Egyptomania: A History of Fascination, Obsession, and Fantasy

Fritze (Invented Knowledge), dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Athens State University (Ala.), delves into how the realities of Egyptology have been reimagined or misinterpreted as sources of hermeticism, portals to another reality, or tokens to confer knowledge and respectability. He opens with a brief, serviceable introduction to the current state of knowledge in the field of Egyptian ancient history before charting the procession of Egyptophilia from Western antiquity through the Islamic golden age and Renaissance Europe into the 21st century. Fritze’s amusing panoply of misfits and fortune hunters includes the 15th-century writer who “claimed to have shown that the infamous Borgia family was descended from Osiris” and an occult organization that confidently asserted that “a hidden Hall of Records on the Giza plateau containing records of lost Atlantis knowledge would be found in 1998.” Ancient Egypt had long been a popular intellectual dalliance of the moneyed and educated classes in the West, becoming introduced to the broader public via mass media mechanisms around the time of the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Regardless of the period, however, cultists and hobbyists have had an uneasy relationship with more sober investigators. Fritze’s entertaining and enlightening work does well in separating ancient Egypt’s actual legacy from the pseudo-history of occultists and assorted charlatans. (Nov.)