It was hard to get access to books and materials needed. In the case of Egyptology, I show how Denmark could be considered belonging to a European periphery. I also argue his museum studies should be regarded as fieldwork as he was on a time constrain and tried to make the most of the time he had by, for example, travel at night and never eating anything during the museums opening hours. Schmidt spent a large part of his career travelling to museums and studying museum objects to acquire knowledge which he later would communicate to a Danish audience through his many public lectures.
I show how most of the primary and secondary sources needed for his practise were not found in Denmark but were spread in several collections and libraries all over the world. I argue, in the case of Schmidt, that the way he practised Egyptology was in many ways unpractical and costly, indicating he was more shaped by the scientific ideals of the national context he worked in. This focus on the small and trivial has previously been attributed to William Matthew Flinders Petrie at least 15 years after Schmidt, and it has been proposed he had done so as for practical purposes as it was easier to take smaller objects out of Egypt and distribute between the subscribers. This affected his scientific views in that he believed in using a quantity of sources, even those which many would regard as trivial in order to reconstruct the past. First, I argue that Schmidt, as the first academic Egyptologist in Denmark, was profoundly influenced by prehistoric archaeology and comparative linguistics, both with Danish roots in the first half of the 19th century. Through the agency of Valdemar Schmidt, the initiator of the Egyptology at the University of Copenhagen, I ask the following 3 questions (1) How did Valdemar Schmidt practise Egyptology? (2) What was his working relation to Egypt and the rest of Europe? (3) Are there any changes over time, and if so, what were they? Several results can be shown. The aim of this study is to examine how Egyptology was established and practised in a non-imperial Scandinavian country – Denmark. The history of Egyptology has for this reason primarily focused on the big four – Great Britain, France, Germany and USA – and on Egypt itself. Egyptology in the 19th and early 20th centuries developed simultaneously with increased imperial presence in Egypt by the European imperial powers, which would have influence on how the discipline was practised.
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