The Rape of the Nile
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Herodotus turned his leisurely journey into one of the most famous passages of the Histories, probably the earliest systematic account of the Nile Valley and its wonders. It is difficult to separate the author’s personal observations from the hearsay and myth that he collected. For instance, he speculated as to the cause of the annual flood. He reported that some Egyptians believed the floods were caused by rain and melting snow, a theory that was proved correct more than 2,000 years later, although Herodotus disbelieved the tale. “How can it [the Nile] flow from the snow when its course lies from the hottest parts of earth to those that are for the most part cooler?” he asked.4
Like so many other classical visitors, Herodotus professed a reverence and enthusiasm for Egyptian institutions. The Egyptians, he observed, were religious to excess, worshiping a large assembly of gods, from whom, he surmised, the Greeks derived at least some of their own divinities. The cat was held in great reverence and buried in special cemeteries, as were other domestic animals. And, like so many visitors after him, Herodotus was fascinated by the burial customs of the ancient Egyptians. He described how the embalmers drew out the brain through the nostrils with an iron hook and then cleaned out and preserved the corpse over a period of seventy days: “Then the relatives take back the corpse and make a hollow wooden coffin, man-shaped. They enclose the corpse therein, and having shut it up, they store it in a coffin chamber, placing it upright against a wall.”5 Modern investigators, who have experimented with Egyptian mummification techniques, have confirmed the essential accuracy of Herodotus’s account—clearly based on firsthand observations.
From burial customs he passed to agriculture and fishing, to the hunting of crocodiles and Egyptian boats. No detail large or small escaped the eye of this insatiably curious visitor. He talked to officials and priests, to village headmen and townspeople with an infinite curiosity that is the mark of a gifted traveler. His hunger for information was insatiable. Herodotus recounted the legends of the origins of the Egyptian state, the story of Menes, the first ruler of a unified Egypt. He told how priests showed him lists recording the names of 350 kings. Two centuries later, the Greek priest Manetho published the same lists in his History of Egypt, written in about 280 BC, the foundation of modern Egyptologists’ dynasties of Egyptian kings.6 The fragmentary historical narrative in the Histories is, at best, little more than hearsay and legend, and the author himself admitted as much. Unfortunately, most of his successors accepted the Histories as gospel truth. As so often happens, historical myths became dogmatic fact, slavishly copied by centuries of historians.
Herodotus was in an unusual position. Of all the many travelers and historians who have visited Egypt in the past 3,000 years whose works have come down to us, Herodotus was the nearest to the great pharaohs themselves. He talked to priests and worshipers who were actively carrying on the traditions of millennia of religious devotion. The monuments of the Nile were in a far better state of preservation than they are today, before the disastrous inroads of archaeological plunderers, despoiling Christians, and quarrying Muslims. So his account is a vivid one, perhaps too vivid, of a remarkable and exotic river valley that he and other educated men reasonably accepted as the cradle of their own civilization. The Egyptians of the day come alive in the Histories: we read of their drinking bouts, of the story of the theft of the thief ’s body, and of complex religious ceremonies, with Herodotus at our side occasionally admonishing us that much of what he learned may have been tall tales. His admonitions were timely, but were largely ignored by Herodotus’s successors and generations of scholars and historians.
Modern scholars have castigated Herodotus, not least among them the great nineteenth-century French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette. “I detest this traveler,” he wrote, complaining that Herodotus visited Egypt when the ancient language was still spoken and thus could have asked all sorts of key historical questions and received accurate answers. Instead, he “tells us gravely that a daughter of Cheops built a pyramid with the fruit of prostitution. Considering the great number of mistakes in Herodotus, would it not have been better for Egyptology had he never existed?”7 Herodotus was indeed an inaccurate, often gullible observer, with a penchant for the fanciful and marvelous. The tall tales of his informants have haunted Egyptology for centuries. British Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner’s assessment of Herodotus as the “Father of History” and a “great genius” is probably fairer, for he was experimenting with what at the time was a totally new literary art form.
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Numerous Greek travelers followed in Herodotus’s footsteps, but only a few of their travelogues survive. The author Diodorus Siculus lived in the Nile Valley from 60 to 57 BC and was one of the first people to write about the huge seated figures of pharaoh Amenhotep III (1386–1349 BC) on the floodplain at Thebes. The Greeks named these 20-meter- (65-foot-) high statues the Colossi of Memnon, after a Homeric hero. Rameses II’s nearby mortuary temple, the Ramesseum, became known as the Memnonium. Diodorus admired the temple and its courts with its statues of the king. He found an inscription on one of the figures, which he quoted, attributing the temple correctly to Ozymandias, the Greek equivalent of Userma’atre’setepenre’, the actual name of Rameses II: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; if any would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass me in any of my works.” Many centuries later, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was inspired by a “traveler from an antique land” who described two “vast and trunkless legs of stone” in the desert. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” he wrote in a short poem that is among the classics of the English language.8
The Greek geographer Strabo (64 BC–ca. AD 23) was a contemporary of Diodorus Siculus. He accompanied Aelius Gallus, a Roman prefect of Egypt, on his expedition to Upper Egypt in 25 BC. Strabo’s Geography is an enormous compilation of factual information about the Roman world. Egypt fills much of his seventeenth book. The account is mainly geographical, a catalog of towns and resources. He treated archaeological sites like other features of the landscape. At Memphis, he visited the site of the Serapeum. “One finds also [at Memphis] at the temple of Serapis, in a spot so sandy that the wind causes the sand to accumulate in heaps, under which we could see many sphinxes, some of them almost entirely buried, others only partially covered.”9 Nearly 2,000 years later, French archaeologist Auguste Mariette used Strabo’s account to rediscover the Serapeum.
FIGURE 2.1 Obelisk from Luxor in the Place de la Concorde, Paris.
Strabo’s party paused to admire the statuary at the Ramesseum, across the Nile from Thebes. Next they examined some inscriptions on obelisks at the temples of the sun god, Amun, at Luxor and Karnak, one of which was later given to King Louis XVIII of France by Pasha Mohammad Ali in the nineteenth century and now stands in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. “Above the Memnonium,” remarked Strabo, “are tombs of kings, which are stone-hewn, are about forty in number, are marvelously constructed, and are a spectacle worth seeing.” This is one of the first references to the Valley of the Kings, for so long the scene of archaeological rape and pillage. Strabo ended by castigating Herodotus and others for “talking much nonsense, adding to their account marvelous tales, to give it, as it were, a kind of tune or rhythm or relish.”10 Strabo was not the first Egyptian traveler to find reality different from history.
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When the Romans occupied Egypt in 31 BC, the Nile Valley became a prosperous and stable province of the greatest empire the world had known. Roman interest in Egypt was predominantly political and exploitative. Her fields became one of Rome’s granaries, but the old religious ways were tolerated and even revered. The stability of Roman Egypt depended on a political system that was superimposed on the native cultures. In France and Britain, for example, thousands of local people became Romanized, adopting many of the customs and institutions of their conquerors. But the Egyptians remained aloof, worshiping their age-old gods, cultivating their fields as they always ha
d, perpetuating many institutions of earlier times. A distinctive way of life of tremendous antiquity continued to survive comparatively unscathed, surrounded by the lasting monuments of religious and political institutions that extended into the distant past. The security of Roman rule enabled the tourist to move around freely in this strange country. For three and a half centuries the Roman world was at peace. A rich and leisured class enjoyed an easy life of travel and luxury, passing in safety to even the remotest corners of the empire. The centralized administration of the Roman Empire made constant travel between Rome and Alexandria, and between the governor’s headquarters and provincial towns, essential. Government delegations, ambassadors, military conscripts, and individual citizens seeking redress all shuttled to and fro from Egypt to Rome. Thousands of tourists also flocked to Egypt and other parts of the Near East in search of education, entertainment, or religious edification.
The Roman tourist took ship at galley ports in southern Italy for a sixday passage to Alexandria, or crossed to Carthage in North Africa and then traveled to the Nile by coast road. Either route was safe and speedy, for the imperial business used the same communication networks. Constant and uninterrupted traffic crisscrossed the Mediterranean. Ships that sometimes reached a length of 53 meters (173 feet) and displaced more than 2,000 tons carried marble, linen, papyrus, glass, and perfumes, as well as passengers. Upon arrival at Alexandria, one could travel by river to the First Cataract and beyond or use the Roman-built post road that now ran alongside the Nile. At Koptos in Upper Egypt, well-maintained mail roads followed the ancient Egyptian route across the desert to the Red Sea ports of Berenice and Myos Hormos, important transshipment points and trading stations for the Arabian and Indian Ocean trade.
Many people traveled to the Nile simply to enlarge their intellectual horizons or out of curiosity. Direct inquiry was the best way of learning about history, geography, and the arts of philosophy, religion, and magic that everyone knew were developed to a high pitch in Egypt. Alexandria had an international reputation for scholarship and medicine. Famous teachers stood ready to accommodate the traveler. The sick could be cured. Then there were the notorious pleasure resorts at Alexandria. Ptolemy I Soter (305–282 BC), a friend and general of Alexander the Great, had founded a temple of the god Serapis at Canopus near Alexandria. By Roman times, this was famous throughout the ancient world for its extravagant and orgiastic rituals. The cult of Serapis was an amalgam of the worship of two Egyptian gods, Osiris and Apis, the latter a sacred bull, important to the Ptolemies as a guarantor of royal power. While the Serapeum complex at Saqqara near Memphis with its ancient bull burials was an important pilgrimage venue, where people flocked seeking cures, the Canopus shrines were a center of ecstatic rituals and feasts.
Tiring of Dionysian pleasures, the tourist could then sail southward up the Nile to another world, where the monuments of antiquity overlooked irrigated fields and centuries-old irrigation systems. We can follow their journeys from the numerous graffiti they left behind them. Although the more serious traveler might examine dozens of ruined temples, most tourists followed an itinerary that took them from Alexandria to Memphis, the pyramids of Giza, then to Thebes and the Valley of the Kings on the west bank opposite the town and the lovely island of Philae with its temple of Isis at the First Cataract, all easily visited by boat or road. Numerous small inns catered to the needs of the weary traveler. Private contractors hired out their boats or pack animals to organized parties of visitors, many of them armed with their Herodotus or Egyptian geographies written by other authors. Like modern guidebooks, these volumes sought to inform and to entertain, to titillate with fantasy and myth, and to embrace all manner of information. Antiquities like the pyramids were only part of a general corpus of information presented to the uncritical reader. Most writers added little to Herodotus, for they plagiarized the great historian’s work unmercifully.
The first major stop for the Roman tourist venturing upstream was the pyramids at Giza, still adorned with their magnificent limestone casing stones, later removed by medieval contractors to construct the public buildings of Cairo. Many travelers inscribed their names on the casing stones, a thoroughly human failing that has vandalized ancient monuments throughout history. The Egyptian examples provide, in themselves, a fascinating historical kaleidoscope of pithy observations and reactions to the marvels of antiquity. The earliest recorded Giza inscription dates to about AD 1475, for the older inscriptions were removed with the casing stones, although we know from the travels of Rudolph von Suchem, a German monk who visited the pyramids in 1336, that earlier inscriptions did exist.11
Near the pyramids of Giza lay the Sphinx, buried in drifting sand. Pliny the Elder was one of the first Roman authors to describe this most famous of Egyptian monuments.12 There were other tourist attractions, too: the temple of Apis, the bull god, at the ancient and flourishing town of Memphis, and the famous “Labyrinth” at the Fayyum Depression west of the Nile, a vast palace of Amenemhet III (1842–1797 BC), a Middle Kingdom pharaoh who undertook massive land-reclamation works in the oasis. The Labyrinth was so named on account of its many courtyards and rooms, which caused imaginative Greeks to compare it to the mythical Cretan Labyrinth. “It has twelve courts, all of them roofed,” wrote Herodotus; “the passages through the courts, in their extreme complication, caused us countless marvelings as we went through, from the court into the rooms, and from the rooms into the pillared chambers.”13 Herodotus felt that the Labyrinth was even more wonderful than the Giza pyramids. Nearby were the sacred crocodiles of the Fayyum, fed from priestly hands—strictly as a tourist attraction. No traces of the Labyrinth survive today. When Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie excavated at the site in 1889, he found only a few columns and architraves, as well as numerous stone chips. For centuries, lime burners had camped among the ruins and slowly reduced them to shredded rubble.
From the Labyrinth, the traveler pressed on upstream to the temples of Amun at Luxor and Karnak at Thebes, where he or she walked through the vast Hypostele hall with its forest of pillars at the temple of Amun at Karnak and ventured across the river into the desolate Valley of the Kings, even then known as the burial place of Egypt’s greatest rulers.14 Visiting the deep burial chambers of the pharaohs quarried into the hills of the valley was an exciting adventure. By the time the Romans came, all the exposed tombs had already been opened and plundered. The tourist tiptoed into the dark chambers and inscribed his name by torchlight on the walls of the desecrated tomb. Generations earlier, Diodorus Siculus had already complained that there was nothing there except the results of pillage and destruction.15
FIGURE 2.2 The temple of Amun at Karnak by the Victorian painter David Roberts (1796–1864). Roberts spent two and a half months in Egypt in 1838, sketching and painting the major monuments and scenes of local life. An expert lithographer, Louis Hague, prepared them for publication over the next eight years. Roberts’s colorful and often romanticized works are deservedly popular with collectors. From the author’s collection.
The two vast seated statues of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, known to everyone as the Colossi of Memnon, on the floodplain near the Valley of the Kings across from Amun’s temples on the west bank were one of the highlights of any visit to the Nile. The Greeks had identified the seated Colossi with the mythical King Memnon of Ethiopia, son of the Dawn, who had assisted the Trojans against Achilles. Like the Labyrinth, the Colossi had received their name from a well-known character of common legend, a familiar historical landmark identified among a landscape of exotic gods and pharaohs. In fact, the two sandstone statues once stood in front of Amenhotep’s vast mortuary temple. The pharaoh was enamored of extravagant statements and lavish display. The summer inundation flooded his stupendous mortuary temple each year, leaving only the inner shrine on a small knoll clear of the water. The Nile eventually destroyed the temple; Roman contractors removed the boulders of the collapsed ruins to use in new construction. Eventually, all that remained were the two Co
lossi.
Both statues had been badly damaged in antiquity, most recently by an earthquake in 27 BC, but this did not prevent the northern statue of the pair from emitting a bell-like sound in the early morning. Tourists flocked to hear the noisy statue at sunrise and to speculate about the strange noises. Some compared the sounds to human voices, others to a twanging harp string. Strabo was more cynical. He suspected that the local priests had installed a mechanism to cause the sound. In fact, the early-morning warmth of the sun caused the stones to expand.
The Colossi attracted both the lowly and the mighty. Many tourists inscribed graffiti on the huge feet. The emperor Hadrian (AD 117–138) visited the site in AD 130. The statue remained silent the first day, but spoke to the emperor and empress on the second, an event that caused an accompanying poetess to inscribe some commemorative verses on the statue in praise of Memnon and, of course, the emperor Hadrian. Memnon’s refusal to speak to the Roman general, later emperor, Septimius Severus three-quarters of a century later was fatal. Severus tried to conciliate the god by restoring the head and torso, an act that silenced the statue forever.
We do not know the full extent of the damage wrought by the Romans on the Egyptian past. There are no official records of a widespread trade in antiquities, but some fine pieces certainly left the country. Apparently, Hadrian fancied Egyptian sculpture. In 1771, the Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton acquired a fine Middle Kingdom female sphinx head in Rome, which almost certainly came from the ruins of Hadrian’s villa, shipped there to adorn his home. Nor, seemingly, had the apparent medicinal properties of Egyptian mummies been recognized. But the obelisk, a slender pinnacle of granite carved with hieroglyphs, proved of overriding interest to the Romans. Constantine the Great (AD 306–337) was a great looter of obelisks. He caused a granite obelisk erected at Thebes by Thutmose III in the fifteenth century BC to be removed to Alexandria. Bureaucratic inertia delayed the monument at the Egyptian coast until after Constantine’s death. Eventually, it found its way to Constantinople, where it was erected in the Hippodrome near the Hagia Sophia Mosque on the orders of Emperor Theodosius I in AD 390. There it still stands. Another was eventually brought to Rome and erected in the great Circus Maximus. In due course it fell down, but was reerected by Pope Sixtus V in 1587.