Thanks for downloading the NRTIME podcast. For more details about NRTIME and for our terms of use, please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for.

I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello. In 1842, a young English adventurer called Austin Henry Layard set out to excavate what he hoped with the remains of the biblical city of Nineveh in Mesopotamia.

On arrival, he discovered that the local French consul Paul Emil Botter was already hard at work.

Across the Middle East and Egypt, archaeologists, antiquarians and adventures were exploring cities older than the Bible and shipping spectacular monuments down the Nile and the Tigris to burgeoning European museums.

What was it about the ancient cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia that so gripped the 19th century imagination? How did nationalism and imperialism affect the search for the ancient past?

And how did archaeology evolve from its adventuresome, even reckless origins, into the signs of artifacts we know today?

With me, to discuss archaeology and imperialism, our Eleanor Robson, lecturing the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University and the Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Richard Parkinson, assistant keeper in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sustained in the British Museum, and Tim Champion, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton.

Tim Champion, although the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 is a critical moment in the history of Egypt holiday, Europe's fascination with Egypt goes back much further.

We know it goes back to the Greeks, we know the Romans had obelisks everywhere, we know the many of us were interested in it, but for our purposes, could we say even earlier start in the 18th century?

How did they begin to generate this passion for? Be it came a passion for these?

Yes, indeed it was, I think it was a period in which knowledge of Egypt and attitudes towards Egypt changed a lot. At the end of the 17th century, knowledge was still very much based on the biblical tradition and the Greek writers, such as Herodotus, but visitors from Western Europe were beginning to go to Egypt to larger numbers and beginning to publish accounts of the antiquities.

And so the debate which had started in the end of the 17th century dealing with how to accommodate Egypt in a biblical account of civilization and chronology moved on to a discussion of the actual antiquities of Egypt for its own sake.

So by the end of the 18th century there were Egyptian antiquities beginning to be shown in museums in Britain and elsewhere and there was a completely different focus on Egypt for its own sake.

The West crashed spectacularly into Egypt with Napoleon and his 30,000 troops and his hundreds even thousands of scholars went there.

Why did he go there? Can you tell us why he went there?

In retrospect it's a spectacular disaster but I think there were a lot of very good reasons. One, probably the strategic reason to interrupt British communications with its great interest in India. So there's a geopolitical reason.

But there are a lot of cultural political reasons. There was the idea of the Ottoman Empire in decline and France saving people from slavery under the empire.

There was also the idea of Napoleon as Alexander recreating a new empire in succession to the Greeks and the Romans.

And frankly I think there was also the idea of collecting objects for museums just as Napoleon had done in Italy in 1796 when he was sort of looting antiquities on a scale very much like the Nazis.

Yes and Napoleon had the idea that he was leader of the most advanced country in the world and they were going back to the greatest of what was thought of then.

It might be the most mysterious unexplored country of antiquity and as it were claiming it.

...