What is Egyptomania?
Describing our love for Egypt
The term ‘Egyptomania’ refers to the wider world’s fascination with ancient Egypt, whose ongoing influence can be found across almost every aspect of visual culture, from architecture and clothing to everyday objects found around the home.
Yet this is no modern phenomenon and can be traced back over two millennia to a time when Greek travellers to Egypt were clearly inspired by the many wonders they encountered there. So too the Romans, who took away so much of Egypt’s ancient statuary and architecture that there are now more obelisks in Rome than remain in Egypt.
By the Renaissance when European scholars began translating Greek and Latin texts and found repeated references to Egypt, it became an increasingly popular destination on the Grand Tour, with York-born George Sandys touring the Giza pyramids in 1611. With his landmark publication of 1615 the first account in the English language to correctly identify the monuments as royal tombs, Sandys’ book and subsequent publications triggered a wave of Egyptomania in which Europe’s elite began to create increasingly monumental examples of Egyptian-inspired architecture as a means of marking their own status.
In 1798 Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt and its aftermath triggered another huge wave of Egyptomania, his scholars’ discovery of the Rosetta Stone subsequently translated by French scholar Jean-François Champollion in 1822 very much establishing the subject of Egyptology as a discipline.
Yet the greatest impact made by ancient Egypt on the modern world was exactly a century later in 1922, when ‘Tutmania’ following the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun by the 5th Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter brought ancient Egypt into the lives of millions via newsreels and newspapers.
Since then there have been further peaks of interest, for example following the release of the 1963 film Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor, the touring exhibition of Tutankhamun’s Treasures in 1972 marking the half-century since his tomb’s discovery and most recently the discovery’s centenary celebrations of 2022.
In every case the ways in which ancient Egypt is received and interpreted by each new generation can reveal so much, not only about the world’s most fascinating ancient culture but its ability to continue to resonate with so many of us around the globe.
