Thrilling: Hieroglyphs – unlocking ancient Egypt, at the British Museum, reviewed

‘Poor old Mornington Crescent, I feel sorry for it with this highly made-up neighbour blocking the view it had enjoyed,’ commiserated Professor C.H. Reilly in the Architects’ Journal in 1928. He was talking about the new reinforced-concrete Carreras cigarette factory designed by architects Marcus Evelyn and Owen Hyman Collins that had just gone up across from the station. It wasn’t the concrete that bothered him so much as the make-up: the gaudily painted façade with papyrus-form columns copied from the ancient Egyptian tomb of Panehsy and the two huge black cats representing the goddess Bast – while advertising Black Cat cigarettes – flanking the entrance.

How did this time-travelling lump of Egyptiana come to land in north London? It’s a long and very complicated story told in two fascinating exhibitions marking the anniversaries of the two great eureka moments in Egyptology – the decoding of hieroglyphs in 1822 and the rediscovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb a century later – both involving imperial conquest, bitter scholastic rivalries and appropriation on a humungous scale.

It was the Romans who began emptying Egypt of its pharaonic patrimony: to mark his conquest in 30 BC Octavian had a pair of obelisks carted off from Heliopolis and set up in Rome. When Renaissance archaeologists began digging into Rome’s classical past, up came imperial loot from ancient Egypt inscribed with mysterious symbols that some humanists fancied held the key to lost priestly wisdom. But how to unlock it? Enter another conqueror, Napoleon. In 1799 French sappers rebuilding an old fort in Rashid dug up a Ptolemaic decree of 196 BC inscribed in three languages: hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. In the Rosetta Stone they had found a philological phrasebook.

The story of the race between the French philologist Jean-François Champollion and the English polymath Thomas Young to decipher hieroglyphic script is a page-turner thrillingly told in the British Museum’s Hieroglyphs exhibition. Far from priestly arcana, however, the show reveals the content of most hieroglyphic texts to be surprisingly mundane. Alongside the usual royal decrees, exhibits include a Brexity graffito of 2,985 BC celebrating King Den smiting a foreigner and an 11th century BC Book of the Dead commissioned by the murderess of two policemen to get her off the hook in the afterlife.

There are some beautiful objects in the British Museum’s show – the 4th century BC basalt torso of the deified Pa-Maj inscribed with hieroglyphic body art makes today’s tattoo jobs look hopelessly naff – but it’s basically an exhibition about the power of the word. The power of the image is the subject of the Sainsbury Centre’s Visions of Ancient Egypt, which traces the history of our love affair with all things pharaonic back to the Egyptomania that swept Europe at the turn of the 19th century. Its first flush can be seen in Piranesi’s fantastical 1769 design for the interior of the Caffè degli Inglesi in Piazza di Spagna – ‘fitter to adorn the inside of an Egyptian sepulchre than a room of social conversation’, thought Thomas Jones – and Josiah Wedgwood’s Egyptian-style ‘Teapot with Crocodile Finial’ (1800-10). Illustrations of Egyptian antiquities by Napoleon’s archaeologist Dominique Vivant Denon reproduced on the Empress Josephine’s Sèvre dinner service in 1810 were more authentic. Artists who had never been to Egypt could not compete. The young Alma Tadema painstakingly researched the setting for his ‘Pastimes in Ancient Egypt 3,000 Years Ago’ (1863), but Edwin Long’s inclusion of a Bes jar in ‘The Gods and Their Makers’ (1878) didn’t lend credence to his vision of a temple workshop staffed by topless sculptresses modelling idols of fluffy white cats.

Egyptomania had nothing on the Tutmania unleashed by Howard Carter’s extraordinary discovery of an intact pharaonic tomb in 1922. Photographs show an entire carpentry workshop dedicated to making crates for the 3,000-year-old booty and a train of Egyptian bearers carrying it off; no wonder the fez-wearing officials posing with Carter in front of the tomb in 1924 look less than happy. Even if they could have halted the exodus of grave goods, they couldn’t stem the flow of pseudo-pharaonic frippery flooding the European market. From flapper dresses with names like ‘mummy wrap’ and perfumes in obelisk-shaped bottles called Ramses II to the French ocean liner Champollion featuring columns copied from the Aten temple and the façade of Upton Park’s Carlton Cinema crowned by a giant winged scarab – not an insect normally associated with fleapits – art deco design became a pharaonic free-for-all. Meanwhile modernist sculptors such as Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti co-opted Egyptian art’s formal qualities.

‘Should the continued appeal of Egypt be seen as appreciation or appropriation?’ is a question posed at the end of the show. It closes with ‘The Other Nefertiti’ (2016), a 3D-printed copy of the smuggled sculpture of Queen Nefertiti in Berlin’s Neues Museum, covertly scanned by Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles and published online as a digital model. In an adjacent video the artists bury another copy on the outskirts of Cairo, kicking sand in the faces of future smugglers.