Dialogues with the Dead Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822-1922 [Hardcover]

Almost every great figure in nineteenth-century Britain, from Thomas Carlyle to William Gladstone to Charles Darwin, read histories of ancient Egypt and argued about their content. Egypt became a focal point in disputes over the nature of human origins, the patterns underlying human history, the status and purpose of the Bible, and the cultural role of the classics. Egyptian archaeology ingrained its influence everywhere from the lecture halls of the ancient universities to the devotional aids of rural Sunday schools, and the plots of sensation fiction.

Dialogues with the Deadshows, for the first time, how Egyptology's development over the century that followed the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script in 1822 can be understood only through its intimate entanglement with the historical, scientific, and religious contentions which defined the era.

Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Introduction: The Accession of Menes
1. The Old Kingdom: Ancient Egypt at mid century
2. First Intermediate Period: The Religion of Science and the Science of Religion
3. The Middle Kingdom: Orthodox Egypt, 1880-1900
4. Second Intermediate Period: Petrie's Prehistory and the Oxyrhynchus papyri
5. The New Kingdom: Ancient Egypt and the Cycles of Civilisation after 1900
Bibliography
Index

David Gangeis Lecturer in History at the University of Birmingham.