in need of preservation, and illicit excavations were regularly undertaken. Edwards was impressed by the places she visited and distressed by the lack of protection afforded them. On her return to England she wrote a book about her experience, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877), and devoted the rest of her life to the foundation and running of a society to excavate and preserve the antiquities of Egypt.

The Egypt Exploration Society was established (as the Egypt Exploration Fund) in 1882 with scholarly backing from Reginald S. Poole, keeper of coins and medals at the british museum in London. The society had the financial support of many private donors, chief of whom was Sir Erasmus Wilson, an eminent surgeon who had already defrayed the cost of the transport to London of the obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle.

In the early years, the society concentrated on verifying biblical accounts of ancient Egypt. The first excavation it sponsored, was in 1893 at the site of Tell el-Maskhuta, which the excavator, the Swiss scholar edouard naville, identified with the biblical city of Pithom. In 1894, the young william matthew flinders petrie started work at Tanis, known as Zoan in the Bible. Naville and Petrie, the principal excavators for the society during the nineteenth century, were very different in character and in their approach to excavation and publication. Naville is probably best known for his clearance of the temples of Mentuhotep, Nebhepetre, and Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, while Petrie excavated many sites for the society, the most important of which was abydos, where he identified the tombs of the kings of the earliest dynasties. His work for the society at Diospolis Parva resulted in the invention of a system of sequence dates for the predynastic period that, with modifications, is still a basic tool for field workers today.

The newly formed society did not limit its activities to excavation. One of Edwards’s main concerns was the damage inflicted on Egypt’s standing monuments, and in 1889 the Society launched its Archaeological Survey to make facsimile copies, through nondestructive methods, of the scenes on the walls of temples and tombs. The fine drawings and paintings, which were and still are produced by the Archaeological Survey, provide lasting records of the scenes and texts on the monuments. Another ongoing aspect of the society’s work is that of the Graeco-Roman Branch, founded in 1895, which publishes Greek and Latin texts excavated by the society, particularly those from the site of Oxyrhynchus in Middle Egypt.

The main focus of the society’s work has, however, been that of excavation in Egypt, and occasionally in the Sudan, and the publication of the results of this work. In the 1920s and 1930s, important excavations were undertaken at Abydos, Armant, and el amarna, where a decade and a half of work established the plan of this last unique city established by the “heretic” pharaoh Akhenaten. In 1979, the society returned to el Amarna, with an expedition directed by Barry Kemp, to undertake a complete survey of the site and to carry out selective excavations and conservation work.

In the 1960s, the society participated in the UNESCO campaign to record and save the monuments of nubia before the construction of the Aswan High Dam. The temple and fortress of Buhen and the temples of Semna and Kumma in the Sudan were fully excavated and recorded. Work also began at the site of Qasr Ibrim on Egypt’s southern frontier, as it was feared that Qasr Ibrim would be completely submerged by the rising waters of the lake. Fortunately, this proved not to be the case, and the excavation of the settlement Qasr Ibrim, currently directed by Mark Horton, has produced much interesting information about this site, which was continually occupied from 1500 b.c. to a.d.1812.

Since World War II, much of the society’s work has been concentrated in the region of saqqara, the cemetery of the ancient capital city at Memphis. bryan emery has excavated impressive tombs of the First Dynasty and the temples and labyrinthine galleries devoted to the cults of sacred animals in the late period, and the society has also engaged at Saqqara in a joint expedition with the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden of Leiden in the Netherlands, directed by Geoffrey T. Martin. Since 1975, this expedition has been clearing, recording, and