A World Beneath the Sands, page 16
Stopping only briefly at Thebes, Lepsius’s expedition pressed on southwards, ‘impatient to commence immediately our second fresh task, which consisted of the investigation of the Ethiopian countries, situated higher up the river’.36 This was Lepsius’s chance to get one up on the French (and the British), given that: ‘The French-Tuscan expedition did not go beyond Wadi Halfa, [while] Wilkinson’s careful description of the Nile land and its monuments . . . only extends a little higher up, as far as Semneh.’37 Lepsius’s patriotism, and his eagerness to best the French, did not however affect his deep admiration for Champollion, with whom he felt a special connection, given the coincidence of their birthdays. On 23 December 1843, Lepsius’s thirty-third birthday, and what would have been Champollion’s fifty-third, the Prussian composed a rather clumsy, if heartfelt, poem to his hero, and committed it to his journal:
Champollion! Champollion!
Champollion! Champollion!
Erklingt ihr Gläser, ting, tang, tong!
Let your glasses ring out, ting, tang, tong!
Daß er’s im Grab erfahre!
That he may experience it in the grave!
Ihm gilt der heutige Ehrentag,
To him belongs today’s auspicious day,
Ich kam ihm weit, weit hinten nach,
I came far, far, behind him,
Fast 21 Jahre.
Almost 21 years.
Champollion! Champollion!
Champollion! Champollion!
Erklingt ihr Gläser, ting, tang, tong!
Let your glasses ring out, ting, tang, tong!
Champollion soll leben!
Champollion shall live!
Vermöcht’ich was auf seinem Pfad,
Might I do something on his path,
Wie gern wollt’ich in Wort und Tat,
How much would I like, in word and deed,
Ihm gern die Ehre geben.38
To do him the honour.
The study of Upper Nubia and its native languages was, in many respects, the expedition’s most groundbreaking and lasting achievement. Knowledge of the Nile Valley beyond the Second Cataract was still very limited; few Europeans had travelled that far south, and the conditions were extremely difficult and dangerous. But Lepsius was not easily disheartened (as the series of disasters earlier in the year had shown). At Korosko, the expedition had to wait for two months for camels to take them on to Meroë. One of the beasts was subsequently killed by a lion.39 The party eventually reached Khartoum on 5 February 1844, and spent the next five months carefully exploring all the sites downstream to Wadi Halfa. The political crisis that erupted between Muhammad Ali and his son in July that year – though word of it reached Europe and prompted Lepsius’s concerned father to write a letter, asking after his son’s safety – scarcely touched the distant reaches of the Nile. By the time Lepsius and his colleagues had regained civilization, the crisis had passed.
The expedition’s next major sojourn was at Thebes, where Lepsius and his colleagues spent a total of seven months, four on the west bank and three at Karnak on the east. The effect of the city’s magnificent monuments was energizing. Lepsius wrote: ‘Here, where the Homeric figures of the mighty Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties meet me in all their splendour and magnificence, I feel once more as fresh as at the beginning of my journey.’40 He certainly needed abundant reserves of energy, for, as he soon realized: ‘The number of monuments of all kinds, both above and below ground, at Thebes, is so great that they may be truly called inexhaustible, even for a combined power like ours.’41 A complete survey and record of every Theban monument being an impossibility, the expedition selected those it believed most important to achieve its stated goals, and focussed its efforts accordingly. The team stayed in Wilkinson’s house while carrying out excavations nearby, and Lepsius recorded his thanks to the Englishman for having ‘rendered an essential service to later travellers by building up the habitable rooms, which, from our being desirous of spending a long time in Thebes, we have profited by’.42
By March 1845, the end of the expedition was fast approaching, and Lepsius was anxious to finish the collection of major antiquities for the Berlin Museum. Of his original targets, neither the scene of desert tribespeople nor the scene of brickmakers could be removed without damage; the obelisk of Senusret I at Crocodilopolis turned out to be not an obelisk at all, but ‘more an obelisk-like elongated stela’;43 while the obelisk at Heliopolis, which was indeed a true obelisk, was rumoured to have been promised by Muhammad Ali to the pope. It wasn’t a great start. Lepsius knew he needed antiquities that were truly monumental, befitting a royal expedition and a national collection. What he had in mind was nothing less than an entire wall of the Ramesseum, and he wrote back to Berlin seeking permission to begin the deconstruction work. But the Prussian government, not wanting to jeopardize its newfound favour with Muhammad Ali, baulked. The Ramesseum, Ramesses the Great’s ‘temple of a million years’, remained intact. A sequence of Old Kingdom funerary chapels at Giza and Saqqara was not so lucky. Before an export licence had even been granted, workers were sent in secret to dismantle three chapels.44 Only when the blocks had been taken down and packed did Wagner seek the pasha’s permission to ship them to Berlin. As it was, on 9 September, Lepsius had to report that the chapels could not yet be dispatched because winter ice would prevent the ships entering German harbours, and storage costs in England or Holland were much higher than in Alexandria. Wagner, by now thoroughly fed up with Egypt and no doubt regretting his move from Constantinople, left for a holiday in Berlin and expressed the hope that he would never have to return. He took one of the expedition members with him, while the others made their own way. Lepsius remained in Alexandria, watching over his precious cargo.
Eventually, Lepsius left Egypt at the beginning of October, over three years since his arrival in the country, and, after a brief detour to his home town of Naumburg, was back in Berlin in January 1846 to start work on publishing his results. And what results they were.
The success of the expedition exceeded all expectations, and fully justified the trust placed in Lepsius as its leader. As he had hoped from the outset, the most important results were in the fields of history and chronology. Careful study of the monuments of the Old Kingdom, a period largely neglected by Champollion and Wilkinson, pushed the origins of Egyptian civilization back by a millennium, and situated them firmly within the Nile Valley. (Earlier generations of scholars had sought them in Ethiopia or even India; Lepsius’s knowledge of comparative linguistics, and his careful exploration of Nubia, disproved both hypotheses.)
The historical existence of the Old Kingdom, and the order of succession of the twelfth dynasty rulers were conclusively demonstrated, and the hiatus of the Amarna Period – when the ‘heretic pharaoh’ Akhenaten brought in sweeping changes to Egyptian religion, art and architecture – was revealed for the first time. At Thebes, Lepsius identified a previously unknown ruler of the eighteenth dynasty, the female pharaoh, Hatshepsut; and by systematic study of inscriptions, correctly established the chronology of the thirteenth, fifteenth, seventeenth and twentieth dynasties of kings.
In others areas of enquiry, the results were no less impressive. Thousands of paper squeezes and copies of inscriptions brought new insights into ancient Egyptian – ‘The lexicon has been increased by our becoming acquainted with several hundred signs, or groups, and the grammar has received a great many corrections’45 – while Lepsius’s study of Nilotic languages (spoken by peoples of the Upper Nile, and distantly related to ancient Egyptian) was truly groundbreaking. He revealed the different canons of proportions (the rules laid down for the depiction of the human body) used at different periods of Egyptian history, so that: ‘The different epochs of Egyptian art now first appeared clear and distinct, each marked by its peculiar character . . . They had so frequently been misunderstood, that no one believed in their existence; they were lost in the general uniformity.’46
The expedition brought back maps and plans of the Nile Valley, and of individual sites, ‘more perfect and exact than any hitherto made’,47 as well as stone and soil samples from ‘the more remarkable localities’.48 And then there were the antiquities. Before leaving Alexandria, Lepsius had received a firman authorizing the removal of the collection, which was to be regarded as a gift from Muhammad Ali to the Prussian king. In total, there were 15,000 antiquities and plaster casts. Once the winter ice had melted, they arrived in Hamburg on 23 May 1846, marking the official end of the expedition. Unloaded and brought to Berlin, they made the city’s museum, at a single stroke, a serious rival to those in Paris, London and Turin. In recognition of Lepsius’s superlative contributions to science and the fatherland, he was named, by royal appointment, professor of Egyptology at Berlin University with a salary of 1,500 thaler.
There was, however, a fly in the ointment. Lepsius had transformed the Egyptian collection in Berlin, but another man, Passalacqua, controlled it. Lepsius wanted to create a dramatic new display, which would stand as a permanent monument to his expedition, showing the development of Egyptian art and culture. The objects would be arranged chronologically, replacing the old ‘cabinet of curiosities’ with a modern, scientific layout. In Lepsius’s view, this was no more than Berlin deserved. After all, since the beginning of the decade, Egyptian antiquities had formed the centre and the main attraction of the British Museum’s collection in London; moreover, the museum’s guide explicitly recognized Egyptian art as standing at the head of the Western art tradition, ‘the source from which the arts of Sculpture and of Painting, and perhaps even the Sciences, were handed to the Greeks – and from the Greeks to us’.49 The new displays Lepsius had in mind for Berlin would demonstrate the point even more clearly. He also had firm views about the decoration of the galleries themselves, favouring coloured scenes from Egyptian temples and tombs as the most suitable backdrop for pharaonic artefacts. Not everyone agreed. As one commentator put it diplomatically, ‘the decoration of the rooms in the Berlin museum by no means meets with such universal approbation’.50 But Passalacqua, out-argued and out of his depth, had to give way. Lepsius got his new display, and the Egyptian galleries opened to public acclaim in 1850. Lepsius became co-director of the museum in 1855, and director on Passalacqua’s death ten years later.
The Berlin Museum has since been redesigned more than once, and Lepsius’s colourful, neo-pharaonic decorative scheme has been swept away. The most enduring memorial to his expedition is to be found, not in bricks and mortar, but in paper and ink – in the form of the most massive Egyptological publication ever produced (or ever likely to be). Lepsius’s ambition in this respect was clear and straightforward: to publish the results of the expedition ‘in a style corresponding with the magnificence of the treasures we brought away with us’.51 He wrote to his father in March 1847: ‘The proposal for the great atlas, which I have set forth in 1000 folio plates, is now before the king, or nearly . . . The sums are significant, and must, of necessity, come from the public purse . . . So it is possible that the Minister of Finance may strike out the budget, unless the king himself approves it.’52
It fell to Lepsius’s most trusted mentor, Humboldt, to plead the case. The Prussian king needed little persuasion, however, and immediately granted 15,000 thalers as a first instalment, giving Lepsius the green light to proceed. The finished work, Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien, eventually ran to 894 folio plates, published in twelve enormous volumes. As another Egyptologist remarked: ‘One needs a corporal and four soldiers to use your Lepsius’ Monuments.’53 It was, and remains, astonishing both for the quantity and quality of the contents. According to Lepsius’s pupil and biographer, the Denkmäler ‘is, and must ever remain, the chief and most fundamental work for the study of Egyptology’.54 As a record of the last major expedition to Egypt before the advent of photography,55 the work effectively sums up the heroic efforts of the early nineteenth-century antiquarians and archaeologists. Wilkinson had in his private library a copy of the Denkmäler, given to him by the German emperor. Lepsius’s great work is still the most prized publication in the history of Egyptology.
To accompany the Denkmäler, Lepsius also published his letters from Egypt, which he had written to Eichhorn, to his academic colleagues, and especially to his father. He dedicated them to Humboldt ‘with the profoundest veneration and gratitude’. Unlike the monumental official tomes, they were aimed not just at antiquarians and scholars, but also at the general public:
to offer a picture to a larger circle of interested readers of the external features of the Expedition, the personal cooperation of the different members belonging to it, the obstacles, or the fortunate circumstances of the journey, the condition of the countries that we traversed, and the influence they exercised on the immediate objects of our understanding; finally, a series of remarks on the individual sites of the monuments in that most historical of all countries . . . which may also excite an increased sympathy in others who have acknowledged the great importance of this newly established science.56
Like Wilkinson before him, Lepsius hoped to win converts to the emergent discipline of Egyptology. Unlike Wilkinson, the end of Lepsius’s great adventure in Egypt was not accompanied by any diminution of his scholarly output. Quite the reverse. Over the remaining forty years of his career, he published essays on the construction of the pyramids, the Nile height measurements at Semna, and the language and culture of the Ethiopians; the first scientific study of ancient Egyptian chronology, Die Chronologie der Aegypter (1849), which sparked criticism from theologians because it challenged biblical orthodoxy, but laid the foundations for all subsequent studies; a comprehensive king list of Egyptian rulers; a Nubian grammar; and a study of measurements and proportions in the ancient world. He discovered a bilingual inscription, the Canopus Decree, which proved Champollion’s system of decipherment beyond doubt, and he was the first to tackle the question of Egypt’s prehistoric past. At the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, Lepsius led the new Prussian crown prince (later Emperor Friedrich III) on a Nile cruise, and from 1874 until his death he was director of the Royal Library.
Few others in the history of Egyptology – not even Champollion – can claim so many achievements. In 1850, the Berlin Academy, where Lepsius’s career had begun, elected him a full member (he had been made a corresponding member in 1844, during the expedition to Egypt), thus publicly recognizing that the study of ancient Egypt stood alongside theology, philology and all the branches of learning, on its own merits. Champollion cracked the code, Wilkinson gave the ancient Egyptians a human face, but it was Lepsius, through his meticulous and systematic approach, who separated Egyptology from classical antiquity and founded it as an independent, scientific discipline.
FIVE
French foundations
A seated statue of King Khafra, found in situ in his valley temple at Giza by Auguste Mariette.
This was like taking possession of Egypt for the cause of science.1
AUGUSTE MARIETTE, 1858
Eighteen forty-eight was the year of revolutionaries and revolutions across Europe and beyond. In London Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto. In Bohemia and Hungary there were nationalist risings, forcing the Hapsburg emperor Ferdinand to abdicate. In France, King Louis Philippe was overthrown, ushering in the Second Republic. Egypt, too, experienced its own dramatic political change with the deposition of Muhammad Ali on grounds of senility. The Albanian soldier who had murdered the Mamluks, thumbed his nose at the Ottoman empire, and played the European powers off against each other, had not only won recognition for himself as the de facto independent ruler of Egypt and for his heirs and successors as hereditary viceroys: he had also, during the course of his forty-three-year reign, transformed Egypt from a pre-industrial, feudal society into a thrusting country with a vibrant economy in a headlong rush into the modern age. Through force of will and of arms, he had imposed a planned economy, revolutionized agricultural production, introduced cash crops to boost exports, built factories and mills to reduce Egypt’s dependence on imports, and improved transport and communications through the construction of roads and bridges, canals and dams. As regular visitors could not fail to notice, Egypt in 1848 was almost unrecognizable compared to the country Muhammad Ali had inherited.
But, as commentators were also quick to point out, all this modernization had been achieved at a heavy cost. The long-suffering fellahin, backbone of Egypt’s rural economy, were especially hard pressed. A combination of demanding production targets, heavy taxes, military conscription and the dreaded corvée (conscripted labour, levied as a form of taxation) made life for an average Egyptian peasant tough and unrelenting. Not just the general population but also Egypt’s patrimony bore the brunt of Muhammad Ali’s development. From Champollion’s in the 1820s to Gliddon’s in the 1830s, there had been no shortage of appeals to the Egyptian ruler to protect the country’s ancient monuments before any more damage was done. But these appeals had fallen on deaf ears. As far as the pasha was concerned, portable antiquities were a handy currency, while larger monuments like obelisks were powerful bargaining chips that could be used to buy support and influence. If Westerners were passionate about the relics of Egypt’s past, that merely gave Egypt’s present ruler greater leverage. The fate of the first national collection of antiquities was a case in point: it had been neglected, given away as trinkets, and the remaining pieces presented to an Austrian archduke as a diplomatic gift. While Muhammad Ali had introduced a few pieces of antiquities legislation, they had been more honoured in the breach than in the observance, and were customarily waived at the ruler’s whim. Antiquarians and archaeologists with a genuine concern for pharaonic civilization were either despondent, angry or resigned: there seemed little prospect of change, little likelihood of a comprehensive package of measures to protect Egypt’s heritage, at least while Muhammad Ali remained in charge.
