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Auguste Mariette went to Egypt to collect Coptic manuscripts for the Bibliothèque Nationale. He failed in that mission but made one of the most sensational Egyptological discoveries of the century, the Serapeum at Saqqara. In 1858 he established Egypt's Antiquities Service and became its first director, a post that gave him an extraordinary level of authority over all antiquities in Egypt. Mariette's priorities were to protect Egypt's monuments, which he had seen damaged and lost at an alarming rate, and to clear the monuments from the accumulations of the ages. He established the Bulaq Museum, the precursor of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. In his energetic efforts Mariette was assisted by several able individuals at the Antiquities Service and by his talented friend, the great German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch who benefitted in turn by the access that Mariette provided to the monuments. Mariette wrote the scenario and designed the costumes and backdrops for Giuseppe Verdi's Aida, which premiered in Cairo in 1871.

Talented individuals continued to make major contributions to Egyptology. Even in Britain, where public support was almost non-existent, the attorney Charles Wycliffe Goodwin became a leading scholar of hieratic in his spare time. In France, Emmanuel de Rougé at last took up where Champollion had left off and raised the study of the ancient Egyptian language to a much higher level. In Germany, Lepsius reigned supreme until he reluctantly had to recognize the accomplishments of Heinrich Brugsch who put ancient Egyptian philology, and especially Demotic studies, on a sound footing. Meanwhile, Lepsius’ achievements included establishment of the basis for ancient Egyptian chronology. In Egypt, the archaeological attainments of Joseph Hekekyan Bey and Alexander Henry Rhind, though little recognized at the time, anticipated the careful methods of later excavators. Yet, the outlook for Egyptology in Egypt appeared problematic at best at the time of Mariette's death in 1881. As it turned out, Egyptology in Egypt and Egyptology in general were about to enter some of their most glorious years.

This chapter recounts the author's initial visit to the Egyptian Museum after her return to Cairo. She was shocked by the miserable condition of the museum itself. In western travel guides it is said, at times dismissively, that the Egyptian Museum resembles a storeroom bursting at the seams. It is true that the most priceless artifacts are crowded close together. However, when the French architect Marcel Dourgnon designed the structure at the end of the nineteenth century, he could not have known that within only a few years an ever increasing number of archaeological missions would make more discoveries and finds than in all the years since the direction of Auguste Mariette in the antiquities department.