The thirty-one-year-old Budge seems to have had other things on his mind when he first visited Giza, comparing the two larger pyramids to ‘a pair of twin breasts against the red light of the western sun’.20 This same red-blooded confidence and disregard for diplomatic niceties soon brought him into conflict with the British agent and consul-general, Evelyn Baring. At their very first meeting, Baring, perennially wary of upsetting the French, told Budge that any excavations carried out in Egypt by a British government employee were likely to ‘complicate political relationships’ and that the occupation of Egypt by the British ‘ought not to be made an excuse for filching antiquities from the country, whether to England or anywhere else’.21 The two men were not destined to get on. According to Budge, Baring ‘spoke with some irritation of the annoyance which he had suffered from several British archaeologists and amateur dealers who were in Cairo at that moment, and having quite made up his mind that I was of the same kidney, he politely but firmly got me out of his room’.22
Baring’s colleague (and eventual successor), the controller of taxes Eldon Gorst, was of the same view. Their stance not only irritated Budge, it mystified him, and he decided to press on with his mission regardless: ‘As I knew quite well that the agents for the great Continental Museums regularly despatched to them collections of antiquities, I determined to follow their example, if I could find out the way they managed their affairs, and send home collections to the British Museum.’23
In December 1886, Budge carried out excavations at Aswan – the ostensible purpose of his expedition – noting that ‘the labour involved was enormous, for the rubbish and broken stones mixed with sand had to be cleared by small sledges’. Nonetheless, the results were worth the effort. As Budge described in a letter to The Times the following month: ‘The whole of the side of the hill is filled with tombs, tier upon tier, and the above rough description of three of them, taken at random, will show what a large and important necropolis awaits excavation.’24 His sponsor, Grenfell, was delighted, and, taking a leaf out of Amelia Edwards’s book, took the opportunity to appeal for further funds:
We have already collected various sums for the prosecution of the work of clearing out the tombs, and would now, with your permission, through the medium of The Times, appeal for help to all archaeologists and others interested in the antiquities of Egypt . . . As during the four years of the British occupation of Egypt but little has been done by our countrymen towards the advancement of the cause of Egyptian archaeology, it would be most unfortunate, now that an opportunity offers, if this important work should fall through for the want of a little pecuniary assistance. I may add that I am able to assist, to some extent, by contributing military labour from the Egyptian regiments at present quartered at Assouan. Subscriptions may be sent to Messrs. Morton, Rose, and Co., Bartholomew-lane, E.C., for Assouan Excavation Fund.25
The prosecution of further excavations at Aswan looked set to be stymied by financial constraints, but Budge’s mission to acquire artefacts for his museum sponsors back in England was going swimmingly. Having visited the museum at Bulaq and seen the state in which the collections were being kept – ‘It seemed as if no one . . . knew or cared about the preservation of the antiquities’26 – he convinced himself that it was his duty as a scholar to remove antiquities to a place of safety where they could be properly conserved and studied. The Egyptian Museum knew what Budge was up to, and sent a representative to watch his comings and goings; but this merely drove the native antiquities dealers into Budge’s arms, since ‘the natives treated the Government’s claim to all antiquities in Egypt with contempt’.27
Budge’s efforts to acquire objects for the British Museum became increasingly daring, and increasingly brazen. At Philae, a company of the Royal Engineers discovered some pieces of carved stone while carrying out temple clearance; Budge saw that they were sent to London. He wanted to transport the colossus of Ramesses II at Mit Rahina to England, but met with implacable opposition from the French and blamed the British authorities for caving in: ‘Sir E. Baring, for some reason or other, wished to placate the French Colony in Egypt . . . Thus the British lost the statue.’28 In truth, it would have proved impossible to lift and transport so immense a statue thousands of miles by river and sea. It remains in its original position to this day, prostrate on the ground, too large even to be re-erected.
As Budge neared the end of his four-month mission, and prepared to take his acquisitions out of the country, Baring intervened once again, pressing for the return of any antiquities bought from dealers. Budge tersely reminded him ‘that I was not a member of his staff, and that I intended to carry out the instructions of the Trustees, and to do my utmost to increase the collections of the British Museum’.29 No wonder Baring is said to have declared: ‘I wish there were no more antiquities in this country; they are more trouble than anything else.’30 In Budge, ‘over-Baring’ had certainly met his match. Next, the Antiquities Service attempted to block the export of Budge’s cases from Alexandria, but he colluded with officials and British military officers at the docks to smuggle the objects through customs and onto a waiting ship. Budge and his hoard arrived safely back in London to the delight of his employers at the British Museum. He had done exactly as he had been asked, and had surpassed expectations.
The appointment of Grébaut as director of the Egyptian Museum and the Antiquities Service in 1886 merely strengthened the native dealers’ hand. Budge was scathing of the new director at Bulaq, calling him ‘by nature, and disposition, and training . . . unsuited for the post into which he was thrust’, and averring (with no sense of irony) that ‘all those who had at heart the progress of Egyptology, and the welfare of the National Collection in Egypt, regretted the appointment’.31 The more Grébaut tried to assert the Egyptian government’s owernship of antiquities, the more he found himself outwitted by the dealers.
In 1887–8, rumours of a major discovery in Upper Egypt began circulating in archaeological circles throughout Europe. Continental museums dispatched representatives to Cairo, ‘each doing his best, as was right, to secure the lion’s share’.32 The discovery in question was that of the Amarna Letters – which Erman would successfully acquire for Berlin’s Egyptian Museum – and the fact that the Antiquities Service knew of it at all came about by accident rather than design. A smuggler was taking one of the largest tablets to Cairo, and:
hid it between his inner garments, and covered himself with his great cloak. As he stepped up into the railway coach this tablet slipped from his clothes and fell on the bed of the railway, and broke in pieces. Many natives in the train and on the platform witnessed the accident and talked freely about it, and thus the news of the discovery of the tablets reached the ears of the Director of Antiquities.33
Budge revelled in the cat-and-mouse game between the dealers and the authorities, making it perfectly clear on which side he stood. Grébaut in turn, and with good reason, distrusted Budge, and ordered the police to watch him, report his movements, and take the names of any dealers he met. Budge was even threatened with arrest and prosecution; but he pressed on, undeterred and utterly confident of his own rightness.
During one collecting trip to Thebes, he acquired from local dealers a remarkable series of funerary papyri – no doubt illicitly excavated from a nearby tomb – and smuggled them back to his storeroom in Luxor. Grébaut followed in hot pursuit, but the captain of his steamer deliberately ran the boat aground on a sandbank near Naqada, just a few hours’ sailing north of Luxor, so that he could attend his daughter’s wedding. The boat remained there for two days. Frustrated, Grébaut sent police to arrest Budge and the dealers, but Budge managed to buy off the police. When Grébaut’s steamer eventually arrived in Luxor, one of the dealers went straight to the boat and bought antiquities from Grébaut’s own servant, ‘who handed them down to him from one end of the steamer while his employer was dining at the other!’34 By now, Antiquities Service guards had been stationed around Budge’s storeroom to stop him removing any of his ill-gotten gains. But Budge had learned a lesson or two from his dealer friends. First, he arranged for the guards to be sent a hearty meal. Then, under cover of darkness, he had an underground tunnel dug from the storeroom to the adjoining garden of the Luxor Hotel. While he and the hotel manager watched anxiously, and while the guards were busy eating: ‘man after man went into the sardâb [basement] of the house, and brought out, piece by piece and box by box, everything which was of the slightest value commercially . . . In this way we saved the Papyrus of Ani, and all the rest of my acquisitions from the officials of the Service of Antiquities, and all Luxor rejoiced.’35
Budge used all sorts of ruses to smuggle the antiquities out of Egypt, for example hiding sheets of papyrus between photographic plates. Once again, he was assisted by sympathetic British officers and corrupt customs officials. He remained totally unrepentant, defending his actions by claiming he had done only: ‘what every collector for a European Museum did in Egypt . . . dispensed with [the authorities’] permission to take out of the country the smaller and more precious objects which were greatly needed to increase existing groups or to fill up gaps in the collections in the British Museum’.36 Moreover, he asserted, because of the parlous state of security at the Bulaq Museum: ‘The objects would have been smuggled out of Egypt all the same; the only difference would have been that instead of being in the British Museum they would be in some museum or private collection on the Continent or in America.’37 ‘No tomb in Egypt,’ he averred, ‘however skilfully and cunningly constructed, has protected the mummy or mummies in it against the ancient tomb-robber, and from wreckage and mutilation at his hands. But it is impossible for any mummy to be wrecked or mutilated in the British Museum.’38
Altogether, Budge was sent to Egypt to acquire antiquities on thirteen more occasions between 1891 and 1913. By the 1890s, forgeries were becoming increasingly common, but Budge’s good relations with all the main dealers allowed him to purchase the best genuine artefacts – much to the chagrin of his European rivals. As he himself put it: ‘It only took a couple of winters to teach the dealers that the Trustees of the British Museum always paid fair prices.’39 He also recognized the importance of local knowledge. Throughout the Nile Valley, as soon as the archaeologists downed tools at the end of a digging season, ‘the natives set to work to finish the excavations on their own account’.40 Moreover, ‘the native seekers after antiquities always have known, and always will know, more about the places where antiquities are to be found than European archaeologists, however greatly they be skilled in Egyptology’.41
When, in 1892, de Morgan replaced Grébaut as director of the Antiquities Service and Egyptian Museum, Budge immediately recognized a kindred spirit. He found de Morgan ‘courteous, sympathetic and broad-minded’,42 principally, one imagines, because the new director had a much more liberal attitude to the export of antiquities, ‘provided that they immediately found safe and secure deposit in great national museums like the Louvre and the British Museum . . . He wanted all the great museums in Europe to acquire all they possibly could, while the British occupied Egypt.’43 To take full advantage of such a benign new regime, Budge’s employers sent him to Egypt in early October 1892, ‘to arrange with the dealers for a regular supply of Egyptian and Coptic antiquities, and to acquire Greek and Coptic papyri and manuscripts of all kinds’.44 When he arrived, he discovered that collecting had turned into a free-for-all. Picking up on the signals sent by de Morgan, foreign agents were smuggling antiquities out of Egypt in their diplomatic baggage. Budge sprang into action, and his reputation preceded him. Each time he visited Thebes, he found ‘another group of happy natives’ awaiting him with antiquities to sell.45 By such means, he acquired for the British Museum an intact prehistoric grave – ‘The body was exhibited at once in the First Egyptian Room, and for the first time the British public saw a neolithic Egyptian’46 – and, directly from dealers at Giza and Saqqara, a series of false doors, statues and stelae, to create at the British Museum ‘the finest collection of monuments of the Early Empire outside Egypt’.47
Even by the standards of his own time, Budge’s reputation was decidedly mixed. Some contemporaries denounced him in the press as ‘a somewhat unscrupulous collector of antiquities for his Museum’, and hoped they might ‘arouse scientific public opinion in England against him and his methods’;48 but Budge continued, undaunted. In his autobiography, written after thirty-five years of collecting, his justification was as robust and outspoken as it had been at the beginning of his career: ‘from first to last . . . the principal robbers of tombs and wreckers of mummies have been the Egyptians themselves. The outcry against the archaeologist is foolish, and the accusations made against him are absurd.’49
It was in the context of operations like Budge’s that, in 1889, Petrie’s young assistant, Francis Llewellyn Griffith, had railed against the mores of contemporary archaeology. He lamented:
If a small portion of the sums of money that, in the name of scientific research, have been spent in Egypt on treasure-hunting for antiquities, on uncovering monuments and exporting them to destruction, on unwatched excavations from which the limestone sculptures have gone straight to the kiln or the village stone-mason – if a small portion of this had been utilized in securing systematically throughout the country accurate and exhaustive copies of the inscriptions above ground and in danger, the most important part of all the evidence of her past that Egypt has handed down to our day would have been gathered intact, instead of being mutilated beyond recovery.50
Such sentiments resonated with Amelia Edwards, for one. The following October, she wrote a letter to The Times announcing the establishment of an Archaeological Survey of Egypt under Griffith’s direction and editorship, and setting out its goals: ‘to map, plan, photograph and copy all the most important sites, sculptures, and paintings and inscriptions yet extant, so as to preserve at least a faithful record of those fast-perishing monuments’.51 It was to be one of the last significant initiatives of her life.
Edwards’s final gift to Egyptology, as we have seen, was to endow a chair at UCL. There is no doubt that Edwards chose University College, rather than one of the two ancient universities, because of its commitment to equality between men and women. Edwards wanted women like her to have the opportunity to study Egyptology at university, and her wish was fulfilled from the outset: of the eight students who enrolled for Petrie’s first course of lectures, seven were women. Petrie was determined to use Edwards’s legacy to build up a nationally important centre of teaching and research. To add to Edwards’s own library, he used his academic contacts to persuade the French government to donate volumes of their archaeological series, and the German Kaiser to donate a complete set of Lepsius’s Denkmäler; within two years, the library comprised 600 volumes. In his inaugural lecture, Petrie launched the Egyptian Research Account to train students in the field as excavators, backed by private donations; it ran for over fifty years and launched the careers of many successful archaeologists. Petrie ensured that the courses given by his assistant, Margaret Murray, would ‘prepare his excavators to be archaeologists and not just diggers’.52
UCL had agreed with Petrie that he would lecture in the first and third terms, leaving the winter months free for his annual season of excavation in Egypt. The location he chose for his first dig as Edwards Professor of Egyptology in the winter of 1893–4 was, on the face of it, rather unprepossessing. At Kuft (ancient Coptos, modern Qift), north of Luxor, a public road ran through the centre of the archaeological site, providing looters with easy access to the ruins. Petrie found the town awash with thieves and dealers. The locals were not much better. He described them as ‘the most troublesome people that I have ever worked with’.53 Nonetheless, he was determined to train some in the science of archaeology, to complement his growing band of students back in London. It was an inspired decision, as he later explained:
Among this rather untoward people we found however, as in every place, a small percentage of excellent men; some half-dozen were of the very best type of native, faithful, friendly, and laborious, and from among these workmen we have drawn about forty to sixty for our work . . . They have formed the backbone of my upper Egyptian staff, and I hope that I may keep these good friends so long as I work anywhere within reach of them.54
Within a couple of seasons, Petrie’s small band of Kuftis grew into something of a local industry, and by the end of the nineteenth century villagers from Kuft enjoyed a virtual monopoly of skilled archaeological labour on Egyptian excavations.55 In time, Petrie’s original Kuftis passed on their skills, father to son, down the generations. Some of their descendants are still employed as professional diggers working in Egypt today, and ‘Kufti’ has become shorthand among archaeologists for a skilled site foreman.
While working at Kuft, Petrie ‘eyed the hills on the opposite side of the Nile, and heard of things being found there’.56 So, after finishing at Kuft, he moved his team across the river and started work at the two adjacent sites of Nagada and Ballas. Petrie concentrated on Nagada, with its extensive cemeteries, while his young assistant, James Quibell, sister in tow, worked at Ballas. ‘Miss Quibell did most of the drawing of the objects found; she seems to have enjoyed excavating and took very kindly to life in Egypt.’57 Yet despite her important contribution, Miss Quibell’s name never appeared on the title page of any of Petrie’s publications, and she is absent from most histories of Egyptology. (Later, during the First World War, she kept a school for children of English residents in Cairo.)
The graves Petrie excavated at Nagada were unlike anything else he had ever encountered in Egypt. The pottery was in strange styles – red with black tops or cream with red-painted decoration – and there were previously unknown classes of object: cosmetic palettes, used for grinding mineral pigments, and flint knives. Petrie held to the ‘diffusionist’ theory that civilization must have reached Egypt from more advanced lands to the East – ex oriente lux – and interpreted the strange burials accordingly. He identified the people buried at Nagada as members of a ‘New Race’, and stuck resolutely to the theory, even when faced with evidence and arguments to the contrary. (Quibell is said to have had his doubts about the ‘New Race’ theory from the outset, although he would not have been so unwise as to utter them in Petrie’s presence.) Petrie’s strength was also his weakness. In the words of his biographer: ‘Once he had seized upon a hypothesis it was sometimes difficult for him to envisage that he could be wrong . . . throughout his life he clung to theories of his own . . . till overwhelming evidence forced him to admit his mistakes.’58 Only in the light of subsequent excavations by Quibell elsewhere in Upper Egypt were the ‘New Race’ burials correctly identified as those of prehistoric, indigenous Egyptians.
A more lasting achievement from Petrie’s excavations at Nagada was his development of ‘sequence dating’, a technique now known as seriation, whereby the gradual changes in style over time within a particular class of object, for example pottery or stone vessels, can be used to place a series of archaeological contexts in their relative chronological order. Petrie also established a system for tomb-digging that set the standard for future archaeologists. Altogether he dug over two hundred graves in a single season at Nagada, making scale drawings of each tomb and its contents. He wanted, above all, to distance himself from the old style of excavation, as practised by Mariette, who ‘only visited his excavation once in a few weeks and left everything to native reises [overseers], just ordering a particular area to be cleared out’.59
While Petrie set new standards of scientific precision and process in his archaeological work, life on one of his digs became synonymous with asceticism to the point of privation. He was fond of the Stoic philosophers, and always took a volume of Epictetus with him when he travelled to Egypt. On his earliest excavations for the EEF in the Nile Delta: ‘He dosed himself daily with quinine and strychnine to ward off the marsh fevers, and found that under his strenuous regime he kept surprisingly well.’60 In February 1895, James Breasted visited Petrie during a honeymoon trip up the Nile. Breasted was looking forward to meeting the archaeologist who had already established an international reputation, but was aghast and genuinely perplexed by Petrie’s modus vivendi: ‘It was never quite clear to those who endured his deliberately primitive regime why service to archaeology should necessarily entail . . . rags, dirt, malnutrition, chronic dyspepsia and almost total absence of the most rudimentary creature comforts.’61
What Breasted had discerned was that Petrie’s austerity was not simply a matter of economy, but of choice. Nonetheless, Breasted had to admit, Petrie achieved ‘maximum results for minimum expenditure’.62 His excavations at Kuft, on which he employed seventy men for eleven weeks, cost just £300.
A few years later, the founder of the National Trust, Canon Rawnsley, visited Petrie’s excavations at Meidum, and so enjoyed the experience – one suspects it must have been a brief visit – that he sent his son, Noel, as a volunteer to work with Petrie during a subsequent winter season. As finishing schools go, it was certainly memorable:
First came an ice-cold bath . . . Visions of ham and eggs are lost in the reality of other food . . . We sit on empty boxes to discuss our meals. The dining room is floored with sand. It is an oblong room and down its centre is a rough trestle table. The boards are somewhat warped and stained, and on them range the bowls of food or opened tins, covered with dishes or saucers to exclude the dust. Along each side-wall is a single plank for shelf, where lie the records of the former excavations, a few odd finds, the public ink and pens and rolls of copied hieroglyphs.63
The diet consisted of tea, ship’s biscuits, and cold tinned tongue. Half-empty tins were left to be served up again the following day. In the heat of Egypt, food poisoning was the regular result. It was even said that tins of food left over from one season were buried, to be dug up again at the start of the next. Each tin would be tested by throwing it against a stone wall. If it survived without exploding, its contents were deemed fit for consumption.64 As for sanitation, Petrie told one of his students ‘the desert is wide and there are many sheltered hollows’.65 (The result, according to Budge, was that Petrie was ‘dirty, verminous and . . . as odiferous as a polecat’.66) The young Rawnsley summed the whole experience up thus: ‘An excavator’s camp in the valley of the Nile is a thing apart . . . a rough sketch in mud bricks and sand, a little settlement of sunburnt men toiling in a thirsty land, alone with nature, in one of her solemnest moods.’67 His time spent with Petrie had, at the very least, disabused him of romantic notions of the Orient. His lasting impression was that ‘the valley of the Nile is not a paradise, for there are dust and flies and smells and other disagreeable things’.68
Later visitors to Petrie’s excavation camp included T. E. Lawrence, who came for six weeks to learn the rudiments of archaeology from its acknowledged master. He, too, had a memorable experience: ‘A Petrie dig is a thing with a flavour of its own: tinned kidneys mingle with mummy-corpses and amulets in the soup: my bed is all gritty with prehistoric alabaster jars of unique types – and my feet at night keep the bread-box from rats.’ Lawrence also got the measure of Petrie as a person, and in his brief description we see through the mask of the great archaeologist to the stubborn, single-minded and rather selfish individual that lay beneath. Lawrence described Petrie, with a remarkable degree of indulgence, as ‘a man of ideas and systems, from the right way to dig a temple to the only way to clean one’s teeth. Also he only is right in all things . . . Further he is easy-tempered, full of humour, and fickle to a degree that makes him delightfully quaint, and a constant source of joy and amusement in his camp.’ But, once again, the end of the visit was an occasion for profound relief. Lawrence concluded: ‘Am awfully glad I went to him. But what a life!’69
That Petrie ever found space in his life for another person is a wonder. That he married is nothing short of miraculous. During the exhibition of his season’s finds, at UCL in the summer of 1896, he noticed a young woman making drawings of some of the objects. He found himself attracted to her, and struck up a conversation. Her name was Hilda Urlin, and she had been asked to sketch some of Petrie’s finds by a family friend, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Holiday. But Hilda herself preferred more practical pursuits. As a child she had been a tomboy, given to sailing boats, spinning tops, and other activities generally deemed unsuitable for a girl.70 Petrie seems to have spotted an ideal soul mate, and within a year had declared his love. Hilda initially rejected his advances, but eventually began to reciprocate his feelings. They married in late November 1897, and spent their honeymoon . . . in Egypt. Fortunately for Petrie, his wife ‘took to life in an archaeological camp like a duck to water’.71 She lacked any domestic skills, but her inability to cook was hardly of concern in a camp that ran on tinned food. Her strength, stamina and stoicism were what mattered. On one of their early excavations together, Petrie recalled, ‘a man came in the dark and shot at close range at the first person who came out of our mess-hut, which was my wife. Happily she escaped.’72 On another occasion, Hilda herself wrote ‘at the head of my bed are 4 great cartonnage heads of mummy cases with staring faces, at the side are collections of alabasters and many bones hard by; at the foot of the bed are 80 skulls’.73 She took it all in her stride.
Neither Petrie nor Budge had found Maspero’s successor at the Museum and Antiquities Service, Eugène Grébaut, easy to deal with. His primary concern, to defend French archaeological pre-eminence at all costs, blinded him to other pressing problems. Thefts from archaeological sites, and the illicit trade in antiquities – exploited, if not encouraged by Budge – flourished under Grébaut’s stewardship. Just about the only positive development in his six-year tenure was the opening of a new Egyptian Museum at Giza; the collection had finally been relocated from its riverside quarters at Bulaq following the disastrous floods of 1878. Khedive Tewfiq offered an old harem palace built by his father, Ismail, and inaugurated it as Egypt’s new national musem on 12 January 1890. But this positive development could not mask Grébaut’s wider failings. In private, even the French consul conceded that he was a disaster and would have to be replaced.74 Grébaut clearly sensed that moves were being made against him; determined to resist demands to hire a German, or – worse still – a Briton, he promoted Ahmed Kamal to the post of assistant curator. Kamal thus became the first Egyptian to be employed in a substantive position in the Egyptian Museum. His appointment was followed shortly afterwards by that of Ahmed Najib as chief inspector of antiquities: the first Egyptian to occupy a senior role in the Antiquities Service. Through his fierce opposition to other European nationalities, Grébaut thus unwittingly became an early champion of Egyptian advancement.
Grébaut’s wider ineptitude, however, could not be ignored. Matters came to a head in 1892. In January that year, Tewfiq died unexpectedly at the age of thirty-nine, and was succeeded by his seventeen-year-old son Abbas. (The boy spoke Turkish, German, French and English, but no Arabic: it was little wonder that late nineteenth-century Cairo witnessed the first stirrings of pan-Arab nationalism, as Egyptians began to debate their future under Ottoman rule.) According to Egyptian law, the age of majority was eighteen, and Abbas was still at school in Vienna. More awkward still for Evelyn Baring (newly ennobled as Lord Cromer), Abbas had imbibed Hapsburg ideas and was no friend of the British. Within just one month of his accession, Abbas had appointed an Anglophobe Swiss as his private secretary, and believed he would have French support in any showdown against Cromer. Tewfiq had been relatively easily to manipulate, but Abbas showed every sign of wanting to be his own man. Cromer himself admitted: ‘I really wish he was not quite so civilized.’75
During the interregnum, while the British authorities were preoccupied with the royal succession, Grébaut took his chance to reassert his position and, in a fit of pique, refused all new concessions to excavate, even to the EEF. It was a step too far. Later that year, by which time Abbas had turned eighteen and returned to Egypt to assume the throne as Abbas II (r.1892–1914), the French authorities forced Grébaut from office. They replaced him with an unlikely choice, the mining engineer and geologist, Jacques de Morgan. Where Grébaut had been petty, de Morgan was affable. His more conciliatory approach certainly found favour with the likes of Petrie and Budge. Inevitably, some French accused de Morgan of being too friendly towards the British. But it was his lack of expertise in Egyptology rather than any want of national pride that eventually sank his directorship. For example, determined to reinforce the flood defences at Kom Ombo, to protect the Ptolemaic temple from slipping into the river, he turned – as any good engineer would – to the nearest source of stone, a handy pile of sixty blocks, which he proceeded to have pulverized into chippings to strengthen the Nile bank. The blocks subsequently turned out to have formed the ancient floor of the temple. In saving it from flooding, de Morgan had irreparably damaged its very fabric. His cavalier attitude to antiquities also led him to propose selling duplicates in the Egyptian Museum directly to foreign museums, enraging the antiquities dealers. For the head of Egypt’s cultural heritage directorate to alienate archaeologists and antique dealers alike was no mean feat. After just five years in post, de Morgan, too, had to go.
Like Grébaut before him, his one moment of triumph concerned the future of the Egyptian Museum. The Giza harem palace was only ever going to be an interim solution, and early in his tenure de Morgan had appointed an international jury to choose the design for a new, permanent museum, to be located in the centre of Cairo. A Frenchman, a Briton and an Italian received designs from all over the world. The five entries they shortlisted were all French; the winner was a relatively unknown architect, Marcel Dourgnon, whose vision was for an imposing edifice in a neoclassical European idiom. On 1 April 1897, Khedive Abbas II laid the cornerstone at the northern end of a grand new square that had been laid out by Ismail as part of his redevelopment of the capital.
By that autumn, however, de Morgan had left office, to be replaced by someone with an unimpeachable background in Egyptology. (Had the authorities proposed another amateur, pressure to appoint the assistant curator at the Egyptian Museum, the German Emile Brugsch, could have proved impossible to resist.) Victor Loret had been a pupil of Maspero’s at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, and had undertaken fieldwork at Thebes. His primary interest was in archaeology, and he relaunched systematic excavations in the Valley of the Kings for the first time since Belzoni’s day, discovering the tombs of Thutmose III and Amenhotep II (the latter hiding a cache of royal mummies) within a month of each other, and fourteen private tombs. He also refounded the Ecole du Caire as the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale and reinstated the catalogue général of the Egyptian Museum, to document all objects entering the collection. Unfortuately, like so many academics, Loret was totally unsuited to a senior administrative role. Clandestine excavations and the illicit trade in antiquities prospered under his incompetent regime. As one British observer put it: ‘Egypt was the happy hunting-ground of archaeologists of all nations . . . excavators were inclined to put a free interpretation on the concessions granted to them by the Egyptian Government, and in spite of the embargo set on their exportation, valuable antiquities continued, from time to time, to slip out of the country.’76
