of Ptahhotep. Around 2360 BC, Egypt’s then vizier gravely counseled the world: ‘Ask the advice of the ignorant as well as of the scholar [but] beware to be arrogant on account of your wisdom’. It is, one feels, an advice with implications that, regrettably, few of Egypt’s recent political leaders have followed themselves, or have allowed their subjects to follow. But notwithstanding the perhaps growing discrepancy between Egypt’s political present and future and the Academy’s ideological message, the building is solidly there. To explain its presence, one needs to delve into the ancient and, also, not so ancient links between Italy and Egypt.
Prehistory
Rome and Egypt go back a very long way. Indeed, it was Caesar’s conquest of Egypt that assured the economic vitality of the nascent Roman Empire, since, of course, the valley of the Nile was one of the great grain baskets both for the Urbs and its armies. In the following centuries, Rome developed a veritable Egyptomania, what with the popularity of the Isis-cult, of trips to the land of the pharaohs by the Roman elite, and the fascination exerted by the phenomenon of the obelisk. At enormous costs, a few dozen of these huge stone needles were shipped to Rome, and set up in the centre of the empire’s most significant public spaces to serve as sundials or signs of cosmic-imperial supremacy. When, with the fall of the empire, most of these obelisks fell, too, the fascination did not stop, since Christian Rome came under their spell as well, especially with the advent of the Renaissance and of Humanism – especially in its neo-Platonic form – from the fifteenth century onwards. Starting in Rome, soon all Europe buzzed with arcane speculations about Egypt’s ancient wisdom that seemed to be embedded in, precisely, these strange monuments. The new Egyptomania that resulted also expressed itself in esoteric movements that continue until today. In the seventeenth century, the man who contributed most to this second wave of Egyptomania precisely through his study of Rome’s many obelisks and the mysterious signs written thereon was the Jesuit erudite Athanasius Kircher (1602-
1680). He claimed to have deciphered the language that, he felt, would lead to solving the riddles of the cosmos, and of creation. Though his claims were spurious, he actually did pave the way for a better understanding of the structure of hieroglyphic and, indeed, for Champollion’s final decoding in the nineteenth century. The material Kircher amassed in the course of his research was exhibited in his private museum in the Jesuit headquarters, the “Collegio Romano”, and for two centuries attracted visitors from all over Europe. In the 1790s, Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778-1823) was a student in Rome when the French occupation forces arrived there. Fleeing the town and his country to avoid conscription in Napoleon’s Italian army, he yet followed in the footsteps of Bonaparte’s subsequent grand expedition to Egypt, which resulted in Europe’s third period of Egyptomania. For soon the famous, multi-volume and richly illustrated Description de l’Egypte presented the world with the first scholarly survey of the country. Belzoni, in need of money, easily could cash in on the new fashion and embarked on a career as an archaeologist and antiques dealer. In 1816 and 1817, besides discovering the temple of Abu Simbel, he brought a number of highly important statues and other artifacts to Europe, mainly to London. His publications, both in English and in Italian, did much to spread his fame. No wonder he became the model not only for Howard Carter, of Tut-ankh-Amunfame, but also for the archaeologist-hero in Raiders of the Lost Ark and subsequent Hollywood films; interestingly, his ‘style’ was then copied by a real archaeologist in the early twenty-first century, Egypt’s own head of ancient monuments Zahi Hawass. By the 1820s, many scholars felt that ancient Egypt had been a, or even the first phase in the long historical process that, starting in the Near East, inevitably had led to the triumphant rise of Europe. It was the German ambassador to the papal court in Rome, Christian von Bunsen (1791-1860), who gained fame with a scholarly analysis of Egypt’s role as the origin of culture through his five-volume Ägyptens Stelle in der Weltgeschichte (1844-
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