When Maspero returned to Egypt in 1899, he was welcomed by archaeologists from all nationalities as the saviour of the Antiquities Service and Egyptian Museum. His three predecessors, in their different ways, had ‘seemed to think that good administration meant annoying as many people as possible . . . They succeeded magnificently.’47 Not only did Maspero have to patch up relations with his fellow Egyptologists, he also faced two particularly pressing challenges. First, there was the repair of the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, following the disastrous collapse of eleven columns on 3 October 1899. Maspero oversaw the rapid installation of wooden bracing, to prop up the remaining columns and buy some much-needed time to plan a full-scale restoration project. Second, there was the impending move of the national collection of antiquities from its temporary home in Giza to a purpose-built museum in the centre of Cairo. The move had been envisaged back in 1893, and work had started on the new museum the following year, during Grébaut’s tenure. There had been the inevitable delays in construction – which the French architect and consul, equally inevitably, blamed on the British48 – but finally the building was handed over to the Antiquities Service in September 1901. That left the really tricky business of moving thousands of fragile antiquities some nine miles from Giza to Ismail Square. Maspero’s inspired solution was to build a narrow-gauge Decauville railway, to provide a smoother, less bumpy and more direct route from old museum to new. The journey, going at a slow speed to protect the objects, took about two hours. Within twelve months, all the antiquities had been transferred, and the official opening of the Egyptian Museum took place on 15 November 1902. (Petrie was typically outspoken, disapproving not only of the location – he thought it should have been built in the drier climate of Luxor – but also of the design, which he called (not without reason) ‘the worst building I ever saw made for such a purpose. Half of it is too dark to be used at all, and much of it is scorched with sun through enormous skylights . . . Nearly half the site is wasted in spaces left to display the abominable architecture.’49)
Indeed, the building boasted a grand, neoclassical facade, which gave pride of place to the heroes of Egyptology since the Napoleonic expedition a century before: men such as Denon and Champollion, Wilkinson and Birch, Burckhardt and Lepsius. Altogether, the inscriptions honoured six Frenchmen, five Britons, four Germans, three Italians, a Dutchman, a Dane and a Swede.50 It was a triumphant and unselfconscious monument to the Western rediscovery of Egypt. The only Egyptian immortalized on the building was the reigning khedive, Abbas II – a puppet ruler, propped up by the British – and his inscription was in Latin. Europe’s implicit claim to the civilization of ancient Egypt was reinforced when Mariette’s sarcophagus was unveiled in its new location, the front garden of the museum – he would lie there for eternity, as the presiding genius and guardian spirit of the institution he had founded.
Just three weeks later, the two European powers who had controlled Egypt and its heritage for over a century, Britain and France, signed the entente cordiale. It was a brilliant diplomatic compromise, recognizing the pre-eminence of British political interests in Egypt while confirming that ‘the general direction of Antiquities in Egypt shall continue to be, as in the past, entrusted to a French scholar’.51 The Franco-British accords effectively ended all the manoeuvring and jostling for position of the previous twenty years.
Maspero’s direction of the new Egyptian Museum brought a measure of efficiency and professionalism to what had, for too long, been a somewhat haphazard enterprise. To reduce the risk of theft, he ordered the museum guards to wear Western uniform instead of traditional Egyptian galabeyas with their inside pockets. He oversaw the publication of the catalogue général, and transformed the museum into a proper scientific institution with its own library and archives. In 1899, there had been just twenty-four staff at the museum; by the time Maspero left office for the second time, in 1914, this number had risen to thirty-nine. In tandem with increasing the staff, he also added significantly to the collection. Most prominent of the new acquisitions was a colossal dyad of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye, found in pieces at Thebes, and reconstructed in the central hall of the museum. Despite such additions, Maspero confidently believed his new museum would have enough space for forty or fifty years’ worth of finds.
In archaeological work, too, Maspero’s return signalled an end to what had become a fragmented, laissez-faire, free-for-all. For over a decade, the Antiquities Service had been denuded of resources, its staff demoralized. Maspero sought to diversify its income, through entry tickets, sales from the museum, and sales of Antiquities Service publications – notably a new periodical, the Annales du Service des Antiquités d’Egypte, which he founded in 1900. He also managed to negotiate – from a grateful and relieved British administration – a trebling of the Service’s budget. With this additional funding, he was able to increase staffing: from just two chief inspectors to five, and from 191 site custodians to 298, by the end of his tenure.
Given the recent disaster at Karnak, the Antiquities Service’s first priority was consolidation and conservation. Maspero launched a series of projects to restore and preserve some of Egypt’s greatest monuments. At Karnak itself, his colleague Georges Legrain continued the systematic investigations begun under de Morgan. This led to the discovery in November 1903 of a vast cache of stone and bronze statues buried underneath the court of the temple’s seventh pylon. The contents were remarkable – within a year, the pit had yielded 472 stone statues and 8,000 bronzes – and it took five years to excavate them all. The final tally was nearly 17,000 objects, perhaps the most important single find in Egypt since Mariette’s discovery of the Serapeum. Other excavations near Karnak’s Sacred Lake uncovered a giant stone scarab while, across the Nile, a systematic clearance began of the Tombs of the Nobles; this necessitated the forced removal of the local residents, many of whose families had lived among and above the sepulchres for generations. Elsewhere in western Thebes, the Antiquities Service undertook the consolidation of the string of mortuary temples, from Medinet Habu in the south to Qurna in the north.
In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Egypt’s rapid modernization had taken its toll on the monuments, but so too had a massive increase in tourism. By the early 1900s, an electric tram had been installed running from the centre of Cairo at Ezbekiya Gardens to the foot of the pyramids, swelling the number of visitors to the Giza plateau. Further south, the torches and candles used to illuminate Theban tombs for tourists were damaging the precious wall paintings, so Maspero pioneered the installation of electric light into the Valley of the Kings. But as fast as the Service could carry out such work, further challenges came to the fore. In December 1902, the first Aswan Dam was completed and Maspero had to find funds to save the temples of Lower Nubia, which were now partially submerged each year for months on end. There was particular anguish over the fate of Philae, ‘jewel of the Nile’. The result was the establishment of an international team of archaeologists, who worked under the auspices of the Service to study and record the Nubian monuments and their inscriptions. After many months’ work at the grandest of all the Nubian temples, Abu Simbel, the team’s Italian conservator, Alexandre Barsanti, wrote, a tad optimistically: ‘there only remains the sand, about 30,000 cubic metres. I think it will require at least another two months, and then everything will be finished.’52
The scale of work facing the Service required Maspero to look for innovative solutions. For example, to bring electric light to Abu Simbel, he struck a deal with Cook & Co. whereby the temple generator would be connected to visiting cruise ships. But the truth was that the Service’s resources, though better than they had been for years, were still inadequate for the massive task of conservation, taking place on so many fronts simultaneously, let alone sufficient to support additional excavations.
Maspero’s solution, from the beginning of his second term of office, was to dispense with the Service’s monopoly and license private excavations. At the same time, he tightened control of illicit digs, and appointed two new inspectors, one for Middle Egypt and one for Upper Egypt (James Quibell and Howard Carter, respectively). He was in no doubt about the serious threat facing archaeological sites from economic development, especially the expansion of irrigation and cultivation. Indeed, he believed that within twenty-five years, those sites not already explored and recorded faced being lost forever. In awarding concessions to dig, his preference was for reputable institutions: universities, museums, and organizations like the EEF. But he also recognized individual talent, and one of his first acts was to award Petrie the concession to excavate at the plum site of Abydos. There, among the ruins of antiquity, Petrie formed his credo: that it was the duty of humanity to preserve all the evidence of its past, ‘not merely objects of artistic beauty, but samples of the relics of every age, pottery, flint artefacts, skulls and skeletons, objects of everyday life from every age of past history’.53
Despite Petrie’s undoubted prowess and reputation as a great field archaeologist, as the nineteenth century concluded and a new century dawned, there was a feeling in Egypt that the days of the old colonial dispensation were numbered. Queen Victoria’s death on 22 January 1901, just three weeks into the new century, ‘cast an undisguised gloom over the whole British community . . . an event in which everyone dimly perceived the makings of a national calamity, though few guessed that it constituted a definite turning point in English history’.54
The entente cordiale three years later brought a century of Anglo-French rivalry in Egypt largely to an end, but the British administration refused to acknowledge that the era of colonial empires was also drawing to a close. The savage punishment of villagers involved in the infamous Denshawai incident of 1906 – in which a British army officer died in an altercation with angry locals, and the colonial authorities meted out collective retribution, including hanging one of the ringleaders in front of his own house – only served to stoke the fires of Egyptian nationalism. By 1907, ‘an elderliness was apparent in the British regime’;55 Sayce decided to sell his dahabiya and return to England for good, commenting that ‘life on the Nile had ceased to be the ideal existence it once was’;56 and even Cromer, who had been Egypt’s de facto ruler for a quarter of a century, decided it was time to retire. Thereafter, ‘it was as though the soul had gone out of the body of the British administration’.57 Though Cromer’s successors, Sir Eldon Gorst and Lord Kitchener, managed to diffuse some of the Egyptian antipathy towards the British, they were in reality only marking time.
The change at Government House was also felt in archaeological circles. Cromer had shown little interest in Egypt’s ancient past, being more concerned about the country’s economic future. His extensive, two-volume work, Modern Egypt, written immediately after his retirement, reveals much about his view of the country and its inhabitants – its subheadings include: ‘Main tenets of Islam – Its failure as a social system’, ‘Degradation of women’, ‘Immutability of the law – slavery – Intolerance’, ‘Coarseness of literature and conversation’, and ‘Obstacles to England’s mission’, as well as ‘Unsuitability of the French system to form the Egyptian character’, and ‘Summary of the classes friendly and hostile to England’ – but not a single section dealt with antiquities or archaeology. By contrast, just a year after his departure, a new university was established in Cairo to bring education – including knowledge of the past – to the Egyptian middle class. A year after that, the British and French governments were persuaded to renounce their claims to the large monuments ‘given’ to them by Muhammad Ali. When, in 1909, the American consul-general offered to pay for the removal of the remaining Luxor obelisk and transport it to central Cairo, objections from Egyptologists and the Egyptian cabinet alike scuppered the plan. Instead, provincial authorities in Egypt were encouraged to establish small regional museums.58
In the last two years of Cromer’s rule and the years immediately succeeding his departure, major American excavations in Egypt really took off. American museums had initially built their collections by subscribing to EEF digs, receiving a share of the finds in exchange for a financial contribution,59 but the advent of wealthy philanthropists gave American institutions the wherewithal to sponsor their own missions. Within a short time, in addition to Breasted’s work for the University of Chicago, expeditions had been launched by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Harvard University in conjunction with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The last of these was directed from the outset by a man who would come to rival even the great Petrie as the leading field archaeologist working in Egypt in the early twentieth century. George Andrew Reisner (1867–1942) was born in Indianapolis, the son of a shoe-store owner. Academically gifted, he studied law at Harvard, intending to become a lawyer, but was fascinated by Semitic languages, the study of which was then emerging. On a research trip to Germany to study Assyriology, he met Erman and was drawn instead to Egyptology. Erman employed him for a year as a temporary assistant in the Berlin Museum, after which Reisner returned to Harvard as instructor in Semitics. The turning point in his career was a chance meeting with Phoebe Hearst, wife of a wealthy mine-owner and US senator (and mother of the newspaper proprietor and collector, William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for Citizen Kane). On a trip up the Nile in 1899, Mrs Hearst fell in love with Egypt and decided she would like to sponsor excavations. With her financial backing, Reisner embarked on a series of digs, culminating in the joint Harvard-Boston expedition to Giza in 1903. His investigations at the pyramids – which he would direct for some forty years – were ‘some of the finest work ever done in Egypt’.60 They resulted in two of the most important archaeological discoveries ever made: the perfectly preserved statues of King Menkaura from his pyramid temple, which rank among the foremost examples of ancient Egyptian art; and the intact burial equipment of Queen Hetepheres, including her silver bracelets and her carrying chair inlaid with ebony and gold.
In 1907, immediately after Cromer’s departure, the Egyptian government appointed Reisner director of the Nubian Archaeological Survey. A systematic survey of Nubian monuments was Maspero’s response to the construction of the Aswan Dam, and the resulting threat posed to Nubian monuments by regular submersion in flood waters. During two seasons of survey and excavation between the First and Fourth Nile Cataracts, Reisner discovered the pyramid tombs of five Nubian pharaohs, and the funerary monuments of a further sixty-eight rulers of the Upper Nile. He later spent a dozen years excavating Nubian fortresses and royal capitals, transforming understanding of Nubian history and shedding historical light on the fabled Kingdom of Kush.
During the course of this work, Reisner effectively laid down the principles of modern archaeological surveying, building significantly on Petrie’s work of the previous generation.61 Reisner consciously eschewed the practices of the Antiquities Service – with its focus on large-scale clearances and the acquisition of museum-quality artefacts – and instead emphasized the importance of careful stratigraphy and complete documentation. He kept a detailed diary, a comprehensive register of finds, and photographs of every object and every stage of a dig. Recognizing that archaeology is a destructive process, Reisner’s aim was to ‘enable future scholars to reconstruct in every detail the conditions found by the excavator’.62 His excavation reports were, in consequence, ‘dense and exhaustive’;63 they took an age to prepare, and were of monumental proportions themselves. Nonetheless, they have stood the test of time, and may still be consulted with great utility a century later.
Appointed curator of the Egyptian collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in 1910 and professor of Egyptology at Harvard in 1914 (only the second chair in Egyptology in the United States, after Breasted’s at Chicago), Reisner actually spent most of his career in Egypt. Like Petrie, he relied on a skilled workforce of Kuftis, with whom he formed a strong bond;64 moreover, he came to identify closely with the ordinary fellahin, which coloured his view, both of the British colonial administration, and of his fellow Americans.
One suspects that, of all his compatriots working in Egypt during the first decade of the twentieth century, Reisner would have had least time for Theodore Davis (1838–1915). They shared a legal background, but there the similarity ended. Davis grew up in poverty and was largely self-educated. The backstreets of Detroit were a world away from the cloistered quads of Harvard, but were all the education Davis received, or needed. Avoiding the draft, he prospered as a lawyer during the American Civil War. At the end of the war, he moved to New York City, attracted by its culture of unbridled capitalism and cut-throat competition. His law firm, Davis and Edsall, made money quickly, but not all of it cleanly. Like Charles Wilbour, Davis made the acquaintance of William M. Tweed, ‘arguably the most corrupt politician in American history’.65 Like Wilbour, Davis used his connections for profit, and within five years of arriving in New York had amassed a considerable fortune. Besides his legal work, he had interests in canals, railroads, forestry, and iron and silver mines; but it was digging of a different sort – in the sands of Egypt, for golden treasure – that began to pique his interest.
Davis first visited Egypt in 1887, at Wilbour’s recommendation, as an extension to an annual winter trip to Europe. Davis and his companion Emma Andrews – a cultured, intelligent and wealthy widow – reached no further than Cairo, but it made a lasting impression on both of them. Two years later, they rented a dahabiya and travelled upstream as far as Thebes. Towards the end of the trip, on 2 February 1890, Davis first set foot in the Valley of Kings. He was struck by the timeless atmosphere (he wrote to a friend: ‘All countries seem youthful in comparison with Egypt’66), intrigued by the tomb entrances half-hidden in the hillsides, and appalled by the condition of the open tombs. An idea began to form in his mind. When, after a bout of pneumonia, he was advised by his doctor to spend every winter in a warm, dry climate, there was no hesitation. A trip up the Nile became Davis’s annual habit for the rest of his life.
By the winter of 1894, he had begun to discuss building his own boat. Finished in January 1897, the Beduin was one of the most luxurious dahabiyas on the Nile, furnished with all the opulence of Davis’s mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. It had a grand piano in the salon, a crystal chandelier in the dining room, bathrooms with hot and cold running water; it was crewed by a score of experienced Nubian sailors who wore white turbans and brown cardigans with the ship’s name in red stitching.67 Live poultry carried on board supplied fresh eggs and meat, so that Davis and Emma could entertain archaeologists up and down the Nile, picking up the latest gossip and learning about the latest discoveries.
On one of his early visits to Egypt, Davis became acquainted with Sayce – who was always on the look-out for wealthy patrons to sponsor new excavations. It was not long before Davis had been introduced to a host of young, impecunious archaeologists, including Percy Newberry and Howard Carter (1874–1939). Carter became a frequent visitor to the Beduin, and in January 1901, Newberry brought on board a bronze bowl he had recently excavated from the tomb of the New Kingdom vizier Rekhmira. Davis was entranced. With funds aplenty and the time to indulge his passions, he decided to sponsor his own excavation. His chosen archaeologist was the young Carter, his chosen location, the Valley of the Kings. They were inspired choices.
In January 1903, Carter rewarded his patron with a major discovery: the tomb of pharaoh Thutmose IV. It was the first king’s burial unearthed in Egypt in the twentieth century, and yielded a hoard of objects from the golden age of Egypt’s eighteenth dynasty: chariots, fine furniture and stone vessels. The Egyptian Museum catalogued a total of 612 artefacts from the tomb, eighty-four of which were given by Maspero to Davis as compensation for his expenditure. Davis in turn presented the bulk of these to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, while he kept the remainder for his personal collection. Only one object was left in the tomb: a mummy, perhaps belonging to one of Thutmose IV’s sons, which had been found by Carter propped up against the wall of one of the side chambers, its abdomen slashed open. (There it remained, remarkably, for more than a century until, in 2005, the tomb was reopened to the public.68)
Carter’s remarkable instinct soon bore further fruit. A tomb created for Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh, turned out to be the longest and deepest in the Valley of the Kings. Clearing it was ‘long, patient, tiresome and dangerous work . . . The serious danger of caving ceilings throughout the entire length of the corridors and chambers was a daily anxiety.’69 Moreover, the whole tomb, from entrance to burial chamber, was filled with stone chippings, rubbish and bat droppings. The hot, dirty and dangerous work was carried out, not by Davis, but by an army of poorly paid Egyptian workmen, whom Davis barely acknowledged in his publication, other than to reassure readers that: ‘Happily the work was so well watched and conducted that no accidents occurred, though many of the men and boys were temporarily overcome by the heat and bad air.’70 Their reward was barely enough money to keep their families off the breadline: his was a beautifully carved stone sarcophagus, one of two found inside the tomb, which he promptly took back to Boston, making it the only Egyptian royal sarcophagus in the New World.
The partnership between Davis and Carter, patron and archaeologist, was proving wildly successful, and looked set to continue. But the entente cordiale of 1904 prompted a shake-up in the Antiquities Service; Maspero switched his two chief inspectors, sending Carter to Lower Egypt and replacing him with Petrie’s former assistant, James Quibell. Davis was determined to continue sponsoring excavations in the Valley of the Kings, and agreed to hire Quibell as his archaeologist; but before Quibell could begin work, he was summoned back north by Maspero to supervise the Antiquities Service’s work at Saqqara. A new chief inspector of antiquities for Upper Egypt was appointed, in the person of Arthur Weigall, but Davis lost patience with the merry-go-round of personnel. He started to make his own decisions about where to dig, despite his total lack of archaeological experience. It could have spelt disaster for his entire mission. Instead, by amazing good fortune, it led to his greatest discovery.
In February 1905, while Davis was aboard the Beduin, moored at Thebes alongside dahabiyas belonging to Sayce and Maspero, his workmen found another concealed entrance in the side of the valley, in a previously unexplored area between two Ramesside royal tombs. Davis claimed the credit for finding it:
The site was most unpromising . . . As an original proposition I would not have explored it, and certainly no Egyptologist, exploring with another person’s money, would have thought of risking the time and expense. But I knew every yard of the lateral valley, except the space described, and I decided that good exploration justified its investigation, and that it would be a satisfaction to know the entire valley, even if it yielded nothing.71
Forcing a way through the blocking stones and the piles of loose chippings, the workmen came face to face with a sumptuous burial of the eighteenth dynasty: not a royal tomb per se, but the magnificent sepulchre created by King Amenhotep III for his parents-in-law. Their names were Yuya and Tjuyu; their funerary goods, a king’s ransom. Although the sarcophagus had been prised open and the mummy wrappings torn off by ancient tomb robbers, most of the grave goods had been left in place. They comprised the most spectacular treasure found in Egypt up to that point. Davis noted laconically, ‘we could see nothing except the glitter of gold’.72 Weigall, quickly alerted to the discovery, was more effusive: ‘We stood, really dumbfounded, and stared around at the relics of the life of over three thousand years ago, all of which were as new almost as when they graced the palace.’73 By coincidence, that very day Maspero received a telegram from Cromer to say that Queen Victoria’s son, the Duke of Connaught, was visiting Egypt as inspector-general of the army and would be in Luxor the following afternoon. Maspero saw an opportunity to win favour with the British authorities by presenting the duke with a new discovery to coincide with his visit. So, the tomb of Yuya and Tjuyu was quickly resealed, to be officially opened the next day in the royal presence.74
Just as remarkable as the gilded coffins, fine furniture and chariots were the intact mummies of Yuya and Tjuyu themselves. Perfectly preserved, they seemed to speak across the centuries. (Their remarkable preservation could have led to disaster. Peering at the face of Yuya, Davis brought his candle so close to the bitumen-encrusted mummy that he nearly set it alight and, with it, the entire contents of the tomb.) A visiting American artist, Joseph Lindon Smith, said that Yuya’s features reminded him of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times went into raptures, calling the tomb ‘the greatest find in the whole history of Egyptian research’, and noting with undisguised pride that its discoverer was ‘an American, a New Yorker’.75
Davis became something of an international celebrity – lauded as a professor, archaeologist and Egyptologist, even though he was none of those things – and the discovery gave Egyptian archaeology a popular following in America for the first time. This in turn generated funding for further excavations by all the great museums, from Boston and New York to Philadelphia and Chicago. Tourists visited Luxor in record numbers the following year, to gawp at the new discovery; but for the archaeologists a long and painstaking process of cataloguing the contents lay ahead. The sheer quantity of material in Yuya and Tjuyu’s burial forced a change in archaeological practice: there was no question of emptying the tomb quickly; only systematic clearance would do justice to such a remarkable find. As Weigall later recounted, with some feeling: ‘The hot days when one sweated over the heavy packing-cases, and the bitterly cold nights when one lay at the mouth of the tomb under the stars, dragged on for many a week; and when at last the long train of boxes was carried down to the Nile en route for the Cairo Museum, it was with a sigh of relief that I returned to my regular work.’76
Finally, in 1909, after four years’ work, the archaeologists were preparing to pack up the last remaining object, a beautiful gilded chair that had been presented to Tjuyu by her granddaughter, Princess Sitamun. But, just as one royal visit had interrupted the opening of the tomb, so another would define its closure. That winter, the widowed Empress Eugénie was visiting Thebes, retracing her Nile trip of forty years earlier. She decided to call in at the tomb (by now famous throughout the world), crossed the floor, and – to the horror of those watching – promptly tried Sitamun’s chair for size. She was the first person to sit in it for over thirty-five centuries: a suitably royal behind in an ancient royal seat.77 To the relief of everyone present, both the three-and-a-half-thousand-year-old chair and the eighty-three-year-old empress survived the encounter unscathed.
Bar a few keepsakes, Davis declined a share of the finds. He explained:
Though under the letter of my permission to explore in the ‘Valley of the Kings’, I was not entitled to any portion of the ‘find’, Monsieur Maspero, with a generosity common to him, offered me a share. I confess that it was a most attractive offer, but, on consideration, I could not bring myself to break up the collection which I felt ought to be exhibited intact in the Cairo Museum, where it could be seen and studied by probably the greatest number of appreciative visitors.78
Today the collection occupies a significant section of the first-floor galleries of the Egyptian Museum.
After the tomb of Yuya and Tjuyu, Davis continued to strike it lucky in the Valley of the Kings. In December 1905, he and his new archaeologist, Edward Ayrton, found a solitary blue faience vase, bearing the name of a little-known pharaoh, Yuya and Tjuyu’s great-grandson, Tutankhamun. For those who knew how to interpret it, it was a vital clue. But for Davis, eager for more spectacular discoveries, it was of little consequence. More rewarding was the tomb of Siptah (a king of the twentieth dynasty), and a series of animal burials. These were followed, in January 1907, by a tomb containing fragments of gold foil, that Davis identified as the burial of Queen Tiye. The story of Tiye, a commoner who became the most powerful woman in ancient Egypt, appealed to American sensibilities; Player’s issued a cigarette card adorned with her presumed likeness, and describing her – implausibly – as ‘blue-eyed, and of very fair complexion’.79
All in all, Davis was blessed with remarkable luck during his decade of digging in the Valley of the Kings. Almost every season he was rewarded with yet another spectacular find. As a result of his success, the Nile Valley and its ancient treasures became firmly implanted in the American public consciousness. A book published in Philadelphia in 1907 spoke of Egypt as ‘The land of the Mysterious River, the magic country of one’s longing dreams of Pharaoh and pyramid and sphinx, of desert and of camel . . . perplexing tokens from when the world was young.’80 Yet for all their romantic notions of Egypt and their republican principles, Americans were every bit as colonial in their attitudes as their European contemporaries. On one of her first visits to Upper Egypt in 1890, Emma Andrews had written: ‘However friendly we may be as individuals, we cannot understand each other.’81 When recently retired US president, and champion of the working man, Theodore Roosevelt visited Egypt in 1910, he gave a speech at the University of Cairo predicting ‘it will be years, perhaps generations, before Egypt is able to govern itself’.82 Hundreds of Egyptian nationalists gathered outside Shepheard’s Hotel to denounce the speech, resulting in the first anti-American demonstration ever seen in the Arab world.
Davis’s winter season of 1907–8 began with the modest discovery of a cache of embalming materials, left over from a royal burial, but struck gold, literally, a few weeks later with a burial full of precious jewellery. Dubbed the ‘Gold Tomb’, its contents included seventy-eight ear pendants, earrings, amulets, bracelets, a head circlet, a silver sandal, rings of gold, silver and electrum, a necklace of 151 filigree gold beads, and a pair of silver gloves The discovery surpassed even the tomb of Yuya and Tjuyu for sheer spectacle, and sparked an international craze for Egyptian-style jewellery. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, then on a trip up the Nile,83 made a point of coming alongside the Beduin to see the treasure of the Gold Tomb for themselves. In distant Waterloo, Iowa, the Daily Courier of 4 August 1909 wrote: ‘the present craze for jewelry fashioned after old Egyptian pieces is likely to receive a fillip from the discoveries of the American explorer, Theodore Davis’.84 Davis himself had written to a friend: ‘It would seem that I have more success than any other explorer, but I brave the danger of conceit by saying I find because I exhaust every spot in the valley regardless of time, expense and promise.’85
True to his word, just a month after finding the Gold Tomb, Davis (or, rather, his employee Ayrton) uncovered the tomb of the general-turned-pharaoh Horemheb, with its immaculately preserved decoration. The press went into a frenzy. A lengthy, syndicated profile of Davis was carried by the American newspapers. Davis explained to readers that: ‘These tombs are cut in solid rock, on hillsides, and the sands of ages have drifted firmly over them’; then, with more than a touch of false modesty, declared that: ‘The only way to find a tomb is to dig for it.’86
The tomb of Horemheb, however, was to be Davis’s last major discovery in the Valley of the Kings. In December 1908, his latest archaeologist, Harold Jones, uncovered a poorly preserved tomb, numbered, according to the system invented by Wilkinson, KV58. Davis believed it to be the tomb of the missing pharaoh, Tutankhamun, and published it as such. (Everyone agreed, with the exception of Davis’s first archaeologist, Howard Carter.) Davis’s final discovery, in January 1910, was an entirely empty tomb. Harold Jones died the following year, while working in the Valley of the Kings. It seemed as if the royal burial ground was biting back, having given up all its secrets. In Davis’s 1912 book, The Tombs of Harmhabi and Touatânkhamanou (his rather tortured renderings of Horemheb and Tutankhamun), he reluctantly concluded that ‘the Valley of the Tombs is now exhausted’. The final page was devoted to a colour plate of the blue faience vase bearing Tutankhamun’s name, which Davis and Ayrton had found under a rock seven years earlier.
