Towards a History of Egyptology: Proceedings of the Egyptological Section of the 8th ESHS Conference in London, 2018.

• Author: Reid, Donald M.

Towards a History of Egyptology: Proceedings of the Egyptological Section of the 8th ESHS Conference in London, 2018. Edited by HANA NAVRATILOVA, THOMAS L. GERTZEN, AIDAN DODSON, and ANDREW BEDNARSKI. Investigano Orientis, vol. 4. Münster: ZAPHON, 2019. Pp. 304, illus. [EURO]79.

This thought-provoking volume is another indicator that the history of Egyptology is finally coming of age. Even leaving aside biographies and studies of one institution or national Egyptological school, publications on the subject since 2015 include edited volumes by Carruthers (2015), Langer (2017), and Bednarski, Dodson, and Ikram (2021); single-authored histories by Thompson (3 vols., 2015-18) and D. Reid (2015); and Aegyptiaca: Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt (2017-). Cambridge University Press has announced A History of Egyptology (ed. Ikram, Dodson, Lacovara. and Bednarski) for late 2020.

Noting the sponsor of the conference that gave rise to this volume--the European Society for the History of Sciences (ESS), the foreword hails this as the first time Egyptology has been considered in a history of science framework. Histories of science have usually emphasized the natural sciences rather than the humanities. Drawing on history, philology, archaeology, anthropology, and zoology among other disciplines, Egyptology spans the conventional sciences/humanities divide.

Chapters by Andrew Bednarski and Hana Navratilova make up the opening thematic section, "Concepts, Models and Approaches to the History of Egyptology." Bednarski's "Building a Disciplinary History: The Challenge of Egyptology" notes Enlightenment influences on the savants of Bonaparte's 1798 Egyptian expedition and on Champollion, the main decipherer of hieroglyphs; nineteenth-century British efforts to vindicate the Bible through Egyptology; individual and institution-centered approaches to the history of Egyptology; and colonial and postcolonial perspectives. In "Limits of Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Life-Writing in the History of Egyptology," Navratilova defends a "biographical turn" in disciplinary histories of science and humanities. Her chapter is less international than Bednarski's: she does cite American James Henry Breasted and Briton Flinders Petrie in weighing the pros and cons of biography in writing the history of Egyptology, but takes most of her examples from the Czech scholars central to her coauthored chapter later in the volume.

The ten remaining chapters are...