by Brian Fagan
But Paser was not so easily silenced. He continued to bombard the governor with evidence relating to tomb robberies. A year later, even high officialdom could not disguise the violations that had taken place. A new governor, Nebmarenakht, convened a fresh inquiry. Forty-five tomb robbers appeared before the court. Fortunately, the high points of the testimony have survived on a series of famous papyri that were—ironically enough—sold on the illegal antiquities market in Thebes in the late nineteenth century. The witnesses were placed on oath, then beaten to extract true confessions. The evidence was damning. The incense roaster of the temple of the sun god, Amun, recounted how he was approached by a group of robbers at night while asleep:
“‘Come out,’ they said, ‘We are going to take plunder for bread to eat.’ They took me with them. We opened the tomb and brought away a shroud of gold and silver. We broke it up, put it in a basket, brought it down and divided it into six parts.” The various accused were beaten on the soles of their feet or tortured with a screw until they either confessed or corroborated each other’s testimony.
The scribe of the Necropolis was examined with the stick [until] he said: “Stop! I will tell. This silver is [all] that we brought out. I saw nothing else.”
He was examined with the birch and the screw. Nesyamenope, the scribe of the Necropolis, said to him: “Then the tomb from which you said the vases of silver were taken is [yet] another tomb. That makes two [tombs] besides the main treasure.” He said: “That is false. The vases belong to the main treasure I have already told you about. We opened one tomb and only one.” He was examined again with the stick and the birch and the screw [but] he would not confess anything beyond what he had [already] said.4
While the (unrecorded) penalties handed out to these particular tomb robbers must have been harsh, any reduction in the tempo of grave robbery can at best have been temporary, for there are scattered records of later trials. Nothing could stop the voracious looters.
Robbers even emptied the tombs of the great Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs such as Seti I and Rameses II of their riches, despite the opposition of dedicated priests and officials who were determined to protect the dead rulers from destruction. They hustled royal mummies from tomb to tomb, from sarcophagus to sarcophagus, one step ahead of the thieves. Rameses II and Seti I themselves were moved several times. Eventually, the robbers became so daring that the priests obtained a strong, trusted guard and moved every known royal mummy to safe hiding in one of two caches, either in a secret tomb in the Valley of the Kings or in a cleft in the hills overlooking Thebes. This time the kings managed to evade the tomb robbers for 3,000 years, until AD 1881, when a major cache in a remote defile near Deir elBahri was discovered by accident by robbers but saved for science.5
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The wealth and stability of ancient Egypt were proverbial in the Mediterranean world of 4,000 years ago. A rich literature tells of the deeds of the pharaohs.6 We know their names, have some knowledge of their personalities, and can gaze on their well-preserved treasures. Most people have heard of Rameses II and Tutankhamun. Artistic traditions and works of art have survived in bewildering glory and amazing quantity despite the depredations of ancient and modern treasure hunters. Vivid writings and character sketches give us insights into the daily life of the Egyptians, into the court scandals and causes célèbres of a long-vanished age. Unfortunately, 3,000 years after the apogee of Egyptian civilization, a mere pittance of the riches and glory that made up the world’s longest-lasting civilization remains for the archaeologist and tourist to study and admire.
The tombs and great monuments of ancient Egypt have been under siege ever since they were built. The Egyptians themselves used them for building stone. Religious zealots and quarrymen followed the tomb robbers. They eradicated inscriptions and removed great temples stone by stone. Arab treasure hunters tunneled around the pyramids of Giza in search of gold. The inscribed casing stones from all three Giza pyramids formed the walls of Cairo’s new citadel. Soldiers used the Sphinx for target practice. Then came the travelers and antiquarians in search of curiosities or commercial gain. Some dynamited the pyramids; others bought mummies and tunneled in the tombs of Saqqara in Lower Egypt. French general Napoléon Bonaparte came to the Nile in 1798 to seize the strategic route to British India. He brought a team of experts with him to study Egypt ancient and modern. His scientists left six years later with Napoléon’s defeated army, carrying crates of priceless antiquities. They produced the multivolume Description of Ancient Egypt that caused a sensation in Europe. By 1833 the monk Father Géramb was able to remark to the Egyptian pasha Muhammad Ali that “it would be hardly respectable, on one’s return from Egypt, to present oneself in Europe without a mummy in one hand and a crocodile in the other.”7
By Géramb’s time, a craze for things Egyptian had taken Europe by storm. Diplomats and tourists, merchants and dukes all vied with one another to assemble spectacular collections of mummies and other antiquities. A craze for things Egyptian affected architecture and fashion. Egyptology became a fashionable subject for the wealthy and the curious. At the same time as the French genius Jean-François Champollion was deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, eager travelers were despoiling the very civilization he sought to understand.
During the past 2,000 years, both Egyptians and a host of foreigners have effectively gutted our potential knowledge of ancient Egypt. They have done so for profit, and also, regrettably, in the name of science and nationalism. The loss to archaeology is incalculable, that to Egyptian history even more staggering. As a result of the looting and pillage of generations of irresponsible visitors, the artifacts and artistic achievements of the ancient Egyptians are scattered all over the globe, some of the most beautiful and spectacular of them stored or displayed thousands of miles from the Nile. Fortunately, something has been saved from the wreckage by the dedicated work of modern archaeologists and by the efforts of the Egyptian government during the past hundred years.
We cannot in all conscience blame those who looted ancient Egypt. In retrospect, they were merely mirroring the moral and intellectual climate of their times. The Egyptians were motivated by profit, by the need to make a good living. Dreams of treasure and wealth, incentives of profit, and a driving lust to own the exotic that has been such a pervasive feature of Western civilization drove many visitors to the Nile. But at least the efforts of the foreigners have made the world aware of the glories of ancient Egypt in a superficial way. The brightly painted mummies of Egyptian pharaohs and their subjects are commonplace in European and American museums. Everyone has seen at least a picture of a hieroglyphic inscription or the pyramids. In these days of swift jet travel and well-organized package tours, many of us have been lucky enough to gaze on the battered remnants of ancient Egypt on the banks of the Nile. We are probably stimulated to visit Egypt by a chance visit to a museum or the reading of a book on the ancient Egyptians. Yet the artifacts we see in London, New York, or Paris were, many of them, obtained by people whose interest in antiquity was accompanied by a fatal curiosity, reinforced with gunpowder, picks, and other destructive instruments. It is one of the tragedies of history that our knowledge of ancient Egypt is derived in large part from artifacts recovered during centuries of pillage and tomb robbing among the rock-cut tombs and pyramids of the Nile.
2
The First Tourists
Risen as a god, hear what I tell you,
That you may rule the land, govern the shores,
Increase well-being!
Beware of subjects who are nobodies.
MIRIAM LICHTHEIM, ED.,
Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings1
“This country is a palimpsest,” wrote that remarkable Victorian lady Lucie Duff-Gordon from Luxor more than a century ago, “in which the Bible is written over Herodotus, and the Koran over that.”2 And a palimpsest it is, of conquests and tourists, of dedicated travelers and hardworking archaeologists. The story of the discovery of ancient Egypt owes a
s much to travelers’ tales as it does to the fine words of professional scholars and leisured antiquarians.
The ancient Egyptians themselves knew that that their civilization was the oldest of all civilized institutions. The pharaohs’ king lists traced king after king backward through time to the moment of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypts under the pharaoh Horus-Aha, or Menes, in about 3100 BC. Egypt’s official history sanctioned by the pharaohs went back even further into a mythic past, to legendary kings known as the “Souls of Nekhen.” According to Egyptian belief, at the beginning of time, the god Atum, “the completed one,” had emerged from the watery chaos and caused the “first moment,” raising a mound of solid earth above the waters. Then the life-giving force of the sun, Re, rose over the land to cause the rest of creation. The Egyptian pharaohs were the personification of ma’at, a sense of rightness that defined civilization along the Nile. They ruled by precedent, divine kings presiding over an ever orderly world. Of course, their world was often far from orderly, but the little-changing ideology of Egypt’s kings maintained a facade of the triumph of order over chaos, of the pharaoh presiding over the unified Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypts. The unification was an act of harmony, of reconciliation between warring gods and the forces of chaos and rightness.
Today, the orderly world of ancient Egypt is long gone. The temples are silent. All-powerful gods like the sun deity, Amun of Thebes, have disappeared on the tides of history. Mud-brick walls crumble; temple pylons collapse inexorably into the river alluvium. The chants and invocations, the banners and dances of adoration have long ceased. All that remains are crumbling columns and silent inscriptions massaged by the mocking rays of the sun. But the mystique of Egypt has captivated travelers for centuries.
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The Egyptians called their homeland Kmt, “the black land,” after the fertile dark soil that nurtured their civilization. Kmt slashed across the arid wastes of the eastern Sahara like a green arrow, following the course of the Nile. The river is the longest on earth, rising in the East African highlands and flowing more than 10,300 kilometers (4,000 miles) northward to the Mediterranean through some of the world’s driest terrain. Fifteen thousand years ago, the Nile flowed through a deep gorge into a much lower ocean. As sea levels rose after the Ice Age, layer upon layer of silt choked the narrow defile and formed the river floodplain of today.
No one knew where the river with its creative forces came from. The pharaohs believed the source lay in a subterranean stream that flowed in the underworld. The Nile’s life-giving waters were thought to well to the surface between granite rocks close to the First Cataract, from a cavern under Elephantine Island in the middle of the river more than 1,550 kilometers (600 miles) from the Mediterranean Sea.
Kmt was, in many respects, a paradise on earth. The river fertilized and watered the Egyptians’ carefully laid-out fields. Lush marshlands and meadows provided food for domesticated animals and wild beasts, water-fowl abounded along the riverbanks, and fish teemed in its muddy waters. As the Nile rose each summer, the river became a vast shallow lake. Villages and towns became islands. The farmers impounded floodwater in natural drainage basins and behind earthen banks to spread it farther over their fields and irrigation works. But the Egyptians lived at the mercy of a capricious Nile. Everyone dreaded exceptionally high inundations, which swept everything before them—cattle, houses, entire villages. Some years, the river barely flooded at all, the victim of droughts far upstream. The Nile rose slightly, then receded almost at once, meaning that thousands would go hungry and famine stalked the land.
Egypt was a linear kingdom, shaped somewhat like an enormous lotus flower with roots deep in Africa. The stalk and the flower were the Two Lands. Ta-shema (Upper Egypt) begins at the First Cataract, where the valley is only 2.4 kilometers (1.5 miles) wide. Upstream lay Nubia, Ta-Seti, “the Land of the Bowmen,” modern-day Sudan, so named because the Nubians were expert archers. Here the river vanished into a limitless desert and an alien world. Upper Egypt was about 800 kilometers (500 miles) long, often bounded by desert cliffs. In places, the floodplain was as much as 18 kilometers (11 miles) across, but often much narrower. Near the pharaohs’ ancient capital at Memphis, the stalk became the flower as the river meandered through a vast silt-choked delta to the sea. Ta-mehu (Lower Egypt) encompassed the delta from the Mediterranean upstream to Memphis. Moist and low-lying, with low hills, swamps, and lakes, the 22,000-square-kilometer (8,500-square-mile) delta was the breadbasket and vineyard of Egypt.
The Egyptian state came into being and endured in part because of Kmt’s linear geography, a kingdom held together by the Nile. But communication was slow, the Two Lands very different from one another politically and economically. To hold the Two Lands together required vigorous, decisive leadership; great political sensitivity; and outstanding personal charisma. With strong rule and unity came harmony, balance, and order. He who ruled a united land was the living personification of the falcon-headed god Horus, symbol of kings. He embodied a unified Upper and Lower Egypt. King Amenhotep III (1386–1349 BC), perhaps the most magnificent of all pharaohs, erected a stela in about 1360 BC at the temple of the sun god, Re, at Karnak in Upper Egypt that spelled out his job description: “The living Horus: Strong Bull, Arisen in Truth: Two Ladies: Giver of Laws, Pacifier of the Two Lands, Gold-Horus: Great of Strength, Smiter of Asiatics: the King of Upper and Lower Egypt . . . Beloved of Amen-Re . . . Who rejoices as he rules the Two Lands like Re for ever.”3 The pharaohs were Egypt, a kingdom with an ideology of the harmonious, almost mythically unified Two Lands. They thought of their history as an orderly sequence of rulers who passed their kingship from one generation to the next. In fact, Egypt had a turbulent, ever changing political landscape. The kingdom fragmented at least twice, but always managed to restore its greatness at the hands of able pharaohs.
The greatness ended in about 1000 BC, when Egypt ceased to be a major imperial power. Conquerors came and went—Nubian kings, Assyrians, Persians, and Alexander the Great—but the essential fabric of Egyptian civilization and its theology survived into Roman times, when Rameses II (1304–1237 BC) and other great pharaohs were remote memories. By the time Egypt under the Ptolemies became a province of the Roman Empire in 31 BC, the land of the pharaohs was part of a much wider Mediterranean world. The Greco-Egyptian city of Alexandria in the delta had long been a cosmopolitan center where the Mediterranean and Asian worlds met, famous for its fleshpots and its men of learning. Long under Greek rule, the Alexandrians believed that the basic institutions of government and religion associated with civilization had originated with the pharaohs. To the Romans, Egypt was a country full of strange wonders, a place where the learned might acquire arcane knowledge and medical skills unheard of elsewhere.
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Long before Anthony and Cleopatra, Egypt’s marvels attracted the learned and curious. The Greek historian Herodotus visited the Nile in about 460–455 BC. He wrote one of the first lengthy accounts of the curiosities and antiquities of the Nile, only a few centuries after the decline of the greatest Egyptian pharaohs. In Herodotus’s day, Egypt was known territory for a duration of four months’ travel upstream deep into Nubia.
Herodotus’s writings show clear evidence of a profound, if at times inaccurate, knowledge of the ancient world. His reputation as a historian stood high even in his own time, for he was invited to read his works in public before the Athenians. Fortunately, his Histories have come down to us in their entirety. They are a collation of observed facts, folktales, myths, genuine history, and delightful curiosities. Herodotus himself emerges from them as a thoroughly gullible and likable man, with a penchant for accurate observation and an infinite capacity for admiration and wonder. The nine books of the Histories do not, of course, measure up to modern historical standards, for their author was much given to exaggeration and was uncritical about his sources. Nevertheless, archaeologists have proven the essential accuracy of his anthropological observations on many occasions.
Herodotus took the trouble to describe Egypt at great length, for he seems to have been more enthusiastic about the Egyptians than almost any other people that he met.
In traveling up the Nile, Herodotus merely followed a well-trodden route. Canals and irrigation works dissected the Nile floodplain; any journey on land was at best laborious before the days of roads, railways, and airlines. All governmental business and commercial activity passed up and down the river in barges and sailing vessels, while simple canoes of papyrus reeds served the villagers’ needs. Few foreigners ventured into the arid wastes of the deserts that pressed onto the Nile Valley. There was little to see, and the caravan journeys could be arduous in the extreme. So the itineraries of most visitors to the Nile remained basically unchanged right up to modern times—a journey up the river from Alexandria to the First Cataract at Aswan, with stops at the pyramids, Karnak, and Thebes. (Cairo is an Islamic city and did not exist in Roman times.)
