[Excavations near the Sphinx]

The son of a banker from Boston who lived in Paris, Greene was an archaeologist who learned to use Gustave Le Gray's waxed-paper process, the photographic technique of choice in the mid-nineteenth century for traveling Frenchmen. In 1853 he made the first of two expeditions to Egypt and Nubia, bringing back more than two hundred negatives of monuments and landscapes.

At Giza, Greene photographed the great pyramids and sphinx that had towered above the desert sands for millennia, but he also pointed his camera downward, to the excavations that were just then bringing to light the long-buried Valley Temple of Khafre and the causeway that led to his pyramid, barely seen in the top left corner. The excavations were led by the French archaeologist François Mariette, founder of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, and although all the carefully posed people in Greene’s photograph appear to be Egyptian, the French presence is felt nonetheless: the tricolor flies from a flagpole on the head of the sphinx, a colonizing symbol of the country’s stake in the recovery of Egypt’s ancient past.