ABSTRACT
Stories of nineteenth-century Egyptian exploration have been popular in English works for more than two hundred years. For scholars interested in the history of Egyptology and archaeology, the events at the heart of these stories form logical starting points for research. For more casual readers, these events evoke entertaining stories of danger and adventure in an exotic land (Belzoni 1820; Brier 1999; Buhl 1986; Ceram 1952; David 2000; Denon 1802; Ebers 1878; Fagan 1975; Trigger 1989; Wilson 1964). Many of these accounts over the past twenty-five years, both popular and academic, have used early nineteenth-century source material (AUC Press 1997; Gillispie and Dewachter 1987; Mayes 2008; Russell 2001 and 2005). Given the relative popularity of Egyptian exploration in the early 1800s, and the uses to which contemporaneous material has been put, it is not surprising that unpublished works from this period have occasionally been reproduced. These reproductions form exciting new sources of data to flesh out our understanding of the early days of Egyptology.
