In the late 19th century, the peripatetic Bonfils family photographed ancient Egypt
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Although Louis Daguerre patented the daguerreotype in 1839, it wasn’t until the latter half of the century that photographs of Egypt and the Holy Land began circulating widely in Europe. This second generation of photographers included the Bonfils family, who would publish thousands of albumen prints and lantern slides of the landscapes, architecture and peoples of the Near East. In 1857, the family patriarch, Felix Bonfils, a bookbinder in the French town of Saint-Hippolyte du Fort, married the 20-year-old Lydie Cabanis. Felix then joined a French military expedition to Lebanon, where he became enchanted by the land’s beauty. When he returned to France, he opened a photographic studio—inaugurating a career that would occupy him and his family throughout their lives. Because one of the Bonfils children, Adrien (1861–1929), suffered from respiratory problems, Lydie took the child to Lebanon in search of a more salubrious climate. By 1867 the entire family had relocated to Lebanon, where Felix established a photographic studio called La Maison Bonfils. When Felix died in 1885, Adrien took charge of the business, eventually publishing three catalogues of photographs of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Anatolia and Greece. In 1895, Adrien decided on a new pursuit—opening a hotel in the Lebanese mountains—and relinquished control of La Maison Bonfils to his mother. Lydie Bonfils (shown third from the right in the bottom row of the photo of the Giza pyramid) ran the studio until World War I broke out; she was evacuated from Beirut in 1916 and died in Cairo two years later.
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The paws and haunches of the Great Sphinx at Giza—which probably represents the 4th Dynasty pharaoh Khafre (2520–2494 B.C.)—were largely covered by drifting sand when Felix Bonfils photographed them around 1875. Over the next few decades, the French Egyptologists Auguste Mariette and Gaston Maspero exposed more of the sphinx’s body. The earliest known attempts to clear debris from the sphinx were made by Pharaoh Thutmose IV (1400–1390 B.C.), who had a stela recording the project installed between the sphinx’s forepaws.
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A welter of courtyards, porticos, enclosure walls, columns and obelisks can be seen in Felix Bonfils’s late-19th-century photo and the modern photo of Karnak’s Temple of Amun, as seen from the south. The god Amun, one of the principal gods in the Egyptian pantheon, was probably first worshiped in Thebes toward the end of the third millennium B.C. The Temple of Amun at Karnak dates to the New Kingdom (1550–1070 B.C.).
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Almost entirely buried in debris around 1875 (as shown in Felix Bonfils’s photograph), two seated statues of Ramesses II (1279–1213 B.C.) flank the entranceway to a temple at Luxor, on the east bank of the Nile in ancient Thebes. Two obelisks once graced this entranceway, though only one remains in situ (its edge can be seen in the modern photograph, to the left of the statue at left). The other obelisk was removed to Paris’s Place de la Concorde in 1836.
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A leaning column has been righted in the 125 years since Felix Bonfils photographed the Great Hypostyle Hall in the Temple of Amun at Karnak. The massive interior space, completed by the New Kingdom pharaoh Ramesses II (1279–1213 B.C.), is the largest room in any religious structure ever built. Many of the hall’s 134 elaborately carved, papyrus-shaped columns soar nearly 70 feet high.
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Only the capitals and upper columns of the hypostyle hall of Esna’s first-century A.D. temple, dedicated to the ram-god Khnum, were visible when Felix Bonfils photographed the building around 1875. The hall was first cleared of debris in the late 19th century by the archaeologist Auguste Mariette. The rest of the Greco-Roman temple remains buried beneath modern buildings.
Although Louis Daguerre patented the daguerreotype in 1839, it wasn’t until the latter half of the century that photographs of Egypt and the Holy Land began circulating widely in Europe. This second generation of photographers included the Bonfils family, who would publish thousands of albumen prints and lantern slides of the landscapes, architecture and peoples of the Near East. In 1857, the family patriarch, Felix Bonfils, a bookbinder in the French town of Saint-Hippolyte du Fort, married the 20-year-old Lydie Cabanis. Felix then joined a French military expedition to Lebanon, where he became enchanted by the land’s beauty. When […]
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