Faced with such shameless looting, Loret steered through a new decree on the protection of Egypt’s cultural heritage, but it was too little, too late. His main talent, besides excavation, seems to have been making enemies. Eventually, all nationalities, including the French, were clamouring for him to go.77
The question was, who could be found to replace him? Since Maspero’s departure in 1886, there had been three directors of the Antiquities Service and Museum in the space of thirteen years. Each had proved more inept than the last. The French were desperate to maintain their control, so hard won and so diligently maintained. Back in 1890, they had received assurances from the Egyptian foreign minister that, in return for a loan, ‘Egypt would not name Britons to the Antiquities Service.’78 Now, nine years later, the French consul-general had to remind his political masters in Paris of the importance of ‘retaining here the Egyptological terrain, the rightful place to which we are entitled by the French origin of this science, the work of Mariette, and the sacrifices France has always made for knowledge of ancient Egypt’.79 But after the high-handed Grébaut, the incompetent de Morgan, and the disastrous Loret, there were few plausible French candidates left. In fact, there was only one.
Scholars began to plead with Maspero to return. Petrie wrote to him in April 1898: ‘I sincerely hope to find you (back) at the Museum next season. The current situation is completely impossible: if French influence has to be represented there by men such as Grébaut and Loret, it would be better for it to disappear to avoid an even greater scandal. Your return would be the only solution acceptable to all parties and all interests.’80
But Maspero was loath to involve himself in what he saw as a campaign to unseat his former pupil, Loret. The situation continued to deteriorate, and six months later, a Frenchman begged Maspero: ‘I am absolutely certain, after what I have seen and heard, that this important position will be given to an Englishman or a German, given the level of discontent this year . . . Your undisputed and indisputable reputation alone can save for France this legitimate inheritance.’81
Meanwhile, Cromer was preoccupied with a matter altogether more important than the future of the Antiquities Service. The Mahdist rebellion in Sudan had been festering for years, but an Anglo-Egyptian army commanded by General Kitchener had been achieving some recent successes. Their efforts at reconquest, facilitated by the newly completed railway from Cairo to Aswan, culminated in the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898, which saw the Khalifa defeated and the death of General Gordon avenged. But no sooner had the British celebrated victory than they were met with another challenge to their control of north-east Africa. While the British and the Mahdist forces had been fighting, a French force had spotted an opportunity to gain a foothold on the Upper Nile, and had marched all the way from the Congo to raise the French flag at Fashoda, less than 500 miles from Khartoum. Kitchener was hastily dispatched, and Britain and France remained on the brink until the French capitulated and withdrew.82
While recapturing Sudan and averting a European war were uppermost in Cromer’s mind, he could not altogether neglect the future leadership of Egypt’s cultural institutions, even though he found archaeological rivalries intensely irritating. His chosen method of intervention was a textbook example of his modus operandi under the ‘veiled protectorate’. He approached that doyen of orientalists, Archibald Sayce, who since 1890 had taken to spending each winter on the Nile on his dahabiya, Istar (complete with an onboard library of 2,000 books and a crew of nineteen). Sayce knew everyone in Egyptology, and agreed to sound out Maspero’s willingness to contemplate a second term. Maspero had refused three previous attempts to bring him back, but this time the very future of the Antiquities Service, and of French pre-eminence, hung on his decision. He agreed to return, but on much more generous terms than before: a salary of £1,500 per annum plus expenses. Cromer did not demur. By September 1899, Maspero was on his way back to Egypt.
As if to signal the dire state into which Egypt’s patrimony had fallen during his thirteen-year absence, on the morning of 3 October, just a few days after his arrival in the country, eleven columns in the great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak came crashing down. The roar could be heard in Luxor two miles away. Maspero found himself having to pick up the pieces, quite literally, of his predecessors’ incompetence and neglect. The disaster at Karnak confirmed his priorities for his second term of office: from now on, the Antiquities Service would focus on conservation and publication of Egypt’s ancient monuments; excavations would be left to foreign missions. As long as they had the money and the requisite skills, overseas expeditions would be welcome in the Nile Valley.
As the world entered the dying days of the nineteenth century, the way was thus opened for new interests to join the scramble for Egypt.
NINE
Egypt and America
Theodore Davis (third from left) outside a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, accompanied by his two archaeologists Arthur Weigall (second from left) and Edward Ayrton (right), and Mrs Weigall.
All good things come to those who dig long and deep enough.1
THEODORE DAVIS, 1902
Europeans had imbibed the mystique and majesty of ancient Egypt from classical times. The very visible presence, in Rome and Constantinople, of obelisks from the distant Nile Valley set a precedent and an expectation: that any future European empire, actual or self-imagined, would proclaim its credentials by erecting a grand pharaonic monument at the heart of its capital city. Furthermore, from the beginning of the Enlightenment, Europe saw itself as the inheritor of classical civilization; and had not the ancient Greeks themselves inherited much from the ancient Egyptians? So it was that Napoleon Bonaparte went to Egypt wishing to be seen as a new Alexander, while the erection of Cleopatra’s Needle on the banks of the Thames signalled the dominance of Victorian London as a new Rome. Imperial France and imperial Britain alike clothed themselves in pharaonic garb, the better to assert their own hegemonic aspirations. Prussia, at first somewhat presumptuously, then, as imperial Germany, more self-confidently, sought to challenge France and Britain in Egypt in order to challenge them in Europe. For most of the nineteenth century, the history of Western enagagement with Egypt was written by these three latter-day empires, with occasional bit parts for the odd Italian or Swiss.
Americans, by contrast, came to Egypt later, and more self-consciously. The influence of ancient Egypt – or, rather, an eighteenth-century European conception of ancient Egypt – on Masonic ritual and symbolism had an important impact on the self-image of the newly independent United States. The country’s Great Seal, adopted in 1782, included an Egyptian pyramid radiating light, while a memorial erected to Christopher Columbus in Baltimore ten years later took the form of an obelisk. However, these early public expressions were not accompanied by a great rush of visitors to the Nile Valley. It was simply too far away. When early citizens of the United States travelled abroad, it was usually to Europe. Only a few plucky adventurers made it as far as the Eastern Mediterranean. The first American to visit Egypt was probably John Ledyard, a friend of Thomas Jefferson’s, who travelled to Alexandria and Cairo in 1789, dying there before he could return home: hardly a great advertisement to his fellow countrymen and women. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1780, elected both Napoleon and Denon as honorary members, in recognition of their having opened up Egypt to Western scholarship; but it would not be until 1820 that a second American, George Bethune English, reached the banks of the Nile.2 The lawyer and diplomat Luther Bradish visited Egypt the following year, as part of a wider tour of Europe and the Middle East. In the mid-1820s, a merchant from Smyrna presented an Egyptian mummy and its accompanying coffin to the people of Boston, early examples of the Egyptian artefacts that began to enter American collections sporadically during the formative years of the United States.
During the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, while Europeans, from Champollion and Wilkinson to Lepsius and Mariette, were opening up and exploring the civilization of the pharaohs, Americans were busy forging their new republic, fighting and emerging from a civil war that would define the parameters of American civilization. Tales from far-off lands were a sideshow compared to the more important business of nation- and fortune-building. In 1832, one Mendes Israel Cohen, a Jewish-American collector from Virginia, boasted that he was the first person to fly the American flag on the Nile,3 while five years later John Lloyd Stephens was the first American to publish a popular account of his travels, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petræ and the Holy Land (1837).4 In 1839, the North American Review presciently described Egypt as ‘a quarter of the world, where comparatively few [Americans] have travelled, but where we anticipate they will soon penetrate, with all their characteristic ardor and enterprise’.5 The person who really put Egypt on the map for Americans in the mid-nineteenth century was the US consul in Cairo, George Gliddon. As well as being a powerful (and outstpoken) advocate for the preservation of Egypt’s monuments, he was also a great popularizer of the subject in his home country. His series of lectures on ancient Egypt, first delivered in 1842 and illustrated with antiquities collected by Cohen, was so successful that it toured the United States for two years. The accompanying book, Ancient Egypt (1843), sold 24,000 copies. Largely as a result of Gliddon’s efforts, American academia accepted the study of ancient Egypt as a subject in its own right in the 1850s: a decade after Prussia, two decades after France, but – it must be said – four decades before Britain.6
Other than Gliddon, the first American to live in Egypt for any length of time – and out of personal rather than diplomatic interest – was an adventurer and dealer from Connecticut, Edwin Smith. He settled in Egypt in 1858 and lived for eighteen years in Luxor, where he became friends with Lucie Duff Gordon. Smith made a living as a moneylender and antiquities dealer. Among the objects he acquired were two important medical papyri, and much of his collection went on to form the core of the Brooklyn Museum. However, he is also said to have used his knowledge of ancient Egyptian writing to help unscrupulous dealers produce fake antiquities for sale.7 While far from being an exemplar of academic integrity, Smith was nonetheless the first American to call himself an Egyptologist (even if his model was more Belzoni than Birch).
American interest in Egypt waned in the 1860s, as domestic struggles convulsed the United States. But after the end of the Civil War, as if the lid had been taken off a pressure cooker, Americans flocked to Egypt, just as Europeans had done after Waterloo. In 1870 alone, 300 American visitors registered at the US consulate-general in Cairo. Veterans of the Civil War even enlisted in the Egyptian army to boost its strength under Ismail, who was disillusioned with Britain and France and keen to throw off the Ottoman yoke. When General Gordon went to the Sudan in 1874 in an attempt to put down the Mahdist rebellion, Ismail sent two American officers to accompany him as a check against Britain’s expansionary intentions. Both experiments proved a failure. Within four years, all but one of the American veterans had resigned or been discharged, while one of the officers resigned his position as chief of staff and left Egypt in 1883, following the British invasion and occupation. (He went on to supervise the building of the base for the Statue of Liberty.8)
The upsurge in American tourism to Egypt was accompanied by a post-bellum drive to found and expand universities and civic museums as pillars of national learning.9 It was in this context that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired its first Egyptian objects in 1874, soon to be joined in Central Park by the second Cleopatra’s Needle (which, as we have seen, was erected in 1881). When former president and Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant visited Egypt on a round-the-world trip in 1878, he apparently showed ‘no interest in the ruins, believing Cairo to be more interesting because of the cafes, which remind him of Paris, than the Pyramids, which he regards as entirely useless’.10 But he was atypical. Many of his fellow citizens who beat a path to Egypt in the latter part of the nineteenth century had a deep interest in the country’s ancient civilization; a few of them would become the founders of American Egyptology. They would bring new insights and breathe fresh life into a subject that had, since its origins, been the preserve of Europeans and the prisoner of European prejudice.
The first great figure in American Egyptology came to the subject, like the founder of British Egyptology, John Gardner Wilkinson, somewhat by accident. Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833–96), was born in Little Compton, Rhode Island, attended his local university, Brown, for two years, but left before graduating owing to ill health, and made his way to New York to seek his fortune, working initially as a journalist at the Tribune newspaper. There he was able to hone his natural gifts as a linguist – he translated Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables into English – and make influential friends in the close-knit, not to say corrupt, world of 1860s New York. Through his political and business connections, Wilbour’s financial affairs flourished; by the time he had reached his mid-thirties, he had made enough money to indulge his literary interests, so he decided to sail for Europe, which would become his home for the rest of his life.
It is not known when, or from where, Wilbour developed an interest in ancient Egypt, but while in Paris in the 1870s he took lessons with Maspero at the Collège de France, and he also studied with Eisenlohr in Heidelberg. Wilbour first visited Egypt in 1880, and was immediately entranced. Thereafter, he took annual trips up the Nile from 1886 on his own luxurious dahabiya, the Seven Hathors. Wilbour’s fellow Nile traveller, Sayce, called him ‘the best Egyptologist living’. In fact, Wilbour was an observer rather than a practitioner, on the sidelines of Egyptology but never at its centre. He published only one, very brief, article, ‘Canalizing the Cataract’,11 otherwise amusing himself by copying inscriptions, correcting the work of others (he gained particular satisfaction by pointing out errors in the works of Champollion and Lepsius), and collecting antiquities. While exploring the First Cataract region, Wilbour struck lucky not once but twice: on the island of Sehel, he discovered the so-called Famine Stela, while from a local dealer on the island of Elephantine he bought nine rolls of papyrus which turned out to document the life of Egypt’s earliest Jewish community. Indeed, it was as a collector with a keen eye for exceptional artefacts that Wilbour made his name and established his reputation. Acquiring antiquities became his abiding passion and his principal motivation. On a visit to Cairo, he wrote: ‘I made no effort to go to the Khédive’s reception last night; why should I seek his acquaintance? He has no papyrus.’12
Had Wilbour chosen to publish, he could have become an Egyptologist of distinction. He was intimately acquainted with every site of archaeological importance, had a wide circle of scholarly friends, and was also an acute observer of contemporary Egyptian society. (On hearing muttered complaints from the fellahin against the British occupation, he noted that: ‘The glee with which all the people, even those in office, recount the victories of the Mahdi . . . indicates which side their sympathies are on even against their own soldiers.’13) As it was, his fame rested largely on his munificence, and came posthumously: the Wilbour Library of Egyptology at the Brooklyn Museum, the Wilbour professorship of Egyptology at Brown University, and the great Wilbour Papyrus, bought as a permanent memorial to a great papyrological collector.
Although Wilbour never practised as a professional Egyptologist – he had neither the desire nor the need – his activities laid the foundations for the birth of the discipline in the United States. He must, therefore, have felt a certain satisfaction to live long enough to see the very first academic position in Egyptology established at an American university. The year was 1895, the young scholar appointed as a teaching assistant at the University of Chicago a man by the name of James Henry Breasted. Breasted, like Wilbour, had started out life in a very different career, training as a pharmacist and serving as a counter clerk in local drug stores near his home in Illinois. Breasted’s family was deeply religious, and he was influenced by his aunt to enrol at the nearest seminary, the Congregational Institute in Chicago, to study the Bible. It was to help with these studies that Breasted started learning Hebrew and Greek, but he quickly realized he had an innate talent for languages. Where Wilbour had been merely gifted, Breasted was a genius. (He eventually taught himself Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Syriac, Babylonian and Assyrian, Arabic, Egyptian, French, German, ‘and a moderate facility in Italian’.14) His tutor at the seminary urged him to consider an academic career in the newly emerging subjects of Near Eastern Studies or Egyptology, where his linguistic skills could be put to good use.
Breasted himself had begun to have doubts about his suitability for theological ministry, so decided to take the plunge, leave the seminary, and enrol at Yale. There, his great fortune was to study under William Rainey Harper, probably the leading intellectual of his generation. Harper had been a child prodigy, graduating from college at fourteen and completing his doctoral studies at Yale at the age of twenty. He recognized a fellow genius when he saw one. He also saw an opportunity to advance the subject of Egyptology in the United States. For, within a few months of Breasted entering Yale, Harper had been approached by the millionaire philanthropist John D. Rockefeller to help establish a new university in Chicago. Harper’s role was to recruit the very best faculty from across America. In Breasted, he saw the perfect candidate. In the summer of 1891, when Breasted had finished his studies, Harper promised him a new chair in Egyptology at Chicago if he would first bring himself up to date with the latest scholarship. That meant a trip to Germany, since under Erman the University of Berlin had become ‘the teaching and research centre of the world for oriental languages, and especially for Egyptology’.15 Breasted was enthusiastic. The only problem was money: with no family resources behind him, the prospect of trans-Atlantic travel was out of reach. Harper was not going to let a lack of funds derail a brilliant academic career, and agreed to provide support for his star pupil. On 30 July 1891, Harper, his family and a small group of his most able students sailed for Germany. For Breasted, it was the start of a remarkable life in Egyptology.
On arrival in Berlin, Breasted enrolled at the university and began taking classes with Erman, ‘the greatest Egyptologist of Germany, and perhaps of the world, in his day – and certainly one of the kindliest, most benign spirits of his generation’.16 Breasted’s progress was nothing short of meteoric. He learned to speak and write German with native fluency. At the end of his first year of study, he joined Erman and Sethe on a summer holiday in the mountains south-west of Berlin, which he described as ‘a fortnight in Elysium’.17 At the end of his third year, he was ready to defend his doctoral thesis, in front of a panel which included Sethe and Borchardt.18 He passed with flying colours. At the feet of Lepsius’s pupils, he had thoroughly imbibed the German approach to scholarship and, with it, a distrust of the ‘French model’. His outspoken criticism of French Egyptologists – ‘Their methods are inclined to be slipshod . . . The most obvious details escape them, and they hide their distaste for the drudgery of solid research behind a facade of facile, sometimes brilliant, but too often inaccurate generalization’19 – would later make him many enemies in France. Nonetheless, Breasted’s three years in Berlin gave him a firm grounding in Egyptology and ‘subjected him to an intellectual discipline which became the keynote of his scientific career’;20 they also made his name in academic and archaeological circles. Suddenly everyone with an eye on the future of the subject wanted a piece of this brilliant young American scholar.
Petrie had already written to Breasted, inviting him to spend a week on his excavations that coming season at Kuft and Nagada. But seven days eating cold food out of a tin was not exactly what Breasted had in mind for his first visit to Egypt – especially as it was also going to be his honeymoon. For, shortly after gaining his doctorate at Berlin, he had married Frances Hart, and a trip up the Nile was to be their first holiday together. It was not quite, perhaps, what a young married woman might have chosen. Breasted still had little money, so the couple took the train from Cairo to Asyut, to save the cost of hiring a boat for the whole journey. Fortunately, Frances ‘minded neither dust nor flies nor filth’.21 What she found harder to bear was her new husband’s preoccupation with Egyptian antiquities and inscriptions, at the expense of their time together. She later recalled ‘a scholarly honeymoon’ where ‘work took precedence over play’.22 Erman had also been in touch with Breasted, asking him to copy inscriptions for the Wörterbuch, and the young American set about his task with relentless enthusiasm and an unwavering focus. But his scholarly pursuits masked a deeper void: he was already, at the age of twenty-nine, becoming ‘a lonely man of few intimate friendships, who looked upon his personal life as a failure’.23
It was while on his honeymoon that Breasted came up with the idea of copying, not merely a representative selection of hieroglyphic inscriptions, but every Egyptian inscription of historical interest. This self-appointed task would preoccupy him for the next decade. Another commission he gladly accepted was to acquire objects for a new Egyptian museum at the University of Chicago. He was assisted by Sayce, ‘a unique British institution in the Near East . . . known, trusted and honoured everywhere, by Europeans and orientals alike’, and, moreover, a man who ‘knew every inch of the Nile for a thousand miles southward from Cairo’. 24 So glowing was Breasted’s reputation that archaeologists like Petrie even gave him anti-quities they had excavated. The result, to Breasted’s satisfaction and Harper’s delight, was ‘the nucleus of a modest though representative collection’.25 By way of acknowledgement for Petrie’s assistance and support, Breasted took the time to visit his excavations at Nagada. He found the archaeologist ‘thoroughly unkempt, clad in ragged, dirty shirt and trousers, worn-out sandals and no socks . . . not merely careless but deliberately slovenly and dirty’.26 The experience proved salutary, convincing Breasted that his calling lay in epigraphy and history, not field archaeology. He wrote to his father: ‘I want to read to my fellow men the oldest chapter in the story of human progress. I would rather do this than gain countless wealth.’27
At the same time, it was clear that archaeology in Egypt could not be left to its own devices, nor to continue in the same vein. As Amelia Edwards had discovered on her trip up the Nile in the 1870s, and Petrie had witnessed for himself a decade later, digging in Egypt was a corrupt business: ‘the least promising sites were assigned to European excavators, while the richest sites were given to native antiquity dealers who were permitted to carry on haphazard digging solely for commercial purposes’.28 Breasted was outraged by the appalling condition of many of the sites he visited, and made his feelings clear in a letter home: ‘I am so filled with indignation against the French and their empty, blatant boasting, “la gloire de la France”, that I can hardly contain myself. I could have wept my eyes out in Amarna. Scarcely less indignant must one feel against the English who are here only for the commerce and the politics of it, and who might reform matters if they would. A combination of French rascality, of English philistine indifference & of German lack of money is gradually allowing Egypt to be pillaged and plundered from end to end. In another generation there will be nothing to be had or saved.’29
If neither France nor Britain – nor, for that matter, Germany – could be trusted to excavate, preserve and record Egypt’s pharaonic heritage, America would have to step in.
Breasted’s first visit to Egypt had given him ‘the equipment for a great work’.30 On his way back to the United States in the spring of 1895, he stopped off in Paris (to see Maspero), in London (where he met Budge, and noted numerous errors in the labelling of the British Museum’s Egyptian collection), and in Oxford (no doubt at Sayce’s suggestion), before arriving in Chicago in April to take up his new teaching post. All thoughts of copying inscriptions or rescuing sites from slipshod archaeology were quickly banished as he faced up to the daunting challenge of establishing a new academic discipline. He wrote: ‘In America, Egyptology really did not exist at all – and here was I, proposing single-handedly to introduce it into a Middle Western community.’31 Moreover, ‘Egyptology was then commonly regarded by the public and the Press as something bizarre, an oddity at a county fair.’32 To make matters worse, Breasted had not received the chair that he had been promised, but only a lowly assistant post. He had to supplement his meagre salary of $800 per year by giving public lectures at gentlemen’s and ladies’ clubs. Not even the wholehearted support of Harper, who had been appointed as the university’s first president, could smooth Breasted’s path. The truth was that: ‘Amid the hurly-burly and travail of a great university’s birth, Egyptology was a super-numerary item of antiquarian bric-à-brac to be laid aside until the rest of the house was in order.’33 While Breasted set to work creating a new department, his grand ideas had to take a back seat – gone for the time being, but certainly not forgotten.
In 1899, Breasted received an invitation from the Royal Academy in Berlin to copy all the Egyptian inscriptions in European collections for the unfolding Wörterbuch project. He jumped at the chance, offering to do the work without payment, on an expenses basis only. His family – by now grown to include a young son – was rather less enthusiastic. Breasted, his wife and child spent the next few years shuttling back and forth between America and Europe, always travelling third-class, skimping on meals, and living ‘as scholar gipsies in an unending succession of dreary, grubby little hotels and pensions’.34 But Breasted could not have been happier. The material he collected provided the basis, not only for the Wörterbuch, but also for his own magnum opus. By the time he had finished the manuscript of his Ancient Records of Egypt, seven years later, it ran to over ten thousand pages. Even with the backing of John D. Rockefeller, the University of Chicago baulked at the cost of publication. (It was finally issued, in five volumes, in 1906–7.) Breasted’s only regret, was that he had not been able to copy ‘all the extant inscriptions along the entire Nile valley’.35 But, come to think of it, that was an idea worth pursuing.
Breasted’s impecunious wanderings around Europe, following his low-budget honeymoon up the Nile, had brought home to him a simple truth of academic scholarship (which is as true today as it was a century ago): research needs money. It had been all very well for the pioneering Egyptologists of independent means, men like Denon and Wilkinson, or for those employed on state-sponsored expeditions, like Champollion and Lepsius; Breasted had neither private funds nor government backing. Instead, he would need to follow the example of Petrie and obtain his own philanthropic support. In the spring of 1903, Breasted secured an interview with John D. Rockefeller’s business agent. The result was a gift of $50,000 to the University of Chicago for archaeological fieldwork in the Near East – the ‘Oriental Exploration Fund’. Breasted decided that its first mission should be an epigraphic survey of Nubia, hitherto a neglected part of the Nile Valley where there had been little in the way of systematic recording. On Christmas Day 1905, a few months after finally being appointed to a chair in Egyptology – the first in America – Breasted set out on his new expedition. The party arrived at Wadi Halfa on 7 January 1906 and started work the very next day. Breasted’s innovative new technique (later dubbed the ‘Chicago method’) was to collate and correct inscriptions from photographs. This occasionally required feats of acrobatics, such as shimmying up the mast of a dahabiya to photograph a stela high up on a cliff face.36 The aims of the expedition were ambitious, its methods novel, and the scale monumental: ‘Sometimes we employed between fifty and a hundred men to excavate temple courts buried in rubbish and drifted sand; or to reassemble like jigsaw puzzles the reliefs on fallen walls; or to relocate and record by modern methods the inscribed monuments mentioned by earlier visitors like Lepsius.’37
Like Lepsius and other nineteenth-century visitors to Nubia, Breasted had to face his fair share of trials and tribulations. Nights on the boat were ‘a carnival of riotous rats . . . They danced and galloped across the roof in a constant tattoo, they dropped through a window onto my bed so that I would be awakened by one sitting on my face!’38 Temperatures soared to 135 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, and, on one occasion: ‘It was so hot in the middle of the day that a standing camera scorched the hands. In the camera’s spirit level, the liquid expanded until the bubble finally disappeared.’39 At other times, however, the expedition had to face bitingly cold winds, sandstorms, and swarms of gnats. The meagre provisions were worthy of a Petrie dig, and Breasted hunted wildfowl ‘to relieve our monotonous diet of tinned foods’.40 While excavating the pyramids of Meroë, in far-flung Upper Nubia, he encountered a ‘grasshopper in the soup to-night . . . I crunched on him for some time, supposing he was a piece of dried herb. But finding him invulnerable, I pulled him out, still intact, but very dead!’41 The party nearly capsized at the Fourth Cataract, and while attempting to shoot the rapids of the Third were wrecked on the rocks; fortunately, British surveyors were working nearby and helped repair Breasted’s boat.42
Despite such adventures and near-disasters, the survey was successfully completed over two seasons. It covered 1,200 miles, and produced more than 1,200 records – photographs, transcriptions and notes. They were never fully published, but are still of inestimable value, especially as many of the monuments recorded have subsequently been damaged or destroyed. Breasted never again travelled south of Wadi Halfa, but his contribution to Nubian archaeology had been, and remains, immense.
Breasted’s final service to Egyptology was also his most enduring. A few months after the end of the First World War, he renewed his courtship of the Rockefeller Foundation, putting to them a proposal he had first dreamt up some years earlier – for an Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. He put it in suitably epochal terms, claiming that the imminent collapse of the Ottoman Empire made ‘the study of these lands . . . the birthright and the sacred legacy of all civilized peoples’.43 Rockefeller was moved by the argument, and agreed to fund an institute for an initial five-year period at $10,000 per year. (He subsequently doubled the figure.) Breasted arrived in Egypt in November 1919 to direct the institute’s first mission: an aerial photographic survey of the Memphite necropolis using an RAF plane lent by General Allenby.44 This visit only confirmed ‘the dire need of epigraphic work to save from destruction . . . fast-perishing written records’. Of immediate concern were the storage facilities in the basement of the (new) Egyptian Museum, where ‘beautifully painted wooden coffins . . . were submerged in water whenever there was an inundation above the normal level’.45 Breasted decided that one of the priorities of the Oriental Institute should be to copy and publish all the surviving Coffin Texts in the Egyptian Museum and in museums across Europe. It was but the first of a series of landmark projects to record pharaonic civilization for posterity.
Breasted had dreamed of recopying and republishing every inscription throughout Egypt using the Chicago method, and in 1924 he launched the Epigraphic Survey under the auspices of the Oriental Institute. That same year, thanks to further Rockefeller largesse, a house was built to serve as the Egyptian base of the institute and its survey, on the west bank of Thebes. Chicago House, as it became known, transferred to new premises on the east bank in 1931, and remains to this day a centre of scholarship and hospitality, a welcome oasis for archaeologists of all nationalities in the heart of modern Luxor.
Institute, Survey and House: together they make an invaluable contribution to the discipline of Egyptology in the twenty-first century; none would have been established without Breasted’s energy, enthusiasm and persuasion. He also had the good fortune to be the right man in the right place at the right time. Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America was a land of unprecedented wealth creation, and much of that wealth was directed into education, research and culture. Breasted ensured that Egyptology got its fair share. As his son and biographer put it: ‘archaeology is likely to have to wait for some time not only for another such champion as James Henry Breasted, but for a recurrence of the coincidence by which his unique blend of scholarship, executive ability and vision attained its fullest development at the most favourable moment yet to have occurred in his country’s economic history.’46
