Alastair Sooke tells the story of Ancient Egyptian art through 30 extraordinary masterpieces. | dHNfZjlmVHY4TjMzTUk
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00I'm in Dorset, seeking a little bit of Egypt in the English countryside.
00:15It seems unlikely, but this is where I had my first taste
00:18of the magical and exotic world of ancient Egypt.
00:21I remember first coming here to Kingston Lacey with my family
00:24when I was a child, and I was fascinated, like millions of others,
00:28by what I found.
00:41This pink granite obelisk is well over 2,000 years old,
00:45and today it's spotted with lichen and moss
00:47as a result of the damp English climate.
00:50But it once stood in front of the sun-baked Temple of Isis
00:54on the island of Philae in southern Egypt,
00:56where in 1815 it caught the eye of the owner of Kingston Lacey,
01:00William Banks.
01:02He was a traveller, he was an amateur archaeologist,
01:05an aesthete and a connoisseur, and he spent years
01:08endeavouring to bring this obelisk from Egypt to his Dorset lawn.
01:17As well as the obelisk, Banks amassed the largest private collection
01:21of Egyptian art in Britain.
01:27Most of the Egyptian antiquities that Banks collected
01:30are on display here in the Billiards Room,
01:33but I suspect that most people would consider these objects
01:36more as curious artefacts than works of art.
01:39And it's true that the ancient Egyptians didn't have a word for art,
01:42but they didn't have a word for religion either,
01:45and they are among the most religious peoples in history.
01:49This enormous tome is the first volume of The Description of Egypt,
01:53which began to appear in 1809, and it is beautiful.
01:58It's filled with hand-coloured illustrations and maps,
02:02and these crisp, really immaculate engravings
02:05that record the monuments of ancient Egypt.
02:08You can readily understand why William Banks became so besotted
02:12as he started to look at these objects.
02:15You can understand why William Banks became so besotted
02:18as he sat in this very library and leafed through these pages.
02:28I want to follow in the footsteps of Banks and his contemporaries
02:32and explore ancient Egypt for myself.
02:38In this series, over three programmes,
02:41I'll travel the length of the country
02:44in search of 30 treasures that tell the bewitching story of Egyptian art.
02:54But above all, I want to look at the treasures of Egypt
02:57not through the eyes of an archaeologist,
02:59but through the eyes of an art lover.