Reviews

056

Ancient Egypt, it seems, is everywhere. It is a rare evening when one cannot find a television documentary highlighting some exciting Egyptian archaeological work. The many books and magazines filling our book shops, along with the abundant resources of the Internet, must satisfy even the most voracious of Egyptophiles.

The 1922 discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun (1336–1327 B.C.E.) thrust Egyptology into the media spotlight. Not only has the serious study of ancient Egypt increased multifold, with scores of heavy tomes being published each year, but discoveries from ancient Egypt have fueled the passion of an enraptured general public. This “Egyptomania” is apparent in the numerous Hollywood releases on Egyptian themes (usually highly inaccurate portrayals of Egypt and archaeology!), as well as in a rich range of Egypt-related fictional works—such as the Amelia Peabody mysteries, the intricately written historical novels of Pauline Gedge, and the comic-book exploits of the Egyptian cat “Sheba.”

It all began, so to speak, with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799. The decipherment of the tri-lingual stone (written in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian demotic and Greek) by Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion made available a massive body of written records from ancient Egypt. Prior to that time, our knowledge of ancient Egyptian civilization had come primarily from such classical authors as Herodotus (c. 485–425 B.C.E.), Strabo (c. 60 B.C.E.–21 C.E.) and Pliny (23–79 C.E.), as well as from the Hebrew Bible. The classical authors, however, provide only a rudimentary picture of ancient Egypt very late in its 3,000-year history (the last half of the first millennium B.C.); and the biblical account represents a selective presentation of Egypt through the lens of a non-Egyptian religious document.

Because of its favorable climate and the dry desert setting of many of its temples and cemeteries, ancient Egypt bequeathed a rich body of written records—from monumental inscriptions to papyrus scrolls. As more and more texts were recovered in the 19th century, and as the young discipline of archaeology began to uncover and understand ancient ruins, the world came into intimate contact with a lost civilization. By the end of the century, many of the fundamentals of Egyptology had been established; not only were the languages and scripts understood, but a good deal was also known about pharaonic-period history, culture and religion.

James Henry Breasted’s Ancient Records of Egypt was in many ways the culmination of the 19th-century text-based reconstruction of ancient Egypt. This five-volume work, first published in 1906, is a compilation and translation (with commentary) of all then-known texts of historical value from the beginning of the dynasties (c. 3000 B.C.E.) to the Persian invasion (525 B.C.E.). It thus represents the primary data upon which ancient historians and archaeologists have reconstructed the history of pharaonic civilization. 057The republication of this seminal work after nearly a century, by the University of Illinois, is as welcome as it is unexpected.

Often considered the founder of American Egyptology, Breasted (1865–1935) attended the Chicago Theological Seminary and then Yale University, where he studied ancient Near Eastern languages under William Rainey Harper (who later became the first president of the newly founded University of Chicago). In 1891 he went to Berlin to undertake graduate studies with the well-known Egyptologist Adolphe Erman. In Germany, Breasted became involved with one of the great scholarly efforts of the era: the Berlin Wörterbuch (a dictionary of Middle Egyptian, the classical phase of the ancient Egyptian language). Completing his Ph.D in 1894, he then returned to the United States and, with Harper’s support, took an appointment at the University of Chicago. In 1919 Breasted founded the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, which remains a leading center for research in the ancient Near East and Egypt.

Never an archaeologist, Breasted stressed the importance of the written record as providing the primary window on the past. His interest in documenting ancient monuments and texts led to his establishing the Chicago Epigraphic Survey—a University of Chicago project still underway—devoted to documenting all ancient Egyptian inscriptions.

Breasted was equally concerned that the ancient Egyptian records be available to more than just a handful of specialists. This motive led to the Ancient Records of Egypt, which Breasted largely completed between 1899 and 1905, while he was actively involved with the Wörterbuch project. Clearly, his work on the Wörterbuch made Ancient Records possible—for the Wörterbuch brought before him thousands of inscriptions he would not otherwise have seen. The result was Ancient Records, which was (and 059remains to this day) a unique work: 10,000 manuscript pages with many never-before-published inscriptions.

This masterpiece was intended to serve as companion to a work Breasted had published a year earlier: the History of Egypt (1905). Breasted ambitiously intended the History of Egypt to provide a narrative synthesis of Egyptian history and Ancient Records to provide the actual data (primary historical documents) from which that history had been reconstructed. The past century, however, has treated these two works very differently. The History of Egypt has long been supplanted by an abundant and ever-growing number of general histories, which have benefited from the considerable advances made in the field over the course of the 20th century. Such is not the case with the still-impressive Ancient Records, which, in its scope and content, has never been equaled. One reason is that Egyptology has become so specialized that scholars are not interested—or perhaps not prepared—to undertake so large a project as publishing an updated anthology of Egypt’s known historical texts.

In many respects, Breasted’s Ancient Records is a dated work—an issue considered in detail by Peter Piccione in his introduction to the University of Illinois’s new five-volume paperback edition. Modern Egyptology is a more nuanced and circumspect discipline than the Egyptology of Breasted’s generation. Ancient texts, particularly those of historical content (such as the great battle reliefs of Ramesses II and III), today tend to be analyzed as much in terms of their ideological and political motivations as for any historical facts that may be recorded. And a greater appreciation has emerged of the ways in which “the facts” were often selectively chosen and manipulated by the ancient authors of monumental and historical texts.

Also slightly out of date in Breasted’s Ancient Records is his often colorful terminology. For example, he regularly translates terms for foreign enemies as “troglodytes,” a word that would not be selected by a modern scholar (even if it might accurately impart the disdain that Egyptians typically held for foreign enemies!).

In addition, a significant number of important texts have come to light since the writing of Ancient Records. One has to consult other sources, for example, to find the important inscriptions of the 16th-century B.C.E. king Kamose (excavated between 1908 and 1954), which detail the campaigns of the Theban kingdom against the Asian Hyksos kings, whose capital was in the Nile Delta. Nonetheless, Breasted’s great work remains valuable in its scope, the accuracy of its translations and the usefulness of its commentary. It is a rare achievement in any scientific discipline to create a work that can weather a century.

Ancient Egypt, it seems, is everywhere. It is a rare evening when one cannot find a television documentary highlighting some exciting Egyptian archaeological work. The many books and magazines filling our book shops, along with the abundant resources of the Internet, must satisfy even the most voracious of Egyptophiles.