A geologist and an Egyptologist in conversation: Sir Charles Lyell and Sir John Gardner Wilkinson

Abstract

The history of archaeology, and of Egyptology, has traditionally been written as a linear narrative of progress, with narrow-minded amateurs—the antiquaries—giving way to professional archaeologists. For some, Joseph Hekekyan's excavations (co-directed by Leonard Horner) at Memphis and Heliopolis in the 1850s have been seen as a turning point, when the geological principle of stratigraphy was applied to archaeology, thus giving rise to methodical scientific excavation. This article challenges the existing narrative by showing how critiques of Hekekyan's excavation and Horner's interpretation, by the antiquary and historian Samuel Sharpe, inspired the eminent geologist Charles Lyell to seek the opinion of John Gardner Wilkinson, another leading antiquarian Egyptologist, as to the validity of the excavations. Wilkinson's specialist knowledge of Egypt enabled him to identity the problematic assumptions that underpinned the excavation programme, which other leading scholars had missed. Though Lyell was unsuccessful in obtaining the support he desired, he became aware of the more complex situation on the ground in Egypt. Instead of ushering in an age of scientific Egyptology, the Horner–Hekekyan programme highlights how new methodological techniques were contested by contemporaries, and did not immediately or necessarily translate into improved knowledge: a much-neglected dimension in fieldwork-centred disciplinary histories.