Romantic Egypt

Book excerpt: Romantic Egypt: Abyssal Ground of British Romanticism traces the historical, cultural and intellectual affiliations between Ancient Egypt and Romantic-period Britain and Germany, including the influences contributed by European thought, politics, and interventions such as Napoleon’s 1799 Egyptian Campaign. Until the contributions of Napoleon’s expedition to scientific knowledge of Ancient Egyptian monuments and ruins, Egypt had been largely swathed in mystical explanations of its past, its achievements, its beliefs, and its cultural importance; however, the increased knowledge about Ancient Egypt competed with the allure of a more mythically imbued antiquity in the Romantic imagination. Romantic Egypt argues that this balance between knowing and not-knowing, between deciphering and imagining a golden-age Egypt, between enlightened thought and mysticism, was essential to the development of the Romantic imaginary because, for the Romantics, western philosophy and art had their birth in the all-but-lost wisdom of Ancient Egypt.