The Rape of the Nile

by Brian Fagan

  The slender proportions and exotic hieroglyphic inscriptions on these obelisks seem to have excited the Romans, for they copied the architectural form with their own cruder obelisks. No one was able to comprehend the significance of Egyptian obelisks, although the soldier and naturalist Pliny the Elder suggested they were symbolic representations of the sun’s rays. A leisurely inspection of the obelisks in Rome convinced him that the hieroglyphic inscriptions comprised “an account of natural science according to the theories of the Egyptian sages.” The same author contemptuously dismissed the pyramids “as a superfluous and foolish display of wealth on the part of the kings.”

  The emperor Augustus used a looted obelisk in Rome’s Campus Martius as a form of calendar to mark the sun’s shadow and the lengths of days and nights: “A pavement was laid down for a distance appropriate to the height of the obelisk, so that the shadow cast at noon on the shortest day of the year might exactly coincide with it. Bronze rods let into the pavement were meant to measure the shadow day by day as it gradually became shorter and then lengthened again. But,” added Pliny, “the readings thus given here for about thirty years have failed to correspond to the calendar.”16

  The Roman interest in ancient Egypt stemmed from plain intellectual curiosity about a civilization assumed to be the oldest in the world. And, for all their curiosity about the cradle of civilization, many more naive Roman tourists must have aspired to the hopes an Alexandrian visitor inscribed on one of the temples at Philae: “Whoever prays to Isis at Philae becomes happy, rich, and long-lived.”17

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  Some fifty years after Constantine the Great had removed the obelisks from Thebes, a nun named Lady Etheria from what is now France visited Egypt as part of a lengthy progression through the holy places of the Near East during the fifth century after Christ. Somewhat bolder than her contemporaries, she visited Alexandria, passed by the pyramids, inspected the dwelling places of hermits, and gazed on the Colossi of Memnon at Thebes. “Nothing else is there now save one great Theban stone in which two great statues are cut out, which they say are the statues of holy men, even Moses and Aaron, erected by the Children of Israel in their honor,” she wrote.18 By Etheria’s time, the Bible was the primary literary source in the civilized world, a safe and secure archive of philosophy and information that was capable of explaining the strange ways of the world.

  Lady Etheria was traveling in unsettled and changing times, when the great academic centers of the classical world were in decline or turning inward on themselves. Egypt had not escaped the winds of change. The waning of Roman power and the rise of Christianity had brought many changes to traditional economic and religious ways. Christianity itself came to Alexandria in the first century AD, in the hands, so it is said, of Saint Mark. A small group of converts soon mushroomed into a large congregation of Christians who refused to worship the emperor as a god in his own right, a campaign of revolt that led to appalling persecutions and numerous martyrdoms. In AD 313 Constantine the Great recognized Christianity as one of the official religions of the empire. The influence of the Alexandrian Christians grew all-powerful on the Nile. The new religion was at first a faith of townsfolk, of educated Alexandrian Greeks and minor tradesmen. In the fourth century, the Scriptures were translated from Greek into Coptic, the language most commonly spoken by Egyptians. A cult of monasticism, a quest for spiritual perfection through retreat from the secular world, emerged among small communities of monks and hermits who spread the new doctrines to the common people. Christianity among the poverty-stricken Coptic peasants began, perhaps, as a form of anticolonial protest against a sinful world dominated by elitist town dwellers.

  The Coptic Christians were far from unified in their beliefs or traditional customs, but were all committed to a new order of religious institutions, which did not tolerate Egypt’s ancient beliefs. Whereas the Roman tourist had been curious about ancient Egyptian religion, the native Copts were determined to expunge all traces of older heretical ways. In 397 the fanatical patriarch Cyril and his armies probably destroyed the Serapeum at Memphis, one of the great Roman tourist attractions. Drifting desert sand mantled the ruins, uncovered only in the nineteenth century. During the sixth century, the emperor Justinian I actively encouraged Christian zeal. He ordered the temples of Isis on the island of Philae closed. The temple statues were removed to Constantinople to commemorate his piety in converting the heathen. The ceremonial panoply of ancient Egyptian religion became illegal and the symbols of the ancient religion evil and sinful. Faith-driven chisels and hammers obliterated inscriptions and faces, heads, hands, and feet from fine friezes on temple porticoes in the name of God.

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  “Mummy Is Become Merchandise”

  When you set in western lightland,

  Earth is in darkness as if in death;

  One sleeps in chambers, heads covered. . . .

  Earth brightens when you dawn in lightland,

  When you shine as Aten of daytime;

  As you dispel the dark,

  As you cast your rays,

  The Two Lands are in festivity.

  GREAT HYMN TO THE ATEN,

  in the tomb of the vizier and pharaoh Ay (1325–1321 BC),

  Tutankhamun’s successor

  For centuries, the neglected temples of the pharaohs stood empty on the floodplain, occupying valuable agricultural land, or on higher ground that was never flooded by the annual inundation. Villagers quarried them for building stone. Hewn stone blocks were admirable building materials in a country desperately short of wood. There was no need to quarry fresh granite when large numbers of beautifully cut and squared blocks were available for the taking from the ruins of a disused temple. Even the ancient Egyptians themselves had recycled their building stone. Where people did not carry away the stone or deface temple inscriptions, nature took over. Desert sands drifted over the Sphinx. Agricultural land was in short supply on the Nile floodplain, so the people built their villages on patches of higher ground, including the roof of the great temple of the falcon-headed god Horus at Edfu, deeply buried under drifting sand.1 Peasant farmers lived on the roof of the temple for centuries. They knew nothing of the significance of the building they had commandeered. Lady Etheria and her contemporaries glimpsed ancient Egypt just as it was entering a long oblivion that lasted for more than ten centuries.

  FIGURE 3.1 The pylon of the temple of Horus at Edfu. From Description de l’Égypte.

  Islam came to Egypt during the seventh century, unleashing yet more destructive forces on temple and sepulcher. The soldier-poet Amr Ibn elAs led the small Muslim army that expelled Cyrus, the Byzantine viceroy of the Nile. He wrote of Alexandria that he had captured a city “that contains 4,000 palaces, 4,000 baths, 400 theaters, 1,200 greengrocers, and 40,000 Jews.”2 But the city was a shadow of its former learned self. A civil war two and a half centuries before had destroyed the city’s famed library. The conquerors founded a new capital upstream at Al-Fustat, a “city of tents,” on the east bank of the Nile, for a new body of water was to separate them from the caliph’s palace in Medina. Al-Fustat and its nearby successor, AlAskar, soon became an important link between East and West.

  At first, Egypt was little more than a military province of expanding Islamic domains, but the new faith spread slowly southward along the banks of the Nile as more agricultural settlers, bureaucrats, and Islamic scholars settled in Egypt. In 870, a young governor, Ahmad Ibn-Talun, declared Egypt an independent state, free of the Abbasid caliph, who now resided in Baghdad. He founded a new capital, Al-Qatai, in the same general area as its predecessors. After sixty-five turbulent years, a Turkish ruler, Al-Ikhshid, brought Egypt back into the Abbasid fold. There matters remained until 969, when a Tunisian Shiite, Al-Meuz Ledin-Ellah, unleashed his Sicilian general, a former slave named Gawhar, on the Nile Valley. He easily captured the now long-established capital area and founded the Fatimid dynasty, as well as yet another capital, AlMansureya, which Al-Muez later named Al-Qahria, Cairo, �
��the Triumphant.” Despite a series of volatile rulers, Cairo flourished, to endure as a great caravan city and center of Islamic learning. The Seljuk leader Salah-el-Din (Saladin) entered Cairo in 1168, threw out the Fatimids, and embarked on an orgy of construction, including a formidable citadel and city walls. He and those who followed him mined the pyramids of their casing stones as building materials. His successors were a dynasty of former slaves, the Mamluks, who ruled over Egypt until 1516, when their domains became a province of the Ottoman Empire based in Constantinople. But the Mamluks still had much control over local affairs, for the Turks were primarily interested in tax collecting.

  The few Europeans who visited Cairo found it a bustling, chaotic city with fine mosques and a magnificent university. The local Islamic scholars marveled at the temples and pyramids, but they came from an even more alien culture, which had no appreciation of the history or cultural achievements of its new colony. Without this historical sense, they were at a loss, nor could the Copts, ignorant of hieroglyphs or older religious ways, enlighten their new masters. So the scholars shrugged and ascribed the works of ancient Egypt to giants or magicians long departed from the banks of the eternal river. Some thought of the pyramids as Joseph’s granaries used for storing corn in years of plenty, a theory already propounded by the Roman author Julius Honorius before the fifth century. Others believed they were treasure houses of long-dead kings. The great Arab geographer ‘al-Masudi (ca. 888–957), famous for his travels from Europe to India, wrote that the Great Pyramid contained “the image of a sheik, made of green stone, sitting on a sofa, and wrapped up in a garment.”3 Unfortunately, the statue could not be moved. Some rather adventurous souls, bolder than ‘al-Masudi, entered the pyramids in search of treasure during the Middle Ages. Temples and pyramids became quarries for building stone or were dismembered in a frantic quest for legendary treasure.

  For centuries, the Arabs pursued treasure hunting with a frenzied intensity, rivaled only by that displayed by nineteenth-century antiquities collectors. Treasure hunting was so widely practiced in the fifteenth century that it was classified as a taxed industry. People dug everywhere using secret magical incantations and techniques, which, if effective, would be just the thing for a modern archaeologist to use in amplification of his electronic detection methods. Guidebooks to treasure hunting included complicated directions to tomb areas, such as one cemetery complex near Memphis that was visible to a treasure hunter if he performed “fumigations” at a certain point. The Book of Hidden Pearls and Precious Mysteries and other such jewels of treasure-hunting lore were regarded as vital parts of the treasure hunter’s safari kit. The instructions given in these handbooks would delight any amateur chemist:

  You will uncover some masonry. Break it, perform continuous fumigation, and you will find a sloping way that will lead you to a chamber containing a corpse covered by a cloth of woven gold and wearing golden armour. The incense should be compounded of agalloche, stigmatas of saffron, dung, carob kernels, sycamore figs. Take a mithqal of each of these ingredients, grind them fine, moisten them with human blood, roll them into pellets and burn them as incense: the talismans and the hiding places will thus be discovered.4

  The learned shrugged at such nonsense, among them the wise and sober Arab writer Ibn Khaldun (1332–1395), who mocked the treasure hunters and their magic in the fifteenth century. “Suppose that a man did want to bury all his treasures and to keep them safe by means of some magical process,” he wrote. “He would take all possible precautions to keep his secret hidden. How could one believe, then, that he would place unmistakable signs to guide those who sought the treasure, and that he would commit those signs to writing?”5 Despite Ibn Khaldun’s scorn, treasure hunters blasted and probed their way through ancient Egypt well into the nineteenth century, undeterred by murders and thefts, or by repeated failures. As late as 1907, Gaston Maspero, then director of antiquities in Egypt, arranged for the publication of The Book of Hidden Pearls at a very low price so that it was freely available as a worthless publication for the most gullible.

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  The outside world knew little of the Egyptians and even less of their ancient civilization, for the governors of Egypt did little to encourage foreigners to visit the Nile. Christians were far from welcome once Islam took root in the country, as the Catholic monk Bernard the Wise found to his cost in 870. He and two companions had to bribe their ship’s captain to put them ashore at Alexandria at all. Then the governor in Cairo cast them into jail until they gave him 300 denarii each. After gazing at “Joseph’s granaries” (the pyramids), the pilgrims withdrew hastily to Jerusalem without any further archaeological inquiries. None of the various Christian pilgrims who strayed from the regular stamping grounds of such travelers in the Holy Land could be described as dispassionate observers, for they almost invariably interpreted the pyramids and other monuments in terms of the Hebrews and the biblical story.

  A few educated and cultured Muslims contributed far more intelligent and perceptive observations. One such was an Arab doctor from Baghdad, Abdel Latif, who taught medicine in Cairo in about 1200. At that time there were few Europeans in Egypt. The superintendent of buildings in the city was busily quarrying away the smaller pyramids within easy reach of Cairo to construct a defense wall around the citadel. Latif ventured about two-thirds of the way into the upper part of the Great Pyramid, which he found crowded with treasure hunters armed with their pet handbooks and incantations. The much trampled passageways were choked with bat droppings and infested with a noxious stench. Latif fainted away in horror and emerged in a highly fearful state. But he was not too shocked to admire the fine hieroglyphs on the casing stones and the Sphinx. “This figure is very beautiful,” he wrote, “and its mouth bears the seal of grace and beauty. It could be remarked that it smiles in a gracious manner.” He ventured also to the ancient pharaonic capital at Memphis, where he described the ruins of the huge Roman city. “It requires a half-day’s march in any direction to cross the visible ruins,” he wrote. Six hundred years later, all that remained were a few mounds of earth and some fragmentary statues.6

  The educated Europeans of five hundred years ago had access to almost no reliable information on Egypt at all, except for travelers’ tales and hearsay brought home by returning Crusaders during the preceding centuries. They could, however, turn to The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundeville, Knight, purportedly an accurate guidebook for pilgrims to the Holy Land, illuminated by the personal experiences of its devout author. This entertaining volume, a mine of information compiled from classical sources, fables, folklore, and highly unreliable travelers’ tales, was soon regarded as the ultimate authority against which other accounts were checked. In fact, Sir John Maundeville never existed, and the author, Jean d’Outremeuse, a Liège notary, never visited the Nile at all. The whole work was a complete fabrication. This deliberate—and highly successful—literary fraud was widely quoted, especially its description of the pyramids. “And some men say that they be sepulchres of great lords, that were sometime, but that is not true, for all the common rumour and speech is all of the people there, both far and near, that they be the granaries of Joseph,” was Maundeville’s verdict on the pyramids—perhaps, indeed, a majority view, but not one shared by Brother Felix Fabri of Ulm in what is now Germany, who actually gazed on the pyramids and sensed (correctly) that they were “marvelous sepulchral monuments of the ancient kings of Egypt.”7

  Firsthand accounts of the Nile were still few and far between. Most people turned to the writings of the great Leo Africanus (1485–1554), a Catholic and a scholar whose wanderings over northern Africa in the early sixteenth century are of the greatest interest to African historians. Leo traveled all the way up the Nile to Aswan and the First Cataract, observing the life on its banks and the antiquities, which were not, however, his primary concern. His History and Description of Africa, as indispensable to the prospective traveler as Maundeville, makes only cursory mention of the pyramids and des
cribes Memphis as a “citie that seemeth in times past to have beene very large.” At Manfalut: “Near unto Nilus stand the ruines of a stately building which seemeth to have beene a temple in times past, among which ruines the citizens finde sometimes coine of silver, sometimes of gold, and sometimes of lead, having on the one side hielygraphick notes, and on the other side the pictures of ancient kings.”8

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  Only the most determined of travelers succeeded in reaching Egypt. The sea voyage across the Mediterranean, perhaps in a Venetian or Turkish galley, might take weeks. Brother Felix Fabri complained of drunken passengers who interrupted his Sunday sermons, and the loathsome occupation of all seamen—“the hunting and catching of lice and vermin.” He had returned from Egypt on a Venetian spice galley, a vessel engaged in regular trading with the Alexandrians. The spices as well as other commodities came overland from the East and were funneled into Europe through Alexandria. Then in 1517, a few years after the Portuguese had opened up the Cape of Good Hope route to the east and monopolized the spice commerce, the Turks invaded Egypt, which became a province of the Turkish Empire. The new ruler, Selim I, confirmed earlier diplomatic treaties with France and Spain and granted a measure of religious protection to non-Muslims. It was now reasonably safe to travel in Egypt—if one managed to escape the attentions of pirates on the way to the Nile. A trickle of pilgrims, diplomats, and merchants made their way to Alexandria and farther inland in search of holy places, political advantage, or commercial opportunity. Most of these travelers were preoccupied with their commercial or religious objectives and were little concerned with scientific observation. But there were some more ambitious explorers. In 1533 Pierre Belon of France, a botanist, inspected the interior of the pyramid of Khufu at Giza and visited the Sphinx, which by this time had been mutilated—by Sheikh Muhammad in 1300.