OVER TWENTY-FIVE MILLION Egyptians still make their living on the land. Despite growing urbanisation throughout the Nile Valley and an expanding tourist industry along the Red Sea coast, one-third of Egypt’s burgeoning population continues to be employed in agriculture. In ancient times, the proportion was much higher—most estimates for ancient Egypt are around 90 to 95 per cent. Life in the countryside has followed the same pattern for thousands of years—farmers preparing the soil with hand-hoes, vegetable beds lovingly created with raised edges to trap the Nile’s water, egrets probing for worms in the newly irrigated fields, men on donkeys, mud-brick houses and dirt streets. Tilling the soil has been the predominant way of life in Egypt for most of its history; the lowly fellahin have created the country’s wealth and provided the foundations of its civilisation.
The prerequisites for successful agriculture are, of course, fertile soil and water. Egypt is blessed in having both, thanks to the Nile. Were it not for the river, Egypt would be nothing but desert. As it is, Egypt is in effect a linear oasis, a narrow strip of cultivation—the Nile’s floodplain—hemmed in on both sides by arid wastes. Throughout the Nile Valley, from the First Cataract to the shores of the Mediterranean, the demands of agriculture have shaped the landscape. Over the millennia, successive parcels of floodplain have been turned into natural flood basins, divided by dykes and criss-crossed by irrigation channels. Diesel-powered water-pumps have all but replaced ox-powered waterwheels and human-powered shadufs as the main technology of irrigation, but moving fresh water from the river to the fields remains the underpinning activity of Egyptian agriculture. The Nile is the source of all life, but it has taken human ingenuity to harness its bounty.
There is one part of Egypt, however, where the effects of the Nile are felt only remotely and where agriculture has flourished thanks to the presence of a different body of water. This most unusual area is the Fayum, the source of its fertility and productivity Egypt’s only natural lake. For thousands of years, Birket Qarun has been fed by the Nile, rising and falling, expanding and contracting in unison with the river’s regime. The very name Fayum is a corruption of the Coptic pa-yom, meaning simply “the lake,” for the region as a whole is inextricably linked with its source of life. Ever since the first lake formed around 7000 BC, people have lived along its shore. The shallow waters afford excellent fishing, and early communities of fisherfolk made their temporary homes on high ground to the north and west of Birket Qarun. While fish were the mainstay of their diet, they supplemented these lacustrine resources with hunting and gathering in the fertile pastures around the lake edge. Bird life has always been abundant in the Fayum, and in earlier times herds of antelope and other game also frequented the lake margins. For Stone Age peoples, the Fayum must have been a veritable Eden.
The Fayum holds a special place in the story of Egyptian civilisation, not so much for its early fisherfolk (whom archaeologists call Qarunian), but for their successors (Fayumian), who flourished around two thousand years later, at the beginning of the fifth millennium BC. They seem to have come from the Western Desert, driven eastwards in search of better ecological conditions by the deteriorating climate and advancing desertification. They found what they were looking for when they reached the shore of Birket Qarun. The traces of their remarkable way of life have all but vanished, swallowed up—like so many Egyptian antiquities—by modern development. Their main settlement, on the lake’s northern shore, now lies under fields: “Nothing is left but a desolate ploughed area where a litter of potsherds and flint cobble still bear witness to one of the few excavated Neolithic settlements in Egypt.”3 The settlement itself had no permanent dwellings, but rather a concentration of hearths, suggesting that the people lived in temporary structures of wood and straw, flimsy but portable homes such as their nomadic ancestors would have erected at each new hunting or fishing encampment. Yet, despite this temporary architecture, the Fayumian people lived a sedentary way of life. Indeed, they are the very first people anywhere in Egypt to have settled down to live on the land. Against all the odds, some of the remains of their revolutionary lifestyle have survived the ravages of seven millennia. A short distance from the ploughed-up settlement, some shallow depressions in the desert surface hold a remarkable secret: grain bins, lined with matting, some of them still containing kernels of barley and emmer (a primitive form of wheat). The high elevation and dry desert climate have provided the perfect conditions for the preservation of organic materials. These silos are the earliest evidence for agriculture in Egypt, and their Fayumian creators were the first people in the Nile Valley to till the land and raise crops.
Despite the fact that agriculture was a novel technique, imported from the Fertile Crescent, Egypt’s earliest farmers were impressively productive. They arranged their grain bins in groups, suggesting communal effort to bring in the harvest; one group contained 109 silos. Each bin, around four feet across and two feet deep, carefully plastered with mud and lined with basketry, could hold eight hundredweight of cereals, representing the yield of two to three acres of land. So the most ambitious group of Fayumian farmers seem to have tended a sizeable holding of two to three hundred acres. When originally excavated, one of the bins still contained a sickle, its wooden shaft set with flint blades.
Agriculture did not, however, entirely displace an older way of life. In 5000 BC, Birket Qarun was around four times its present size, some fifty miles wide, and fishing remained an important activity for the Fayumian people. The animal bones found in the village hearths—from turtles, hippos, crocodiles, bittern and wild geese, as well as from domesticated cattle, goats and sheep—show that hunting and animal husbandry were also valuable sources of food. Altogether, the impression is that the Fayum’s farmers enjoyed a rather comfortable living by the shores of Birket Qarun. They ate a wholesome and varied diet, grew flax to weave into linen and traded precious objects from far and wide, including seashells from the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, and stone cosmetic palettes from Nubia. In their taste for bodily decoration and pottery (red-coated and burnished), they set the trend for later phases of Egyptian culture. In their mastery of agriculture, they laid the foundations for the glories of pharaonic civilisation.
Most of the Fayumian granaries have been destroyed by a modern road and two large irrigation canals. The area containing the last remaining grain bins had also been zoned for agriculture, but was saved from destruction at the last minute. When the farmer realised the significance of the pits on his land, he agreed to work around them. It is ironic that “the earliest evidence of agriculture in Egypt was almost destroyed by ploughing.”4
Over the succeeding centuries and millennia, the Fayumians’ innovation became the mainstay of the Egyptian economy, and the lands around Birket Qarun were some of the most productive in the country. From the beginning of the second millennium BC onwards, the Egyptians began to regulate water flow into the lake, by means of dams and canals. This trend reached its peak circa 1900 BC, when the lake was artificially expanded to extend the irrigated area and bring more land under cultivation; so impressive were the results that the Fayum region became known as mi-wer, “great lake.” The driving force behind this major civil engineering project was King Amenemhat III, and he remains a powerful, if ghostly, presence in the Fayum.
Our minibus ground to a halt next to an improbable-looking, if productive, patch of land, near a small Fayum village called Biahmu. Water gurgled along an irrigation canal down one side of the field, drawn from a nearby canal by an invisible, though clearly audible, diesel pump. A camel munched lazily on a heap of fodder under a stand of palm trees. Within the field margins, a crop of lucerne grew lush and tall. And there, in the middle of the cultivated area, incongruous against this scene of agricultural bounty, stood an enormous pedestal, its back towering thirty or forty feet into the air. This old heap of stones was, in fact, the remains of a monument that was once the most famous in the Fayum. The pedestal, now empty and unadorned, once held a colossal double-st
atue of Amenemhat III. From its lofty height, the king looked out over the farmlands he had brought into being. Elsewhere in the Fayum, the king built further edifices to mark his achievement: a temple on the western edge of the cultivation, sited as if to hold back the encroaching desert by magical means; and, to the south-east of the Great Lake, a pyramid, its mortuary chapel so large, complex and multi-roomed that classical authors dubbed it “the Labyrinth.” Today, the Labyrinth is nothing more than a series of muddy lines in the soil, the pyramid has collapsed into a pile of bricks, and the temple is losing its battle with the sand dunes. The double-statue of Biahmu is no more, but its colossal pedestal survives, surrounded by crops, an enduring testament to the long history of intensive agriculture in this part of Egypt.
Uniquely in the annals of pharaonic civilisation, we have a first-hand account of life on the land in the lush fields of the Fayum. In the early twentieth century, during the excavation of a tomb in the hills of Thebes, archaeologists uncovered a mass of discarded, crumpled papyri that had been dumped into the tomb shaft before it was sealed. Among this refuse was a collection of letters and household accounts belonging to a man named Heqanakht. He lived in the early years of the Middle Kingdom (circa 2000 BC) and farmed land on the edge of the Fayum, in a place with the poetic name of “jujube-grove” (Nebsyt). At the same time, he held the post of priest in the mortuary cult of one of the king’s viziers, and this official duty took Heqanakht periodically away from home to the great southern city of Thebes. It was during these sojourns in Upper Egypt that Heqanakht wrote letters back to his family—letters which subsequently ended up in the rubbish filling the shaft of the vizier’s tomb. Heqanakht’s casual correspondence provides a remarkable window on his world, that of a successful Egyptian farmer four thousand years ago.
At the time he wrote home, Heqanakht was probably well into his thirties, distinctly middle-aged in ancient Egyptian terms. He was already married for the second time and was master of a large household of relatives and dependants. He must have been fairly well educated by the standards of the age, certainly literate enough to write some or all of his own letters; he resorted to employing a professional scribe only when something more formal was required. For the most part, his letters reflect his chief preoccupation, which was farming. They are dominated by economic matters, ranging from the collection of debts to the distribution of grain, and they underline his worries at leaving his business interests in the hands of others. His tone is concerned, but also impatient and hectoring: “Take great care! Watch over my seed-corn! Look after all my property! Look, I count you responsible for it. Take great care with all my property!”5 In particular, Heqanakht was anxious to ensure that the steward of his estates, a man named Merisu, made the necessary and timely preparations for the coming agricultural year. Heqanakht instructed Merisu not to siphon off any of the grain held in reserve to pay the rent on a parcel of farmland, and to investigate the possibility of renting additional land if the circumstances looked favourable.
As a successful businessman, Heqanakht had financial dealings with at least twenty-eight different people, sixteen of them neighbouring farmers. Alongside these professional relationships, Heqanakht’s life was full of personal interest and intrigue. His large household included eighteen dependants and three servants. Among his employees were a foreman, a steward (Merisu), a household scribe and a fieldhand in charge of cattle. Heqanakht’s extended family, all living under his roof, comprised his mother and another senior female relative; a younger brother; a son and daughter by Heqanakht’s previous marriage, and two daughters by his second marriage; and the new wife herself. Like Egyptian men down the centuries, Heqanakht showed particular reverence towards his mother, sending her special greetings and reassuring her about his well-being. Like Egyptian men down the centuries, too, Heqanakht also betrayed more than a touch of favouritism towards his son, telling his other relatives, “Whatever he wants, you shall make him content with what he wants.”6
In this large and rivalrous household, the atmosphere seems to have been claustrophobic and febrile. One of the main causes of tension was the attitude of Heqanakht’s relatives to his new wife. A long way from home, Heqanakht clearly worried that the others were ganging up on the new arrival. Believing that one of his female servants had behaved particularly badly towards his wife, Heqanakht had the unfortunate girl promptly dismissed. He then accused his family of not protecting the wife against the maid’s malice because they regarded the former as a slut and a parvenu.
The domestic intrigue reflected in Heqanakht’s letters proved so compelling that Agatha Christie used it as the basis for her murder mystery novel, Death Comes as the End. Whether resentment ever boiled over into murder, we shall never know, but the Heqanakht letters certainly provide a vivid picture of life on a Fayum farm—a picture that still rings true today. Four thousand years after Heqanakht, the inhabitants of the Fayum retain a reputation for being clannish and rebellious.
AGATHA CHRISTIE WAS NOT the only woman of her generation to be entranced by Egypt and its ancient culture. Less famous by far, but much more influential in the history of Egyptology, was an almost exact contemporary of Christie’s, a woman by the name of Gertrude Caton-Thompson (1888–1985). Born at a time and into a social set which expected women to do nothing more onerous than be an exemplary hostess, Gertrude defied all expectations by becoming an archaeologist. Abandoning the wealth and privilege of her background, she made her name excavating on the shores of Birket Qarun. And, to the chagrin of many of her male contemporaries, her work succeeded in rewriting the origins of Egyptian civilisation.
Despite losing her father when she was just five years old, Gertrude enjoyed a charmed childhood. With her brother and widowed mother, she lived in an eleven-bedroom house which boasted a forty-foot billiard room, stables and three-and-a-half acres of garden. The family went to dances with the Astors at Cliveden, hunted in the Christmas holidays and spent summers in France and Scotland. Like many of their social set, they were drawn to the winter climate of Egypt, and it was in 1907 that Gertrude first visited the country. She returned four years later and stayed at the Winter Palace in Luxor, describing it as “a haven of peace in its orange-scented garden, with glorious views across the Nile to the Theban Hills.”7 But Egypt cast a darker spell, too. During World War I, Gertrude’s sweetheart, a captain in the British army, was killed in the Western Desert near the Baharia Oasis. Yet, despite these early influences, nothing suggested that Egypt would become Gertrude’s abiding interest.
All that changed in 1915, during a visit to Paris. Gertrude seems to have been entranced by the Egyptian collections of the Louvre and the Egyptianising architecture of the Napoleonic city. Returning to London, she took Arabic lessons and embarked on a course in prehistoric archaeology at University College, where she met Flinders Petrie, then at the height of his career as Professor of Egyptology. In 1921, Gertrude persuaded her mother to allow her to join Petrie’s excavations in Egypt. The contrast with her gilded youth could not have been more stark. Second-class travel was a novelty, and the Petries’ spartan lifestyle she treated as a great adventure. It was the golden age of Egyptology, and Petrie introduced the young woman from the Home Counties to the wonders of excavation in the land of the pharaohs. She visited Carter and Carnarvon’s dig in the Valley of the Kings—just a year before their discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb—then accompanied the Petries to their own dig at Oxyrhynchus in Middle Egypt. It was to prove a disappointment: not because of the Petries’ asceticism or the dirt and filth of the place itself, but because Oxyrhynchus, with its abundant Greek and Roman remains, offered little for a woman whose chief interest was the Palaeolithic period.
In typically resourceful fashion, Gertrude upped sticks and left Oxyrhynchus—on her own—to dig at Helwan. Throughout her archaeological career, she displayed a doughtiness impressive even by the standards of the time, and especially for a woman: “It was my habit,” she explained, “to carry a pistol in case of a
n encounter with an angry hyena. At night the weapon lived under my pillow.”8 On excavations, she slept in an abandoned tomb, which she happily shared with a family of cobras. It was that same indefatigable spirit that led her, in 1924, to discover the first stratified prehistoric settlement site ever excavated in Egypt—not in the Nile Valley, but on the remote northern fringes of the Fayum.
In archaeological circles, the Fayum had become known as a source of flint tools, but nobody had shown much interest in their precise provenance. Nobody, that is, except Gertrude Caton-Thompson. Having identified a promising site, she returned to London to begin preparations for a full-scale archaeological expedition. Petrie promised her five of his best Qiftis (though irascible, he recognised a fellow archaeologist when he saw one), and she selected her own personal companion. Together, the two women headed back to Egypt—via Trieste, on the Orient Express.
In the winter of 1924, Egypt was in uproar following the murder in Cairo of the British Governor of Sudan. In the opinion of the colonial authorities, it was no place for a member of the fairer sex. No sooner had Gertrude arrived than she was advised to leave. But where fainter hearts would have capitulated, she circumvented, ignoring the British authorities and going straight to the Egyptian governor of the Fayum to secure his personal protection. He advised her to take camels, but she insisted on sticking with the second-hand (but chauffeur-driven) Ford she had purchased in Cairo. Once again, her intuition proved well-founded, and the car was a great success. Having finally arrived at the dig site, she embarked on her first solo season of excavation, an experience she adored.
Those two months changed our understanding of Egyptian prehistory. The dig produced the first Neolithic pottery ever discovered in Egypt, together with flint tools, grinding-stones and cereal remains: in summary, the earliest evidence of a settled agricultural lifestyle in Egypt. Two further seasons in the Fayum uncovered the grain silos of the Fayumian farmers, found quite by chance when Gertrude was scraping back the desert surface to investigate the underlying geology. The mats lining the pits were in such good condition that she was able to lift ten intact and send several back to England. Gertrude made important discoveries from other periods, too: the gypsum quarry used by the plasterers who worked in the decorated tombs of the Pyramid Age, and a Ptolemaic irrigation system that had succumbed to the encroaching desert. Interested not merely in archaeology but also in the environmental setting, Gertrude and her companion undertook a geological expedition—by camel—to the neighbouring depression of Rayana in temperatures reaching 49°C in the shade. To avoid the excessive heat, they returned to camp by night, relying on Gertrude’s instinct for direction to see them safely back when their guide got lost among the dunes.
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