The most lasting achievement of the German Egyptologist Heinrich Karl Brugsch (1827-94) is perhaps his work on the Egyptian demotic script, which had been relatively neglected since Champollion's death. This illustrated two-volume history of Egypt, 'derived entirely from the monuments', was first published in an English translation (by H. D. Seymour, from the 1876 first German edition, and edited by Philip Smith) in 1879. Brugsch brings to bear his...