginning around 1900, Porter worked on the bibliography in England (and never traveled to Egypt), while Moss later verified the information in Egypt. Their Topographical Bibliography, which continues as a project, also includes evidence from Nubia and the Egyptian oases, as well as inscribed Egyptian artifacts from outside Egypt and in foreign museums.
Gertrude Caton Thompson (1888-1985) played a fundamental role in archaeological investigations in Egypt. Using stratigraphic controls, she excavated a Predynastic village at Hammamiya in Middle Egypt in 1924 (see 4.9). Working with geologist Elinor Gardner several years later, Caton Thompson identified the earliest known Neolithic culture, which she called the Faiyum A, in the Faiyum region of northern Egypt (see 4.8). Caton Thomson later investigated the prehistory of Kharga Oasis, in the Western Desert, recording sites from the Lower Paleolithic to the Neolithic.
Many more prehistorians came to work in Egypt and northern Sudan in the 1960s in connection with the construction of the second High Dam at Aswan. Lower (northern) Nubia was eventually flooded by the waters of Lake Nasser, but before this occurred thousands of archaeological sites, from prehistory to the Ottoman period, were recorded and selectively excavated. Archaeologists and scholars from all over the world participated in this monumental undertaking, including prehistorians who had never worked before in Africa. Especially significant has been the work of Fred Wendorf, of Southern Methodist University, on Paleolithic cultures in the Nile Valley. Wendorf’s investigations in the Western Desert, sometimes in remote places where archaeologists had never ventured before, have revealed unique evidence of prehistoric habitation during periods when this desert was less arid than it is today (see 4.7).
The archaeological campaign in Nubia in the 1960s also investigated pharaonic sites, as well as sites of the various Nubian cultures contemporary with pharaonic Egypt and later periods. Hundreds of rock drawings and inscriptions were recorded as well. But the campaign is perhaps best known for its spectacular efforts organized by UNESCO, working with the Egyptian Antiquities Organization (EAO), to save Egyptian temples in Nubia, especially the removal of Rameses Il’s two rock-cut temples of Abu Simbel to a higher location (see Plate 8.13). At Aswan to the north of the new dam, the threatened Temple of Isis and associated monuments on Philae Island were later dismantled and reassembled on higher ground on a nearby island in the 1970s (see 10.5).
Fortunately to the south of Lake Nasser archaeological sites in Upper Nubia were not threatened. From 1977 to the present excavations have been conducted at the ancient city of Kerma and in its huge cemetery by Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet (of the Archaeological Expedition of the University of Geneva to the Sudan). Although Kerma peoples were contemporaries of the Egyptians in the Old and Middle Kingdoms, the evidence that Bonnet has excavated is of a very different culture from that of ancient Egypt (see Figure 7.12 and Box 7-D).
Significant developments of Egyptian-directed archaeology also occurred in the 20th century. Increasingly the Egyptian Antiquities Service, now called the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), was run by Egyptians and Egyptian-trained Egyptologists. SCA officials have conducted excavations at many sites in Egypt and filled the Cairo Museum, as well as museums throughout Egypt, with artifacts from their excavations of prehistoric, pharaonic, Greco-Roman, and Christian sites. Egyptology is taught at a number of universities in Egypt, and Egyptian Egyptologists and officials work together with foreign expeditions. The SCA is the organization, under the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, which regulates all excavations and issues permits to do archaeological investigations in Egypt, as well as ensuring the protection and preservation of ancient sites and monuments. Its current director, Zahi Hawass, is well known for his excavations at Giza and in the “Valley of the Golden Mummies” in Bahariya Oasis, in the Western Desert (see 10.6).
Investigations have been conducted at thousands of sites in Egypt and Nubia for more than 150 years, but it is only possible to discuss some of the more prominent ones in this book.
World History
