This chapter addresses the ancient Egyptian dimensions of George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859). Using Eliot’s opening lines likening authorship to Egyptian sorcery as a springboard, this chapter argues for the continued significance of this reference throughout Adam Bede, demonstrating an interconnectedness between established Christian motifs and ancient Egyptian religion and mythology. In addition to the Wesleyan Methodist aspects of the novel, this chapter demonstrates a discernible recreation of the biblical Genesis story running throughout the text, combined with tangible references to ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses. This analysis is contextualised through references to other works on ancient Egypt that likely influenced Eliot, including Edward William Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), his translations of The Thousand and One Nights (1838–40), and Charles Knight’s The Pictorial Bible (1836–38). Overall, this chapter places Eliot’s first novel within its contemporary Egyptological culture and, in doing so, proposes that Adam Bede retells the biblical story of Adam and Eve with a distinctly ancient Egyptian inflection.

This chapter considers Bram Stoker’s novel The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) within the broader context of archaeological fiction, a genre that is characterised by detailed description of artefacts and strategic citation of authorities. Stoker’s credibility as a novice Egyptologist is suggested through his setting of an ancient Egyptian tomb in the Valley of the Sorcerer, an obvious parallel to Egypt’s Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens, and his apparent basing of his fictional Queen Tera on the real pharaoh Hatshepsut. Equally significant, this chapter demonstrates, is his synthesis of the Egyptological writings of E. A. Wallis Budge, Flinders Petrie and Amelia Edwards into his depiction of the journey to the ‘beyond’. Stoker, as this chapter shows, relies on a wealth of academic writing to weave his fiction; the role of the narrator is to peruse relevant archaeological studies and scrutinise symbolically charged artefacts, becoming the intermediary who functions not only as a conduit between the ancient past and the modern present, but also the fictional world that Stoker creates and the real world from which he gleans a substantial quantity of Egyptological detail.

This chapter examines the ways in which nineteenth-century writers and artists remembered the biblical tale of the wife of Potiphar, who attempted to seduce her husband’s enslaved advisor, Joseph. Potiphar’s wife was recalled throughout Western history as a prototype for immoral, aggressive female sexuality. Her profuse reappearances in Victorian writing and art, though, encouraged by the development of Egyptology and the rise of archaeological fantasy, complicate her character and her narrative. This chapter details the resurgence of Potiphar’s wife across a range of early and mid-Victorian texts, including Charles Wells’s verse drama Joseph and his Brethren (1823), the discussions surrounding Wells’s work by Pre-Raphaelites and Algernon Charles Swinburne in the 1870s and an edited poetry collection by Louisa Stuart Costello (1845). These writers and artists move beyond the biblical temptress to discuss the idea of a complex, sexually aware female character and to theorise the connections between the sexualised body and experimental aesthetic form. Mrs Potiphar’s mid-Victorian revival, this chapter demonstrates, propels the move towards considering ancient Egyptian femininity for models of modern female subjectivity and experimental art that would become more fully realised at the end of the century.

The introduction to this volume teases out the nuances of the ways in which nineteenth-century notions of taste, gender, religion and empire were shifting across the century, via references to ancient Egypt. It ascertains how the chapters that make up this book provide new readings of canonical authors and texts, and introduce a wealth of new material into a burgeoning critical debate, relating pertinent arguments that emerge in individual chapters to each other to provide a critical framework with which the reader might understand the collection as a whole. It also emphasises how, as the first multi-authored study of ancient Egypt in literary culture, the chapters of the volume collectively suggest that nineteenth-century cultural fascination with ancient Egypt is far more widespread than previously realised.

This chapter examines how the Victorians sought to understand and redefine Christianity by examining its relationship and connectedness to ancient Egyptian religion and vice versa. Specifically, it presents a typological reading of H. Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra (1889) informed by his posthumously published autobiography The Days of my Life (1926), arguing that the novel is both a microcosm of shifting Victorian attitudes towards Christianity and representative of Haggard’s personal struggle with traditional Protestantism. Haggard capitalised upon the sensationalist discourse that surrounded Egypt and used a loose, typological structure within Cleopatra to present a complex, imaginative dialogue on religion in the nineteenth century as well as explore his own personal doubts surrounding the Christian faith. In Cleopatra, this chapter demonstrates, Haggard establishes that what passed long ago in Egypt still resonates with, and could possibly alter, preconceived assumptions regarding faith and humanity in nineteenth-century England. The inherent tensions produced by Haggard’s own fluctuating faith are reflective of a society keen to define its faith in the face of advancing scientific and archaeological discoveries.

This chapter considers how theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra from the mid to late nineteenth century shaped Victorian views about ancient Egypt, suggesting that such productions were received by audiences as emblematic of Britain’s shaky imperial position. Turning to audience responses and charting the development of the stage Cleopatra from a ‘majestic Juno’ to a ‘demonic Venus’ via performances by Isabella Glyn (1849, 1855, 1867), Ellin Wallis (1873), Sarah Bernhardt (1890) and Lily Langtry (1890), this chapter examines how such imperial anxieties are expressed in relation to views about both English and Egyptian women. Re-examining passages from Shakespeare’s play in which Cleopatra is referred to as a ‘whore’ whose ‘lust’ for Antony can only mean destruction for Egypt and Rome in light of the cultural context surrounding nineteenth-century productions, further illuminates how reviewers saw the play as bound not only to Victorian assumptions about women’s sexuality but to deep-rooted anxieties about Britain’s relationship with Egypt itself.

This chapter investigates the concept of innovation and its research history across a number of disciplines, from economics to archaeology. It explores how particular conceptualizations of innovation and progress have been tied up in colonial and racist discourse through the case study of colonial and archaeological assessments of Aboriginal Tasmanian culture and technology. The chapter argues that archaeologists, by dint of their training in exploring worlds and social structures not shaped by post-Industrial-Revolution capitalist relations, are particularly well suited to explore the wider question of how and why people innovate (or don’t).

This chapter explores the tricky question of non-innovation, and how we might understand it both archaeologically and in the present. At its core is the case study of Romano-British Cornwall, during an apparently static and stodgy period where archaeologists have observed a marked tendency towards continuity from much earlier periods in settlement pattern and material culture. By assuming that this seeming non-change reflected active, negotiated choices, a new model emerges in which maintaining traditional practices and ways of life is part of an active resistance of Roman domination. This case study is used as an entry point, first to discuss how to identify and understand innovation resistance or non-innovation in archaeological contexts and, second, to understand the various practices that are bundled together under the umbrella of conservatism. The chapter emphasizes how innovation and non-innovation result from and affect flows of power, and the effects of these on personal and social networks. The logic of anti-innovation is explored, and the modern myth of disruption as unalloyed good is, itself, disrupted. The chapter builds on post-colonial literature to argue that persistence is a better frame for non-innovation than conservatism, but that even the identification of a given practice as innovative or not is a subjective judgment affected by power relations, histories of practice, and local context.

This chapter explores the idea of invention and asks what, if any, insight archaeology can offer into something that is often considered both momentary and rare. The invention of metallurgy in Eurasia is explored both to delineate the variety of archaeological tools applied to understand this phenomenon, and to demonstrate that invention is considerably less transient than typically imagined. Taking a social approach, the chapter argues that invention is a process with both spatial extent and time depth, and one that involves a network of people, crafts, and ideas. To explore this further, a discussion of imitation and emulation is developed. This brings together archaeological and anthropological narratives of technological imitation with more recent work on iterative processes and re-combination in the digital sphere. The chapter argues that the idea of parsimonious inventions developed by singular (male) individuals is a myth that elides the complex social networks and historical processes that shape this creative process.

This chapter explores the motivations for innovation adoption in the past and present. It is built around a discussion of the complicated ways indigenous people incorporated (some) European materials into their material culture through a culturally contingent process of re-definition and negotiation. This fraught process is contrasted with common-sense adoption narratives built around a scaffolding of economic rationalism and superior functionality. The chapter argues against this sort of post hoc ergo propter hoc interpretation, suggesting instead that the choice to adopt an innovation is best understood through the lens of specific social and interpersonal relationships. In order to shift our perspective away from more traditional adoption narratives focused on influential or aggrandizing male elites, the chapter looks at shifting patterns of community and identity linked together by women and children through phatic labor. The role of kin – biological and fictive – is emphasized.