ABSTRACT
The contradictions and paradoxes implicit in the Napoleonic encounter with Ancient Egypt remain with us, in the uneasy coexistence of Egyptology with a strong public desire to retain a source of mystery, sensuous experience and self-knowledge. The domestication of Ancient Egypt also found expression in contemporary European fashions for interior design, instigated during the late 18th century by Giovanni Battista Piranesi's spectacular Egyptianizing fireplaces. In France and Italy these fashions originated under the patronage of the Ancien Rgime but were incorporated into bourgeois tastes during the early 19th century through the production of cabinets, clocks and more minor household articles such as teapots, which had been produced in Egyptianizing styles by Josiah Wedgwood for the mercantile middle classes of England as early as the 1770s. The chapter discusses their implications for the contemporary study of what was once habitually referred to as the ancient Orient.
