A World Beneath the Sands, page 30
Other than Gliddon, the first American to live in Egypt for any length of time – and out of personal rather than diplomatic interest – was an adventurer and dealer from Connecticut, Edwin Smith. He settled in Egypt in 1858 and lived for eighteen years in Luxor, where he became friends with Lucie Duff Gordon. Smith made a living as a moneylender and antiquities dealer. Among the objects he acquired were two important medical papyri, and much of his collection went on to form the core of the Brooklyn Museum. However, he is also said to have used his knowledge of ancient Egyptian writing to help unscrupulous dealers produce fake antiquities for sale.7 While far from being an exemplar of academic integrity, Smith was nonetheless the first American to call himself an Egyptologist (even if his model was more Belzoni than Birch).
American interest in Egypt waned in the 1860s, as domestic struggles convulsed the United States. But after the end of the Civil War, as if the lid had been taken off a pressure cooker, Americans flocked to Egypt, just as Europeans had done after Waterloo. In 1870 alone, 300 American visitors registered at the US consulate-general in Cairo. Veterans of the Civil War even enlisted in the Egyptian army to boost its strength under Ismail, who was disillusioned with Britain and France and keen to throw off the Ottoman yoke. When General Gordon went to the Sudan in 1874 in an attempt to put down the Mahdist rebellion, Ismail sent two American officers to accompany him as a check against Britain’s expansionary intentions. Both experiments proved a failure. Within four years, all but one of the American veterans had resigned or been discharged, while one of the officers resigned his position as chief of staff and left Egypt in 1883, following the British invasion and occupation. (He went on to supervise the building of the base for the Statue of Liberty.8)
The upsurge in American tourism to Egypt was accompanied by a post-bellum drive to found and expand universities and civic museums as pillars of national learning.9 It was in this context that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired its first Egyptian objects in 1874, soon to be joined in Central Park by the second Cleopatra’s Needle (which, as we have seen, was erected in 1881). When former president and Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant visited Egypt on a round-the-world trip in 1878, he apparently showed ‘no interest in the ruins, believing Cairo to be more interesting because of the cafes, which remind him of Paris, than the Pyramids, which he regards as entirely useless’.10 But he was atypical. Many of his fellow citizens who beat a path to Egypt in the latter part of the nineteenth century had a deep interest in the country’s ancient civilization; a few of them would become the founders of American Egyptology. They would bring new insights and breathe fresh life into a subject that had, since its origins, been the preserve of Europeans and the prisoner of European prejudice.
The first great figure in American Egyptology came to the subject, like the founder of British Egyptology, John Gardner Wilkinson, somewhat by accident. Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833–96), was born in Little Compton, Rhode Island, attended his local university, Brown, for two years, but left before graduating owing to ill health, and made his way to New York to seek his fortune, working initially as a journalist at the Tribune newspaper. There he was able to hone his natural gifts as a linguist – he translated Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables into English – and make influential friends in the close-knit, not to say corrupt, world of 1860s New York. Through his political and business connections, Wilbour’s financial affairs flourished; by the time he had reached his mid-thirties, he had made enough money to indulge his literary interests, so he decided to sail for Europe, which would become his home for the rest of his life.
It is not known when, or from where, Wilbour developed an interest in ancient Egypt, but while in Paris in the 1870s he took lessons with Maspero at the Collège de France, and he also studied with Eisenlohr in Heidelberg. Wilbour first visited Egypt in 1880, and was immediately entranced. Thereafter, he took annual trips up the Nile from 1886 on his own luxurious dahabiya, the Seven Hathors. Wilbour’s fellow Nile traveller, Sayce, called him ‘the best Egyptologist living’. In fact, Wilbour was an observer rather than a practitioner, on the sidelines of Egyptology but never at its centre. He published only one, very brief, article, ‘Canalizing the Cataract’,11 otherwise amusing himself by copying inscriptions, correcting the work of others (he gained particular satisfaction by pointing out errors in the works of Champollion and Lepsius), and collecting antiquities. While exploring the First Cataract region, Wilbour struck lucky not once but twice: on the island of Sehel, he discovered the so-called Famine Stela, while from a local dealer on the island of Elephantine he bought nine rolls of papyrus which turned out to document the life of Egypt’s earliest Jewish community. Indeed, it was as a collector with a keen eye for exceptional artefacts that Wilbour made his name and established his reputation. Acquiring antiquities became his abiding passion and his principal motivation. On a visit to Cairo, he wrote: ‘I made no effort to go to the Khédive’s reception last night; why should I seek his acquaintance? He has no papyrus.’12
Had Wilbour chosen to publish, he could have become an Egyptologist of distinction. He was intimately acquainted with every site of archaeological importance, had a wide circle of scholarly friends, and was also an acute observer of contemporary Egyptian society. (On hearing muttered complaints from the fellahin against the British occupation, he noted that: ‘The glee with which all the people, even those in office, recount the victories of the Mahdi . . . indicates which side their sympathies are on even against their own soldiers.’13) As it was, his fame rested largely on his munificence, and came posthumously: the Wilbour Library of Egyptology at the Brooklyn Museum, the Wilbour professorship of Egyptology at Brown University, and the great Wilbour Papyrus, bought as a permanent memorial to a great papyrological collector.
Although Wilbour never practised as a professional Egyptologist – he had neither the desire nor the need – his activities laid the foundations for the birth of the discipline in the United States. He must, therefore, have felt a certain satisfaction to live long enough to see the very first academic position in Egyptology established at an American university. The year was 1895, the young scholar appointed as a teaching assistant at the University of Chicago a man by the name of James Henry Breasted. Breasted, like Wilbour, had started out life in a very different career, training as a pharmacist and serving as a counter clerk in local drug stores near his home in Illinois. Breasted’s family was deeply religious, and he was influenced by his aunt to enrol at the nearest seminary, the Congregational Institute in Chicago, to study the Bible. It was to help with these studies that Breasted started learning Hebrew and Greek, but he quickly realized he had an innate talent for languages. Where Wilbour had been merely gifted, Breasted was a genius. (He eventually taught himself Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Syriac, Babylonian and Assyrian, Arabic, Egyptian, French, German, ‘and a moderate facility in Italian’.14) His tutor at the seminary urged him to consider an academic career in the newly emerging subjects of Near Eastern Studies or Egyptology, where his linguistic skills could be put to good use.
Breasted himself had begun to have doubts about his suitability for theological ministry, so decided to take the plunge, leave the seminary, and enrol at Yale. There, his great fortune was to study under William Rainey Harper, probably the leading intellectual of his generation. Harper had been a child prodigy, graduating from college at fourteen and completing his doctoral studies at Yale at the age of twenty. He recognized a fellow genius when he saw one. He also saw an opportunity to advance the subject of Egyptology in the United States. For, within a few months of Breasted entering Yale, Harper had been approached by the millionaire philanthropist John D. Rockefeller to help establish a new university in Chicago. Harper’s role was to recruit the very best faculty from across America. In Breasted, he saw the perfect candidate. In the summer of 1891, when Breasted had finished his studies, Harper promised him a new chair in Egyptology at Chicago if he would first bring himself up to date with the latest scholarship. That meant a trip to Germany, since under Erman the University of Berlin had become ‘the teaching and research centre of the world for oriental languages, and especially for Egyptology’.15 Breasted was enthusiastic. The only problem was money: with no family resources behind him, the prospect of trans-Atlantic travel was out of reach. Harper was not going to let a lack of funds derail a brilliant academic career, and agreed to provide support for his star pupil. On 30 July 1891, Harper, his family and a small group of his most able students sailed for Germany. For Breasted, it was the start of a remarkable life in Egyptology.
On arrival in Berlin, Breasted enrolled at the university and began taking classes with Erman, ‘the greatest Egyptologist of Germany, and perhaps of the world, in his day – and certainly one of the kindliest, most benign spirits of his generation’.16 Breasted’s progress was nothing short of meteoric. He learned to speak and write German with native fluency. At the end of his first year of study, he joined Erman and Sethe on a summer holiday in the mountains south-west of Berlin, which he described as ‘a fortnight in Elysium’.17 At the end of his third year, he was ready to defend his doctoral thesis, in front of a panel which included Sethe and Borchardt.18 He passed with flying colours. At the feet of Lepsius’s pupils, he had thoroughly imbibed the German approach to scholarship and, with it, a distrust of the ‘French model’. His outspoken criticism of French Egyptologists – ‘Their methods are inclined to be slipshod . . . The most obvious details escape them, and they hide their distaste for the drudgery of solid research behind a facade of facile, sometimes brilliant, but too often inaccurate generalization’19 – would later make him many enemies in France. Nonetheless, Breasted’s three years in Berlin gave him a firm grounding in Egyptology and ‘subjected him to an intellectual discipline which became the keynote of his scientific career’;20 they also made his name in academic and archaeological circles. Suddenly everyone with an eye on the future of the subject wanted a piece of this brilliant young American scholar.
Petrie had already written to Breasted, inviting him to spend a week on his excavations that coming season at Kuft and Nagada. But seven days eating cold food out of a tin was not exactly what Breasted had in mind for his first visit to Egypt – especially as it was also going to be his honeymoon. For, shortly after gaining his doctorate at Berlin, he had married Frances Hart, and a trip up the Nile was to be their first holiday together. It was not quite, perhaps, what a young married woman might have chosen. Breasted still had little money, so the couple took the train from Cairo to Asyut, to save the cost of hiring a boat for the whole journey. Fortunately, Frances ‘minded neither dust nor flies nor filth’.21 What she found harder to bear was her new husband’s preoccupation with Egyptian antiquities and inscriptions, at the expense of their time together. She later recalled ‘a scholarly honeymoon’ where ‘work took precedence over play’.22 Erman had also been in touch with Breasted, asking him to copy inscriptions for the Wörterbuch, and the young American set about his task with relentless enthusiasm and an unwavering focus. But his scholarly pursuits masked a deeper void: he was already, at the age of twenty-nine, becoming ‘a lonely man of few intimate friendships, who looked upon his personal life as a failure’.23
It was while on his honeymoon that Breasted came up with the idea of copying, not merely a representative selection of hieroglyphic inscriptions, but every Egyptian inscription of historical interest. This self-appointed task would preoccupy him for the next decade. Another commission he gladly accepted was to acquire objects for a new Egyptian museum at the University of Chicago. He was assisted by Sayce, ‘a unique British institution in the Near East . . . known, trusted and honoured everywhere, by Europeans and orientals alike’, and, moreover, a man who ‘knew every inch of the Nile for a thousand miles southward from Cairo’. 24 So glowing was Breasted’s reputation that archaeologists like Petrie even gave him anti-quities they had excavated. The result, to Breasted’s satisfaction and Harper’s delight, was ‘the nucleus of a modest though representative collection’.25 By way of acknowledgement for Petrie’s assistance and support, Breasted took the time to visit his excavations at Nagada. He found the archaeologist ‘thoroughly unkempt, clad in ragged, dirty shirt and trousers, worn-out sandals and no socks . . . not merely careless but deliberately slovenly and dirty’.26 The experience proved salutary, convincing Breasted that his calling lay in epigraphy and history, not field archaeology. He wrote to his father: ‘I want to read to my fellow men the oldest chapter in the story of human progress. I would rather do this than gain countless wealth.’27
At the same time, it was clear that archaeology in Egypt could not be left to its own devices, nor to continue in the same vein. As Amelia Edwards had discovered on her trip up the Nile in the 1870s, and Petrie had witnessed for himself a decade later, digging in Egypt was a corrupt business: ‘the least promising sites were assigned to European excavators, while the richest sites were given to native antiquity dealers who were permitted to carry on haphazard digging solely for commercial purposes’.28 Breasted was outraged by the appalling condition of many of the sites he visited, and made his feelings clear in a letter home: ‘I am so filled with indignation against the French and their empty, blatant boasting, “la gloire de la France”, that I can hardly contain myself. I could have wept my eyes out in Amarna. Scarcely less indignant must one feel against the English who are here only for the commerce and the politics of it, and who might reform matters if they would. A combination of French rascality, of English philistine indifference & of German lack of money is gradually allowing Egypt to be pillaged and plundered from end to end. In another generation there will be nothing to be had or saved.’29
If neither France nor Britain – nor, for that matter, Germany – could be trusted to excavate, preserve and record Egypt’s pharaonic heritage, America would have to step in.
Breasted’s first visit to Egypt had given him ‘the equipment for a great work’.30 On his way back to the United States in the spring of 1895, he stopped off in Paris (to see Maspero), in London (where he met Budge, and noted numerous errors in the labelling of the British Museum’s Egyptian collection), and in Oxford (no doubt at Sayce’s suggestion), before arriving in Chicago in April to take up his new teaching post. All thoughts of copying inscriptions or rescuing sites from slipshod archaeology were quickly banished as he faced up to the daunting challenge of establishing a new academic discipline. He wrote: ‘In America, Egyptology really did not exist at all – and here was I, proposing single-handedly to introduce it into a Middle Western community.’31 Moreover, ‘Egyptology was then commonly regarded by the public and the Press as something bizarre, an oddity at a county fair.’32 To make matters worse, Breasted had not received the chair that he had been promised, but only a lowly assistant post. He had to supplement his meagre salary of $800 per year by giving public lectures at gentlemen’s and ladies’ clubs. Not even the wholehearted support of Harper, who had been appointed as the university’s first president, could smooth Breasted’s path. The truth was that: ‘Amid the hurly-burly and travail of a great university’s birth, Egyptology was a super-numerary item of antiquarian bric-à-brac to be laid aside until the rest of the house was in order.’33 While Breasted set to work creating a new department, his grand ideas had to take a back seat – gone for the time being, but certainly not forgotten.
In 1899, Breasted received an invitation from the Royal Academy in Berlin to copy all the Egyptian inscriptions in European collections for the unfolding Wörterbuch project. He jumped at the chance, offering to do the work without payment, on an expenses basis only. His family – by now grown to include a young son – was rather less enthusiastic. Breasted, his wife and child spent the next few years shuttling back and forth between America and Europe, always travelling third-class, skimping on meals, and living ‘as scholar gipsies in an unending succession of dreary, grubby little hotels and pensions’.34 But Breasted could not have been happier. The material he collected provided the basis, not only for the Wörterbuch, but also for his own magnum opus. By the time he had finished the manuscript of his Ancient Records of Egypt, seven years later, it ran to over ten thousand pages. Even with the backing of John D. Rockefeller, the University of Chicago baulked at the cost of publication. (It was finally issued, in five volumes, in 1906–7.) Breasted’s only regret, was that he had not been able to copy ‘all the extant inscriptions along the entire Nile valley’.35 But, come to think of it, that was an idea worth pursuing.
