El viaje de inspección anual al Alto Egipto de 1886 y el fondo fotográfico Toda de la Biblioteca Museu Víctor Balaguer

Abstract

This paper shows an example of how peripheral Egyptologies –in this case, the Spanish one– can provide perspectives illustrating the main stream in the field at the end of the nineteenth century. The study is focused on a photographic collection preserved in the Biblioteca Museu Víctor Balaguer of Vilanova i la Geltrú, Barcelona (BMVB). It gathers a visual narration of the annual inspection tour to Upper Egypt in 1886 carried out by the Service de Conservation des Antiquités. There is no documentation detailing when or how the images entered the institution, but they were surely collected by Eduard Toda i Güell, who took part in the expedition. The preserved documents produced by that generation of Egyptologists rarely include images taken during these trips. The photographs in the BMVB illustrate how, and for what purposes, the photography was used in epigraphic fieldwork in Egypt during the 1880s.