A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology
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4.3 • 11 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A thrilling history of the West’s scramble for the riches of ancient Egypt by the foremost Egyptologist of our time.
From the decipherment of hieroglyphics in 1822 to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon a hundred years later, the uncovering of Egypt’s ancient past took place in an atmosphere of grand adventure and international rivalry.
In A World Beneath the Sands, acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson chronicles the ruthless race between the British, French, Germans, and Americans to lay claim to its mysteries and treasures. He tells riveting stories of the men and women whose obsession with Egypt’s ancient civilization helped to enrich and transform our understanding of the Nile Valley and its people, and left a lasting impression on Egypt, too. Travelers and treasure-hunters, ethnographers and archaeologists: whatever their motives, whatever their methods, a century of adventure and scholarship revealed a lost world, buried for centuries beneath the sands.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Wilkinson (The Nile) revisits the whirlwind of archaeological discoveries made in the Nile Valley between the 1822 decoding of the Rosetta Stone and the 1922 unearthing of King Tutankhamun's tomb, in this meticulous and vibrant account. He sketches how Napoleon's 1798 expedition into Egypt inaugurated an "intense Anglo-French rivalry" over the country and its artifacts, and documents the competition between British polymath Thomas Young and French scholar Jean-Fran ois Champollion to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Champollion won out, though the Rosetta Stone ended up in British hands a foreshadowing of the British takeover of the French-built Suez Canal, and the country itself, in the 1880s. In between, Wilkinson highlights the achievements of Prussian explorer Karl Richard Lepsius, who made the first "systematic exploration" of the Great Pyramid of Giza, and Auguste Mariette, who discovered the Serapeum at Saqqara in 1851, among other Egyptologists. He also notes the devastating impact of "treasure-hunting," "slapdash excavation," and Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali's modernization efforts on archaeological sites, and details novelist Amelia Blandford Edwards's campaign to "save Egypt's patrimony for future generations." Wilkinson marshals a wealth of detail into a cohesive and entertaining narrative. The result is an essential portrait of how the rediscovery of " ancient past paved the way for its modern rebirth."
