The Rape of the Nile

by Brian Fagan

  At the time, Young had achieved far more than Champollion and seemed to be far ahead in the race for decipherment. He also believed that little more progress could be made until more bilingual inscriptions became available. The Frenchman was much distracted by political events in Grenoble, which caused him to lose his job as a librarian. He was threatened with a treason trial, but the charges were dismissed. Some time passed before he read Young’s article, and disagreed with it, by which time he had returned to Paris and settled with his brother in a rented house a few yards from the Academy of Inscriptions and Literature. He was soon accepted into leading academic circles, but was left alone to study demotic, which he compared to Coptic. His academic colleagues were preoccupied with Egyptian zodiacs, and especially with the newly arrived Dendera example, as a means of dating Egyptian civilization and the age of the world, a controversial subject in ecclesiastical circles.10

  Champollion rejected Young’s view that hieroglyphs were an alphabetic script. On December 23, 1821, he decided to carry out a numerical analysis of the Rosetta-stone texts. He found that 1,419 hieroglyphic signs paralleled 486 words of the Greek text. He could not establish a numerical relationship between the Greek and hieroglyphic texts, which made him realize that the hieroglyphs were at least partly phonetic and far more complex than previously realized. He tried transliterating the later demotic texts into the earlier hieratic, and then into hieroglyphs, despite being unable to read them. The transliterations gave him a first understanding of how the scripts worked and how they related to one another. Instead of using the Young approach of relying on bilingual texts, he looked at all aspects of Egyptian writing, something he could do because of his remarkably broad knowledge of related languages.

  A series of fortunate discoveries came along. Some Greek papyri from Abydos enabled him to identify a Ptolemy cartouche and possibly that of Cleopatra. Champollion converted the latter into a hypothetical hieroglyphic version, but it was not until a colleague passed along a lithograph of the Philae obelisk with its Cleopatra cartouches that he saw that the real thing was a close match. He now worked with heightened excitement, for he was able to work out the possible meanings of ancient Egyptian words that were similar to Coptic ones.

  On September 14, 1822, Champollion received copies of the hieroglyphs on the Abu Simbel temple duplicated precisely by architect JeanNicholas Huyot. He pored over the cartouches, where he soon identified the name Rameses, then another pharaoh’s name, Tuthmosis. The cartouches gave him the underlying principle of hieroglyphs. Carefully, he rechecked his results, then dashed out of his attic room into the street to tell his brother at the nearby Institute of France. Panting with excitement, he burst in on Jacques-Joseph, shouting, “Je tiens l’affair” (I’ve got it) and fell to the floor in a dead faint. He had discovered the complex phonetic principles of hieroglyphs, “a script at times figurative, symbolic and phonetic, in the same text, phrase, I would almost say the same word.”11

  Within days he was hard at work again on his famous Lettre à M. Dacier, secrétaire perpétuel de l’Académie royale des Inscriptions et BellesLettres, relative à l’alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques (Letter to M. Dacier, Secretary-General of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Literature, concerning the alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphs), published in late October 1822, in which he announced his discovery. He had read the paper at a meeting of the Academy of Inscriptions and Literature on September 27. By chance, Thomas Young was in the audience and was generous in his praise. The discovery was considered so important that the king himself was informed.

  Champollion now tried to acquire as many hieroglyphic texts as he could, for most of the available material was going to England and was accessible to Young rather than himself. He even went so far as to copy hieroglyphic texts before their sale in Paris auction rooms. Decipherment came easier and easier, using a method where he transliterated the text into Coptic, then into French, not a perfect system, but one that worked well enough at the time. In 1824, he published his Précis du système hieroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens (A summary of the hieroglyphic system of the ancient Egyptians), in which he went into far greater detail than he had in his Lettre. There were explanations of hieroglyphic signs, discussions of points of agreement and disagreement with Thomas Young, and discourses on the names of kings, on royal titles, and the different types of Egyptian writing. The Précis was an astounding tour de force, received with acclaim by Champollion’s supporters and with disdain by his enemies, most of them on the other side of the Channel. Decipherment soon became a nationalistic issue, to the French a striking demonstration of national pride. In May of the same year, the young Frenchman was able to visit London and see the Rosetta stone for the first time. But, as he well knew, the stone, the very symbol of decipherment, had been of limited use. The hieroglyphic inscription was too damaged to be of much use.

  Jean-François Champollion was now a man obsessed with decipherment and with teaching others how to translate hieroglyphs. He traveled to Italy to catalog the Drovetti collection in Turin, where he worked on papyri and identified the Turin Royal Canon with its list of Egyptian kings. His reputation had preceded him. Pope Leo XII received him in audience and offered to make him a cardinal. The stunned Champollion declined, because he had a wife and daughter. Instead, the pope persuaded the king of France to appoint him a knight of the Legion of Honor. Meanwhile, opposition to his decipherment surfaced on many sides, accentuated by Champollion’s low tolerance of any form of criticism. He was gratified when Henry Salt, once a fervent supporter of Young’s approach, declared that he was wrong and that the Frenchman was correct. By this time, Champollion was curator of the Egyptian section at the Louvre, where he arranged the Drovetti and Salt collections that had transformed the Louvre into one of the finest museums in Europe. He used his knowledge of hieroglyphs to arrange the material in the correct order.

  The man who had unlocked the secrets of ancient Egypt had never visited the Nile. In 1828, his influential supporters at court persuaded the king to support a joint French and Tuscan expedition under Champollion’s leadership, with the patronage both of the monarch and of the grand duke of Tuscany. Thirty years after Napoléon’s savants sailed for the Nile, Champollion, the Italian Egyptologist Ippolito Rosellini, and twelve others, including artists, draftsmen, and architects, disembarked at Alexandria.12 They were delayed for several weeks waiting for permits, probably because Drovetti was concerned at the prospect of excavations outside his control. Champollion warned him that the expedition had the full backing of the king of France and that he had the ear of the court. The permits arrived a few days later. Meanwhile, the expedition acquired comfortable Turkish clothing for their journey.

  Champollion’s expedition was a triumphal journey. It was an electrifying experience both for the master and for the other members of the party. For the first time they were able to read the inscriptions on the great temples and understand the significance of some of the oldest monuments in the world. Champollion’s ideas and the many startlingly revolutionary hypotheses about the significance and context of Egyptian monuments that had welled up in his mind were confirmed again and again by his field observations.

  FIGURE 11.3 Jean-François Champollion and his companions of the Egyptian expedition in a romantic pose. Ippolito Rosellini stands to the seated Champollion’s left. The expedition made few discoveries, but concentrated on recording what had been found and survived. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

  The expedition traveled upstream in two boats named Isis and Hathor, sailing fast to the First Cataract and then into Nubia as far as the Second Cataract. Having assessed different locations, the travelers would take their time coming downstream for more detailed studies. On their way south, they visited Memphis and Saqqara, the pyramids of Giza, and the tombs of Beni Hasan. Earlier travelers had reported wrongly that they contained little of significance, but a few moments with a wet sponge revealed spectacular wall paintings.13 But it was Dendera that was
the most overwhelming experience, the very Dendera that Napoléon’s soldiers had saluted in 1799.

  Unable to restrain themselves, the members of the expedition rushed ashore from their boats on a brightly moonlit night and stormed the temple in a state of wild excitement. “The moonlight was magnificent. . . . [A]lone and without our guides, but armed to the teeth, we set off across the fields. . . . We walked like this, singing the most recent opera marches.” They were lost when a villager appeared and promptly bolted at the sight of them. Champollion caught him and persuaded him to serve as a guide. “I will not try to describe the impression which the great propylon and especially the portico of the great temple made on us. . . . It is grace and majesty brought together in the highest degree.”14 For two glorious hours the travelers wandered through the moonlit temple, drunk with enthusiasm and rapture, before returning to their boat at three in the morning. The next day, they inspected the temple in daylight. Champollion could read enough hieroglyphs to establish that Dendera was a Ptolemaic temple dedicated to the goddess Hathor.

  From Dendera, they traveled to Karnak and Thebes, where Champollion raced from “marvel to marvel,” carving his name high on a column at Karnak. Eventually, they sailed as far as Wadi Halfa, just below the Second Cataract—any further progress southward would have meant a journey on land through desert terrain where a famine was raging. They had paused at Abu Simbel on the way upstream, clearing sand from the entrance. Champollion slipped through the narrow defile in the door on his stomach into the cavernous interior, where his mind reeled at the sight of the beautiful reliefs. On the return journey, the artists and draftsmen drew everything in temperatures like those of a “heated Turkish bath.” Champollion and Rosellini concentrated on the hieroglyphs, doublechecking everything before entrusting their copies to a draftsman. The work of copying took thirteen days.

  After six days at Philae, they settled into the first three chambers of the empty tomb of pharaoh Rameses IV in the Valley of the Kings, a favorite camping spot for visitors.15 The expedition recorded the paintings and inscriptions of the sixteen accessible royal tombs, contributing to the destruction by removing areas of plaster with friezes from the tomb of Seti I. After more than four months of seemingly endless copying, everyone was exhausted, but the work continued around Qurna and in the temple at Medinet Habu. Here Champollion finally proved that ancient Egyptian art developed without any influence from classical Greece, that it “only owes to itself,” as he put it in a letter to his brother. After brief stays at Thebes and Karnak, the boats rode the inundation down to Cairo and Alexandria. In January 1830, the thirty-nine-year-old Champollion returned to Paris, where ill health dogged him. He died of a stroke on March 4, 1832. His devoted brother published his dictionary of hieroglyphs between 1841 and 1844.

  ::

  The seventeen months that Champollion spent in the Nile Valley were the climax of a remarkable and intensely productive career. It was not given to Champollion to excavate sites and recover ancient Egypt from the ground. Rather, he was content to observe the remains themselves and put them into a true chronological perspective. Jean-François Champollion had, in one stroke, extended the frontiers of written history by thousands of years into unknown epochs where the origins of Egyptian civilization were to be found.

  The prospects for scientific investigation were stupendous, yet all that Champollion saw was destruction and looting. Not that he was above recommending that an obelisk from Thebes be removed to Paris as a memorial to Napoléon’s troops. Muhammad Ali eventually agreed to the request, although he had originally given the Theban obelisks to the British. At colossal expense, one of the two obelisks in front of the temple at Thebes was transported to Paris in 1830—on a special barge named Dromedaire. On October 25, 1836, it was erected in the Place de la Concorde in the presence of the king of France and 200,000 spectators.

  Meanwhile, the destruction continued. The antiquarian Sébastien Louis Saulnier of zodiac fame found Egypt divided between Bernardino Drovetti and Henry Salt. The situation was more complicated on the ground, complete with demarcation lines drawn through the middle of temples. The consuls’ agents patrolled their respective banks, ever watchful for intruders on their cherished monopolies. Both had the ear of the pasha. Both were obsessed with collecting and regarded ancient Egypt as their exclusive property. Saulnier likened them to competing monarchs: “They concluded a peace treaty. Like kings who, in accommodating their differences, want to preclude all causes that could renew them, they took a river for the border of the respective possessions that they granted themselves in Egypt. For two or three years now, it is the flow of the Nile that has separated them.”16

  There was still room for smaller operators, among them the Triesteborn adventurer Giuseppe Passalacqua, who came to Egypt to set up business as a horse dealer and turned to tomb robbing instead. In 1832, he stumbled over the tomb of a queen named Mentuhotep at Dra Abu’l Naga near Qurna on the west bank opposite Thebes. He arrived at the tomb soon after it was partially looted, but recovered the queen’s mummy and a painted canopic box that had once belonged to her husband.17 Passalacqua left the queen’s heavy wooden coffin in the tomb. A decade or so later, Englishman John Gardner Wilkinson recorded the ten columns of inscriptions—the earliest record of the Book of the Dead recorded for science. The former horse trader made other spectacular discoveries, including a passageway cut some 46 meters (150 feet) into a cliff, crammed with mummies, some of them buried with the tools of their trade, such as a scribe’s palette and a hunter’s weapons.

  By 1820, years of indiscriminate collecting had ravaged Egypt’s temples and tombs. The Theban necropolis remained a battlefield for looters and treasure hunters. Thousands of artifacts lay in museums and private collections, with no record as to where they were found or under what circumstances. Only a few could be placed within a general area, or within a specific cemetery. Ancient Egypt was nothing more than a moneymaking enterprise, a way of providing artifacts to collectors, museums, and scholars at a profit.

  12

  Artists and Archaeologists

  Of all possible locations at Thebes, Wilkinson had chosen the most

  thrilling. Straight down, he looked upon the tawny desert, filled

  with the tumble rubbish of ancient tombs. Just below him was the

  Ramesseum, from which Belzoni had snatched the colossal head.

  Over to the right were the twin statues which Westerners call the

  Colossi of Memnon, as well as the great sprawling temple of

  Medinet Habu. . . . Then the ever-changing, ever interesting Nile

  cut its pulsing course across the land. On the far side of the river

  were to be seen the columns of the Luxor temple and the soaring

  obelisks of mighty Karnak.

  EGYPTOLOGIST JOHN A. WILSON,

  Signs and Wonders upon Pharaoh:

  A History of American Archaeology, on the view from John Gardner Wilkinson’s

  tomb-residence at Thebes

  Jean-François Champollion considered himself the sole decipherer of hieroglyphs, as the man who unlocked the secrets of ancient Egypt. Like all decipherments, no one epigrapher made all the advances, secured all the clues. Champollion drew on the work of others, on copies made by Napoléon’s savants and other visitors. Without question, however, it was his decisive advances that were in considerable part responsible for a new era in the study of the ancient Egyptians, a time when artists and antiquarians devoted months, even years, to copying and recording rather than destructive excavation and looting. The treasure hunting still continued, but a few voices now deplored the ravaging of temple and tomb.

  Champollion himself wrote to the pasha deploring the widespread destruction of archaeological sites and the trade in antiquities. He pointed out how many tourists were now visiting the Nile simply to see the monuments and admire the marvels of the past. Tourists meant money, and in the long run a greater profit than that obtained from demolition and loot
ing. He recommended that excavation be controlled, that quarrying stone from temples be forbidden, and that the exportation of antiquities be strictly regulated.

  Champollion’s strongly worded pleas had an effect on Muhammad Ali’s thinking and led to a landmark government ordinance published on August 15, 1835. The preamble of the ordinance noted that museums and collectors were so hungry for antiquities that there was a danger that all traces of ancient monuments would vanish from Egyptian soil to enrich foreign countries. The ordinance forbade all exportation of antiquities, authorized the construction of a museum in Cairo to house antiquities owned by the government or found in excavations conducted by it, made it illegal to destroy monuments, and endorsed efforts at conservation. At the same time, Muhammad Ali appointed an inspector of museums to travel through Upper Egypt and inspect key sites. The ordinance was, of course, unenforceable. But it was a step in the right direction, even if the pasha’s museum got off to a shaky start and most of the antiquities in it were sold or given to foreign dignitaries by Ali and his successors.

  Fortunately, a few visitors to the Nile now came in search of knowledge rather than artifacts, out of a profound curiosity and enthusiasm for the world’s earliest civilization. By 1821, the handful of antiquarians with a serious interest in Egypt sensed that decipherment was imminent, among them the classical archaeologist and traveler Sir William Gell, who corresponded with Thomas Young and mentored a promising young scholar— John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875), destined to become one of Egyptology’s seminal figures.1