The Shadow of the Obelisk
How the West Unearthed, Owned, and Reimagined Ancient Egypt

Three obelisks stand in Paris, London, and New York. None has faced the Nile in over a century.

This book traces two hundred years of Egypt's rediscovery-turned-extraction — from Napoleon's savants and Belzoni's gunpowder to the race science that tried to sever the pharaohs from Africa, the Hollywood curses and Tutmania crazes that made a civilization into spectacle, and the still-unresolved fights over the Rosetta Stone and the Nefertiti bust. Thirty chapters ask a question that has never stopped being urgent: who owns the memory of a civilization?