In Egypt earlier this year, standing in a tomb in Luxor and gazing in wonder at the still-vibrant 3000-year-old fresco a secco paintings, I saw what looked like a prototype design for early 19th century Empire-style furniture. In a sense, it was. Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign of 1798 might have been a military invasion against the British occupation – his army landed at Alexandria, swiftly moved south to defeat the ruling Mamluks at the Battle of the Pyramids, established a French administration in Cairo, and progressed into lower Egypt - but also in the party was a group of 167 scholars and academics, who were tasked with documenting every aspect of Egyptian civilisation. Their work became the monumental Description de l’Egypte, which provided inspiration aplenty for the designers and architects of the time. Obelisks and pyramids, hieroglyphs and sphinxes, lions’ paws and lotus flowers spread through France and across Europe, finding their way onto buildings and into our homes.
There was another wave of enthusiasm in the early 20th century, prompted by the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb with its solid gold coffin and vast accumulation of gilded essentials for the afterlife (arguably, ancient Egyptians were the first collector-hoarders). Ever since, the ripples have kept spreading: there have been record-making exhibitions, while in design terms we’ve had the continuing echoes of Egyptian-influenced Art Deco, Soane Britain’s Egyptomania collection, Louis Barthélemy’s Egyptomania tiles for Balineum, and the recent launch of Anut Cairo, a contemporary homeware brand which is ‘a love letter to Egypt.’ Alongside we’ve got Made in Ancient Egypt taking place at The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (until April 12, 2026), Egypt: Influencing British Design at Sir John Soane’s Museum (until January 18, 2026) – and there’s the unequivocally chic presentation of ancient Egyptian artefacts at major art fairs. The question, really, is why are we collectively so obsessed, beyond our shared love of stuff? And is there more to it, and its impact on our homes, than we think we know?
To begin with that last question, the answer is undoubtedly ‘yes’. For a start, ancient Egypt lasted for over three millennia (it was they, incidentally, who invented our means of measuring time), and our national curriculum awards the topic a single term at primary school. And of its dissemination, says Claudio Corsi, a specialist in antiquities formerly of Christie’s, ‘that began long before Napoleon, with the Romans.’ Who, lest we have forgotten, conquered the ancient civilisation in 30BC (the 1963 film Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, gives us a highly compelling four-hour dramatized account that is a veritable visual feast.) The Romans were drawn by the wealth of ancient Egypt, and were keen on the high quality of Egyptian linen and decorative glassware, of which exquisite examples can be seen at the Fitzwilliam exhibition – Goya Gallagher, founder of Anut Cairo, labels the excellence of those ancient crafts ‘a testament to the reach of the human hand.’ Notably, Egyptian cotton is still considered superior– and in the form of bedlinen can be purchased from John Lewis, The White Company, Frette, and others.
But the Romans were also fascinated by the antiquity, even then the pyramids were 2500-years-old, along with the mysteriousness and perceived wisdom of the culture. The great library of Alexandria, stocked with papyrus scrolls - another Egyptian invention, of around 2900 BC - was viewed as a pinnacle of knowledge, and hieroglyphs were believed to hold profound secrets associated with the cult of Isis, which came with an appealing promise of afterlife. ‘The Romans wanted to be associated with that world,’ continues Claudio. They shipped obelisks to Rome to adorn the city’s public squares, sphinx-adorned coins became part of the currency, a temple to Egyptian deities was established, and Emperor Hadrian, who journeyed up the Nile in AD 130, decorated the gardens of his villa at Tivoli with pharaonic sculpture. There was more, too, because happily for the Romans - and us years later - the aesthetics of ancient Egypt lend themselves generously to reproduction.
Partly, we’ve got the climate to thank, which has ensured survival of root sources. The colours have lasted too, increasing the appeal of what Goya describes as ‘ancient Egyptian storytelling through pictorial language.’ But the tones are powerful even on their own: when the artist Bridget Riley visited Egypt in the 1980s, she altered her entire palette to concentrate only on those earthy, natural hues, as well as Egyptian blue, the world’s first synthetic colour invented c. 3100 BC. Returning to architecture and design, Claudio points out that while there was some artistic variation between dynasties, core conventions remained stable for long periods of time, including the depiction of figures in profile, the symmetry, and the shapes - which has afforded a clear aesthetic. In 1856, the architect Owen Jones published The Grammar of Ornament, in which he adduced that the shapes and patterns could only have come from nature, describing the whole as ‘a pure, original style.’ And, says Lulu Lytle of Soane Britain, who studied Egyptology at University College London, ‘the forms are pared back, which is why they’ve endured and have never looked old or dated.’
Early Egyptomania in the UK was Grand Tour-driven – and owed, like the Romans, to our being wowed by the age and engineering prowess of ancient Egypt. In c. 1690, Grinling Gibbons (who never went to Egypt) designed a chimney piece for Hampton Court Palace that incorporated an obelisk inspired by examples in Rome. By the 1770s, Robert Adam (who also never visited Egypt) was proposing entire Egyptian-style buildings to his clients, as well as more modest items, such as an obelisk-shaped stove for the Countess of Home – which was an early hint at the vast range of possibilities that were to come. For Napoleon’s campaign wasn’t quite the military success that he’d hoped for: the British defeated the French at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, and again at the Battle of Alexandria in 1801. In the latter they acquired the Rosetta Stone, which went to the British Museum, marking the beginning of a sizeable influx - which was to have a sizeable impact.
When Henry Salt became Consul General of Egypt in 1815 he made it his mission to secure more antiquities and artefacts. He had on his payroll ‘the great Belzoni’, a former circus strongman and explorer whose first feat was removing the seven-tonne statue of Ramesses II from Luxor’s Ramasseum and transporting it to London – inducing Shelley’s 1818 poem Ozymandius. Next, Belzoni discovered and excavated the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, and in 1821 recreated it as an immersive exhibition, visited by thousands, at the 1812-built Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly which had been designed with pillars and inclined sides covered in hieroglyphs (that still couldn’t be understood.) And in 1824, Sir John Soane bought the actual sarcophagus of Seti I (the British Museum had turned it down, thinking £2000 was too steep.) Soane was Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, and, although he also never went to Egypt - and considered ancient Egyptian architecture a ‘primitive’ precursor to that of the ancient Greeks – he lectured on it, bringing it to the attention of the architects of the day.
Not everything designed was realised - Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s original designs for Clifton Suspension Bridge would have seen us enter it through a temple-like gateway with pylons, crowned with pairs of sphinxes (imagine!) – but the Egyptian Avenue at Highgate Cemetery has mausoleums adorned with obelisks, lotus-bud columns, and cavetto cornices, and the Egyptian House in Penzance was partly inspired by the Egyptian Hall on Picadilly (which was pulled down in 1905, to make way for flats.) We also have the glut of smaller obelisks hewn from precious stones – Philip Hooper has a faux malachite pair on his mantlepiece - salt and pepper shakers engraved with hieroglyphs (which, thanks to the Rosetta Stone, became less of a mystery post-1822), wine coolers given a similar treatment, and even biscuit tins.
Naturally, more has survived from the 20th and 21st centuries. There has been a shift away from direct representation, which would have pleased Sir John Soane, who was critical of the mimicry we might now term cultural appropriation. The Carreras Cigarette Factory in Camden (which Lulu Lytle’s grandfather worked on) is an excellent example of how Art Deco designers blended ancient Egyptian geometric patterns and stylised motifs with their distinctly modern aesthetic. There was often much use of scarabs, lotus flowers, sphinxes - and the palmette, including in its evolved scallop form - yes, that Matilda Goad lampshade owes to ancient Egypt.
When David Hockney went to Egypt in 1963, he produced a series of sketches that juxtapose ancient monuments with modern items, and Louis Barthélemy’s tiles for Balineum do similar, capturing the energy and vivacity of contemporary Egypt while simultaneously paying homage to the ancient paintings and hieroglyphs lining Egyptian temples and tombs. Louis also collaborates with artisans in Cairo, the Nile Delta and the desert Oasis of Siwa to produce appliqued tapestries and other textiles of captivating beauty. And Anut Cairo, too, has a collaborative business model, offering pottery from Fayoum, bedspreads made by the weavers of Akhmim which was the textile centre of ancient Egypt, and more. Their embroiderers have made two tapestries for the show at Sir John Soane’s Museum, using linens dyed in the ancient way and stitched together by a master tent maker, to depict the 19th century journey of the aforementioned Sarcophagus of Seti I from the Valley of the Kings to Lincoln’s Inn Fields – where it can still be seen, today, among Sir John Soane’s other treasures.
Which brings us back to the beginning, and the genuine artefacts which bring real connection to that revered culture, ever arousing wonder and offering aesthetic inspiration. It’s been illegal to export any antiquities from Egypt since 1983, but there are various London-based galleries that specialise in those that are already in the west, including ArtAncient, Rupert Wace, David Aaron, and Charles Ede. And, beyond major institutions and those places already mentioned, there are further house museums, including the Freud Museum, and Little Hall in Lavenham, Suffolk, which became a repository for Egyptologist Robert Grenville Gayer-Anderson’s collection, amassed in the early 20th century. There’s also, of course, Egypt itself, where Cairo thrums with dumbfounding vitality, and the river Nile is banked by lush vegetation that gives away to seemingly endless golden desert. It is, as Lulu identifies, the other reason why we continue to want to live with tangible emblems, whatever form they might take: ‘they speak to a beauty, and romance, that is transportive.’
