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The Museum Library Egyptology Collection

Unlike the Penn Museum's Egyptian Collection, one of the few in the United States built on scientifically excavated and well provenanced ancient Egyptian artifacts, the Museum Library's Egyptian collection was at its inception, much less systematically acquired. As part of the Museum's original library housed in the Elkin's Library Room, the collection developed rather haphazardly through gifts of various curators and patrons generously donating their own publications or their personal libraries.

As a subscriber to the Egypt Exploration Fund and the Egypt Research Account, through the wise foresight of the first curator of the Museum's Egyptian and Mediterranean Section, Sara Yorke Stevenson (1889-1905), the museum received the many publications of those expeditions. These early excavation reports formed the foundation of the Egyptology collection, chronically as they do the first scientifically rigorous excavations carried out in Egypt by the so-called “Father of Modern Archaeology” W. M. Flinders Petrie and his many students. The Egyptian Collection also benefited from the generosity of Eckley Brinton Coxe Jr., president of the Museum's Board of Managers (1910-1916) and sponsor of expeditions to Nubia and Egypt, who gave not only funds to build the collection, but volumes from his own library as well.

Library development was slowed by the fact that the Museum's collections were separate from the university-wide library system and limited to use by Museum staff and visiting scholars. In 1942 the Museum Library was opened for student use and a systematic collection development program was begun. Major gifts to the Egyptology collection were made by Hans and Gertrude Dresel during this period. By 1971, the Museum Library's collections were made part of the University of Pennsylvania's Library system.

Today the Egyptology collection contains more than 5000 volumes covering every phase of ancient Egyptian culture and Egyptological inquiry. The collection is kept discrete from the rest of the Museum Library's collections and is one of the most heavily used collections in the library. Highlights of the collection include a full set of the Description de L'Egypte, which was published soon after Napoleon's great scientific and military expedition to Egypt in 1798. The multivolume work is credited with directing the attention of Europe to ancient Egypt, which led to the modern study of Egyptology. The fourteen volumes of the first edition represent the work of the 175 scholars, scientists, artists and technicians who accompanied Napoleon's army on the expedition charged with fully recording all aspects of ancient and modern Egyptian life.

While continuing to build the collection through the acquisition of modern scholarly publications, efforts are also being made to preserve older and more fragile books in the collection by acquiring and making available to Penn students scanned copies of rare volumes through the Aegyptus Electreus project.