Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, vol. 3: From 1914 to the Twenty-First Century.

• Author: Reid, Donald Malcolm

Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, vol. 3: From 1914 to the Twenty-First Century. By JASON THOMPSON. Cairo: THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO PRESS, 2018. Pp. xvii + 598.

Back in 1957, John Wilson of the University of Chicago regretted to the present reviewer the absence of a good history of Egyptology and suggested sampling the memoirs of Wallis Budge and Flinders Petrie. A few years later, Wilson published a history of American Egyptology and then his autobiography. Jason Thompson's three-volume Wonderful Things goes a long way toward filling the lacuna that Wilson lamented so long ago.

A historian of the British empire and the Middle East rather than an Egyptologist. Thompson is most at home in the nineteenth-century British archives he earlier mined for his excellent studies of Egyptologist Gardiner Wilkinson and orientalist and Arabist E. W. Lane.

Following a Western civilization framework, volume 1 of Wonderful Things gives a nod to ancient Egyptians' ideas about their history, then broadens out on Greek and Roman perceptions of Egypt from Homer to the fifth century CE. An ensuing "Medieval Hiatus" (chap. 2) balances European ideas about pharaonic civilization with those of their Arab contemporaries. After a chapter each on European Renaissance and Enlightenment perceptions, the remaining two-thirds of the volume covers the period from the brief French conquest in 1798 to the death in 1881 of Auguste Mariette, founder of Egypt's Antiquities Service and Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. Young General Bonaparte, the expedition's Description del'Egypte, consul-collectors Salt and Drovetti, buccaneering collector Belzoni, Champollion the decipherer, and Egyptological pioneers Wilkinson, Richard Lepsius, and Samuel Birch are set alongside many lesser figures.

The second volume, "The Golden Age" 1881-1914, highlights Mariette's successor Gaston Maspero, excavator Flinders Petrie and Britain's Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF), and philologist Adolf Erman and his "Berlin school." Ludwig Borchardt opened a German archaeological institute in Cairo to compete with France's IFAO, and James Henry Breasted (University of Chicago), George Reisner (Harvard and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts), and Herbert Winlock (Metropolitan Museum of Art) brought American professional Egyptology onto the scene.

Volume 3 covers the century since 1914. alternating between fieldwork in Egypt (and occasionally Sudan) and the library, museum, and lecture hall back home...