The Rape of the Nile

by Brian Fagan

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  FIGURE 12.1 Sir John Gardner Wilkinson in Turkish costume. Courtesy: The National Trust.

  Wilkinson’s parents died at an early age, leaving him with modest private means. He planned an army career, but while awaiting a commission embarked on an old-style Grand Tour through Mediterranean lands. His itinerary included Egypt, which had fascinated him from an early age. In Rome he met Sir William Gell, who promised to brief him thoroughly on ancient Egypt. At the time, Gell probably knew more about ancient Egypt than anyone. He had read virtually all the published work on the subject and corresponded regularly with Salt, Young, and others. Gell himself had planned to go to the Nile, but his gout and other commitments prevented him.

  The young Wilkinson arrived in Alexandria in late 1821 with a smattering of Arabic and boundless enthusiasm. Gell had steeped him in Thomas Young’s approach to hieroglyphs and supervised him while sketching Egyptian artifacts, to the point that he was better prepared than any traveler before him. Henry Salt welcomed him in Cairo and took him to the pyramids at Giza. The consul’s dragoman, Osman Efendi, a former Scottish drummer boy named Donald Thomson, lived as a Turk and a Muslim. Osman dressed Wilkinson in Turkish clothes, a wise precaution in a country where Europeans were still rare and moved around at their peril.

  After a trip as far upstream as the Second Cataract, Wilkinson threw himself into Egyptology. He had no interest in excavation, except to clear an inscription, and acquired relatively few artifacts for himself, and certainly not for personal gain. He was a copyist of inscriptions, monuments, and tombs whose sketches were freehand, but surprisingly accurate. His copies of hieroglyphs were said by experts to be superior to those in the Description, at the time the major source of information. During the next twelve years, Wilkinson traveled widely in Egypt and the surrounding deserts, sometimes alone, at others in the company of a small number of like-minded antiquarians and artists. He and his friend James Burton adopted a Turkish lifestyle right down to costume, passing themselves off as Muslims to their servants and acquaintances.2 In so doing, they became part of the local aristocracy, maintaining a suitable distance from the native Egyptians. They recoiled with horror at first against the pervasive slavery, but later acquired slaves of their own as mistresses.

  By 1824, Wilkinson’s antiquarian interests sharpened. Salt obtained a firman from the pasha for him, which gave him permission to visit sites, to excavate, and to intervene to protect them from destruction. At the time, no one knew anything of ancient Egyptian history or chronology. The knowledge he and his colleagues had to draw on was rudimentary at best, and usually wrong. His wide travels took him to el-Amarna on the east bank, about 480 kilometers (300 miles) downstream of Thebes. Many years later, in 1887, another Englishman, Flinders Petrie, unearthed the Amarna diplomatic tablets and identified the abandoned city as Akhetaten, the capital of the New Kingdom pharaoh Akhenaten (1350–1334 BC). As far as we know, Wilkinson was the first antiquarian to visit the extensive site and the burial caves behind it. He puzzled over the exotic and often naturalistic frescoes in the sepulchers, where “the sun is represented with rays terminating in hands,” something he had seen nowhere else.3 When he sent Sir William Gell a copy of the now-famous mural of Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti raising their arms to the sun disk, his mentor pronounced it a depiction of two pregnant women offering sacrifice.

  Wilkinson, who worked almost single-handedly, deciphered dozens of inscriptions and recognized many royal cartouches correctly for the first time. We owe to Wilkinson the first attempts to put the royal dynasties and kings of Egypt into proper order. He made exact drawings of the tomb paintings at Beni Hasan before Champollion and Ippolito Rosellini worked there, identified the long-lost site of the Labyrinth at Hawara, and covered the pages of many notebooks with minute and exact records far in advance of those of his contemporaries. Unlike Champollion, Wilkinson worked without government support and achieved miracles with minimal resources.

  Wilkinson was continually on the move, copying, visiting, and puzzling over hieroglyphs. He achieved some insignificant results with Young’s approach, but lacked the knowledge of Coptic essential for real progress. Sir William Gell sent him Champollion’s Lettre à M. Dacier in 1823, but it was not until he received the Précis with its lists and more detailed analysis that Wilkinson began to comprehend the extent of the Frenchman’s understanding of hieroglyphs. In tomb and temple, he copied inscriptions and accumulated a hieroglyphic vocabulary by comparing Coptic and ancient Egyptian words. Soon he began to make discoveries on his own account, developing a chronology for different monuments and for Egyptian history as a whole. He found himself correcting Champollion’s “terrible mistakes.” He was upset by Champollion’s disregard for Young and put off by the Frenchman’s arbitrary and often high-handed ways. This may be why he did not meet Champollion during his 1828 expedition, preferring to work discreetly in the background. He wrote to Gell: “Ch may read a wall of hierogs, so can I or anyone else when no Egyptians are present, but I like better proofs. . . . Besides he has an unfair way of changing without informing his reader of former errors.”4 There’s a common perception that Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs, which is an overstatement. His research provided vital impetus to a process that continued for decades. Fifteen years passed before the controversies died down and there was some consensus that he was correct. No one could translate a running hieroglyphic text until the 1840s.

  Wilkinson was the first person to work in Egypt with at least some philological background. He could have made substantial contributions to hieroglyphic studies, but, restless as ever, chose to move on to other interests once he had acquired a working knowledge of the subject. But his research and copies were of immense value for the future.

  From 1827 onward, Wilkinson spent most of his time on the west bank at Thebes. He appropriated the T-shaped and long-looted tomb of the New Kingdom vizier ‘Amechu as his residence. He installed partitions to make rooms, threw down carpets, and installed his library and Egyptian furniture, while enjoying a magnificent view over the Nile Valley, with the temples of Luxor and Karnak in the distance. Here he held court, entertaining friends and burning wooden mummy cases in the fireplace, as everyone did. The wood gave off a horrible odor. His visitors would tie up their boats nearby and stay for days in a home filled with laughter and good times. Wrote one casual visitor: “the odour of the mummies had long since been dispelled by the more congenial perfume of savory viands.”5 They were astonished at Wilkinson’s leisurely routine, which began with breakfast at 10:30 AM. Nevertheless, he completed an astounding quantity of work, including the first topographical map of western Thebes. He surveyed and numbered the tombs of the Valley of the Kings, a numerical system still used today. His main interest was the paintings in nobles’ tombs, for he realized that they provided rich insights into the daily life of the ancient Egyptians. Wilkinson considered the naturalistic friezes the “epitome of life” and a chance to journey back into the society that created them, as if one were a spectator of the events on the walls. Many of the tombs recorded by Wilkinson and his colleagues were damaged or destroyed soon afterward by vandals or local people using the tombs as their homes.

  The future of ancient Egypt lay in the hands of John Gardner Wilkinson and a small group of mainly British artists and travelers in the 1820s and 1830s. They worked together and independently, exchanging information, visiting one another, and thoroughly enjoying themselves. Unfortunately, almost none of them published their work. Robert Hay (1799–1863) came from Scottish landed gentry, entered the Royal Navy, and then inherited the family estate. A naval cruise in the eastern Mediterranean had given him a lasting interest in Egypt, so he decided to go on a Grand Tour that included Egypt. Hay traveled in the style of his eighteenth-century predecessors, complete with a retinue of artists and architects, among them a talented artist, Joseph Bonomi. He also recruited another Scotsman, Frederick Catherwood, who was to achieve international fame some years later for his d
rawings of Maya cities.6 Hay’s team produced as accurate copies as they could, often using a camera lucida, a prism and set of interchangeable lenses that cast an image on a table so that a draftsman could copy it. His architects produced elevations and floor plans. Hay himself was a gifted artist who produced not only panoramic scenes and drawings of ancient Egyptian monuments, but also exquisite depictions of Islamic architecture and an excellent record of river villages in the 1820s. He eventually returned to England in 1835 with a laden portfolio, but lost interest in ancient Egypt and never published anything, except a sumptuous volume, Illustrations of Cairo, in 1840. Thirty-nine volumes of his unpublished drawings reside in the British Museum.

  Hay dedicated Illustrations of Cairo to one of his Egypt friends, Edward William Lane, who had arrived in Cairo in 1825. Unlike his friends, Lane lived among the Egyptians, on the argument that he wanted to study their literature. He was a loner who spent much of his life in Egypt, returning to England to write, and lived like a hermit. Lane’s great work was An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, published by the London publisher John Murray in 1836.7 This remarkable work, based as it was on a pioneer form of what anthropologists call “participant observation,” remains a classic and established his reputation.

  Wilkinson himself left Egypt in 1833. His months in the nobles’ tombs at Qurna had taught him much about the lives of ancient Egyptians. A germ of an idea for a book on the subject formed in his mind as he returned to England. His plan fitted well in a popular literary genre of the day, an extension of the travelogue that was more impersonal and a pioneer of later ethnographic studies. Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians appeared in three volumes in 1837 under John Murray’s imprint, shortly after a more comprehensive volume on Thebes. Wilkinson had written enough material for five volumes, the additional two soon appearing when the book sold well. Manners and Customs made Wilkinson a household name, earned him a knighthood, and remained in print throughout the nineteenth century. Unlike the massive, and expensive, Description, the moderate price of the book placed it within reach of a rapidly growing number of middle-class readers.

  Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians covered more than fifty subjects, everything from daily life itself to chronology and social organization. The format was ideal for a comprehensive journey through ancient Egypt, allowing the author to dwell on such topics as a feast, complete with dissertations on the furniture, music, and food. Wilkinson used his own work and classical sources for his chronology, estimating the date of the first pharaoh, Menes, at about 2320 BC, well after the biblical date of the Creation (4004 BC), which was established theological dogma at the time. Wilkinson brought the ancient inhabitants of the Nile Valley to life in a wealth of detail never possible before, through their sites and particularly from their paintings, papyri, and inscriptions. He emphasized the religion, culture, and daily life of the ancient Egyptians rather than their political history. It was the first study in centuries to look beyond Herodotus and the traditional legends to the Egyptian sources themselves. John Gardner Wilkinson was one of those rare but highly influential scholars with the ability to carry out important basic research while simultaneously possessing the knack of fascinating the general public with more popular accounts of his discoveries.8

  FIGURE 12.2 Persons Coming to Be Registered and Brought Before the Scribes, sketches from Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians.

  John Gardner Wilkinson never traveled to Egypt for any more serious research, although he did return in 1841 to carry out research for an Egyptian travel guide for a series of such volumes published by John Murray aimed firmly not at the wealthy but at new generations of middleclass travelers. He traveled in style up the Nile, his baggage requiring a small army of porters. The contents included an iron bedstead, a sword, a velvet waistcoat, and “much more.” He lamented the high cost of living. “Egypt’s much altered for the worst & has lost much of its oriental character,” he wrote to Robert Hay. “The travellers who go up the Nile will I fear soon be like Rhine tourists. & Cheapside will pour out its Legions upon Egypt.”9 These were the very tourists at which his Handbook for Travellers in Egypt was aimed. It appeared in 1847; well-thumbed copies journeyed up and down the Nile for many years.

  Egypt’s heat now bothered Wilkinson, who spent the rest of his life as a gentleman scholar, consulted occasionally by the British Museum about Egyptian acquisitions. He moved out of the mainstream of Egyptology, for his interests were transitory and his working methods more those of a man of letters than an archaeologist. His reputation to the wider world rested almost entirely on Manners and Customs, which remained a definitive account of ancient Egypt until superseded by Flinders Petrie’s diggings and the University of Chicago’s James Breasted’s History of Egypt, published in 1905, which was based on precise translations of inscriptions and papyri.10 John Gardner Wilkinson made some of the first accurate copies of Egyptian art, hieroglyphs, and tomb paintings, far superior to anything in the Description and in Champollion’s work. Sixty years were to pass before new copyists came to the Nile, and these were professionals rather than enthusiastic amateurs. Only in recent years have Egyptologists and a wider audience realized Wilkinson’s extraordinary accomplishments. His impact on our understanding of ancient Egypt continues to this day.

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  Champollion’s death, and the departure of John Gardner Wilkinson from Egypt, left somewhat of a vacuum in the study of hieroglyphs. In any case, the days of the amateur investigator were numbered, for museums and universities were becoming the centers of academic inquiry. The next major initiative came from the king of Prussia, who sponsored a huge expedition to Egypt in 1842 with the same lofty goals as that of the Champollion explorations of 1828. Naturalist, cartographer, and artist Alexander von Humboldt was one of the last universal scholars in the natural sciences and the eloquent advocate of the royal expedition. The obvious choice as leader was Karl Richard Lepsius (1810–1884), a thirty-two-year-old lecturer at the University of Berlin. The artist Bonomi and James Wild, an English architect, joined Lepsius and his Prussian staff in an exhaustive survey of the major archaeological sites of the Nile.11

  The three-year expedition was a great success, largely because Lepsius himself spent a long time in thorough preparation. He visited all the major collections of Egyptian antiquities in Europe, taught himself Champollion’s grammar and proved its validity to his satisfaction, and learned lithography and copper engraving before leaving for Egypt. Although the main intention was to survey monuments and collect antiquities, Lepsius did dig at the site of the Labyrinth in the Fayyum and even made accurate drawings of the archaeological layers at the site, a startling innovation for the time. The expedition stayed a long time at Thebes, where Lepsius availed himself of Wilkinson’s residence in ‘Amechu’s tomb.

  Lepsius and his colleagues left Egypt with thousands of drawings, as well as 15,000 casts and Egyptian antiquities that formed the nucleus of an Egyptian museum in Berlin. The records from the expedition were invaluable, but Lepsius’s collection methods could be brutal. He dynamited a column from Seti I’s tomb and carried it off, as well as a section of a tiled wall from Djoser’s Step Pyramid at Saqqara, given to the king by Muhammad Ali in exchange for the gift of a fine dinner service.12

  Karl Lepsius became a professor at Berlin University in 1846, eventually keeper of the Egyptian collections at the museum and keeper of the Royal Library. He devoted the next ten years to publishing the results of the expedition in the twelve-volume set of 894 folio plates, Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien, probably the largest work on Egyptology ever published. Five further volumes of descriptive text were edited after Lepsius’s death in 1884. Together, the subsidized publications of the Lepsius expedition represent a magnificent and valuable source on the monuments of ancient Egypt, still of great use even today.

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  The Prussian expedition set new standards for the recording of monuments and i
nscriptions that foreshadowed the more systematic efforts of later scientists, but did not engage in much excavation. By the late 1840s, most of the major monuments of Upper Egypt had been surveyed, at least cursorily, but Lower Egypt and the delta were still archaeologically unknown. Decades of uncontrolled digging had wrought terrible destruction. The few investigators with seemingly more lofty scientific goals were as destructive as tomb robbers. In 1837, Colonel Richard William Howard Vyse, a military gentleman with a strong belief in the Bible, made the first survey of the pyramids of Giza. He had worked with Giovanni Caviglia in 1835, then returned in 1837 for further excavations accompanied by a civil engineer, John Shae Penning. They used gunpowder during their investigations, which caused serious damage to the Great Pyramid but allowed them to enter the burial chamber of the third pyramid of Menkaure. Vyse removed the magnificent granite sarcophagus from the pyramid, then shipped it to England, only to have it lost at sea during the voyage.13

  Excavation was still largely the domain of the dealer and tomb robber. The resultant destruction was catastrophic and on an immense scale. The volume of protest against wholesale destruction was still muted and hardly loud enough to be heard, for most major European museums and consular officers were busily engaged in searching for new finds. A few solitary voices were raised, among them that of an American, George Robins Gliddon, at one time American vice-consul in Alexandria and later a well-known author and lecturer on ancient Egypt whose travels took him as far west as St. Louis. In 1841 he wrote one of the first appeals to the archaeological conscience, an obscure and little-remembered memoir, An Appeal to the Antiquaries of Europe on the Destruction of the Monuments of Egypt, which seems to have been largely ignored.14

  Gliddon’s Appeal is a long and turgid documentation of the destruction of the monuments of the Nile since the Napoleonic Wars, damage wrought by both vandals and antiquarians, but more especially by Muhammad Ali and his government. Philae had remained intact only because of the turbulent waters of the First Cataract. The Nilometer had lost its steps, taken to build a palace. Thebes had been decimated ever since Wilkinson’s investigations in 1836. Gunpowder could be used on the Karnak temples—for a price. A small bribe could obtain sculptured blocks from the portico. The wooden door on Seti I’s tomb, so carefully erected by Belzoni, was removed by Albanian soldiers after Henry Salt’s death. A quarter of the temple of Dendera disappeared into the walls of a saltpeter factory in 1835. Only the protests of the French consul, Jean-François Mimaut, stopped its complete destruction. “Strange,” wrote Gliddon somberly, “that the Columns erected by a Hadrian to the service of religion, should now uphold a distillery for rum!”15 Gliddon rightly accused the pasha of deliberate neglect, of exploitation of the temples for building factories that never went into production, and of using firmans as political favors for influential visitors.