Egypt in the European imagination

Egypt in the European imagination has loomed large from the very first written texts in the Greek and Hebrew traditions. Egypt was already immemorially ancient to outsiders, and the idea of Egypt as a figment of the European imagination has continued to be at least as influential in the history of ideas as the actual historical Egypt itself. All Egyptian culture was transmitted through the lens of Hellenistic conceptions of it, until the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics by Champollion in the 1820s.

After Late Antiquity, Egypt became purely the land of a royal individual named "Pharaoh" who oppressed the Hebrews.

The revival of curiosity about the Antique world, seen through written documents, spurred the publication of a collection of Greek texts that had been assembled in Late Antiquity, which were published as the corpus of works of Hermes Trismegistus. But the broken ruins that appeared in settings of the newly prominent iconic episode of the "Rest on the Flight into Egypt" were always of Roman character.

18th century

The 18th century witnessed the rise of a first authentically historicist imagination, one that attempted to picture the cultures of the distant past as truly different in kind, not merely in curious detail and superstitious idolatry. In an atmosphere of antiquarian interest, a sense arose that ancient knowledge was somehow embodied in Egyptian monuments and lore, an Egyptian imagery pervaded the Freemasonry and its imagery, such as they eye of the pyramid, still depicted, with the masonic "Novus Ordo Seclorum", on the Great Seal of the United States (1782), represented on the American dollar bill, and the solemn Egyptianizing flimflam of Mozart's The Magic Flute (1791).

With historicism came the first fictions set in the Egypt of the imagination. Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra had been set partly in Alexandria, but its protagonists were noble and universal, and Shakespeare had not been concerned to evoke local color.

The culture of Romanticism embraced every exotic locale, and its rise in the popular imagination happened to coincide with Napoleon's failed Egyptian campaign. A modern "Battle of the Nile" could hardly fail to stire renewed curiosity about Egypt beyond the figure of Cleopatra. At virtually the same moment the Tarot captured the imagination of the Frenchman Antoine Court de Gebelin who brought them to European attention, giving them occult and mystical qualities, which could best be expressed by attributing to them the keys of the occult knowledge of Egypt.

19th century

On the most popular 19th century level, all of ancient Egypt was reduced in the European imagination to the Nile, the Pyramids and The Sphinx in a setting of sand, characterized on a more literary level in Shelley's "Ozymandias" (1818):

round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ancient Egypt provided the setting for Verdi's stately tragedy Aida, commissioned by the Europeanized Khedive for premiere in Cairo.

20th century

In 1912, the discovery of an exquisite painted limestone bust of Nefertiti, unearthed from its sculptor's workshop near the royal retreat of Amarna, added the first new celebrity of Egypt. The bust, now in Berlin's Egyptian Museum became so famous through the medium of photography that it became the most familiar, most copied work of ancient Egyptian sculpture; Nefertiti's strong-featured profile was a major influence on the new ideals of feminine beauty of the 20th century.

The discovery of the unlooted tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 introduced a new Ancient Egyptian celebrity to join Nefertiti, as "King Tut". Aside from its spectacular treasures, which influenced the design vocabulary of Art Deco, for many years, popular rumors of a "curse", probably fueled by tabloid newspapers at the time of the discovery, have persisted, selecting the early death of some of those who had first entered the tomb. However, a recent study of journals and death records indicates no statistical difference between the age of death of those who entered the tomb and those on the expedition who did not. Indeed, most lived past 70.

Hollywood's Egypt is America's second contribution to the Egypt of the imagination (see the Book of Abraham); the spectacle of Egypt climaxed in sequences of Cecil B. deMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) and Jeanne Crain as Nefertiti in the Cinecittà 1961 Italian motion picture production of Queen of the Nile but collapsed with the failure of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963), the last serious cinematic Egyptian extravaganza.

Tutankhamun has also been commemorated in the whimsical song "King Tut" by comedian Steve Martin.

More recently, Pharaoh is a historical novel by Bolesław Prus, relating to the fall of the Twentieth Dynasty and the New Kingdom).

See also

• Orientalism
• The Bible
• Aida