A World Beneath the Sands, page 18
The later Apis burials had all been robbed in antiquity, but Mariette subsequently discovered an earlier, intact burial made in the reign of Ramesses II and overseen by his son, the High Priest of Ptah, Khaemwaset. In the thin layer of sand which covered the floor around the sarcophagus, the footprints of the ancient Egyptian workmen were still visible; and around the doorway were the fingerprints of the priest who had sealed the chamber more than three thousand years before. Mariette was deeply moved by this human thread stretching across so many centuries.15
What had started out as a short-term mission to acquire Coptic manuscripts had now, more than two years later, acquired the makings of a more or less permanent archaeological expedition. Back in Paris, Mariette’s wife gave up waiting for him to return, and set sail for Egypt with their three daughters. They joined him at Saqqara where they settled down in a ramshackle construction dubbed ‘the little house among the sands’. Mariette’s employers at the Louvre forgave him his failure to procure any papyri, and were only too happy for him to continue his excavations. The Serapeum became the most celebrated discovery since the Rosetta Stone, and a favourite day trip for scholars and tourists from Cairo. By the time the thousands of finds from the Serapeum reached the Louvre, the President of the Second Republic’s Constituent Assembly, Louis-Napoleon, had declared himself Emperor Napoleon III (r.1852–70). Mariette’s discovery, and the cultural riches it brought his homeland, were thus celebrated as an auspicious harbinger of a new imperial age. With a confidence not seen since the days of the first Napoleon, France looked forward to regaining its rightful place as the leading Egyptological nation of the world.
The impact of Mariette’s discoveries – bolstered by Maxime du Camp’s photographic study, Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, published the same year – spread across Europe, propelling the civilization of ancient Egypt back into the forefront of fashion. Two of the strangest manifestations of this new ‘Egyptomania’ were aristocratic follies: in Scotland, the newly deceased tenth Duke of Hamilton was mummified and buried in a Ptolemaic sarcophagus in the family vault, following his own carefully expressed wishes;16 while, in Germany, the newly widowed Prince of Pückler-Muskau began creating massive earthwork pyramids in his landscape garden, one of which was to serve as his final resting place, following funeral rites modelled on those of ancient Egypt.17
Having rediscovered the famed Serapeum beneath the sands of Saqqara, Mariette next turned his attention to the most iconic area of the Memphite necropolis, the Giza plateau. Vyse and Perring had been there a decade and a half earlier, and had blasted open the burial chambers of the three main pyramids; but, Mariette believed, they had only scratched the surface (or, more accurately, drilled the back) of the Great Sphinx. In 1817, Caviglia had made some discoveries – the flight of steps ascending the monument and the pavement between its paws – but the dunes had returned, covering both Caviglia’s trench and the bulk of the great statue. As at Saqqara, the work required just to hold back the sand, let alone remove it, would be daunting . . . and expensive. The French government might have been delighted by the recent haul of antiquities from the Serapeum, but it baulked at financing a further flight of fancy. So, like Champollion and Lepsius before him, Mariette turned to an influential patron to advance his cause. Emmanuel, Vicomte de Rougé was ten years’ Mariette’s senior. A talented philologist and the first person to translate a running ancient Egyptian text, he had been appointed conservator of the Egyptian collection at the Louvre in 1849, the same year that Mariette had started work at the museum; the two had become firm friends. Through his aristocratic contacts, de Rougé secured for Mariette the interest and patronage of a noted collector, Honoré d’Albert, Duc de Luynes, who was keen to solve the riddles of the Sphinx. The duke sent the princely sum of 60,000 francs for Mariette’s new mission, and on 15 September 1853 the work began.
It took fifty workmen to clear the sand, which covered the Sphinx up to its shoulders, and remove the dwellings on top of the statue. Clearing the northern face alone took nearly a month. In the process, Mariette was the first to reveal the full extent of the Sphinx enclosure. He relocated the chambers that Caviglia had found, and the well described by an earlier traveller, Father Vansleb, in the seventeenth century. Mariette hoped the shaft might lead to a hidden chamber, but after fifteen days of clearance, it turned out to be a natural fissure in the rock. As Giza’s twenty-first century archaeologists have noted, not without sympathy: ‘Mariette plunged into the sea of sand that had once again filled Caviglia’s trench of 30 years earlier. The more he dug, the more sand would pour down into his trench, and there was no immediate flow of discoveries as in his excavation at the Serapeum. He soon lost patience.’18
The absence of discoveries, though dispiriting, was nonetheless important for what it disproved: there was no entrance to the Sphinx, no hidden chambers, no secret corridors; it was simply a natural knoll with masonry additions. While the Sphinx might hold no further secrets, Mariette had a hunch that an area to the south-east, where Wilkinson had noted a series of pits, might prove more promising. Once again, Mariette’s intution was rewarded. In June 1854, he discovered the valley temple of King Khafra’s pyramid complex. It was filled with sand, up to twenty-six feet deep in places. Another mammoth clearance effort ensued but, with just three feet of sand to go, Mariette’s funds ran out. He appealed to Paris, but to no avail. With great reluctance he had to abandon the work, leaving any hidden treasures (of which there turned out to be one very significant example) for another day.
Frustrated and elated in equal measure, Mariette prepared to leave Egypt and return home. With his wife and three children, he embarked at Alexandria at the end of July. Just two weeks earlier, Abbas had been assassinated by his bodyguard, leaving the throne to his son, the Francophile Said (r.1854–63). It was, as it turned out, a good omen for the future. Mariette’s first visit to Egypt had been full of unexpected twists and turns, disappointments but also great discoveries. As he later summed it up: ‘I left for Egypt in search of Coptic manuscripts. I didn’t find any. But I brought back a temple.’19
On his return to Paris, Mariette found that he had become something of a celebrity. His lectures at the Académie des Inscriptions were reported in Le Figaro. The discovery of the Serapeum was lauded by figures as eminent as Jomard (geographer to the Napoleonic expedition and arch-rival of Champollion), Louis de Saulcy (keeper of the Artillery Museum and senator), and Mariette’s own friend and mentor, de Rougé. People queued to see the seated scribe on display at the Louvre. Indeed, Mariette’s employers at the museum could count themselves well pleased with his achievements, and they promoted him to ‘adjunct curator’, his first substantive post in Egyptology. He wrote to his half-brother, Edouard: ‘My destiny is set.’20 He immediately began writing up his discoveries, but other duties soon supervened, and he only ever finished the first volume. He longed to return to Egypt, but instead the Louvre sent him on a study tour of other Egyptian collections across Europe (mindful, no doubt, of his skills as a copyist and cataloguer). A second trip to the land of the pharaohs seemed to be receding ever further into the distance when fate intervened a second time.
On 14 August 1857, Napoleon III visited the Louvre to open its new wings, and Mariette was present at the celebrations. A few weeks later he was unexpectedly ordered back to Cairo. The circumstances could not have been stranger. The emperor’s cousin, Prince Napoleon, had expressed a desire to visit Egypt for himself, and not just as a tourist. The prince wished to discover some antiquities. For the sake of Franco-Egyptian relations the visit had to be a success. As the leading (indeed the only) Egyptian archaeologist in France, Mariette’s job would be to unearth, and then rebury, a series of objects for the prince to ‘discover’. This was just the opportunity Mariette was looking for. There was little prospect of further promotion at the Louvre, and he dearly wished to return to excavation.
Once back in Egypt, he presented his credentials to the new ruler. Said (now more often styled ‘viceroy’ rather than ‘pasha’) was suspicious of Mariette’s motives, wondering if the real purpose of his visit was to advance French interests in the Suez Canal project. But he graciously made a steamer available for Mariette’s personal use, and the Frenchman lost no time in initiating new digs throughout the Nile Valley: at his old stamping grounds of Saqqara and Giza, as well as the rich archaeological sites of Abydos, Thebes and Elephantine.21 The results were immediate and impressive. At Saqqara, Mariette discovered the sarcophagus of the fourth dynasty king Shepseskaf, still in situ in the burial chamber of his coffin-shaped pyramid. Mariette celebrated with a winter cruise up the Nile with his close friend and fellow Egyptologist, Heinrich Brugsch. Ever the diplomat, Mariette dedicated his handsome folio publication of the Serapeum which appeared that year (Le Sérapéum de Memphis, 1857) to Prince Napoleon, with a foreword that consciously harked back to the Napoleonic expedition led by the prince’s forebear half a century earlier: ‘It is not only through the bravery of our soldiers and the genius of their commander that the Egyptian expedition has attracted the attention of posterity. Perhaps the prestige of this glorious campaign would be the less if science had not profited from our victories, and if Egypt, subject to our armies, had not at the same time been opened up to research by our scholars.’22
But then, quite unexpectedly, it was announced that the prince had postponed his visit indefinitely, and Mariette’s mission was changed from one of archaeology to one of acquisition: instead of finding objects for the prince to unearth, he was now required to gather a representative sample of antiquities for the prince’s personal collection, which Said would present as a diplomatic gift. Mariette did not demur. The objects were sent to Paris, and the prince was delighted. Mariette’s good standing with Said was restored. In a fulsome letter of thanks to the viceroy, Prince Napoleon felt emboldened to make a suggestion: ‘If Your Royal Highness were to ask of France the offices of a scholar to protect [Egypt’s] heritage and create a museum, the government would designate no other man but [Mariette].’23
As with the original suggestion of sending Mariette back to Egypt, the influence of Ferdinand de Lesseps – who had known Said since their shared childhood days in Cairo, and was now an influential member of the viceroy’s circle – can be detected. Said got the message. On 1 June 1858, by royal decree, the Egyptian Antiquities Service was founded; Mariette was appointed director of Egypt’s historic monuments, at a generous salary of 18,000 francs per annum. The letter of appointment, signed by Said, stated: ‘You will ensure the safety of the monuments; you will tell the governors of all the provinces that I forbid them to touch one single antique stone; you will imprison any peasant who sets foot inside a temple.’24 Mariette summed up his feelings succinctly: ‘This was like taking possession of Egypt for the cause of science.’25
To accompany his exclusive excavation rights throughout Egypt, the new director had extraordinary resources at his command. In addition to use of the royal steamer Samannoud (on which he had travelled up the Nile with Brugsch the previous winter) for his tours of inspection, Mariette was given the right to call upon the army and to levy corvée labour. In total, he had access to 7,000 workmen. He wasted no time in putting them to good use. His old friend Bonnefoy was named director of excavations in Upper Egypt, and digs were launched at many sites simultaneously. Mariette mobilized a hundred workers at Abydos, over three hundred at Giza, and up to five hundred at Thebes, where four new tombs were opened in the Valley of the Kings.26 A young Egyptologist, Théodule Devéria, arriving in Cairo in early 1859 to be Mariette’s assistant, wrote: ‘They are removing the sand the entire length of the valley and around Cairo – a veritable army of diggers is at work.’27
With unprecedented effort directed at uncovering Egypt’s ancient past, the discoveries came thick and fast:28 the relief of the Queen of Punt in 1858;29 the coffin and jewellery of Queen Ahhotep the following February; the leonine sphinxes of Amenemhat III from Tanis later that same year; the ‘Sheikh el-Beled’ wooden statue and the wooden panels of Hesira from Saqqara in 1860. One of the greatest finds, and for Mariette one of the most rewarding, was the magnificent seated statue of Khafra from his valley temple at Giza. Because lack of funds had forced Mariette to give up the excavation of the temple six years earlier, it was one of the first sites to be reopened when he took up the reins of the new Antiquities Service. Just as he had suspected, the temple had been abandoned in antiquity and there, in its inner hall, was a life-sized statue of its royal owner, carved from a single block of diorite, undamaged over the succeeding forty-three centuries. It was, and remains, one of the greatest masterpieces of ancient Egyptian art.
Mariette’s results may have been impressive, but his methods were decidedly slipshod, even by the standards of the time. With work progressing on many fronts simultaneously, he left his workmen unsupervised, kept few records, paid no attention to stratigraphy, and happily split up groups of objects. It did not have to be so. In 1855, a Scotsman named Alexander Rhind, a lawyer rather than an archaeologist, had come to Thebes for his health and, while he was there, excavated several Theban tombs. He argued that ancient monuments and antiquities should be left intact and in situ, and that museums should display only casts and facsimiles. But his ideas were ahead of his time, and his death before his thirtieth birthday robbed archaeology of a visionary practitioner. Mariette, while not quite in the Vyse camp, definitely belonged to the old school. His excavations have, perhaps unfairly, been described as ‘miseries inflicted by Europeans . . . without tangible benefit to the workers’.30 Certainly, his foremen showed no mercy in the application of the corvée.
Early in his tenure at the Antiquities Service, Mariette realized that his future career now lay in Egypt. He returned to France to fetch his family, but his employers at the Louvre were not exactly thrilled to see him. They did not welcome one of their staff working for the Egyptian government – especially as one of Mariette’s first actions had been to send inspectors to unauthorized digs, to seize any antiquities illegally excavated (highly ironic, given his own activities at the Serapeum, less than ten years earlier). A compromise was reached whereby Mariette resigned from his substantive position at the Louvre, accepting an honorary deputy keepership instead.31 He and his wife, and their children – now numbering four daughters and a son – set up home in the port of Bulaq, in a house infested with rats, snakes and scorpions. It was even less comfortable than the ‘little house among the sands’.
One of the most pressing issues resulting from the frenzy of archaeological activity was where to store all the resulting finds. Mariette had identified the former hangars of the Alexandria–Cairo Steamer Company at Bulaq (defunct since the arrival of the railway) as a suitable repository; but after just a few months, the storerooms were full. A permanent solution was clearly needed, and one was not long in coming. In 1859, Said agreed to establish a national museum with Mariette as director. The only question was where it should be located. Mariette’s proposal was the valley temple of Khafra (also known as Armachis) at Giza, the site of his most spectacular discovery since the Serapeum. He wrote to Brugsch: ‘As for the Museum, I firmly believe that it should be at the pyramids themselves, utilizing the temple of Armachis which I discovered previously. It is a good enough location, which has the huge advantage of being out of sight of the Turks, who are a little offended by Viceroy’s European notion of founding a Museum.’32
Building modern Egypt’s national museum at the site of ancient Egypt’s greatest cultural achievement was a bold plan, but utterly impractical. Giza was still covered in sand dunes, difficult to reach, and distant from the Nile. (Mariette’s vision of a Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza has only now been realized, over a century and a half later.) By contrast, Bulaq, the main port of Cairo, presented a more sensible option, given its location on the east bank of the Nile and its proximity to the centre of Cairo. So, while not giving up on his dream of a purpose-built museum, Mariette came up with a design for the Bulaq site.
Meanwhile, there was no let-up in the pace of excavations. Bonnefoy was struck down by exhaustion and malaria, but Mariette continued to dig even in the intense summer heat. Bonnefoy’s death at Thebes, in August 1859, shook Mariette – the two had worked together since Mariette’s first visit to Egypt – and he returned to France to recuperate. His reception was decidedly less warm than at his previous homecoming, five years earlier. He was accused by his former colleagues at the Louvre of betrayal by establishing a museum in Cairo, and by ending the practice of dividing finds between the excavator and the Egyptian state. Nonetheless, he was still a valuable asset for the French government in Egypt: on a subsequent visit to Paris, at a private audience with Napoleon III, the emperor asked him to act as a secret agent, to protect French interests against the schemes of the British.
The entente between Second Empire France and Said’s Egypt was cemented in 1862 when the viceroy paid a state visit to France, with Mariette as his personal guide. Travelling from London, Said landed at Boulogne to a rapturous reception. In Mariette’s home town, the viceroy announced to a delighted crowd that he had conferred on Mariette the status of bey, and placed him in charge of educating the royal children. In recognition of his achievements, the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris finally elected Mariette a member. But his moment of triumph was short-lived: just a few months later, Said’s death, on 17 January 1863, dealt Mariette’s plans a fatal blow and robbed him of a staunch ally (and France of a valued friend). He would have to build a new relationship, from scratch, with the new viceroy, Said’s nephew Ismail (r.1863–79).
