The split of the Netherlands and Belgium into two states during 1830–31 ended the Leiden Museum’s golden years of acquisition, leaving it to face a new economic reality. It also meant that the dream of the museum’s director, Conrad Reuvens (see Fig. 5.1), to move the collections to one of the monarchy’s former capitals had ended, Brussels having become the capital of the new state of Belgium, and no funding being available for a transfer of the collections to Amsterdam. Even so, Reuvens continued referring to what officially was no more than the university´s ‘Archaeological Cabinet’ as the ‘National Museum of Antiquities’ (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden).

In a fascinating 1992 essay, Antonia Lant revisited the longstanding theoretical link between early silent films and Egyptian funeral paraphernalia. She writes that in the early twentieth century, blackened cinematic enclosures, built in the ‘Egyptian’ architectural style, were often associated with dark Egyptian tombs. Neon signs would entice the audience with their promise of a mysterious experience inside the auditorium. The cinema was also viewed as a necropolis where a silent dead world came to life on the silver screen and spoke through a pictorial language – a sort of hieroglyphic communication revealed by the light of the projector.

If one maintains a single perspective of Egyptology, we must acknowledge that the schism that occurred within the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (see pp. 19) was a blow to both sides. For the Dutch, the directors of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (RMO) were forced to adapt to new economic realities (see p. 136). For them, the golden age of acquiring antiquities came to an abrupt end, even though the RMO’s collections continued to grow. For the Belgians, not only had Brussels lost any chance of one day hosting the great Egyptian museum promised to them, but also Leiden, with its collection of Egyptian antiquities, its university library and its Chair of Egyptology, lay in the now-separated northern part of the country, and would henceforth be Dutch. At a time when travel was rarely undertaken and when antiquities and reference books were few and exceedingly costly, Belgian savants found themselves, overnight, bereft of materials and instruction. The Belgian–Dutch divorce thus delayed the emergence of a specifically Belgian Egyptology: it remained to be seen if and how an independent Belgium could reverse the effects of this historical reality.

The official birthday of Czechoslovakia was 28 October 1918. The genesis of an Egyptological chair and seminar followed in the 1920s, after a redefinition of the Czech part of the university in Prague as the Charles University (Univerzita Karlova: cf. p. 278). Czechoslovak Egyptology – indeed oriental studies as a whole – was, like many aspects of a state that was a successor to a multinational empire, derived from the Austrian(-Hungarian) school system and educational practices, a system that was, albeit reluctantly at times, multinational and multilingual. Tensions between a multinational state and local national revival (as nations within one state competed for a political recognition) had an impact on the formation of scholarship, particularly in the humanities. On one hand, future Czechoslovak oriental studies had important ties to international scholarship, specifically to German-, French- and English-speaking orientalists; on the other, within regions such as the former Austria-Hungary, history and humanities were confronted with several competing national revivals (and hence national memories and histories), and there was a need to counteract local tendencies towards insularity that might be motivated by narrow nationalism.

Egyptology, in the narrow sense of the formal study of ancient Egypt at tertiary and professional level, came late to Australasia. However, popular Egyptology, in the sense of public interest in ancient Egypt and that aspect of it now termed Egyptomania, goes back to the early years of European settlement, and is well documented in the press from the nineteenth century onwards.

Owing to its particular history, Russian Egyptology has a number of features that make it rather peculiar and little known in the wider world. First, its development started more than a half a century later than in western Europe, and it made its first steps when many of the academic trends of the first three quarters of the nineteenth century had more or less run their course.

The Habsburg Empire, dissolved at the end of 1918, was a substantial if heterogeneous state entity, which included the later modern states of Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, plus parts of Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina), Italy, Croatia, Poland, Ukraine and Rumania. Its academic centres of Vienna, Budapest, Cracow, Prague and Lemberg (Lviv) included a number of academic positions that embraced not only the study of the ancient Near East including Egypt, but also that of the contemporary ‘Orient’. Throughout the period covered by this book, the study of Egyptology was closely related to that of oriental philology and history.

In a paper entitled ‘Spanische Ägyptologie’ published in 1974, German Egyptologist Ingrid Gamer-Wallert summarised in a single page the state of Spanish Egyptology at the time. While she acknowledged the acquisition of the Debod temple, the intervention in Nubia and fieldwork taking place in Herakleopolis, she also pointed out the absence of any Egyptological chair in Spain.

Although the civilisation of the ancient Egyptians may have died thousands of years ago, modern cultures around the world continue to connect with it, from collections of antiquities, pyramids on US dollar bills and Egyptianising buildings, to Egypt-inspired motifs in clothing and the visual and plastic arts. Indeed, the Great Pyramid, Tutankhamun’s gold burial mask, hieroglyphs and even mummies are instantly recognisable as Egyptian by people from countries across the world. The familiarity that modern audiences have with the remnants of ancient Egyptian material culture and the Egyptian aesthetic are due to a well-established (and apparently endless) stream of books, articles, documentaries and touring museum exhibitions. Periods of what we call ‘Egyptomania’, when ancient Egypt has influenced popular, and even high, culture, have also contributed considerably to people’s interest and familiarity.

On 16 May 1830, after several abortive attempts, Jean-François Champollion was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Less than a year later, a decree of 18 March 1831, signed by King Louis Philippe I (1773–1850, r. 1830–48), created a Chair of Archaeology at the Collège de France. The chair’s inaugural lecture was delivered on 10 May before an audience of scholars and distinguished persons. The nomination had been prepared upon the return of the Franco-Tuscan expedition, but delayed by the overthrow of Charles X (1757–1836, r. 1824–30) in August 1830. The record of the inaugural lecture would prove to be another founding document for the discipline, in much the same way as had the Lettre à Monsieur Dacier, and it was published in 1836 by Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeac as the ‘Introduction’ to the younger Champollion’s Grammaire égyptienne.