Egyptomania: TLS Review

The TLS reviewer of David Gange’s Dialogues with the Dead and Bob Brier’s Egyptomania catalogues some of the Egyptian trinkets that amused Victorians: “Victorian ladies wore sarcophagi charms and brooches of winged scarabs; men’s coat buttons were embossed with pharaohs’ heads. ‘Egyptian’ cigarettes were all the rage along with smoking paraphernalia, some of whose motifs were unintentionally portentous, like the gold cigarette cases inscribed with scenes from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, cigarette holders featuring Anubis ushering the deceased into the afterlife, and a cigar humidor shaped like a canopic jar, the receptacle for organs extracted from mummified cadavers.”

Intellectuals were similarly enamored: “‘Egypt is alive in the hearts and daily business of all civilized nations,’ wrote Thomas Carlyle. The Archbishop of Canterbury named his cat Ra, while his daughter, travelling in Egypt in the 1880s, wrote of confessing her sins to the sphinx, not from some esoteric compulsion but in egalitarian homage to the achievements of a pagan yet spiritual people.”

Of these books, the review is most impressed with Gange’s: “Dialogues with the Dead may be considered the definitive history of the study of ancient Egypt in nineteenth-century Britain,” documenting how Egyptology was linked with “science, art, literature, music, architecture, politics, historical writing and art criticism into high relief. Implicated with its sibling disciplines (archaeology, geology, evolutionary theory) in debates about the nature of time, history, religious beliefs and human origins.” 

Interest in the Bible was, of course, intertwined with interest in the ways of ancient Egyptians: “Present in devotional texts, biblical novels, illustrated bibles, and remarkably popular epic poems, the Holy Land was more familiar to average citizens than the geography of their own country. Indeed, while postcolonial histories describe British Egyptology as an imperialist exercise, “familiarity was consistently as much a part of Egypt’s image as exoticism and spectacle”. As the Industrial Revolution gathered steam with its social and economic upheavals, people looked to their well-trodden biblical past to see where they were heading, and Egyptology was cast as a virtually God-given tool to verify the biblical narrative.” In the age of “Dover Beach,” Egyptology seemed to provide some help in shoring up against the tide of unbelief.

Egypt served for some as an ancient model of modern economy: “The spectacle of biblical Egypt was famously rendered by the painter John Martin, ‘whose ferociously intense panoramas of cosmic rage’ depicting a heathen Memphis on the eve of divine destruction recalled the seething furnaces of modern industry, matching the cautionary narrative some assigned to Egypt with an admonition about rapid, disconcerting change. But the pharaohs were also champions of industry, in the eyes of some of their modern counterparts. Inspired by Bible verses noting Egypt’s production of fine flax and linen, John Marshall, a Unitarian, built the Temple Works mill in Leeds. Modelled on the Temple of Horus at Edfu, it was large enough to hold a thousand workers, a fitting shrine to the ingenuity of a confident, ambitious society which traced its roots via Oxford and Cambridge all the way to Thebes.”