The Rape of the Nile

by Brian Fagan

  Son of Rameses I, Seti I had been a vizier and troop commander before ascending to the throne. His thirteen-year reign witnessed an apogee of Egyptian art and culture, as the country entered a prosperous imperial era. Seti led successful military expeditions to Syria on several occasions in the early years of his reign. He also campaigned against the nomadic Libyans. The pharaoh commissioned a magnificently decorated temple in honor of Osiris at Abydos, which shows the pharaoh making offerings in his role as priest. He is shown with his son, later to become Rameses II, standing before long king lists that chronicle Egypt’s kings from the earliest times. Seti also began the construction of Karnak’s famed Hypostele Hall with its vast columns, a masterpiece completed by his son. Throughout his reign, Seti strove to restore Egypt to its former greatness, after the chaos of the Akhenaten years.

  Shabtis (sometimes called shawbtis or ubshabtis) were funerary figures that were called the “answerers.” They accompanied the deceased to serve them in the afterworld.

  19. Quotes and description of the discovery in Belzoni, op. cit. (1820), 231–248.

  20. The second earl of Belmore (1774–1841) came from a landowning family in Northern Ireland. Heavily in debt, Belmore fled abroad in his yacht to live more cheaply. He went on to become a controversial governor of Jamaica in 1828.

  Belzoni named the sepulcher the tomb of Apis, later changing it to Psammethis. In the predecipherment era, no one could identify the owner correctly.

  21. Edouard de Montulé, Travels in Egypt During 1818 and 1819 (London: J. Murray, 1823), 26ff.

  22. Robert Richardson, Travels Along the Mediterranean, 1816–1818, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1822), 1:307. See also Belzoni, op cit. (1820), 357. Richardson (1779–1847) traveled with the earl of Belmore’s party.

  CHAPTER 8: “PYRAMIDICAL BRAINS”

  1. Sarah Belzoni’s journey was a considerable achievement for a woman traveling independently, but she had plenty of experience of journeying in Islamic lands. The male dress was a wise precaution when it was dangerous for women to travel without their husbands.

  William John Bankes (1786?–1855) was a traveler, collector, and antiquarian, born of a wealthy family, who owned Kingston Lacy in Dorset, southern England. After serving as an aide-de-camp to the duke of Wellington during the Peninsular War, he traveled widely in the Near East, and especially Egypt. He was violently opposed to Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphs, but maintained a lifetime interest in the subject. Bankes subsequently became a member of Parliament before being forced to leave England because of his homosexuality. His extensive Egyptian collections are still at Kingston Lacy. A recent biography is Patricia Usick, Adventures in Egypt and Nubia: The Travels of William Bankes (1786–1855) (London: British Museum Press, 2002).

  2. An exact modern equivalent is virtually impossible to establish, but may have been about US$120, a relatively much larger sum in those days. Egyptian currency was based on the Turkish piastre until Muhammad Ali revalued it and reorganized the monetary system in 1834.

  3. Belzoni, op. cit. (1820), 255.

  4. Ibid., 266.

  5. The pharaoh Khafre (2558–2532 BC) reigned long enough to erect the second Giza pyramid on slightly higher ground than that of his father. This gives the illusion that it is taller than the Great Pyramid, when it is actually shorter, being 136.4 meters (447 and one-half feet) high. The passages from the two entrances join up to lead to the burial chamber. Belzoni left a permanent record of his visit. He wrote his name in lamp black on the south wall of the chamber, where it can be seen to this day.

  The Sphinx was part of Khafre’s funerary complex, carved from solid limestone as a crouched, human-headed lion representing the sun god, Re-Horakhty, at the moment when the sun rises in the East. Quote is from ibid., 256.

  6. Quotes in this and the following paragraphs come from Charles Fitzclarence, Journal of a Route Across India, Through Egypt to England, 1817–1819 (London: John Murray, 1819), 66ff.

  7. Belzoni, op. cit. (1820), 252.

  8. Ibid., 294.

  9. Ibid., 290.

  10. Ibid., 294–295.

  11. Frédéric Cailliaud (1787–1869) was a skilled artist, geologist, and mineralogist who produced maps of several Western Desert oases, among them Kharga, which enabled the French savants writing the Description de l’Égypte to refine their own researches. Cailliaud also explored the temple of Amun at Jebel Barkal in Nubia and was one of the first antiquarians to describe the city of Meroe on the east bank of the White Nile, some 200 kilometers (124 miles) north of Khartoum in today’s Sudan. Meroe prospered off the Red Sea trade from 593 BC to AD 350 and was also an important ironworking center. Cailliaud continued to travel widely in Egypt and the surrounding deserts until 1822, when he returned to France, never to visit Egypt again. He subsequently published a four-volume work, Voyage à Méroé et au Fleuve Blanc (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1826–1827). For a biography, see Michel Chauvet, “Les adventures d’un naturaliste en Égypte et au Soudan: 1815–1822,” Toutanhamon Magazine 8 (1999): 1–6.

  12. Belzoni gives a vivid description of the flood in his Narrative, op. cit. (1820), 299ff. British irrigation expert William Willcocks, who worked in Egypt during the 1890s, wrote that “the Nile looms very large before every Egyptian and with good reason.” He described the frantic efforts made by villagers to divert water from their hamlets and into reservoirs, the backbreaking work of maintaining irrigation works year-round. See William Willcocks, Sixty Years in the East (London: Blackwood, 1935), from which the quote also comes (p. 111). Since the average floodplain relief was only about 2 meters (6 feet), the difference between a high and low inundation, between hunger and catastrophic flood, was remarkably small.

  13. Berenice owed much of its later prosperity to the discovery of the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean by an Alexandrine Greek skipper named Hippalus, who was an expert navigator in the first century BC. He sailed direct from Arabia to India on the winds of the southwestern monsoon, and returned on the northeastern one in the course of a single year. Within a remarkably short time, the volume of trade among Rome, Alexandria, and India increased exponentially.

  14. The Ababde are a Bedouin group with deep roots in antiquity. Short quotes in the narrative of the Berenice journey are from Belzoni, op. cit. (1820), 316ff.

  15. Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville (1697–1782) became the most respected cartographer of his time, his maps famous for their accuracy. His African maps, including the Red Sea area, were standard reference works until the great explorations of the nineteenth century.

  16. Ras Banas is now a major scuba-diving destination. Quotes from Belzoni, op. cit. (1820), 332.

  17. Ibid., 335.

  18. Frédéric Cailliaud, Voyage à l’oasis de Thèbes et dans les deserts et situé à l’orient et à l’occident de la Thébäid, 2 vols. (English edition, London: Phillips, 1822), 134.

  19. Belzoni, op. cit. (1820), 346.

  CHAPTER 9: HIGH JINKSAT PHILAE

  1. Baron Albert von Sack was a well-known naturalist who traveled extensively in Surinam and Venezuela before coming to Egypt. He was a chamberlain to the king of Prussia.

  For William Bankes, see Chapter 8, note 1.

  2. Belzoni, op. cit. (1820), 351.

  3. Ibid., 349.

  4. The Egyptians called obelisks tekhenu, objects that were considered sacred to the god Re and to other solar deities. The Philae obelisk is 6.7 meters (22 feet) high and is inscribed in Greek and hieroglyphs with the name of pharaoh Ptolemy VII (116–81 BC), his wife, and sister Cleopatra (no relation to the later queen). Champollion used the inscriptions to identify the hieroglyphic form of the name Ptolemy. The Philae obelisk arrived in England in 1821, but lay in a damaged state on the lawn in front of the house at Kingston Lacy for six years. Bankes persuaded the visiting duke of Wellington to lay the foundation stone for the obelisk in 1827, but it was not raised until 1839. Two years later, Bankes was forced to go abroad and never returned. For a general discussion o
f these remarkable monuments, see Fekri Hassan, “Imperialist Aspirations of Egyptian Obelisks,” in Jeffreys, op. cit. (2003), 19–68.

  5. On Edfu, see Chapter 3, note 1.

  6. Quotes from Belzoni, op. cit. (1820), 362.

  7. Sarah’s “Trifling Account” of her travels appears in Belzoni, op. cit. (1820), 441ff. The quote is from p. 471.

  8. In retrospect, Belzoni’s work on the tomb did incalculable damage—the paintings were much damaged in the copying, the flash flood inundated much of the now open tomb, and hundreds of sweating visitors caused the art to fade.

  9. This incident is described in ibid., 365ff, where the quotes in this and the two paragraphs above may be found. Ridley, op. cit. (1998), 85ff, offers a thorough analysis of this incident.

  10. Belzoni, op. cit. (1820), 372–373.

  11. Herodotus, op. cit. (1987), 241.

  12. On William George Browne, see Chapter 3, note 20.

  13. Belzoni, op. cit. (1820), 377–378. The Middle Kingdom pharaoh Senwosret II (Khakheperre) (1879–1878 BC) of the Twelfth Dynasty supervised major reclamation works in the Fayyum, converting thousands of hectares of marshland into productive fields. Such reclamation projects were a relic of the famines that struck Egypt at the end of the Old Kingdom, causing economic, social, and political disorder.

  14. The Labyrinth (this is the Greek name for the site) was a temple precinct of courts and colonnades erected by Amenemhet III of the Twelfth Dynasty (1844–1797 BC) at Hawara.

  Hawara was part of the now largely destroyed mortuary complex of Amenemhet III.

  Arsinoe was the capital town of the Arsinoite nome and the administrative center of the Fayyum.

  15. Ibid., 380–381.

  16. Ibid., 381.

  17. Two temples adorn this site, the larger two-story structure dating to the Late Period, the smaller temple of Sobek-Re to Roman times.

  18. Ibid., 385. The settlement was a small oasis town that flourished in the centuries before Christ.

  19. Both quotes in this paragraph come from Ibid., 388.

  20. Ibid., 390.

  21. Ibid., 395–396.

  22. Recently made famous in archaeological circles by the discovery of a huge Romano-Egyptian cemetery dating to the first to third centuries AD. See Chapter 16.

  23. Quotes in these paragraphs come from ibid., 428ff.

  24. Ibid., 437.

  CHAPTER 10: “A MULTITUDE OF COLLATERAL CURIOSITIES”

  1. Seti I erected the Wadi Mia temple east of Edfu to commemorate the reopening of an ancient desert road, made possible by his well digging.

  2. The Times, March 31, 1820; Mayes, op. cit. (2003), 249.

  3. Belzoni, op. cit. (1820), v.

  4. Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of John Murray, with an Account of the Origin and Progress of the House, 1768–1843, condensed by Thomas MacKay (London: John Murray, 1850), 56; Quarterly Review, October 1820; Mayes, op. cit. (2003), 256.

  5. The Egyptian Hall was developed by a well-known showman of the day, William Bullock (ca. 1770–1849). A naturalist and traveler, Bullock promoted a fashion for Egypt that was prevalent in London academic and artistic circles. His London Museum at 12 Piccadilly Street boasted of two large statues of Isis and Osiris, as well as sphinxes and hieroglyphs. The facade was based on Denon’s sketches of the temple of Hathor at Dendera. Inevitably, the museum became known as the Egyptian Hall. After exhibiting Napoléon’s carriage, captured at the Battle of Waterloo, Bullock remodeled the interior in an Egyptian style in 1819. By coincidence, one of the first major exhibitions was Belzoni’s. See Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1978).

  6. J. S. Curl, Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).

  7. In modern equivalents, this would be many thousands of pounds.

  8. Mayes, op. cit. (2003), 289.

  9. Both quotes in this paragraph from ibid., 290.

  10. In 1805–1806, the Scottish explorer Mungo Park (1771–1806) had penetrated far up the Niger River, but drowned during his attempt to locate the source.

  11. Halls, op. cit. (1834), 157; Mayes, op. cit. (2003), 290.

  12. Yanni (Giovanni d’) Athanasi (1799–ca. 1850) was the son of a Greek merchant in Cairo. He became a servant to Colonel Ernest Missett, the British consul, then to Henry Salt. Well known to many Egyptian travelers, he excavated for Salt, then on his own account, accumulating two large collections of Egyptian antiquities that were sold at Sotheby’s in London.

  CHAPTER 11: DECIPHERMENT

  Guide to Further Reading

  Andrew Robinson, The Story of Writing (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995), is an admirable account of decipherment and early scripts. So is Richard Parkinson and others, Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). Lesley Adkins and Roy Adkins, op. cit. (2000), place Champollion in a broader Egyptological context, discuss his rivalry with Thomas Young, and provide an admirable biography. I used this account extensively here. A useful life is Jean Lacouture, Champollion: Une vie de lumières (Paris: B. Grasset, 1988).

  1. Warren R. Dawson and Eric P. Uphill, Who Was Who in Egyptology, 3d ed., revised by M. L. Brierbrier (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1995).

  2. Karl Meyer, The Plundered Past, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Pelican Books, 1992), 23.

  3. Joseph Ernest Renan (1823–1892) wrote widely admired critical and historical works on the Scriptures. He visited Egypt and was shocked by the destruction. Quote is from François-Marie Luzel, ed., Correspondance de Renan (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1995), 178.

  4. Sébastien Louis Saulnier (1790–1835) financed expeditions to Egypt and commissioned Lelorrain to remove the zodiac. He was also interested in roads and railroads.

  Jean Baptiste Lelorrain was a French engineer whose only contribution to Egyptology was to steal the zodiac of Dendera.

  5. The zodiac (now represented by a copy) lies in the Greco-Roman temple of Hathor.

  6. Kircher was also famous for his research on sunspots. Much vilified, he contributed a considerable body of knowledge to the understanding of Coptic, much used by later scholars.

  Jörgen Zoega (1755–1809) was a highly respected archaeologist and coin expert who worked in Rome and served as Danish consul there.

  7. Thomas Young (1773–1829) was a physician and a linguistic genius. At age fourteen, he had some knowledge of eleven languages, including Arabic, Persian, and Ethiopic. He was the first to recognize astigmatism in the eye and published on the undulating theory of light. His hieroglyphic studies began after he was appointed professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, London, in 1801. Young wrote sixteen works on hieroglyphs, including an appendix to the second edition of Belzoni’s Travels, published in 1821. See Alexander Wood and Frank Oldham, Thomas Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954).

  The word cartouche (cartridge) came from the savants, who remarked on the similarities between such ovals and the cartridges in their guns.

  8. Baron Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier (1768–1830) was not only a gifted mathematician but also a skilled administrator who played a leading role in the Egyptian Commission’s work. Napoléon subsequently appointed him prefect of the Isère, where he commissioned memorable public works. Fourier was an important mentor of Champollion.

  9. Thomas Young, “Egypt,” supplement to Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1819.

  10. Discussion in Adkins and Adkins, op. cit. (2000), pp. 166–167.

  11. Jean-Nicholas Huyot (1780–1840) played a key role in decipherment, but his greatest claim to fame is the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. For more detail of how Champollion figured the names, see ibid., 180–181. Quote is on p. 183.

  12. Niccolo Francesco Ippolito Baldessare Rosellini (1800–1843) was professor of Oriental languages at the University of Pisa and the founder of Egyptology in Italy. After the Champollion expedition,
he published his vast Monumenti dell’Egito e della Nubia in three parts (1832–1844), a work still of fundamental importance. Rosellini married the daughter of the well-known composer Cherubini in 1827.

  13. Beni Hasan north of Khemenu, “the Eight Towns” (Hermopolis), is modern el-Ashunein. It was the center of power of the fifteenth nome and a cult center for the scribe god, Thoth. The tomb paintings seen by Champollion were those of nomarchs (provincial governors) of the Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasties (2134–1782 BC).

  14. Letter by Champollion to his brother Jacques-Joseph. Quoted in ibid., 254.

  15. Rameses IV (1151–1145 BC) reigned for only six years after the death of his illustrious father, Rameses II. His tomb was open in Roman times, but the brightly decorated walls and sarcophagus survive.

  16. M. Saulnier, Fils, Notice sur le voyage de M. Lelorrain en Égypte: Et Observations sur le zodiaque circulaire de Denderah (Paris: Chez L’Auteur, 1822), 16. Translation by Thompson, op. cit. (1996), 25.

  17. Giuseppe Passalacqua (1797–1865) found tomb robbing more profitable than horse trading. He acquired a large collection of Egyptian antiquities, mainly from Thebes; offered them to the Louvre, which declined; then sold them to Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia for the Berlin Museum for 100,000 francs. He became conservator of the Egyptian collections there as part of the deal, a post he held until the end of his life. There’s an interesting sequel to the Mentuhotep discovery. In 1996, a hitherto unknown Seventeenth Dynasty royal funerary diadem came to light in Britain with the death of an English private collector. It was traced back to the early nineteenth century, and to the Qurna region. Perhaps it belonged to Queen Mentuhotep.

  A description of the find can be found in Reeves, op. cit. (2000), 27. See also Manniche, op. cit. (1987), for the necropolis generally.

  CHAPTER 12: ARTISTS AND ARCHAEOLOGISTS

  Guide to Further Reading

  Jason Thompson, Sir Gardner Wilkinson and His Circle (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), is both an admirable biography on one of the leading early (and until now much neglected) Egyptologists and a definitive account of the group of antiquarians and artists who worked in Egypt during the 1820s and 1830s. On Lepsius, see George Ebers, Richard Lepsius: A Biography, trans. Zoe Dana (New York: Underhill, 1887). For Mariette and his times, see Elizabeth David, Mariette Pacha (Paris: Pygmalion, 1994). I also relied on Edouard Mariette’s Mariette Pacha (Paris: Payot, 1904) and on Gaston Maspero’s Auguste Mariette, notice biographique et oeuvres diverses (Paris, 1904). Mariette’s own writings, especially The Monuments of Upper Egypt (trans. unknown) (Cairo: A. Mourés, 1877), are also informative. R. T. Ridley, “Auguste Mariette: One Hundred Years After,” Abr-Nahrain 22 (1983-1984): 118–158, offers an excellent appraisal. See also James Baikie, A Century of Excavations in the Land of the Pharaohs (London: London Religious Tract Society, 1923).