A World Beneath the Sands: Adventurers and Archaeologists in the Golden Age of Egyptology

What could be more exciting, more exotic or more intrepid than digging in the sands of Egypt in the hope of discovering golden treasures from the age of the pharaohs? Our fascination with ancient Egypt goes back to the ancient Greeks. But the heyday of Egyptology was undoubtedly the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This golden age of scholarship and adventure is neatly book-ended by two epoch-making events: Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphics in 1822 and the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon a hundred years later. In A World Beneath the Sands, the acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson tells the riveting stories of the men and women whose obsession with Egypt's ancient civilisation drove them to uncover its secrets. Champollion, Carter and Carnarvon are here, but so too are their lesser-known contemporaries, such as the Prussian scholar Karl Richard Lepsius, the Frenchman Auguste Mariette and the British aristocrat Lucie Duff-Gordon. Their work – and those of others like them – helped to enrich and transform our understanding of the Nile Valley and its people, and left a lasting impression on Egypt, too. Travellers and treasure-hunters, ethnographers and epigraphers, antiquarians and archaeologists: whatever their motives, whatever their methods, all understood that in pursuing Egyptology they were part of a greater endeavour – to reveal a lost world, buried for centuries beneath the sands.

About the Author :
Professor Toby Wilkinson is an internationally acclaimed Egyptologist, and the prize-winning author of twelve books which have been translated into twelve languages. His books include The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, The Nile and A World Beneath the Sands. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Historical Society, and a member of the international editorial board of the Journal of Egyptian History. He is the Vice-Chancellor of the Fiji National University and a Bye-Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.

Review :
It would be hard to overstate the excellence of Wilkinson's storytelling – and I was surprisingly distraught to think that there can never be a sequel. The definitive account of the golden age of Egyptology It is a story full of drama, with the Nile, the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings as backdrop. That A World Beneath the Sands is also a subtle and stimulating study of the paradoxes of 19th-century colonialism is a bonus indeed. Fascinating . . . A World Beneath the Sands is more than a saga of foreigners in the desert – it also follows Egypt on its rocky path to the 20th century. The story that strings these wonderful characters together is the steady professionalisation of Egyptology — the shift, as Wilkinson puts it, from 'scoundrels to scholars'. A gripping tale . . . excellent The debate over the decolonization of Egyptology and the repatriation of artefacts has only just started. Wilkinson's elegantly written book provides a sound background and a useful biography that will allow readers to understand and participate in that debate. A fascinating story. Riveting . . . Wilkinson is a consummate historian . . . He has mastered the facts with painstaking research and allowed them to speak for themselves. Rarely do the facts speak this clearly. Dramatic, detailed and eccentric-packed . . . as Toby Wilkinson shows, the discovery of lost monuments, grave goods and mummified corpses also stimulated the emergence of their true inheritors, the modern Egyptian nation. Vividly detailed A superbly readable, magnificently entertaining, profoundly thoughtful and scholarly history of the bizarre and determined characters who burrowed into Egypt in comparatively recent history - and who all too often made away with their finds. You will want to read chunks of it aloud to anyone who happens to be around. Wilkinson marshals a wealth of detail into a cohesive and entertaining narrative . . . an essential portrait Few can bring us ancient Egypt with such dynamism as Toby Wilkinson. In A World Beneath the Sands, he has excelled himself in bringing to life the intriguing and swashbuckling story of Egypt’s discovery. He shows us how much what we seek from the past has always told us about ourselves.