A History of World Egyptology

The Rosetta Stone that proved key to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, discovered by a French military engineer in 1799 (now in the British Museum), and the gold mask of Tutankhamun, discovered by British Egyptologist Howard Carter in 1922 (now in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum), are generally considered the world’s most-famous objects from ancient Egypt. They also suggest the enduring international nature of Egyptology. This began with the Anglo-French rivalry over the decipherment between Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion in 1814-1823 and the French-Italian collaboration between Champollion and Ippolito Rosellini in their pioneering 1828-1829 expedition to Egypt, which appli