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Hieroglyphs to Hype at Fairfield: two centuries of Egyptomania and the names behind it
6 November 2026
Hieroglyphs to Hype: The Modern Afterlife of Ancient Egypt is at the Fairfield University Art Museum in Fairfield, Connecticut, until 12 December 2026, in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries. Entry and the talks around it are free.
It is a show about Egyptomania, the West's two-hundred-year craze for Egypt: paintings, prints, photographs, silver and contemporary art from the early 1800s to now, lent by Yale, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Hood Museum and private collectors. The craze began with the hieroglyphs themselves, and the faces it made famous all had names written in them.
Napoleon's scholars started the craze
In 1798 Napoleon invaded Egypt with an army and about 160 scholars and artists. Their drawings, published as the Description de l'Égypte from 1809, put temples, obelisks and sphinxes into European homes, and soon onto clocks, wallpaper, candlesticks and spoons. The show's Egyptian-style silver and even an Egyptian-style waste bin descend from those plates.
In 1822 Jean-François Champollion showed how hieroglyphs work, and Egypt became something people could read. Travel followed. The Scottish painter David Roberts toured Egypt and Nubia in 1838 and 1839, and his 1849 painting of the hall inside the great temple of Abu Simbel is in the show.
Cleopatra's name helped crack the code
Champollion compared the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra in cartouches on an obelisk and the Rosetta Stone, because both shared letters and both were spelled out by sound. Kleopatra takes eleven signs: the sandy hill (N29) for q, the lion (E23) for l, the reed (M17) for i, the quail chick (G43) for w, the stool (Q3) for p, the vulture (G1) for ꜣ, the hand (D46) for d, the mouth (D21) for r, the vulture again, the bread loaf (X1) for t, and an egg (H8) that marks a woman's name.
The show's Cleopatras are modern ones, from portraits to Elizabeth Taylor, who played her in 1963. Audrey Flack's photorealist Lux Eternal of 2022 looks back at Taylor, and Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos asks what it means to want to look like Cleopatra.
Nefertiti means the beautiful one has come
The painted bust of Nefertiti, found at Amarna in 1912 and in Berlin ever since, became the most copied ancient face of the twentieth century, and the show follows it into prints and photographs. Her name, nfrt-iyti, means "the beautiful one has come".
The heart and windpipe (F35) write nfr, "beautiful", and the bread loaf (X1) makes it feminine, nfrt. The reed (M17) and the walking legs (D54) write iy, "to come", and a second loaf ends it. The bust itself has no inscription. She is known by her flat-topped crown, which only she wore.
Tutankhamun made Egyptomania mass culture
After Howard Carter's team found Tutankhamun's tomb in November 1922, Egyptian style was everywhere: in jewellery, cinemas, dance tunes and the Art Deco skyscraper. The show traces that wave through photographs of the tomb and of the king's mummy, and on into The Mummy films and television like Ancient Aliens, which its curator Megan Paqua uses to show how far the craze drifted from the evidence.
Other works push back. Lorraine O'Grady paired her own family photographs with Nefertiti and her relatives, and the Egyptian artist Sara Sallam reflects on mummies shown in museums.
New York's own obelisk is a train ride away
A lecture on 5 November covers Egypt's habit of giving away monuments. The nearest example is Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park, given by Egypt and raised behind the Metropolitan Museum in 1881. Its twin went to London in 1878, and Paris got an obelisk from Luxor in 1836.
The name has nothing to do with Cleopatra. The obelisk was raised at Heliopolis by Thutmose III about 1475 BC, and his throne name runs down the middle of each face: mn-ḫpr-rꜥ, Menkheperre, written with the sun disc (N5), the game board (Y5) for mn, the ripple (N35) and the scarab (L1) for ḫpr. Ramesses II added his own columns later.
Questions
When is Hieroglyphs to Hype on at Fairfield University?
From 18 September to 12 December 2026, in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries of the Fairfield University Art Museum in Connecticut. The talks are free and open to the public.
What is Egyptomania?
The fashion for ancient Egypt in Western art, design and entertainment, which took off after Napoleon's expedition of 1798 and again after Tutankhamun's tomb was found in 1922.
Is the bust of Nefertiti in the exhibition?
No. The bust stays at the Neues Museum in Berlin. The exhibition shows how artists and photographers have used her image.
Glossary
- afterlife
- The life Egyptians expected after death. It needed a preserved body, a tomb, offerings and the right spells.
- cartouche
- An oval ring drawn around a royal name, a loop of rope tied at one end. Kings wrote their two main names in cartouches.
- hieroglyphs
- The picture signs of ancient Egyptian writing, used from about 3200 BC to AD 394. A sign can stand for sounds, for a whole word, or for the kind of thing a word means.
- mummy
- A body dried and wrapped in linen so that it would last. Egyptians believed the spirit needed it in the afterlife.
- obelisk
- A tall, four-sided stone pillar with a pointed top, usually set up in pairs before a temple and carved with the king's names.
- Rosetta Stone
- A stone slab of 196 BC carrying one decree in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek. It helped Jean-François Champollion decipher hieroglyphs in 1822.
- scarab
- The dung beetle, sign of the rising sun and of the word ḫpr, "to come into being". Carved scarabs were used as seals and amulets.
- sphinx
- A statue with the body of a lion and the head of a king, a guardian of temples and tombs. The Great Sphinx at Giza is the largest.
- temple
- The house of a god, where priests served the god's statue. Temples for dead kings kept up their offerings after death.
- throne name
- The name a king took when he came to the throne, written in the first cartouche after the title "King of Upper and Lower Egypt". Egyptologists also call it the prenomen.
- tomb
- A burial place: a pit, a mastaba, a pyramid or rooms cut into rock. Its chapel was where the family brought offerings.
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More to read
- How to read hieroglyphs How to read hieroglyphs: find the way the signs face, sound out the alphabet signs, spot the silent ones. A king's name read sign by sign.
- Which way do you read hieroglyphs? Which way do you read hieroglyphs? Toward the faces: birds, snakes and people look at the start of the line. Rows, columns and the odd exceptions.
- The hieroglyph alphabet: 24 signs and their sounds The hieroglyphic alphabet: the 24 one-consonant signs Egyptologists list, with the picture, the sound and how to spell an English name with them.