EGYPTOLOGY

At the end of the 18^thC there was a contemporary fascination with the ancient world. That Egypt had a long and ancient history was appreciated but little was known about it because the culture's hieroglyphs were no longer decipherable. India made Egypt of strategic interest to Britain. In 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte sought to overthrow British political and economic dominance in the subcontinent. The quickest way for him to try to transport an army there by crossing from the south-eastern Mediterranean to the north-western Indian Ocean. His attempt was thwarted by Lord Nelson at the Battle of the Nile.

Egyptian items began to appear in London's sales rooms. The architect Sir John Soane was able to purchase the sarcophagus of Seti I (reigned 1294-1279 B.C.). This can be viewed in Sir John Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Website: www.ees.ac.uk www.thebritishmuseum.org/our-work/departments/egypt-and-sudan

Giovanni Battista Belzoni

In 1817 Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778-1823) discovered the seven-tonne bust of Ramesses II (c.1303-1213 B.C.) at the Great Temple of Ptah near Memphis. It is now in the British Museum.

It inspired Shelley (1792-1822) to write the sonnet Ozymandias (1818), which was a meditation on the transience of earthly power.

Location: Great Russell Street, WC1B 3DG (blue, yellow)

Cleopatra's Needle

Cleopatra s Needle was sculpted c.1500 B.C. for Thutmose III (1479 B.C.-1425 B.C.). It stood in Alexandria, on Egypt's Mediterranean coast. Cleopatra would have known the obelisk but the events that were recorded on it would have been ancient history to her. The Needle was given to the British in 1819 by Mehmet Ali, an Albanian-born the Viceroy of Egypt. It did not arrive in London until 1878. The obelisk was brought over largely through the efforts of Sir Erasmus Wilson, who was a dermatologist. The artefact arrived in London after a dramatic sea voyage. It was secured on a raft that was towed from Egypt by the S.S. Olga. In the Bay of Biscay a storm blew up and the crew of the ship feared that the platform would sink and drag their vessel down after it. Therefore, they cut it loose. Five days later the raft was found to be still floating nearby by the crew of a Portuguese ship. It was taken to Portugal. Following its arrival in London, it was erected on the Victoria Embankment in 1878. (Its sister stands in Central Park, New York City.)

Location: Victoria Embankment, WC2N 6PB (purple, grey)

Sir Benjamin Baker

Benjamin Baker's (1840-1907) masterpiece was the Forth Bridge (1890). He designed the floating cylindrical container that brought Cleopatra's Needle to London.

Baker did a lot of work for the Egyptian government. He designed the Aswan Low Dam (1902).

The Egypt Exploration Society

The Egypt Exploration was founded by Amelia Edwards in 1882.

Website: www.ees.ac.uk

The Egyptian Society

The Egyptian Society was founded in 1742. Its initial chairman was the 1^st Earl of Sandwich. Its members included the 2^nd Duke of Montagu and the antiquarian William Stukeley.

William Lethieullier

Colonel William Lethieullier visited Egypt in 1721. In 1756 he bequeathed the inner coffin of Irtyu to the British Museum.

Location: Great Russell Street, WC1B 3DG (blue, yellow)

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology

Petrie developed an archaeological technique that is called seriation. This made him one of the disciplines founding fathers. While conducting excavations in Egypt he unearthed some strange looking burials. His initial assumption was that they were those that had been created by a people that had invaded the Middle Kingdom after the pyramids had been built. However, the graves contained no hieroglyphs. He appreciated that they might belong to Egyptians prior to the civilisation's development of writing. Using pieces of pottery from the graves, as well as others from dateable times, he looked for any slight variations that their designs and decoration might have from each other. By working out the historical sequence in which they had been created he was able to prove that the new graves had been prior to any of the great monuments.

Flinders Petrie disliked being interrupted by tourists when he was excavating in Egypt. Therefore, he tended to wear very little which had the effect of dissuading most of then from approaching him while he was working.

Petrie believed that facial features and skull shape were indicative of moral values and character, as well as intellectual ability. He died in Palestine in 1942, bequeathing his own head to the Royal College of Surgeons for study, he having believed that it was typical of an Englishman. The object arrived at its destination in a glass bottle. However, the attached label became detached so that for many years the bonce resorted in anonymity.

In 1873 the author Amelia Edwards made her first visit to Egypt. She published her impressions in the travelogue A Thousand Miles Up The Nile (1876). In 1882 she and Reginald Poole of the British Museum founded the Egypt Exploration Fund (subsequently the Egypt Exploration Society). She gave up her writing career in order to concentrate on Egyptology. At her death she left her collection of Egyptian artefacts to University College together with a bequest to underwrite the establishment of a chair in Egyptology. The Department of Egyptian Archaeology & Philology used the collection to set up The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. The initial holder of chair was William Flinders Petrie. In 1913 he sold his own collection of Egyptian artefacts to the Museum.

Location: Malet Place, WC1E 6BT (blue, orange)

Website: www.ucl.ac.uk/culture/petrie-museum

The Rosetta Stone

In 196 B.C. the pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes (reigned 204-181 B.C.) issued a decree that led to the creation of the Rosetta Stone.¹ One of Napoleon's officers uncovered the stone.

Napoleon s archaeologists assembled a large collection of items. The French frigate Egyptienne was captured on the high seas and the material taken to London. It proved to be a major stimulus for Europeans to study Ancient Egyptian culture. In 1802 the granite Stone was lodged in the British Museum.

The Stone attracted the interest of the polymath Thomas Phenomenon Young, who went on to make a number important contributions to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. He could see that words such as Ptolemy and Cleopatra were written with a form of alphabet that indicated their sound in Greek and thus was able to construct a basic alphabet. However, he regarded them as being exceptions in the text and held to the view stated by Classical sources that hieroglyphs were symbolic. Jean-Francois Champollion availed himself of Young's insights. Champollion was more open-minded and used a number of different approaches. He appreciated that hieroglyphs might directly indicate the sounds of Ancient Egyptian. He had learnt Coptic and so was able to apply his insight. He found that he could read the name Ramases. He believed that understanding hieroglyphs would reveal ancient secrets and insights. In 1822 he decoded them he soon appreciated that most of them were mundane. He sought to claim that the Phenomenon had made no worthwhile contribution to the decoding the hieroglyphs.

Champollion worked from copies of the stone. He may never have seen it.

Location: Great Russell Street, WC1B 3DG (blue, yellow)

Website: www.britishmuseum.org/collection/egypt/explore-rosetta-stone

¹. Rosetta is a port to the east of Alexandria. There were three scripts on the Stone: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphic, and Egyptian demotic.

Sekhmet

Above the doorway of Sotheby's New Bond Street premises is a basalt statue of Sekhmet, the Upper Egyptian lion-headed, warrior goddess of war and strife. Her breath was said to have created the desert. Her annual festival required the consumption of vast quantities of beer. The artefact dates from c.1320 B.C..

In the 1880s the statue was sold at a Sotheby's auction for 40. However, it was never collected and has remained upon the premises ever since. The travel writer Bruce Chatwin's first published article was The Bust of Sekhmet (1966), which appeared in a yearbook that the auction house published.

Location: 34-35 New Bond Street, W1A 2AA (orange, turquoise)

See Also: AUCTIONEERS Sotheby s; LIONS

Website: www.sothebys.com/en/slideshows/a-closer-look-a-bust-of-the-egyptian-goddess-sekhmet

Tutankhamun and Howard Carter

Tutenkhamun was written out of the lists of pharaohs as a collateral result of the experiment with monotheism. The tomb robbers of later eras were oblivious as to his existence and therefore did not go looking for his tomb.

The 5^th Earl of Carnarvon provided the financial wherewithal to enable the adventurer-archaeologist Howard Carter to excavate the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun. Thereby, the peer is supposed to have brought upon himself the curse of Tutankhamun . When he died in Cairo in 1923 the lights of his apartment are supposed to have blacked out and his dog back home in England to have dropped dead.

Location: 19 Collingham Gardens, SW5 0HL. Mr Carter's home. (orange, red)

Putney Vale Cemetery, Stag Lane, SW15 3DZ. The cemetery contains Carter's grave.

Dame Barbara Cartland

The romantic novelist Dame Barbara Cartland was particularly inclined to wearing pink clothes. The reputed reason for this was said to be because in 1927 Howard Carter had taken her into Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of The Kings near Luxor. This had been decorated so that much of it appeared to be bright pink.

See Also: LITERATURE

Tooting Common

The British Museum's 1972 Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition was seen by 1,694,117 people.

There is a story that while the exhibition was on Scotsman arrived at one of the London railway termini. He approached a black cab and asked the driver to take him to Tutankhamun . At the end of the journey he arrived at Tooting Common.

David Backhouse 2024