by Brian Fagan
Bulaq Museum was now a showpiece. Mariette was much in demand to escort foreign dignitaries and maintained academic ties with serious Egyptologists all over Europe. He had even closer links with government officers, dealers, and humble villagers throughout the Nile Valley, contacts that he used to keep an eye on his precious monuments. He worked with an inspired frenzy and was at his desk or out in the field every day at dawn. At lunch or dinner, however, he would relax, for his wife, Eleanore, maintained an open house, which was always crowded with friends and visitors. Work became the only antidote when his devoted wife died of the plague in 1865. Perhaps it was fortunate that he was ordered to Paris for a year to set up the Egyptian exhibit in the International Exhibition of 1867.
Paris was entranced with the splendor of Mariette’s exhibits, which purported to reconstruct life in ancient Egypt. He ransacked the collections at Bulaq for their finest pieces. Queen Ahhotep’s jewelry formed the centerpiece and sensation of the Paris exhibition. The jewelry excited the cupidity of no less a regal personage than the empress Eugénie herself. She promptly intimated to the khedive that she would be graciously pleased to receive the jewels as a gift. It was a great moment for Egyptian archaeology when the khedive deferred to Mariette. The empress offered him prestigious posts, even a role in writing her husband’s biography of Caesar.25 Neither bribes nor threats could sway Mariette, not even the displeasure of a powerful empress or an indignant khedive. The jewelry returned safely to Egypt.
Preservation was much on Mariette’s mind in his later years. “It behooves us to preserve Egypt’s monuments with care,” he once wrote. “Five hundred years hence Egypt should still be able to show to the scholars who shall visit her the same monuments that we are now describing.” Tourists were a thorn in Mariette’s side. One American tourist in particular aroused his justifiable ire by touring Upper Egypt in 1870 “with a pot of tar in one hand and a brush in the other, leaving on all the temples the indelible and truly disgraceful record of his passage.”26
Vandalism was a serious problem, too. The tomb of the Fifth Dynasty official Ti at Saqqara, for example, suffered more damage by the hand of tourists over a decade of Mariette’s tenure than it had during the whole of the previous 6,000 years of its existence. Under the circumstances, we can understand why Mariette dug up as much as he could to save Egypt’s antiquities for posterity. In all, we are told, Mariette employed more than 2,780 laborers during his career, a number far larger than any one man could supervise at all closely. Workshops for handling the new flood of antiquities were set up at Edfu, Thebes, Abydos, and Memphis, an innovation far ahead of facilities available in other Near Eastern countries. His critics were many, one of them describing him as a “whirlwind” that had descended on the Nile.
Mariette’s prodigious energies were not devoted entirely to antiquities. He was deeply involved in the glittering ceremonies that accompanied the opening of the Suez Canal on November 17, 1869. His old adversary, the empress Eugénie, opened the waterway in the French royal yacht Aigle. Mariette must have gained some quiet satisfaction in escorting her royal highness up the Nile. The khedive also enlisted Mariette’s literary talents for a quite different task, the writing of the libretto for Verdi’s Aïda, a grand opera with an ancient Egyptian theme composed to commemorate the opening of the canal. Mariette shared this memorable task with C. du Locle, a fellow Frenchman.
The last decade of Mariette’s long career was a series of archaeological and personal tragedies. Financial troubles dogged his excavations as the khedive plunged Egypt so deeply into debt that the British and French deposed him in 1879. The year before, the inundation flooded the museum. Much was lost, including many of Mariette’s books and priceless notes on the Serapeum. His international reputation grew, and he was honored by the Academy of Inscriptions and Literature in Paris. Back home, Mariette’s children died one by one, leaving him with a depleted family and little to live for. A French nobleman left a haunting picture of an elderly and quieter man in 1872: “A man of great stature, broadly built, aged rather than old, an Athlete roughed out of the mass like the colossi over which he watches. His deep-toned face has a dreamy and morose look, yet how many times, sitting on the bank of the Nile, did he speak with feeling of this strange Egypt, its river, its nocturnal skies.”27
After the British and French takeover in 1872, life became more settled. At least Mariette’s salary was paid regularly. But his health was failing, as diabetes weakened his formidable constitution. He struggled back to Cairo from Europe in late 1880 and died peacefully in the house by his beloved museum on January 18, 1881. The Serapeum was still unpublished, but the tide had turned. A permanent museum, filled with the glories of ancient Egypt, had ensured that the course of Egyptology was changed forever and that the rape of the Nile would slow, if never completely cease. A grieving Egypt gave him a state funeral and buried the man it owed so much at the door of his museum.
13
“In the British Museum He Is Placed Beyond the Reach of All Such Evils”
Luxor is the center of a more or less legitimate traffic in antiquities.
Luxor possesses certain manufactories where statuettes, stelae, and
scarabae are imitated with a dexterity which often deceives even
the most experienced antiquarian.
AUGUSTE MARIETTE,
quoted in Brian Fagan, The Rape of the Nile, 1st ed.
Auguste Mariette saw the dawning of an era when tourism changed the face of Egyptology. The steamship and the railroad had started it all—a tourist boom that made travel through the eastern Mediterranean world accessible to a far broader spectrum of European society. Cairo and Alexandria, Giza and Saqqara had long been within the purview of the more adventurous eighteenth-century traveler. Napoléon and Muhammad Ali made Upper Egypt more secure. By 1820, Ali controlled the Nile as far upstream as the Second Cataract, which made it possible for Europeans to travel that far. Soon there were guidebooks. In 1830, Jean Jacques Rifaud’s Tableau de l’Égypte, de la Nubie et des lieux circonvoisons (Guidebook to Egypt, Nubia, and surrounding attractions) guided travelers up the Nile from Alexandria to the Second Cataract, complete with side trips, an Arabic vocabulary, and essays on ge- ography and local peoples. Rifaud’s guide was superficial at best, without maps, and soon superseded by more ambitious works such as John Gardner Wilkinson’s handbooks of the 1830s and 1840s.1
Egypt was more accessible, but traveling there was still a major undertaking. The passage from southern France to Alexandria could take a month or more under sail until 1837, when the Peninsular and Orient Line (P&O) won government contracts to carry mail by steamship from England to Gibraltar, Malta, and Alexandria. By 1843, P&O steamers took but fifteen days to travel from Southampton to Alexandria. A passenger who went overland to Marseilles could trim four or five days off the journey. Only 275 visitors transited Egypt on their way to and from India in 1844. The number leaped to 3,000 in 1847. By 1858, one could travel from Alexandria to Suez by train. Eleven years later, the Suez Canal opened, so many transit visitors now went straight through to India. Egypt rapidly became a popular tourist destination in its own right.
A rapidly growing tourist infrastructure accommodated the visitor. Wilkinson had recommended a minimum of three months for a journey to the Second Cataract. By 1880, one could dash from London to the same destination and back in six weeks, but most people took much longer. John Murray, Karl Baedeker, and Adolphe Joanne produced objective, comprehensive guides for the average tourist after the 1860s. European-run hotels rose in Cairo, among them the Hôtel de l’Orient, built originally for transitory visitors in 1843, then renamed Shepheard’s when an English owner of that name took over. Shepheard’s became one of the great Victorian hotels, frequented by the rich and famous and Cook’s tourists.2
Three modes of transport carried the tourist upstream: the dahabiyya (the Nile sailing vessel), the steamer, and the railroad. Dahabiyyas were the choice of the leisurely, more affluent traveler an
d could reach considerable size, with a crew of ten or more. In his Handbook, Wilkinson recommended sinking the ship first to rid it of “rats and other noxious inhabitants,” and shipping out with a chicken coop and a plentiful supply of biscuits. By 1858, steamers came into use on the Nile, with regular tours from Cairo to Upper Egypt by 1873. The railroad extended as far upstream as Asyut, mainly as a way of exporting sugar cane, but tourists could board steamers at the town, thereby shortening the trip by several days. The lines reached Aswan in 1898, impelled there by Horatio Herbert Kitchener’s Sudanese campaign and military needs. Railroad travel cut steamer time by one-half to two-thirds, making the river the choice of the leisured tourist, while dahabiyyas faded into history. In 1873, John Murray firmly recommended a sailing boat if time and money permitted. “In a boat of your own you are your own master, and can stop or go on as you feel inclined.”3 He pointed out that one might be “amongst a number of people you never saw before,” locked into a rigid schedule.
The steamer and the railroad brought mass tourism to Egypt, in the hands of the ubiquitous Thomas Cook (1808–1892), who started his business with morally uplifting railroad excursions in Britain, then in Europe.4 His first tour of Egypt came in 1869, when his guests attended the opening ceremonies of the Suez Canal, then followed the Prince of Wales’s party upstream in two chartered steamboats. His Nile business boomed, despite naked monks swimming out to his boats, to the horror of the ladies. Thomas Cook had strong evangelical motives. His son John Mason (1834–1899) took over the business and propelled the company into mass tourism. By 1870, Cook ran a steamer and 136 dahabiyyas up the river. Twenty years later, the company’s tourists packed twenty steamboats. Tourism had come to Egypt to stay. Some people deplored the hordes of visitors, who descended on temple and tomb by the hundred and delighted in inscribing their names there. Others were merely amused: “The nominal suzerain of Egypt is the Sultan; its real suzerain is Lord Cromer. Its nominal Governor is the Khedive; its real governor, for a final touch of comic opera, is Thomas Cook & Son.”5
Whatever one’s view of the tourist, the impact on ancient Egypt was profound and often catastrophic. Auguste Mariette devoted much of his life to watching over the increasing numbers of scholars and tourists who flocked to the Nile. His successor, Gaston Maspero, carried on his work with the Antiquities Service and the museum. And, for the first time, we find a few efforts to make ancient Egypt accessible to native Egyptians.
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Auguste Mariette’s death in 1881 coincided with a major change in the political scene, sparked both by the khedive’s incompetence and by a popular insurrection in Cairo. The British and French governments took an ardent interest in the affairs of Egypt, more so because of the major investments represented by the Suez Canal and other industrial development. At any sign of unrest, allied warships would appear off Alexandria, as if to remind the Turks that others were the masters of the Nile.
A military revolt in September 1881 resulted in the formation of an abortive popular government that lasted but a year. The British demanded the resignation of the new ministry, nominally headed by the khedive Tawfiq, but in fact led by Ahmed Arabi, a young army officer. Public order deteriorated, and Europeans were assaulted in the streets of Alexandria. So the British sent the Mediterranean fleet and an expeditionary force to the Nile. General Sir Garnet Wolseley and his army made short work of the Egyptians. By September 1882, the British had restored order in Egypt, reinforced with all the authority and panoply of Victoria’s mighty armies. A British agent and consul general, Sir Evelyn Baring (1841–1917), controlled a puppet khedive. This powerful and righteous man, a model of calm Victorian authority, effectively ruled Egypt for twenty-four years. Although he had no formal authority over the khedive, his word was law and his policies emanated from London.
Baring was an economist with a background in the classics and India who spent his entire career in Egypt placing the debt-ridden country on a firm financial basis through a series of harsh austerity measures that hit all government departments hard, including the Antiquities Service. British civil servants took over the running of defense, police matters, foreign affairs, finance, and public works. But the French remained influential in education, the arts, and archaeology. Rivalry between British and French archaeologists colored Egyptology for much of the late nineteenth century—including arguments over excavation permits, approaches to ancient Egypt, and research methods. The French and Germans were often in violent disagreement, the former preferring a free-flowing approach to Egyptology, the latter obsessed with orderly interpretations and minute details of art and artifacts. Thanks to Gaston Maspero, however, the French effectively controlled archaeology in Egypt from 1881 until as late as 1936.
Gaston Maspero (1846–1916), a young Egyptologist and an expert in hieroglyphs, had become friends with Mariette when a student in Paris in 1867. He was the son of an Italian refugee from Milan, and acquired an interest in Egyptology at an early age. He was soon specializing in hieroglyphs and assumed a prominent role in the Collège de France whilst in his twenties. By any standards, he was a successful scholar, although he did not visit Egypt until he was thirty-four years old.
Maspero used his influential connections to lobby for a French school of archaeology in Cairo, which would perpetuate the strong French presence in Egyptology started by Napoléon and Champollion and fostered by Mariette. He came out to found the school on orders from the French government in 1881, arriving in Cairo just two weeks before the great man succumbed to diabetes. A master of bureaucratic maneuvering, Maspero moved over into the directorship of the Antiquities Service with smooth efficiency, while one of his students took over the school. He completely reorganized the service, worked on the Saqqara pyramids, and became the dominant force behind all archaeology in Egypt for a generation. Maspero was a giant among pioneers of Egyptology, a man whose incredible energy and industry exceeded even that of Mariette. His prodigious talents turned to all aspects of Egyptology from excavation to hieroglyphs, while his popular works on Egyptology and other subjects were widely read in Europe and had much to do with the emergence of more responsible attitudes toward ancient Egypt.6
Lord Cromer and Maspero together built up the Antiquities Service from an embryonic organization into a more viable institution with five regional inspectors who regulated all excavations in Egypt. They supervised the reorganization of the huge collections in the Bulaq Museum. Some foreign excavators were now allowed to work under the eye of the inspectorate, although the illegal traffic in antiquities and forgeries continued on the side, encouraged by ambitious foreign museums and unscrupulous private collectors.
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The dealers of Luxor always had a ready market for whatever antiquities were for sale. From the 1860s onward the tourist traffic through the area increased steadily.7 The tomb robbers of Qurna made a comfortable living from the many boats that called at Luxor and Karnak. In 1881, the supply of mummies and other fine antiquities seemed almost inexhaustible, especially those supplied by two known robbers, Ahmed Abd el-Rasul and his brother Mohammed. They smuggled their loot into Thebes in bundles of clothing or baskets of vegetables. Ahmed had accidentally discovered an exceptionally rich cache of mummies and grave furniture at the base of an abandoned shaft into the rocky hillside while looking for a lost goat. For nearly ten years Ahmed and his brother mined the cache for small quantities of fine antiquities that they floated onto the open market a few at a time, to avoid deflating the prices in a rising market.
Greedy American and English tourists soon snapped up the Rasuls’ small items of jewelry bearing the royal insignia. Inevitably, news of these exceptional purchases reached Gaston Maspero, who sensed that a spectacular find had been made near the Valley of the Kings. He suspected that some pharaohs’ mummies were involved, for many of the Rasuls’ pieces were unique and of unquestionable royal association.
Maspero acted with caution, for local officialdom was far from incorruptible in 1881. First, he
telegraphed the Luxor police, asking them to keep an eye on local antiquities dealers. Then he dispatched one of his staff to Luxor in the disguise of a rich tourist with money to spend. Maspero’s agent quietly bought a few choice pieces to gain the trust of the dealers and soon became one of the obvious targets for the best antiquities. One day a dealer brought him a magnificent funerary statuette from a Twenty-first Dynasty tomb that could have come only from a royal burial. After extended haggling, the agent bought the piece, but not before he had been introduced to Ahmed Abd el-Rasul. Both the police and Maspero’s agent suspected both the Rasul family and Mustapha Aga Ayat, a Turk who had succeeded in having himself appointed consular agent for Belgium, Great Britain, and Russia in Luxor, a post that gave him diplomatic immunity and a convenient cover for dealing in antiquities. The Rasul family sold most of their finds to him.
While Aga Ayat was immune from prosecution, the Rasuls were not. The brothers were arrested in April 1881 and sent in chains to the mayor of Qena for examination. The two men pleaded their innocence with eloquence, pointing out that no antiquities had been found in their houses— they were not that stupid—and producing a swarm of witnesses who swore to the high-minded conduct of the Rasul family. Daud Pasha, the mayor, soon released the brothers. Torture and persuasion had produced no firm evidence, and, one suspects, Daud knew the family only too well. Everyone returned home to Qurna apparently satisfied. But a massive family quarrel soon erupted over the sharing of the proceeds of the cache, with Ahmed claiming a larger portion of the loot to compensate for his suffering under torture. Soon the quarrel became common knowledge around Thebes, and the Antiquities Service started fresh inquiries. Mohammed soon realized that his only route to safety was to confess to everything. Three months after the trial he was back in Qena, where he confessed all to Daud Pasha, obtained immunity from punishment, and dictated every detail of the family conspiracy into official court records.
