Many people imagine that archaeology is an armchair science. I would like to see them dangling from a rope, with a 30-metre shaft beneath their feet and an inscription to copy at the bottom of the shaft; or on their belly in a narrow passage dug through the masonry of a pyramid, aware that one false move dislodging a stone could cause 100 tonnes of stone to fall on your back . . . I have just spent four whole days inside the pyramid of Pepi II at Saqqara . . . In a couple of places, the masonry is so badly damaged that we never knew if, having entered, we would be able to get out.19
But he was well aware of his responsibilities, both to science and to French interests. In a letter to Joseph Ernest Renan, the orientalist whose idea it had been to establish the Ecole Française in Cairo, he wrote:
I only accepted the role . . . to prevent the succession to Mariette from passing into Brugsch’s hands. I hope to keep it only long enough to pass it on to another Frenchman. The Egyptian government, which knows how much store France sets by retaining this office, would love to give it to a native or a German, if I were unlucky enough to give it the slightest excuse to take it back.20
The Germans were surprisingly magnanimous in defeat. On 19 May 1882, no less a figure than Lepsius wrote to Maspero: ‘Your leadership will mark a new era in the history of modern research in Egypt, Mariette notwithstanding.’21
Two months later the British invaded Egypt, and Maspero faced an unprecedented diplomatic and curatorial crisis. There were those in Britain who viewed the bombardment of Alexandria and the accompanying civil unrest with alarm, from the perspective of Egypt’s antiquities. Amelia Edwards, keenly interested in ancient Egypt since her voyage up the Nile and an increasingly vocal advocate for the preservation of pharaonic remains, alerted the Foreign Office to the vulnerability of the Bulaq Museum, and requested that it be given armed protection if necessary.22 Her diplomacy – or perhaps her doggedness – won the day and, from the British army’s first entry into Cairo, an officer was despatched to check on the museum, and troops visited regularly to ensure its security. Once the dust had settled on Tel el Kebir and its aftermath, Maspero had to learn to deal with Egypt’s new de facto ruler, Evelyn Baring, who was no particular fan of archaeology. Perhaps to assuage native sentiment, the British authorities allowed an Egyptian pupil of Heinrich Brugsch’s, Ahmed Kamal, to establish a school of Egyptology for Egyptians. It was a pioneering move, but it lasted only three years and had only one graduating class.23 In a further nod to nationalists, an Egyptian government decree stipulated that the museum (and any future museum), all its contents (current and future), all monuments and all antiquities belonged to the Egyptian state and were inalienable. It was a bold statement of intent, but without adequate resources to police it, failed to put a stop to the trade in antiquities.
Baring was more concerned to maintain the delicate diplomatic balance between the European powers, which had come under great strain as a result of the British occupation. He went out of his way to support Maspero’s position as director of the Museum and the Antiquities Service: let France control Egyptian culture, Britain would concern itself with more important matters, notably the economy. To keep the different European interests happy – or at least engaged – Baring set up a Consultative Archaeological Committee (Egyptian membership was notably lacking), and moved the Antiquities Service under the Ministry of Public Works, to provide a measure of stability. No longer would the director have to go cap in hand to the khedive; he would be able to rely on an agreed budget.
The problem was, the budget was woefully inadequate: there were simply too many other demands on the Egyptian treasury. Moreover, Baring’s abolition of the corvée – which, together with the kurbash (whip), was one of the most hated aspects of Ottoman rule willingly maintained by Egypt’s ‘independent’ khedives – removed from the director of the Antiquities Service a ready source of manpower. Constrained by scarce financial and human resources, Maspero found his ability to undertake large-scale operations severely restricted. No amount of restructuring or reorganization could alter that basic fact. All the while, Egypt’s ancient monuments continued to face neglect, damage and destruction. There was nothing for it: Maspero would have to end his own service’s monopoly on excavation, a monopoly that Mariette had fought so hard to implement and defend. The era of the gentleman amateur and the state-sponsored expedition was over. Who, then, might have the wherewithal to take up the slack?
Since her trip up the Nile, Amelia Edwards had set her mind to the study, publication and preservation of Egypt’s ancient monuments. In 1879, on her own initiative, she had written to Mariette with the suggestion of raising a fund by subscription to finance a new excavation for scientific ends. She had received no reply. (Perhaps Mariette was too ill to give it serious consideration, or perhaps he was wary of any attempt – especially by the British – to water down his exclusive right to excavate.) To make matters worse, Birch – keeper of oriental antiquities at the British Museum and, after the death of Wilkinson, Britain’s leading Egyptologist – made no attempt to hide his opposition. He dismissed the plan as ‘sentimental’, betraying both contempt and fear of amateur outsiders muscling in on the academic establishment.24
Never one to be easily dissuaded, Edwards bided her time and began to rally support for her cause. She signed up Lane’s nephew, Reginald Poole, keeper of coins and medals at the British Museum (and clearly no friend of Birch’s); the Reverend Archibald Sayce, professor of Assyriology at Oxford, and a great networker; and Erasmus Wilson, the surgeon and benefactor who had funded the transport of Cleopatra’s Needle to London. They made a powerful and persuasive triumvirate.25 Once Mariette was off the scene, in January 1881, Edwards wrote straight away to his successor, Maspero, with whom she had already started a friendly correspondence – he had advised her on hieroglyphic inscriptions during her research for A Thousand Miles Up the Nile. The new director seemed more amenable, but the political situation in Egypt was tense and Dual Control was causing a strain in Anglo-French relations. Maspero advised her to wait a little longer. One of Poole’s acquaintances was a Swiss scholar by the name of Edouard Naville, who had studied under Lepsius, assisted the French in the Franco-Prussian War, and had already acquired a reputation across Europe as an up-and-coming Egyptologist. In early 1882, Poole asked Naville to use his influence and sound out Maspero once again. The answer this time was favourable: Maspero had no objection to Edwards’s proposal, and would do what he could to support it. Moreover, he suggested that the target for any new excavation should be the Nile Delta, not only because it was relatively unstudied, but also because a site with possible Old Testament connections would surely appeal to both Christian and Jewish donors.26
On 27 March 1882, in Poole’s office at the British Museum, a meeting took place at which, by formal resolution, the Delta Exploration Fund came into being. (At Poole’s suggestion, it quickly changed its name to the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF), to give it greater scope.) Edwards and Poole were elected joint honorary secretaries, while Wilson – who had promised a sizeable donation – was appointed treasurer. Sayce agreed to be one of the fund’s ‘agents’ in Egypt. A jubilant Edwards sent a formal announcement to the press (making full use of her journalistic contacts), stating that the aim of the fund was to explore the Nile Delta where ‘the documents of a lost period of Biblical history must lie concealed’.27 It was a masterstroke. She began fundraising in earnest, contacting wealthy friends and acquaintances, and the fund started looking for an archaeologist to lead its first expedition.
In typical fashion, Edwards already had someone in mind. In fact, she had already written to him. Heinrich Schliemann, the man who had recently located the ruins of ancient Troy, was just about the most famous archaeologist in the world. Someone of his calibre would give the new fund the launch it needed. He had agreed to Edwards’s request, but when the proposal was put to Maspero, he was aghast. Arabi’s revolt had seriously destabilized the political balance in Egypt, and had put the Anglo-French relationship under great strain. The last thing Maspero needed was an arrogant and abrasive German wading into the picture. In his view, Schliemann was ‘tactless and quarrelsome, sought only publicity for himself and would alienate the authorities’;28 there could be no question of him excavating on behalf of the EEF. Far better to identify a young, more pliable Englishman who would be prepared to work under Maspero’s instruction and who, once he had proved himself, might eventually take over as dig director in his own right. The committee’s thoughts naturally turned to Naville: he wasn’t English, but he fitted the bill in every other respect. That summer, he agreed to be the fund’s first archaeologist. Planning for the EEF’s first mission started in earnest.
The British invasion of Egypt, in July 1882, temporarily put everything on hold. But, once the dust had settled, British occupation actually made it easier for the EEF’s mission to go ahead, and Maspero desperately needed help with his colossal task of excavation. In January 1883, Naville presented his credentials to Maspero in Cairo and set out for the remote Delta site of Tell el-Maskhuta (by coincidence, close to the battlefield of Tel el Kebir), for the first British-sponsored excavation in Egypt since Vyse and Perring’s explosive work at Giza forty years earlier. At the end of the season, that spring, two statues that Naville had found, and which seemed to confirm his identification of Tell el-Maskhuta as the biblical city of Pithom, were graciously presented by khedive Tewfiq to Erasmus Wilson (thus circumventing the new law on the export of antiquities) and by Wilson to the British Museum. Naville gave a public lecture in London, at which it was announced that the EEF’s next dig would be at San el-Hagar, the biblical Zoan (a location, mentioned in the Old Testament, where Moses is said to have performed miracles before Pharaoh), where Mariette had uncovered a series of impressive monuments. Public interest was aroused, and new donations flooded in, including a thousand pounds from Wilson and subscriptions from across the Atlantic, where the Reverend William Copley Winslow had started a campaign called, with typical American gusto, ‘Spades for Zoan’. All looked set fair for the forthcoming winter season. But, as the day approached, Naville announced to the EEF that he was too preoccupied with other projects and would be unable to continue as the fund’s excavation director. His withdrawal left a gaping hole in the fund’s plans. They approached Maspero, whose laconic response was: ‘Send me a young Englishman and I will train him.’29
The death of Mariette, the British occupation, and the foundation of the Egypt Exploration Fund: from the early 1880s, there was a new dispensation for archaeology in Egypt. One man would step forward to make it his own.
The great Egyptologists of the nineteenth century – or, at least, the great British Egyptologists – tended to come from unexpected quarters. Thomas Young, physician and physicist, came to Egyptian hieroglyphics via forays in comparative linguistics. John Gardner Wilkinson, traveller and artist, fell into Egyptology for want of anything better to do. The third, and greatest, British Egyptologist during the discipline’s golden age – and the man credited as ‘the father of Egyptian archaeology’ – was drawn to the subject through a fascination with ancient measurements and the esoteric work of an unorthodox astronomer.
William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) was a sickly child, too weak to attend school. Indeed, he never received any formal education (with the exception of a university extension course on algebra and trigonometry, at the age of twenty-four).30 Yet, by the end of his long and illustrious career, he had been appointed to the first chair in Egyptology in Britain, elected a fellow of both the Royal Society and the British Academy, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and the American Philosophical Society, received honorary doctorates from Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh, and been knighted for services to scholarship. By his own admission, he was entirely self-taught, and his childhood interests focussed on objects. His mother had a collection of fossils and minerals, which he studied avidly, and he ‘ransacked the marine store ships of Woolwich for coins, thus beginning archaeology when still accompanied by my nurse, at eight’.31 At the age of fourteen, young Flinders began joining his father, an engineer and surveyor, on trips to measure and record the ancient earthworks near their home in Kent. It quickly turned into something of an obsession. In 1872, he and his father carried out the first proper survey of Stonehenge. Trips followed to sites across England, conducted with an economy that would remain his hallmark for the rest of his life: ‘Travelling always third class, and spending on average 1/- or 1/6 for his lodging . . . he reckoned to spend five shillings and sixpence on food every week.’32
The result of all this activity, both in the field and in the British Museum, was Petrie’s first book, Inductive Metrology, or the Recovery of Ancient Measurements from the Monuments (1877). Meanwhile, his introduction to the pyramids of ancient Egypt had been through the writings of Charles Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal for Scotland and professor of astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. Petrie’s father, William, had once courted Smyth’s sister, so when Smyth published his bestselling book Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (1866) and its successor volume Life and Work at the Great Pyramid (1867) – themselves inspired by an earlier speculative work, John Taylor’s The Great Pyramid: Why Was It Built? And Who Built It? (1859) – the Petries, father and son, took more than a passing interest. The more they read, the more they were intrigued by Smyth’s theory of the ‘pyramid inch’, the supposed basic unit that underpinned the dimensions and construction of the pyramids of Giza, and by his convincing blend of mathematics and fundamental Christianity. Flinders Petrie soon decided that, in order to confirm the veracity of Smyth’s theories, a reliable set of measurements was required. The Great Pyramid of Giza would have to be surveyed, and he was the man to do it.
With no experience of Egypt, no Arabic and very little money, Petrie set sail from Liverpool at the end of November 1880, bound for Alexandria. Before leaving, he went to see Birch at the British Museum to seek his advice. Like Petrie, Birch had never actually been to Egypt, but he suggested that the young man might like to copy inscriptions whenever he had the opportunity, and bring back some specimens of pottery – a class of material that was abundant on all archaeological sites, but which had never before been collected. The systematic excavation and study of small finds – pottery, flints, stone vessels – would subsequently be one of Petrie’s distinctive contributions to Egyptian archaeology.
Finding his way to Giza, Petrie installed himself in a disused tomb. Despite the rats, mice and fleas, and the almost impossibly meagre rations, he relished the spartan freedom of it all. He wrote to a friend in February 1881: ‘Life here is really comfortable, without many of the encumbrances of regular hours: bells, collars and cuffs, blacking, tablecloths or many others of the unnecessaries of Civilization.’33 Indeed, he made asceticism his guiding principle, even – especially – if it meant thumbing his nose at Victorian respectability: ‘It was often most convenient to strip entirely for work, owing to the heat and absence of any current of air, in the interior. For outside work in hot weather, vest and pants were suitable, and if pink they kept the tourist at bay, as the creature seemed to him too queer for inspection.’34
Petrie’s self-sufficiency and self-discipline were the defining characteristics of his personality from the very start of his life in archaeology. He was focussed, sometimes to the point of coldness, and sentiment seems to have played little, if any, part in his thoughts. His autobiography, written towards the end of a long and eventful career, is surprisingly dull, a straightforward record of actions and achievements, entirely devoid of emotion. In his own words, it had ‘nothing otherwise to do with the inner life’; indeed, he was firmly of the view that: ‘The affairs of a private person are seldom pertinent to the interests of others, yet the rise of a great branch of knowledge in the archaeological discovery of man’s development should be worth some record.’35 This focus, while it did not necessarily make for easy personal relationships, was greatly to the benefit of Egyptian archaeology.
That first season at Giza, Petrie worked entirely independently, without any permit, but received some assistance from a local man named Ali Gabri, who had started as a basket boy on Vyse’s excavations. Despite Petrie’s lack of formal Egyptological training, he could not fail to be appalled at the destruction of monuments going on around him. Never one to moderate his views, he did not hesitate to point the finger of blame: ‘The savage indifference of the Arabs . . . is only surpassed by a most barbaric sort of regard for the monuments by those in power . . . It is sickening to see the rate at which everything is being destroyed, and the little regard paid to its preservation.’36
He returned home to England in June, having completed his survey of the pyramids (which, incidentally, proved Smyth entirely wrong); but he had found his calling. In October, Petrie was back in Egypt for a second season. That winter, he travelled up the Nile with Sayce and a few others, stopping at Luxor to survey the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
It was while Petrie was back at Giza, in the early spring of 1882, that news reached him of the foundation of the Delta Exploration Fund, and of Naville’s forthcoming excavation. Petrie desperately wanted to continue his own explorations in Egypt, but had no funding. He decided to take a chance and write direct to Amelia Edwards, setting out his philosophy of archaeology: ‘I believe the true line lies as much in the careful noting and comparison of small details, as in more wholesale and off-hand clearances.’37 It was music to Edwards’s ears. When Naville relinquished his duties the following year, and despite opposition from some of the fund’s committee, Edwards, backed by Wilson, decided to give the unknown Petrie a chance. His book, The Pyramids and Temples of Giza, was published to enthusiastic reviews (including one from Edwards herself) in September 1883; two months later, Petrie started digging for the EEF in the Wadi Tumilat, and then at San el-Hagar. Visiting Tell el-Maskhuta, the site of Naville’s excavations the previous year, Petrie found a number of small objects, overlooked or discarded, among the spoil heaps. This merely confirmed him in his approach: ‘My duty was that of a salvage man, to get all I could quickly gathered in.’38
San el-Hagar might have been promoted by the EEF as the biblical Zoan, but the reality was altogether less prepossessing: ‘The miserable Arab huts of San first meet the eye . . . with on one side a muddy stream into which they throw their dead buffalo, and from which they drink, and on the other a swamp full of rotting graves and filth.’39 Nonetheless Petrie sent regular reports back to England, which Edwards used as the basis of short articles in The Times, designed both to keep the fund’s subscribers up to date with developments and to encourage new donors. By the middle of June, ‘after many dust storms, heat over 100°, and violent rain’,40 Petrie closed down the dig and travelled to Cairo. Edwards wrote to him with genuine enthusiasm and gratitude: ‘I wish to tell you again with what deep interest I follow you in these records of your daily life and arduous work . . . I take a hearty pleasure and pride in the task of making your manner of work known to the public, and I feel that you are setting a splendid example of scientific excavation to all Europe’, before signing off, ‘there is but one W.F.P. and . . . I am delighted to be his prophet’.41
Petrie’s next season for the EEF, at Naukratis, a trading settlement founded in the Nile Delta by ancient Greek merchants, included the first stratified section ever made on an Egyptian excavation. Petrie was truly setting new standards for Egyptian archaeology. He also broke the mould by speedily publishing his finds at the end of each season and by mounting an annual exhibition of small finds (some of them smuggled through customs, apparently with Maspero’s blessing).42 Despite such successes, however, tensions soon started to develop between Petrie and his colleagues back in England. He fell out spectacularly with the British Museum when it thoughtlessly described the finds it had received from his excavation as ‘worthless’. He wrote to Edwards: ‘The false statements of that letter, and the gross ignorance it shewed of genuine and scientific archaeology, bar me from having anything to do with that quarter again.’43 (The estrangement did, indeed, last the rest of his life.) He also fell out with the EEF Committee. He found them bumbling and amateurish, while they questioned his use of funds. Unused and unsuited to criticism or control, he decided to resign. Edwards pleaded with him, but he was implacable. On 16 October 1886, she read out his letter of resignation to the committee, before sending a personal note to Petrie, which read: ‘Goodbye, good luck, and God bless you. Ever your faithful friend, A. B. Edwards.’44
The Egypt Exploration Fund and Petrie went their separate ways, but the bond between Edwards and her protégé endured. She secured for him the patronage of two wealthy businessmen and philanthropists, Jesse Haworth and Henry Kennard, enabling him to continue excavating in Egypt on his own account. As a result, over the next four decades, he dug at more sites even than Mariette, made more major discoveries than any other archaeologist, before or since, amassed a vast collection of antiquities, and published a thousand books, articles and reviews.
As for Edwards, she may have lost her star excavator, but her enthusiasm for Egyptology and her dedication to the EEF remained undimmed. That year alone, she wrote over four thousand letters to recruit new members and solicit donations. In the winter of 1889–90, despite having just recovered from a serious illness, she embarked on an extensive lecture tour of the United States, again to raise funds for the EEF. Altogether she gave 120 lectures at universities, colleges and learned societies all down the east coast, from Boston to Baltimore. It was a triumphal progress, and the zenith of her Egyptological career. She was particularly impressed by the women’s colleges she visited – Vassar, Wellesley and Smith – and regretted that women’s education in England lagged so far behind. Freed from the social conventions of Victorian London, she gave free rein to some of her more radical views. One lecture, for example, was entitled ‘The Social and Political Position of Women in Ancient Egypt’ – the contemporary resonance and relevance were not lost on her audience, prompting the poet Henry W. Austin to laud her as a pioneer of women’s emancipation:
Yes, by such lives laborious
Is quicker shapen the plan
Of the day, when woman glorious
Shall arise: arise victorious –
No longer the slave laborious,
Or the tempting toy of man! 45
The tour was a huge success, but left Edwards exhausted. She never fully recovered her health and died on 15 April 1892, just three months after her lifelong companion Mrs Braysher. But Amelia Edwards was not finished quite yet. In her will, she endowed the first chair of Egyptology in Britain, at University College London – a radical institution, and the first in England to award degrees to women on a par with men – and drew up the terms so as to ensure that Petrie would be appointed. She also left the college her books and antiquities. Almost single-handedly, by her actions in life and her generosity in death, Edwards established Egyptian archaeology as a serious discipline in Britain. She was a remarkable and pioneering woman in a male-dominated age.
For Maspero, the foundation of the Egypt Exploration Fund brought another player into the field of Egyptian archaeology, but it did not, on its own, solve his problems. He was still desperately short of funds for the Museum and Antiquities Service, yet was expected to carry out major projects like the clearance of Luxor Temple. This involved compensating the owners of the houses that had been built up, over the centuries, against, inside and even on top of the monument (including the ‘French House’ lived in by Lucie Duff Gordon). He negotiated with Thomas Cook to introduce a visitor’s tax (later changed to entry tickets), but it was insufficient. Maspero had no option but to petition the British colonial authorities for additional funding. Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff, undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Public Works, responded by means of an open letter to The Times. He praised Maspero’s leadership of the Antiquities Service – ‘Here is a department where there is no need of Joint Control, for there is only one M. Maspero’46 – but rejected the request for funds. Scott-Moncrieff asserted, patronizingly: ‘We prefer in England to subscribe to the causes of this sort on a voluntary basis, rather than to see our government do it for us,’ and went on to encourage personal donations. It was a quintessential civil servant’s reply. The result of his appeal was a paltry £90 from English donors, while French subscriptions totalled 21,789 francs. The clearance of Luxor Temple eventually began the following year.
Maspero also had to scrimp and save the necessary funds to improve the Egyptian Museum. This even meant selling some small, duplicate objects from the collection, including shabtis, amulets and even mummies. Petrie, with his particular fondness for small finds, was furious. But, by such means, Maspero managed to look after the collection and add Graeco-Roman objects to round out the museum’s historical breadth. (After he left office, his successor promptly sent most of the post-pharaonic holdings to Alexandria.)
Although British rule tried to accommodate French interests, at least in the cultural sphere, it could nonetheless prove frustrating. Whilst maintaining cordial relations with Baring in public, Maspero’s private correspondence revealed his true feelings. He criticized the British (and the point was directed particularly at Baring) for importing their ‘brutal manners’ from India, and for trying to impose ‘bizarre rules of English bureaucracy’ on a land accustomed to sixty years of French-style administration.47 Like others, Maspero was unsettled by disturbances in Egypt and the Sudan, a delayed reaction against the British invasion, which only seemed to provoke an even harsher crackdown. A French friend of Maspero’s wishfully saw in the unrest a more apocalyptic vision, prophesying ‘the English nation is lost and its future is utterly compromised’.48 A well-meaning Amelia Edwards tried to reassure Maspero that the British authorities would not interfere with his jurisdiction over the Antiquities Service and Museum. But British commercial interests, as well as political ones, were starting to dominate the country, to Maspero’s annoyance. In the spring of 1885, he wrote to a friend: ‘You might naively have persuaded yourself in Europe that the Khedive and, over him, the English consul-general were the masters of Egypt. You would be singularly mistaken: the real kings of Egypt at the moment are [Thomas] Cook and its two representatives Rostowich and Pagnon. It is Cook who last year transported the army to Dongola, it is Cook this year who is making the railway.’49
Another reason, perhaps, for Maspero’s unease was the sense, in the early 1880s, that the heroic age of Egyptology was passing. Mariette had died in 1881, followed by Lepsius in 1884 and Birch in 1885. The last links with the age of Champollion and Wilkinson were gone. In their place, a new generation found itself entrusted with the heavy burden of archaeology and scholarship, preservation and stewardship. Alongside Maspero were Petrie (who began his work in Egypt in 1880), Adolf Erman (who started teaching at the University of Berlin in 1881), and Ernest Budge (who succeeded Birch at the British Museum). They would have to redefine Egyptology and take it forward into a new century.
