Egypt and Nubia
(click on map to expand)
Review Journal of
Pages on Ancient Egypt and Nubia
Outline of Early Egyptology (ca.
de l'Egypte (1802-1809)
- French scientists and artists
recorded Egypt's natural history and archaeology during the brief
Napoleonic occupation of Egypt (1798-1800).
- Pyramids, temples, sculptures,
and other monuments were carefully recorded by artists including Vivant
Denon, Duterette, Cecille, Jollias, and Devilliers; and mapped by
French army surveyors. (Coincidentally, the Rosetta stone was found at
the mouth of the Nile in 1799.)
- These were the first accurate
site renderings of Lower and Upper Egypt, from the Nile Delta
(Alexandria, Giza) upriver to Philae near the 1st Nile cataract at
Aswan. Their publication in Description
de l'Egypte (1802-1809) provided the baseline documents for
John Lewis Burckhardt (1784-1818)
- A Swiss explorer, fluent in Arabic, who travelled to Egypt
and Ethiopia in 1811-1813, Burckhardt was the first to describe various
archaeological sites in Lower and
Upper Nubia (today's Sudan).
- His account, Travels in
Nubia, provided basic site and temple
plans, and recorded Greek and Coptic inscriptions at several Nubian
sites, including Derr and Kalabsha.
- He also recorded abundant ethnographic data during his
travels, including accounts of active slaving of upper Nile
tribal villages by the Egyptian army.
- Burckhardt died prematurely in 1818; Travels in Nubia
was published posthumously (1819).
Jean Francois Champollion (1790-1832)
- A gifted French linguist who, contemporary with England's
Thomas Young, deciphered the Rosetta
stone (1822), a Ptolemaic decree from 196 BC which had parallel
texts in hieroglyphs, demotic script, and Greek. Decipherment was aided
by similar royal name cartouches of Ptolemy and Cleopatra on an obelisk
brought to England in 1818.
- Champollion established viable methods of heiroglyphic
translation, based on a syllabary of consonants correlating the
Ptolemaic demotic script with the related Coptic
language spoken during the Roman period in
Egypt. This opened the way for the historic study of ancient Egypt,
which had hieroglyphic texts dating back to ca.3000 BC.
- Numerous inscriptions were recorded by Champollion in Egypt
and Lower Nubia in an 1828-1829 expedition with the Italian scholar
Ippolito Rossolini and the artist Nestor L'Hote. These were first
published in Monuments de l'Egypte
et de la Nubie,
vols. 1 and 2 (1832).
- The premature death of Jean Francois Champollion in 1832
was followed by posthumous publication of his Grammaire
égyptienne (1836). Further publication of the Monuments was edited by
his elder brother, Jacques-Joseph Champollion Figeac, and
- A brilliant scholar who received his doctorate in Classical
archaeology, then studied in the 1830s with Champollion's associates
Jean Letronne and Ippolito Rosellini. After analyzing
Champollion's Grammaire égyptienne, Lepsius was the
first to determine that Egyptian hieroglyphic writing did not use
vowels. He would then significantly advance the work begun
by Champollion of
deciphering and organizing Egyptian texts into an historic framework.
- Lepsius led a well-equipped German survey expedition of
Egypt and Nubia from Alexandria to Khartoum 1842-5; this set
standards for recording sites and incriptions.
- Lepsius published the landmark series, Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopia
(Monuments of Egypt and Ethiopia) in 6 volumes starting in 1849
last volume completed by Naville in 1913). The Denkmäler, with thousands of
accurately rendered inscriptions, site plans, and site views, has
remained a basic reference for Egyptology.
- Lepsius became director of
Berlin's Ägyptisches Museum in 1865. The following year, he
returned to Egypt, where he discovered the Decree of Canopus at Tanis
in the Nile delta. This Ptolemaic decree from 239 BC was
similar to the Rosetta stone in that it had Egyptian text
written in both hieroglyphic and demotic scripts, as well as a Greek
- Lepsius also published in 1880 an important study
of ancient Nubian, Nubische
Grammatik (Nubian Grammar). Nubian was an African, non-Semitic
language spoken in Nubia (today's Sudan) throughout the Dynastic era,
and later linked to the (still mainly undeciphered ) Meroitic script,
used in the ancient Meroitic empire (ca. 200 BC-AD 700), contemporary
with the Graeco-Roman era.
Auguste Mariette (1811-1881)
- A prodigious excavator who dominated archaeology in
Egypt during the mid 19th century. His interest in Egyptology
began when he saw the drawings of Nestor L'Hote, a family friend
who had travelled with Champollion to Egypt and drawn many of the
hieroglyphic inscriptions in resulting publications. Mariette,
originally a school teacher in Boulougne-sur-Mere, taught himself
Egyptian hieroglyphs and Coptic, and in 1849 was hired by the Louvre
Museum in Paris to buy ancient manuscripts in Coptic, Syriac, Arabic,
- In 1850 Mariette first went to Egypt and, while visiting
Saqqara in 1851, discovered the then buried Avenue of the Sphinxes, and
the subterranean catacombs with Apis bull sarcophagi . Among many finds
of sculptures and inscriptions was the nearly intact tomb of the son of
Rameses II, Khaemweset.
- With support from the Louvre, Mariette spent the next four
years excavating sites along the Nile. Under arrangement with the
Egyptian government, the Louvre kept half the artifacts removed from
the sites. Mariette returned with 230 crates of artifacts and was
appointed Assistant Curator at the Louvre, but by 1858
he had returned to Egypt with a job as as head conservator
for Egyptian monuments.
- Thus began an extensive series of excavations
throughout Egypt, aided by the fact that no other archaeologists had
permnission to dig in Egypt. Major finds included the buried temple at
the base of the Sphinx in Giza;.the pyramids of Memphis
(revealing the decorated tomb of Khafra); the tombs of Saqqara;
the necropoli of Meidatum, Abydos, and Thebes; and temples at
Dendera, Edfu, Karnak, Medinet-Habu, and Deir el-Bahri.
- In 1863 Mariette established the Bulak Museum for
antiquities in Cairo, a predecessor of today's Egyptian National Museum.
- .Mariette became celebrated in France for his contributions
to archaeology. Among his other accomplishments, he wrote the plot of
Verdi's opera Aida. Mariette
appointed the linguist Gaston Maspero to succeed him as director of
French archaeology in Egypt.
- A Victorian novelist whose highly readable
book, 1000 Miles up the Nile (1878),
contributed to making Edwards a well-known sponsor of Egyptian
- With the partial backing of the British
Museum, Edwards founded the Egypt Exploration Society
in 1882, whose Egypt Exploration Fund sponsored excavations by Edouard
Naville, W. M. Flinders Petrie, Francis
Griffith, and many others.
- Her bequest founded the Edwards Library at
University College, London, where Petrie taught for many years; today a
center of Egyptian research.
W. M. Flinders Petrie (1853-1941)
- A pioneering British archaeologist whose
initial projects in lower Egypt were
carefully-recorded surveys and excavations at Giza
(1883), Tanis (1884), Naukratis (1885) and Bubastis (1889) in
the Nile Delta, and Arsinoe and Hawara (1889) in the Fayum lake
region. Most of these excavations and publications were funded by the
Egypt Exploration Fund.
- Petrie led numerous excavations between
1887-1925 as part of the British School in
Egypt, mainly in
upper Egypt, at major Old Kingdom and
pre-dynastic sites including Medum (1892), Coptos (1893), Naqada
(1896), Thebes (1897), Hierakonpolis (1898), Diospolis
Parva (1901), Abydos (1901, 1902, 1903),
Rifeh (1907), and Memphis (1908-1913). From these sites, Petrie established
a comprehensive pottery sequence in order to date sites lacking
inscriptions, and led efforts to identify the early iconography and
hieroglyphic script related to the Scorpion King, Narmer, and other
early rulers of Egypt.
- Overall, Petrie is noted for his
excellent field methods and prompt publications, and is
considered "the father of British Egyptology" (Hobson 1987).
- Petrie's students and assistants
included Egyptologists who became prominent from ca.1890-1940 such
Newberry, Edward Quibell, John Garstang, Margaret Murray, Eric Peet,
Alan Gardiner, and Howard Carter. Frequent co-authors also included the
noted epigraphers Francis Griffith (Egyptian and Meroitic
hieroglyphs), and W. E. Crum (Coptic).
- Griffith directed the Archaeological Survey of
(1891-1910) for the Egypt Exploration Fund. The Survey's goal, in the
active site looting, was to document as many sites as possible with
photographs, plans, and drawings.
- He worked with Percy Newberry and Norman de Garis Davies to
paintings and inscriptions at major tomb sites including Saqqara, Beni
Hassan, and Abydos.
- Griffith made significant advances in the study of the
script, from inscriptions recovered at Lower Nubian sites prior to
their flooding by the Aswan Dam (Qasr Ibrim, Karanog, Areika, Buhen).
These were excavated by McIver
and Wooley (1909-1911) for the University Museum, Univ.of Pennsylvania.
- Founded Griffith Institute at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
- A student of Flinders Petrie in the late 1890s, Murray
participated in numerous Dynastic temple and tomb
excavations, recording their wall paintings and inscriptions, and
becoming skilled in reading hieroglyphic texts.
- Murray worked at the Abydos Oseireon (1902), and at tombs
at Saqqara (1904, 1905), and Gurog (1905), sponsored by the British
School in Egypt. Murray subsequently worked at the Manchester Museum.
- Other publications on Egypt include reports on the mastabas
(Old Kingdom tombs) at Saqqara (1908;1935); Elementary Egyptian Grammar (1905);
Elementary Coptic Grammar
(1911); an index of names of the Old Kingdom (1908); a translation
of the manuscript from the Tomb of Two Brothers at Rifeh (1910),
published by the Manchester Museum; Egyptian Sculpture (1930); and Egyptian
- Murray became
of Egyptology at the University College of London in 1924, until
her retirement in 1935. In 1926, she became a fellow of Britain's Royal
Selected Archives on Egypt