European acquiescence merely encouraged Muhammad Ali to bolder measures to bolster his personal power and his country’s independence. Throughout the 1830s, Egypt’s efforts at territorial expansion – as we have seen, first an invasion of Syria to compensate for losses at the Battle of Navarino, then a full-scale assault on Constantinople – had to be reined in through protracted diplomatic negotiations. Eventually in 1840, in the face of further Egyptian confrontation with the Ottoman Empire, the European powers called the Convention of London. They offered Muhammad Ali a deal: if he withdrew his forces from Lebanon and Syria, they would grant him and his dynasty hereditary rule over Egypt. His brinksmanship had worked. He had to accept a limit on the size of the Egyptian army, but he had gained his independence from the sultan and established himself as the unquestioned ruler of the Nile Valley.
His political goals achieved, Muhammad Ali duly set about transforming Egypt’s economy. His agricultural reforms brought an additional one million acres of land under cultivation, in turn leading to a rapid expansion of the population – from 2.5 million to 4.5 million within the space of twenty-five years. Political stability also led to a surge in Europeans travelling to, and through, Egypt. Within eight years, the number of travellers taking the overland route between Britain and India increased by a factor of ten. The Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company won the contract to deliver mail to India, and operated on both sides of the isthmus of Suez. In the process, the P&O steamer service via Gibraltar and Malta gave British travellers a faster, more frequent route to Egypt. To cater to this burgeoning number of transit passengers, two English entrepreneurs named Hill and Raven set up a series of rest houses between Cairo and Suez. Each had its own well to supply fresh water, and was stocked with food and drink: beer and ale at a shilling a bottle, and even a modest range of wines. However, even with such comforts, Suez, never mind the Eastern Desert, could not compete with the attractions of Cairo. As a result, hotels run by and for Europeans began to spring up across the capital during the 1830s. A certain Samuel Shepheard was employed to run Hill’s hotels, including the one in central Cairo that would later bear his name and become a central fixture in the European experience of Egypt. Passengers bound for India could remain in Cairo until their steamer for India was ready, its arrival at Suez announced by a semaphore relay across the desert.56
All this economic development put Egypt’s heritage in an increasingly vulnerable position. As early as 1829, Champollion had appealed to Muhammad Ali to protect his country’s patrimony. Eventually, six years later, the Egyptian government passed its first piece of antiquities legislation. It blamed Europeans (with some justification) for the destruction of Egypt’s monuments, but also cited European precedents for introducing an export ban on antiquities and the establishment of a national collection. The latter, named the Antiqakhana, was initially set up in the Ezbekiya district, under the direction of the imam Tahtawi. However, within a few years, it was already in a parlous condition: ‘nothing but a confused mass of broken mummies and cases, some imperfect tablets, and various fragments, which, had they been capable of being spoilt, would have been rendered valueless by the damp of the place’.57 (Just two decades after its establishment, the collection had disappeared entirely, through a combination of neglect and indifference; the final pieces were presented to Archduke Maximilian of Austria in 1855 as a diplomatic gift.58)
At the same time as the Egyptian government was passing a law to protect its ancient monuments, Muhammad Ali was giving an order to build eighteen new saltpetre factories, one of them constructed from blocks dynamited from the ninth pylon at Karnak. The thoughtless neglect and wanton destruction of Egypt’s pharaonic inheritance provoked a mixture of despair and anger among Western observers. The French claimed the moral high ground, asserting that: ‘France, snatching an obelisk from the ever-heightening mud of the Nile, or the savage ignorance of the Turks . . . earns a right to the thanks of the learned of Europe, to whom belong all the monuments of antiquity, because they know how to appreciate them. Antiquity is a garden that belongs by natural right to those who cultivate and harvest its fruits.’59
The American consul in Cairo, George Gliddon, was even more outspoken, claiming that ‘in destroying the Ancient Monuments of Egypt, the present government of that country has been influenced by avarice, wantonness and negligence’.60 He praised Champollion for delivering antiquities ‘out of the house of bondage’61 to the safety of European museums, and launched a vitriolic attack on Muhammad Ali for neglecting, not just pharaonic but also Islamic monuments: ‘besides destroying the Monuments of remote Egyptian antiquity, the civilizing and praise-bespattered ruler of Egypt has not erected any substitutes worthy of the slightest notice, nor has he preserved those great and noble Edifices belonging to the religion, of which he is so erroneously termed the Defender and Representative’.62
Gliddon painted a bleak picture of what would happen if no action were taken – ‘Great will be the disappointment of the traveler . . . to find, – a mound, where a Temple existed – a crater, where a sculptured Pylon but lately stood – a heap of broken stones on the site of a gigantic Portico – a yawning abyss, instead of a Hemi-speos – a powder-blasted cavern, in lieu of a Monarch’s tomb!’63 – in each case citing a real example of a site where this had already happened or was about to occur. He appealed to his readers to intervene before it was too late: ‘Let therefore all those parties, individuals, or Societies, who are anxious to save Egypt’s remaining Antiquities, from a destruction that will otherwise be swift and inevitable, apply to their respective Governments, and urge the subject upon their enlightened notice.’64
As for the handful of Egyptians actively interested in their country’s pre-Islamic past, people like Tahtawi conceded the pre-eminence of European scholarship but did not believe this gave foreigners the right to remove Egyptian antiquities at will.65
It was in this febrile atmosphere of destruction and mutual recrimination that a third Englishman abroad came to Egypt, with literally explosive consequences.
In contrast to Wilkinson and Lane, Richard William Howard Vyse (1784–1853) was no scholar or aesthete. He was an army man through and through. His father had been a general, his grandfather a field marshal. Following in the family tradition, Vyse joined the British army in 1800 at the age of sixteen and won rapid promotion up the ranks: lieutenant in 1801, captain in 1802, major in 1813.66 He combined his military duties with two terms as a Member of Parliament for Beverley and then for Honiton (this, of course, was before the Great Reform Act).
Vyse arrived in Egypt at the end of December 1835, intending to visit the major sites, satisfy his curiosity, and prove the historical veracity of the Bible. He later wrote: ‘Among the many objects of interest . . . the Pyramids, particularly those of Gizeh, attracted my attention.’67 He was intrigued by their age, purpose and construction, and determined to break open their secrets. True to his military instincts, Vyse first carried out reconnaissance on the Giza plateau, before commencing ‘operations’ in November 1836. There had been previous half-hearted attempts to explore the pyramids. By contrast, Vyse was resolved to leave no stone unturned. His account of the expedition is peppered with references to ‘blasting’: ‘Two quarrymen were employed in blasting the stones in the lower entrance of the Second Pyramid’;68 ‘Daoud was sent to blast in Davison’s Chamber; and small charges of gunpowder were used in the other works wherever they could be applied.’69 The pyramid of Menkaura, with its lower courses of granite casing, had proved particularly intractable to earlier investigators, but Vyse was not going to be deterred: ‘I was resolved to examine every part of the pavement, and even to take down the face of the building; in short, to leave no expedient untried, with whatever expense of money or time it might be attended, to find the mysterious entrance’;70 ‘the mortar was nearly as hard as the stone itself, so that with Arab workmen, and common tools, it was a most tedious operation . . . Towards the end of this work gunpowder was used with great effect.’71
The impact on the monuments was matched by the deleterious effects on Vyse’s workmen – ‘Achmet, the Janissary, was sent to Cairo on account of ophthalmia . . . a circumstance not to be wondered at, considering the dust and heat to which he had been constantly exposed by night as well as by day in the bottom of the shaft of the Third Pyramid’72 – but the pyramids duly yielded up their secrets. In the Great Pyramid, Vyse discovered a further set of relieving chambers above the burial chamber. These he named, without a hint of irony, after famous Britons of his day: the Duke of Wellington, Admiral Nelson, the now obscure Lady Arbuthnot, and the (long since forgotten) diplomat Patrick Campbell. In his diary entry for 28 April 1837, Vyse proudly recorded: ‘Mr Hill inscribed Nelson’s great name in the chamber lately discovered.’73 In the pyramid of Menkaura, Vyse located the burial chamber which still housed the king’s basalt sarcophagus. This was promptly extracted and sent to the British Museum in London, but was lost at sea when the ship carrying it, the Beatrice, sank off the coast of Spain. (It still awaits recovery.) Vyse also bored into the back of the Great Sphinx, attempting to find a hidden chamber. The great statue put up stiff resistance to the assault – ‘The boring rods were broken owing to the carelessness of the Arabs, at the depth of twenty-seven feet in the back of the Sphinx. Various attempts were made to get them out, and on the 21st of July gunpowder was used for that purpose’74 – but eventually yielded. Nothing was found.
Vyse was utterly confident of his own abilities and secure in his own views. Unsurprisingly, he fell out with his first assistant, Caviglia. Vyse subsequently hired a civil engineer from Lincolnshire, John Shae Perring, lately arrived in Egypt as manager of public works for Muhammad Ali. Vyse left Perring to complete the work at the pyramids, and returned to England to resume his military career.75 Despite its (numerous) shortcomings, Vyse’s work at the pyramids was, nonetheless, the most important undertaken at Giza during the nineteenth century, and the resulting publication remained a standard work well into the twentieth. Having travelled to Egypt to prove the veracity of the Bible (which attributed the pyramids to the Shepherd Kings), Vyse returned to England having definitively shown that they were, in fact, royal tombs of the Old Kingdom. It was a small but significant victory for archaeology over ideology.
Even as Vyse was working at Giza with his sticks of dynamite and boring rods, two important developments signalled the dawning of a new era for the study and conservation of Egypt’s cultural heritage. In Cairo, European residents with a serious interest in antiquity founded the Egyptian Society. Inspired by memories of Napoleon’s short-lived Institut d’Egypte, its objective was to serve as ‘a rendezvous for Travellers, with the view of associating literary and scientific men, who may from time to time visit Egypt’.76 Membership grew steadily, from an initial dozen or so to over a hundred within seven years. The society acquired a good working library, and conferred honorary membership on all the distinguished European figures of Egyptian scholarship: Jomard and Rosellini, Wilkinson and Lane. In London, at the same time, another future member, Samuel Birch, began his long and distinguished career at the British Museum. Over the next half-century, he would establish the museum as a leading centre of scholarship on ancient Egypt, bringing a new professionalism to the work of cataloguing and studying its growing collections. Every scholar interested in Egypt, from Lepsius to Budge, would beat a path to Birch’s door. He would go on to found the influential Society of Biblical Archaeology; and he would assist both with the publication of Vyse’s expedition report and with the revisions to Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs.
As for Wilkinson himself, after Manners and Customs was published in 1837, his considerable energies increasingly took him in different directions. When he had left Egypt, back in 1833, he had told his friend Hay that he planned to return within two years. But he was soon diverted by other interests. He spent much of his time visiting his wide circle of well-read and well-heeled friends, painting refined watercolours of their country houses, indulging his love of conversation and debate. He corresponded with the scientist Charles Babbage, and with Byron’s daughter, the mathematician Ada Lovelace. He joined the Oriental Club and the Athenaeum; the latter was housed in a new building designed by James Burton’s younger brother, Decimus, and hosted the Cabinet for dinner most Wednesdays. Wilkinson’s two clubs, along with the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature – he had been elected a fellow of both – and the Royal Geographical Society – where he became a member of the council – provided intellectual stimulation aplenty. He enjoyed his role as a public intellectual, his opinion being sought on the great issues of the day, and he was knighted in 1839 (he chose to be known as ‘Sir Gardner’ rather than ‘Sir John’).
Wilkinson maintained more than a passing interest in Egyptology, advising the British Museum, to which he had donated some of his collection of antiquities, on further acquisitions. In 1841, he finally returned to Egypt to gather material for a second edition of his Topography of Thebes (renamed Modern Egypt and Thebes (1843)). He did not like what he found. He wrote to Ada Lovelace: ‘Egypt is much spoilt since I saw it before . . . the travellers who go up the Nile will I fear soon be like Rhine tourists & Cheapside will pour out its legions upon Egypt.’77 Of course, these very travellers were the people for whom he was writing Modern Egypt and Thebes, just as they would be the readers of its successor volume, Murray’s A Handbook for Egypt (1847), one of a series that set the pattern for all subsequent tourist guides.
Wilkinson returned to Egypt and Nubia for a third time in the winter of 1848–9, sailing upstream as far south as the temple of Gebel Barkal, a site that only a handful of Europeans had visited. From his close study of pharaonic monuments, Wilkinson had developed a keen interest in ancient Egyptian architecture; but, when it came to publishing the material, he had chosen to leave the field clear for his friend Hay. Only when it became apparent that Hay was never going to deliver did Wilkinson complete his own study, publishing it privately by subscription. The Architecture of Ancient Egypt (1850) appeared in the same year as David Roberts’s six influential volumes of lithographs of The Holy Land, Syria, Egypt and Nubia.78 Wilkinson’s book may not have had such a wide circulation, but its impact on mid-nineteenth-century architecture was profound. Suddenly, Egyptianizing forms became all the rage, often in the most unlikely contexts. John Marshall’s flax mill in Leeds had a facade modelled on the temple of Edfu, and a smokestack disguised as an obelisk. The architects of the Albert Memorial even briefly considered an Egyptian design.
In October 1855, suffering from ill-health, Wilkinson sailed again to Egypt for the fourth and last time, but sunstroke kept him confined to his cabin for much of his stay. Egyptological scholarship, which he had done so much to foster, had come on in leaps and bounds, and a new generation of scholars had left him behind. Edward Lane’s nephew, Reginald Stuart Poole, kept him abreast of new developments; but Wilkinson was now an observer rather than an active participant. On his return to Britain in 1856, he married Caroline Lucas, a woman twenty-four years his junior to whom he had been introduced by a mutual friend, the Welsh heiress Lady Llanover. In Caroline’s company, he spent his final years living on the Gower Peninsula, his interests focussed on Welsh culture and British antiquities. He died in 1875 and was buried at Llandovery in a grave marked by a monument of his own design, in the shape of an obelisk.
Meanwhile, Lane – the only one of Wilkinson’s friends who maintained a lasting interest in Egypt – had struggled to find a publisher for his monumental Arabic–English Lexicon. The Prussian government had promised to cover the costs of printing, but the 1848 revolutions in Europe scuppered the plan. Eventually, Lane persuaded his friend Lord Prudhoe (who had succeeded to the dukedom of Northumberland in 1847) to finance the work, while Lane and his family had to subsist on a modest annual grant from the British Government Fund for Special Service. After 1849, he never returned to Egypt, but continued to work on the Lexicon for the rest of his life, devoting himself to it nearly every day. It remains supreme in its field. Lane died in 1876, just ten months after Wilkinson.
Back in their youth, in the 1830s, Wilkinson and Lane, together with their group of friends and fellow-travellers, had transformed the West’s engagement with Egypt. The pharaonic past, which under Champollion had been the preserve of erudite specialists, was made accessible to an interested public. And Arab Egypt, for so long seen through the lens of Crusader tales and the Arabian Nights, was revealed as a vibrant, complex and rapidly modernizing society. Above all, through their companion volumes of Manners and Customs, Wilkinson and Lane had given life to the people of Egypt, past and present. Dismissed by later generations as amateurs and dilettantes, Wilkinson and his colleagues are only now finally gaining recognition for their lasting contribution to Egyptology.79
FOUR
The Prussian project
Richard Lepsius and members of his Prussian expedition atop the Great Pyramid at Giza, in an illustration by the expedition artist Johann Frey.
My next plan: a scientific expedition to Egypt and the copper-rich lands in Arabia.1
RICHARD LEPSIUS, 1840
Napoleon and Nelson, Salt and Drovetti, Young and Champollion: during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the scramble for Egypt – to describe, acquire, understand and control – was a two-horse race between France and Britain. Champollion made it possible to understand pharaonic culture in its own words, on its own terms; Wilkinson and Lane opened up new avenues of enquiry, and made Egyptian civilization, ancient and modern, accessible to the general reading public. But after Champollion’s death in 1832, none of his associates or pupils had the same depth of learning, the same drive or determination, to take his linguistic studies any further. After the death of Gell in 1836, Wilkinson’s research on ancient Egypt lacked direction, and Britain’s leadership in Egyptian archaeology and history waned. The infant discipline of Egyptology could have died there and then. With France convulsed by the aftermath of the July revolution of 1830, and Britain preoccupied with political, social and industrial upheavals, the world of ancient Egypt struggled to compete for attention. Moreover, French and British archaeologists had found a new arena for their rivalry: Mesopotamia.2 What was needed, if the study of Egypt’s ancient past was to take the next leap forward, was a new force, and a new champion.
The changes that swept Europe in the 1830s, challenging and transforming the old powers of Britain and France, also provided a window of opportunity for a new power to assert itself, on the continent and further afield. The kingdom of Prussia had been born in the early eighteenth century from the union of Brandenburg and territories to the east, and had come through a series of conflicts – the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars – with its territories intact and its position strengthened. A German customs union was established on 1 January 1834, largely at Prussian behest, ushering in a new era of prosperity and economic opportunity.3 When French forces crossed the Rhine in 1840–1, a wave of German nationalism was unleashed which Prussia was able to ride and exploit. The result was that, by 1842, Prussia had emerged, unchallenged, as the engine of German power in Europe, and a serious rival to the colonial ambitions of Britain and France.
Ever since the days of ancient Rome, upstart nations had turned to the past to legitimize their power: by appropriating the cultural glories of an illustrious predecessor, a new polity might lay claim to the mantle of leadership and assert its place on the world stage. France had done it with the Napoleonic expedition, and with the subsequent transport of one of the Luxor obelisks to Paris. (Charles X had been assured that if Paris gained an obelisk, ‘it would no longer have any reason to envy Rome’.4) Britain had done it by claiming the Rosetta Stone as war booty, and by the transport of the Young Memnon to London. Now Prussia, as the new European power, looked to the past to seize the present and assert its future.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. By a remarkable coincidence, Karl Richard Lepsius (1810–84) was born exactly twenty years to the day after Champollion, and was destined to pick up the torch he had lit so brightly. Lepsius, too, showed an early genius for languages, studying Sanskrit, comparative philology and archaeology at the universities of Leipzig and Göttingen, and gaining his doctorate in 1833 with a dissertation on ancient Italian dialects. He could have taken his studies in any direction. The fact that he chose Egypt was due to three other towering figures of nineteenth-century German scholarship, men who were to act as mentors, advocates and supporters throughout Lepsius’s career, guiding his energies and directing his enthusiasms to the benefit of Egyptology. The first, and eldest, was Alexander von Humboldt, polymath and scientific adviser to successive Prussian monarchs. Humboldt’s interests were extraordinarily wide-ranging and he personally knew most of the leading European intellectuals of the age. (As we have seen, he attended the landmark session of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1822 at which Champollion announced the decipherment of hieroglyphics; Humboldt would act as a pall-bearer at Champollion’s funeral ten years later.) The second of Lepsius’s mentors was Carl Josias von Bunsen, another scholar of astonishing range and ability. Besides being a noted expert in oriental languages, philology, theology and ancient history, Bunsen was also an accomplished diplomat, serving for the best part of two decades (1824–41) as Prussian minister-resident in Rome, and then for a further fourteen years (1841–54) as Prussian ambassador in London (where his circle of acquaintances included Wilkinson and Birch). Completing the triumvirate was the archaeologist Eduard Gerhard, who spent most of his time in Rome where he and Bunsen had founded the Institute of Archaeological Correspondence in 1829 under the patronage of the then crown prince of Prussia.
During his years in Italy, Bunsen surrounded himself with a brilliant intellectual circle, akin to Gell’s in Naples, welcoming visiting scholars to discuss and debate the latest discoveries and ideas. It was in this context that Bunsen was introduced to Champollion (when the latter visited Rome in April/May 1825) and thus to the emergent discipline of Egyptology. For the rest of his career, Bunsen eagerly followed the development of the subject, corresponding with its leading practitioners. The publication of Rosellini’s Monumenti dell’Egitto e della Nubia in 1832 confirmed the importance of Egyptian civilization. The following year, Gerhard encountered Lepsius in Berlin and recommended him at once to Bunsen: here was the man to spearhead Egyptological studies in Prussia. At Gerhard’s encouragement, Lepsius travelled to Paris to spend three years learning about Champollion’s system of decipherment and conducting his own private research. Champollion had died the year before Lepsius’s arrival, but it was as if the standard of Egyptological scholarship passed seamlessly from one man to the other, Lepsius picking up where Champollion had left off. Lepsius’s studies not only confirmed the correctness of Champollion’s system, but took Egyptian philology to the next stage, enabling, for the first time, the translation of running hieroglyphic texts as opposed to mere names and epithets.5
With such an auspicious start to Prussian Egyptology, Humboldt suggested to the Berlin Academy of Sciences that it should formally adopt the new discipline as one of its areas of research; and who better to lead it than Lepsius? After initial reservations about devoting his career to a still nascent field, Lepsius agreed, and set about learning Coptic, gathering copies of ancient texts, and immersing himself in hieroglyphics. In 1836, a grant from the academy – again facilitated by Humboldt, Bunsen and Gerhard – allowed Lepsius to make an extended study trip to Italy. His itinerary followed closely that of Champollion a decade earlier. In Turin, he made copies of the Book of the Dead and the Turin Royal Canon; in Pisa, he met, and received encouragement from, Champollion’s pupil and co-director of the Franco-Tuscan expedition, Rosellini; in Livorno, he studied Egyptian artefacts being held in storage; and in Rome, he met members of Bunsen’s circle, including the chaplain to the Prussian diplomatic mission, Hermann Abeken, and the Swiss artist Johann Frey, who made engravings for Lepsius of the hieroglyphic inscriptions on Roman monuments. Bunsen and Gerhard showed their faith in Lepsius by appointing him secretary of the Institute for Archaeological Correspondence, and he established its periodical, the Annali dell’ Istituto, as a major vehicle for Egyptological scholarship. The result of this first intensive period of study was the publication, in 1837, of Lepsius’s Lettre à M. le Professeur H. Rosellini sur l’alphabet hiéroglyphique – a conscious homage to Champollion, which both championed his illustrious predecessor’s system and extended it by demonstrating the existence of syllabic as well as phonetic signs. Lepsius left Rome in 1838, prepared for the second phase of his career, which, like Champollion’s, would take him to Egypt itself.
Back in 1820–1, before Champollion or Wilkinson had set foot on Egyptian soil, the Berlin Academy had sent an expedition to the Nile Valley to collect antiquities. In the absence of an archaeological expert, it had been led by a Prussian army officer, Johann Heinrich von Minutoli, accompanied by two doctors-cum-naturalists, Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg and Wilhelm Friedrich Hemprich. They had visited distant Siwa, reached as far south as Dongola (Hemprich died in Abyssinia), and collected antiquities, as well as specimens of flora, fauna and minerals. Some of the pharaonic objects they brought back were sold in Paris and seen by Champollion; others were acquired for the Berlin Museum. Perhaps the most important outcome of the expedition was the interest in Egypt that it sparked in the young crown prince of Prussia, an interest which Minutoli encouraged and which Humboldt and Bunsen nurtured. As a result, in 1827, the prince bought the collection of Egyptian antiquities amassed by Passalacqua, which had been offered to but rejected by the French government. It formed the core of the new Berlin Museum, and Passalacqua duly had himself appointed as the first curator of Prussia’s Egyptian collections.
On 7 June 1840, the old Prussian king died, and was succeeded by his eldest son, the crown prince, as Friedrich Wilhelm IV (r.1840–61). The scholars of the Berlin Academy seized their moment. Just six months later, on 21 December, Humboldt sent the new king a formal proposal for an Egyptian expedition, suggesting Lepsius as its leader. The expedition needed a proven scholar with expertise in hieroglyphics as well as pharaonic civilization; Lepsius, in financial difficulties and struggling to establish himself in Berlin, needed the expedition to advance his career. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. To advance the cause, Lepsius wrote directly to the royal palace, pleading for this chance to secure his own and his family’s prospects. He noted: ‘Your Royal Majesty has so favourably and graciously deigned to express yourself regarding the truly confidential advice of Humboldt about my next plan: a scientific expedition to Egypt and the copper-rich lands in Arabia,’ and undertook to obtain ‘insights not accessible to Champollion’ if the king would only authorize the expedition to commence ‘next autumn for 1½ to 2 years at the state’s expense’.6 The antiquarian monarch could not resist, and, before the year was out, granted funds for a major expedition to depart for the Nile Valley the following autumn.
Planning started at once. The king appointed his minister for religious, educational and medical affairs, Johann Albrecht Friedrich Eichhorn, to oversee preparations. The first task was to identify the expedition members. Lepsius had specifically requested an architect, in order to make accurate measurements of all the monuments, something that neither the Napoleonic nor the Franco-Tuscan expedition had undertaken. He explained: ‘It is especially desirable for me to have the assistance of a technician to pursue the architectural objectives of the expedition which have, until now, been so unfairly neglected given that they constitute so important a part of Egyptian cultural history.’7
A suitable candidate soon presented himself, in the form of the Berlin-based architect and surveyor, Georg Erbkam. However, within days of Erbkam’s appointment, Lepsius began to have doubts that the rest of the preparations could be accomplished in the allotted time. If his was to be a properly scientific expedition, not just another antiquarian voyage up the Nile, it would need meticulous planning, and a great deal of advance research. He had already begun to formulate in his mind the questions he wanted the expedition to solve. Foremost among them were various unexplained intricacies of ancient Egyptian chronology. To make serious strides in this area, Lepsius realized, would require a detailed knowledge of the extant sources, notably the Turin Royal Canon. There was no way he could master the document, as well as make all the other arrangements, in a few short months. Reluctantly, he shared his doubts with his mentors. They were in agreement. In March 1841, Bunsen wrote to Eichhorn, asking for the expedition to be postponed. A few weeks later, Humboldt wrote to the king in the same vein. The financial uncertainty created by a year’s delay would be more than compensated for by the extra time for preparations.
Lepsius set to work on the Turin Royal Canon, and on the Book of the Dead in the same collection. Embarrassingly, two of his academic mentors, Bunsen and the classicist August Boeckh, favoured radically different approaches to ancient Egyptian history; Lepsius could not afford to upset either, so he produced only a handwritten manuscript of the Canon. But he was able to publish his edition of the Book of the Dead (Todtenbuch der Aegypter nach dem hieroglyphischen Papyrus in Turin), a copy of which he proudly sent to the Prussian king as a new year’s gift on 3 January 1842. Lepsius also took advantage of the expedition’s postponement to visit the most important European collections of Egyptian antiquities, in Paris, Leiden and London, leading to a second publication, Auswahl der wichtigsten Urkunden des Aegyptischen Altherthums. His scholarship was now making significant strides, and before the spring was out, the king controversially appointed Lepsius to an extraordinary professorship in the faculty of philosophy at Berlin University. (The faculty already had twenty-three extraordinary professors, against a budget for only fourteen, and had argued against creating a post in Egyptology; but Eichhorn successfully persuaded the king that an official government expedition should be led by someone with professorial status. Prussian pride prevailed.)
His major pieces of philological and cultural research accomplished, on 24 May 1842 Lepsius sent a formal prospectus to Eichhorn, setting the context and outlining his proposals for the forthcoming expedition: ‘In the twenty years since Champollion’s Lettre à M. Dacier, Egyptian history has been revealed, at first back to the time of Moses and Jacob, now back to the first flowering of the Old Kingdom.’8 He went on to chart the main achievements of Egyptology to date, including the Franco-Tuscan expedition; to laud Young as the forerunner of Champollion; to praise Wilkinson’s recently published Manners and Customs; and to note the zeal with which antiquities were being acquired in England through private as well as government enterprise, so that the British Museum now possessed the greatest collection of sculpture and manuscripts after Turin. The prospectus was carefully calculated to press all the right buttons: by praising the achievements of French and British scholars, it shone a light on the notable absence of comparable German scholarship; by referring to the impressive Egyptian collections in London and Turin, it highlighted the second-rate status of Berlin’s collection.
