The Rape of the Nile

by Brian Fagan

  1. Sir William Gell (1777–1836) achieved fame for his work in the Ionian Islands and Greece. He was intensely interested in hieroglyphs and corresponded with Thomas Young. A brilliant intellectual conversationalist, Gell was a great influence on many scholars from his homes in Naples and Rome, where he entertained numerous travelers surrounded by books, a guitar, and “several dogs.” Few scholars of the day exercised a greater influence on early Egyptology. A discussion of this remarkable scholar will be found in Jason Thompson, “‘Purveyor-General to the Hieroglyphics’: Sir William Gell and the Development of Egyptology,” in Jeffreys, op. cit. (2003), 77–85.

  2. James Burton (1788–1862) was a traveler and copyist whose drawings and plans in the British Museum are of great value for their details of many now destroyed sites. Many of the artifacts in his collection were purchased by the British Museum in 1836. In later life, he devoted most of his time to family genealogy.

  3. Thompson, op. cit. (1996), 68, where a discussion of Wilkinson at elAmarna will be found (pp. 67ff).

  4. H. R. Hall, “Letters to Sir William Gell from Henry Salt, [Sir] J. G. Wilkinson, and Baron von Bunson,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 2 (1915): 158.

  5. ‘Amechu was governor of Thebes and grand vizier to the pharaoh Tuthmosis III (1504–1450 BC). Quote from H. R. Hoskins, Visit to the Great Oasis of the Libyan Desert (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1837), 16.

  6. Joseph Bonomi (1796–1878) was of Italian birth, but brought up in England, where he became a highly respected sculptor and artist. He came to Egypt with Hay, worked there for eight years, then worked on a wide variety of commissions. He became curator of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, 1861–1878.

  Scottish artist and traveler Frederick Catherwood (1799–1855) visited the Holy Land with Hay, Bonomi, and others. His Egyptian work is less well known than his drawings and paintings resulting from his Central American expeditions with the American traveler John Lloyd Stephens, 1839–1843. Had his Nile work been published, it would have established him as one of the best artists to depict ancient Egypt.

  7. Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (London: John Murray, 1836).

  8. John Gardner Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (London: John Murray, 1837). Thompson, op. cit. (1996), chap. 10, offers a superb analysis of the book, to which the interested reader is referred.

  9. See Thompson, op. cit. (1996), 169–170. Letter to Hay quoted on p. 170. John Gardner Wilkinson, Handbook for Travellers in Egypt (London: John Murray, 1847).

  10. James Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (New York: Scribners, 1905).

  11. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) achieved scientific immortality with his journeys through the Andes and much of South America in 1799–1805. He discovered the Peruvian coastal current that is named after him and was the first person to recognize the value of seabird guano as a natural fertilizer. Guano became a major Peruvian export during the nineteenth century.

  James Wild (1814–1892) achieved later fame as decorative architect for the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, London, in 1851. He was curator of the Sir John Soane Museum, 1878–1892.

  12. The Step Pyramid at Saqqara was the first such elaborate mortuary complex, built in about 2650 BC by the famed architect Imhotep for the Old Kingdom pharaoh Djoser (2668–2649 BC). The step design was the forerunner of the perfect pyramid shape achieved by later architects.

  13. Menkaure (or Mycerinus) (2532–2504 BC) is said by legend to have been a more benevolent ruler than his predecessors Khufu and Khafre. The king’s name is inscribed in red ocher on the ceiling of one of the queen’s chambers in the pyramid. The smaller size of his pyramid may have been the result of political and economic strains caused by the huge construction projects of his predecessors.

  Richard William Howard-Vyse (1784–1853) enjoyed a successful military career, rising to the rank of major general. His Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh appeared in three volumes (London: J. Fraser, 1840–1842) and was the standard work on the pyramids until the Flinders Petrie survey of 1880–1882.

  14. George Robins Gliddon (1809–1857) was born in England and taken to Egypt at an early age. He succeeded his father as U.S. vice-consul in Alexandria before giving public lectures on Egypt throughout the eastern United States as far west as St. Louis from 1843 onward. He was the first popular writer on ancient Egypt in the United States.

  15. G. R. Gliddon, An Appeal to the Antiquaries of Europe on the Destruction of the Monuments of Egypt (London: J. Madsen, 1841), 95.

  16. Lord Algernon Percy, first baron Prudoe and fourth duke of Northumberland (1792–1865), met Champollion in Egypt in 1859, made extensive Egyptian collections, and became first lord of the Admiralty and a trustee of the British Museum.

  17. Achille Constant Théodore Émile Prisse D’Avennes (1807–1879) served as an engineer to the pasha until 1836 before becoming an Egyptologist. He was apparently not an engaging character, so little is known of him.

  18. Nestor L’Hôte (1804–1842) accompanied Champollion to Egypt as a draftsman, returning on two later occasions to complete a huge portfolio of drawings that form a valuable archive in the Louvre.

  19. Charles Lenormant (1802–1850) also went with Champollion to Egypt and later became professor of Egyptian archaeology at the Collège de France in Paris.

  20. The living Apis bull was the manifestation of the god Ptah, creator god of Memphis. All such bulls were black with a white diamond mark on the forehead and other distinguishing characteristics. The bull lived in pampered luxury in Ptah’s temple at Memphis, then was mummified after death. Apis was an oracle and prophet, a source of wisdom, so the birth or death of an Apis bull was an important public occasion.

  21. Auguste Mariette, Choix de monuments et de dessins découverts ou executés pendant le déblaiement du Sérapéum de Memphis (Paris: Gide et J. Baudry, 1856).

  22. Heinrich Ferdinand Karl Brugsch (1827–1894) was encouraged in his Egyptian interests by Alexander von Humboldt and developed a knowledge of demotic at an early age. He is best remembered for his research on hieroglyphs. Brugsch was director of the pasha’s short-lived School of Egyptology, 1870–1879.

  Émile Brugsch (1842–1930) was his younger brother. He started as Heinrich’s assistant, then worked for Gaston Maspero before becoming conservator at the Cairo museum, a post he held for forty-five years. A somewhat controversial figure, he is said to have sold antiquities through the museum store.

  23. The mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut (1498–1483 BC) was designed, so the pharaoh tells us in an inscription on the walls, as “a garden for my father Amun.” One of the masterpieces of Egyptian architecture, the terraced and rockcut temple sits against a natural amphitheater of cliffs. Hatshepsut was a strongwilled woman who subverted the position of the child pharaoh Tuthmosis III while serving as his regent. She is mainly remembered for her expedition to the Land of Punt (probably in the southern Red Sea), and may have been assassinated by the adult Tuthmosis III.

  Mentuhotep I (2060–2010 BC) reigned for fifty years during the Middle Kingdom. His mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri was a stepped podium with squarecut pillars topped with a terrace with a Hypostele hall at the rear below the cliffs.

  24. Queen Ahhotep was thought initially to be a wife of the pharaoh Kamose, but the identification has been challenged.

  25. Egypt’s rulers were now known as khedives, Turkish viceroys who ruled Egypt, at least nominally, from 1847 to 1914. For this incident, see Reid, op. cit. (2002), 128–129.

  26. Edouard Mariette, op. cit. (1904), 210.

  27. Ibid., 275.

  CHAPTER 13: “IN THE BR ITISH MUSEUM HE IS PLACED BEYOND THE REACH O F ALL SUCH EVILS”

  Guide to Further Reading

  Wallis Budge, By Nile and Tigris (London: John Murray, 1920), is a boastful chronicle of this British Museum official’s often unscrupul
ous, and, it must be said, ingenious dealings. Donald Malcolm Reid’s Whose Pharaohs? op. cit. (2002), was an essential source for this chapter.

  1. Jean Jacques Rifaud (1786–ca. 1845) was a French sculptor and excavator who worked for Drovetti and spent more than four decades digging (badly) in Egypt.

  2. This passage is based on Reid, op. cit. (2002), 73–75.

  3. John Murray, A Handbook for Travellers in Egypt, 4th ed. (London: John Murray, 1873), xiv. This passage is based on Reid, op. cit. (2002), 84–85.

  4. Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1991). Quoted in Reid, op. cit. (2002), 89, who cites John Pudney, The Thomas Cook Story (London: Michael Joseph, 1953), 212.

  5. The political background is summarized for the general reader by Reid, op. cit. (2002), 153ff. See also Lord Cromer, Ancient and Modern Imperialism (New York: Longmans, 1910).

  6. Maspero wrote numerous books and hundreds of articles on ancient Egypt, of which L’Égyptologie (Paris: Hachette, 1915) is probably the best known.

  For a biography, see Elisabeth David, Gaston Maspero, 1846–1916: Le gentleman Égyptologue (Paris: Pygmalion/G. Watelet, 1999).

  7. From here onward, I use the term Luxor to refer to the modern city of that name, a term that came into widespread use during the late nineteenth century. Thebes is interchangeable, but tends to refer to the region, both the east and west banks around Luxor.

  8. Gaston Maspero with Émile Brugsch, La Trouvaille de Deir el-Bahari (Paris: Hachette, 1881), 57.

  9. Ibid., 112.

  10. Samuel Birch (1813–1885) was responsible for the introduction of the Champollion approach to decipherment to Britain. He spent almost all his career in the British Museum, from where he exercised an enormous influence over Egyptology and Assyriology. Birch never had time to visit the Nile, but compiled the first complete grammar and dictionary of ancient Egyptian.

  11. Originally Sir Evelyn Baring, this remarkable statesman and diplomat became Lord Cromer in 1901. Cromer’s Modern Egypt, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1908), is a basic source on late-nineteenth-century Egypt.

  12. Budge, op. cit. (1920), 95.

  13. Ibid., 137.

  14. Eugène Grébaut (1846–1915) was more a scholar than an administrator. He was an inept director who offended both Egyptologists and local people, resigning in 1892 to become a lecturer in ancient history at the Sorbonne in Paris.

  15. Quotes in these two paragraphs are from Ibid., 143–144.

  16. The extended quotes in these three paragraphs are from ibid., 145ff.

  17. Reid, op. cit. (2002), 101.

  18. An admirable analysis appears in ibid., 109–112.

  19. Cli Mubarak was a cabinet minister, educational reformer, and engineer who planned modern Cairo. He wrote a classic geographical encyclopedia, AlKhitat al-tawfiqiyya al-jadida (1886–1887).

  20. Reid, op. cit. (2002), 201–203 and other pages, offers an analysis of this important figure.

  21. Quoted in ibid., 201.

  CHAPTER 14: “A BOATING-TRIP INTERSPERSED WITH RUINS”

  Guide to Further Reading

  The travel literature of the period is rich and often repetitive. No one should miss Lucie Duff-Gordon’s Letters from Egypt, op. cit. (1865). John A. Wilson, Signs and Wonders upon Pharaoh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), discusses American tourists of the day, while David Reid, op. cit. (2002), is an admirable guide to the literature on early tourism and its wider context. Joan Rees, Amelia Edwards: Traveler, Novelist, and Egyptologist (London: Rubicon Books, 1998), offers a short biography of this all-important tourist. Amelia Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (New York: Scribners, 1877), is a classic of Egyptological literature.

  1. Authoress Lucie Duff-Gordon (1821–1869) was the wife of Sir Alexander Duff-Gordon and a prominent literary figure in London. She settled at the Cape of Good Hope from 1860 to 1863, then moved to Luxor. Her Letters from Egypt are perceptive, at times pithy, and often deeply moving.

  2. Duff-Gordon, op. cit. (1865), 110.

  3. Jean-Jacques-Antoine Ampère, Voyage en Égypte et en Nubie (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1868), 3.

  4. Discussion in Wilson, op. cit. (1964), chap. 5.

  5. Twain, op. cit. (1996), 628. See Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: Sensibility on Tour (London: Bodley Head, 1972).

  6. Edwards, op. cit. (1877), 224.

  7. Ibid., 307.

  8. Ibid., 415.

  9. Ibid., 487.

  10. Ibid., 600–601.

  11. Ibid., 76.

  12. Ibid., 601.

  13. Ibid., 604–605.

  14. The decipherment of the so-called Flood Tablets from Nineveh in 1872 was one of the great popular sensations of the day. Bank engraver-turned-epigrapher George Smith found the fragmentary tablets in the royal library of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal (668–627 BC). They bore a tale of a seer named Hasisadra and a great flood that bore a remarkable resemblance to Noah’s flood in Genesis. Smith subsequently discovered the missing portions of the tablets in Austen Henry Layard’s spoil heaps at Nineveh. The devout hailed the Flood Tablets as proof of the historical truth of the Old Testament, but even Smith realized that he was reading late copies of an ancient legend. For the story, see Brian Fagan, The Return to Babylon (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979).

  15. The Egypt Exploration Fund still flourishes and commemorated its centenary with a history: T. G. H. James, ed., Excavating in Egypt: The Egypt Exploration Society, 1882–1982 (London: British Museum Publications, 1982). Quote from p. 23.

  16. Alexander Henry Rhind, Thebes: Its Tombs and Their Tenants, Including a Record of Excavations in the Necropolis (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1862), 110. Rhind also wrote an obscure handbook on Egypt as a winter resort six years earlier.

  17. Wadi Tumiliat was a fertile depression in the eastern delta that served as a route to the Red Sea. The ancient Egyptians called it “Sweet Water.” Bubastis, north of Cairo, was a cult center for the cat goddess, Bastet, and a center for major religious festivals. The Ramessid pharaohs built a huge temple there in her honor. A great catacomb contains numerous mummified cats.

  18. On Howard Carter’s early career, see T. G. H. James, Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun (London: Kegan Paul, 1992), which offers a comprehensive analysis. See also Nicholas Reeves and John H. Taylor, Howard Carter Before Tutankhamun (London: British Museum, 1992).

  19. George Moritz Ebers, An Egyptian Princess (New York: A. L. Burt, 1868), 17.

  20. Erman’s names were Johann Peter Adolph, but he was universally known as Adolf. Adolph Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt (London: Macmillan, 1894). For Who Was Who quote, see Dawson and Uphill, op. cit. (1995), 99.

  CHAPTER 15: SCIENCE AND THE SMALL ARTIFACT

  Guide to Further Reading

  Late-nineteenth-century Egyptologists have become a fashionable subject for biography in recent years. As a result, this chapter is based on far more sources than those available a quarter century ago. Julie Hankey, A Passion for Egypt: Arthur Weigall, Tutankhamun, and the “Curse of the Pharaohs” (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), treats of relatively minor player, but provides rich perspective on the small world of Egyptology in the 1880s and 1890s. So does Nicholas Reeves and John H. Taylor’s Before Tutankhamun, op. cit. (1992). Flinders Petrie is the subject of a definitive biography by Margaret D. Drower, Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology (London: Victor Gallancz, 1985), which was a major source for this chapter, as was T. G. H. James, op. cit. (1992). I also drew on Flinders Petrie’s own writings, notably Seventy Years in Archaeology (London: Low, Marston, 1931) and Ten Years Digging in Egypt, 1881–1891 (London: Religious Tract Society, 1931), as well as consulting many of his technical reports. Margaret Drower, ed. Letters from the Desert: The Correspondence of Flinders and Hilda Petrie (London: Aris and Phillips, 2004) is a fascinating window into the Petries’ life in Egypt.

  1. Somers Clarke (1841–1926) was an expert on cathedrals and served as surveyor of the fab
ric at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, then as architect to Chichester Cathedral. He retired to Egypt, carried out some restoration work, and brought much higher standards to the study of ancient Egyptian buildings. Quote from a letter from Clarke to Egyptologist Francis Griffith (1899) cited by Hankey, op. cit. (2001), 47.

  Victor Loret (1859–1946) was a distinguished Egyptologist who did much good work during his tenure as director. He was, however, totally unsuited for any form of administrative post and alienated virtually every archaeologist working along the Nile, including Naville, Newberry, and Petrie. He later founded a school of Egyptology in Lyons and became a successful teacher.

  Jacques Jean Marie de Morgan (1857–1924) was an engineer by training who worked as a prospector in many parts of the world before serving as director of antiquities in Egypt, 1892–1897. He made remarkable discoveries at the pyramids of Dashur and worked on the Predynastic, as did Petrie. He later worked at Susa in Persia, where he made important discoveries.