Author Description

The story of the beginnings of research into the wonders of antiquity in Egypt is unique in at least one point. In no other land does a conquering army march at the head of the pioneers of exploration; but the true beginnings of the century and a quarter of research which has given to us so many wonders from the Land of the Nile are to be found with that amazing troop of learned camp-followers who accompanied NapoleonÕs army on the expedition of 1798. The wonders of ancient Egypt had never altogether been blotted from the memory and the interest of man, as was the case with some of the other lands of the Classic East. The pages of Herodotus, never fuller or more vivid than when he is dealing with Egypt, prevented that oblivion; and therefore Herodotus has some right to be named at the very beginning of the story of the exploration of ancient Egypt as the pioneer of pioneers. But the world was first really awakened to the richness of the Treasury of Egypt by the colossal production, twelve volumes of plates and twenty-four of text, which was the result of the untiring labours of Vivant Denon and his collaboratorsÑthe famousDescription de lÕEgypteÑa work almost comparable in scale and grandeur with the monuments which it described. Few armies have left behind them such a memorial of their passage across a landÑthe more credit to the man whose inexhaustibly fertile brain conceived the idea of making even war subserve the interests of science. Unfortunately, however, the tie with international strifes and jealousies, which had drawn the French savants originally to the Nile Valley, remained unbroken for many years; and questions of arch¾ology were continually complicated by questions of national pride and prestige, so that the early story of Egyptian exploration is not the story of pure research, conducted for the love of truth and of antiquity, but very often merely the story of how the representative of France strove with the representative of Britain or Ital