With Robert Frost, University of Nottingham.
Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797-1875), a Georgian-Victorian polymath, is mainly remembered today for writing Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (1837), a work which approached ancient Egyptian civilization from an anthropological perspective, and for his Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Egypt (1847), the first guidebook for visitors to that country.
Wilkinson’s research into the geomorphology of the Nile Delta and Nile valley, as well as the Eastern and Western Deserts of Egypt, by comparison, have received no attention, academic or otherwise. A closer look at Wilkinson’s work, both his less widely-known articles in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, and in short sections in his well-known books, shows however that his interest in geomorphology was his longest-standing intellectual interest, even moreso than his interest in Egyptology. Even more importantly, it informed his other work and was integral to several branches of his research into ancient Egyptian civilization, including that which he wrote about in Manners and Customs. Wilkinson’s geomorphological research has the additional interesting dimension that, although his distinct research questions were different from those asked by Egyptologists today, and his methods relatively crude, he nevertheless considered ideas about environmental change in a way not common in Egyptian archaeology until the 1980s.
I will also consider contemporary geological and geomorphological debates in which Wilkinson participated, under the broad terms of uniformitarianism and catastrophism.
Part of the Cultural and Historical Seminar Series.
Please contact sue.davis@nottingham.ac.uk for the link to the event.