Egyptomania and the Language of Jewels

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The Paradox of the Forgotten King

He was meant to be forgotten. Every trace of his existence was to be erased — his name chiselled from monuments, his statues mutilated, the arms and hands that would have guided him through the afterlife deliberately destroyed. The process the ancient Egyptians called damnatio memoriae was designed to condemn a soul to oblivion, and in the case of the boy who had once been called Tutankhaten, later Tutankhamun, it very nearly worked.

For over three thousand years, the young pharaoh lay undisturbed in a modest tomb in the Valley of the Kings — small, hastily arranged, and chaotic in its splendour. His crime was simply this: he was the son of Akhenaten, the heretic king who had dismantled the ancient polytheistic religion in favour of a single sun disc, alienating a powerful priesthood in the process. When Akhenaten died, the nine-year-old boy followed his counsellors’ advice and reinstated the old gods. It was not enough. His officials ensured that the son of the heretic would vanish from history.

And yet, it is precisely because Tutankhamun was forgotten that he became immortal. His obscurity saved his tomb from the grave robbers who emptied every other royal burial in the Valley. When British archaeologist Howard Carter finally broke through the sealed doorway on 26 November 1922 — after fifteen years of searching — what he found would ignite a cultural revolution that reshaped architecture, fashion, cinema, and, above all, the art of jewellery.

But the story of Egypt’s hold on the jeweller’s imagination does not begin in 1922. It begins more than a century earlier, with another conqueror who understood the power of ancient symbols: Napoleon Bonaparte.

The First Wave: Napoleon, Scholars, and the Birth of Egyptology (c. 1798–1830s)

Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign of 1798–1801 was a military failure but a cultural triumph. Alongside his soldiers, Bonaparte brought 167 scholars — scientists, engineers, artists, and historians — who would document the monuments, temples, and artefacts of a civilisation that had fascinated Europe since antiquity but remained largely mysterious. The result was the monumental Description de l’Égypte, published in stages between 1809 and 1829: a twenty-three-volume encyclopaedia of illustrations and observations that opened ancient Egypt to the European imagination as never before.

The Rosetta Stone, seized by French troops in 1799 and later claimed by the British, became the key to deciphering hieroglyphics when Jean-François Champollion cracked the code in the 1820s. Suddenly, Egypt was not merely a land of picturesque ruins — it was a readable civilisation, with stories, gods, and a symbolic language that could be understood and, crucially, appropriated.

Napoleon himself embraced Egyptian symbolism with the instinct of a master propagandist. One of the most intimate surviving objects from this fascination is a small scarab ring, carved from the iron of a cannonball that had struck during the Battle of Dresden in August 1813. Napoleon gave this talismanic object to his mistress, Marie Walewska — the scarab a lucky motif he had adopted from his Egyptian campaign, the material a relic of his survival in battle. The ring remains in the Walewska family to this day, a private emblem of how deeply Egyptian symbolism had penetrated the personal mythology of Europe’s most powerful man.

The Egyptian taste spread rapidly through the decorative arts. In Paris, architects Charles Percier, François-Honoré-Georges Jacob-Desmalter, and goldsmith Martin-Guillaume Biennais created Egypt-inspired furniture and objets d’art — cabinets designed to resemble temple façades, ceremonial vessels decorated with hieroglyphic motifs. In England, Wedgwood produced porcelain tea services adorned with crocodiles, scarabs, and winged symbols. The entrance of what is today the German Embassy in Paris was designed to evoke an Egyptian temple front. Egypt had become a way of seeing — a visual vocabulary that signalled sophistication, mystery, and a connection to the eternal.

Even in these early decades, jewellery was beginning to absorb the fascination. Empress Joséphine, Napoleon’s first wife, owned Egyptian-inspired pieces: Dominique Vivant Denon, the influential cultural figure who had accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, purchased on her behalf earrings mounted with eleven scarabs and pearls, and a matching necklace of scarabs. These pieces no longer survive, but their inclusion in the imperial inventories testifies to how quickly the Egyptian campaign had generated demand for wearable antiquity at the highest echelons of European society.

Yet during the Napoleonic era, the Egyptian Revival competed with a far stronger passion for Greek and Roman classicism. It would take a new wave of archaeological discoveries — and a new empire — to bring Egypt fully into the jeweller’s workshop.

The Victorian Obsession: Scarabs, Sentiment, and the Suez Canal (c. 1860–1901)

The true golden age of nineteenth-century Egyptomania in jewellery arrived not with Napoleon but with the Victorians.

The catalyst was a convergence of forces. In Egypt, the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette, director of the newly established Cairo Museum, was making astonishing discoveries. His excavation of the tomb of Queen Ahhotep in the 1860s yielded a spectacular treasure of gold jewellery, weaponry, and ceremonial objects that toured European exhibitions, including the 1867 Paris Exposition. Meanwhile, the construction of the Suez Canal (1859–1869) — with its formal opening presided over by Empress Eugénie herself — kept Egypt perpetually in the news and the public imagination.

At the 1867 Paris Exposition, Egyptian-inspired jewels were prominently displayed by several of the most important French houses, including Boucheron, Mellerio, and Gustave Baugrand. Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III and one of the most influential arbiters of taste in Europe, commissioned her court jeweller Alexandre-Gabriel Lemonnier to create an Egyptian-style aigrette featuring a lotus flower and bird’s wings — a piece that captured the era’s appetite for archaeological glamour worn as personal adornment. By the late 1860s, scarabs, sphinxes, and serpents were firmly established among the fashionable motifs of the Second Empire.

What made the Victorian engagement with Egyptian jewellery distinct from what came before — and from the Art Deco Egyptomania that would follow — was its emotional dimension. The Victorian era was a culture steeped in the symbolism of death, mourning, and the afterlife. After Prince Albert’s death in 1861, Queen Victoria’s protracted mourning transformed British society’s relationship with loss, and jewellery became one of its most eloquent expressions. Black onyx, jet, enamel, and dark hardstones dominated the mourning palette; sentimentality and hidden symbolism governed design.

In this context, the Egyptian scarab — ancient symbol of resurrection, rebirth, and the journey to eternal life — held a particular and powerful resonance. It was not merely exotic decoration; it spoke directly to the Victorian preoccupation with what lay beyond the grave. Scarab brooches, rings, earrings, and necklaces proliferated throughout the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, rendered in gold, enamel, faience, and carved hardstones. Some mounted genuine ancient scarabs acquired through the flourishing antiquities trade; others were Victorian reproductions, often featuring invented hieroglyphs that no Egyptologist would recognise as authentic — but which satisfied the public desire for the appearance of ancient mystery.

The earlier Victorian Egyptian Revival pieces, from the 1860s and 1870s, were typically wrought in heavy gold, in keeping with the archaeological manner fashionable at the time. Scarabs, sphinx heads, and ram’s-head motifs appeared on the shield-shaped brooches and drop earring suites characteristic of the period. By the 1880s and 1890s, the style had broadened: winged scarab brooches set with emeralds, rubies, turquoise, and rose-cut diamonds appeared in increasing numbers, while swivelling scarab rings — where an ancient or reproduction faience beetle could be rotated to reveal inscribed hieroglyphs on the reverse — became a distinctive Victorian type.

It was during this period that the most significant Egyptian Revival jewellers established their practices. In Rome, the Castellani firm — Fortunato Pio Castellani and his sons Alessandro and Augusto — had made their name as the foremost practitioners of archaeological revival jewellery, specialising in painstaking recreations of Etruscan and classical goldsmithing techniques. Their Egyptian work was comparatively rare, since their Italian clientele preferred the local Etruscan and Roman styles, but the pieces they did produce were extraordinary. A necklace composed of fifteen antique scarabs carved from steatite and faience, set in gold with micromosaic decoration in the Egyptian palette, dates to around 1860 and exemplifies Castellani’s approach: embedding authentic antiquities within modern goldwork. A matching scarab brooch — featuring an ancient faience amulet carved with the baboon god, framed in micromosaic — demonstrated the same fusion of Roman technique and Egyptian iconography. Both pieces have passed through major auction houses; a Castellani gold necklace of fifteen scarabs, from the personal collection of Alfredo Castellani, was offered at Sotheby’s in December 2022 with an estimate of $450,000–$650,000. A related Egyptian-style scarab necklace attributed to Giacinto Melillo, one of Alessandro Castellani’s protégés who took over the Naples workshop, is held at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

In London, Carlo Giuliano took a more personal approach. Working from roughly 1860 to 1895, Giuliano collected articles of faience and scarabs to mount as jewels, but also created original enamel and gold pieces using hieroglyphs and ancient inscriptions for design inspiration. His polychrome enamel work was particularly striking, producing effects that recalled the intarsia inlay technique of ancient Egyptian craftsmen. A demi-parure of necklace, earrings, and bracelet by Giuliano, dating to around 1865, is held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

On the Parisian scene, Gustave Baugrand — the prominent jeweller of Napoleon III’s court — created a celebrated profile illustration of an Egyptian queen in precious stones, rendered according to the French design sensibilities of the 1860s. The most famous Egyptian woman of the era was Cleopatra, and she became a recurring figure in jewellery, painting, and theatre alike. A few decades later, the painter Georges Clairin would portray the French actress Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra in profile “according to the Egyptian way” — a vivid illustration of how Egypt had become not just a source of motifs but a way of thinking, a mode of cultural performance.

In Britain, the jeweller Robert Phillips created an Egyptian Revival scarab parure for Princess Alexandra of Denmark (later Queen Alexandra) — modelled on an ancient Egyptian necklace owned by Sir Henry Scott, which had been discovered at Thebes. Unfortunately, like the scarab jewellery of Empress Joséphine, this parure no longer survives, but its existence at the pinnacle of the British court confirms how thoroughly the Egyptian Revival had penetrated aristocratic taste. Other notable makers in this Victorian wave include the Parisian goldsmith Jules Wiese, whose Egyptian Revival necklace of faience, steatite, and coloured stones (c. 1870) was sold through Sotheby’s; Émile Philippe, also of Paris, who produced a carved coloured-stone scarab piece around 1878; and Marcus & Co. of New York, whose Egyptian Revival jade and enamel temple clip (c. 1900) and opal and enamel brooch are held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Edwardian Twilight and the Eve of Tutankhamun (c. 1900–1922)

As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, the Egyptian fascination evolved. Archaeological discoveries continued to supply fresh inspiration: Gaston Maspero opened the temples at Karnak; Edward Ayrton found a royal tomb at Thebes in 1908; and Ludwig Borchardt discovered the polychrome bust of Nefertiti around 1912, introducing a new and immensely powerful feminine icon to the Western visual repertoire.

At the same time, the aesthetic landscape was shifting. Art Nouveau, with its organic forms and flowing lines, absorbed the scarab into its own vocabulary — no longer as an archaeological artefact but as a creature of nature. René Lalique created a Scarab Pendant that fused Egyptian motifs — the beetle, the lotus blossom — with sinuous Art Nouveau forms, using green enamel and jasper to evoke the Egyptian association of green with renewal and rebirth. Unlike Castellani, who had strived for archaeological accuracy, Lalique used the scarab as a springboard for personal artistic interpretation, engraving the reverse with non-Egyptian iconography — a sign that by the early 1900s, Egyptian symbols had become a universal design language no longer tethered to literal reproduction.

Across the Atlantic, Tiffany & Co. brought a distinctly American sensibility to the Egyptian revival. Louis Comfort Tiffany, the firm’s artistic visionary, was captivated by the iridescent surfaces of ancient Egyptian faience and glass. Around 1913 — nearly a decade before Tutankhamun’s discovery — he created an Egyptian Revival necklace of extraordinary beauty, combining gold, lapis lazuli, amber, and turquoise in a design inspired by ancient menat necklaces. The piece, now in a private collection, was exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as part of the landmark Past is Present: Revival Jewelry exhibition (2017–2018).

Tiffany also cast iridescent Favrile glass into beetle forms and set them into wearable pieces that blurred the line between decorative art and jewellery. In 1913, Louis Comfort Tiffany hosted a lavish Egyptian-themed costume ball for three hundred guests — a spectacle that demonstrated how thoroughly Egypt had permeated American high society even before Howard Carter lifted his first stone in the Valley of the Kings.

In the mass market, the Neiger Brothers of Gablonz (now Jablonec nad Nisou, in the Czech Republic) produced widely popular costume jewellery featuring pyramids, sphinxes, obelisks, and imitation hieroglyphs — pieces that are considered clichés today but were enormously fashionable at the time and remain highly collectable.

By the early 1920s, then, the ground was thoroughly prepared. European and American jewellers had been drawing on Egyptian motifs for well over a century. The Napoleonic expedition had provided the intellectual foundation; the Victorian era had given the scarab its sentimental and symbolic power; the Edwardian period and Art Nouveau had transformed Egyptian forms into a modern design language. And a steady stream of archaeological discoveries had kept the supply of inspiration flowing.

What was needed was a catalyst. It arrived on 4 November 1922.

“Gold, Gold Everywhere”: The Discovery That Changed Everything

The story of Howard Carter’s discovery has been told many times, but its impact on the world of jewellery cannot be overstated without understanding the sheer sensory shock of what he found.

Carter had spent fifteen years searching for Tutankhamun — painstakingly learning the pharaoh’s name, mapping the Valley of the Kings, and methodically eliminating possible sites. His patron, Lord Carnarvon, was losing patience and funding. The 1922 season was to be the last.

On 4 November, a water boy stumbled upon a step cut into the rock. Within days, Carter had uncovered a staircase leading to a sealed doorway. On 26 November, with Carnarvon at his side, he made a small breach in the wall and raised a candle to peer inside. Asked by Carnarvon what he could see, Carter gave his famous reply — words that would become the most quoted sentence in the history of archaeology: he could see wonderful things.

What he saw was a chaotic pile of the most magnificent objects ever found in a single archaeological context. And the common element binding them all was gold — gold used not merely as a precious metal but as a divine material, the skin of the gods themselves.

The tomb was small — remarkably so for a pharaoh. Carter would later observe that the burial chamber of Ramses II, had it survived intact, would have been ten times larger, its treasure ten times greater. But it was precisely the modesty of Tutankhamun’s tomb that had saved it. The great royal burials had all been looted in antiquity. This small, forgotten chamber offered the modern world its only glimpse of what a pharaoh’s funerary treasure actually looked like — and in doing so, it revealed the extraordinary role that jewels played in Egyptian belief.

The mummy itself was covered in jewellery. Howard Carter, who was a gifted illustrator as well as an archaeologist, carefully documented the removal of approximately two hundred amulets in gold and precious stones, positioned among the layers of linen wrappings. Each amulet had been placed in a specific location on the body for a specific protective purpose. Inscribed with passages from the Book of the Dead, these golden objects formed a kind of spiritual armour — a shield to protect the pharaoh from the dangers he would face on his journey to eternal life.

Among the most significant pieces was a pectoral necklace found on the mummy’s chest, depicting the goddess Nephthys. Close examination, however, revealed a telling detail: while the depiction of the goddess was finely executed, an adjacent cartouche was crudely engraved, the colours dull, the workmanship poor. Egyptologists concluded that this pectoral had not been made for Tutankhamun at all — it had been hastily appropriated from another burial, the boy-king’s name scratched onto it in haste. This discovery revealed how rapidly and chaotically the young pharaoh had been interred, confirming his political insignificance and the urgency with which his officials had wanted him buried and forgotten.

The golden mask — eleven kilograms of solid 24-karat gold — became an instant icon. What struck observers was not only its magnificence but its humanity: the pierced ears of the mask mirrored those of the actual mummy, a detail that testified both to the artisans’ attention to realism and to the pharaoh’s youth, since in ancient Egypt only women and children wore earrings.

But for the future of jewellery design, perhaps the most revolutionary revelation from the tomb was not any single object but a principle. The jewels of Tutankhamun demonstrated that in the Egyptian symbolic system, colour was everything. Gold was the skin of the gods. Silver was their bones. Lapis lazuli — that intense, celestial blue — was the hair of the gods. Carnelian represented the burning fire of the sun. And the power of an amulet resided in its colour, not its material: a faience bead and a precious stone of the same hue carried identical protective force.

This was a radical idea for European jewellers, who had always operated within a hierarchy of materials where diamonds sat at the apex. The Egyptian principle of chromatic equivalence — where humble glass could carry the same symbolic weight as emerald — would profoundly influence the Art Deco approach to colour and material, encouraging designers to combine precious and semi-precious stones, hardstones, enamel, and even industrial materials in ways that had no precedent in Western tradition.

From Discovery to Delirium: The Birth of “Tut Mania”

The media response was unprecedented. Lord Carnarvon had granted exclusive reporting rights to The Times of London, but rival journalists found ways around the restriction. H.V. Morton of the Daily Express filed dispatches that fired the public imagination with accounts of golden sarcophagi and chambers crowded with priceless treasures. Within weeks, newspapers around the world were carrying stories about the discovery, and the public appetite for anything Egyptian became insatiable.

Tutankhamun became “Tut” — easier to remember, easier to market. And “Egyptomania” became “Tut Mania.” The craze swept through every aspect of visual culture. In architecture, the Chrysler Building in New York (commenced 1928, opened 1930) incorporated Egyptian-inspired sunburst motifs and elevator doors based on the papyrus flower. The Hoover Building in London (opened 1933) featured dramatic geometric sunbursts that paid homage to ancient Egypt. Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard was built to showcase new films, and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923) dazzled audiences with grandiose sets of Egyptian temples. Textiles printed with hieroglyphs appeared in British living rooms and bedrooms. Egypt was everywhere.

And it was in the ateliers of the great jewellery houses of Paris, London, and New York that Tut Mania would find its most enduring — and its most exquisite — expression. In January 1924, just over a year after the tomb’s opening, Cartier placed a full-colour advertisement in The Illustrated London News promoting jewels “set with real antiques” — a signal that the race to translate Tutankhamun’s treasure into wearable art had begun in earnest.

The stage was set for the most extraordinary period of Egyptian-inspired jewellery the world had ever seen. The maisons were ready. The public was ravenous. And the language of the pharaohs was about to be spoken in platinum, diamonds, and the brilliant chromatic palette of Art Deco.

Part II will explore the masterpieces themselves — from Cartier’s archaeological brooches to Van Cleef & Arpels’ chromatic fantasies, from Lacloche Frères’ narrative bracelets to the enduring thread that connects Tutankhamun’s uraeus to Bulgari’s Serpenti, Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, and the Egyptian-inspired jewels of our own century.