The climate and the bleak surroundings were not the only tribulations. For her third excavation season, Gertrude traded in her second-hand Ford for a state-of-the-art, six-wheeled Morris truck, recommended by the British army for desert travel. Never one to take someone else’s word for it, Gertrude took the precaution of trying the vehicle out on a military testing ground in the Midlands, and was suitably impressed. But the sand dunes around Birket Qarun proved altogether more taxing than the hills around Birmingham, and at the end of the season Gertrude brought a court case against the Morris Motor Company, demanding full compensation for the expenses incurred in extracting her vehicle from the Sahara and towing it back to Cairo. Morris swiftly capitulated.
After such adventures, Gertrude wrote, without a hint of irony, “it had been realised by my mother that my archaeology was not a passing hobby.”9 Indeed, after her pioneering work in the Fayum, Gertrude went on to excavate at Great Zimbabwe, in the Transvaal, in the Belgian Congo and Uganda, and in Kenya with Louis Leakey. She was appointed to the Council of the Royal Geographical Society, awarded the Rivers Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute and elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
She never lost her sense of adventure, nor her love for the finer things in life: on the day the Battle of Britain began, she was in London to go shopping and have her hair done at Harvey Nichols. Her background had given her the utter self-assurance and confidence that anything was possible, any obstacle could be overcome, and she used those qualities to advance the cause of women intellectuals as much as to push back the frontiers of science. Gertrude Caton-Thompson finished her memoirs at the age of ninety-one, and died at the ripe old age of ninety-seven, indefatigable to the last.
Gertrude chose the Fayum because of her interest in Egyptian prehistory. But she could easily have selected it for another reason: as Petrie’s excavations in the 1880s had shown, the Fayum had, in pharaonic times, played home to more than its fair share of determined and influential women. While the kings of ancient Egypt held court at Memphis or Thebes, their wives and daughters exercised power, behind the scenes, from a palace on the south-eastern edge of the Fayum. The site known today as Medinet el-Gurob, “town of the crows,” was in ancient times called “the harem of the Great Canal,” or more simply “the harem of the Lake.” It was well named, for it lay on the edge of the desert, overlooking a major irrigation canal. Indeed, the diversion of the Bahr Yusuf from its northward course into the Fayum basin, initiated at the beginning of the New Kingdom, was controlled from Gurob.
Texts suggest that there was a harem-palace in the Fayum from at least Middle Kingdom times. The kings of the Twelfth Dynasty enjoyed fishing and fowling on Birket Qarun, and the lake shore provided the perfect location for a pleasure palace. (It is tempting to believe that Amenemhat III’s frequent visits to the Fayum may have been prompted as much by the presence of a harem-palace as by his interest in hydraulic engineering.) But it was the creation of an Egyptian empire in the New Kingdom, and especially the Eighteenth Dynasty fashion for diplomatic marriages, that spurred the establishment of a major institution for royal women at Gurob. When, as a result of military campaigns in Syria–Palestine, Thutmose III returned home with a clutch of Near Eastern princesses as well as a haul of booty, he needed somewhere to house them and their extensive retinue of attendants. His solution was to build a new harem-palace at Gurob—a palace that his exotic concubines could call home; where the royal children could be brought up in a safe and secure environment; and, just as important, where the royal women and their retainers could engage in worthwhile and economically productive activity.
The resulting complex, situated within a twelve-acre walled enclosure, comprised two large buildings. One, a residential wing with spacious columned halls, housed the living quarters for the royal women, their children and servants. The other, an administrative-cum-industrial wing, provided storage facilities and workshops. (There were also offices for the harem-palace bureaucrats, all of them male—what aspiring Egyptian man would not have been attracted by a job with the title Overseer of the Young Women of the Lord of the Two Lands?) In ancient Egypt as in medieval Europe, the manufacture of fine textiles was an activity closely associated with aristocratic women, and the harem-palace of Gurob became a major centre of weaving. Flax grown on the rich farmlands of the Fayum provided the raw material, and the finished product—Gurob linen—was highly sought-after throughout the Nile Valley. A papyrus found at Gurob refers to “royal linen, head-cloths, bag-tunic and triangular cloths, all of the first quality.”10 Glass—another elite product with long-standing royal connotations—was also manufactured at Gurob (the royal potteries of Sèvres in Bourbon France offer an instructive parallel), as were jewellery and cosmetics. To supplement its manufacturing activities, the harem-palace of Gurob owned its own buildings and estates; was supported by central taxation; and received regular supplies from the royal treasury, delivered by boat to the harbourside just outside the palace walls. In short, it was a major economic institution in its own right.
Unfortunately for the kings of Egypt, this combination of economic independence, geographic isolation from the capital and a clutch of rival wives and their children all under one roof made the harem-palace a dangerous place. It provided a fertile breeding-ground for conspiracies, stoked by the jealousies of the king’s multiple wives and their offspring. Two full-scale harem plots are attested in the annals of ancient Egypt, but one suspects there must have been more. The conspiracy against the Sixth Dynasty King Pepi I (2300 BC) by one of his own wives was resolved by a secret judicial hearing. By contrast, the plot against Ramesses III, 1,150 years later, ended in the king’s assassination, his throat slit from side to side. One of his sons was sentenced to death, together with a clutch of senior harem officials.
In happier times, the palace at Gurob would have played host to a succession of exotic and dazzling royal women: Princess Gilukhepa of Mittani, a diplomatic bride for Amenhotep III, who arrived in Egypt with a retinue of 317 women; the king’s favourite wife Tiye, to whose statue belonged the beautiful painted ebony head, found at Gurob, that is now one of the treasures of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin; and the Hittite princess whose marriage to Ramesses II concluded the world’s first peace treaty.
The palace at Gurob flourished for some three hundred years, until the dying days of the New Kingdom. It remains the only site in Egypt where both buildings on the ground and inscriptions confirm the existence of a harem. The buildings themselves, protected by the dry climate, survived relatively intact until the late nineteenth century AD. And the tradition of pleasure palaces in the Fayum did not stop there. The last king of Egypt, Farouk, was a fanatical sportsman and a notorious womaniser. Both pastimes came together on the shore of Birket Qarun, where he built a hunting-lodge and retreat. Known as Auberge Fayum, it hosted royal parties until the final days of the Egyptian monarchy. In 1945, it was the location for high-level negotiations between the Egyptian and British authorities; no less a personage than Winston Churchill graced its halls.
After the Free Officers’ coup of 1952, Auberge Fayum was renamed Auberge du Lac, but it retained its colonial ambience and hedonistic atmosphere well into the 1970s. Today, it has been given a new lease on life, refurbished as a five-star hotel and health resort with stunning views over Birket Qarun. It is particularly popular as a weekend getaway for wealthy Egyptians. The pharaohs would have approved.
AFTER THE EXPANSION in cultivation during the Middle Kingdom and the diversion of the Bahr Yusuf at the beginning of the New Kingdom, the third great wave of land reclamation in the Fayum took place under Ptolemaic rule. From initially dismissing the region as “the marsh,” the Ptolemies came to value the Fayum for its potential to increase agricultural production and thus the wealth of Egypt. They started the process of shrinking Birket Qarun by controlling the inflow of water from the Bahr Yusuf, and reclaimed the resulting land by means of drainage ditches, canals and dykes. Sweet Nile water was pumped on to
the new fields by means of Archimedes screws, manned around the clock. As a result, the area under cultivation grew rapidly and the Fayum became one of the richest areas of farmland in Egypt. It was particularly prized for its vineyards, orchards and market gardens. (Today, it remains a major area for flower-growing, and most of the flower waters and essential oils sold in the bazaars of Cairo originate in the Fayum.)
Much of the new farmland was apportioned to army veterans, brought in from other places in Egypt and from the wider Mediterranean. This process transformed the ethnic mix of the Fayum and led on occasions to open hostility between communities. A few of the new settlements, such as Samareia, had Jewish names, reflecting the origin of their particular settlers. Most of the landowners were Greek, while the irrigation workers and humble fellahin were Egyptian. Half the population were veterans and their families, half civilians. Added to this mix were tourists from across the Ptolemaic lands, drawn by the attraction of feeding the sacred crocodiles of Krokodilopolis with fried fish and honey cakes sold by the enterprising priests. (A Roman-period papyrus recounts how “Lucius Memmius, a Roman senator, who occupies a position of great dignity and honour, is making the voyage from Alexandria to the Arsinoite Nome to see the sights. Let him be received with special magnificence and take care that … the customary tit-bits for Petesouchos and the crocodiles … be provided.”11) All in all, the Ptolemaic Fayum was a cultural and linguistic melting-pot, a microcosm of the wider Nile Valley under Hellenistic rule.
Among the newly founded settlements was the city of Karanis. Located on the north-eastern edge of the Fayum, on the border between cultivation and desert, it covered an area of 185 acres and flourished for over seven centuries, from 270 BC to AD 500. Excavations at the site in modern times have yielded major quantities of both archaeological and documentary evidence, making Karanis one of the best-understood settlements of the ancient Mediterranean world. In its multistorey houses lived mostly poor farm-workers who toiled in the fields to bring in an annual grain harvest to benefit absentee landlords. Children were sent to work in the fields at an early age, and families supplemented their meagre income by keeping a few farm animals themselves and rearing flocks of pigeons in large dovecots on behalf of wealthy patrons.
In such miserable conditions, it is little wonder that the inhabitants of Karanis sought divine assistance. In its heyday, the city boasted two temples, the southern dedicated to two local crocodile gods, Pnepheros and Petesouchos, and the northern to the compound Greek–Egyptian deity Zeus-Ammon-Serapis-Helios. There was also a cult centre for the Thracian horseman-god Heron, and perhaps even a Mithraeum, while a wall painting from a household shrine showing Isis suckling the infant Horus directly foreshadowed the Christian iconography of the Virgin and child. The citizens of Karanis, it seems, were covering all their spiritual bases.
But the Fayum’s Ptolemaic renaissance was shortlived. By the reign of Ptolemy II, with the state increasingly distracted by foreign policy crises, the essential infrastructure of irrigation started to be neglected. Canals silted up, farmland turned back to desert and the population shrank. Only the Roman conquest of Egypt saved the Fayum from further decline. Soon after seizing power, and recognising the potential of the region to supply Rome with grain, the emperor Augustus ordered the Roman army into the Fayum to repair the irrigation system. The turnaround was swift. Cities like Karanis boomed again, boosted by economic links with neighbouring communities and with the great Mediterranean port of Alexandria. Grain production soared; with 10 per cent of Egypt’s cultivable land, the Fayum became known as the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Large numbers of army veterans were granted land, swelling the population. But it was not all rosy. The Roman emperors grew greedy and started to tax the population of the Fayum more heavily than other Egyptians—twice the average, in fact. Eventually many people moved away to avoid serfdom. In AD 165 a plague killed much of the remaining population. By the late second century, social order had started to break down. Papyri from the town of Tebtunis, one of the largest settlements in the region, record extortion, theft, disappearances, and even an attempted gang murder.
Set against this picture of societal decline is an extraordinary cultural heritage, reflecting the Fayum’s multi-ethnic, polyglot population. Romans and Egyptians moved in the same social circles (even if the Romans were generally wealthier), and both communities wrote in Greek. This complex, composite identity was expressed most creatively—and in true Egyptian fashion—in the funerary customs of the Graeco-Roman Fayum. Perhaps the most celebrated objects of the period from anywhere in Egypt are the extraordinary mummy portraits from Hawara, the site of Amenemhat III’s pyramid complex on the edge of the Fayum. In classical times, burial near the fabled Labyrinth was a particular privilege, and Hawara served as the cemetery for the urbanised elite of the regional capital. The gilded mummy masks, which feature Graeco-Roman portraiture in a quintessentially Egyptian context, bring us face to face with the higher echelons of Fayum society. They also tell poignant personal stories.
An example is Artemidorus, a man of about twenty years, with large brown eyes under arched bushy eyebrows, a long aquiline nose, full lips, sunburned skin and dark brown hair brushed forwards in the style fashionable during the reign of the emperor Trajan. In his mummy portrait of about AD 120, painted in encaustic on lime wood with gold-leaf decoration, Artemidorus is shown wearing a white tunic and a creamy white mantle over his left shoulder. In one person, he thus combines a Greek name, Greek identity (his father was also called Artemidorus), a Romanised portrait, and an adherence to Egyptian funerary customs. The woman buried with him (his wife?) had the Egyptian name Themoutharin, adding a further twist.
About a century earlier, during the reign of Augustus, another young man with a Greek name was buried in the cemetery at Hawara. In his mummy portrait, Syros son of Herakles harked back to Ptolemaic imagery—an indication, perhaps, that he resented the recent Roman conquest?—with his sculpted cheekbones and large ears set high on the sides of his head. Most striking, however, was the prominent Egyptian imagery with which he chose to have his portrait adorned: a row of cobras with solar discs on their heads, a winged scarab-beetle, sphinxes, a human-headed ba-bird, the goddess Nut, the mummy laid on a bier, and the gods Anubis and Horus leading the deceased into the presence of Osiris. There is no hint of Romanisation, but rather a conscious reverence for the beliefs and customs of ancient Egypt. All the more surprising, therefore, that Syros’ companion in death (and most probably his close friend in life), a young man called Mareis, should have chosen to be painted sporting a fashionable Roman hairstyle of curls brushed forwards on to the brow. In the Graeco-Roman Fayum, identities and friendships bridged ethnic and cultural divisions in often complex ways.
A final mummy mask from the Fayum is of a young woman of delicate features. She was aged in her late teens or early twenties when she died around AD 40. The only ornamentation on her portrait is a pair of large earrings, each comprising a pearl suspended from a gold disc. An inscription in Greek next to her face names her as “Hermione, teacher of grammar.” In her mixed Egypto-Graeco-Roman community, her role would have been to promote the Greek cultural traditions of the ruling elite, which included a thorough knowledge of grammar. Her mummy mask, together with her complete mummified body, was discovered by Flinders Petrie at Hawara in 1888. Hermione looked like just the sort of woman of whom Petrie approved, a “studious and meek schoolmistress without a trace of show or ornament.”12 He duly sent her, and her mask, to Girton College Cambridge, to inspire its female students to yet greater feats of self-effacing erudition. It is one of the great ironies of Egyptology that Hermione was discovered in the very year in which Gertrude Caton-Thompson was born—a woman who, under Petrie’s own tutelage, would equal his discoveries in the Fayum and strike a blow for an altogether different kind of female scholarship.
The Fayum portraits represent the region’s cultural zenith, but since the fall of the Roman Empire the Fayum has experienced mix
ed fortunes. Like other remoter parts of Egypt, it attracted early Christian settlers, and was particularly popular with those seeking an ascetic lifestyle. Christianity put down deep roots (the region eventually boasted thirty-five monasteries), and the inhabitants of the Fayum did not take kindly to the Arab invasion of AD 639. The region remained a hotbed of rebellion and was the last part of Egypt to be fully subdued by the Arab conquerors. Little wonder, then, that the Fayum was by turns plundered and neglected by Egypt’s Muslim rulers. Invading Fatimid armies laid waste to the region in 969, and thereafter it continued a long decline into the Ottoman era. In 1245, when the local governor commissioned a survey of the hydrology for his masters in Cairo, he reported a region almost completely abandoned; the Fayum was at its lowest ebb in over six thousand years. At the beginning of the reign of Muhammad Ali in the early nineteenth century, when Egypt began its emergence into the modern age, there were only 60 villages in the Fayum—compared with 114 under Ptolemaic rule, two thousand years earlier.
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