Having piqued Prussia’s sense of its own destiny, Lepsius proceeded to elaborate the goals of his expedition: ‘to investigate and collect, with an historical and antiquarian view, the ancient Egyptian monuments in the Nile Valley, and upon the Peninsula of Sinai’.9 The few living Egyptologists (Rosellini, Wilkinson, Birch, and Leemans10 in Leiden) were either focussed on philology or busy curating museum collections; nobody was pursuing the study of pharaonic history. That would be Lepsius’s task, and his opportunity. He wanted to understand ancient Egyptian culture, as represented through art, mythology and language, not only in its own terms but also in relation to other cultures and to world history. The expedition would systematically collect the material for such a study. It would also fill in the gaps left by the Napoleonic and Franco-Tuscan expeditions, especially in relation to ancient Egyptian architecture.
Thanks to his meticulous research, Lepsius knew exactly which sites he would need to visit to solve the chronology of the Old Kingdom (a term first coined by Bunsen to refer to the first great flowering of pharaonic civilization during the Pyramid Age, c.2575–2175 BC). He had identified Memphis, the Fayum, the Delta, Abydos and the Wadi Hammamat – sites largely ignored by Champollion – as the most promising. He also intended to reach the oases of the Libyan Desert and the copper mines of Sinai. The expedition would seek to understand the relationship between Egypt and Nubia, and to locate the Ramesside monuments in Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine. Lepsius further suspected that there were more eighteenth-dynasty royal tombs awaiting discovery in the Valley of the Kings. The expedition would set itself the task of taking paper squeezes (applying wet papier maché to the surface of a relief to create a durable impression) and making copies of every significant relief and inscription from pharaonic Egypt. Finally, if all this were not enough, Lepsius would target the removal of key antiquities for the Berlin Museum, to make the Prussian state collection the equal of those in London, Paris, Leiden and Turin. Specifically, he had in mind the carved list of kings from Karnak (the British Museum had a version from Abydos); the scene of desert tribespeople bringing tribute, from the tomb of Khnumhotep at Beni Hasan; the scene of brickmakers (believed to be Hebrews in bondage) and the figures of Amenhotep I and Queen Ahmose-Nefertari from the tomb of Rekhmira at Thebes; either or both of the small obelisks of Senusret I at Heliopolis and Crocodilopolis; and a representative selection of historical papyri and Coptic manuscripts. All in all, it was a colossal set of objectives.
The members of the Berlin Academy were impressed by Lepsius’s ambition, but rather doubted that so many goals could be achieved in just two years. They also thought his proposed budget (of 19,000 thaler) wholly inadequate. Going for broke, on 19 June they authorized Eichhorn to forward the proposal, supported by copious expert testimony, to the king, but with a total budget of 33,100 thaler – 25,000 thaler for the expedition, 1,000 thaler for purchases, 3,000 thaler for transport (which Lepsius had completely forgotten to include), and 1,100 thaler for final preparations. To everyone’s relief, the sum was granted. The expedition would go ahead. (In the final account, it cost 34,600 thaler – an overspend, but not a large one.)
There followed feverish activity to identify the remaining members, who would contribute so much to the endeavour’s success. Lepsius wanted not one, but two draughtsmen, explaining that ‘a second draughtsman for sculpture and sites is almost essential, for when the first is busy copying inscriptions’.11 Two brothers currently in Berlin, Ernst and Max Weidenbach, came highly recommended, but Max (then aged nineteen) was due to begin his military service the following year. Lepsius wrote to the ministry of foreign affairs to request a deferment. He had already signed up an old friend from his Rome days, Johann Frey, but he also wanted a moulder who could make plaster casts of important statues, and had in mind a sculptor from his home town of Naumburg, Carl Franke. The Prussian government agreed to fund all six participants – Lepsius, Erbkam, the Weidenbachs, Frey and Franke – and to send Abeken (another of Lepsius’s Roman contacts) as expedition chaplain ‘who in various ways promoted the antiquarian objects of the journey’.12 Two further members would join the party in London before departure: a second architect, James Wild, and Joseph Bonomi, a trusted and experienced Egypt hand, who had been part of Wilkinson’s circle in Cairo.
Following the London Convention of 1840, the Prussian diplomatic presence in Egypt had been sharply reduced, leaving the country’s interests in the hands of the Swedish consul-general, Anastasi. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since Anastasi was well known to Muhammad Ali. Nonetheless, Lepsius was taking no chances in preparing for his expedition. In early July 1842, he wrote to the Prussian foreign minister, Heinrich von Bülow, asking him to seek a firman from the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople, and another from Muhammad Ali, together with letters of recommendation from the foreign ministers of Austria, Britain and France to their agents in Egypt making clear the antiquarian nature of the expedition: Lepsius wanted not only to obtain official permission, but also to avoid potential conflict with other countries’ agents employed to collect antiquities. Finally, to oil the wheels, the Prussian king wrote to Muhammad Ali to add his personal seal of approval to the endeavour, and sent a pair of vases from the royal porcelain factory as a gift. The pasha was delighted with the present, proclaiming the Prussian porcelain superior in quality to the French dinner service he had received from Louis Philippe of France a decade earlier.13 The reciprocal diplomatic niceties were appreciated on both sides.
In one last request, Lepsius – conscious that the Egyptian collections in Berlin were under the direction of Passalacqua – asked that, while all antiquities brought back from Egypt would be the property of the Prussian state, he should be granted unfettered access to them for his lifetime. It would prove a canny move. With this request granted, everything was in place. Lepsius set sail from Southampton on 1 September 1842 on the greatest, and best-prepared, scientific expedition to Egypt that had ever been attempted. As he noted afterwards: ‘It was fitted out and maintained for more than three years by the munificence of the King, and enjoyed uninterruptedly his gracious favour and sympathy, as well as the most active and kind attention from Alexander v. Humboldt, and by a rare union of fortunate circumstances, it attained the purposes they had in view, as completely as could be expected.’14
After ‘a stormy passage through the Bay of Biscay and a short stay in Gibraltar and Malta’,15 Lepsius landed in Egypt on 18 September, to rendezvous with the other members of the expedition who had arrived via different routes. Despite the assistance of Anastasi, Lepsius was concerned at the lack of Prussian diplomatic support on the ground, noting to his friend Graf Usedom that: ‘The Turks set great store by protocol, good recommendations, and an introduction by an important person.’16 Not only was Prussia without representation, nobody in Alexandria believed that the head of the Prussian legation in Constantinople, von Wagner, would ever visit Egypt, let alone take up residence. Lepsius pleaded for a Prussian representative to be based permanently in the country.17 In the event, Lepsius need not have worried. Still smarting from the London Convention, Muhammad Ali was casting around for a friendly European nation. The rising power of Prussia fitted the bill perfectly. As a result, Muhammad Ali’s firman, when it arrived, was unusually generous, giving Lepsius ‘unlimited permission to make all the excavations which I might think desirable, and with instructions to the local authorities to render me assistance’.18 Furthermore, the recent legislation prohibiting the export of antiquities was waived in Lepsius’s favour. So it was with confidence and a sense of possibility that the expedition left Alexandria, bound for Cairo and the start of an epic programme of work.
Egypt’s capital had changed considerably since Champollion’s expedition fourteen years earlier. Most noticeable, perhaps, was the huge increase in the number of resident Europeans. What had been a relatively small community of around 3,000 in 1836 had grown to a sizeable population of 50,000 by the end of the 1840s.19 To accommodate the burgeoning number of Western visitors, Cairo’s tourist infrastructure was also undergoing something of a transformation. Wilkinson noted the changes in his 1843 Modern Egypt and Thebes: ‘The first hotel for some years has been Hill’s, or the Eastern Hotel. But its place is now taken by the Hôtel d’Orient . . . which is said to be very comfortable.’20 He was full of admiration for the entrepreneurs – ‘In a place like Cairo, where the houses are badly suited for hotels, where European comforts are unknown, and where every thing has to be created afresh to suit the convenience of travellers, great praise is due to any one who has sufficient enterprise to set up one of these large establishments’21 – but they were simply responding to a growing market. Among the tourists who passed through Cairo in the 1840s were Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale; indeed, they arrived within two days of each other, but stayed in different hotels. Flaubert was attracted by the exoticism of the Orient and the easy availability of prostitutes. Nightingale, on the other hand, was horrified by the poverty and squalor she encountered in the backstreets of Egypt. She wrote to her parents: ‘No European can have the least idea of the misery of an African village; if he has not seen it, no description brings it home.’22
It was not just the poverty that appalled Nightingale. For many in Muhammad Ali’s Egypt of the 1840s, life was nasty, brutish and short. While the London Convention had reined in the pasha’s territorial ambitions abroad, it had done nothing to constrain his use of military force at home. Although much reduced in number, the Egyptian army was being put to good use to round up deserters from Muhammad Ali’s harsh economic regime and return them forcibly to their villages. On the large private estates set up to produce cash crops for the European market, the workers were treated little better than slaves. As the situation deteriorated, a new law of April 1844 laid down the death penalty for anyone found harbouring outlaws. In such a climate, desertion from the army spiralled, and men resorted to self-mutilation to avoid conscription. Muhammad Ali’s answer was further repression, and a ruthless emphasis on obedience and discipline. The Egyptian government even set up a school in Paris, run by the French ministry of war, to inculcate these values in young Egyptians who, it was intended, would return to Egypt equipped to become the country’s future leaders.
By contrast with the increasingly despotic Muhammad Ali, Lepsius’s royal patron, Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, was a benevolent monarch. Moreover, he was actively interested in ancient Egypt and had made the whole expedition possible. Not since the days of Napoleon had a European ruler shown such a commitment to antiquarian and archaeological study. For this reason, perhaps, Lepsius decided that 15 October 1842, the king’s birthday, should be marked in style with the expedition’s first visit to the pyramids at Giza. It was a memorable occasion, laden with patriotic feeling:
The morning was beautiful beyond description, fresh and festive. We rode in a long procession through the yet quiet city, and through the green avenues and gardens which are now laid out before it . . . It is impossible to describe the scene that met our view when we emerged from the avenues of date-trees and acacias; the sun rose on the left behind the Moqattam hills, and illuminated the summits of the Pyramids in front, which lay before us in the plain like gigantic rock crystals. All were overpowered, and felt the solemn influence of the splendour and grandeur of this morning scene . . . What a spectacle, and what recollections did it call forth! When Abraham came to Egypt for the first time, he saw these very Pyramids, which had been already built many centuries before.23
To celebrate the occasion, the expedition members climbed to the top of the Great Pyramid and unfurled the Prussian flag. (Frey made a memorable drawing of the scene, which now rests in the department of drawings in the National Gallery in Berlin.) They also sang the Prussian royal hymn inside the burial chamber. Finally, as a more permanent gesture, they carved and set up a commemorative inscription on a stone tablet, five feet wide and four feet high, painted in bright colours. Carefully composed in hieroglyphics, the text was probably the first extensive translation into ancient Egyptian for fifteen centuries. It ran:
Thus speak the servants of the King, whose name is the Sun and Rock of Prussia, Lepsius the scribe, Erbkam the architect, the Brothers Weidenbach the painters, Frey the painter, Franke the moulder, Bonomi the sculptor, Wild the architect: All hail to the Eagle, the Protector of the Cross, to the King the Sun and Rock of Prussia, to the Son of the Sun, who freed his Fatherland, Frederick William IV, the Philopator, the Father of his Country, the Gracious One, the Favourite of Wisdom and History, the Guardian of the Rhine, whom Germany has chosen, the Dispenser of Life. May the most high God grant the king, and his Consort, the Queen Elizabeth, the Rich in Life, the Philometor, the Mother of her Country, the Gracious One, an ever new and long life on Earth, and a blessed habitation in Heaven through all Eternity. In the year of our Saviour, 1842, in the tenth month, on the fifteenth day, on the forty-seventh Birthday of his Majesty, on the Pyramid of King Cheops.24
It was a composition worthy of a pharaoh. In a sign of his easy mastery of the principles of ancient Egyptian script, Lepsius substituted the Prussian eagle for the usual falcon in the king’s title, and used it to stand for ‘Prussia’, while a double-headed eagle signified ‘Germany’. The inscription duly installed, Lepsius swelled with pride – young Prussia had left its mark on the greatest monument from antiquity. Others were less impressed; back in England, Wilkinson wrote to a friend: ‘You have of course read Dr Lepsius’s letters from Egypt & I dare say have wondered as I have how people could be so silly as to put that inscription in hieroglyphs on the great Pyramid about the King of Prussia & the rest. The English have been laughed at for scribbling their names but this far exceeds in folly any thing done by them.’25 One may detect just a hint of jealousy.
Returning to Giza for a second visit on 9 November, Lepsius’s expedition set up camp to start its systematic exploration of the site. It would take more than six months. As Lepsius noted, Champollion and Rosellini ‘did little more than pass through’ and, other than the recent ‘operations’ by Vyse and Perring, ‘little had been done to promote a more minute investigation of this remarkable spot’.26 New Year’s Eve 1842 was marked with the lighting of bonfires on the tops of the pyramids, but Lepsius and his team kept at it: ‘Still always here! in full activity since the 9th November, and perhaps for several weeks longer in the new year. But yet, how could I suspect from the accounts that have hitherto been given by travellers what a harvest we had to gather on this spot.’27
Upwards of forty workmen were employed to clear the sand and rubble from around the monuments, but not everything went to plan. In the first few months of 1843, the expedition was visited by a succession of disasters, some of them almost biblical in scale. First, a sudden rainstorm and flash flood destroyed the camp, washing away belongings ‘into the muddy, foam covered, slimy lake, our books, our drawings, sketches, linen, instruments of all kinds’; dripping wet, the men had to wade waist-deep to retrieve their possessions, or rather ‘what the sand had not yet swallowed’.28 Then, a few weeks later, a swarm of locusts ravaged the country for miles around. The following month, an armed mob attacked the camp one night, plundering it for anything of monetary value. Lepsius was sanguine, recording ‘none of our party were seriously injured, and nothing that is irreparable was lost. The affair, therefore, is over, and the consequences may only prove a useful lesson to us.’29 Thereafter, the camp was patrolled each night by eight watchmen, permanently on guard against attacks by Arabs or Bedouin. Finally, to add insult to injury, Lepsius was struck down by a violent cold and had to return to Cairo to recover. ‘It is to be hoped that my state of health will not detain me long here,’ he lamented, ‘for my impatience daily increases to return from the living city of the Mamelukes into the solemn Death-city of the old Pharaohs.’30
Lepsius summed up the various trials and tribulations suffered by the expedition in its first six months:
It appears that we are to have a taste of all the plagues of Egypt. Our experience began with the inundation at the Great Pyramids; then came the locusts . . . which, combined with the previous cattle disease, is indeed sufficient to cause a famine; then occurred the hostile attack which was preceded by a daring robbery. Nor has even a conflagration been wholly wanting. By an incautious salute, Wild’s tent was set on fire and partly burned in Saqâra . . . Now comes, in addition, to this, the annoyance of mice . . . they gnaw, play, and squeak away in my tent . . . During the night they run over my bed, and over my face . . . In spite of all these annoyances, however, we continue to keep up a good and cheerful spirit.31
To cap it all, Frey was taken seriously ill and had to return to Europe. (It may have had something to do with the expedition’s drinking habits: Lepsius had declared ‘the Nile water is pleasant to the taste, and may be enjoyed in great abundance without any detriment’.32) Lepsius certainly felt responsible, and asked the Prussian government for extra funds to support both Frey and his elderly mother. Archaeology in Egypt in the 1840s was no walk in the park.
Lepsius’s expedition may have set new standards in the study of individual sites and monuments, but it took a retrograde step where preservation was concerned. Armed with a royal firman, it plundered with abandon, sending statues, stelae and even entire tomb chapels back to Berlin to grace the city’s museum. A train of ten camels was needed to transport the loot from Giza to Cairo. Yet, with no hint of irony, Lepsius complained about the quarrying of monuments: ‘It is really shocking to see how every day whole trains of camels come here from the neighbouring villages, and march back again in long files, laden with building stones.’33 A decade earlier, Wilkinson had baulked at hacking reliefs out of tomb walls, but Lepsius felt no such qualms. Certainly, the parlous state of the official government collection of antiquities did nothing to persuade him to leave priceless artefacts in situ. Muhammad Ali had talked about founding a national museum, but even enlightened European scholars like Wilkinson had scoffed at the notion, declaring that: ‘the formation of a Museum in Egypt is purely Utopian; and while the impediments raised against the removal of antiquities from Egypt does an injury to the world, Egypt is not a gainer. The excavations are made without knowledge or energy, the Pasha is cheated by those who work, and no one there takes any interest in a museum.’34
One of the objects Lepsius especially wanted to acquire was the Karnak king list. But his rivals had other ideas. In the summer of 1843, as Lepsius was making his way upstream, the French adventurer, Achilles Prisse d’Avennes, whom Muhammad Ali had appointed as an engineer and lecturer in military schools, cut the block from the temple, working secretly at night, right under Lepsius’s nose, and loaded it onto his boat to take down the Nile, and onwards to Paris. As the two men passed on the river, Prisse d’Avennes invited Lepsius aboard and sat him down on a crate which, unbeknownst to Lepsius, contained the priceless relic.35 It was a typically extravagant and pointed gesture by the Frenchman, and a reminder to the Prussians that national rivalries were alive and kicking in the race for Egypt’s past.
Stopping only briefly at Thebes, Lepsius’s expedition pressed on southwards, ‘impatient to commence immediately our second fresh task, which consisted of the investigation of the Ethiopian countries, situated higher up the river’.36 This was Lepsius’s chance to get one up on the French (and the British), given that: ‘The French-Tuscan expedition did not go beyond Wadi Halfa, [while] Wilkinson’s careful description of the Nile land and its monuments . . . only extends a little higher up, as far as Semneh.’37 Lepsius’s patriotism, and his eagerness to best the French, did not however affect his deep admiration for Champollion, with whom he felt a special connection, given the coincidence of their birthdays. On 23 December 1843, Lepsius’s thirty-third birthday, and what would have been Champollion’s fifty-third, the Prussian composed a rather clumsy, if heartfelt, poem to his hero, and committed it to his journal:
Champollion! Champollion!
Champollion! Champollion!
Erklingt ihr Gläser, ting, tang, tong!
Let your glasses ring out, ting, tang, tong!
Daß er’s im Grab erfahre!
That he may experience it in the grave!
Ihm gilt der heutige Ehrentag,
To him belongs today’s auspicious day,
Ich kam ihm weit, weit hinten nach,
I came far, far, behind him,
Fast 21 Jahre.
Almost 21 years.
Champollion! Champollion!
Champollion! Champollion!
Erklingt ihr Gläser, ting, tang, tong!
Let your glasses ring out, ting, tang, tong!
Champollion soll leben!
