BEDTIME STORIES

Hippolyte Délié and Émile Béchard were French photographers active in Egypt in the second half of the nineteenth century, known for their documentation of archaeological sites, monuments and museum collections. Their work belongs to the formative period of archaeological photography, when the medium was increasingly used not only to record antiquities but also to circulate knowledge of them to audiences beyond Egypt. In 1871, they received permission from the Egyptologist Auguste Mariette to photograph the collections of the Boulaq Museum in Cairo, the first national museum of Egyptian antiquities and the precursor of today’s Egyptian Museum.
Panthéon forms part of this project and presents an assemblage of ancient Egyptian statues and figurines representing deities including Sekhmet, Osiris, Bastet and Bes. Carefully arranged within the museum galleries, the composition reflects the systematic and didactic character of the photographers’ collaboration with Mariette, who selected important objects and contributed scholarly texts to the publication. The image was included in the Album du Musée de Boulaq, published in 1872 with forty photographic plates, one of the earliest sustained photographic surveys of an archaeological museum collection. By bringing together objects associated with different cults and divine figures, Panthéon offered contemporary viewers a condensed visual overview of Pharaonic religious imagery, while the album as a whole played an important role in disseminating knowledge of Egyptian art and archaeology to a wider European audience.