world contain millions of Egyptian antiquities, and an even greater number of remains are still in situ, ranging from the temples, tombs, and cities of the Nile Valley and delta to rock inscriptions carved on remote crags in the Libyan Desert, the Eastern (Arabian) Desert, and the Sinai Peninsula. Three principal factors have facilitated the survival of an unusual wealth of detail concerning pharaonic Egypt: a penchant for grandiose and elaborate funerary arrangements, arid conditions suitable for preservation, and the use of writing on a wide variety of media.

The history of the rediscovery of ancient Egypt is in many respects the same as that of any other civilization in that centuries of ignorance and plundering were gradually replaced by the more enlightened approaches of late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century scholars. Within this broad trend, however, various specific aspects of Egyptology, such as epigraphy, excavation, philology, and anthropology, have progressed at very different rates.

For most of its history, Egyptian archaeology has tended to be extremely conservative, both in overall conceptual terms and with regard to methods of postexcavation analysis and interpretation of archaeological data. Even in the early 1970s there were still relatively few indications that archaeologists working in Egypt and the Near East were embarking on any radical changes in their methods of analysis and interpretation, particularly when compared with the many advances that were being made in prehistory and historical archaeology elsewhere in the world. While lewis binford was laying the foundations of his “middle range theory” (Binford 1972) and Michael Schiffer was formulating the laws of “behavioral archaeology” (Schiffer 1976), most Egyptologists were still preoccupied with the business of pure data gathering and history writing.

In Bruce Trigger’s A History of Archaeological Thought (1989), there are a mere handful of references to Egyptian archaeology: only the invention by sir william matthew flinders petrie of an early form of seriation known as “sequence dating” merits a full page or so of discussion. Although this lack of references may well be a fair assessment of the Egyptologists’ contribution to archaeological thought, the excavation of Egyptian sites has, over the last 150 years, provided a steady stream of valuable data. This rapidly expanding database has not only provided new insights into the material culture of the pharaonic period, but it has also made a significant contribution to the creation of a chronological framework for the Mediterranean region. The central role played by Egyptology in the formulation of ancient chronology has lent greater significance to recent attempts to pinpoint flaws in the chronology of the Pharaonic period (James, Thorpe, Kokkinos, Morkot, and Frankish l991; Rohl 1995), but the established chronology is now a dense matrix of archaeological and textual details that have proved difficult to sort out.

Virtually all nineteenth-century excavations in Egypt were designed to provide art treasures for European and American museums and private collections, since the expeditions’ financial support invariably derived from those sources. Even in the late nineteenth century, when scholarly societies, such as the egypt exploration society and the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, began to fund excavations with specific research aims in mind, there were still sponsors who required a steady stream of antiquities. It is also evident from excavation records and publications that new archaeological data were regarded primarily as a means of supplementing and illustrating the ample textual record of Egyptian history rather than as the basis for predominantly archaeological reconstructions of the past.

It is symptomatic of the largely historical motivation of pre–World War II archaeologists in Egypt that John Pendlebury, the young director of the British excavations at el amarna, the most important urban site in Egypt, described his enthusiasm for the site in the following way: “One cannot tell in what part of the city some important historical document may come to light. A mere slum house may contain an inscription that will revolutionize history” (Pendlebury 1935, xxviii). The implications of this remark are compounded by the fact that Pendlebury was regarded as an unusually archaeological Egyptologist compared to many of