Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822 is regarded as defining the inception of Egyptology as an academic discipline. But, his linguistic breakthrough was also bound to influence wider European social, cultural, and art history. Throughout the continent, from London to Rome, autocrats of all sorts—from kings to queens, princes, and even popes—started commissioning Egyptologists with the composition of novel hieroglyphic inscriptions celebrating them and their power, in curiously ad hoc expressions of that Egyptomaniac movement which had already gripped the continent at the turn of the century, through Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition. This lecture will present this peculiar half-scholarly half-populist phenomenon, discuss selected case studies through analysis of the original monuments and their language, and contextualise them within the development of early Egyptology as a form of colonial appropriation of Egypt on the part of western autocrats, who looked at pharaonic antiquity as a golden age for absolute power.

About the Speaker

Dr Luigi Prada is Associate Professor of Egyptology (Dr. habil.) at Uppsala University, Sweden. He was educated in both Egyptology and Classics, firstly in Italy and then in Oxford. He works primarily on textual and cultural-historical studies, with a particular focus on the later phases of Egypt’s history and language(s) / scripts. Prior to Uppsala, he held academic positions in the UK (Oxford), Germany (Heidelberg), and Denmark (Copenhagen). He is active in the field, both in Egypt as Assistant Director of the Oxford-Uppsala Epigraphic Project in Elkab, and in the Sudan.