Napoleon I’s expedition to and short-lived conquest of Egypt in 1798 was the culmination of 18th-century interest in the East. The expedition was accompanied by a team of scholars who recorded the ancient and contemporary country, issuing in 1809–28 the Description de l’Égypte, the most comprehensive study to be made before the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script. The renowned Rosetta Stone, which bears a decree of Ptolemy V Epiphanes in hieroglyphs, demotic script, and Greek alphabetic characters, was discovered during the expedition; it was ceded to the British after the French capitulation in Egypt and became the property of the British Museum in London. This document greatly assisted the decipherment, accomplished by Jean-François Champollion in 1822.
Rosetta StoneThe Rosetta Stone, basalt slab from Fort Saint-Julien, Rosetta (Rashīd), Egypt, 196 bce; in the British Museum, London.© Photos.com/Jupiterimages
The Egyptian language revealed by the decipherment and decades of subsequent study is a member of the Afro-Asiatic (formerly Hamito-Semitic) language family. Egyptian is closest to the family’s Semitic branch but is distinctive in many respects. During several millennia it changed greatly. The script does not write vowels, and because Greek forms for royal names were known from Manetho long before the Egyptian forms became available, those used to this day are a mixture of Greek and Egyptian.
In the first half of the 19th century, vast numbers of antiquities were exported from Egypt, forming the nucleus of collections in many major museums. These were removed rather than excavated, inflicting, together with the economic development of the country, colossal damage on ancient sites. At the same time, many travelers and scholars visited the country and recorded the monuments. The most important, and remarkably accurate, record was produced by the Prussian expedition led by Karl Richard Lepsius, in 1842–45, which explored sites as far south as the central Sudan.
In the mid-19th century, Egyptology developed as a subject in France and in Prussia. The Antiquities Service and a museum of Egyptian antiquities were established in Egypt by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, a great excavator who attempted to preserve sites from destruction, and the Prussian Heinrich Brugsch, who made great progress in the interpretation of texts of many periods and published the first major Egyptian dictionary. In 1880 Flinders (later Sir Flinders) Petrie began more than 40 years of methodical excavation, which created an archaeological framework for all the chief periods of Egyptian culture except for remote prehistory. Petrie was the initiator of much in archaeological method, but he was later surpassed by George Andrew Reisner, who excavated for American institutions from 1899 to 1937. The greatest late 19th-century Egyptologist was Adolf Erman of Berlin, who put the understanding of the Egyptian language on a sound basis and wrote general works that for the first time organized what was known about the earlier periods.
Complete facsimile copies of Egyptian monuments have been published since the 1890s, providing a separate record that becomes more vital as the originals decay. The pioneer of this scientific epigraphy was James Henry Breasted of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, who began his work in 1905 and shortly thereafter was joined by others. Many scholars are now engaged in epigraphy.
In the first half of the 20th century, some outstanding archaeological discoveries were made: Howard Carter uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922; Pierre Montet found the tombs of 21st–22nd-dynasty kings at Tanis in 1939–44; and W.B. Emery and L.P. Kirwan found tombs of the Ballānah culture (the 4th through the 6th century ce) in Nubia in 1931–34. The last of these was part of the second survey of Lower Nubia in 1929–34, which preceded the second raising of the Aswān Dam. This was followed in the late 1950s and ’60s by an international campaign to excavate and record sites in Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia before the completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1970. Lower Nubia is now one of the most thoroughly explored archaeological regions of the world. Most of its many temples have been moved, either to higher ground nearby, as happened to Abu Simbel and Philae, or to quite different places, including various foreign museums. The campaign also had the welcome consequence of introducing a wide range of archaeological expertise to Egypt, so that standards of excavation and recording in the country have risen greatly.
Carter, HowardHoward Carter.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Excavation and survey of great importance have continued in many places. For example, at Ṣaqqārah, part of the necropolis of the ancient city of Memphis, new areas of the Sarapeum have been uncovered with rich finds, and a major New Kingdom necropolis is being thoroughly explored. The site of ancient Memphis itself has been systematically surveyed; its position in relation to the ancient course of the Nile has been established; and urban occupation areas have been studied in detail for the first time.
Egyptology is, however, a primarily interpretive subject. There have been outstanding contributions—for example in art, for which Heinrich Schäfer established the principles of the rendering of nature, and in language. New light has been cast on texts, the majority of which are written in a simple metre that can serve as the basis of sophisticated literary works. The physical environment, social structure, kingship, and religion are other fields in which great advances have been made, while the reconstruction of the outline of history is constantly being improved in detail.
The Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods
Predynastic Egypt
Egypt, ancientSites associated with Egypt from Predynastic to Byzantine times.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Egypt, ancientSites associated with Egypt from Predynastic to Byzantine times, Nile delta region.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Egypt, ancientSites associated with Egypt from Predynastic to Byzantine times, Thebes region.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.The peoples of predynastic Egypt were the successors of the Paleolithic inhabitants of northeastern Africa, who had spread over much of its area; during wet phases they had left remains in regions as inhospitable as the Great Sand Sea. The final desiccation of the Sahara was not complete until the end of the 3rd millennium bce; over thousands of years people must have migrated from there to the Nile valley, the environment of which improved as the region dried out. In this process the decisive change from the nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life of Paleolithic times to settled agriculture has not so far been identified. Sometime after 5000 bce the raising of crops was introduced, probably on a horticultural scale, in small local cultures that seem to have penetrated southward through Egypt into the oases and the Sudan. Several of the basic food plants that were grown are native to the Middle East, so the new techniques probably spread from there. No large-scale migration need have been involved, and the cultures were at first largely self-contained. The preserved evidence for them is unrepresentative because it comes from the low desert, where relatively few people lived; as was the case later, most people probably settled in the valley and delta.
The earliest known Neolithic cultures in Egypt have been found at Marimda Banī Salāma, on the southwestern edge of the delta, and farther to the southwest, in Al-Fayyūm. The site at Marimda Banī Salāma, which dates to the 6th–5th millennium bce, gives evidence of settlement and shows that cereals were grown. In Al-Fayyūm, where evidence dates to the 5th millennium bce, the settlements were near the shore of Lake Qārūn, and the settlers engaged in fishing. Marimda is a very large site that was occupied for many centuries. The inhabitants lived in lightly built huts; they may have buried their dead within their houses, but areas where burials have been found may not have been occupied by dwellings at the same time. Pottery was used in both cultures. In addition to these Egyptian Neolithic cultures, others have been identified in the Western Desert, in the Second Cataract area, and north of Khartoum. Some of these are as early as the Egyptian ones, while others overlapped with the succeeding Egyptian predynastic cultures.