The Rape of the Nile

by Brian Fagan

  A half century earlier, European travelers had to grapple with epidemics of bubonic plague. They spent three weeks or more in isolated quarantine on their return home. Fortunately, the slow journey home consumed much of the isolation period. Egypt was the land of the biblical plagues until 1844, when bubonic epidemics mysteriously ceased. In their place came cholera, borne by water and imported from its Indian home in Bengal, transmitted widely through irrigation agriculture along the Nile. Cholera epidemics struck Egypt eleven times between 1831 and 1902. Despite this scourge, a plague-free Egypt became a recommended destination for Europeans with health concerns who suffered during damp European winters. Edward William Lane of Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians fame had abandoned his career as an engraver and moved to the Nile Valley for health reasons. He was but one of many ailing visitors in later decades who spent months living quietly in hotels along the river. Egypt became a much recommended health resort.

  One such émigrée was the formidable Lady Lucie Duff-Gordon, who settled at Luxor in a ramshackle residence known as the French House. Her ruined and spartan dwelling was perched on the roof of a temple near the Nile.1 From 1863 to 1869 Lucie Duff-Gordon surveyed the local scene, entertained both the great and the lowly, and assimilated herself into local peasant society to an extent that shocked many of her contemporaries. She wrote a steady stream of lively letters to her family, which were published in two widely read volumes that achieved great popularity. They are remarkable reading, unusual for their humility and careful perception of local society. She exposed the outrageous deeds of the khedive’s government and the hideous oppression of the common man with tart comment and pitiless detail that heightened public reaction toward the excesses of Egypt’s rulers. At the same time, the trivial domestic round of harvest and famine, of dust storm and interesting visitor, came to light in a charming way that captivated her audience.

  The Duff-Gordon letters, a revelation to people unfamiliar with the teeming life of the Nile’s banks, caused quite a stir. Antiquities were to her as much a part of the landscape as the people. She met an old foreman who had worked for Belzoni and visited Seti I’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. In one letter to her husband, who had thanked her for the gift of a pharaonic lion, she admitted she “stole him for you from a temple, where he served as footstool for people to mount their donkeys. A man has stolen a very nice silver antique ring for me out of the last excavations— don’t tell Mariette. My fellah friend said, ‘Better thou have it than Mariette sell it to the French and pocket the money; if I didn’t steal it, he would’— so I received the stolen property calmly.”2

  Most affluent visitors came to be entertained and informed, taking what the French writer Jean-Jacques-Antoine Ampère epigrammatically called a “donkey-ride and a boating-trip interspersed with ruins.”3 Such tourists almost invariably traveled in a single chartered dahabiyya, or sometimes, like Belzoni’s friend Lord Belmore half a century before, in a convoy of hired vessels. Those with time to spare often went as far south as Abu Simbel and the Second Cataract.

  FIGURE 14.1 A dahabiyya at Luxor, by the Victorian artist David Roberts. “Some are luxuriously fitted up, room even being found for a piano.” From the author’s collection.

  By 1870, three hundred American tourists registered at the consulate in Cairo in a year.4 Mark Twain had recently published Innocents Abroad, a widely read and at times entertaining account of his travels. Time was short, and he managed only the pyramids and the Sphinx before turning for home. Yet he admired the lushness of Egypt, “the boundless sweep of level plain, green with luxuriant grain, that gladdens the eye as far as it can pierce through the soft, rich atmosphere.” He described Shepheard’s Hotel as “the worst on earth except the one I stopped at once in a small town in the United States.” One member of his party tried to hammer a memento off the face of the Sphinx, but Mark Twain was content with accusing the Egyptians of feeding mummies to their railway engines. Seventeen years before, the French novelist Gustave Flaubert had enjoyed a bawdy and somewhat riotous voyage up the Nile and had been less polite. He accused the inhabitants of Edfu of using the temple as a public latrine and suffered from the fleas.5

  FIGURE 14.2 Amelia Edwards (1831–1892).

  Tourists were a nightmare for Mariette and Maspero, but, in the end, they were an important catalyst of public opinion. In November 1873, Shepheard’s Hotel welcomed a sunburned visitor, Amelia B. Edwards, a popular novelist, lecturer, and passionate traveler, a tourist whose perception of ancient Egypt was to influence that of thousands of Victorians.

  Amelia Edwards (1831–1892) was one of that distinctive Victorian breed of prolific romantic novelists whose literary output more than compensated for the lack of radio and television a century ago. During her sixty-one years, an immense number of articles, lectures, books, reviews, and pamphlets streamed from her facile pen. The daughter of an army officer who served under the duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War, she showed a remarkable talent for writing and drawing in childhood and possessed a fine voice of potentially professional standard. Her first poem was published when she was seven years old.

  Ultimately, Amelia Edwards became a journalist, contributing articles on all manner of subjects to popular periodicals such as Chambers’s Journal and the Saturday Review. She wrote eight forgettable but popular novels between 1855 and 1880. Edwards also edited popular books on history and art, most of which sold well and allowed her to live the life of leisured travel and writing that was the right of a successful late-Victorian author.

  In 1872, she explored the Dolomites in northern Italy, at a time an outof-the-way destination even for male travelers. Her first best-selling travel book resulted, issued originally as Midsummer Ramble in the Dolomites, and later as Untrodden Peaks. During the summer of 1873, she and her travel companion, Lucy Renshawe, planned a walking tour in France. The rain would not stop, so they decided on impulse to travel to Cairo instead. An interest in history and early civilization led Edwards to an extended tour through Syria and Egypt in 1873–1874. The trip changed her life and led to her best-known book, A Thousand Miles up the Nile, published three years later. A Thousand Miles was a deservedly popular travel book that went through several editions and displays Edwards’s lush writing style at its best. She described a typical, fairly luxurious trip to the Second Cataract in two dahabiyyas. The party consisted of five English gentlefolk, traveling in company with two English ladies in another craft. They seem to have been typical Nile-goers, young and old, well dressed and ill dressed, learned and unlearned, eager for any new experience, and, like so many Victorians, secure in their own society and conscious of the superiority of its values, religion, and morals over those of “foreigners” and certainly the Egyptians.

  Amelia Edwards made full use of her river journey and wrote a book that is delightfully evocative both of the unchanging Nile scene and of the tourist life of a century ago. A Thousand Miles is informative, yet bears its knowledge lightly. The facts are accurate, carefully checked by Samuel Birch of the British Museum and by Wallis Budge (who regarded the lady with some distrust). But her own impressions come through strongest. Her feelings in the Hypostele Hall at Karnak cascade in vivid prose, as she compares the columns to a grove of huge redwood trees:

  But the great trees, though they have taken three thousand years to grow, lack the pathos and mystery that comes of human labor. They do not strike their roots through six thousand years of history. They have not been watered with the blood and tears of millions. Their leaves know no sounds less musical than the singing of birds, or the moaning of the night wind as it sweeps over the highlands of Calaveros. But every breath that wanders down the painted aisles of Karnak seems to echo back the sighs of those who perished in the quarry, at the oar, and under the chariotwheels of the conqueror.6

  Edwards was entranced by the temples of Philae:

  The approach by water is quite the most beautiful. Seen from the level of a small boat, the island, with its
palms, its colonnades, its pylons, seems to rise out of the river like a mirage. Piled rocks frame it on either side, and purple mountains close up the distance. As the boat glides nearer between glistening boulders, those sculptured towers rise higher and even higher against the sky. They show no sign of ruin or of age. . . . All looks solid, stately, perfect. One forgets for the moment that anything has changed. If a sound of antique chanting were to be borne along the quiet air—if a procession of white-robed priests bearing aloft the veiled ark of the God, were to come sweeping round between the palms and the pylons—we should not think it strange.7

  The party made their way by the now well-known river journey to Abu Simbel and the Second Cataract. An eighteen-day stay at Abu Simbel was broken by a four-day excursion in Belzoni’s footsteps to the Second Cataract, where they climbed the rock of Abusir. The summit bore the names of dozens of visitors, including Giovanni Belzoni. Unlike the Italian, Edwards and her companions enjoyed “draughts of ice-cold lemonade” from a goatskin at the summit.

  Abu Simbel made the greatest impression. Every morning Edwards rose to greet the sunrise and the miracle of daylight at Abu Simbel. “Every morning I saw those awful brethren pass from death to life, from life to sculptured stone. I brought myself almost to believe at last that there must sooner or later come some one sunrise when the ancient charm would snap asunder, and the giants must arise and speak.”8

  The travelers cleared a small painted shrine with the aid of fifty locals and experienced for themselves the excitement of original discovery, gazing on paintings that had been covered up for centuries. Like Belzoni, more than fifty years before, they had some hectic bargaining with the headman who had to be content with “six pounds for his men, and for himself two pots of jam, two boxes of sardines, a bottle of eau-deCologne, a box of pills, and half a sovereign.”9

  FIGURE 14.3 The landing at Aswan.

  By the time of Edwards’s visit, Abu Simbel was positively crowded. At one point there were no fewer than three sketching tents pitched at the great temple and a fleet of dahabiyyas ranged along the shore. Everywhere along the river there was bustle at the temples and major monuments. At Thebes there were many boats, “gay with English and American colours.” American and English tourists were most commonly met with, but Germans, Belgians, and French were also encountered. The dealers of Luxor flocked to each boat as it moored:

  They waylaid and followed us wherever we went; while some of the better sort—grave men in long black robes and ample turbans—installed themselves on our lower deck, and lived there for a fortnight. There we always found them, patient, imperturbable, ready to rise up, and salaam, and produce from some hidden pocket a purseful of scarabs or a bundle of funerary statuettes. Some of these gentlemen were Arabs, some Copts—all polite, plausible, and mendacious.10

  Earlier Edwards had been shocked by the change in tourist attitudes toward “antikas,” including her own. The violated graveyards at Saqqara came as quite a shock, but she wrote:

  [W]e soon became quite hardened to such sights, and learnt to rummage among dusty sepulchers with no more compunction than would have befitted a gang of professional body-snatchers. These are the experiences upon which one looks back afterwards with wonder, and something like remorse; but so infectious is the universal callousness, and so overmastering is the passion for relic-hunting, that I do not doubt we should again do the same things under the same circumstances.11

  She certainly purchased artifacts for herself. By the end of her life, Edwards had collected more than 3,000 antiquities. She is said to have kept two ancient Egyptian heads in her bedroom closet.

  The dealers at Thebes did a roaring trade, not only in genuine antiquities, the best of which were reserved for really wealthy collectors and the agents of foreign museums, but also in forgeries. Everything was grist for the forgers’ mill—inscribed tablets, alabaster statuettes, and, of course, scarabs, antiqued by feeding them to turkeys as a bolus, a process from which they “acquire by the simple process of digestion a degree of venerableness that is really charming.”12 A frenetic pace of excavation and forgery led to busy winters in Luxor. The illegal excavators lived in fear of the governor, but carried on their illicit trade as they had done for centuries. They dwelled among the tombs, as they had lived in Belzoni’s time, driving donkeys or lifting water during the day and excavating in the tombs at night. Everybody had “antikas” to sell, from the turbaned official on a commercial visit to the “gentlemanly native” encountered at dinner with a scarab in his pocket.

  Quite by chance, Edwards and a companion wandered into a forger’s workshop while looking for a consulate. They were admitted to a large unfurnished room where three tables were strewn with scarabs, amulets, and funerary statuettes in every stage of completion. The tools of the trade lay around the unfinished objects, together with a large mummy case used for the wood. No one was in the room, but a few minutes later a well-dressed Arab arrived breathlessly and ushered his unwelcome guests out of the house, explaining that the consulate had been moved. “I met that well-dressed Arab a day or two after,” wrote Edwards, “and he immediately vanished round the nearest corner.”13

  By this time the Antiquities Service maintained a small gang of official excavators near Qurna, under the supervision of the governor. The mummies they found were forwarded to Bulaq unopened. One day Edwards witnessed the discovery of some burials. Early in the morning the visitors rode out to the Ramesseum, crossing the Nile by boat and then eating their breakfast on donkey back as they rode across the plain. It was a gorgeous morning. The young barley shimmered and rippled for miles in the morning sun. The Colossi of Memnon glistened in the freshness of the new day. Wildflowers were ablaze in the barley. It was a memorable excursion, heightened by the discovery of a carved sarcophagus the moment they arrived at the excavations. The mummy was in almost perfect condition, deposited in a brick-lined vault. The governor himself was supervising the excavations, and invited Edwards to lunch with him in a nearby tomb, now converted into a stable where the mummies were temporarily stored. The lunch consisted of sour milk and a tray of cakes, and it was eaten to the accompaniment of reeking manure.

  Edwards seems to have declined refreshment, for the party lunched in the Ramesseum, one of many jolly lunches in the leisured Egypt of the day. Rugs lay among the columns. Waiters flitted to and fro. At a discreet distance the “brown and tattered Arabs” milled, each with a string of forged scarabs, pieces of mummy case, or fake statues to sell. Here, as throughout the voyage, the respectful (and not so respectful) natives paid court to the representatives of civilization vigorously maintaining their rigid social values in the wilderness.

  The tourist life of a century ago reverberates solidly through the lush pages of Amelia Edwards’s tour de force. We are suitably entranced, educated, enlightened, and shocked through its pages. Once back in England, she plunged into a whirlwind of activity, lecturing to clubs and societies and writing article after article about her experiences on the Nile. She professed horror at the vandalism and destruction of the temples and tombs of ancient Egypt, deplored the lack of sound excavation techniques, and lamented the promiscuous destruction of temples by quarrymen.

  Amelia Edwards’s pen was a powerful weapon in molding public opinion about ancient Egypt at a time when there was already a devoted interest in things Egyptian among the educated public. Country gentlemen purchased the most learned monographs on Thebes, historical novels featuring the pharaohs sold thousands of copies, and books linking the archaeology of ancient Egypt with the biblical story were popular birthday and Christmas gifts. Interest in all the early classical and prehistoric civilizations was unusually high, thanks to the work of Heinrich Schliemann at Troy and of Austen Henry Layard and others in Mesopotamia, as well as the decipherment of the so-called Flood Tablets from Nineveh in 1872.14 A classical education was still considered to be an essential attribute of an educated person, as was a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures. Egypt figured prominently in bo
th, and everyone was excited by pyramids, mummies, and the hieroglyphic controversies. Long before Amelia Edwards’s time, Egyptology, thanks to Wilkinson, Lepsius, and other scholars, as well as thousands of religious-tract writers, was having an increasing impact on the popular culture of Europe—on architecture, fashion, and, to a lesser extent, on serious literature. Unfortunately, many of these literary efforts were grossly misleading, for it was almost impossible for a middle-class Victorian writer with narrow and well-defined cultural values to understand contemporary Egyptian culture, let alone that of the ancient Egyptians.

  FIGURE 14.4 The Victorian tourist at large, “in an Egyptian street.” A devout Victorian couple, Scriptures in hand, make their way through Cairo’s bazaar.

  Amelia Edwards took up the cudgels on behalf of scientific archaeology in an intense burst of literary productivity that lasted from her return from Egypt until her death in 1892. Three years after her return from the Nile, A Thousand Miles was published to popular acclaim. A stream of articles and progress reports on Egyptology appeared in dozens of journals and newspapers under the Edwards name, arguing that the only solution to the orgy of destruction that called itself archaeology was systematic recording of monuments and properly scientific excavations. Amelia Edwards was so concerned that she stopped writing fiction altogether and concentrated on Egyptology to the exclusion of other topics. Her efforts generated polite public interest, but galvanized the somewhat sleepy world of British Egyptology.

  Professional Egyptologists in England were, however, deeply concerned about the state of affairs on the Nile. An abortive attempt to found the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1880 had come to nothing. In March 1882, Amelia Edwards conceived the idea of the Egypt Exploration Fund designed to carry out scientific excavations in Egypt. She managed to assemble a group of powerful backers, among them Reginald Stuart Poole, a distinguished Orientalist, and Sir Erasmus Wilson, a wellknown surgeon who had financed the transportation of the obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle from Alexandria to London. This enterprise had cost 10,000 pounds, a colossal sum in those days. A prestigious meeting at the British Museum resulted in the foundation of the fund under the presidency of its major benefactor, Wilson. Edwards and Poole became the secretaries. Advertisements were placed in prominent newspapers announcing the formation of the group, appealing for funds, and giving details of sites to be explored. The objectives of the Egypt Exploration Fund were “to organize expeditions in Egypt, with a view to the elucidation of the History and Arts of Ancient Egypt, and the illustration of the Old Testament narrative, so far as it has to do with Egypt and the Egyptians.”15 The Egypt Exploration Fund was among the first organizations to apply for excavation permits with serious research and potential publication as the primary objective, not spectacular finds.