- Female travelers like Lucie Duff Gordon, Amelia Edwards, and Emma Andrews transformed tourism and the study of Ancient Egypt with their stories and diaries.
- The rise of organized Nile tours and the work of societies like the EES boosted archaeology and the conservation of Egyptian monuments.
- The introduction of photography —from calotype to collodion— revolutionized the documentation of temples, tombs and landscapes of the land of the pharaohs.
- Current exhibitions and projects combine objects, historical images, and new technologies to offer a more human and complete view of Egyptian civilization.
El Ancient Egypt It has not only bequeathed us pyramids, colossal temples, and mummies shrouded in mystery; it has also inspired, for more than two centuries, a very particular way of traveling, observing, and telling stories. From the first solo female travelers who journeyed up the Nile to photographers burdened with heavy tripods, the land of the pharaohs has become a perfect setting for reportage, travelogues, and archaeological projects that blend science, tourism, and fascination.
Throughout the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, writers, archaeologists, and photography pioneers They forever changed the way we understand Egypt. Their letters, books, negatives, and glass plates not only documented temples and tombs, but also portrayed daily life on the banks of the Nile, the rise of organized tourism, and the often-silenced role of the Egyptian workersThis journey through reports and photographs of Ancient Egypt explores its history, the techniques they used, and how all of this continues to influence how we see this civilization today.
Women travelers who changed Egyptology
In the mid-19th century, when traveling alone as a woman was almost a rarity, Lucie Duff Gordon She decided to settle in Luxor to improve her health. Suffering from tuberculosis and seeking a dry climate, she ended up living literally above the Luxor Temple, in the so-called Maison de France, a building erected on the ruins of the sanctuary. From there, she wrote almost daily to her family in London, letters that described with unusual detail local politics, religious customs, life on the west bank of the Nile, and her close relationship with the surrounding Egyptian inhabitants.
Those letters later became the book “Letters from Egypt”One of the first major modern accounts of the country written by a woman, her writing, unlike the romantic novels of the time, was almost like a series of ethnographic reports: it described political tensions, daily life in the souks, and the view of the temple from her window, with camels, donkeys, and dogs filling the street with noise. Her example—living alone, mingling with the local population, and writing frankly—paved the way for a whole generation of female travelers.
One of the most influential, according to Duff Gordon, was Amelia EdwardsA British novelist who, after reading the letters of her predecessor, embarked on a Nile voyage between 1873 and 1874 with her companion Lucy Renshaw. They traveled in a dahabiya called Philae, a kind of houseboat, and covered virtually the entire classic itinerary: the pyramids of Giza and Saqqara, the Beni Hassan cemetery, the temples of Dendera and Luxor, the Theban tombs, Esna, Aswan, and Abu Simbel. At that time, almost no major monuments had yet been restoredMany were half-buried, covered in sand, or in a deplorable state of preservation.
During his stay in Luxor, Edwards wanted to see Duff Gordon's old house up close. Upon discovering it partially ruined and with the temple covered by piles of bricks, She was shocked by the abandonmentHe went up to the old room, looked out of the same window from which his compatriot gazed at the Nile, and wrote one of the most famous phrases in his diary: the view, with its light, colors and silence laden with history, “furnished the room” and turned the poverty of the place into something grand.
That would be Edwards' only trip to Egypt, but it resulted in one of the most influential travel books in history. “A Thousand Miles up the Nile”Published in 1877, the work blends travelogue with a well-documented history of the country, descriptions of the main archaeological sites, and a passionate defense of the need to preserve monuments for the future. Unlike guidebooks of the time, it did not simply recommend stops; it insisted on the care of the sites and denounced looting and neglect.
Edwards' book not only turned the pyramids of Giza, the Valley of the Kings, or Abu Simbel into mandatory stops for anyone traveling to Egypt For decades, it also had a huge impact in academic circles. Its success led her to co-found the Egypt Exploration Society (EES)The European Excavations Society (EES), an institution created to fund excavations and systematically document the country's monuments, distributed detailed annual reports through a subscription system, primarily among middle-class British families. These reports included plans, object lists, drawings, and descriptions of ongoing work, documents that remain a key reference even today.
Archaeological tourism and organized trips along the Nile
While Edwards was traveling through Egypt with his dahabiya, another revolution was brewing in Europe: the emergence of package toursThomas Cook began offering all-inclusive tours of Europe in the mid-19th century, and soon added destinations steeped in history, such as Rome and Athens, to its catalog. The idea was clear: if you spent a good amount of money on a trip, you should return not only with fond memories, but also with historical knowledge and the feeling of having supported, at least indirectly, local economies and heritage.
In 1869, with the opening of the Suez Canal, Thomas Cook made the definitive leap into Egypt. He began selling Nile cruises with itineraries very similar to Edwards's, thus democratizing the experience. Archaeological tourism in North AfricaFor the first time, women who wanted to travel alone could do so under the umbrella of a company that offered them a certain degree of security and logistics: boats, guides, planned stops, visits to temples and tombs… By the end of the 1880s, Cook was transporting more than 5.000 people a year along the Nile, effectively setting the pace for river tours throughout the country.
Among those who embarked on that wave were the American Emma Andrews and her partner, the millionaire Theodore Davis. They arrived in 1889 with a copy of Edwards' book under their arm and several of Cook's pamphlets, ready to live their own Egyptian adventure. They quickly rented a private dahabiya, outfitted it for long stays, and began to travel up and down the Nile every year: for a quarter of a century they made the same winter migration, following almost to the letter the itinerary described in "A Thousand Miles up the Nile."
Andrews and Davis represent, like few others, the tourist-archaeologists From the late 19th century: wealthy people who combined luxury vacations with a genuine passion for ancient history. They bought countless antiquities, amassed immense collections, and, from 1900 onward, took it a step further: they began to finance and even personally direct excavations in the Valley of the Kings. Between 1900 and 1914, in a context of laws that required most finds to be handed over to the Cairo Museum but allowed "duplicates" to go to the patron or the archaeologist, they supported the opening of between 25 and 30 tombs.
Andrews and Davis' most celebrated campaign was the excavation of the tomb KV 46The tomb of Yuya and Tuya, parents of Queen Tiye and great-grandparents of Tutankhamun, was discovered in 1905 and was, at the time, the best-preserved tomb ever found in Egypt. The funerary goods were found virtually intact: richly decorated coffins, spectacular funerary masks, a complete chariot, and a large number of other objects that are now on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The impression this discovery made was enormous and served, among other things, to further fuel international fascination with the Valley of the Kings.
Beyond the objects, the value of Emma Andrews' work lies in her excavation diariesDay after day, she recorded who visited the site, what they found, how the Egyptian workers reacted, and what decisions she and Davis made. She included maps, sketches, and comments about antiquities dealers, foremen, sailors, and local residents—people who almost never appeared in the official reports signed by European men. Many of these notebooks were used by Davis in her publications without acknowledging Andrews' authorship, yet another example of the silencing of women in the history of Egyptology.
The birth of archaeological photography in Egypt
Almost at the same time as travelogues were multiplying, another silent revolution was taking place: the appearance of photography as a scientific and documentary tool. Until then, the representation of temples, statues, or reliefs depended on the talent—and the time available—of painters in Ancient Egypt, draftsmen and engravers. Since the Renaissance, many artists had used the camera obscura to help them draw perspectives and proportions, but it was still an interpretive work.
The invention of techniques such as daguerreotype or calotype At the beginning of the 19th century, thanks to a combination of advances in chemistry and optics, it became possible to capture images of reality with unprecedented precision. Nicéphore Niépce experimented with the first heliogravures; Daguerre obtained sharp images on plates coated with silver iodide, although with the problem that they darkened over time; and William Henry Fox Talbot made the great leap forward with the paper negative, the calotype, which allowed for multiple copies of the same scene to be made.
Shortly afterwards, authors such as Claude Felix Abel Niépce Blanquart introduced the albumen process, which involved paper coated with egg white and silver nitrate. The result was a highly defined image, although it required very long exposures, something especially challenging under the harsh Egyptian desert sun. From 1850 onward, the wet collodion process became the preferred method for many traveling photographers because it facilitated development after their trip, while albumen prints became almost universal.
For a time, I worked in photography, drawing, and printmaking. They lived together without too many clashesIn fact, the first photographs of archaeological objects imitated the staging of academic drawings: meticulous compositions, a sense of volume, and a certain theatricality. However, the entry of photography into commercial circuits generated tensions with engravers and lithographers, who saw their businesses threatened. The controversy subsided when, at the Great Exhibition in London in 1862, several photographic works were awarded prizes, among them some remarkable images of Egypt by the Frenchman Cammas.
Since then, photography has established itself as a an essential tool for archaeologyIt allowed for the objective recording of a monument's condition, its exact reproduction in scientific publications, and its sharing with researchers who had never set foot in Egypt. Compared to drawing, which was susceptible to error or retouching, the photographic plate became a reliable, efficient, and relatively inexpensive source of documentation in the medium term.
Camera pioneers in the land of the pharaohs
Around 1850, a veritable generation of international photographers emerged who, driven by scientific curiosity and tourist demand, traveled throughout Egypt with their cameras. The so-called "journey to the Orient"—Egypt and the Holy Land—was almost an initiatory goal for artists, intellectuals, and Romantic travelers. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the consolidation of Nile cruises facilitated logistics, and many Egyptian cities began to fill with them. visitor-oriented photography studios, which offered views of temples and exotic portraits as souvenirs.
These photographers had to deal with all sorts of difficulties: extreme heat, dust, transport of extremely heavy equipment On mules and camels, carrying delicate chemicals, with undisciplined assistants, wary tribes, bandits, and sometimes wild animals, they managed to leave us an extraordinary legacy of calotypes, collodion plates, and albumen prints that allow us to see what the monuments looked like when they were still half-submerged in the sand or before the major restorations of the 20th century.
The exhibition “Pioneers of Photography in Egypt (1857-1890)”, organized at the Santander Image Documentation Center (CDIS) with funds from the Abeledo-Llabata and Santiago Entrena collections, brought together some 40 original images by great names such as Maxime Du Camp, Francis Frith, Antonio Beato, the Zangaki brothers, Félix Bonfils, Abdullah Frères, Pascal Sebah, Luigi Fiorillo, G. Lekegian, Hippolyte Arnoux, Wilhelm Hammerschmidt, Henri Béchard, Frank Mason Good or G. SarolidesHis photographs capture both the monumentality of the temples and the atmosphere of the streets, markets, and riverbanks.
The exhibition underscored the extent to which those images condense a “romantic” era of Egyptology: caravans parked next to ruined colossi, European archaeologists in suits and top hats on improvised scaffolding, anonymous Egyptian workers excavating under a blazing sun… Through their lenses, Egypt became a stage for adventure for the West, but also a visual laboratory in which they experimented with framing, lighting and techniques.
Daily life, religion and power in reports on Ancient Egypt
Beyond the temples that have been photographed ad nauseam, many modern reports on Ancient Egypt have focused on explaining what was life like for those who built that world?The country was established in the fertile Nile Valley, divided into Upper and Lower Egypt, and took advantage of the surrounding desert as a natural barrier that hindered invasions. Around 10.000 years ago, the first human groups began to settle along the riverbanks, benefiting from its annual floods, which left behind a layer of silt ideal for agriculture.
With remarkable organizational skills, Egypt consolidated itself as the first great territorial state around 3100 BC, when Pharaoh Narmer unified the two regions. From then on, three great periods of splendor followed—the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms—marked by political, religious, and economic changes. Many current popular texts, supported by archaeological findings and exhibitions such as "Ancient Egypt: Life on the Nile," strive to show that behind the pharaohs and the gods lay a complex and hierarchical society, with peasants, artisans, scribes, and slaves.
At the top of the social pyramid was the pharaoh, considered a living god, guarantor of cosmic order and ultimately responsible for the well-being of the country, associated with the goddess MaatBelow them, high officials and governors administered the provinces, called nomes. Further down, peasants and artisans sustained the economy, built tombs and temples, and produced the luxury goods that would accompany the elites on their journey to the afterlife. At the bottom of the social ladder, slaves were treated as merchandise, bought and sold without hesitation.
During the Old Kingdom—known as the “age of the pyramids”—the political-religious system was consolidated and the great royal necropolises of Giza and Saqqara were built. Recent reports insist that these works, far from being the product of malnourished slave labor, involved a complex work organization with rotating teams of workers, well-fed and equipped with tools, clothing and basic medical assistanceScenes from private tombs show these men enjoying hunts, feasts, and family life, something that contemporary photographers strive to capture in detail.
In the Middle Kingdom, with its capital at Thebes, a significant evolution occurred in religious ideas: the pharaohs began to be seen more as exceptional human heroes as untouchable deities. At the same time, writing became widespread as a tool for administration, control, and literary expression. On papyrus, scribes recorded essays, poems, and philosophical texts such as the famous "Dialogue of a Man Tired of Life with His Soul," which some recent reports cite as an early example of existential reflection, along with The Legend of Sinuhe.
The New Kingdom, for its part, was marked by military campaigns and territorial expansion towards the Levant. Pharaohs like Ramses II extended their domains as far as the area of present-day Syria, clashing with peoples such as the Hittites. Written sources and relief scenes, which are photographed today in temples like Abu Simbel and Karnak, depict battles, treaties, caravans, and tributes, creating a visual narrative of imperial power.
Architecture, mummies, and the journey to the afterlife
Among the most iconic images of Ancient Egypt are, of course, the pyramidsMany popular science articles and recent archaeological studies have debunked the idea that they were built using almost supernatural methods. It is known that each new pyramid began to be planned as soon as a pharaoh ascended the throne, and that villages had to provide groups of workers organized into teams of about twenty people. A classic example is the Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, built in just over two decades with millions of stone blocks transported on wooden sledges, dragged over dampened sand to reduce friction.
The extraction and carving of materials such as granite required ingenious techniquesThe stonemasons used dolerite hammers to open cracks, inserted wooden wedges, and soaked them in water so that, as they swelled, they would break the rock. Idols like Imhotep, architect of the Step Pyramid of Saqqara, are now key figures in exhibitions and reports, not only as builders, but also as sages versed in medicine and astronomy.
But if there's one topic that continues to fascinate the public, it's the life after deathEgyptian religion was based on the belief that, after death, the individual would continue to exist in an idealized version of their earthly life. To achieve this, it was essential to preserve the body, provide it with food, clothing, grave goods, and ritual texts, and successfully pass the judgment of Osiris, where the heart of the deceased was weighed against the feather of the goddess Maat. In mythology, this was also the role of the deity. the goddess Isis.
Contemporary photojournalism and documentaries revel in the process of mummificationThe process involved washing the corpse, removing internal organs, desiccating it for forty days with natron (the “divine salt”), and then wrapping it in layers of linen with amulets inserted between them. Royal and aristocratic tombs were filled with furniture, jewelry, vessels, musical instruments, and tools—everything considered necessary for a comfortable existence beyond the threshold of death.
In parallel, modern research has brought new approaches to mummies, both from a scientific and ethical point of view. Some institutions, such as the British Museum, have promoted the use of the term “mummified remains” instead of “mummies” to emphasize the human nature of these bodies, although Many Egyptologists consider it unnecessary the terminological shift and prefer to focus on the cultural context and respect in the exhibition. Digital scanners, chemical analyses of funerary vessels, and genetic studies have made it possible to reconstruct smells, ointments, and resin mixtures used in embalming, as well as the geographical origin of some raw materials—a body of knowledge linked to written tradition and the figure of Thot, protector of writing and wisdom.
Recent exhibitions and new perspectives on Egypt
In recent decades, numerous exhibitions have sought to bring a more complete vision of Ancient Egypt to the general public, combining original pieces, historical photographs and digital resourcesExhibitions such as “Ancient Egypt: Life on the Nile”, organized at the La Moneda Cultural Center with funds from the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, have presented hundreds of objects —jewelry, ceramics, papyri, sculptures, stelae— along with explanatory panels and catalogs accessible online.
These initiatives often focus on daily life: how trades were organized, how work was distributed in temples and necropolises, what Egyptians ate, and how they entertained themselves. They also recover love poems, moral texts, and family scenes, reminding us that behind the rigid image of the statues, there were people who laughed, fell in love, or complained about bureaucracy.
In parallel, projects such as the Djehuty Project in LuxorExcavations at Saqqara and Spanish and European missions at Sharuna have spurred exhibitions that highlight both the discoveries and the role of local teams. Some recent exhibitions have openly celebrated the role of Egyptian workers and women—from queens and priestesses of the past to contemporary researchers—thus continuing the path unintentionally begun by Duff Gordon, Edwards, and Andrews with their accounts and diaries.
The commemoration of the centenary of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb has also multiplied the reports, historical novels, comics and documentaries about the young pharaoh. From Howard Carter's classic account to the most recent interpretations, the figure of Tutankhamun has become a perfect thread to explain 20th-century archaeology, the often unequal relationship between Western powers and Egypt, and the role of major museums in the circulation of antiquities; alongside all this, the legend of the curse of Tutankhamun has fueled a large part of the popular imagination.
All this network of travel, photographs, excavations, and exhibitions has given rise to an image of Egypt that we sometimes mix with clichés, but which rests on the work—not always visible—of travelers, photographers, laborers, archaeologists and conservatorsLucie Duff Gordon's letters from her "Theban palace," Amelia Edwards's accounts of sailing the Nile, Emma Andrews's meticulous diaries, the photographs of Du Camp and Frith, and the displays in today's museums all form a vast, collective report on the land of the Nile. Thanks to this combination of written word and image, we can now approach a civilization more than five millennia old with a clarity and intimacy that would have been almost unimaginable for those 19th-century pioneers.
