Clare Fellows, Toby Wilkinson and Paul Cartledge, discuss their new books

A World Beneath the Sands,
by Toby Wilkinson

Our fascination with ancient Egypt goes back to the ancient Greeks. But the heyday of Egyptology was undoubtedly the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This golden age of scholarship and adventure is neatly book-ended by two epoch-making events: Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphics in 1822 and the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon a hundred years later.

In A World Beneath the Sands, the acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson tells the riveting stories of the men and women whose obsession with Egypt's ancient civilisation drove them to uncover its secrets. Champollion, Carter and Carnarvon are here, but so too are their lesser-known contemporaries, such as the Prussian scholar Karl Richard Lepsius, the Frenchman Auguste Mariette and the British aristocrat Lucie Duff-Gordon.

Their work – and those of others like them – helped to enrich and transform our understanding of the Nile Valley and its people, and left a lasting impression on Egypt, too. Travellers and treasure-hunters, ethnographers and epigraphers, antiquarians and archaeologists: whatever their motives, whatever their methods, all understood that in pursuing Egyptology they were part of a greater endeavour – to reveal a lost world, buried for centuries beneath the sands.

Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece,
by Paul Cartledge

The ancient Greek city of Thebes was at times very important but also very often forgotten - or, worse, confused with its even better known ancient Egyptian namesake (now modern Luxor). Its fame was usually eclipsed by that of Sparta and Athens, and it made one dreadful mistake which eventually led to its complete if only temporary physical annihilation. However, besides the historical city there was also the mythical city - Thebes the city of Oedipus and so the fount and origin of an everflowing stream of still pertinent myth (think Freud...). In my new book, Thebes: the Forgotten City of Ancient Greece (Picador 2020), I try to do justice to both cities, the historical and the mythical, and this lecture will likewise aim to give a strong flavour of both.