Two centuries separate Jean-François Champollion's 1822 decipherment of hieroglyphs from the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum in 2025. A French-Egyptian historian, writing from Cairo, traces the long French presence in Egyptology and what the GEM means for it.
Each chapter takes a single episode of the French presence in Egyptology and reads it against what the GEM means for that presence today. The voice is French, the perspective is Cairo, the language of the chapters is English with French paragraphs where they are needed.
On the twenty-seventh of September 1822, Jean-François Champollion read his Lettre à M. Dacier at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris and inaugurated the modern discipline of Egyptology. The two-hundred-and-third anniversary of the lettre coincided, almost exactly, with the opening of the GEM.
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Auguste Mariette, sent to Egypt by the Louvre in 1850, became in 1858 the first director of the newly-created Egyptian Antiquities Service and the founder of the first state museum at Boulaq. The Boulaq museum is the institutional ancestor of every Egyptian museum that has followed, including the GEM.
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The Institut français d'archéologie orientale (IFAO) was founded in 1880 as the Mission archéologique française du Caire and has occupied its building in the Mounira district of Cairo since 1907. It is the oldest foreign archaeological institute in Egypt and remains, in many respects, the principal French presence in Egyptology.
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Through the twentieth century the IFAO and its allied institutions ran a dense and continuous programme of field missions in Egypt — at Karnak, at Saqqara, at Deir el-Medina, at Tod, at Tanis. The missions are the working substance of French Egyptology and the principal source of its publications.
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The opening of the GEM is the most consequential moment in Egyptian museums since the Tahrir building opened in 1902. For French Egyptology — institutionally embedded in Cairo through the IFAO, in Paris through the Louvre and the École du Louvre, in the universities — the GEM is both a working partner and a new institutional weight to reckon with.
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French-Egyptian historian of Egyptology, attached as a research associate to the Institut français d'archéologie orientale (IFAO) in Cairo. Author of two books on the nineteenth-century French presence in Egypt. More on the project →