by Brian Fagan
By the time Gliddon’s Appeal appeared, public opinion had begun to favor some conservation measures. Champollion had complained in 1829, the French consul Jean François Mimaut, in a new diplomatic departure, in 1839. Lord Algernon Percy, an aristocratic collector, had been moved to comment on the scale of destruction two years earlier.16 In 1839–1840, the British government cataloged a long list of damage and devastation in a formal report to the pasha. But a public exposé of the situation was delayed in the hope that something would be done by the Egyptian government. The report stemmed from a major study of consular and commercial activities by diplomats in Egypt compiled by Lord Bowring that was highly critical of the antiquities trade. When the report was released in 1842, Lord Palmerston excised those parts that dealt with some of the archaeological activities of consuls, although by the mid1830s diplomats were too busy on other matters to spend time on archaeology and the pasha’s Antiquities Law of 1835 was at least in existence— on paper.
Gliddon’s pompous effusion had little apparent effect on the sins of the tourist or treasure hunter, despite his railings against the hammer-wielding chipper of monuments or the “Anglo-Indian gentleman” who cut basreliefs off the walls of Amenhotep III’s tomb so he could draw them more effectively on board his Nile boat. When the artist had finished, the originals were thrown into the river. Even as Lepsius and his draftsmen were in Upper Egypt, an eccentric French artist and traveler named Émile Prisse D’Avennes stole into the temple of Karnak and removed the magnificent Table of Kings, a series of carved stone blocks recording the portraits and cartouches of many Egyptian pharaohs. D’Avennes had no firman and was in open defiance of the antiquities ordinance.17
By dint of working at night and in great secrecy, D’Avennes succeeded in packing the stones into eighteen crates before he was denounced to the governor of Esna. The angry official placed his tent under guard. A month later, he bribed the governor and quietly moved the blocks on board a boat after nightfall. On the way downstream he met Lepsius on his way to Karnak and entertained the eminent scholar with coffee as he sat on one of the priceless packing cases. Even the French consul declined to have anything to do with D’Avennes, whose finds were eventually deposited in the Louvre.
The more respectable collectors took refuge behind a familiar nineteenth-century argument, which still circulates today. Surely it was better, they argued, to let scholars and dealers take their precious finds to Europe, where they would be safe from plunder and destruction. As long as there was no museum in Cairo, this position was a defensible one, even more so after the rapid dissolution of the pasha’s museum in the Ezbekiya Gardens, its artifacts dispersed as diplomatic gifts. The pressure to copy and record as well as to preserve by export was strong among respectable scientists of the day. This export came at a high price. Dealers and freelance operators threw away, burned, or destroyed thousands of papyri and smaller artifacts in their frantic digging for large antiquities. Every museum in Europe wanted major finds and beautiful papyri. Hardly surprisingly, no one could be bothered to develop systematic techniques for recovery of material from archaeological sites.
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Coptic manuscripts were particularly hot properties, especially for museums. Their agents cajoled and flattered remote religious communities out of their libraries, which is why one of early Egyptology’s best-known figures, Auguste Mariette (1821–1881), came to the Nile.
Auguste Mariette was born in Boulogne, France, on February 11, 1821. After an uneventful but happy childhood, he went to England at the age of eighteen to teach French at a private school in Stratford-upon-Avon. The job lasted a year, an experimental venture at ribbon designing an even shorter time. So Mariette returned to Boulogne and became a teacher at the local college where he had received his own education. He soon discovered he had a talent for writing and spent his spare time preparing articles on all manner of subjects for newspapers and magazines. Until he was twenty-two, Mariette had no exposure to Egypt or to Egyptology. Then in 1842, the father of a recently deceased artist and explorer, Nestor L’Hôte, who had been a member of Champollion’s expedition and died on a later desert journey, was transferred to Boulogne.18 His son had left an enormous mass of papers and copies that urgently needed organization and publication. L’Hôte’s father, a customs officer, was related to the Mariettes. By chance, he asked Auguste to examine the papers. Mariette was fascinated by the new world that opened up in front of him; he became engrossed by the intricacies of hieroglyphs and decipherment.
Soon Mariette spent every moment of his spare time with his new hobby and writing a catalog of the few Egyptian objects in the Boulogne Museum. On the strength of this piece, he got the city to back his application for official support for an expedition to Egypt, but without success. Mariette impulsively resigned his teaching and editing jobs and moved to Paris. There he pored over the Karnak Table of Kings in the Louvre and wrote a closely reasoned seventy-page paper on the inscriptions that so impressed director and Egyptologist Charles Lenormant at the Collège de France that he obtained a minor job at the Louvre for the energetic young man.19 Soon Mariette was spending his days cataloging papyri and his evenings reading everything about Egyptology and mastering hieroglyphs to a professional standard.
Lenormant continued to approve. In 1850 he instructed his protégé to collect rare Coptic manuscripts in Egypt. Excitedly, Mariette took ship to Alexandria and contacted the Coptic patriarch in Cairo, only to find him deeply hostile to foreign collectors. Some years before, two Englishmen, Lord Curzen and Henry Tattan, had gotten some monks drunk and made off with an entire library of manuscripts. He was not about to let any other books out of ecclesiastical hands.
Mariette was momentarily at a loss, for it was clearly profitless to look for manuscripts. He turned his thoughts toward excavation, for a supplementary clause in his instructions authorized him to excavate archaeological sites to enrich the museum collections. By the end of October 1850 Mariette had gathered some equipment and was camped in the midst of the Necropolis at Saqqara. He had no firman from the pasha, little money, and only the most limited authority from the Louvre. But he was inspired by the head of a sphinx projecting from the sand, similar to other examples from Saqqara that he had seen in Cairo and Alexandria. Mariette’s wide reading paid off. He suddenly remembered that the Greek geographer Strabo had referred to a Serapeum at Memphis, in a sandy place where an avenue of sphinxes leading to the tomb of the holy Apis bulls was constantly smothered by drifting sand. Inspired, he gambled everything and gathered thirty workmen at the sphinx to dig for the Serapeum.
Within hours, sphinx after sphinx emerged from the sand. The workers simply followed the avenue from statue to statue. Tombs, seated statues, a phallic god, and two temples of Apis, one Greek and the other Egyptian, soon came to light, the latter containing a magnificent statue.20 Mariette soon ran out of money, but the French consul, Arnaud Lemoyne, was so captivated by the energy of the young man that he advanced him money to continue while he applied to his superiors in Paris for more funds. Fortunately for Mariette, the Apis finds dazzled the Louvre, which sent an increased subvention.
A few weeks later, Mariette dug up a huge cache of bronze statues of Osiris, Apis, and other Egyptian gods under a temple floor, a discovery that aroused the envy and fascination of Egyptian and foreigner alike. All Cairo was excited, and the dealers jealous. Abbas Pasha, the son of Muhammad Ali, stepped in and tried to confiscate the finds, but the French consul poured diplomatic oil on troubled waters with a token handover of antiquities. The pasha granted Mariette a firman on the condition that France renounce all claims to future discoveries, which caused considerable alarm in Paris, since the French government had just voted 30,000 francs to pay for further excavations.
Mariette just went on digging. In November 1851, he finally reached the tomb of Apis, sealed by a magnificent sandstone door. The young archaeologist was soon inside, marveling at the huge granite coffins of the bulls, their lids removed and scatte
red by tomb robbers centuries earlier. But an enormous amount of material still remained, all of which, under the conditions of the firman, was to go to the pasha’s museum, where it would probably be given away to distinguished foreign visitors in exchange for political favors. With fiendish cunning, Mariette set up his packing cases at the bottom of a deep pit where a secret trapdoor led to the tombs below. For several months he packed the items from his early excavations ceded to France by day and the contents of the theoretically still-unopened tomb below him by night. The finest relics from the Serapeum duly arrived at the Louvre, while Mariette blandly showed disappointed officials the empty tombs he had just discovered.
Over a period of many months Mariette explored the innermost recesses of the Serapeum. He was lucky enough to find an undisturbed burial of Apis, deposited in the time of Rameses II. Even the footprints of the funeral workmen were preserved in the dust of the tomb, while the sarcophagus contained both the undisturbed mummy and rich jewelry and gold. The Serapeum finds caused a sensation in Paris when they were exhibited at the Louvre. Mariette was promoted to assistant keeper and soon published a series of plates of the Serapeum, titled Choix de monuments, that gave a foretaste of what full publication of his excavations might lay before the public.21
FIGURE 12.3 A scribe figure from the Serapeum, found by Mariette. This illustration comes from his Choix de monuments (1856).
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A perennially restless man like Mariette could never be happy in one place for long. His contacts among Egyptologists were now wide. A warm and gregarious man, he had become a close friend of the German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch, an expert on demotic script. Brugsch came on a chance visit to the Serapeum, and a lifetime of friendship was forged. Both Brugsch and Mariette were convivial souls, full of bonhomie and fond of good living. Although Mariette was never especially revealing about his personal life in Egypt, Brugsch filled in some gaps. He recalled Mariette’s mud house at the Serapeum, which teemed with women, children, monkeys, and his laborers. The furniture was spartan at best. Bats flew around his bedroom. Brugsch tucked his mosquito net under the mattress and endured the first of many uncomfortable nights.22
Mariette also came to the attention of that remarkable diplomat and visionary Ferdinand-Marie de Lesseps, the genius behind the construction of the Suez Canal. De Lesseps was attracted by Mariette’s ambitious and burning energy, and listened to his proposals for saving the monuments of the Nile. He spoke with Said Pasha, the new ruler of Egypt after the assassination of Mariette’s old adversary, Abbas Pasha, in 1854. Three years later, the pasha invited the French government to send Mariette to Egypt on the occasion of the visit of Prince Napoléon to the Nile. It was only when he arrived that Mariette discovered that he was to dig for fine antiquities to be presented to the royal visitor. He was to proceed upriver, make archaeological finds, then rebury them for the royal visitor to “find.” Mariette did not hesitate for a moment. Money and an official steamer were at his disposal. He started digging at Saqqara and was soon at Thebes and Abydos, where Brugsch soon joined him in a happy field reunion. On the west bank near Qurna, Mariette’s men unearthed a simple wooden coffin containing a mummy that fell to pieces when exposed to the air. An extraordinary collection of artifacts survived in the bandages, including a gold and bronze dagger, lion amulets, and a cartouche-shaped box inscribed with the name of a king later identified as the pharaoh Kamose, who expelled the Asian Hyksos from Egypt in about 1570 BC. Mariette shrewdly arranged for the pasha to send some nice artifacts to the prince, which ensured him the goodwill of the royal family.
De Lesseps now stepped in and persuaded the pasha to appoint Auguste Mariette mamar (director) of ancient monuments in Egypt and curator of a new museum of antiquities to be built in Cairo. Such an appointment was long overdue and was bitterly opposed by dealers and diplomats up to their necks in the antiquities trade. The pasha gave Mariette sweeping powers, ordering him to arrest any peasant who set foot in a temple.
Mariette’s position was extremely precarious. He had to depend on the pasha’s goodwill for funding. The museum premises consisted of a deserted mosque, small filthy sheds, and a house alive with vermin in which the Mariettes lived. But Mariette was blissfully happy and gathered his family and faithful supervisors around him in an orgy of excavation. Labor was cheap and abundant, for he was able to requisition the entire male population of a village if he wished. His ruthless methods were unpopular, but they certainly produced results. At one point, men were digging under his direction at thirty-seven different locations simultaneously, from the delta to the First Cataract!
Auguste Mariette’s discoveries were extraordinary, but excavated with complete abandon. He was mainly concerned with spectacular finds, which he needed to fill his museum and to satisfy the pasha. Dynamite was among his techniques; careful recording and observation mattered nothing—only objects. He emptied more than three hundred tombs at Giza and Saqqara alone. At Edfu he moved the Arab village off the roof of the buried temple onto the plain and exposed this magnificent shrine to full view for the first time in centuries. At Thebes, Mariette’s laborers cleared the buried temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri, nearly getting in a fight with a British aristocrat, the marquis of Dufferin and Ava, who was quietly removing a large number of carved stone fragments from the mortuary temple of Mentuhotep nearby.23 The great temple of Hathor, the temple of Amun at Karnak, and many other major sites came under Mariette’s attack. He recovered more than 15,000 artifacts from his promiscuous excavations.
Conservation was a new idea, and one that at this point merely implied a cessation of quarrying temples and channeling as many looted and excavated antiquities into official hands as possible. Mariette tried to achieve this by forbidding any excavations in Egypt except his own and making exportation of antiquities a virtual impossibility. He made every effort to get funds for a new museum, but his difficulties were formidable. The pasha had no real interest in archaeology. He had appointed Mariette to appease the powerful de Lesseps and Napoléon III, whom, he felt, would be kept quiet by some gesture toward antiquity. He was likely to cut off funds without warning or give away a choice item in the national collections to a favored visitor. The only way Mariette could keep interest alive was by producing a steady stream of gorgeous finds to titillate the pasha’s fancy. This, of course, led to a frantic rush for new discoveries, which corrupted the whole course of archaeology on every official excavation, as other Egyptologists later found out to their cost.
Not that everything flowed into Mariette’s hands. In 1855, Anthony Charles Harris, an English merchant and papyrus collector in Alexandria, was offered a collection of papyri found in a tomb behind the temple at Medinet Habu near Thebes. He could not afford to buy them all, but managed to purchase the best, which included the so-called Great Harris Papyrus, a 40.5-meter- (133-foot-) long record of donations to Amun and his priesthood made by pharaoh Rameses III. The others included the famous tomb-robbery trial records between the reigns of Rameses VI and Rameses XI described in Chapter 1. Harris’s daughter Selima sold his papyrus collection to the British Museum in 1872, an acquisition that kindled the trustees’ thirst for yet more in future years.
FIGURE 12.4 Auguste Mariette in 1861
Early in 1859, Mariette received word in Cairo that his workers had found another royal burial close to that of Kamose unearthed two years earlier. This time the sarcophagus was intact, that of a queen, Ahhotep, a wife of Kamose, accompanied by weapons and a necklace of golden flies, a reward for valor in battle. In Mariette’s absence, the local headman at Qena took over the mummy, disposed of the bandages and bones, and shipped off the 2 kilograms (4 pounds) of gold ornaments as a gift to the khedive.24 Mariette was incensed. He took a steamer upstream with an official order enabling him to stop all vessels on the Nile suspected of carrying antiquities. Passions flowed strongly when the two steamers met. For half an hour the argument raged furiously over the gold, until the Frenchman took the law into
his hands and laid about him with his fists in a fury. One man was nearly thrown in the river, another cajoled at gunpoint, until the jewelry was handed over. Mariette rushed to the pasha, presented him with a scarab and a necklace for one of his wives, and averted a tense political situation. The pasha was so delighted with the finds—and, one suspects, the discomfiture of his official—that he ordered a new museum built to house the queen’s possessions. A new museum building at Bulaq opened in 1863, filled with Mariette’s treasures.
Mariette’s long career involved him in diplomacy as well as archaeology. For a while the French government used him on a diplomatic mission to persuade Said Pasha to visit France in connection with a financial loan. Mariette disliked his diplomatic role, but eventually accompanied Said to France, where they visited his hometown of Boulogne and received a tumultuous welcome. Said was so pleased that he gave Mariette the title of bey and a pension. But this friendship was abruptly cut short by the death of Said Pasha six months later.
