Kirjahaku

Howard Carter is often remembered for the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, but his legacy in the field of Egyptology spreads far further than this single discovery. The youngest of 11 children, Howard Carter began his career as an artist working for the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1891. Despite his young age, he pioneered new techniques in archaeological recording and used those skills to create beautiful, accurate images of tomb and temple scenes preserved on the monuments of Egypt. Carter’s largest known watercolour painting (EES.ART.224) is a full-scale reproduction of a scene from the shrine to Anubis in Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahari. This work, actually comprised of six pieces of paper combined together to create the scene, is testament to his expertise as an artist. It shows Tuthmosis I and his mother Senseneb before an offering table laden with food dedicated to the god Anubis, a jackal-headed god of embalming. Very little is known about queen Senseneb, and this scene represents one of the few known depictions of her. By shining a spotlight on the painting, Carl Graves provides context to it while uncovering the life and legacy of one of Egypt’s greatest archaeologists.

Amelia Blanford Edwards (1831-1892), author of the hugely successful illustrated travelogue, A Thousand Miles up the Nile—still in print and regularly reprinted—was so much more than a pioneer of British Egyptology. She was a writer, musician, artist, activist, and explorer. She is remembered for different reasons, by different people, in different ways. This volume offers new revelations about Amelia’s private life and her relationships with women that led her, ultimately, to the founding of the Egypt Exploration Fund (now Society).What circumstances in her life led Amelia Edwards to Egypt and what happened after her famous journey ‘A Thousand Miles Up the Nile’? To answer these questions, Carl Graves navigates Amelia’s complicated personal life, unpacking the events that surrounded the foundation of the Egypt Exploration Fund (now Society). Her legacy in Egyptology ends with the equally intriguing journey of an oil painting by Florence Blakiston Attwood-Mathews, now in the collection of the Society. But who really is the woman in the painting?