International Workshop

Recentering the Formation of Modern Egyptology:
Egypt, Pisa and Livorno 1770s-1825

Pisa, 11-12 December 2025 (address)

In 1825-1826 Ippolito Rosellini inaugurated the world’s first academic course on ancient Egyptian history and language, at the University of Pisa. This workshop seeks to revisit this underexamined event and its role in the emergence of Egyptology as a university discipline.

This workshop invites papers that investigate political, social, economic, or cultural dynamics that catalysed the formation of Egyptology in the 1820s. Why did which people in which particular lands, large and small, move to invest in the study of an ancient civilization whose written past was only beginning to be deciphered? What interests underpinned the creation of a chair in Egyptology and the expansion of museum collections? Are comparable factors and interest groups identifiable
in other lands, first and foremost in Ottoman Egypt before and during the time of Mohamed Ali? How did academic institutions, collectors, and merchants collaborate—explicitly or implicitly—to shape this nascent field?

Scientific and Organising Committee:
Gianluca Miniaci, Stephen Quirke, Clare Lewis, Mattia Mancini

Organisation assistants:

Students’ names

Institutions:
Dipartimento di Civiltà e Forme del Sapere, Università di Pisa

Institute of Archaeology, University College London

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