Download The Millionaire and the Mummies: Theodore Davis's Gilded Age by John M. Adams PDF
By John M. Adams
Egypt, The Valley of the Kings, 1905: An American robber baron friends throughout the gap he has minimize in an historic tomb wall and discovers the richest trove of golden treasure ever noticeable in Egypt.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Theodore Davis was once the main well-known archaeologist on this planet; his occupation grew to become tomb-robbing and treasure-hunting right into a technological know-how. utilizing six of Davis’s most vital discoveries—from the feminine Pharaoh Hatshepsut’s sarcophagus to the beautiful shabti statuettes looted from the Egyptian Museum now not too lengthy ago—as a lens round which to concentration his quintessentially American rags-to-riches story, Adams chronicles the dizzying upward push of a terrible nation preacher’s son who, via corruption and fraud, accumulated large wealth in Gilded Age ny after which atoned for his ruthless profession by means of inventing new criteria for systematic excavation. Davis came upon a checklist eighteen tombs within the Valley and, breaking with customized, gave the entire spoils of his discoveries to museums. A accomplice of Boss Tweed, pal of Teddy Roosevelt, and rival of J. P. Morgan, the colourful "American Lord Carnarvon" shared his Newport mansion together with his Rembrandts, his spouse, and his mistress. The in simple terms cause Davis has been forgotten by way of heritage to a wide quantity is one of the incontrovertible fact that he stopped simply wanting King Tutankhamen’s tomb, the invention of which propelled Howard Carter (Davis’s erstwhile worker) to around the world reputation quite a few brief years later.
Drawing on infrequent and never-before-published archival fabric, The Millionaire and the Mummies, the first biography of Theodore Davis ever written rehabilitates a tarnished photo via an exhilarating story of crime and event, choked with larger-than-life characters, unbelievable treasures, and unique settings.
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Additional resources for The Millionaire and the Mummies: Theodore Davis's Gilded Age in the Valley of the Kings
Example text
I shift the emphasis away from the perspective of the Greek world by examining the Egyptian core of the empire and the conscious continuation of a pharaonic style of governance. The Ptolemies’ active accommodation to Egyptian kingship and to the legitimizing authority of the priesthoods puts them in sharp contrast to both the Persians who came before and the Romans who came after them. But the nature of royal power must be set into its historical context and measured against real power. 2 On the one hand are the optimists who stress, for example, the output of literature, new temple building, state expansion, and the achievements of Alexandrian scholars.
Dynasty 25, 747–656 BC) kings. These delicate political maneuvers by Psammetichus show the continuing economic and political power of both the temple of Amun and the civil authority, the majordomo Montuemhat. The administration of the south of the country appears, indeed, not to have been much disturbed by Saı¨te recentralization. 7 Between 650 BC and the Hellenistic period there was a significant shift to wetter conditions in the eastern Mediterranean (Issar 2003:24; cf. Hdt. 10). 8 Egyptian Museum, Cairo, JdE 36327.
8 Ancient states, however, were far more complicated, and assessing the constraints that rulers faced are equally as important as assessing the actions they took. In Egypt, the supreme ruler was one actor in a complex world that grew increasingly more complex in the New Kingdom with the rise of powerful temple estates and a standing army that often combined forces to push back against the ruler and his aims. 11 That success requires explanation. I do not see the Ptolemies as “an entirely new departure in Middle Eastern history,” but, rather, as a state built on the strong institutional foundations of Saı¨te and Persian centralized governance.