A
WORLD
BENEATH
THE SANDS
Adventurers and Archaeologists in the Golden Age of Egyptology
Toby Wilkinson
I dedicate this book, with deepest gratitude, to the memory of Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge, Egyptologist and author, for his generosity in endowing a fund for Egyptology at Christ’s College, Cambridge; and to successive Masters, Fellows and Scholars of Christ’s for maintaining and nurturing the Lady Wallis Budge Fund over the past eighty-five years. Its beneficiaries (of which I am proud to be one) have played, and will continue to play, their part in shaping Egyptology.
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Timeline
Maps
Introduction
PROLOGUE Travellers in an antique land
ONE Description and decipherment
TWO In the footsteps of Napoleon
THREE Englishmen abroad
FOUR The Prussian project
FIVE French foundations
SIX A thousand miles up the Nile
SEVEN A permanent occupation
EIGHT Scholars and scoundrels
NINE Egypt and America
TEN Imperial ambitions
ELEVEN Wonderful things
EPILOGUE The future of the past
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Plate Section
List of Illustrations
Mono
PROLOGUE Frontispiece of the English edition of Norden’s Travels in Egypt and Nubia, 1757 (Gg. 1. 12-13 reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)
1. The Rosetta Stone (Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)
2. Frontispiece of the Napoleonic Description de l’Egypte (By Impr. impériale – https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/ items/510d47e0-0f27-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=49898981)
3. John Gardner Wilkinson (The Harpur Crewe Collection / National Trust Photographic Library / Mike Williams / Bridgeman Images)
4. Richard Lepsius and members of his Prussian expedition (bpk / Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, SMB / Margarete Büsing)
