EGYPTOMANIA

A History of Fascination, Obsession and Fantasy

By Ronald H. Fritze

Illustrated. 444 pp. Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press. $35.

Egypt has exerted a peculiar charm since ancient times. The Greeks and Romans deferred to it as a far older civilization, whose monuments and writing seemed both baffling and magical. Egyptian culture appeared to have emerged fully formed and to have disappeared almost as suddenly, but its 3,000-year history cast a long shadow over later centuries and is felt even today. This afterlife of ancient Egypt is the subject of Ronald H. Fritze’s wide-ranging “Egyptomania.”

Conventional wisdom sees the modern fascination with the land of the pharaohs taking shape from the Renaissance onward, stimulated by the trophies that had been brought to imperial Rome and later enhanced by Napoleon’s short-lived Egyptian campaign, an incursion that created a vogue for decorative arts and monumental architecture of a decidedly “Oriental” flavor. Like Gothic chapels or Chinese pagodas, Egyptian art was embraced as an exotic foil to the classical style, but unlike the Gothic or Greek Revival, it lacked a coherent rationale and had little staying power. By the end of the 19th century, Egyptomania had become a branch of Orientalism.

Fritze offers a broader interpretation of the subject, going back to the Greek historian Herodotus and forward to Cecil B. DeMille and Tutankhamen, a reproduction of whose golden funerary mask adorns the book’s cover. Unfortunately, Fritze tends to blur the line between Egyptomania and Egyptology, which is rather like blurring that between astrology and astronomy. The text is freighted with a history of the pharaohs and digressions on Hermeticism and Rosicrucianism that take us away from the main theme. Plots of novels and films are dutifully outlined, and the book suffers from being long on description and short on analysis. What it does convey well is the disjunction between the actuality of Egypt and later interpretations of it: Before hieroglyphics were deciphered by Champollion and other linguists in the 1820s, the reality of ancient Egypt was literally a closed book.