Sphinx outside the box

Obelisks, pyramids and motifs from ancient Egypt didn't only influence grand country houses or powerful Biblical paintings, but also shaped tea-ware, cinemas and even factory floors, as Michael Hall reveals

- Michael Hall

UNLIKE the Greeks and Phoenicians, those great seafaring nations of the ancient eastern Mediterranean, the Egyptians were landlubbers. There is no evidence that they knew what lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules, still less that they had heard of the large islands off the north coast of France. That ignorance was almost certainly mutual until Britain and Egypt both fell under the sway of Rome. In the empire, cultural links were made across vast distances and, because the Romans readily absorbed foreign cults into their own religious repertoire, there were temples to Egyptian gods, notably Isis, in Britain. Her cult explains the discovery in the Thames in the early 19th century of a remarkable 1st or 2nd century AD silver sculpture of Horus, her son by Osiris. Known to the Romans as Harpocrates, he is shown as a child, accompanied by a dog, a tortoise and his distinctive attribute, a hawk.

By the late 2nd century, the British could learn about Egypt from another source, the Bible. Although the country is represented there as a refuge— for Abraham and Sarah, as well as Christ and his family—its role as a place of sexual temptation in the story of Joseph and the account in the Book of Exodus of the Jews’ exile in Egypt were to prove an especial attraction to artists.