to present a wide-ranging and detailed view of ancient Egypt in his book on its manners and customs. Certainly there were inaccuracies, misconceptions, and omissions in the publications of the early nineteenth century, but in many respects the fundamentals were already known and the last one and a half centuries have arguably been more concerned with filling in the details than breaking new ground.

Although the greatest individual achievement in the history of Egyptology was undoubtedly the deciphering of hieroglyphs by Champollion, the birth of Egyptian archaeology owes a great deal to the work of another French Egyptologist, auguste mariette. Born and educated in Boulogne-sur-Mer in northern France, Mariette was inspired to take up Egyptology when he examined the papers bequeathed to his family by his cousin Nestor L’Hote, who had served as a draftsman on Champollion’s Franco-Tuscan expedition. In 1850, Mariette was sent to Egypt to obtain papyri for the collection of the Louvre, where he had been employed to inventory the Egyptian inscriptions. Once in Egypt, however, he embarked on a career in excavation, beginning with a remarkable discovery of the Serapeum (the burial place of the sacred Apis bulls) at saqqara.

As a result of his prolific archaeological work at many different sites (including Giza, abydos, Thebes, and Elephantine), Mariette was appointed in 1858 to the office of first director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service (now known as the Supreme Council of Antiquities). In this post he was able to reduce the amount of plundering of Egyptian antiquities as well as to create the nucleus of a national archaeological collection (housed initially in a disused warehouse at Bulaq, the port of Cairo, and most recently at the Egyptian Museum in the center of Cairo). During the next twenty years he excavated at some thirty-five different sites and gradually expanded the national museum.

However, despite the efforts of Mariette and his successor Gaston Maspero, the plundering of ancient sites remained a common problem. Such important finds as the Deir el-Bahari cache of royal mummies and the El Amarna archive of cuneiform tablets were initially plundered by local people and only came to scholarly attention when items became available on the art market. Maspero’s official discovery of the Deir el-Bahari cache in 1881 involved something of a detective story in which he traced a hieratic papyrus of the Twenty-first Dynasty pharaoh Pinudjem back to the Abd el-Rassul family in the Theban village of Gurna, the family that had first uncovered the mummies ten years earlier.

Flinders Petrie, George Reisner, and the Introduction of Scientific Archaeology

Between the period of organized plundering undertaken by such men as giovanni belzoni and Drovetti in the early nineteenth century and the excavations of French scholars Emile Amelineau and J.L. De Morgan in the 1890s, there was surprisingly little development in the techniques employed by Egyptian archaeologists. As John Wortham puts it in his history of British Egyptology: “Although archaeologists no longer used dynamite to excavate sites, their techniques remained unrefined” (Wortham 1971, 106).

The concept of “clearance,” as opposed to scientific excavation, was arguably one of the most insidious and retrogressive aspects of nineteenth-century archaeology in Egypt. The very word appeared to substantiate the fallacy that the sand simply had to be removed in order to reveal the significant monuments hidden below, thus helping to discourage the proper consideration of stratigraphic excavation and the appreciation of all components of a site such as sand, shards, mud bricks, and towering stone gateways as being equally important and integral elements of the archaeological record. The use of the term clearance also encouraged the feeling that the antiquities of Egypt simply needed to be exposed and displayed rather than being analyzed, interpreted, or reconstructed. From the 1880s onward, however, the emergence of more scientific approaches gradually discredited the practice, although it was many years before clearance techniques could be said to have been eradicated.

Two individuals, W.M. Flinders Petrie and george reisner, were primarily responsible for the modernization of archaeology in Egypt in