The Rape of the Nile

by Brian Fagan

  As always, Petrie developed his own methods to clear the cemetery. He sent boys to hunt for soft places in the ground; as soon as they had cleared around the edge of a grave pit, he moved them on. Then ordinary workers cleared the burial filling until they located clay vessels lying around the body. Next, expert workers with a delicate touch cleared around the pottery and skeleton, leaving everything in place. Last, his devoted excavator and friend Ali Mohamed es Suefi removed every scrap of earth and left the pits, bones, and beads exposed for recording.

  The Naqada cemeteries were undated, with no inscriptions or papyri to provide a chronology. Petrie turned to the hundreds of pots from the graves for enlightenment. He found that there were gradual changes in the shapes of vessels and particularly in the handles on a certain type of jar. These changed from functional designs, obviously for daily use, to more decorative forms, and finally degenerated into a series of painted lines. Similar jars came to light at Diospolis Parva and other Predynastic sites, again associated with characteristic grave furniture.

  Eventually, Petrie found so many graves that he was able to build up a series of “stages” of grave-furniture groups, to which he assigned “sequence dates,” based on the stylistic changes in the pots. His earliest stage was “ST 30,” for he rightly assumed that he had not yet found the earliest Predynastic societies. Fifty stages later he came to “ST 80,” which coincided with the beginning of dynastic time and the first pharaoh, Menes. These sequence dates provided the first attempt at a chronology for prehistoric Egypt and were applied by Petrie and others to finds throughout the Nile Valley.19

  Petrie regarded sequence dating as one of his major contributions to archaeology. “This system enables us to deal with material which is entirely undated otherwise; and the larger the quantity of it the more accurate are the results. There is no reason now why prehistoric ages, from which there are groups of remains, should not be dealt with as surely and clearly as the historic ages with recorded dates.” This optimistic statement appeared in Petrie’s Methods and Aims in Archaeology, published in 1904, where he enumerated his fundamental rules of excavation, honed by many seasons of self-instruction in the Nile Valley.20 In fact, later research has shown that sequence dating is nothing more than a refined form of ordering undated finds. But, for its time, it was a bold and revolutionary attempt to place Egyptian archaeology on a better chronological footing.

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  Petrie’s zestful researches took him the length and breadth of the Nile Valley. He kept up a running battle with the Antiquities Service, especially with Grébaut and the museum, whose relationships with dealers he strongly distrusted. His autobiography, Seventy Years in Archaeology, is replete with stories about the sins of his French colleagues. One Gallic archaeologist worked a royal tomb at Abydos, kept no plans, and boasted that he had burnt First Dynasty woodwork in his camp kitchen. His finds were scattered among his financial partners in Paris and sold by auction. Fortunately, Grébaut resigned in 1892.

  Grébaut’s successor, Jacques de Morgan, was a more congenial director, an engineer and prospector who came to Cairo with no Egyptian experience whatsoever. He was at work among the pyramids of Dashur two years later, where he unearthed a series of tombs of the Middle Kingdom, including three princesses, two queens, and the pharaoh Hor of the Thirteenth Dynasty (ca. 1760 BC). In a pit near the looted sarcophagus of Princess Sithathor, de Morgan found a wooden box containing her jewels, including pectoral ornaments, rings, and pendants. The following season, he found four intact Twelfth Dynasty burials of Middle Kingdom royalty, among them the undisturbed grave of Queen Khnemet. The Illustrated London News depicted a heroic de Morgan displaying the queen’s diadem to an admiring audience. For all his flamboyance, de Morgan was a serious excavator who found an early tomb at Naqada that helped define the Predynastic period.

  Petrie got on better with de Morgan, who was matter-of-fact about his job, despite a new khedival ruling that placed severe restrictions on the export of antiquities found on foreign excavations. The same could not be said for his successor, Victor Loret, who was more of a scholar and certainly not an archaeologist or an administrator. Matters came to a head when Loret, when told of an example of pillage, casually remarked, “That’s impossible! There’s a law!”21

  FIGURE 15.1 The Petrie excavation camp at Abydos. Bettman/Corbis.

  Loret was replaced by Gaston Maspero, who was popular with everyone. He allowed Petrie to go to Abydos to clear up the mess in the royal cemetery. He promptly found the tombs of four of the eight kings of the First Dynasty and a queen, identified them, and cleared more than three hundred graves of their servants as well. Even more remarkable was the publication record. The work at Abydos began in November 1899 and was completed in March 1900. By June 22 of the same year Petrie had completed the proofs of the index. The published report was available almost as soon as the finds were ready for display, surely a record for archaeological publication. The First Dynasty finds were duly exhibited in London, and Petrie at last noticed a difference in public attitudes. “A new public feeling appeared; instead of only caring for things of beauty or remarkable appearance, people hang over the tables, fascinated by the fragments of the Ist Dynasty. Some workmen would spend their whole dinner hour in the room.”22

  The tussles with dealers and tomb robbers continued throughout the earlier part of Petrie’s long career. Abydos was a bad spot for pillagers. While Petrie was engaged in tracing twelve successive rebuildings of the great temple by examining minute differences in trench-wall colors, the locals had other things on their minds. One man succeeded in removing a statue weighing more than 45 kilograms (100 pounds) from the courtyard of Petrie’s house. He was tracked down by the distinctive impressions of his feet in the ground and arrested, but got off by bribing the police. On another occasion, a man loitered outside the Petries’ mess hut at night and fired a pistol at Mrs. Petrie from point-blank range. Fortunately, the bullet missed.23

  Extraordinary precautions were taken during the excavation of a plundered tomb at el-Lahun in 1914. The sarcophagus in the tomb was empty, and Petrie did not expect to find anything dramatic. But a few rings of fine gold tubing came to light at the side of the sarcophagus. Immediately, Petrie dismissed the men and left only a single trusted workman in the trench, joined by Guy Brunton, one of Petrie’s students. Together they carefully removed the soil from the gold and began to uncover a spectacular treasure. Brunton lived in the tomb day and night, gently extracting all the objects from the soil without damaging them. Each item was carefully washed and photographed before being packed away. Petrie was so anxious to avoid pillage that he warned all his party not to talk or write about the gold hoard. The collection turned out to be a royal treasure of the Twelfth Dynasty. It was finally bought by the Metropolitan Museum of New York after prolonged but fruitless negotiations with British museums.

  The pace and breathtaking scope of Petrie’s archaeological life amaze the modern student. Each winter he excavated in Egypt, spending the spring and summer in Europe writing up the previous season’s work and exhibiting the finds. At least a book a year flowed from his prolific pen. Dozens of lectures as well as his regular University of London series were delivered every year. In forty-two years Petrie excavated more sites than Mariette and made more major discoveries than any other archaeologist before or after him. Naukratis and Kahun, the el-Amarna discoveries, the tombs of Abydos, and the el-Lahun jewels were only a few of his finds. He resurrected Predynastic Egypt from Naqada and Diospolis Parva. He found the famous Victory Stela of pharaoh Merneptah in the king’s mortuary temple at Thebes, which provided the first known Egyptian references to Israel, a find that prompted one of his colleagues to murmur, “Won’t the reverends be pleased.”24

  Petrie was an innovator, an Egyptologist who was ahead of his time yet forced to support his excavations by selling his finds to European museums. Unfortunately, he had a somewhat tactless and quarrelsome personality. Distinguished public figures did not imp
ress him, and he was not afraid to describe the aged and authoritative writer Professor John Stuart Blackie of Edinburgh University as “a genial man who argued on Greek accent all day with all comers, and sang Scotch songs with but small provocation.”25 Petrie’s lack of formal education led him in later life to ignore the valuable work of his contemporaries and to insist that he was always right—never an endearing quality in an archaeologist.

  Petrie did far more than found an English school of Egyptology and introduce reputable excavation methods into the Nile Valley. He trained a whole generation of new Egyptologists, schooled in hieroglyphs and his excavation methods. Many of them improved on his techniques. Howard Carter (1873–1939) worked with Petrie. Classical archaeologist Ernest Arthur Gardner (1862–1939) learned his excavation at Naukratis and went on to direct the British School of Archaeology in Athens, where he helped Petrie with his work on cross-dating Mycenaean imports from Egypt. Sir Alan Gardiner, one of the greatest British Egyptologists of the twentieth century, was befriended by Petrie and spent a lifetime studying hieratic texts. His Egyptian Grammar (1927) is one of the fundamental sourcebooks for all students of ancient Egyptian languages. Guy Brunton, the young assistant who dug up the treasure of el-Lahun, went on to become one of Petrie’s most distinguished followers, renowned for his careful excavations of Predynastic tombs and villages. Gertrude Caton Thompson (1888–1985) learned excavation from Petrie. She eschewed ancient Egypt and studied the Stone Age. She excavated the sites of the earliest known Egyptian farmers in the Fayyum Depression in the 1920s and then went on to study the Stone Age hunters of the Kharga oasis. The list of Petrie’s former apprentices reads like a who’s who of archaeology. Few archaeologists have ever exercised such a profound influence on future generations.

  The annual Petrie excavations continued for most years until 1926, when he abruptly transferred his attentions to Palestine. New and stringent regulations to control excavations by anyone except those employed directly by the National Museum or the Antiquities Service effectively prevented Petrie from further digging in the Nile Valley. In part, these regulations came into effect as a result of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, which focused attention on the liberal conditions under which foreign expeditions were allowed to work in Egypt and to remove most of their finds with them at the expense of the national collections. By this time, Petrie’s work was done. Forty years of excavation, training, and publication had improved standards of field archaeology and brought forward a whole new generation of Egyptologists, including some native Egyptian scholars, to man the Antiquities Service. Petrie himself had put more of ancient Egypt on record than any excavator before him. He continued to work every year in what was then called Palestine until the outbreak of World War II. He lived on to the age of eighty-nine as a respected if fiery phenomenon of twentieth-century archaeology. As we shall see, his protégés took over where he left off in a remarkable legacy of discovery and cutting-edge scholarship.

  Like so many other Egyptian excavators, even those hungry for plunder and buried treasure, Petrie was at his best in the field. He returned to the quiet and serenity of the desert to escape the batterings of a late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century scholarly world where minor quarrels and petty intrigues were all too common. Flinders Petrie believed passionately in the importance of the past: “The man who knows and dwells in history adds a new dimension to his existence. . . . He lives in all time; the ages are his, all live alike to him.”26

  The history of Egyptology is full of men of unusual energy—Denon, Belzoni, Mariette, Petrie, and others—who excavated the length and breadth of the Nile Valley. Each seems to have had a fascination with the desert environment, with its quiet serenity and unchanging sunshine. This tranquil backdrop was the scene of an unparalleled scramble for antiquity that had no rivals in the ferocity and ruthlessness of its aims.

  16

  “Wonderful Things”

  I still say all the time that you never know what the sand of Egypt

  might hold of secrets. And that’s why I believe until today we have

  discovered only thirty percent of our monuments. Still seventy

  percent is buried underneath the ground.

  ZAHI HAWASS,

  quoted in Nicholas Reeves, Ancient Egypt: The Great Discoveries

  Flinders Petrie had described the destruction in Egypt in 1880 as akin to a “house on fire.” For the next three decades, he bestrode the small world of Egyptology like a colossus. His excavations were a school for an entire generation of young archaeologists, among them Percy Newberry (1869–1949), a botanist and archaeologist who cut his teeth with Petrie at Hawara and Kahun. Newberry was a skilled, if unimaginative, draftsman whose first independent work was in the Middle Kingdom tombs at Beni Hasan, where he worked on behalf of the Archaeological Survey of Egypt in 1890, a scheme concocted by Amelia Edwards and Flinders Petrie to record major sites along the Nile before it was too late. While on a visit to the ancestral home of Lord Amherst the year before, the twenty-two-year-old Newberry admired the work of a young artist who was working on the extensive Amherst collections. The artist’s name was Howard Carter.1

  Howard Carter (1873–1939) was of humble birth. The son of an artist, he showed precocious ability, which came to the attention of Lord Amherst and his daughter, Lady William Cecil. At age eighteen, Carter was employed by the Amherst family to draw items in their collection. Both Lord and Lady Amherst encouraged the young man and introduced him to Newberry, who needed his talents at the British Museum to work up pencil sketches of his Beni Hasan copies. Carter was soon assigned to other tasks, among them copying the minutely detailed drawings made by Robert Hay three-quarters of a century earlier. In 1891, the Egypt Exploration Fund sent him to work with Newberry at Beni Hasan as an assistant draftsman.

  He found himself in a small, incestuous world populated by gentleman scholars, in which he and Flinders Petrie stood out for their humble origins and lack of formal education. Carter was confident in his exceptional abilities as a draftsman and watercolorist, which made it easier for him to move in his new social milieu. Beni Hasan’s exquisite paintings covered 1,115 square meters (12,000 square feet) and offered a formidable challenge to an artist. Newberry had traced the paintings the year before. It remained for Carter to make color drawings of the details of the murals. He succeeded brilliantly, so much so that he was sent to el-Amarna to work with Flinders Petrie in 1892, on a portion of the site that the latter had “sold” to Amherst. At first Petrie was doubtful about Carter, but his doubts soon turned to admiration, as the young artist took to excavation like a natural.

  For the next six years, Carter found himself in demand, at Beni Hasan and also, at Newberry’s recommendation, under Édouard-Henri Naville on Queen Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri near Thebes. While Petrie and others violently opposed Naville’s appointment to the site on the grounds that he was not careful enough, Carter covered himself with glory during a series of field seasons when he copied wall reliefs, assisted in clearance, and engaged in some architectural restoration. “In those six years, I learnt more of Egyptian art, its serene simplicity, than in any time or place. I had several colleagues to help me; there were tragedies, professional jealousies, and often amusing comedies. But I was lucky.”2 He had achieved a fine reputation as an artist, but he was definitely not considered a gentleman, criticized for his uncouth table manners.

  Carter’s first break came in 1899, when Gaston Maspero appointed him chief inspector of antiquities for Upper Egypt, one of only two inspectors in the country, as an attempt to internationalize the service. Wrote Maspero: “I find him very active, a very good young man, a little obstinate, but I believe that things will go well when he is persuaded of the impossibility of securing all the reforms in one go. The only misfortune is that he doesn’t understand French, but he is learning it.” Maspero’s “young man” threw himself into a whirlwind of activity. He found himself dealing with tourists, and with the r
obbing of Amenophis II’s sepulcher in the Valley of the Kings. Looters overpowered the tomb guards and tore bandages off the mummy of the pharaoh.3 Carter inspected the ravaged mummy, which had been ripped open by an expert who knew exactly where to look for jewelry, of which he had found none. Immediate suspicion fell on the notorious Rasul family, whose footprints were found in the tomb. While Carter measured them, professional trackers followed the spore to Mohammed Abd el-Rasul’s house in Qurna. He was arrested, but the judge would not convict him on the basis of just a footprint.

  FIGURE 16.1 Howard Carter was a consummate painter. In a painting from 1899, pharaoh Tuthmosis I and his mother, Seniseneb, present offerings at the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut. Courtesy: Egypt Exploration Society. Photograph by Peter Hayman.

  Much of Carter’s work involved conservation in the Valley of the Kings, where he lit some of the tombs with electric light for the first time. His years as inspector brought him in touch with wealthy patrons, among them the New York lawyer Theodore Davis, who received a concession to work in the valley in 1902. Carter supervised the work, under a government agreement that duplicate finds would go to Davis. These researches established Carter as someone with a nose for discovery. He found the tomb of an Eighteenth Dynasty noble named Userhet and that of a Nubian-born child from the royal nursery, which contained a wooden box filled with two exquisitely made leather loincloths. The tomb of pharaoh Tuthmosis IV with a columned burial chamber and quartzite sarcophagus came to light in 1903. Fragments of the original funerary regalia lay scattered over the floor. “Everything had been broken into by those ruthless vandals, who in their thirst for gold had spared nothing.”4 He was able to recover part of the king’s chariot and one of his riding gauntlets.