The works of the Champollion and Rosellini expeditions are invaluable and irreplaceable because they contain information and illustrations of Egyptian monuments made early in the exploration and exploitation of that country. They are two of the oldest and most important publications to include accurate copies of reliefs and inscriptions and are still regularly consulted for many of them. The quality of the plates is excellent but the rarity of the publications and their very large format (72 x 58 cm page size) make them unwieldy at best and inaccessible at worst to researchers who wish to use them. If they exist in digitized form, the originals will be handled less, thus prolonging their useful lives, and they could be made accessible to altogether more people.

Champollion and Rosellini are two of the most important of these early sources, but digitizing this set of volumes should be seen as the first stage of a larger process of capturing the 19th and early 20th century legacy with a view to making it widely available. The Sackler Library has perhaps the world’s finest collection of these publications, almost all of which are still in excellent condition, so that it is the logical collection to use as the point of departure for digitization.

Link to online collection