What is it about Ancient Egypt that has exerted such a pull on the modern imagination? Perhaps it is the air of the sinister that cloaks the figures of that pantheon of gods with whom we are so familiar from paintings on the walls of Egyptian burial chambers and temples.

This feeling was certainly confirmed by the reaction of so many of us who witnessed the passage last month of the giant statue of the jackal-headed god Anubis on its journey by barge up the Thames to announce the arrival of the Tutankhamun exhibition in London. Anubis was the guardian of the dead, who took souls to the Underworld.

There was something unutterably chilling in the sight of this dark, strange figure appearing unexpectedly in the morning light through the raised bascules of Tower Bridge, and proceeding solemnly upstream. For a moment through half-closed eyes the 21st-century Thames seemed to have been transformed into the Nile of more than 3,000 years ago.

Contemporary novelists – including manifestly serious figures such as the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz and the Finn Mika Waltari – have been fascinated in their droves in exploring the Pharaonic era and perhaps finding relevance to their own times. That heavyweight champion of modern American letters, Norman Mailer, could not resist the lure of measuring himself against Egyptian civilisation.

It cost him 11 years years of research and writing to come up with Ancient Evenings, which eventually saw the light of day in 1983 .

For other, lighter hearts among the community of novelists, unconcerned with weightier metaphysical preoccupations, Egypt has been an opportunity to entertain (as well as mildly frighten and titillate) with stories of of romance and intrigue conducted against an exotic backdrop that has allowed fancy full play. The fictions of writers ranging from Louisa May Alcott through Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilbur Smith to Barbara Cartland are evidence of an inexhaustible appetite for such stories among young and old.

From its fledgling days the cinema, too, was fascinated by Egypt, and this enthusiasm has continued without check. Neither Greek nor Roman empires and their many battles, campaigns and myths can demonstrate the huge volume of titles that have been generated by the pharaohs and, more to the point, their mummies.

From the dawn of film the mummy has simply carried every other aspect of Ancient Egpyt before it. Among the earliest short, silent essays in film-making is such fare as The Haunted Curiosity Shop, made in Britain in 1901. A somewhat primitive attempt, in which an antiquarian is terrified by the emergence of a mummy from a cupboard in his house, it nevertheless points the way to much of what has succeeded it. Since then miles and miles of convincingly mouldering bandages and a huge tonnage of papier-mâché masking have passed in front of the cameras.

Yet even in these early silent days the laudable educational biblical impulse was strong, as exemplified by the French five-part silent Joseph Vendu par ses Frères of 1904, complete with the attempted seduction of our hero by Potiphar’s wife. Biblical films involving the Children of Israel and their oppression in Egypt have proved enduringly popular.

So, too, though she really has nothing to do with Ancient Egypt, has that lusty daughter of the Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty, Cleopatra, most famously impersonated by Elizabeth Taylor with Richard Burton as her doting Antony in the Joseph L. Mankiewicz-directed film of 1963.

But in the cinema, despite all laudable educational impulses, the mummy has always been in the driving seat. The classic celluloid account is of course The Mummy of 1932 directed by Karl Freund and starring Boris Kar-lov. Regarded as the mother of all mummy films, it was based on the short story Cagliostro by Nina Wilcox Putnam, inspired in its turn by the life of the Italian traveller and occultist Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (Giuseppe Balsamo, 1743-95).

The Mummy’s Hand (1940), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942) and The Mummy’s Curse (1944) were just a few of the torrent of titles of variations on the theme that Freund’s masterpiece has spawned, an unstoppable procession that has marched unchecked right up to our own era and Night of Anubis (2005) and Terror in the Mummy’s Tomb (2007).

The mummy is still alive and kicking. How Ancient Egypt and its pharaohs, gods and goddesses are best translated to the screen is a matter of debate, Peter Davies writes. For me the 1950s, that high noon of Technicolor with its vivid hues and the excitement of the wide screen, gave the whole era a glamour that surmounted the corniest of scripts. A movie such as Land of the Pharaohs (1955) had it all. Jack Hawkins of The Cruel Seafame, was the Pharaoh Khu-fu, obsessed with the idea of amassing huge wealth and defying that age-old adage “you can't take it with you” by enlisting his archtitect, Vashtar, (the inimitable James Robertson Justice) to build him a robbery-proof pyramid to house him and his gold in the afterlife. Bent on preventing this was the Princess Nellifer, played with splendid bitchiness and breathtaking sexuality by a young Joan Collins. Remarkably, the wooden dialogue that propelled this macabre rompwas the work of Nobel prize-winning novelist William Faulkner.

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