Nationalization and Personalization of the Egyptian Antiquities: Henry Salt a British General Consul in Egypt 1816 to 1827

In 1998, an anthropologist, Philip L. Kohl stated that archaeological findings are manipulated for nationalist purposes and that archaeology’s development during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is associated with nationalism, colonization, imperialism, sometimes personal in Europe. [1] Kohl’s statement is significant because it conveys how archaeology emerged as a national mission. During the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, Egyptian antiquities were at the center attention. Mythical and historical evidence for Greeks and Romans inEgypt were cited in order to justify the extensive excavations which were linked to a rising European national self consciousness.  Consequently, the great imperialist powers, France and the Great Britain (who saw themselves as heirs of the Greeks and Romans) were determined to fulfill their national museum with the Egyptian antiquities.[1] Philip L. Kohl, “Nationalism and Archaeology: On the Constructions of Nations and the Reconstructions of the Remote Past,” in Annual Review of Anthropology , Vol. 27 (1998), p. 223. Pp. 223-246