When Napoleon landed at Alexandria on 1 July 1798 he was accompanied not just by the troops charged with capturing Egypt and Syria from the Ottoman Turks but also by a group of scientists and artists whose job was to record the sights and artefacts of the fabled lands. One of those “lapdogs”, as the soldiers called them, was the artist-diplomat Vivant Denon who in 1802 published, in two spectacular pillustrated volumes, his Voyage dans la basse et la haute Egypte (“Journey in Lower and Upper Egypt”). It would prove to be one of the most influential books of the 19th century.
Denon’s Voyage sparked Egyptomania, a fad for all things Egyptian that would find expression in architecture, interior decoration, art and literature – especially in Britain and France – and which intensified when Egyptian antiquities began to appear in European museums. “Ozymandias” (1818), Shelley’s celebrated poem on the transience of temporal power, was written in anticipation of the arrival in the British Museum of a giant, head-and-torso statue of Ramesses II: Ozymandias was the pharaoh’s Greek name.
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