Palestine, the biblical past of Egyptian archaeology seems to have attracted
scholars inspired by a religious impulse only from the 1870s. In 1882 the aims
of the British-based Egypt Exploration Fund included ‘to organise exped-
itions in Egypt, with a view to the elucidation of the History and Arts of
Ancient Egypt, and the illustration of the Old Testament narrative, so far as it
has to do with Egypt and the Egyptians’ (in Moorey 1991: 6). The fund invited
Edouard Naville (1844–1926), a Swiss scholar, professor at the University of
Geneva who had studied in Berlin under Karl Richard Lepsius (also men-
tioned in Chapters 3 and 5), to excavate at Tell el-Maskhuta. He interpreted
the unearthed ruins as the House of Atum, one of the store-cities built by the
Hebrews in their period of enslavement in Egypt. Another such city was later
uncovered by the Briton, Petrie, at the site of Ramses in Tel el-Retabeh in
1905–6. Petrie’s interest in Egyptian archaeology had had a religious back-
ground from the start. He had been attracted to it through Pyramidology—a
pseudoscience which saw the pyramids as an act of God, which had inscribed
his divinity in their proportions. Although he soon abandoned this theory as
unreliable (Silberman 1999b), the appeal of the study of the Bible and its
archaeology would remain and would eventually take him to Palestine.
The mounting evidence of the Old Testament in Egyptian territory was
strengthened in the last two decades of the century. Two more examples will
be mentioned. First, in 1887 oYcial documents written on clay tablets in
Akkadian in cuneiform script—the type of script used in Mesopotamia, then
the language of international diplomacy—were found fortuitously at Tell el-
Amarna. Those tablets were acquired by the museums of Berlin and London.
They told of the Levant’s rulers and their relations with the Egyptian admin-
istration and of life in Canaan (ancient Palestine) in the fourteenth century
bce. They also mentioned a people, the Hapiru or Habiru, whom scholars
identiWed as the Hebrews. In 1896 the stela of Merneptah was found by Petrie.
On it was inscribed a victory hymn celebrating the Pharaoh’s campaign in
Canaan in which a people called Israel had been destroyed. The second
Wnding was discovered at the temple of Amun at Karnak, where a scene was
identiWed with Pharaoh Shishak’s invasion of Palestine. It included a topo-
graphical list of cities that had been studied earlier in the century by Cham-
pollion (Elliot 2003; Moorey 1991: 4–6).
Research into the Bible also took scholars to Turkey where the inquiry was
related to both the Old and the New Testament. In 1865 the French scholar
Ernest Renan undertook a visit to Turkey publishingSt Paul(1869). His
research was followed by that of William Ramsay (1851–1939) (Shankland
2004: 23), the Regius Professor of Humanities at Aberdeen University from
1886, who again used Paul’s travels as the basis of his enquiries, traversing
Turkey to study the ancient topography (Moorey 1991: 21). Regarding
138 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism