his colleagues in the 1930s (see Powell 1973, 61, where Pendlebury is said to be part of “a new generation of archaeologists openly disapproving of what they regarded as the amateurish policies of the past”).

Napoleon, Champollion, and the Problem of Integrating Textual and Archaeological Data

Just as it is difficult to ascertain the date at which European antiquarianism was superseded by archaeology (see Daniel 1967; Piggott 1989), it is difficult to be precise about the point at which the simple enthusiasm for Egyptian antiquities was transformed into something resembling the modern discipline of Egyptology. Most histories of Egyptian archaeology, however, see the Napoleonic expedition at the beginning of the nineteenth century as the first systematic attempt to record and describe the standing remains of Pharaonic Egypt. The importance of the Description de l’Egypte, the multivolume publication that resulted from the expedition, lay not only in its high standards of draftsmanship and accuracy but also in the fact that it constituted a continuous and internally consistent appraisal by a single group of scholars, thus providing the first real assessment of ancient Egypt in its totality.

However, the beginning of Egyptology as a complete historical discipline, comprising the study of both texts and archaeology, was made possible by the more deskbound endeavors of the French linguist jean-françois champollion. His decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822, closely followed by Thomas Young’s decipherment of the demotic script in the late 1820s, transformed Egyptology almost overnight from prehistory into history. The translation of a whole range of documents, containing such information as the names of gods and kings as well as the details of religious rituals and economic transactions, soon enabled the field of Egyptology to take its place alongside the study of the classical civilizations. Champollion’s discovery, however, had also set in motion an inexorable process of academic divergence between linguists and excavators, between historians and anthropologists.

From the moment that hieroglyphs, both hieratic and demotic, began to be translated, Egyptology was characterized by a constant struggle to reconcile the kinds of general socioeconomic evidence preserved in the archaeological record with the more specific historical information contained in ancient texts. Although the newly discovered knowledge of the texts had the potential to revive the very thoughts and emotions of the ancient Egyptians, it also introduced the temptation to assume that the answers to questions about Egyptian civilization could be found in the written word rather than in the archaeologist’s trench. The purely archaeological view of Egyptian culture, as preserved in the form of buried walls, artifacts, and organic remains, would henceforth have to be seen in the context of a richly detailed corpus of texts written on stone and papyrus. The absence of written records in prehistoric archaeology may be frustrating, but it has undoubtedly allowed prehistoric archaeologists greater freedom to evolve new theories and hypotheses that are based purely on the surviving material culture. In Egyptian archaeology, as in other historical disciplines, the written word, with all its potential for subjectivity and persuasion, has a paradoxical tendency to obscure, and sometimes eclipse, the archaeological evidence (see Kemp 1984).

It is interesting, from the point of view of the dichotomy between texts and archaeology, to compare the history of Egyptian archaeology with that of Mayan studies, given that Mayanists appear to have experienced the reverse situation: their discipline was predominantly anthropological and archaeological until Mayan glyphs began to be deciphered in the 1980s, producing a sudden flood of texts that have significantly altered the perception of the Mayan culture. In some respects, the suspicion with which Mayan archaeologists initially regarded the historical information provided by their philological colleagues (see Coe 1992, 270–274; Schele and Miller 1986) is a mirror image of the reaction of many traditional text-based Egyptologists to the increasingly science-based and anthropological analyses of Pharaonic Egypt produced by archaeologists in recent years. Both Mayanists and