The Rape of the Nile

by Brian Fagan

  Drovetti lived on for many more years and was reappointed French consul general in Egypt in 1821. He retired for reasons of health in 1829, after twenty-seven years of residence and collecting in the Nile Valley. Over the years, he sold antiquities to numerous travelers and assembled a remarkable collection, which he tried to sell to the French government. Like Salt, he had considerable difficulty disposing of his antiquities. The French government procrastinated, largely because of clerical opposition on fundamentalist grounds. Devout churchmen feared that Drovetti’s collection would show that Egyptian civilization was older than 4004 BC, the established date of the Creation, calculated from the Scriptures by Archbishop James Ussher in the seventeenth century and accepted as theological dogma. While the clerics and bureaucrats argued and both the English and the Germans made bids, Drovetti finally sold his finds to the king of Sardinia for £13,000. The French consul also assembled two later collections, the first of which he sold to Charles X of France for one-quarter of a million francs; it now graces the Louvre. Drovetti’s last antiquities were bought by the German scholar Karl Richard Lepsius for the Berlin Museum.

  Drovetti died in 1852. He was never a great pioneer or expert on Egyptology, his interest being purely commercial. His excavation and collecting methods and those of his agents were quite ruthless. But the fruits of his labors, and those of his diplomatic colleagues, grace the museums of Europe and caused a dramatically heightened interest in ancient Egypt among educated Europeans.

  Yet, by a curious twist of fate, the three rival collectors of antiquities— Belzoni, Drovetti, and Salt—whose competition had enlivened the burial grounds and temples of Thebes for so long, enriched the national collections of their rivals’ homelands. Belzoni, an Italian, furnished the Egyptian gallery of the British Museum. Drovetti’s antiquities formed the basis of the magnificent Turin collection, while Henry Salt’s efforts greatly enhanced the galleries of the Louvre. All reaped the rewards of fame, notoriety, or financial gain. The only loser was Egypt.

  PART THREE

  BIRTH OF A SCIENCE

  In summary, the well-agreed interest of science

  demands, not that excavations are interrupted

  because science acquires new certainties and

  unexpected enlightenment each day through

  this work, but that one submits the excavators

  to such a control that the preservation of the

  tombs discovered today and in the future might

  be fully assured and well guaranteed against

  the attacks of ignorance or blind greed.

  JEAN-FRANÇOIS CHAMPOLLION

  to the pasha of Egypt, 1829, quoted in Lesley Adkins

  and Roy Adkins, The Keys of Egypt

  11

  Decipherment

  Into this Egypt already impoverished by Musselman devastators

  and European speculators, learned society has now descended like

  an invasion of barbarians to carry off what little remains of [its]

  admirable monuments.

  ÉMILE PRISSE D’AVENNES,

  quoted in Elisabeth David, Mariette Pacha, 1821–1881

  Where Giovanni Belzoni had pioneered, others soon followed. He and his rivals had started a scramble for Egyptian antiquities that soon expanded to a rape of massive proportions. Hundreds of collectors, amateur antiquarians, and curious tourists descended on the Nile during the twenty years after Belzoni’s departure. Many of them were content to visit and admire. Others were out for loot, treasure, or simply personal profit. The names of the most active collectors have come down to us through their collections, remnants of which are scattered in the museums of the world, listed in auction sale catalogs, and held in private hands. Some of the most acquisitive, and the most successful nineteenth-century dealers in Egyptian antiquities, are enshrined in that admirable publication Who Was Who in Egyptology, an exhaustive compilation of the saints and criminals of Egyptology.1

  One such collector was Anthony Charles Harris (1790–1869), an English merchant who lived in Alexandria. He bought and sold fine antiquities, specializing in papyri. The British Museum acquired his own collection in 1872, one of hundreds of collections, large or small, assembled in the eighty years between Belzoni’s departure and the end of the nineteenth century. Papyri, mummies, scarabs, even whole temples were removed from Egypt by individuals who were anxious for a quick profit or wanted to gratify a collector’s desire to acquire a tangible relic of the Egyptian past, a type of disease described by one French scholar, Henri Codet, in 1922 as “a passion so violent that it is inferior to love or ambition only in the pettiness of its aims.”2

  The trouble was that collecting was so easy. Muhammad Ali had no cause to legislate against the removal of antiquities, for Egypt had no national museum to keep them in. The Turkish rulers of Egypt had no interest in, or identity with, the ancient past. To them the antiquities of the Nile were a significant political tool, useful for gratifying eccentric but powerful visitors or diplomats with curious collecting habits. The tangible monuments of ancient Egypt were merely a source of building stone, or perhaps the site for a modern village elevated above the annual floodwaters.

  The museums of Europe were now so eager to obtain Egyptian antiquities that they were quite prepared to ship entire rooms, friezes, or tombs. Forty-five years after Belzoni’s excavations, the French philosopher Joseph-Ernest Renan wrote:

  Purveyors to museums have gone through the country like vandals; to secure a fragment of a head, a piece of inscription, precious antiquities were reduced to fragments. Nearly always provided with a consular instrument, these avid destroyers treated Egypt as their own property. The worst enemy, however, of Egyptian antiquities is still the English or American traveler. The names of these idiots will go down to posterity, since they were careful to inscribe themselves on famous monuments across the most delicate drawings.3

  By the 1840s, the secrets of ancient Egypt had been at least partially unlocked by the decipherment of hieroglyphs, and some people had begun to realize the full extent of the awful damage that had been done. But it was too late. Firm government leadership and legislative action had been urgently needed and were sadly lacking, even as the Description was published.

  FIGURE 11.1 The zodiac of Dendera, as illustrated by Napoléon’s savants. From Description de l’Égypte.

  The 1820s to 1840s were a time of intense academic debate over the chronology of ancient Egypt and over the age of humanity, which revolved around astronomy and zodiacs that displayed the heavens. A French antiquarian and collector, Sébastien Louis Saulnier, heard about the zodiac in the temple of Dendera.4 He hired an agent, Jean-Baptiste Lelorrain, to remove it from the ceiling of the temple and ship it to France. The circular zodiac dates from the end of the Ptolemaic period or even later. It represents celestial Egypt, which the Egyptians thought of as a duplication of terrestrial Egypt with the same districts and features.

  Saulnier and Lelorrain decided that the zodiac, which had been located by General Desaix de Veygoux during the French expedition, had “in a way become a national monument,” and should therefore be moved from Dendera to Paris. Lelorrain arrived in Alexandria in October 1820 prepared to export the zodiac by any means possible. Carefully concealing his real intentions, he announced that he planned to try some digging at Thebes. Even so, he had to eject an “observer” from his boat, a spy planted by Henry Salt to keep a watch on his activities.

  Some English visitors were sketching at Dendera when Lelorrain took his first look at the zodiac. So he went on upstream to Thebes, where he bought a few mummies and other antiquities to cover his tracks. When the French returned to Dendera the artists had left, so Lelorrain was free to begin his operations. The zodiac lay in the ceiling of the center room of three in a small building near the magnificent temple that Napoléon’s soldiers had so greatly admired.5 The task of removal was a formidable one, for the zodiac was carved on two huge blocks 0.9 meters (3 feet) thick. Lelorrain ha
d only chisels and saws with him, so he resorted to gunpowder to blow holes in the temple roof. Fortunately, his carefully controlled blasts did not bring the ceiling down. He set a large workforce laboring day and night to saw through the limestone.

  Twenty-two days later, in a scene reminiscent of Belzoni at the Ramesseum, Lelorrain dragged the zodiac down the slope of earth that still filled the building and levered it onto special wooden rollers for the journey to the waiting boat more than 6.4 kilometers (4 miles) away. The rollers soon wore out. Lelorrain had to revert to levers and brute strength to move a heavy sledge carrying the blocks to the Nile. The Frenchman did not possess Belzoni’s artistry at moving large objects. He tried to lever the sledge aboard the riverboat on sloping planks, but it slipped and the zodiac plopped into the soft mud by the river’s edge. Fortunately for Lelorrain, he was paying his workers exceptionally well, so they were as keen as he was to see the boat safely loaded. By prodigious labor they managed to rescue the slabs and load them safely into the boat that was now leaking disastrously. Frantic caulking of the spurting seams saved the day.

  Then the captain refused to cast off. A passing American had seen Lelorrain at work and told Henry Salt, who had arranged for a timely bribe. Lelorrain paid the captain a 1,000-piastre gratuity and started downstream. Halfway to Cairo, one of Salt’s European agents presented the Frenchman with an order from the pasha’s grand vizier forbidding Lelorrain to remove the zodiac. Lelorrain ran up the French colors and boldly challenged the English to board his vessel. His bold stratagem worked, and the agent sailed away in ineffectual rage. Salt, who had been on the point of removing the zodiac for himself and William Bankes of obelisk fame, was furious. He pursued Lelorrain to Alexandria and interceded with the pasha, claiming he had dug at Dendera before the Frenchman had even heard of the place and therefore owned the zodiac, but to no avail.

  Eventually, the zodiac arrived in Paris amid scenes of great enthusiasm. Saulnier and Lelorrain made a handsome profit. They sold the zodiac to King Louis XVIII for 150,000 francs. It can now be seen in the Louvre. The visitor to Dendera must be content with a plaster replica.

  The impudent tricks of Lelorrain and Salt were but typical of the antiquarian morality of the times, for people like Saulnier, Drovetti, and Athanasi were motivated partly by curiosity, but mainly by greed. No one had any understanding of what they were seeing or removing, because no one was able to read hieroglyphs.

  ::

  Egyptian hieroglyphs had fascinated scholars for centuries before the discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799. The fascination began during the Renaissance, with the revival in classical learning and the assumption that much wisdom came from the ancient Egyptians. Between 1582 and 1589, six Egyptian obelisks were either resited or reerected in Rome, each covered with elaborate hieroglyphic script. A Venetian scholar, Pierius Valerianus, was the first to write a book on hieroglyphs. His attempts to decipher hieroglyphic symbols were, at best, fantasy.

  In 1666, the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680) was entrusted with the publication of a hieroglyphic inscription on an obelisk in Rome’s Piazza della Minerva, erected by the order of Pope Alexander VII. He produced an elaborate reading of an inscription that merely recites the name of the pharaoh Psammeticus spelled phonetically! Kircher was a brilliant scholar, with a flamboyant, imaginative mind, like his contemporaries convinced that hieroglyphs were picture writing. When Jesuit missionaries in China wrote saying there was no resemblance between Chinese script and hieroglyphs, the mystery deepened. In the 1790s, a Danish scholar named Jörgen Zoega hypothesized that the script might, in fact, be phonetic, an important step toward decipherment.6

  The discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799 changed the playing field dramatically. Napoléon’s savants knew from the outset that this prosaic inscription in three scripts would serve as the key to hieroglyphs. Wax copies of the stone circulated widely in Europe amid general confidence that the secrets of ancient Egyptian writing would soon become apparent. But the experts could make no sense of “picture symbols” of the formal hieroglyphic script. They were trying to translate them as individual ideas rather than sounds, which was entirely the wrong approach. At the same time, they hypothesized correctly that the demotic inscription was an alphabetic form of the formal script.

  FIGURE 11.2 A summary of the different ancient Egyptian scripts.

  If this theory was correct, then the obvious attack was through demotic. Eminent scholars such as Sylvestre de Sacy, a well-known French Orientalist, and Johan Åkerblad, a Swede, tried to work out the demotic alphabet, with mixed results. Everyone was feeling discouraged when Thomas Young, an English doctor with broad research talents in medicine, natural philosophy, mathematics, and languages, became interested in a papyrus shown him by a friend. He obtained a copy of the Rosetta inscription in 1814 and began a comparison of the demotic and Greek scripts. He also noted the striking resemblance between some demotic symbols and corresponding hieroglyphs. Young concluded that demotic script was a mixture of alphabetic signs and hieroglyphic symbols. Napoléon’s savants had suggested that royal names lay within ovals in Egyptian scripts. The Rosetta inscription had six such cartouches, which contained the name Ptolemy, a name he assumed was spelled alphabetically—a foreign name.7 By matching the hieroglyphs to the letters of the Greek spelling of Ptolemy, Young assigned sound values to various symbols. Many of them were correct. Then he made a false assumption—that the remaining hieroglyphs used to write Egyptian language were nonphonetic. As a result, he never achieved full decipherment.

  Young’s principal rival was a Frenchman, a linguistic genius of impatient personality. Jean-François Champollion was born on December 23, 1790, in Figeac, France, the son of an impoverished bookseller. His formal education did not begin until he was eight years old, but he soon displayed a precocious ability in languages and drawing. His brother Jacques-Joseph supervised his formal education in Grenoble, where he acquired a passionate interest in Egypt. This brought him, at the age of eleven, to the attention of the mathematician Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier, who had been one of Napoléon’s Egyptian savants and was writing the historical introduction to the Description de l’Égypte.8 Fourier and his collections inspired the young Champollion with the desire to break the secrets of hieroglyphs. From this time on, they exercised a strong influence on one another. Formal schooling bored Champollion, who became increasingly obsessed with Egypt and by a conviction that antiquity was best studied through languages. By the time he was seventeen, Champollion had learned Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Persian, and other Eastern languages, as well as English, German, and Italian. He also added Coptic to his repertoire, in the belief that the language of Christian Egypt might have retained something of ancient Egyptian speech.

  In 1807 Champollion and his brother went to Paris, at the time the leading cultural center in Europe, filled with loot from Napoléon’s conquests. While living in great poverty, Jean-François studied under the Orientalist de Sacy, worked for the commission compiling the Description, and took language courses. The young linguist acquired priceless contacts with the leading scholars of Oriental languages and culture. Despite ill health and poverty, he immersed himself in all the Coptic scripts he could find, assuming that Coptic alphabetical letters matched those of ancient Egyptian. Later, he realized that he was wrong. Coptic was a late development of ancient Egyptian, and hieroglyphs were not a simple alphabet. He also turned his attention to the Rosetta stone.

  Within a few months, Champollion had used his knowledge of Coptic and the Greek inscription to tease out the value of a number of the demotic letters. His findings agreed with those of the Swedish scholar Johan Åkerblad, published some years earlier. He also pored over papyri with their hieratic writings, but was unaware that demotic and hieratic were different scripts.

  He studied the Rosetta stone for months, apparently without result. Seven years later he published two volumes on the geographical placenames of ancient Egypt in which he proclaimed rather
brashly that he could read the demotic inscription on the stone. He was nearly right, for he believed that Coptic was the closest surviving relative of ancient Egyptian. The research was demanding, frustrating, and full of dead ends. Champollion responded by immersing himself in Coptic, amusing himself by translating his thoughts into the language. By this time, he had convinced himself that the decipherment of hieroglyphs was his destiny.

  After two years of fruitless study, Champollion returned to Grenoble, where he was appointed to a teaching position at the new university there. He continued to work on hieroglyphs, discarding theory after theory in his search for decipherment and working on Egyptian place-names along the way. His L’Égypte sous les pharaons appeared in 1811. Jealous rivals promptly accused him of plagiarism.

  Political upheavals and the restoration of the monarchy cost Champollion his teaching job and brought research to an end until 1818, when he received much better copies of the Rosetta stone from London. Even then, distractions such as teaching got in the way of his work.

  In 1819 the Encyclopaedia Britannica published a long article by Thomas Young on ancient Egypt, in which he summarized his own attempts to read hieroglyphs. He concluded that there were three consecutive Egyptian scripts and ended his article with what he called the “Rudiments of a Hieroglyphical Vocabulary,” some information on sounds and phrases, and a list of monuments.9 The vocabulary showed how Ptolemy’s name occurred six times in the demotic inscription. Young also believed that he had deciphered other royal names at Karnak and Philae. He thought he had worked out fourteen letters of a hieroglyphic alphabet; in fact, only five letters were correct.