The discovery of ancient Egypt (Artefact Series: 1)

The Elgin marbles are today perhaps the most notorious of the ancient art collections taken from foreign lands in the nineteenth century whose repatriation is sought by their home country. Allegations that these artefacts were taken without permission underlie the demand for their return. But a glance at early nineteenth-century exploration and collecting of artefacts reveals plenty of other cases of what might now seem ethically-dubious collecting by European explorers.  

Early archaeological excavation and collecting in Egypt is an example. For while this country yielded rich archaeological returns in the nineteenth century, the teams involved and the collectors who benefitted were rarely native to Egypt. Britain and France, the great European powers of the time, were the main recipients. 

At the end of the eighteenth century, in the wake of the French revolution, the French set their sights on Egypt as a potential foreign conquest.  But Egypt, like Greece, was not a nation that enjoyed self-determination. It had long been governed by the vast Ottoman Empire, whose centre was Constantinople (Istanbul). The effective rulers of Egypt were the Mamluks, freed slaves of the Turkish army. So when Napoleon’s army entered Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century, it was this foreign Mamluk military that it engaged with. 

Engraving after Bonaparte before the Sphinx, painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1886)

Initially, Napoleon’s army was triumphant in its Egyptian campaign, but military conquest was not his sole goal. His aim was also to explore, get to know, and record the details of the country’s present and its distant past. And to preserve whatever was valuable of this past by removing as much as possible back to France. ‘Free’ France, liberated by its Revolution, was deemed a far safer and more civilized home for precious artefacts than was Egypt. And with the recent opening of the Louvre, one of the first great public museums, the French believed that an ideal home awaited any ancient Egyptian artefacts their army might discover.

To this end, Napoleon established a research team known as the Commission on the Arts and Sciences. Comprising over 150 specialists, this Commission would pursue scholarly cultural research in Egypt and advise on what should be removed and transported back to France. During the military campaign, archaeologists from the Commission seized a sizeable number of ancient Egyptian artefacts, most famously the Rosetta Stone, a large stone fragment (inscribed with a decree by King Ptolemy V), dating from 196 BC. 

Rosetta Stone

One of the significant features of the French campaign was that the Commission members were able to penetrate into southern (Upper) Egypt where many of the massive, pre-classical artefacts were to be found. Until this time, ancient Egypt had been little known beyond its most recent period, the age of Anthony and Cleopatra (first century BC) – a period associated with smaller decorative artefacts and centred around the north (Lower Egypt). Now a more ancient Egypt could be known through its great pyramids, mortuary temples, obelisks and sphinxes. 

Napoleon’s military presence in the country was short-lived. Defeated by the British navy at the Battle of the Nile in 1801, the French military retreated and, under the terms of the peace treaty, was forced to hand over to Britain the recently-acquired ancient Egyptian treasures. Copies had been made of the important Rosetta Stone, but the original, along with the other trophies seized from the French, were taken not to the Louvre, as originally intended, but instead to London and the British Museum. 

The arrival of these treasures prompted the British Museum to establish a Department of Antiquities, and within a few years they were all on display in the new Townley Galleries and later the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery.

View through the Egyptian Room, Townley Gallery, British Museum (1820)

The French Commission on the Arts and Sciences, who had now lost these artefacts, had nevertheless had time to document and illustrate them in great detail. This research formed the basis of the book titled Travel to the Limits of Upper Egypt (1802) by Vivant Denon, member of the Commission and later Director of the Louvre. It also led to the publication in France of a multi-volume book, The Description of Egypt, which appeared between 1808 and 1828, collaboratively produced by the Commission. Both publications aroused huge amounts of public interest, in both France and Britain, in the world of ancient Egypt, giving rise to what has been dubbed Egyptomania, a craze for objects designed in Egyptian style – or if possible for the originals.

Frontispiece to The Description of Egypt (1808-28)

Britain maintained an important presence in Egypt after the end of the Napoleonic era, so further archaeological excavations were possible in the later nineteenth century. Sometimes these involved the removal of artefacts that the French had attempted but failed to remove, such as the massive bust of Ramesses II (The Younger Memnon), finally dislodged from its site in Thebes in 1816 and dragged back to England where it entered the British Museum in 1821.

Bust of Ramesses II, British Museum

Meanwhile France, although defeated in the recent wars, nevertheless also remained an important player in Egypt and continued to be particularly influential in the field of cultural affairs. To this end, the French judiciously cultivated relations with Egypt’s governor. Egypt was still officially a ‘province’ of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, but was no longer governed by the Mamluks. These had been dispersed by the French army. In their place rose another foreign ruler, Mehmet Ali, an Albanian army officer loyal to the Ottomans. With his name Egyptianized to Muhammad Ali, he became Pasha (ruler) of Egypt in 1806 and ruled the country for over 40 years until 1849.

Muhammad Ali (1769-1849), ruler of Egypt

Muhammad Ali, Albanian by birth and loyal to overlords in Constantinople, had little sentimental interest in the treasures of ancient Egypt. In the course of his long rule, far from protecting these treasures, he was often to use them as bargaining tools with foreign powers and as rewards for favours. And the two foreign powers with most at stake in Egypt were Britain and France. By mid-century a significant number of ancient Egyptian treasures had found their way back to these two countries, often with the full knowledge and approval of local officials, or the direct approval of the pasha. 

In all, the nineteenth-century haul of Egyptian treasures to French and British museums was so large that it was dubbed ‘the harvest of the gods’. The treasures of an ancient culture were finding themselves far away from their original home. As early as 1827, as many as four new rooms had to be added to the Louvre Museum to house this harvest; they became the basis of the Louvre’s ‘Egyptian Museum’ while the Egyptian holdings of the British Museum grew to even greater heights so that they numbered 10,000 by 1866 (today numbering 100,000 and the largest collection outside Egypt).

The Egyptian Gallery in the Louvre (1863)

Few in either country expressed qualms about the ethics of these removals. Indeed the consensus was largely that the artefacts were far safer in European museums than on their home soil. When in 1821 the ‘Dendera zodiac’, a huge stone ceiling block, was hacked from a temple dedicated to Hathor in Dendera, north of Luxor, and put on board a ship bound for France, it was noted that the Pasha had approved its removal and that it had ‘thus been rescued from destruction and danger’ (M. Saulnier, 1822, quoted in Wilkinson 2020, 42).

Dendera Zodiac, Louvre Museum 

One lone voice in France was to publicly express doubts. Congratulating the Dendera team on their successful removal of the zodiac, Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion nevertheless added a caveat: ‘we cannot, however, refrain from expressing a certain regret that this magnificent temple has been deprived of one of its finest monuments…Should we, in France, follow the example of Lord Elgin? Certainly not.’ (Champollion, 1821. Quoted in Wilkinson 2020*, 43) 

It is ironic, then, that when the zodiac arrived in France, its ancient hieroglyphics, as well as those inscribed on other seized artefacts, were to provide Champollion, brilliant philologist that he was, with the tools for unlocking the mysteries of this long-forgotten script. The decoding of hieroglyphics forms another chapter in the fascinating story of nineteenth-century Egyptology.

• T. Wilkinson, A World Beneath the Sands: Adventurers and Archaeologists in the Golden Age of Egyptology, Picador, 2020.