History seems never more magnificent and rewarding than in its revelation of the familiar as foreign. In this spectacular example, Stephanie Moser reconnects the parallel lives of collections in three strands: institution, architecture, and audience experience. From a footing in museum studies within a university department of archaeology, Moser overcomes the disciplinary divides through meticulous archival research at museum and library, delivering a reliable source for rediscovering this one incarnation of the public square.

The first history to be unlearned is that of the institution. The British Museum was created in 1753 for the acquisition, preservation, and maintenance by the nation of the objects amassed by Hans Sloane, among the largest private collections of the age of the Encyclopedia. During the period covered by Moser, 1753–1880, the advances in archaeology led the museum to focus on antiquities, away from its original scope of library, natural history, coins and medals, prints and drawings, and ethnography. The Egyptian collections form a crucial part of this story of the archaeological redefinition of the British Museum. Our contemporary restitution debates cast the British Museum in the role of colonial predator, greedily removing monuments from peoples unable to resist. Moser records how solidly disinterested an institution the museum in fact remained throughout this period on all matters Egyptian, despite the prominence of modern Egypt in British foreign policy. British interests in Egypt as a route to India were strong throughout the period, but this foreign presence did not become direct colonial rule until the 1882 bombardment of Alexandria and military occupation of the country—in other words, not until the advent of a more methodical archaeology and, in England, the late establishment of university departments of Egyptology. Throughout the period of large-scale acquisitions of luxury items, coffins, and sculpture, Egypt was not a colony of a European power, but a semiautonomous province of the Ottoman Empire; in the late eighteenth century, it was under the Mamluks; and from 1807, it was much more threateningly under the Albanian governor Mohamed Ali and his descendants. The bulk of the sculpture and coffins arrived in the museum not by colonial British Museum–sponsored excursion, but by a series of accidents and grudgingly accepted gifts: significantly, until 1955 there was not even a separate Egyptian department. Within the Department of Antiquities, as throughout European academe, ancient Egypt was assigned the role of warped foil to the perfection of classical European antiquity—specifically, from the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles halfway through this story, Periclean Athens. The British Museum plays its part in the lethal orientalism by which we think we see in the Pyramids, not in the Parthenon, the product of a slave-based economy; the builders of the pyramids may have worked no more willingly than modern construction workers, but they were not slaves. Moser quotes from an 1803 Edinburgh Review article the orientalist prejudice that ancient Egyptian art “banishes every idea of inventive freedom.” (88) In such assertions and their echo in any class of ancient art, we may identify the monoglossia of an academically and officially approved reaction in both conservative and liberal circles against the uncontrolled other, a disdain for an “Orient.”

This deadening disapproval could not deprive the objects of space, simply because, from acquisitions foisted on the museum trustees in 1801 and 1823, the collections included several stone objects of colossal size. The climax of the museum's architectural history is the present neoclassical building, designed by Robert Smirke; his Egyptian Sculpture Gallery opened in 1834. Moser emphasizes the historical context and nature of museum design choices by drawing attention to the more vivid Egyptian style created by other London nineteenth-century designers but avoided at the British Museum. Whereas the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly hosted the exuberant re-creation of the tomb of Sety I in the Valley of the Kings, as drawn by Belzoni, at the British Museum a sober neoclassicism enacted the elitist disdain for this other culture, selecting classical Greek forms of architectural design. Yet, ironically, as Moser notes (157) and as reflected in comments at the time (162–63), the scale of the new gallery lent itself more to the Egyptian than to the Parthenon sculptures. The objects spoke to viewers against the intentions behind the design.

This third strand, audience reception, has been less researched in this history until now, and its presentation entwined with institution and architecture is one of the most precious delights of the volume. Faithful to her documentary research, with judicious citations from the varied social reactions in museum visiting, Moser overturns the authoritarianism of manager/curator/designer in display history. In its place, she installs a powerfully subversive relation between object and viewer, in which the object silently functions as the Walter Benjamin artwork, a monad of past material in the present world, primed to explode the arrogance of modernity. Egyptian soil and history have preserved the same range of materials as found in China and Mexico, from the same deep antiquity of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. From the development of European antiquities' collectors and excavators, many museums around the world have been able to display the same three audience-captivating spheres of material from Pompeii and Herculaneum: monuments, human bodies (or traces of them), and objects of daily life. Each of these three generates a web of reactions outside the approved academic filters for perceiving Greek art and, from Winckelmann as much as from Darwin, evolutionary chains of being. To the Vesuvian cast, Egypt added color and a world outside academicized Athens and Italy: “Unlike Greece and Rome, Egypt was the province of the people … an accessible alternative” (231). Western academe has never forgiven Egypt this, the ultimate crime of the other, to be uncontrolledly popular and, especially until the 1822 decipherment of hieroglyphs, to leave academic elitism exposed for its ignorance. In revealing this story, Moser offers an immensely stimulating rediscovery of our own various attitudes and some of their origins. The next visit to the museum might be the more accurate, appreciative, and enjoyable for it.