ABSTRACT

As the great cultural event of 1988, the Glasgow Garden Festival ran its ecstatic course, on a smaller and quieter scale another cultural phenomenon, pharaoh fever, was abroad in Edinburgh. Surrounding the fantastically successful Gold of the Pharaohs exhibition of the plundered requisites of the tomb of King Psusennes, a substantial industry in commercial Egyptology arose. In the exhibition shop you could buy pharaoh posters, pencils, tea towels, t-shirts, mugs and other miscellanea, simulated pendants and brooches, casts of Osiris, Horus, etc. Across the road in the Waverley Market, you could purchase ‘Gold of the Pharaohs’ jewellery or contemporary crafted Egyptian tapestries and other artefacts. A major department store sponsored an exhibition of nineteenth-century lithographs of Egypt, and local libraries put on a variety of exhibitions and events which were enthusiastically advertised-‘you only have to look into your local library these days to be transported back to the land of Pharaohs as you’re liable to find palm-trees, Egyptian wall friezes and even an occasional mummy!’