Thanks to his modest bearing, Niebuhr escaped the more dramatic kind of incident that occurred so frequently on Forsskål’s trips into the desert. The only time he found himself in a critical situation was when he was in the company of the self-assured botanist, who did not find it easy to divest himself of his lofty sense of superiority. This was in the spring of 1762. Forsskål had promised to help Niebuhr with some survey work on the pyramids at Gizeh; and one afternoon the two men, accompanied by two Arab guides, were riding on their donkeys over the dunes, Niebuhr with his astrolabe in front of him on the saddle. As they were approaching the pyramids, they suddenly caught sight of an armed Arab galloping towards them at full speed out of the desert.
To picture the place as it then was, we must try to distinguish it from the tourist attraction it is to-day. No Napoleon had as yet made the pyramids fashionable in the capitals of Europe; there were no hotels with their swimming baths and tennis courts, no riding schools or night clubs, no kiosks with postcards and colour films, no asphalt roads from which a car-borne public can view the monuments to King Cheops and King Khafra bathed not in moonlight but in floodlight. Remote from Cairo (when you have to travel there by donkey), these enormous monuments lay there in the middle of the desert whipped by dust-storms, with the sphinx half-buried in the sand and surrounded by fallen blocks of stone. Isolated and eroded, they presented their decay to the shifting stars, the only tourists who regularly passed that way. Their passages fallen in, their burial chambers plundered, they lay waiting to serve as a convenient quarry when the Sultan took it into his head to erect some new buildings in Cairo, or when the people in the nearby village needed an extra byre.
It is in such desolate surroundings that Forsskål and Niebuhr saw the stranger ride up to them and halt his horse in front of their donkeys. When he heard of their errand, he offered to conduct them to the pyramids; but Forsskål, feeling that they had enough with their own two guides, declined. The Arab declared that in any case they could not prevent him from accompanying them; and he rode with them to the monuments. As they rounded a sand-dune, he rode quickly on, stuck his lance in the sand in front of Forsskål, and forbade him to ride any farther until he had given him baksheesh. Carsten Niebuhr takes up the story: “Herr Forsskål not only refused to give him anything, but also refused to hold out any promise of anything. Yet we who sat there unarmed on our donkeys were quite defenceless against this sheik, especially as we could not rely in any way on our guides. I therefore rode quickly up to the top of the dune and shouted to Herr Forsskål that there were some people working down on the plain. When the sheik heard this he once again became quite polite. But we now decided not to ride on any farther, but instead to turn back to a village three or four miles from Gizeh, whither the Arabs had promised to accompany us. On the way there the young sheik behaved very arrogantly, but we had to be patient. As we parted company he once more demanded a tip from us. He would certainly have been content with little, but Herr Forsskål had taken it into his head not to give him anything at all. When the man saw he was not going to achieve anything that way, he stretched out his hand to my companion’s head and took his turban. My friend now adopted an admirable attitude. His manner grew quite cold; he turned to the two other Arabs and said: ‘You are Bedouin; in our country people say that we Europeans can travel in complete security so long as we are under the protection of the Bedouin. If you therefore stand by and let me be robbed by this companion of yours, I will go home and tell people that one cannot trust the Bedouin.’ These words so roused the Arabs’ pride that they at once compelled the third man to give the turban back. Thereupon he turned to me; and as I would not give him anything either, he quickly reached out for my astrolabe, which I was holding in front of me on my donkey.”
An Egyptian Arab drawn by Baurenfeind. According to Niebuhr, the Bedouin who tried to attack Forsskål by the pyramids was dressed in the same way. (After a block by Clemens)
The patient Niebuhr would stand a good deal, but not rude hands laid on his astrolabe. In the last analysis it was his most reliable guide, giving him information that nobody else could provide, and in Egypt completely irreplaceable. As the Arab made to take hold of the instrument, the otherwise even-tempered Niebuhr saw red.
“Unfortunately I could not take things quite so calmly and coolly as Herr Forsskål. I seized him by the big kerchief he had wound round his neck, and as he was sitting on his horse without holding on to the reins, he promptly fell to the ground. This put me into a position of extreme danger, because the young man regarded it as a fearful insult, in the presence of the many peasants who had gradually collected around us, to be thrown to the ground by a Christian. Immediately he pulled out his pistol and thrust it against my breast. I am afraid I cannot deny that at that moment I believed death was near. But presumably the weapon cannot have been loaded. The other Arabs tried to calm him down, and at last he gave us to understand that he would be satisfied if I gave him half a Speciedaler.”
Under the threat of similar terrors Niebuhr and Forsskål continued their work on the pyramids for the next few days. Niebuhr checked their siting with his compass and found that the four sides lay exactly north, east, south and west—a recognition not really affected by more recent measurements, which show that the discrepancy between the alignment of the sides of the pyramids and the cardinal points of the compass amounts to only a fraction of a degree. Moreover he climbed both the Cheops pyramid and the precipitous Khafra pyramid, which to-day only trained mountaineers dare attempt, and came down convinced that both monuments were hewn from the top downwards—a theory shared by a majority of the experts.
The triangulations by which Niebuhr calculated the height of the pyramids
Finally, Niebuhr attempted to measure the heights of the two pyramids. He himself says about this: “When there is only a limited time in which to inspect these astonishing works of architecture, and when one is, moreover, surrounded by people who must be regarded as potential robbers, one does not always choose the most straightforward and most reliable method; my measurements are therefore not always as accurate as I might wish.” Let us see what they are. Niebuhr proceeded by employing a number of ingenious triangulations, the angles of which he measured with his astrolabe. By such means he calculated the height of the pyramid of Cheops as being 440 feet. If we assume he was using Danish feet, and take a Danish foot as equivalent to 0.31385 metres, his estimate of the height of the pyramid of Cheops then becomes 138.09 metres. According to the most recent measurements using precision instruments of a very different kind, the height of the Cheops pyramid is 137-38 metres. The difference thus amounts to only 71 centimetres—an error of barely one half of one per cent. For the pyramid of Khafra he similarly arrived at a figure a little higher than the present one. It is of course possible that both pyramids are in fact lower to-day than they were when Niebuhr measured them, as a result of the intervening two hundred years of wind erosion and decay. But that this is not an altogether adequate explanation of the small discrepancy in his figures is clear from the measurements he made, which show considerable error. To find the length of the pyramids, Niebuhr had—because of the large number of fallen stones—to be content with pacing them off as accurately as he could, a method that resulted in inaccuracies of up to 5 per cent.
In spite of these deficiencies, however, he succeeded in these few days at Gizeh in achieving the expedition’s first important result. It is worth remembering that, when Napoleon Bonaparte uttered his famous words about the forty centuries looking down on the French soldiers from the top of the pyramids, a country lad from the North Friesland marshlands had already measured the height of the same pyramids thirty-six years earlier with an accuracy of up to half of one per cent. Napoleon’s words echoed throughout Europe; Niebuhr’s measurements did not, but neither did they cost human lives. On the contrary, they seem to rouse from centuries of oblivion those workers who had toiled on the granite so that there might be something to look down upon Napoleon.
It is almost as though the original ideas of the ancient Egyptians express themselves again through the medium of Carsten Niebuhr’s geometrical calculations. From these two miserable quarries in the desert arise once more the graves of King Cheops and King Khafra.
Niebuhr’s work on the pyramids had, in a sense, perspectives wider than those he was able to measure with his astrolabe. For the first time we see him also beginning to ponder things that he cannot reduce to clear geometrical formulæ. He noticed the small fossils in the rock upon which the pyramids are built—fossils about the size of a coin, which even to-day the Arabs call Fadda abu el-haun, or Sphinx coins. They occur along with other even smaller fossils that are present in enormous numbers in the hills of Egypt. Niebuhr picked up one of these fossils; and perhaps he learnt from Forsskål how this had once been a mollusc living in the sea that at that time covered all Egypt. Niebuhr stood looking at the fossil in wonderment, and goes on: “How many years must it have taken for such an enormous number of snails to be born and to die, that this hill might reach its present height? How many years must it have taken before Egypt dried out, especially if the water receded as slowly as has been the case for the last few thousand years? How many years must it have taken before Egypt became sufficiently populated for men to begin dreaming of building the first pyramid? How many years must have rolled by before the large number of pyramids we can still see in Egypt to-day had been built—and yet we do not know with any certainty even to-day in what century and by whom the last of them was built.”
With the measuring of the pyramids at Gizeh, Niebuhr had finished his work in Cairo. Months had elapsed, but still they waited in vain for a reply from Bernstorff; and as their departure was constantly being postponed, Niebuhr now had to find some other outlet for his active mind. He decided to copy some hieroglyphic inscriptions that had intrigued him ever since he first found them on some sarcophagi in the middle of one of Cairo’s busiest streets. In his diary he relates how the job of copying them at first seemed almost hopelessly difficult; but little by little he got so much practice that the Egyptian characters caused him no more difficulty than did the Greek or Cufic.
How comprehensive this work which he did “for his own amusement” actually was can be seen from his journal, which includes no less than thirteen large plates, covered with closely written hieroglyphics. Niebuhr hoped that these copies might help in solving the mystery of Egyptian writing. This hope was in vain, for the mystery was not solved until over fifty years later, when Champollion brilliantly deciphered the Rosetta Stone. We have not yet reached that point in our history of the expedition where Niebuhr, by copying ancient inscriptions, was to be the immediate cause of anything so important as the deciphering of an entire language.
Nevertheless these thirteen plates leave a strong impression on the beholder because they show so little trace of the difficulties under which they were made. The inscriptions were in the open street, and Niebuhr had to carry out his slow and patient work surrounded by a crowd of curious Arabs, half astonished and half angry. Because of the crowds that gathered, Niebuhr soon roused the disapproval of the authorities; and the so-called saradsj’s (who were not unlike a kind of police constable) then tried on every conceivable pretext to cheat him and subject him to crude demands for money. For his assistant Niebuhr had picked one of his “poor students,” and time after time the two men had to interrupt their work because of shouted insults and other uproar. One afternoon a saradsj threatened Niebuhr with a beating on the spot if he did not promptly vanish. The Mohammedan student advised him to withdraw, for it was quite clear that the man’s threat was serious. Niebuhr had to yield, and to the jeers of the crowd he collected his equipment and disappeared. He walked home brooding darkly and smarting under the humiliation. Finally he complained to his Arab student: Why should he put up with being insulted by such an ignorant person, without being able to answer back?
They continued for a moment along the street in silence. Then the Mohammedan answered: “Can you forbid a dog to bark at you? Or when you have been kicked by a donkey, are you any better a person for kicking it back?”
5
The arduous work of copying the hieroglyphics in Cairo was a task that, according to the royal instructions, should have been done by the expedition’s philologist, Professor von Haven. It is difficult to imagine that distinguished gentleman enduring all the inconveniences Niebuhr had to go through in this connection; and in all the many months the expedition spent in Cairo, he made no attempt to do so. While Forsskål was interesting himself in the times of arrival of the caravans and Niebuhr was measuring the height of the pyramids, the Dane led a cloistered, luxurious existence in M. Bezoardin’s house in the French quarter. Professor von Haven had other problems.
From the time of his stay in Cairo five letters in all are extant from von Haven’s hand: three to von Gähler, one to Moltke, and one to Temler, who was a secretary in the German Chancellery in Copenhagen; the first four letters are in French, the last is written in an equally impeccable German. Together they convey by subtle omission what von Haven was not managing to get done in Cairo.
First came the duties of representation. A professor must not take these too lightly, and von Haven kept von Gähler fully informed on all social matters. He had been to receptions given by the French Consul and the Venetian Consul. He found the former “young, rich, phlegmatic, taciturn, but from all reports very cultured,” while the latter in his eyes was “fairly old, feeble, with a choleric temperament and rather overbearing.” At the first of these places von Haven fancied he was given a rather reserved reception; the Venetian Consul on the other hand (and evidently despite his choleric temperament) had been “especially cordial.” After these visits to the two consuls it was the turn of the more prominent European businessmen in the town; von Haven reported that he had paid formal visits to all of them and it is obvious how busy he must have been when he explains that “these gentlemen, together with their households, make up in all about forty people.”
Yet all this was only an overture. Von Haven had an audience with Mustapha Pasha himself, the Governor of Cairo; and the description of his visit fills several pages of his letter to von Gähler. The Governor received him with exceptional politeness; the Governor was clad in his splendid ceremonial robes of sable; the Governor asked after the health of His Majesty, the King of Denmark; everybody rose and Professor von Haven gave a little speech of thanks; Professor von Haven bowed and smiled; Professor von Haven was offered “coffee, sherbet-dishes, perfumes and sweet-smelling rose water” by the innumerable slaves and servants of the house.
Then he turned his attention to His Grace the Archbishop of Sinai, to His Excellency the Patriarch of Alexandria, to Signor Angeli d’Athanasio, a wealthy Greek shipowner, to Signor Nicolo Paremble, another wealthy Greek shipowner; and everywhere the Danish professor was received with the most exquisite tokens of respect, and with the sweetest smelling rose water. A little of this also got sprinkled on Herr Kramer; Professor von Haven spoke about his countryman in flattering phrases, and since these few but benevolent lines are absolutely the only evidence that has survived of what Christian Kramer was doing during their long stay in Cairo, it is only fair to quote them here in full. They ran as follows: “As a doctor, Herr Kramer has been much in demand here in Cairo. The Venetian Consul has consulted him, and Pasha Odibaschi sent for him to examine his donkeys and horses.”
About his more scholarly activity our philologist is not nearly so detailed in his information. He remarks to Moltke in passing that in Cairo he has acquired “fifty or so manuscripts” but he does not go into any more details about them; and several months later the number seems to have diminished considerably, seeing that he then informed Temler that in Egypt he “has found only a few precious Hebrew testaments, which are over 1000 years old, together with some Arabic books.” His historical researches, he tells Moltke, have on the other hand been entirely fruitless: “Anyone who hopes to learn anything new about the h
istory of Arabia before the time of Mohammed is deceiving himself; the historian Pocock has said everything there is to say. I doubt very much whether more is known about this subject even in Arabia itself. The hopes which have been held by the French Academy will be fulfilled only in a very small degree.” Von Haven also felt he could afford to be sceptical of the results of the work of the other members of the expedition—for example, the survey work at Gizeh. “As far as the pyramids are concerned,” he says, “I do not believe that any of us has discovered anything new here, because none of us understands very much about architecture.”
Baurenfeind’s drawings of Egyptian hats
In his letter to Moltke von Haven finally touched on his own purely linguistic studies. He did so in the following ambiguous phrases: “The remainder of my time has been devoted to specialised philological investigations, which will need a period of time much longer than the span of my present stay in Egypt to come to full maturity, and which as a consequence cannot at the present moment be communicated to other scholars. Moreover Herr Michaelis asked me not so much to do linguistic research in Egypt as in Arabia itself.”
The long and short of these evasions is that von Haven’s activity during the year and more of their stay in Egypt consisted in the purchase of two Hebrew Testaments. Herr Kramer for his part cured one donkey. The rest is rose water.
Yet this was by no means the most serious of the Danish professor’s omissions. Along with his linguistic studies, the copying of inscriptions and the purchase of old books, the royal instructions had assigned to von Haven another and quite definite task, which had also to be done during the expedition’s stay in Egypt. A few years earlier some Englishmen had found a hill in the Sinai desert which the local Arabs called Djebel el-Mokateb—“the hill of inscriptions.” From what the Englishmen said, the rock faces were covered with inscriptions which European scholars supposed had been done by Moses himself when he led his people on the flight from Egypt through the Sinai desert. To visit this hill, to copy its inscriptions, to interpret their contents and thereby determine their origin had become, of all the objectives of the expedition, the one which was already assured of the greatest interest from the contemporary world; and the man who had been selected for the honour of becoming the author of a new chapter in Bible research, of acting as intermediary between Moses and Frederick V, was the Dane, Friedrich Christian von Haven.
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