A forgotten chapter in Egyptology: Sir John Gardner Wilkinson's investigations into a dynamic Nile

Abstract

Recent landscape archaeology projects have assumed that previous generations of Egyptologists eschewed research into environmental change, with the exception of one mid nineteenth century pioneer, Joseph Hekekyan. This article shows that this narrative is mainly a historiographical artefact with little basis in reality: scholars and travellers in Egypt were interested in environmental change, mainly in relation to the River Nile, as far back as the early eighteenth century. Debate about the extent to which Egypt's present-day topography had been shaped by ongoing geomorphological processes on the one hand, and ancient catastrophic events on the other was particularly lively in the early years of the nineteenth century, as was linking such geographical research to historical problems. This article concentrates primarily on the work of one English Egyptologist, Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875), in relation to the ancient extent of the Nile Delta, and of the agricultural lands of the Nile valley, at Thebes. Wilkinson followed leading catastrophist geologists, notably Georges Cuvier and Déodat Dolomieu, and investigated alluvial deposition in relation to ancient sites, including the Isle of Pharos, Alexandria, and the Colossi of Memnon, Thebes, in order to reconstruct the ancient landscape, and answer questions relating to Egyptian prehistory and political economy. Although Wilkinson's work may have fallen short of modern standards, it nevertheless demonstrates that early nineteenth century scholars appreciated that Egypt's landscape was dynamic rather than static, and that they used this knowledge to further their understanding of ancient Egyptian history.