European interest in ancient Egypt
was strong in Roman times and revived in the Renaissance, when the wealth of
Egyptian remains in the city of Rome was supplemented by information provided
by visitors to Egypt itself. Views of Egypt were dominated by the classical tradition that it was the land of ancient wisdom; this wisdom was thought to
inhere in the hieroglyphic script, which was believed to impart profound
symbolic ideas, not—as it in fact does—the sounds and words of texts. Between
the 15th and 18th centuries, Egypt had a minor but significant position in
general views of antiquity and its monuments gradually became better known
through the work of scholars in Europe and travelers in the country itself; the
finest publications of the latter were by Richard Pococke, Frederik Ludwig Norden,
and Carsten
Niebuhr, all of whose works in the 18th century helped to stimulate an
Egyptian revival in European art and architecture. Coptic, the
Christian successor of the ancient Egyptian language was studied from the 17th
century, notably by Athanasius
Kircher, for its potential, to provide the key to Egyptian.
Napoleon I’s an expedition to and short-lived
conquest of Egypt in 1798 was the culmination of an 18th-century interest in the
East. The expedition was accompanied by a team of scholars who recorded the
ancient and contemporary country, issuing in 1809–28 the Description de
l’Égypte, the most comprehensive study
to be made before the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script. The
renowned Rosetta
Stone, which bears a decree of Ptolemy V
Epiphanes in hieroglyphs, demotic script, and Greek alphabetic
characters were discovered during the expedition; it was ceded to the British
after the French capitulation in Egypt and became the property of the British Museum in
London. This document greatly assisted the decipherment, accomplished by Jean-François
Champollion in 1822.
The Egyptian language revealed
by the decipherment and decades of subsequent study is a member of the Afro-Asiatic (formerly
Hamito-Semitic) language family. Egyptian is closest to the family’s Semitic
branch but is distinctive in many respects. During several millennia it changed
greatly. The script does not write vowels, and because Greek forms for royal
names were known from Manetho long before the Egyptian forms became available,
those used to this day are a mixture of Greek and Egyptian.
In the first half of the 19th century, vast numbers of antiquities
were exported from Egypt, forming the nucleus of collections in many major
museums. These were removed rather than excavated, inflicting, together with
the economic development of the country, colossal damage on ancient sites. At
the same time, many travelers and scholars visited the country and recorded the
monuments. The most important, and remarkably accurate, the record was produced by
the Prussian expedition led by Karl Richard
Lepsius, in 1842–45, which explored sites as far south as central Sudan.
In the mid-19th century, Egyptology developed
as a subject in France and in Prussia. The Antiquities Service and a museum of
Egyptian antiquities were established in Egypt by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette,
a great excavator who attempted to preserve sites from destruction, and the
Prussian Heinrich
Brugsch, who made great progress in the interpretation of texts of many
periods and published the first major Egyptian dictionary. In 1880 Flinders (later Sir
Flinders) Petrie began more than 40 years of methodical excavation,
which created an archaeological framework for all the chief periods of Egyptian
culture except for remote prehistory. Petrie was the initiator of many in archaeological
method, but he was later surpassed by George Andrew
Reisner, who excavated for American institutions from 1899 to 1937. The
greatest late 19th-century Egyptologist was Adolf Erman of Berlin, who put
the understanding of the Egyptian language on a sound basis and wrote general
works that for the first time organized what was known about the earlier
periods.
Complete facsimile copies of Egyptian monuments have been published
since the 1890s, providing a separate record that becomes more vital as the decay of the original.
The pioneer of this scientific epigraphy was James Henry
Breasted of the Oriental Institute of the University of
Chicago, who began his work in 1905 and shortly thereafter was joined by
others. Many scholars are now engaged in epigraphy.
In the first half of the 20th century, some outstanding
archaeological discoveries were made: Howard Carter uncovered
the tomb of Tutankhamun in
1922; Pierre
Montet found the tombs of 21st–22nd-Dynasty kings at Tanis in 1939–44; and
W.B. Emery and L.P. Kirwan found tombs of the Ballānah culture (the 4th through
the 6th century CE) in Nubia in 1931–34. The
last of these was part of the second survey of Lower Nubia in 1929–34, which
preceded the second raising of the Aswān Dam. This was followed in the late The 1950s and ’60s by an international campaign to excavate and record sites in
Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia before the completion of the Aswan High Dam in
1970. Lower Nubia is now one of the most thoroughly explored archaeological
regions of the world. Most of its many temples have been moved, either to
higher ground nearby, as happened to Abu Simbel and Philae, or to
quite different places, including various foreign museums. The campaign also
had the welcome consequence of introducing a wide range of archaeological
expertise to Egypt, so that standards of excavation and recording in the
country have risen greatly.
Excavation and survey of great importance have continued in many
places. For example, at Ṣaqqārah,
part of the necropolis of the ancient city of Memphis,
new areas of the Sarapeum have
been uncovered with rich finds, and a major New Kingdom necropolis is being
thoroughly explored. The site of ancient Memphis itself has been systematically
surveyed; its position in relation to the ancient course of the Nile has been
established; urban occupation areas have been studied in detail for the
first time.
Egyptology is, however, a primarily interpretive subject. There
have been outstanding contributions—for example in art, for which Heinrich
Schäfer established the principles of the rendering of nature, and in language.
New light has been cast on texts, the majority of which are written in a simple meter that can serve as the basis of sophisticated literary works. The
physical environment,
social structure, kingship, and religion are other fields in which great
advances have been made, while the reconstruction of the outline of history is
constantly being improved in detail.
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