From Napoleon and the Great Pyramid to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb … archeological explorations and European colonialism
In 1880, a ship from Alexandria moored off 23rd Street, New York City. On board was an obelisk. Nothing proclaimed imperial might quite like a phallic pharaonic monument. This was why, in ancient times, obelisks had been transported to both Rome and Constantinople. Now, in the 19th century, the capitals of more recent empires were getting in on the act. Paris had an obelisk. London had an obelisk. No wonder civic leaders in New York, eager to draw attention to the growing wealth and might of America’s financial capital, should have been desperate to obtain one as well. “It would be absurd for the people of any great city,” as the New York Herald put it, “to hope to be happy without an Egyptian obelisk.”
Toby Wilkinson’s new history of the golden age of Egyptology is also very much a history of western willy-waving. How could it not be? Wilkinson begins with Napoleon posing in the shadow of the Great Pyramid; he ends with the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and the adoption by Egyptians of the boy-pharaoh as an icon of their recently won independence.