A World Beneath the Sands, page 29
The diet consisted of tea, ship’s biscuits, and cold tinned tongue. Half-empty tins were left to be served up again the following day. In the heat of Egypt, food poisoning was the regular result. It was even said that tins of food left over from one season were buried, to be dug up again at the start of the next. Each tin would be tested by throwing it against a stone wall. If it survived without exploding, its contents were deemed fit for consumption.64 As for sanitation, Petrie told one of his students ‘the desert is wide and there are many sheltered hollows’.65 (The result, according to Budge, was that Petrie was ‘dirty, verminous and . . . as odiferous as a polecat’.66) The young Rawnsley summed the whole experience up thus: ‘An excavator’s camp in the valley of the Nile is a thing apart . . . a rough sketch in mud bricks and sand, a little settlement of sunburnt men toiling in a thirsty land, alone with nature, in one of her solemnest moods.’67 His time spent with Petrie had, at the very least, disabused him of romantic notions of the Orient. His lasting impression was that ‘the valley of the Nile is not a paradise, for there are dust and flies and smells and other disagreeable things’.68
Later visitors to Petrie’s excavation camp included T. E. Lawrence, who came for six weeks to learn the rudiments of archaeology from its acknowledged master. He, too, had a memorable experience: ‘A Petrie dig is a thing with a flavour of its own: tinned kidneys mingle with mummy-corpses and amulets in the soup: my bed is all gritty with prehistoric alabaster jars of unique types – and my feet at night keep the bread-box from rats.’ Lawrence also got the measure of Petrie as a person, and in his brief description we see through the mask of the great archaeologist to the stubborn, single-minded and rather selfish individual that lay beneath. Lawrence described Petrie, with a remarkable degree of indulgence, as ‘a man of ideas and systems, from the right way to dig a temple to the only way to clean one’s teeth. Also he only is right in all things . . . Further he is easy-tempered, full of humour, and fickle to a degree that makes him delightfully quaint, and a constant source of joy and amusement in his camp.’ But, once again, the end of the visit was an occasion for profound relief. Lawrence concluded: ‘Am awfully glad I went to him. But what a life!’69
That Petrie ever found space in his life for another person is a wonder. That he married is nothing short of miraculous. During the exhibition of his season’s finds, at UCL in the summer of 1896, he noticed a young woman making drawings of some of the objects. He found himself attracted to her, and struck up a conversation. Her name was Hilda Urlin, and she had been asked to sketch some of Petrie’s finds by a family friend, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Holiday. But Hilda herself preferred more practical pursuits. As a child she had been a tomboy, given to sailing boats, spinning tops, and other activities generally deemed unsuitable for a girl.70 Petrie seems to have spotted an ideal soul mate, and within a year had declared his love. Hilda initially rejected his advances, but eventually began to reciprocate his feelings. They married in late November 1897, and spent their honeymoon . . . in Egypt. Fortunately for Petrie, his wife ‘took to life in an archaeological camp like a duck to water’.71 She lacked any domestic skills, but her inability to cook was hardly of concern in a camp that ran on tinned food. Her strength, stamina and stoicism were what mattered. On one of their early excavations together, Petrie recalled, ‘a man came in the dark and shot at close range at the first person who came out of our mess-hut, which was my wife. Happily she escaped.’72 On another occasion, Hilda herself wrote ‘at the head of my bed are 4 great cartonnage heads of mummy cases with staring faces, at the side are collections of alabasters and many bones hard by; at the foot of the bed are 80 skulls’.73 She took it all in her stride.
Neither Petrie nor Budge had found Maspero’s successor at the Museum and Antiquities Service, Eugène Grébaut, easy to deal with. His primary concern, to defend French archaeological pre-eminence at all costs, blinded him to other pressing problems. Thefts from archaeological sites, and the illicit trade in antiquities – exploited, if not encouraged by Budge – flourished under Grébaut’s stewardship. Just about the only positive development in his six-year tenure was the opening of a new Egyptian Museum at Giza; the collection had finally been relocated from its riverside quarters at Bulaq following the disastrous floods of 1878. Khedive Tewfiq offered an old harem palace built by his father, Ismail, and inaugurated it as Egypt’s new national musem on 12 January 1890. But this positive development could not mask Grébaut’s wider failings. In private, even the French consul conceded that he was a disaster and would have to be replaced.74 Grébaut clearly sensed that moves were being made against him; determined to resist demands to hire a German, or – worse still – a Briton, he promoted Ahmed Kamal to the post of assistant curator. Kamal thus became the first Egyptian to be employed in a substantive position in the Egyptian Museum. His appointment was followed shortly afterwards by that of Ahmed Najib as chief inspector of antiquities: the first Egyptian to occupy a senior role in the Antiquities Service. Through his fierce opposition to other European nationalities, Grébaut thus unwittingly became an early champion of Egyptian advancement.
Grébaut’s wider ineptitude, however, could not be ignored. Matters came to a head in 1892. In January that year, Tewfiq died unexpectedly at the age of thirty-nine, and was succeeded by his seventeen-year-old son Abbas. (The boy spoke Turkish, German, French and English, but no Arabic: it was little wonder that late nineteenth-century Cairo witnessed the first stirrings of pan-Arab nationalism, as Egyptians began to debate their future under Ottoman rule.) According to Egyptian law, the age of majority was eighteen, and Abbas was still at school in Vienna. More awkward still for Evelyn Baring (newly ennobled as Lord Cromer), Abbas had imbibed Hapsburg ideas and was no friend of the British. Within just one month of his accession, Abbas had appointed an Anglophobe Swiss as his private secretary, and believed he would have French support in any showdown against Cromer. Tewfiq had been relatively easily to manipulate, but Abbas showed every sign of wanting to be his own man. Cromer himself admitted: ‘I really wish he was not quite so civilized.’75
During the interregnum, while the British authorities were preoccupied with the royal succession, Grébaut took his chance to reassert his position and, in a fit of pique, refused all new concessions to excavate, even to the EEF. It was a step too far. Later that year, by which time Abbas had turned eighteen and returned to Egypt to assume the throne as Abbas II (r.1892–1914), the French authorities forced Grébaut from office. They replaced him with an unlikely choice, the mining engineer and geologist, Jacques de Morgan. Where Grébaut had been petty, de Morgan was affable. His more conciliatory approach certainly found favour with the likes of Petrie and Budge. Inevitably, some French accused de Morgan of being too friendly towards the British. But it was his lack of expertise in Egyptology rather than any want of national pride that eventually sank his directorship. For example, determined to reinforce the flood defences at Kom Ombo, to protect the Ptolemaic temple from slipping into the river, he turned – as any good engineer would – to the nearest source of stone, a handy pile of sixty blocks, which he proceeded to have pulverized into chippings to strengthen the Nile bank. The blocks subsequently turned out to have formed the ancient floor of the temple. In saving it from flooding, de Morgan had irreparably damaged its very fabric. His cavalier attitude to antiquities also led him to propose selling duplicates in the Egyptian Museum directly to foreign museums, enraging the antiquities dealers. For the head of Egypt’s cultural heritage directorate to alienate archaeologists and antique dealers alike was no mean feat. After just five years in post, de Morgan, too, had to go.
Like Grébaut before him, his one moment of triumph concerned the future of the Egyptian Museum. The Giza harem palace was only ever going to be an interim solution, and early in his tenure de Morgan had appointed an international jury to choose the design for a new, permanent museum, to be located in the centre of Cairo. A Frenchman, a Briton and an Italian received designs from all over the world. The five entries they shortlisted were all French; the winner was a relatively unknown architect, Marcel Dourgnon, whose vision was for an imposing edifice in a neoclassical European idiom. On 1 April 1897, Khedive Abbas II laid the cornerstone at the northern end of a grand new square that had been laid out by Ismail as part of his redevelopment of the capital.
By that autumn, however, de Morgan had left office, to be replaced by someone with an unimpeachable background in Egyptology. (Had the authorities proposed another amateur, pressure to appoint the assistant curator at the Egyptian Museum, the German Emile Brugsch, could have proved impossible to resist.) Victor Loret had been a pupil of Maspero’s at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, and had undertaken fieldwork at Thebes. His primary interest was in archaeology, and he relaunched systematic excavations in the Valley of the Kings for the first time since Belzoni’s day, discovering the tombs of Thutmose III and Amenhotep II (the latter hiding a cache of royal mummies) within a month of each other, and fourteen private tombs. He also refounded the Ecole du Caire as the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale and reinstated the catalogue général of the Egyptian Museum, to document all objects entering the collection. Unfortuately, like so many academics, Loret was totally unsuited to a senior administrative role. Clandestine excavations and the illicit trade in antiquities prospered under his incompetent regime. As one British observer put it: ‘Egypt was the happy hunting-ground of archaeologists of all nations . . . excavators were inclined to put a free interpretation on the concessions granted to them by the Egyptian Government, and in spite of the embargo set on their exportation, valuable antiquities continued, from time to time, to slip out of the country.’76
Faced with such shameless looting, Loret steered through a new decree on the protection of Egypt’s cultural heritage, but it was too little, too late. His main talent, besides excavation, seems to have been making enemies. Eventually, all nationalities, including the French, were clamouring for him to go.77
The question was, who could be found to replace him? Since Maspero’s departure in 1886, there had been three directors of the Antiquities Service and Museum in the space of thirteen years. Each had proved more inept than the last. The French were desperate to maintain their control, so hard won and so diligently maintained. Back in 1890, they had received assurances from the Egyptian foreign minister that, in return for a loan, ‘Egypt would not name Britons to the Antiquities Service.’78 Now, nine years later, the French consul-general had to remind his political masters in Paris of the importance of ‘retaining here the Egyptological terrain, the rightful place to which we are entitled by the French origin of this science, the work of Mariette, and the sacrifices France has always made for knowledge of ancient Egypt’.79 But after the high-handed Grébaut, the incompetent de Morgan, and the disastrous Loret, there were few plausible French candidates left. In fact, there was only one.
Scholars began to plead with Maspero to return. Petrie wrote to him in April 1898: ‘I sincerely hope to find you (back) at the Museum next season. The current situation is completely impossible: if French influence has to be represented there by men such as Grébaut and Loret, it would be better for it to disappear to avoid an even greater scandal. Your return would be the only solution acceptable to all parties and all interests.’80
But Maspero was loath to involve himself in what he saw as a campaign to unseat his former pupil, Loret. The situation continued to deteriorate, and six months later, a Frenchman begged Maspero: ‘I am absolutely certain, after what I have seen and heard, that this important position will be given to an Englishman or a German, given the level of discontent this year . . . Your undisputed and indisputable reputation alone can save for France this legitimate inheritance.’81
Meanwhile, Cromer was preoccupied with a matter altogether more important than the future of the Antiquities Service. The Mahdist rebellion in Sudan had been festering for years, but an Anglo-Egyptian army commanded by General Kitchener had been achieving some recent successes. Their efforts at reconquest, facilitated by the newly completed railway from Cairo to Aswan, culminated in the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898, which saw the Khalifa defeated and the death of General Gordon avenged. But no sooner had the British celebrated victory than they were met with another challenge to their control of north-east Africa. While the British and the Mahdist forces had been fighting, a French force had spotted an opportunity to gain a foothold on the Upper Nile, and had marched all the way from the Congo to raise the French flag at Fashoda, less than 500 miles from Khartoum. Kitchener was hastily dispatched, and Britain and France remained on the brink until the French capitulated and withdrew.82
While recapturing Sudan and averting a European war were uppermost in Cromer’s mind, he could not altogether neglect the future leadership of Egypt’s cultural institutions, even though he found archaeological rivalries intensely irritating. His chosen method of intervention was a textbook example of his modus operandi under the ‘veiled protectorate’. He approached that doyen of orientalists, Archibald Sayce, who since 1890 had taken to spending each winter on the Nile on his dahabiya, Istar (complete with an onboard library of 2,000 books and a crew of nineteen). Sayce knew everyone in Egyptology, and agreed to sound out Maspero’s willingness to contemplate a second term. Maspero had refused three previous attempts to bring him back, but this time the very future of the Antiquities Service, and of French pre-eminence, hung on his decision. He agreed to return, but on much more generous terms than before: a salary of £1,500 per annum plus expenses. Cromer did not demur. By September 1899, Maspero was on his way back to Egypt.
As if to signal the dire state into which Egypt’s patrimony had fallen during his thirteen-year absence, on the morning of 3 October, just a few days after his arrival in the country, eleven columns in the great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak came crashing down. The roar could be heard in Luxor two miles away. Maspero found himself having to pick up the pieces, quite literally, of his predecessors’ incompetence and neglect. The disaster at Karnak confirmed his priorities for his second term of office: from now on, the Antiquities Service would focus on conservation and publication of Egypt’s ancient monuments; excavations would be left to foreign missions. As long as they had the money and the requisite skills, overseas expeditions would be welcome in the Nile Valley.
As the world entered the dying days of the nineteenth century, the way was thus opened for new interests to join the scramble for Egypt.
NINE
Egypt and America
Theodore Davis (third from left) outside a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, accompanied by his two archaeologists Arthur Weigall (second from left) and Edward Ayrton (right), and Mrs Weigall.
All good things come to those who dig long and deep enough.1
THEODORE DAVIS, 1902
Europeans had imbibed the mystique and majesty of ancient Egypt from classical times. The very visible presence, in Rome and Constantinople, of obelisks from the distant Nile Valley set a precedent and an expectation: that any future European empire, actual or self-imagined, would proclaim its credentials by erecting a grand pharaonic monument at the heart of its capital city. Furthermore, from the beginning of the Enlightenment, Europe saw itself as the inheritor of classical civilization; and had not the ancient Greeks themselves inherited much from the ancient Egyptians? So it was that Napoleon Bonaparte went to Egypt wishing to be seen as a new Alexander, while the erection of Cleopatra’s Needle on the banks of the Thames signalled the dominance of Victorian London as a new Rome. Imperial France and imperial Britain alike clothed themselves in pharaonic garb, the better to assert their own hegemonic aspirations. Prussia, at first somewhat presumptuously, then, as imperial Germany, more self-confidently, sought to challenge France and Britain in Egypt in order to challenge them in Europe. For most of the nineteenth century, the history of Western enagagement with Egypt was written by these three latter-day empires, with occasional bit parts for the odd Italian or Swiss.
Americans, by contrast, came to Egypt later, and more self-consciously. The influence of ancient Egypt – or, rather, an eighteenth-century European conception of ancient Egypt – on Masonic ritual and symbolism had an important impact on the self-image of the newly independent United States. The country’s Great Seal, adopted in 1782, included an Egyptian pyramid radiating light, while a memorial erected to Christopher Columbus in Baltimore ten years later took the form of an obelisk. However, these early public expressions were not accompanied by a great rush of visitors to the Nile Valley. It was simply too far away. When early citizens of the United States travelled abroad, it was usually to Europe. Only a few plucky adventurers made it as far as the Eastern Mediterranean. The first American to visit Egypt was probably John Ledyard, a friend of Thomas Jefferson’s, who travelled to Alexandria and Cairo in 1789, dying there before he could return home: hardly a great advertisement to his fellow countrymen and women. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1780, elected both Napoleon and Denon as honorary members, in recognition of their having opened up Egypt to Western scholarship; but it would not be until 1820 that a second American, George Bethune English, reached the banks of the Nile.2 The lawyer and diplomat Luther Bradish visited Egypt the following year, as part of a wider tour of Europe and the Middle East. In the mid-1820s, a merchant from Smyrna presented an Egyptian mummy and its accompanying coffin to the people of Boston, early examples of the Egyptian artefacts that began to enter American collections sporadically during the formative years of the United States.
During the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, while Europeans, from Champollion and Wilkinson to Lepsius and Mariette, were opening up and exploring the civilization of the pharaohs, Americans were busy forging their new republic, fighting and emerging from a civil war that would define the parameters of American civilization. Tales from far-off lands were a sideshow compared to the more important business of nation- and fortune-building. In 1832, one Mendes Israel Cohen, a Jewish-American collector from Virginia, boasted that he was the first person to fly the American flag on the Nile,3 while five years later John Lloyd Stephens was the first American to publish a popular account of his travels, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petræ and the Holy Land (1837).4 In 1839, the North American Review presciently described Egypt as ‘a quarter of the world, where comparatively few [Americans] have travelled, but where we anticipate they will soon penetrate, with all their characteristic ardor and enterprise’.5 The person who really put Egypt on the map for Americans in the mid-nineteenth century was the US consul in Cairo, George Gliddon. As well as being a powerful (and outstpoken) advocate for the preservation of Egypt’s monuments, he was also a great popularizer of the subject in his home country. His series of lectures on ancient Egypt, first delivered in 1842 and illustrated with antiquities collected by Cohen, was so successful that it toured the United States for two years. The accompanying book, Ancient Egypt (1843), sold 24,000 copies. Largely as a result of Gliddon’s efforts, American academia accepted the study of ancient Egypt as a subject in its own right in the 1850s: a decade after Prussia, two decades after France, but – it must be said – four decades before Britain.6
