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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2017

"Dialogues with the dead, and with the living too! British Egyptology societies & the politics of preservation (1882-1898)"

Résumé

In his recent Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion (2013), David Gange reminds us that Britain’s fascination with Egypt was inspired by the Bible and that from the 1840s at least, there was an attempt at identifying Biblical, Old Testament loci in modern Egypt, in particular the Exodus route. Biblical geography spurred the creation of the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1865, and to a certain extent, also that of the Egyptian Exploration Fund in 1882. Napoleon’s 1798-1801 Egyptian campaign, as well as the popularity of the ‘Grand Tour’ had fuelled the Egyptian mania in both France and Britain, with a greater desire on the part of tourists to see the monuments for themselves, despite the greater political instability of that Ottoman region due to the emergence of the Mahdists in the late-nineteenth century. Novelist Amelia Edwards’s best-selling travelogue, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, published in 1877, contributed to increase the Egyptian craze, but its publication precisely in the same year as William Morris set up the Society for the Protection of the Ancient Buildings needs to be set back in a context when amateurs, explorers and Egyptologists not only wanted to acquire further knowledge about Egypt’s Ancient monuments, but also sought to interact with the local authorities and local actors (including the French director of the Egyptian Antiquities and the Bulak Museum, Gaston Maspero) to preserve this cultural and historical heritage. This paper will explore how members of the Egyptian Exploration Fund (1882), the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments in Egypt (1888), the Archaeological Survey (1890) and the Egyptian Research Account (1894), strove hard to conciliate local actors, with the help of the British government, to conduct wide-ranging excavations in between Britain’s bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 and Egypt becoming a British protectorate in 1898, while still ensuring the British public could discover archaeological findings in carefully presented exhibitions and according to very strict rules, enable their nation to even acquire some ‘monuments’.

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Dates et versions

hal-02558634 , version 1 (29-04-2020)

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  • HAL Id : hal-02558634 , version 1

Citer

Stéphanie Prevost. "Dialogues with the dead, and with the living too! British Egyptology societies & the politics of preservation (1882-1898)". Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg. Geographies of Contact : Contexts of Encounter Between Britain and the Middle East, Hélène Ibata, Caroline Lehni, Fanny Moghaddassi & Nader Moghaddam (eds.), , pp.215-233, 2017. ⟨hal-02558634⟩
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