A World Beneath the Sands, page 9
In accordance with the proposal, first drawn up by Champollion and Rosellini in the middle of the previous year, the expedition would build on the foundations laid by Napoleon and his savants, and would extend the work of the Description (the final volume of which had still not been published). Now was the time, Champollion argued, to use the breakthrough of decipherment to advance the study of ancient Egypt – in situ. It was agreed that Champollion, as the elder and more eminent scholar, would be expedition leader, with Rosellini as assistant director. Reflecting the fifty-fifty division of costs, each side would include seven members. On the French side, alongside Champollion, were Charles Lenormant (inspector general); Antoine Bibent (architect); Alexandre Duchesne, Pierre-François Lehoux and Edouard Bertin (painters); and Nestor L’Hôte (artist-cum-customs officer). Joining Rosellini on the Tuscan side were his uncle Gaetano Rosellini (architect), his brother-in-law Cherubini (artist), Giuseppe Angelelli (painter), Giuseppe Raddi and Gaetano Galastri (naturalists), and Alessandro Ricci (doctor). The last was a practical addition to the party, who would more than justify his inclusion. All seemed set fair. There was just one final detail to iron out: permission from the Egyptian ruler, Muhammad Ali.
Unfortunately, political events in the Eastern Mediterranean, and with them, relations between Egypt and the European powers, were suddenly plunged into crisis. Things had started to simmer in 1821 when the Greek provinces rebelled against Ottoman rule and agitated for independence. In the months that followed, the Ottoman army had been unable to quell the uprising, and intercommunal violence between Greeks and Turks had spread to Constantinople. With Britain, France and Russia all united in support of the Greek cause, the Ottoman sultan cast around elsewhere for military assistance. With heavy irony, the wayward province of Egypt seemed to offer an answer. For, in 1822, as part of Muhammad Ali’s modernization plans, and to cement and enhance his own power, he had created a new Egyptian army. His ‘new order’ (nizam jadid) was consciously modelled on the Napoleonic regime, and brought all barracks, military schools and training camps under a single code of instruction and discipline.9 Up to 200,000 men were drafted from communities large and small throughout Egypt, often for years at a time, and garrisons for them and their families were built near all the country’s major towns. Muhammad Ali’s policies ushered in nothing less than the thorough militarization of Egyptian society; it was to be perhaps the most durable of his reforms. And it meant that, when the appeal came from Constantinople for military assistance, Muhammad Ali was ready to respond – at a price. In exchange for the offer of Crete as an addition to Egyptian territory, he eventually sent 16,000 soldiers and sixty-three naval vessels under the command of his son, Ibrahim. If the intervention had succeeded, the Ottoman sultan would have retained his authority, and the ruler of Egypt greatly enhanced his. Unfortunately for both men, the combined forces of Britain, France and Russia proved too resolute and powerful an enemy. The ensuing confrontation culminated in October 1827 at the Battle of Navarino, when the entire Egyptian fleet, alongside many Ottoman ships, was sunk. Humbled and hopelessly exposed, Muhammad Ali had to sue for terms with the European powers. Never again would he risk the Egyptian army defending his nominal suzerain in far-off Constantinople. From now on, Egypt’s foreign policy would be resolutely in pursuance of its own interests.
Against such a backdrop, a European expedition to Egypt headed by a Frenchman was unlikely to be welcomed by the Egyptian government. To make matters worse, Champollion had detractors closer to home: ever since the death of Henry Salt in October 1827, the French consul Drovetti had enjoyed a near monopoly on collecting antiquities in the Nile Valley; when news of the proposed Franco-Tuscan expedition reached him, he was aghast at the prospect of a state-backed, scientific mission encroaching on his lucrative activities, and lost no time in trying to prevent it. No matter that, back in 1824, he had promised Champollion assistance with any future Egyptian expedition. To safeguard his own position and income, Drovetti now wrote to Champollion in terms carefully calculated to frighten and dissuade: ‘I suffer, more than any other, from the circumstances which prevent me from encouraging this project to go ahead in the current year . . . There reigns in Egypt, as in all the other parts of the Ottoman empire, a spirit of animosity towards Europeans which, in certain cases, could produce ferment and seditious acts against the personal safety of those domiciled or who find themselves travelling there.’ He continued, at his most disingenuous: ‘Please be assured that I could not be more sorry for not being able to facilitate your wishes.’10
The expedition might have been stopped in its tracks there and then, had not the French king, Charles X, already given permission for it to proceed, exactly one week before Drovetti’s letter. Upon receiving royal approval, Champollion wasted no time in departing Paris for Toulon, eager to embark as soon as possible. On his way south, Champollion must have crossed with Drovetti’s letter, winging its way to his Paris address. There, it was opened by Champollion’s brother, who, smelling a rat, deliberately delayed forwarding it to Toulon. By the time it arrived at the port, prompting a request by the French government to the local prefect to detain the expedition, Champollion had set sail. (He only learned of the letter upon arrival in Alexandria, and commented: ‘It is the hand of Amun that diverted it.’11) His parting words to his brother were: ‘Goodbye, my dear friend; do not worry, the gods of Egypt watch over us.’12
Champollion and his companions sailed out of Toulon harbour on 31 July 1828 – thirty years after Napoleon – and first set eyes on the Egyptian coast eighteen days later. Champollion had waited all his life for this moment, and felt as if he had come home. In the first of a regular series of letters to his brother which, together with his journal, provide a vivid and invaluable account of the whole expedition, he wrote: ‘It’s as if I had been born in this country, and the Europeans have already concluded that I look like a Copt . . . Moreover, I have adopted the manners and customs of the country.’13
Indeed, his swarthy complexion and excellent Arabic meant that he could easily pass for a native. (He later adopted local dress and grew a long beard, completing the transformation.) With the monuments of ancient Egypt now at his fingertips, he set straight to work. On his first full day in the country, he visited the most famous sight in Alexandria, Cleopatra’s Needles, and concluded from their inscriptions that they had nothing at all to do with Cleopatra but, instead, dated back to pharaonic times. In a similar vein, he established that another famous Alexandrian monument, Pompey’s Pillar, had been erected by the emperor Diocletian, 300 years after Pompey’s visit. Thus, in the space of a few hours, thanks to his ability to read the ancient Egyptian texts, Champollion cut a swathe through the accumulated myths, legends and misunderstandings of centuries. For the first time since the Roman empire, the monuments of ancient Egypt could once again speak for themselves.
Memories of a more recent empire stirred patriotic thoughts in Champollion’s mind, as he toured places visited by Napoleon and his savants three decades earlier. ‘Everything in this city’, he wrote to his brother on 23 August 1828, ‘breathes the memory of our former power and shows how easily French influence exerts itself on the Egyptian population.’14 But Champollion’s ambitions extended far beyond Alexandria. If he were to follow in the footsteps of his childhood hero and explore the Nile Valley in its entirety, he would need permission from the Egyptian ruler. Fortunately, in the weeks since Champollion had left France, the political situation in Egypt had calmed. Britain had signed a treaty with Muhammad Ali, permitting the evacuation of Egyptian troops from Greece. As a result, the pasha was now less ill-disposed towards Europeans and might, after all, be persuaded to grant the expedition a royal firman (official permit).
Just six days after landing in Alexandria, Champollion was granted the all-important audience with Muhammad Ali, and must have been surprised and delighted at the outcome: not only was the expedition given permission to travel as far south as the Egyptian border with Sudan, it was also allocated two Egyptian guards for its protection. A furious Drovetti tried to intervene, but Champollion had established his own direct line to the French consulate; Muhammad Ali’s firman arrived on 10 September. It even gave the Franco-Tuscan expedition permission to visit sites formerly reserved for Drovetti and his fellow antiquities collector Anastasi. It was a total victory for Champollion. Ecstatic and relieved, he wrote to his brother:
I have had to use all my diplomatic skills (all this letter is absolutely confidential). You have seen in Drovetti’s letter that the reasons for preventing my voyage to Egypt were exaggerated. It was, at root, simply a calculation of personal interest. The antiquities dealers were all squirming at the news of my arrival in Egypt with the intention of excavating.15
When Muhammad Ali put a large sailing boat, the Isis, at the expedition’s disposal, Drovetti made the gallant gesture of supplying it with bottles of fine French wine. But he would not forget the indignity of having his monopoly so rudely and completely snatched away, and would take his revenge by failing to forward Champollion’s post from France during the course of the expedition. Champollion would later write of Drovetti:
He should be ashamed for his conduct towards me regarding the excavations and the firman which I had to extract from the authorities . . . I have not the least confidence in him, and I am not impressed by his politicking and his conduct in Egypt, where he is only concerned for his own interests . . . All the French despise him, and I wouldn’t dare say that they are wrong.16
Through a combination of his intellectual reputation and political connections, Champollion had bested his rival. On the eve of departure from Alexandria, 13 September 1828, the founder of Egyptology was full of anticipation: ‘In forty-eight hours I will have seen the sacred river of which, until now, I have only drunk; and this land of Egypt, about which I have dreamt for so long.’17
Champollion came to Egypt as a devotee, fulfilling the ambition of a lifetime. He drank Nile water as a matter of pride (despite concerns about the plague), and felt more at home in the backstreets of Cairo than in the boulevards of Paris. He certainly found the Egyptian capital remarkably clean compared with the filth of its French counterpart. However, his love affair with the land of the pharaohs did not blind him to the harsh realities of life under its modern masters. Only a few days after arriving in Cairo, he wrote in his journal: ‘The pace of civilization would march very quickly here, if a well-intentioned government presided over the affairs of unhappy Egypt. But a totalitarian spirit devours or dries up everything.’18
If the state of contemporary Egypt was depressing, the ancient monuments presented an equally dispiriting picture. Champollion was particularly disappointed by Saqqara, with its confusing mass of spoil heaps and ruins. ‘The vast expanse interrupted by pyramids was riddled with hillocks of sand covered in debris,’ he wrote. ‘All these hillocks are the result of excavations in search of mummies and antiquities, and the number of shafts or tombs at Saqqara must be enormous, if you consider that the sand thrown up in discovering one shaft must itself hide the openings to several other shafts.’19
In the early nineteenth century, ancient Egypt was still buried beneath the sands. That was especially true at Giza, which Champollion had first glimpsed in the distance on 19 September 1828 and which he began to explore in earnest three weeks later. As he wrote on 8 October: ‘I wanted to clear the sand covering the inscription of Thutmose IV which is engraved on the [Sphinx’s] chest; but the Arabs who descended upon us from the heights crowned by the Pyramids told me that it would require forty men and eight days to accomplish. So I had to give it up.’20
Strangely, there is a gap in Champollion’s otherwise comprehensive journal corresponding to the next three days, which he spent at Giza. Whether he was dumbstruck by the sheer magnificence of the pyramids, overcome by mental and physical exhaustion, or simply too preoccupied by the ancient ruins to commit his observations to paper, it is an unexplained hiatus in an otherwise detailed record of his Egyptian expedition.
Following in the footsteps of Napoleon, Champollion felt a heavy responsibility: not just to study the monuments recorded in the Description, but to improve upon that great work by making accurate drawings of the inscriptions – aided by his ability to read them – and to correct other inaccuracies so as to present the most authoritative study of pharaonic civilization ever undertaken. He was certainly uniquely qualified to undertake such a task. Indeed, his reputation as the decipherer of hieroglyphics preceded him, as he had discovered when preparing to set sail from the port of Cairo on his journey upstream: ‘I met here Lord Prudhoe, Mr Burton and Major Felix, Englishmen, committed hieroglyphicists, who showered me with attention as if I were the head of a sect.’21 Nothing, however, could have prepared Champollion for the sheer number of monuments and quantity of inscriptions to be studied and copied when he reached the great southern city of Thebes. The temples were on a grand scale – ‘Suffice to say . . . that we in Europe are mere Lilliputians and that no people, ancient or modern, has conceived the art of architecture on a scale so sublime, massive and awe-inspiring as did the ancient Egyptians’22 – and he quickly realized that to do the site justice would require months, not days. But far from being overwhelmed by the task, he felt newly energized. He wrote to his brother: ‘My health is excellent; the climate suits me, and I am much better than in Paris.’23 Indeed, Egypt had transformed not only Champollion’s health but his whole outlook. He felt moved to declare: ‘I belong entirely to Egypt – she is everything to me and I must seek consolation from her, because I will receive none from Europe.’24
With each new site he visited, this reaction grew stronger. At Dendera, once home to the famous zodiac now displayed in Paris, Champollion and his companions ‘spent two hours in ecstasy, running through the great halls with our poor torch, trying to read the exterior inscriptions by the light of the moon’.25 No inconvenience or danger would be allowed to stand in the way of scientific examination. At Abu Simbel, where two great temples were hewn from the living rock face – a recent visitor had declared the site ‘the ne-plus-ultra of Egyptian labour, and . . . the noblest monument of antiquity that is to be found on the banks of the Nile’26 – the challenges were especially daunting. When Burckhardt had rediscovered the site fifteen years before, in 1813, the whole of the main entrance and most of the four flanking colossi had been completely covered by sand, the accumulation of twenty-five centuries. Bankes had visited in 1815, but was unable to enter. It took Belzoni, with his engineering expertise, to clear the sand and open the temple in 1817; Bankes had returned two years later to find drifts once again threatening access. Now, another decade on, the desert had reclaimed its prize, and the portal was completely blocked. It took a huge effort just to clear a hole big enough for a man to squeeze through. But Champollion was undaunted:
I undressed almost completely, down to my Arab shirt and long linen underpants, and pushed myself flat on my stomach through the small opening in the doorway that, if cleared of sand, would be at least 25 feet in height. I thought I was entering the mouth of a furnace, and, when I had slid entirely into the temple, I found myself in an atmosphere heated to 52 degrees: we went through this astonishing excavation, Rosellini, Ricci, I and one of the Arabs holding a candle in his hand . . . After two and a half hours of admiration, and having seen all the bas-reliefs, the need to breathe a little fresh air made itself felt, and we had to regain the mouth of the furnace.27
During two intense weeks at Abu Simbel, the expedition succeeded in making copies of all the temple reliefs; it was a heroic effort. As Champollion remarked to his brother: ‘Thus has been our memorable Abu Simbel campaign: it is the bitterest and the most glorious we have accomplished during the entire voyage. Frenchmen and Tuscans have been rivals in zeal and devotion.’28
As they prepared to leave, the men took the scaffolding away from the entrance, whereupon the sand collapsed, re-covering the doorway to a depth of two metres above the cornice. Having yielded up its secrets, the temple fell silent again. Champollion knew he would never return.
The mammoth campaign at Abu Simbel exhausted the expedition both physically and materially. By the time Champollion and his companions reached Wadi Halfa, on Egypt’s southern border with Sudan and the furthest point of their journey, they were surviving on dry biscuits brought from Aswan. After replenishing their stores in the town’s souk, they celebrated New Year’s Day 1829, and the beginning of the return journey, with a Nubian dinner washed down with two bottles of Saint-Georges wine. Reaching the Second Nile Cataract without incident and copying the inscriptions at Abu Simbel were not the only causes for celebration. The expedition had also vindicated Champollion’s theory of decipherment and proved the accuracy of his system. He wrote triumphantly to his old friend and mentor, Bon-Joseph Dacier:
I am proud that, having followed the course of the Nile from its mouth to the second cataract, I am able to announce to you that there is nothing to modify in our Lettre sur l’alphabet hiéroglyphes. Our alphabet is good: it can be applied with equal success to Egyptian monuments of Roman and Ptolemaic times and, which is of greater interest, to the inscriptions in all the temples, palaces and tombs of pharaonic date. Everything justifies, therefore, the encouragement that you so kindly gave to my hieroglyphic work at a time when nobody was disposed to favour it.29
Glowing with justification and pride, Champollion allowed personal thoughts to invade his mind for the briefest of moments, asking his brother in a postscript: ‘Send me news of my wife.’30 He also displayed glimpses of humour, writing in his journal, after an unsuccessful hunting trip: ‘Thus deprived, for the twentieth time, of the sweet hope of eating grilled crocodile, we continued downriver.’31 Then he plunged back into his studies.
