A World Beneath the Sands by Toby Wilkinson
21/01/2021 - 22:29
Toby Wilkinson's colorful new book is a study of Egyptology between the first decipherment of hieroglyphics in 1822, and Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb (right), 100 years later, said James McConnachie in The Sunday Times. This period, known as the “Golden Age” of Egyptology, could “also be regarded as a very dark age indeed” - a time of plunder and skulduggery in which the world's most powerful nations vied to rob Egypt's artefacts.
Virtually all the leading Egyptologists of the day were European; and as Wilkinson shows, they were a pretty eccentric lot. Flinders Petrie, who helped systematise the preservation of artefacts in the 1880s, liked to work in his underwear - claiming it “kept the tourists at bay”. (He was also, Wilkinson notes, “odoriferous as a polecat”.) Wallis Budge “dug an escape tunnel from his storeroom into the grounds of the adjacent Luxor Hotel” to enable him to remove objects without detection. Such men preferred to think of themselves as “scholars” rather than “scoundrels”, but the line between the two was “often blurred”. While these Egyptologists were guilty of “ruthless exploitation and catty infighting”, many were also brave pioneers, said Robert Eustace in The Daily Telegraph.