Egypt 1950 : My first visit

Bernard V Bothmer was a leading Egyptologist and art historian of the mid-twentieth century.

Born in Berlin, he emigrated to America in 1941, and soon become an assistant curator of Ancient Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

In 1950 Bothmer received a small grant to go to Egypt, to familiarize himself with the Cairo Museum and the archaeological sites, and to visit and study the places where the Harvard University-Museum of Fine Arts Egyptian Expedition had done its fieldwork before the War.

It was his first visit to Egypt. In this book, his diary of the trip, Bothmer details all the places he visited, from Aswan in the south to Saqqara in the north, and the people he met along the way.

He describes the events and experiences of everyday life, from trains and donkeys to the Hotel Luxor, and alludes to the political and social circumstances surrounding the practice of archaeology in Egypt in the middle of the 20th century.