Egyptology Notes

From the Golden Age of Travel and Exploration…Egyptologists’ Notebooks by Chris Naunton

Egyptologists’ Notebooks by Chris Naunton

A book in journal/notebook format filled with photographs, sketches, maps and images from Egyptologists around the world. This book is both reading material and visual inspiration.

Next time you travel, here’s something to inspire your own journal and diary notetaking.

Egyptologists’ Notebook is everything the title promises.
As a kind of cross between a collection of mini-biographies, scrapbook items and sketch journals, this book takes those of us who love the romance, history and intrigue of ancient Egypt, on an armchair’s tour through time. And not just a fanciful one, but an educational one.

The author, Chris Naunton, is an Egyptologist. Having worked as the Director for the Egypt Exploration Society in London, President of the International Association of Egyptologists and as a writer and TV presenter, he has the right background to author this extensive book.

Visually, delicious!

The Book and Its Cover

First, I have to remark on the book cover, which cannot be overlooked.
I love it. It’s just evocative of a certain time and place - as are all the assembled photographs, and materials inside. And not only that, but it’s beautifully printed with embossed detailing that adds texture and layering to the design. It feels like a journal that you might stumble upon in an attic were it not for its pristine condition.

The Egyptologists

The written content is presented in chapters, each spotlighting an Egyptologist and it’s organized chronologically. So, the first person featured is Athanasius Kircher from the 17th century and the last is Walter Bryan Emery from the mid 20th century.

An elevation sketch from one of the notebooks.

Those names may not sound familiar to you (or maybe they do) but you probably have heard of Howard Carter, of King Tut fame.
And what about Flinders Petrie? One of the most important figures in archaeology and mentioned by Dr. Jones in my favorite Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Amelia Edwards, one of the few women Egyptologists, gets her own chapter as well. She was supposedly the inspiration for Elizabeth Peter’s popular mystery series set in Egypt.
Peters herself was also an Egyptologist, having received her Ph.D from the University of Chicago.

And perhaps you’re familiar with Jean-Francois Champollion…or if not with him, at least with his decipherment of the very famous Rosetta Stone. It was after all, the key to unlocking the translation of hieroglyphic script.

The Age of Exploration

To read through the chapters and peruse the images in this book is truly fascinating. It gives a glimpse of what it must have been like to travel down the Nile and discover in a time before technology did much of the heavy lifting.

But also just the idea of what making these kind of discoveries must have been like. In a far away land, in years when foreign travel was not the norm and by no means as convenient as it is today.

A vintage ink bottle with Sphinx logo. Ancient Egypt continues to inspire art and design through the ages.

Although, I would say that even now, Egypt is still a place still many have not set foot on in person. And by many, I include myself.
I have always, always wanted to go. And I feel like there was a window these last few years, and we should have gone. We talked about, but put it off, and now with the troubles around the world, it feels a little less likely that we’ll do it in the very near future.

So, until then, Egyptologists’ Notebooks and books like it, will help keep the flame of desire lit. And someday, I’ll be travelling down the Nile and seeing things I’ve only read about.
I just know it.

Taking Inspiration for your own notebook…
A book like this reminds how fantastic collecting things like interesting ephemera from hotels, restaurants, museums…things like napkins with unusual fonts, museum ticket stubs, train schedules, and little sketches or doodles from places I find along the way, is.
It’s less about for now and more about for the future when you or someone else will come upon your notebook which may have been put away on a shelf at some point and discover wherever it was you travelled those many years ago.

Now, I wish I had done this so many times in the past - I would have a journal full of travel notes, drawings and found paper objects from Warsaw, Paris, London and Amsterdam as well as parts of Denmark from a 1980s school trip. I would have remembrances from a trip to Japan in the late 1970s. And all the other trips, small and large in between then and now.

So, get started, whether on your next camping, sailing, cross-country or overseas trip.

My next post will be about a photo album I bought at a flea market which made me a little sad in a melancholy way but it was also a time capsule to a different era. The owner of the photo album was named Alice, per a note inside the pages, and she took a trip around Europe just before the outbreak of WWII.

It’s different than the notebook concept in that in a notebook it’s more about the places you find and recording them vs recording via photographs. I found Alice’s photo album and it gave me the same kind of twinge of melancholy that collecting vintage slides and other photos do sometimes do. At the same time, they are wonderful for historical reference.