However, does knows history hit this one area of history that I always think is sort of peculiar because it's almost hived off, it's been hived off, it's got its own kind of academic departments, ecosystem, fan base, publishing world, a culture around it.

And that's Egyptology, the study of those extraordinary nilotinib, civilizations, 3000 years, something like 200 well attested rulers of that part of the world.

And it's left behind the most extraordinary architectural and artistic legacy. My favorite Egyptologist, of course, Chris Nordenson, he's a legend. He's been on the podcast before.

And every time he comes to the podcast asking the same question, because I'm stupid, I ask him how many tombs still out there, how it is. And we're talking just about the tombs of pharaohs rulers, basically. And he always answers and I actually have learnt it now that there are about 200 well attested pharaohs over that 3000 year period.

And around half of them, half of them have tombs that have not yet been found. So there you go. That's what's happening. Everybody, this podcast is sort of about that.

This podcast is about his new book, which is The Old Egyptologist, this bizarre bunch of misfits, travellers', tomb robbers, tourists, adventurers who went to Egypt and fell in love with the gigantic legacy of that period of history. If you want to subscribe to history at TV, it's our third birthday this week. Everyone, now is the time to subscribe at history hit TV used code Paduan. You can all Chris Nolan's previous podcasts. You can watch shows about Egypt and Egyptology.

You can do anything you like. Really. It's actually brilliant like Netflix, but just a history. And why don't you go to the shop at mycelia while you're at it. Why not?

In the meantime, everyone enjoy Chris Norten. Chris, good to have you back on the podcast. Thank you so much, Dan. Very nice to be back. The subject, your next book, which is fascinating, which is talking about these scholars and Egyptologists and all of their documents, their drawings and the way in which you must have got inside their heads working on this new project. One of the things I was trying to do with this is to capture some of the excitement of what it was like to be in Egypt at a time when certainly in terms of the earliest European travellers in the 17th, 18th century, they're the kind of earliest that I dealt with for the purposes of this book.

Anyway, when they were going to Egypt, they were going to somewhere that was foreign and almost completely unknown. And they had texts with them, which might have been written in classical times. They might have had biblical texts in mind, and they just did not know what they were going to see. And so they were wandering through Egypt, finding the remains of ancient places and wondering where these were and in some cases stumbling upon great cities like Memphis and Thebes and Alexandria.

And so, yeah, I did want to capture something of the magic of that. That's possible thanks to their diaries, their sketches, paintings, et cetera, et cetera, which are the sort of beginnings of Egyptology in the source material on which our whole subject is built.

Who are these people? Were they wealthy, leisured gentry from Europe or were they tomb robbers? Who were they? No, you're right. They were often wealthy, I guess, kind of, you know, people who had just an intellectual curiosity. They were travellers mostly in the beginning. So the book is called Egyptologist Notebooks, and everybody who features in the book made a contribution to Egyptology. But the word Egyptology itself doesn't even get coined until the middle of the 19th century.

So a lot of the people that we're sort of calling Egyptologist for the purposes of the book actually were travellers of one kind or another or scholars, just people who had an interest in the world. Generally, knowledge of ancient Egypt was really pretty small. If you go back as far as the 17th and 18th centuries, you certainly, by comparison with what was known of, say, the classical world, there were plenty of people who could read and were reading texts in Greek and Latin.

But Egypt is kind of much more distant and exotic than that somehow. So not very many people went. It wasn't a very hospitable place for people early on. It was difficult to travel around. It was a dangerous place to a certain extent. So you needed money, obviously, to get there, but then you needed money to equip yourself and you needed to take the risk of sailing up the Nile into this. I mean, really completely uncharted territory in the hope that you might see something interesting when there was no guarantee because this just wasn't known.

But, of course, people very quickly did begin to find that there were very spectacular things to see and to document them so that they could make their accounts available to people back home. And this is the beginnings of our subjects. Who are some of your favorites? The first character in the book actually is a guy called Athanasius Kircher, who's the only person in the book who never went to Egypt. He's kind of a favorite of mine in a way that he maybe wouldn't approve of.

He's important to us because he's one of the first people to have a good crack at trying to read the Egyptian language. He was a great scholar, polymath, and did all kinds of things in addition to his little bits and pieces of Egyptology. But it was also a very religious man and very interested in ancient sort of spirituality and wisdom. And he wanted to read into the Egyptian language these ancient kind of wisdom texts. He believed that the hieroglyphs encoded the things that he believed basically, and he was horrendously misguided in this absolutely wrong in his translations.

He had no basis to make these claims, but in a strange way, in generating interest and excitement in this, he is an important contributor to Egyptology because he sends people he sets people interested in the countries. And so he essentially sets them off travelling to the country to begin gathering copies of inscriptions, descriptions and drawings of monuments. Another of my I guess my favorite characters from early on is an English traveller called George Sands, who published an account of his travels around Europe in the Middle East, a description of the East and some other countries, which is a strangely vague title.

But there you go. And he made drawings of he didn't get very far at the Nile Valley, actually, but he visited Alexandria. He visited Giza. And although he doesn't give it the name that we know it by now, it's pretty clear that he visited Cairo and probably was right in standing on the spot that represented the center of the capital city of Memphis. But in some ways, what I really love about these early descriptions is that it isn't always possible to say exactly where they were and to identify what they were looking at.

But there's this sort of tantalizing possibility that these people were among the very first to take an interest in a cemetery like Sekara, which, as you know, is one of the richest archaeological sites in the world. And we know now just exactly how much there was to find there. And Sands was there at a time when almost nobody had had been inside these tombs for centuries and centuries, and they were still full of mummies, coffins, grave goods of all kinds.

So, you know, to try and sort of. Imagine what it must have been like to have been there if it was possible to travel back in time and kind of accompany him on his journey across the desert to Sekara, you know, wow, what a thrill.

Had anything valuable been removed and what was left was just regarded as, you know, junk. Well, I mean, a lot of stuff was really lost in the sense that it was no longer visible. So to take the pyramids and the Sphinx as an example, those things are much too big to ever become completely buried. They loom so large in the imagination of writers and travelers. From the time they were built until the present day, those things were never forgotten about, but other things were, you know, were lost.

It's really striking how little was known of somewhere like Sekara, which, okay, maybe didn't quite have the celebrity of Giza, but it's the place where the first monumental stone building in the world was built. And what an incredible monument the step pyramid is and what a striking monument on the landscape. And yet, you know, this place does seem to have disappeared from the mines. It's true also that some places had really fallen into ruin to the extent that they were a disappointment, actually, to some of our travellers.

So Sands in particular is really shocked and clearly disappointed by what he finds in Alexandria and Alexandria in his time at the beginning of the. Hundreds had shrunk. It was nothing like the size in terms of population, an area that it was in the Ptolemaic and Roman period. And most of the very grandiose buildings, which he could read about very easily in the descriptions of Strabo and others, had just vanished. You know, he was expecting to see the remains of this great city and it just wasn't there.

But once people got their eye in and once people, I guess, became a bit more determined and it became a bit more possible. There comes a certain moment, end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century. And interestingly enough, Napoleon Bonaparte plays an important role in this. Europeans came to travel to Egypt in much greater numbers and came to settle in Egypt as well. And that made it much easier for Europeans to to go there, to settle, to spend protracted amounts of time there and to do things like study monuments without risk of their health declining or or even worse.

That gives Egyptology the opportunity to sort of develop. But prior to that point, that knowledge was very low and there just wasn't a lot to see. Actually, in many cases, Alexander is a really good example of that. So much of it had just vanished in the early years.

You're looking at is it a matter of just doing a bit of dusting and finding places just literally in centimeters below the sand? That's a really good question. It's a bit difficult to know that, actually, because, as I say, the descriptions are often quite brief and a little bit vague. In the case of Alexandria, where an entire grand city has been lost, then a lot of work would have been necessary, much more than a traveller like Sands who's got a couple of weeks maybe in Egypt before he's got to move on in the case of somewhere like Sekara and if not sand, but then somebody who followed him, British Irish priest and traveller, a guy called Richard Pocock, visited Egypt in the 1930s.

He was able to make quite accurate plans of tombs in places like Sekara and in Luxor. And they're identifiable. These places which show quite clearly that he was able with maybe a little bit of digging, maybe a little bit of assistance from a local who knew an interesting thing. He could show a European wealthy traveller for a bit of baksheesh, a bit of money. But these things were just there, in some cases waiting. So it is a bit difficult to know that.

And you also in your book, you're careful to remind us that there were some remarkable women on these expeditions as well. Yeah, absolutely. It was very important to me when I started out on this project. The book is intended to be a kind of celebration of the visual. Egyptology is a very visual discipline and sketches and drawings and things are really important. So it was intended to be a visual celebration. But as well as that, it is also a kind of overview history of Egyptology down to the middle of the 20th century.

And that story has been told a number of times. It's not a terribly well known story, but it has been told before, but it's tended to be told from a quite straightforward academic standpoint. And that often means that it's been told as the stories of great men, great white men whose names go on the front of published accounts. And those stories have tended to forget lots of other people and sad to say, but in the past, these stories have not included women to the extent that they should.

And in the 19th century, there were a lot of extremely influential women in Egyptology, some of whom could claim to be as influential as anybody ever was in Egyptology. So Amelia Edwards, for example, who travels to Egypt as a travel writer but becomes a kind of self-taught Egyptologist and great campaigner for ancient Egypt, founded the first ever chair of Egyptology in the U.K. She deliberately chose UCL for that chair because it was the only university offering degrees to women at the time.

And she founded the Egypt. Exploration Society, which was the first foreign institution sponsoring archaeological projects in Egypt, so the first kind of enduring presence that would excavate in Egypt over a long period of time is still going 130 odd years later. So her legacy is incredible. But there are a number of women who absolutely contrary to the way things worked in so many other fields at that time, were pioneering figures in the intellectual world, in archaeology, in travel, in managing to make things happen in a foreign conservative Muslim country.

So people like Marianne Brocklehurst, who travelled to Egypt a number of times independently at one point at the same time as Amelia Nina McPherson, who was married to Norman Tagaris Davis, who becomes arguably the finest artist copyist of Egyptian decoration there ever was. These are stories that really need to be told. There's a kind of rebalancing here, I think. And so I was really keen to include as many of those kinds of stories in the book as I could have.

We stepped away now from sort of unalloyed appreciation, celebration of these people. Are we thinking about them in different ways in relation to them presumably destroying quite a lot of places as they were looking for other places or removing items that, you know, without asking permission and without any thought that this might be imperialism. When you're writing this book, how do you think about those issues?

Yeah, that's very tricky because in some ways, you know, what we want is for this book. And part of the intended appeal of this book is that we're transporting the reader back to that time when it was possible to make discoveries like almost always kind of easily, you know, you can go to Egypt and just walk into the desert and find something incredible. There's a great magic to that. And in some ways, what I'm trying to do with the book is to transport people back to that time and to tell these magical stories of these people who did these wonderful things.

But you're absolutely right that it would be irresponsible to present all of this as if it was unalloyed kind of success, you know, and just something that was nothing but absolutely wonderful. A lot of these discoveries, in inverted commas, played out against a backdrop of imperialism, colonialism in Egypt. And that is another aspect of the story of the history of Egyptology that has kind of been pushed under the carpet a little bit.

And we're a long way away yet from the point where everybody understands Egyptology and archaeology in Egypt and elsewhere in that part of the world to have played out to have a kind of balanced understanding of the good and the bad of that. But one thing that I was very keen against trying to do in this book is to just emphasise the role of the Egyptian people in the story. They tend to be one of the much less appreciated groups. So in almost all cases, when it comes to digging things up, the majority of the people actually doing the digging were Egyptians who have been silent in the story and unacknowledged up to now.

And in many cases, the people who were actually revealing these monuments did so because they had very great skill in recognizing what they were looking at as they were removing debris. And quite often the archaeologists who get all the credit are not even present. So it's quite striking that Howard Carter's account of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun begins with him arriving on site to find that his Egyptian Wortman is excavated. His diggers have gone quiet because they found something.

He wasn't even there when they found the steps. And so that's not to say that, you know, Carter has nothing to do with this or, you know, he wasn't involved or he wasn't directing the work. But the story of the Egyptians on the other side is unacknowledged. So I've tried where possible to sort of explain that. That is the way the story's been told up to now. There is a different story and there's a rebalancing. We need we need to appreciate the Egyptian people's role in the story a bit more.

And also that a lot of the time it was the colonialist imperialists who were kind of forcing a way of doing things onto the country without really asking the local people whether they wanted this or not. So it's a very tricky sort of line to walk there. On the one hand, you're trying to say, look at these great people in the great thing they did. On the other hand, you're also trying to say, but maybe they weren't entirely all that great and we should be aware of that, too.

Thank you very much.

On the podcast, there was the book called the book is called Egyptologists Notebooks. It is a visual celebration of the history of archaeology and Egyptology in Egypt. Good luck with that, buddy. Thank you very much.

Ivan, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms. But anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favor, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Martinus. I know, but them's the rules. Then we go farther up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome.

So thank you so much.

Sleep well.