Egypt in The European Imagination - 20th Century

20th Century

In 1912, the discovery of an exquisite painted limestone bust of Nefertiti, unearthed from its sculptor's workshop near the royal city of Amarna, added the first new celebrity of Egypt. The bust, now in Berlin's Egyptian Museum became so famous through the medium of photography that it became the most familiar, most copied work of ancient Egyptian sculpture; Nefertiti's strong-featured profile was a notable influence on new ideals of feminine beauty in the 20th century.

The 1922 discovery of the undamaged tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun introduced a new celebrity to join Nefertiti — "King Tut". The tomb's spectacular treasures influenced Art-Deco design vocabulary. Also, for many years there persisted rumors, probably tabloid-inspired, of a "curse"; the rumors focused on the alleged premature deaths of some of those who had first entered the tomb. A recent study of journals and death records, however, indicates no statistical difference between the ages at death of those who had entered the tomb and of expedition members who had not; indeed, most of the individuals lived past age 70. The idea of a "mummy's curse" inspired films such as The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff, which popularized the idea of ancient Egyptian mummies reanimating as monsters. Another literary occurrence at that time of Egypt is Agatha Christie's 1936 mystery novel Death on the Nile.

The mystification of ancient Egypt took a new turn in the context of Afrocentrism. Afrocentrists claim that Egyptians were black, based on ambiguous and sporadic occurrences in literature, and on the fact that Egypt was sometimes called Kemet (meaning the black country). Taking again Herodotus, Diodorus and others literally, and drawing on 18th century Masonic imagination, Afrocentrists claimed that the ancient black Egyptians made significant contributions to ancient Greece and Rome during their formative periods. Again, Egypt becomes the mystified cradle of civilization. But the Egypt they refer to is not the real Egypt as archaeology shows it after Champollion, but it is again the Greek-European Egypt of Mysteries. Sometimes, these theories go together with conspiracy theories where whites supposedly have erased all evidence of the cultural indebtness of Greece to Egypt. It is from this context where every claim can be called true that stories arose such like that Cleopatra was black (she was as Greek as the rest of the Ptolemaic family), or Moses (see Henri Gamache) or that Aristotle copied all of his work from the Library of Alexandria (which was founded after his death).

Hollywood's Egypt is a major contributor to the fantasy Egypt of modern culture. The cinematic spectacle of Egypt climaxed in sequences of Cecil B. deMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) and in Jeanne Crain's Nefertiti in the 1961 Italian Cinecittà production of Queen of the Nile, and collapsed with the failure of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963). The 1966 Polish film adaptation of Bolesław Prus' novel, Pharaoh, while spectacular, left something to be desired.

In 1978, Tutankhamun was commemorated in the whimsical song, "King Tut", by American comedian Steve Martin, and in 1986 the poses in some Egyptian mural art were evoked in the song "Walk Like an Egyptian" by The Bangles.

A best-selling series of novels by French author and Egyptologist Christian Jacq was inspired by the life of Pharaoh Ramses II ("the Great").