The scholars who solved the riddles in the sands

In 1835 the first two Egyptian antiquities were registered in the British Museum: a pair of red granite lions from Nubia. Each bore the name of Tutankhamun — not that anyone had ever heard of him.

All serious understanding of the millennia-spanning Nilotic civilisation had disappeared before the last hieroglyph was carved in 394 AD. In the mid-18th century the most advanced ‘scholarship’ on the subject consisted of ‘pinpricks of insight in an enveloping fog of misapprehension’, and by the early 19th century the Egypt of the pharaohs was still largely buried in the sand. The word ‘Egyptology’ did not exist.

Yet within 100 years Egypt would no longer be known as a land of biblical-classical myth but ‘the crucible of great feats of artistic and architectural achievement’, thanks to what Toby Wilkinson calls a ‘golden age of scholarship and adventure’ — between Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphics and the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922.

The men (and very occasionally women) who undertook this work were a colourful mix of often amateur collectors, ethnographers, antiquarians, archaeologists and treasure-hunters, including the sometime circus-strongman Giovanni Belzoni, the consumptive Lucie Duff-Gordon (who lived atop the Luxor temple) and the Prussian scholar Karl Richard Lepsius, who first wrestled the subject into some sort of academic discipline.

The Egyptians had been robbing tombs since the day after they were sealed, one British archaeologist claimed

The great British Egyptologists ‘tended to come from unexpected quarters’. John Gardner Wilkinson arrived in Egypt on the Grand Tour and accidentally became the world’s foremost authority on its ancient history; Flinders Petrie had never been to school, was inspired by the quackish astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth, and worked outdoors in vest and pants; E.A. Wallis Budge was possibly the illegitimate son of Gladstone. But none of them beat France’s Auguste Mariette, who was apprenticed to a ribbon-maker, died as director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service and now rests in a sarcophagus in front of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.