A pioneer of British Egyptology, Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875) first travelled to Egypt in 1821, the year before Champollion published his breakthrough work on the Rosetta Stone. As public interest in Egypt grew, Wilkinson studied and sketched the country's major archaeological sites, most notably the tombs of Thebes. His Topography of Thebes and General View of Egypt (1835) and Modern Egypt and Thebes (1843) are also reissued in this series. This well-illustrated three-volume work, first published in 1837, remained for over a century a key text on the lives of ancient Egyptians. Writing in a popular genre that was normally focused on contemporary societies, Wilkinson covers areas ranging from daily life to funerary beliefs. His imaginative approach underpinned the book's considerable success. Volume 1 addresses the physical and human geography of ancient Egypt, with a historical narrative up to the point of its conquest by Alexander the Great.