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The Pursuit of a Modern History for a Semimodern Field

of the natural history collections to another site in 1861, antiquities became the focus of the museum alongside the books and manuscripts that more than a century later were distinguished as the British Library. Five central chapters treat major installations of the growing Egyptian collection between 1759 and 1880, when Britain was about to occupy Egypt and British Egyptology was beginning to become more specialized. The 1880s and 1890s saw the founding of the Egypt Exploration Fund (later Society), the addition of the Egyptologist E. A. W. Budge to the museum staff, the creation of the first British chair in Egyptology at University College, London, for Flinders Petrie, and growing American involvement in the field. For most of the previous 120 years, in contrast, the museum had “acted more as a reluctant recipient of important donations and bargain offers than as an institution intent on creating an impressive Egyptian collection” (p. 218). Moser selects a contemporary catchphrase to characterize the acquisition, display, and reception of each successive installation of the Egyptian collection. The mostly small amulets, scarabs, and figures of animal gods unveiled in 1759—along with the mummies and coffins, which would remain perennial favorites—were summed up as “wondrous curiosities.” Exhibited alongside such curiosities as Cromwell’s watch and a picture painted on a cobweb, their instructional value was limited indeed. In 1801 the British captured the Egyptian collection that Napoleon Bonaparte’s scholars had assembled, and George III’s presentation of it to the museum in 1802 gave impetus to the construction of the Townley Gallery. The new Egyptian display that opened there in 1808 included the Rosetta Stone, two obelisks of Nectanebo, a colossal stone fist and a ram’s head, and a large statue of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet. It had the virtue of presenting Egyptian sculpture as a major collection, but the works were perceived as “colossal monstrosities,” suffering in comparison to the perceived masterpieces of classical Greek sculpture on display in the betterlighted and more extensive adjacent galleries. Six years of haggling preceded the museum’s grudging purchase of the collection that the British consul general Henry Salt had amassed in Egypt in competition with his French rival Bernardino Drovetti. The centerpiece of the resulting 1823 installation, again in the Townley Gallery, was the colossal bust of Memnon (Ramesses II) that Salt’s agent Giovanni Belzoni had extracted with great difficulty from the west bank at Thebes. With the 1823 presentation, Egyptian sculptures began to be perceived as “monumental masterpieces,” albeit still far inferior to those of the ancient Greeks. The next big installation came in 1834, when the Egyptian sculptures were given a far grander presentation in the massive Greek Revival gallery designed by Robert Smirke. The second stage of this new installation came in 1837, when the mummies, coffins, and smaller objects went on display upstairs. The bulk of the new material came from the purchase of three collections—those of the British bookseller Joseph Sams, the late Salt (his third collection; disgusted with the negotiations, he had sold his second collection to the Louvre), and the Greek merchant Giovanni Anastasi. The collections emphasized smaller objects of everyday life, such as furniture, clothes, toys, and toilet articles, and “accessible oddities” seemed an appropriate label for the emphasis of the new representation. In the last of these major installations, in 1854, the Egyptian collection remained artificially divided between Smirke’s now much-extended galleries and the upper-story rooms. This time the revolutionary change was the arrangement of the sculptures primarily in chronological sequence rather than on aesthetic principles. Such a historical sequence became possible only in the wake of the decipherment of hieroglyphics beginning in the 1820s. This triumph of history and chronology over aesthetics coincided with the museum trustees’ surrender of much discretion in acquisitions and display strategies to their more scholarly employees, the keepers. Despite the changes in the presentation and perception of Egyptian art over the course of these 120 years, the preference for classical art prevailed over the selective appreciation now accorded ancient Egyptian artifacts. A year after the 1854 installation opened, the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne described the museum’s Egyptian sculptures as “hideous, blubber-lipped faces of giants, and human shapes, with beasts’ heads on them” (p. 208). Moser cautions against reading her narrative as an evolutionary progression toward a truer or more favorable evaluation of ancient Egypt. She emphasizes that the old labels and perceptions had taken root too deeply to be simply displaced. “Monumental masterpieces” and “accessible oddities” were superimposed on rather than replacing the earlier perceptions of “colossal monstrosities” and “wondrous curiosities,” and “the real ‘magic’ of ancient Egypt lies in its ability to tolerate these alternative identities” (p. 217). Other than pointing to the greater professionalization in British Egyptology after 1880, she gives little hint as to the directions the British Museum would take in its representations of ancient Egypt in its next 120 years—down to our time. Wondrous Curiosities left me both hoping that Moser has a sequel in mind and anticipating the productive influence that her stimulating work should have on museum studies, the history and anthropology of scholarly disciplines, and understanding and analysis of Egypt’s perennial fascination.