Certainly, the British authorities, and Cromer in particular, were always more interested in economic matters, in restoring and maintaining financial stability and productive capacity. By the end of the nineteenth century, Egypt had one of the most extensive railway networks in the world per head of population. The railway was the largest employer in the country, and the number of passengers using the service increased from less than 5 million in 1890 to almost 30 million in 1906. Alongside the railways, the road and telegraph networks were expanded; ports were developed to handle burgeoning volumes of trade; police stations were built throughout the country to maintain order. But the greatest changes by far were felt in the sphere of agriculture. British rule saw changes in patterns of land ownership, an expansion of irrigation, and a commensurate – and unprecedented – increase in agricultural production.25 Most of this increase was down to a single crop, cotton. Egypt’s most important cash crop from the time of Muhammad Ali onwards, cotton came to dominate the economy under British rule: it accounted for 92 per cent of Egyptian exports by value on the eve of the First World War.26 It has been said that ‘no other place in the world in the nineteenth century was transformed on a greater scale to serve the production of a single industry’.27 The downside of the expansion of cotton production was that, by 1913, Egypt – famed as the breadbasket of the Roman Empire – had become dependent on imported grain to feed its population. It fell to Kitchener to take drastic action in preparation for wartime, sharply reducing the acreage devoted to cotton to make way for wheat, and establishing Egypt’s first Ministry of Agriculture to monitor food production.
Aside from agriculture, however, the British administration took a decidedly laissez-faire approach to other sectors of the economy. It was the French who dominated the sugar industry and controlled the Suez Canal. They also ran most of the best schools in the country. All Cairo’s main hotels (Shepheard’s, the Gezira Palace and the Savoy) were under European management, and the area around Shepheard’s was a European enclave. Expatriate life in Cairo, as in other cities of the British Empire, revolved around clubs. The Gezira Sporting Club had been founded immediately after the British invasion of 1882, on land ‘gifted’ by the khedive. Modelled on the Hurlingham Club in London, it was frequented by British administrators, Cairo’s other foreign residents, and a few members of the Egyptian ruling class. Even more exclusive was the Turf Club, which was reserved exclusively for the British. In the early 1920s, Lord Edward Cecil, at that time the only Englishman permitted to attend the Egyptian Council of Ministers, visited the Turf Club two or three times a day between business meetings. While the men lunched and dined at their club, their wives maintained their own social calendar. Lady Cromer took different groups of British ladies for a fortnightly audience with the khedive. According to one expatriate Englishwoman: ‘For many years the Khedive’s ball was the culminating event in the winter festivities in Cairo, and was as brilliant a function as oriental splendour and cosmopolitan fashion in combination could compass.’28
Throughout the period of colonial rule, the British simply never understood the Egyptians. They lived separate lives, in different worlds. Cromer, though he effectively ran Egypt for a quarter of a century, never learned Arabic. Many Europeans – figures like Lucie Duff Gordon were exceptional – thought the Egyptians indolent and in need of moral reform. Cromer detested Islam, regarding it as ‘a complete failure’, and liked to describe colonial administration as a process of ‘continual tutoring’.29 He believed the Egyptians incapable of self-government. His deputy from 1894 to 1902, Rennell Rodd, was even more contemptuous, writing that: ‘the Oriental mind did not appeal to him, and that in so far as he understood it he regarded it as an obstacle to be overcome rather than a factor to be studied with sympathetic attention’.30 There were plenty of British expatriates who swallowed their own propaganda, genuinely believing that: ‘The poor fellaheen, who had suffered deception for more centuries than they could count, realized that they had at last found justice and hugged it to themselves as a precious discovery.’31
Such sentiments were totally at odds with the true character of British rule. Martial law, military raids, widespread imprisonment, a network of informants, and the systematic use of torture were Cromer’s instruments of government.32 His secret intelligence service was extensive and highly effective: ‘He was kept informed of everything that went on, and often staggered people by his knowledge of their most intimate affairs.’33 Against this background, nationalism started to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century, in Cairo’s cafes and newspapers, as prolonged exposure to Europeans and European ideas started to transform Egyptian politics.
The British had never intended to colonize Egypt. Successive governments steadfastly resisted annexing it to the British Empire, ruling instead through the ‘veiled protectorate’. This made it even harder for Egyptian patriots to challenge the status quo, since it had no legal standing or structure. Cromer was a strong advocate of the veiled protectorate, fearing that formal annexation might provoke a war with France. Those particular concerns were largely put to rest after the signing of the entente cordiale in 1904, but there were indigenous threats to British rule. One was the unpredictable nature of the Egyptian succession. Muhammad Ali had successfully played one European power off against another. Said had been decidedly pro-French, Abbas I more even-handed. Ismail had fought to assert his own authority, while Tewfiq had been a pawn of the British. The accession of Abbas II in 1892 threatened to be a disruption, as his schooling in Vienna had taught him, if not outright Anglophobia, then certainly ‘Hapsburg notions of sovereign power and prerogative’ and an ‘intolerance of British control’.34 Cromer had had to assert his authority with the young khedive, who subsequently retreated into a life of indolence and self-aggrandizement.
By 1910, Egyptian nationalists were on the rise but in despair. Their own prime minister, Boutros Ghali,35 had been accused of siding with the British during the Denshawai incident in 1906, and was shot by an assassin while leaving the foreign ministry. In the ensuing international outcry, Theodore Roosevelt declared that the British should ‘govern or get out’ of Egypt.36 In the House of Commons, the leader of the opposition, Arthur Balfour, justified continuing British control on the back of advances in Egyptology, arguing: ‘We know the civilization of Egypt better than we know the civilization of any other country, we know it further back; we know it more intimately.’37 Egyptians saw it rather differently, making their own connections between their country’s glorious, ancient past and its current, parlous situation. The journalist Ahmad Lufti al-Sayyid wrote that: ‘Our nation today does not exist independently from the nation of our past. The nation is a single unbroken, unbreakable whole’; he looked upon pharaonic civilization as an inspiration to action ‘so that this miserable present might pass, and so that our Egypt might be returned to its ancient past’.38 Kitchener, by contrast, dreamed of creating ‘a new viceroyalty of Egypt and Sudan, with himself as the first viceroy’.39 Events in Europe in the summer of 1914 would shatter his dreams, and bring those of men like al-Sayyid a step closer.
When the Turks joined the Central Powers on 5 November 1914, Britain found itself at war with the Ottoman Empire, of which Egypt was still technically a part. The British response was to declare a formal protectorate the following month. Abbas II, who was in Constantinople and whom Kitchener had called ‘that wicked little khedive’,40 was prevented from returning to Egypt and deposed. The British replaced him with his eldest uncle, Hussein Kamel (r.1914–17). He was ‘elevated’ to the style of sultan, but it was clear to everyone where true power lay. The British representative, Sir Milne Cheetham (Kitchener had been recalled to London at the outbreak of hostilities, to serve as Secretary of State for War), now styled high commissioner, reintroduced martial law, suspended the legislative assembly, banned political parties and closed down outspoken newspapers.
Egypt was turned into a fortified army camp for Indian and Australian regiments en route to the Western front. Troops flooded Cairo: the main British garrison was in the district of Abbassia, while the barracks at Kasr el-Nil occupied a prime site in the city centre; the Australians were based at Mena Camp, near the pyramids. Alexandria became the base of operations for the naval war in the Eastern Mediterranean, including the Gallipoli campaign. A British soldier temporarily stationed at Mustapha Camp, outside Alexandria, commented: ‘The eastern half of Alexandria is not really Oriental at all. It differs only in matters of detail from the modern quarters of other seaports across the Mediterranean. The streets are labelled with French names, while on the pavement one seems to meet far more English and French and Italians and Greeks than Egyptians.’41 It was a measure of just how Europeanized Egypt had become after a century of foreign involvement.
At the height of the war, while the Prince of Wales was practising his golf at Giza – according to legend he drove a ball from the summit of the pyramid of Khafra onto a green at the Mena House Hotel42 – his loyal troops were ‘encamped on the bare sands of Sinai, on the unknown Libyan coast, in remote oases far out in the western desert, or in little mosquito-ridden towns on the Nile’.43 British officers, meanwhile, frequented the Gezira Sporting Club. In addition to hosting tens of thousands of troops awaiting manoeuvres, Egypt was also used as a base where injured servicemen were sent to convalesce: ‘At Heliopolis the Army has taken over one of the largest and most gorgeous hotels in the world, and many other buildings in Cairo – Government offices, barracks, private houses – have all been pressed into the service, especially for hospital purposes.’44 So full was the capital of British officers, civil servants, engineers, and temporarily jobless archaeologists that, on the island of Gezira, some of the roads resembled ‘Wimbledon or Beckenham or some other prosperous London suburb’.45
The British and the Egyptians, as was their wont, generally kept separate company, meeting only in the local cinemas. Serving in Egypt certainly opened the eyes of British soldiers, for whom Egypt had previously been a fabled land, ‘vaguely associated with camels, plagues, bullrushes, Potiphar’s wife, Moses, and crocodiles’. As a member of the Egypt Expeditionary Force wrote: ‘We who are serving in Egypt and Palestine know that we are fortunate to have had such a chance of seeing these ancient lands, a chance that would never have come to most of us in the ordinary course of our tranquil lives.’46
But the war also opened the eyes of the Egyptians, for whom the prospect of the British fighting fellow Muslims (the Turks) merely stoked their desire for independence.
The First World War marked not just an interruption in the work of archaeologists in Egypt, but also the end of an era in Egyptology. Maspero retired in 1914 and died two years later. Cromer – no particular friend of archaeologists, but a major figure in their story, nonetheless – died in 1917. Both Maspero and Erman lost sons in the conflict, while the German House at Thebes was deliberately destroyed by British troops in 1915. Maspero’s successor at the Antiquities Service and Museum, Pierre Lacau, was unable to take up his post until September 1915, leaving the institutions rudderless for over a year. From 1916 to 1917, he had to return to France, and delegated temporary responsibility for affairs in Egypt to the secretary-general of the Institut d’Egypte, Georges Daressy. Not that there was much to be done in the realm of Egyptian archaeology. Foreign missions were halted for the duration of the war. Breasted, profoundly distressed both by the war itself and by the anti-German sentiment it provoked, tried to lose himself in his work. In London, he stayed with H. G. Wells, and was invited to Highclere by Lord Carnarvon – a man he described as ‘devoted to Egypt’.47 Breasted’s wartime scholarship resulted in a high-school textbook, Ancient Times (1916), which proved so popular that the royalties finally put its author on a secure financial footing.48 Petrie also found himself stuck in London, where he spent his time at University College London, ‘doing regular lectures and working up material’.49 (His politics were the polar opposite of Breasted’s, and he was a member of the Anti-Socialist Society and President of the British Constitution Association.)
Once the armistice had been declared and four long years of war had finally come to an end, archaeologists began to make preparations to return to Egypt. Predictably, Petrie was on the first civilian ship back. He later recounted: ‘Although it was difficult to secure passages even a year after the Armistice, we managed to return to Egypt, leaving November 19, 1919.’50 By the following year, he was busy digging again, this time in the cemeteries of Middle Egypt.
The most significant impact of the war on Egyptian archaeology was the banning of German missions. The German Institute was stripped of its concessions, and the plum site of Amarna was given to the EEF (which changed its name, in 1919, to the Egypt Exploration Society) as archaeological war reparations. Erman, who had done so much to promote German interests in Egypt, was incensed, describing it as ‘Raub’ (‘robbery’). Gardiner’s testy reply laid bare the feelings aroused by the war. He wrote to Erman:
Do you really imagine that the French Director of the Service of Antiquities, who has seen one sixth of his country overrun and devastated by the German armies would willingly countenance the resumption of German excavations in Egypt, so long as he could possibly prevent it? And do you think it likely that the British who stood shoulder to shoulder with the French in defending Egypt against Turkish and German invaders, would be disposed in this matter to adopt the German point of view in preference to the French? . . . what you describe as Raub would necessarily be regarded by the average Frenchman or Englishman as an obvious compensatory act of justice.51
German Egyptologists had hoped that their scholarship would not be influenced by geopolitical events, so the loss of the Amarna concession was a bitter blow.52 But the ever-undiplomatic Gardiner pointed out that ‘it is the consideration that the Egyptians themselves would certainly interpret concessions made to Germany at the present moment as a sign of weakness on the part of the Entente’.53 For several decades after the war, Anglo-German relations within Egyptology resumed their former antagonism.
An aspect of Egyptian archaeology that had not changed was the perennial lack of funding for British digs. In a long and impassioned letter to The Times in March 1919, Sir Arthur Evans, the discoverer of Minoan civilization, president of the Society of Antiquaries, and one of the most decorated archaeologists of his generation, pleaded the case for a properly funded British Institute of Archaeology in Egypt, with a library and a budget for research and publications, to match the government-backed French, American and (temporarily suspended) German institutions. He began by describing the competition faced by British excavators in the Nile Valley:
Forty years have now passed since the French Government founded the Institut Français d’Archéologie du Caire . . . In 1906 Germany established the Imperial Archaeological Institute in Cairo and its work has been greatly assisted by the wealthy society known as the Orientgesellschaft, itself largely under official auspices. With the United States, on the other hand, the functions of a Centralized National Institution have been more than filled by several parallel organizations, lavishly equipped and practically permanent in their nature.54
He then asked, plaintively: ‘Beside all this, what is the position of Britain – the protecting Power, the moral trustee of Egypt’s inheritance?’ Echoing the sentiments of Amelia Edwards three decades earlier, Evans lamented the fact that: ‘As a whole the moneyed classes in this country – unlike their aristocratic predecessors of a century and a half ago – show little of that enthusiasm for the advancement of knowledge which ensures such a liberal response to appeals on the other side of the Atlantic.’
His proposition was simple and bold, and was deliberately designed to stir British imperial pride: ‘a uniquely qualified committee, formed under the auspices of the British Academy . . . has presented a memorial to the Lords of the Treasury, strongly urging the creation of an Imperial British Institute of Archaeology in Cairo, to be subsidized by an annual grant from the Treasury at least sufficient to make our position as protecting Power not appreciably inferior in this respect to [that] of other countries’. His concluding sentence was a call to action, and an appeal to the national conscience: ‘Our good name among civilized peoples will largely depend on the manner in which our Government fulfils its grave responsibilities as trustee not only of Egypt’s present, but of its past.’55
Needless to say, Evans’s appeal fell on deaf ears. British excavations in Egypt continued to be funded privately and run on a shoestring. In this aspect, at least, Egyptological history was destined to repeat itself – again and again. Twelve years later, Petrie concluded his memoir with the same hope, undaunted by fifty years of fruitless pleading: ‘The whole machinery of research has never been so well developed, and the only hindrance is insufficiency of means, for in the absence of any government help, the progress of researches depends entirely on the public.’56
As for Borchardt, though he continued in office as director of the Imperial German Institute for Egyptian Archaeology (renamed, after the war, the Egyptian section of the German Archaeological Institute), his research in the Nile Valley was, perforce, restricted to the collections of the Egyptian Museum. He published an extensive study of the museum’s royal and private statuary, to complement the publication of his greatest archaeological discovery, the bust of Nefertiti. More than the Rosetta Stone or the Dendera zodiac, the Luxor obelisk or Cleopatra’s Needles, more even than the pieces smuggled out by Budge, the bust of Nefertiti came to represent for Egyptian nationalists the exploitation and appropriation of their history by foreigners – a perennial insult that had gone on for more than a century. Outrage over the bust’s removal to Berlin – keenly felt in 1912, and rekindled after the war – stoked the fires of nationalism and forced the colonial authorities to face the inevitable reckoning.
Sultan Hussein Kamel had died during the war, in October 1917, and was succeeded by his entirely ill-prepared and ill-suited younger brother, Ahmed Fuad (r.1917–36). The new sultan spoke little Arabic, and appeared to his people just as much a stooge of the British as his predecessor. ‘Secret societies flourished in the revolutionary atmosphere and Cairo was a hotbed of plots and conspiracies.’57 Egyptians were actively questioning their colonial status, and just two days after the armistice, the prime minister, Zaghloul Pasha, requested permission to lead a delegation to London to negotiate independence.58 The British authorities, however, thought they could deny nationalist demands. Their North African protectorate was simply too strategically important, lying across the route to India and giving access to Britain’s newly won colonial possessions in East Africa. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed and began to be dismantled, Egypt also gave Britain an advantage over France – whose North African interests were far to the west, in Algeria and Tunisia.59
The British authorities’ response to the calls for independence was therefore to arrest the nationalist leaders. That was incendiary enough, but an attempt to deport them was a provocation too far. Full-scale riots spread from Cairo to the countryside. Insurgents, bolstered by Bedouin from the deserts, cut telegraph wires, tore up railway tracks and besieged British garrisons – every symbol of colonial domination was a legitimate target. The British responded with force, meting out harsh sentences to the rioters – but, at the same time, opened negotiations on Egypt’s future. The new high commissioner, Lord Allenby, ‘made up his mind that the only way to pacify the Egyptians was to give them all – or nearly all – they wanted’.60
The last gasp of the British imperial presence in Egypt is recorded in Lord Edward Cecil’s memoir, subtitled ‘pictures of the lighter side of Egyptian life’ and published two years after the end of the war. In its diffident tone, it perfectly captures the attitudes and interests of the British ruling class in the dying days of the protectorate. The first section, subtitled ‘My Daily Life’, is divided into the following chapters: ‘Getting up and breakfasting; Office Part I; Office Part II; Council; Office Part III, and lunch; Golf; Committee; Office, Club, and Dinner; Evening Party; Supper Part I; Supper Part II; My Dream’. The second section, ‘Going on Leave’, charts the journey from Cairo to Calais via Port Said and Marseilles. Cecil said of himself, ‘like all sane men, I dislike work’, and of his Cairo club, ‘it is the only place where one can get decent food at a price less than that paid at a Monte Carlo restaurant’. He was unself-consciously condescending towards the Egyptians – referring to ‘the undeveloped state of their intelligence, and to the tradition of bad government’ – but also perceptive enough to realize that Egyptian politics were ‘a web of personal intrigue and counter-intrigue’ and that ‘he who follows not custom in the East is a fool’. His account is full of the social whirl of Cairo’s glittering balls, and of the thoughts of home that always loomed large among the expatriate community: ‘If you see two Anglo-Egyptians in deep conversation, you will find that five times out of ten they are discussing steamship lines, their virtues and iniquities.’61
But the sands of time were fast running out on British rule in Egypt. Just a year after Cecil’s memoir, the Egyptians’ longing for self-rule would be brought to a head – not by a nationalist politician or a popular uprising, but by the greatest archaeological discovery ever made in the Nile Valley.
ELEVEN
Wonderful things
Howard Carter (first from left) meeting his patron Lord Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn Herbert on their arrival at Luxor railway station in November 1922, accompanied by the provincial governor.
Our sensations and astonishment are difficult to describe as the better light revealed to us the marvellous collection of treasures.1
HOWARD CARTER, 1922
The name of Tutankhamun barely features in the annals of nineteenth-century Egyptology. None of the classical authors, on whose accounts of Egyptian history most European scholars relied, made mention of him at all. Nor did he feature in the king list compiled from ancient sources by the third-century BC Egyptian priest Manetho and preserved in later fragmentary copies. Only after Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphics in 1822 made it possible to read ancient Egyptian inscriptions directly for the first time did antiquarian visitors to Egypt begin to notice occasional, brief texts that mentioned a little-known pharaoh bearing the throne name Nebkheperura and the birth name Tutankhamun. In the later 1820s, during Wilkinson’s twelve-year sojourn in the Nile Valley, he travelled into the Eastern Desert between the river and the Red Sea; at the remote site of Bir Abbad, east of Edfu, his eagle eyes noted a stone block bearing the names of Tutankhamun. In 1828, Wilkinson made another discovery that mentioned the same pharaoh: a tomb cut into the hillside of western Thebes that had been created for a high official named Huy – a viceroy of Kush, the king’s personal representative in Egyptian-controlled Nubia – during the reign of Tutankhamun.
While Wilkinson was exploring the deserts and hills of Upper Egypt, his friend Lord Prudhoe (later the fourth Duke of Northumberland) was venturing even further afield, to Upper Nubia. At the ancient religious capital of Gebel Barkal, near the Fourth Nile Cataract, Prudhoe collected two magnificent statues of recumbent lions, each carved from a single block of red granite. Reused and reinscribed by a Nubian ruler, Amanislo, in the third century BC, the beasts had originally been carved by the pharaoh Amenhotep III a thousand years earlier. One of them bore a dedicatory inscription of Tutankhamun, recounting how he had renewed the monument in honour of its original patron, his grandfather Amenhotep III. In 1835, Prudhoe presented both lions to the British Museum, where they had the distinction of becoming the first two objects to be registered in its nascent collection of Egyptian antiquities. (They bear the registration numbers EA1 and EA2.) Thus far, Tutankhamun was no more than a minor footnote in the unfolding history of ancient Egypt.
Further evidence for the existence and achievements of this king had to wait until Mariette’s excavations of the Serapeum in the 1850s. The third of the great bull burials uncovered in the underground vaults had, it transpired, been carried out during the reign of Tutankhamun; a few objects from the burial found their way to the Louvre, part of the steady stream of artefacts dug from the sands of Saqqara with which Mariette repaid his Parisian employer. Another four decades later, one of the more notable discoveries made by the hapless Emile Amélineau during his disastrous excavations at Abydos was a box of gilded wood, bearing Tutankhamun’s royal cartouche. But it was Petrie’s dig in the winter of 1891–2 at the site of Amarna that made the real breakthrough, shining new light on the history of Akhenaten’s reign and its immediate aftermath, at the end of the eighteenth dynasty. Numerous inscribed objects from the ruined city, including the Amarna Letters that Erman had purchased for the Berlin Museum, mentioned Nebkheperura Tutankhamun by name, and made it clear that he was Akhenaten’s son and successor. Moreover, the evidence suggested that the royal court had remained at Amarna under Tutankhamun, at least during the early years of his reign. Suddenly his absence from the king-lists made sense: Akhenaten’s royal revolution had been so radical, such a break with centuries of pharaonic tradition, that, after his death and the restoration of orthodoxy, he and all his associates had been expunged from history as if they had never existed. What the ancient Egyptians had tried so hard to suppress was, only now, being rediscovered, thanks to the meticulous efforts of Egyptologists.
With the dawn of the twentieth century, the name of Tutankhamun started to crop up, if not everywhere, then certainly more frequently. Suddenly, this little-known pharaoh began to emerge from a hundred generations of obscurity to take his place among the kings of Egypt’s golden age. In 1905, investigations in the temple of Karnak, north of Luxor, uncovered a great stone slab, covered with hieroglyphic inscriptions. At some point in its long history, the stela had been earmarked for reuse; it still bore a series of deep incisions down its front, where workmen had tried to cut it into pieces. But enough survived of the text to enable scholars to translate it. It turned out to be a dedicatory inscription celebrating the restoration of Karnak, and the other temples of Egypt, following their abandonment under Akhenaten. The king responsible for this glorious renaissance was none other than Tutankhamun. For those who knew how to interpret it, the ‘Restoration Stela’ gave a clear indication that Tutankhamun had broken with the teachings of his father, and the city of Amarna, and had restored Thebes as both the religious capital of Egypt and a centre of royal activity.
A further, chance discovery, that same archaeological season, confirmed the fact: while digging in the Valley of the Kings for the Davis mission, Ayrton found, concealed under a rock, a small faience cup bearing the name Nebkheperura. Two years later, Davis and Ayrton discovered a hole in the ground above the entrance to the tomb of Seti I. ‘Pit 54’, as they termed it, contained a cache of materials left over from the embalming of a royal mummy – not just any royal mummy but, according to the hieroglyphic inscriptions on some of the objects, the mummy of Tutankhamun. This seemed unequivocal evidence that, not only had Tutankhamun been active in Thebes, he had also been buried in its royal necropolis, the Valley of the Kings. Now the hunt was on for his tomb. In January 1909, Davis discovered what he had been looking for: a small, undecorated chamber (numbered KV58), abandoned in antiquity and filled with mud, but crucially containing a stone shabti, fittings from a horse’s harness, and several fragments of gold foil bearing the names of Tutankhamun and his wife Ankhesenamun. Davis proudly announced his discovery in the resulting publication:
The finding of the blue cup with the cartouche of Touatânkhamanou, and not far from it the quite undecorated tomb containing the gold leaf inscribed with the names of Touatânkhamanou and Ankhousnamanou . . . and the pit containing the jars with the name of Touatânkhamanou, lead me to conclude that Touatânkhamanou was originally buried in the tomb described above, and that it was afterwards robbed, leaving the few things that I have mentioned.2
