EGYPTIAN
shock, family, publication ambitions, and an increasingly complex professional relationship with Robert Hay. His efforts to write and publish his doomed Description of Egypt eventually led him to return to Egypt for further research. It was at this point in his life that Lane turned his attention to a project that would become his first triumph: his Modern Egyptians. Thompson engagingly recounts the delays, illustrations, editing, and censorship that this work experienced. The result, however, proved an instant success. Here Thompson discusses how the publication related to Gardner Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, stressing how the two works were regarded as a pair throughout the mid-nineteenth century. Yet Lane’s success was not limited to his Modern Egyptians, as demonstrated by his translation of the Arabian Nights. After wrestling with tragedies including illness, family loss, and his publisher’s bankruptcy, Lane reoriented himself in new, scholarly directions, bringing part of his family to live in Egypt in the 1830s. One of these ventures involved his sister, Sophia, who, with his assistance, wrote a book The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo (1846). Two other projects include Lane’s Lexicon and translated sections of the Quran. The family’s return to England saw Lane continue, despite his continually faltering health, his efforts on the mammoth Lexicon, which Thompson presents in an historical light. As Lane’s family matured in Worthing, he became more reclusive as he threw himself further into his work. The publication of the first volume of his Lexicon won him further accolades and set a new standard in lexicography. Its triumph must have acted as a foil to the loss of his beloved nephew Stanley, viewed by Lane as his intellectual heir. The book ends with a discussion of Lane’s family, and scholarly legacy, assessing the shortcomings of the completed Lexicon, finished after Lane’s death, and Lane’s position in the Orientalist debate. Thompson’s work proves a very satisfying account of a complicated man and life. As he states (p.1): ‘Modern Egyptians is one of the most influential and widely cited works in the history of Middle East studies’. Yet the work has continually proven a source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines. As such, a comprehensive study of the man who produced it was long overdue. ANDREW BEDNARSKI Herbert E Winlock, with Introduction and Appendix by Dorothea Arnold, Tutankhamun’s Funeral. Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 2010 (ISBN 978 1 58839 369 2 and 978 0 300 16735 1). Price: £10.99. It is a curious fact that, as well as possessing the only (virtually) intact royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings, Tutankhamun is also the only monarch whose funeral and embalming debris have also been positively identified. These had come to light packed in something like a dozen large pottery vessels in a small pit in the Valley of the Kings, now numbered KV 54, some fifteen years before Howard Carter’s epoch-making discovery of 1922.
ARCHAEOLOGY
This funerary debris was only one of many finds during the excavations conducted by Theodore Davis in the area. Little appreciated at the time of its discovery in late December 1907, most of the deposit passed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1909, where its nature was first appreciated by the Museum’s Herbert Winlock in the 1920s, and finally published by him in 1941. The core of this volume is a re-issue of Winlock’s work, published to coincide with an exhibition built around the assemblage - now sadly denuded of some items, sold off by the Museum during its ill-advised ‘deaccessioning’ programme of the 1950s. The book opens with a foreword by the Museum’s current Director - a post held by Winlock himself - followed by an introduction by the current Director of the Egyptian Department, Dorothea Arnold, who provides an overview of the Egyptian mummification process, the funeral and the practice of establishing caches of the leftover debris, either in or near the tomb itself.
She also provides a brief background to the excavation of Davis and to Winlock himself. Winlock’s original text - Materials Used at the Embalming of King Tutankhamun - forms the next chapter. Winlock continues to be one of the best writers ever to have been an Egyptologist - even his most technical papers being exemplars of clarity and elegance - and this piece well lives up to his high standards. He tells the story of how the Museum came to possess the objects before going on to describe them and discuss their use - basically divided between items deriving from the embalming process and others that he believed were the debris left behind from a funeral meal. While a splendid piece of work, research over the six decades that have elapsed since Winlock wrote has changed Egyptologists’ views on some of the American scholar’s conclusions - and even some of his ‘facts’. These are addressed by Dr Arnold and Emelia Cortes in a final section - ‘Updating Winlock’ - arranged as a commentary on Winlock’s text. Among issues discussed are the question as to which miniature mummy-mask was actually found in KV 54 (the painted one now in New York, or a gilded one now in Cairo); the outcome of modern analyses of the textiles and floral adornments, and the 36
actual nature of Winlock’s ‘funerary meal’. It is noted that the bird remains found in the jars could actually have been food offerings to the dead king and that the accompanying floral collars might in fact have been unused funerary wreaths. The proposal made some time ago that the KV 54 deposit might have been moved from the entrance corridor of Tutankhamun’s actual tomb, KV 62, is also briefly discussed, along with noting the need to include the evidence provided by the recent discovery of the much larger embalmers’ cache, KV 63, only a short distance from KV 62. However, no substantive consideration is given to the KV 63 deposit, in spite of the increasing likelihood that it may actually have belonged to Tutankhamun himself - especially in light of the dating evidence deriving from the analysis of the flood-levels in this part of the Valley (cf. Cross, JEA 94 (2008), pp.303312). In this case, the material found in KV 54 might have been items employed after the sealing of the main KV 63 deposit. The volume is illustrated by a mixture of archive images of Tutankhamun’s tomb and its contents, modern colour images illustrating the KV 54 material or points made in the text, plates from Winlock’s original book, and photographs taken from the museum record cards of objects now deaccessioned. My only comments on these are that the images of objects from KV 62 lack their accession numbers (provided for all other objects), that the photograph of the Cairo miniature mask almost certainly from the group is small, monochrome and out of focus - surely a decent-sized colour image could have been procured - and that it would have been nice to have included all of Winlock’s plates (rather than just VII through X) to maintain the integrity of his original work. As a final point, given the dispersal of much of the material from KV 54 since the 1950s deaccessioning, it would perhaps have been useful to have included a concordance of Metropolitan numbers and those of their new owners, where known (cf. p. 68). Nevertheless, the book is a handy re-presentation of a very important group of objects, of a type that has now become far more widely recognised following the excavation of KV 63. AIDAN DODSON Jason Thompson, A History of Egypt from Earliest Times to the Present. Haus Publishing, 2009 (ISBN 978 1 906598 04 4). Price: £17.99. Robert L Tignor, Egypt. A Short History. Princeton University Press, 2010 (ISBN 978 0 691 14763 5). Price: £ 20.95. A short but comprehensive history of the whole of Egyptian civilization has long been desirable and now two have appeared within a short time of each other. Jason Thompson is a well known writer and biographer of the beginnings of scientific research into ancient Egyptian and Islamic history in the nineteenth century and this study was first published by the American University Press in Egypt in 2008. Robert Tignor is a distinguished scholar of the Islamic Period in Egypt. Their academic backgrounds are reflected in the treatment of the periods of Egyptian history as Thompson covers the