As we approach the bicentenary of decipherment and the centenary of Tutankhamun’s rediscovery, there has never been a better time to retell – and, in retelling, to reassess – the story of Egyptology. New discoveries, new research and new insights since 1922 have transformed both our understanding of ancient Egypt and the discipline of Egyptology itself. Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in the early history of archaeology and travel in the Middle East; many of Egyptology’s nineteenth-century protagonists – its lesser-known figures, as well as its more famous names – have been the focus of detailed biographical study; and the opening up of private and institutional archives has shed new light on the motives and methods of archaeologists and their imperialist colleagues.
Indeed, the close relationship between scientific excavation and colonial expansion has emerged as a major theme in recent studies of Egyptology. As one scholar has observed: ‘For rising empires, both ancient and modern, Egypt has always been a symbol of ancient sovereignty.’3 This has long been understood and appreciated. When Julius Caesar sailed up the Nile with Cleopatra, the trip was a double celebration: on a personal level, it marked his amorous conquest of the most famous woman in the world; on a political level, it announced Rome’s vice-like embrace of the fabled land of the pharaohs. Shortly afterwards the Romans began the practice of appropriating archaeological monuments in order to demonstrate their hegemony, and their successors – the colonial powers of Western Europe and, latterly, America – followed suit. Roman emperors may have been content to ship the odd Egyptian obelisk, sphinx or statue back to the imperial capital, to adorn public spaces and private retreats, and to signal both their sophisticated taste and their all-encompassing authority, all the while squeezing every drop of profit out of their Egyptian possessions. European and American interest in Egypt was more complex, if no less naked. The exploration and description of the Nile Valley and its antiquities – carried out, with an accelerating pace, throughout the nineteenth century – was motivated by religious, philosophical or antiquarian interests, and helped to create and shape the new disciplines of archaeology and Egyptology; but these ostensibly scholarly activities also served, wittingly or unwittingly, to open up Egypt to Western involvement and interference, economic, social and political. From its very inception, Egyptology was thus the handmaid of imperialism, in a manner that Caesar would have recognized and applauded.
At the same time, Egypt’s exposure to Western influences – some willingly encouraged, many impossible to resist – served to change Egyptian society from the inside. During the course of the nineteenth century, notions of modernity, progress, and national identity – concepts that had barely stirred in Egypt during the preceding 1,800 years of foreign occupation and control – slowly began to take root. By the beginning of the twentieth century, after a hundred years of engagement with foreigners, Egyptians themselves had begun to think about, and plan for, their own independent future. The story of Egyptology is thus also the story of Egyptian self-determination. The detailed understanding and appreciation of the country’s ancient past paved the way for its modern rebirth. As the West rediscovered Egypt, so Egypt discovered itself.
This book seeks to tell both stories, for they are deeply interwoven. It also seeks to take a balanced approach; for Western interest in Egypt, despite the arguments of some commentators, was neither wholly malign nor wholly benign. In the world of antiquarianism and archaeology there were good and bad individuals, scholars and scoundrels, those motivated by a desire for knowledge and those motivated by personal greed. So too, in the world of economics and politics, some (albeit rather few) had genuine aspirations for Egypt’s development, while others (all too frequently) saw a chance for making a fast buck. Western engagement with Egypt featured more than its fair share of charlatans and condescending imperialists, but also a handful of more enlightened souls who sought to understand the Egyptians on their own terms, sympathized with their predicament, and sought to ameliorate their condition. They, too, are part of the tapestry that is the history of the golden age of Egyptology.
In the pages that follow, well-known giants, from Champollion to Carter and Carnarvon, will each get their moment in the sun. But so too will their lesser-known contemporaries, men and women whose painstaking but less headline-grabbing work helped to enrich and transform our understanding of the Nile Valley and its people, and left a lasting impression on Egypt, too. Travellers and treasure-hunters, ethnographers and epigraphers, antiquarians and archaeologists: whatever their motives, whatever their methods, all understood that in pursuing Egyptology they were part of a greater endeavour – to reveal a lost world, buried for centuries beneath the sands.
PROLOGUE
Travellers in an antique land
Frontispiece of the English edition of Norden’s Travels in Egypt and Nubia (1757). Enlightenment Europe is depicted revealing the secrets of an exotic, degenerate and subjugated civilization.
When you are got to the entrance of the first pyramid, you discharge some pistols, to fright away the bats: after which you make two Arabs enter, and remove the sand, which almost entirely stops up the passage.1
FREDERIK NORDEN, 1757
In the summer of 47 BC, with Egypt’s last queen at his side, Julius Caesar became Egypt’s first tourist. Sailing up the Nile, he set a trend that would be followed by adventurous travellers over the succeeding two millennia. During the years of Roman occupation, legionaries and dignitaries visited some of Egypt’s most spectacular monuments, as attested by their surviving graffiti. One of the most notable excursions was that undertaken by the emperor Hadrian, an extended trip through Egypt in AD 130 with his lover Antinous. The youth’s subsequent death by drowning in the Nile spurred the establishment of a whole new cult and a new imperial city, Antinoöpolis, to perpetuate his memory.
Following the collapse of the Roman empire, records of foreigners visiting Egypt during the years of Byzantine rule (in the fifth and sixth centuries AD) are few and far between. By contrast, the Arab conquest of 641 made Egypt an integral part of a new, multicultural and multifaith empire – moreover one founded on trade, exploration and intellectual inquiry. It was in this context that Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela visited Egypt during his journey of 1165–71, entering from Abyssinia to the south. A few decades later, a scholar from present-day Iraq, Abdel Latif el-Baghdadi, arrived in Cairo and took up residence as a teacher. Around 1238, Jamal al-Din al-Idrisi wrote a book on the pyramids, the earliest known work on Egypt’s most iconic ancient monuments.
While Egypt, and especially Cairo, featured on the mental map of Arabic scholars, and was relatively accessible from other Arab lands, the Nile Valley was altogether more remote, both psychologically and practically, for medieval Europeans. The earliest continental travellers were drawn to Egypt because of its biblical associations; such pilgrims mostly confined themselves to Alexandria and Cairo, and never ventured south of the pyramids. For example, Felix Fabri, a Dominican monk born in Zurich in 1441, reached the port city of Alexandria and penned an early description of Cleopatra’s Needle: ‘a very remarkable column, all of one stone, yet of wonderful height and width. On the four sides were carved men and animals and birds from top to bottom; and no one knows what these friezes signify.’2
From the beginning of the sixteenth century, Europe’s trading empires increasingly came into contact with Arab vessels on the high seas. The resulting clashes were often bloody. In 1501, the Portuguese navy sank an Egyptian fleet moored at Calicut (modern Kozhikode), on the west coast of India; seven years later, it attacked and destroyed the entire Egyptian Red Sea fleet, dealing a fatal blow to the importance of Suez as a trading and trans-shipment centre, and forcing merchant ships to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, which the Portuguese controlled. It was an early indication both of Egypt’s strategic potential and of the European desire to dominate trade routes. These two factors, one way or another, would determine the relationship between Europe and Egypt for the next four and a half centuries. With its fleet destroyed and its economy weakened, Egypt was in a vulnerable position, and in 1517 the Turks invaded and added the Nile Valley to their expanding territory, beginning four hundred years of suzerainty.
Egypt’s incorporation into the Ottoman empire had the unintended consequence of making it more, not less, accessible to adventurous Europeans. Western nations maintained active diplomatic relations with the Sublime Porte, and this helped to facilitate travel to Ottoman lands. As a result, towards the end of the sixteenth century, a flurry of visitors reached the Nile Valley. In 1583, a Polish nobleman, Prince Nicholas Christopher Radziwill, spent about two months in Egypt during his two-year pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He visited Alexandria and Memphis, purchased two mummies, described the Sphinx and climbed the Great Pyramid at Giza, and – significantly – wrote up his travels in a book published on his return. A Latin translation appeared in 1601 followed by German editions in 1603 and 1605, and a Polish edition in 1607. Hierosolymitana peregrinatio was one of the earliest European works on Egypt to mention its ancient monuments. Three years after Radziwill’s sojourn, two Englishmen reached Egypt. John Evesham arrived in Alexandria aboard the merchant vessel Tyger, while a London merchant, Laurence Aldersey, ventured further afield, visiting all the sites of interest around Cairo. Finally, in what seems to have been the busiest decade for European travel to Egypt since the days of the Romans, an anonymous Venetian travelled as far south as Upper Egypt in 1589. He explained to his incredulous readers: ‘For some years I had a lively desire to see the province of the Saïd [Upper Egypt] as far as the end of the land of Egypt, and my sole reason was to see so many superb buildings, churches, colossal statues, needles and columns.’3
Greater ease of access to the Nile Valley coincided with the first stirrings of Renaissance thought, with the result that sixteenth-century European travellers to Egypt did not just visit the country as idle tourists but also began to take an interest in its distinctive characteristics, especially its ancient monuments. This trend accelerated in the following decades. In 1610, George Sandys, the seventh and youngest son of the Archbishop of York, spent a year in Turkey, Egypt and Palestine as part of an extended grand tour. Like others before him, he climbed the Great Pyramid, but he also took pains to observe its interior, and to study the second and third pyramids at Giza. The account of his travels, A Relation of a Journey begun An. Dom. 1610, in Four Books (1615) is notable, not only for its astonished description of crocodiles, but also for the assertion that the pyramids were not built by the Jews, were not the granaries of Joseph, but were tombs built by the ancient Egyptians for their kings. He was thus perhaps the first European to deduce the true purpose of the pyramids, dismissing handed-down myths and medieval traditions and using his own first-hand observations to inform his conclusions.
This groundbreaking approach was built upon by another Englishman, the mathematician and astronomer John Greaves. Unlike many of his more dilettantish contemporaries, he was a serious and committed scholar, dedicated to advancing understanding of his chosen subjects. For example, in order to be able to read ancient Greek, Arab and Persian works on astronomy, he studied a number of oriental languages and travelled extensively in the Ottoman empire, collecting scientific manuscripts. During his trip in the 1630s, he went from Constantinople to Rhodes and thence to Egypt. Equipped with mathematical instruments, he travelled from Alexandria to Cairo to take accurate measurements of the pyramids. He formed his own opinion of their purpose, concurring with Sandys that they had been built as royal tombs; he too explored the interior of the Great Pyramid. He also measured the size of its stones, produced a remarkably accurate cross section of the monument above ground level, and correctly identified a neighbouring building as a funerary temple. Greaves published his results in a book entitled Pyramidographia, or a Discourse on the Pyramids in Aegypt (1646). It was heavily criticized by his contemporaries, but is lauded today as a landmark work, ahead of its time.
Under the tutored eyes of men like Sandys and Greaves, the study of ancient Egypt slowly began to emerge from the fog of myth and legend into the light of scientific enquiry. However, the more fanciful interpretations of pharaonic monuments had not quite had their day. Their undoubted champion in the seventeenth century was, on the face of it, an eminent scholar. Athanasius Kircher was a German priest and antiquarian, who had entered the Jesuit order and studied philosophy, mathematics and a host of oriental languages. In 1635 he was appointed professor of mathematics at the Roman College, but he was a true renaissance man, not confining his studies to a single subject. He could read Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic, and correctly surmised that Coptic – the liturgical language of the Egyptian Orthodox Church – was related to ancient Egyptian. But what might have provided the basis for an insightful study of pharaonic civilization was fatally undermined by Kircher’s interest in, and adherence to, a school of religious philosophy popular at the time, known as Hermeticism.
In the early centuries AD, a community of Greek writers in Egypt, probably based at Alexandria, had adopted the collective name Hermes Trismegistus and, under this pseudonym, had composed a body of texts. The writings comprised religion and philosophy, magic and alchemy, and reflected the diverse cultural influences alive in Alexandria at the time. They were a mixture of Platonism, Stoicism and popular philosophy, spiced up with some Jewish and Near Eastern elements. To give this melange some semblance of authority, the writers claimed great antiquity for their work. Few of their Greek contemporaries in Alexandria would have fallen for such a ruse, but when the text reached the hands of the early church fathers, the authors’ claims were believed. Hermes Trismegistus was acknowledged as a real person, and the collection of writings ascribed to him became known as the Corpus Hermeticum. Moreover, European theologians saw in the corpus prefigurations of the essential truths of Christianity. It gained a hallowed status and eventually, in 1460, was translated from Greek into Latin, and subsequently into many European languages.
Throughout the Middle Ages, Hermeticism, as it came to be known, had a profound influence on Western thought. Kircher’s adherence to Hermeticism coloured his interpretation of the ancient Egyptian monuments he saw around him in Rome, which he published in his influential 1652 work, Oedipus Aegyptiacus. He felt certain that the hieroglyphs must express profound Hermetic truths, discernible only to initiates, and gave his imagination full rein when producing interpretations of what were, in truth, rather pedestrian inscriptions. Despite growing evidence that it was profoundly mistaken, Hermeticism remained stubbornly influential throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The belief that Egypt was the source of occult wisdom was simply too enticing to abandon.
The problem for scholars like Sandys and Greaves was that ancient Egyptian civilization was too mysterious to be accepted on the same basis as ancient Greece or Rome. Had not Greek and Roman authors themselves, including Herodotus, Strabo and Diodorus Siculus, remarked on Egypt’s magical, mystical characteristics? Other texts of equal repute seemed to confirm the view. Alongside the Corpus Hermeticum, another hugely influential work was the Hieroglyphika by the fifth-century author Horapollo. When rediscovered by scholars in fifteenth-century Florence, it strongly reinforced the theory that ancient Egyptian writing encoded deeper, mystical truths. This view of pharaonic civilization would be inherited by the Rosicrucians and Freemasons.
During the European Enlightenment, the allure of ancient Egypt was thus due more to its association with esoteric knowledge and mystical insight than to any sense of wonder at the practical achievements of the pharaohs. A growing fashion for all things ancient Egyptian found expression not only in books but also in the widespread adoption of Egyptian architectural forms, in country houses and landscape gardens. As well as being aesthetically pleasing, they signalled that the owner was a free thinker, open to new and radical ideas.
In the eighteenth century, curiosity about Egypt and its ancient past began to grow. The Nile Valley’s peculiar combination of biblical and classical resonances made Egypt a land at once familiar and strange. While no more than half a dozen or so first-hand accounts of Egypt were published by Europeans between 1500 and 1650, during the following century-and-a-half the number rose to over fifty. Frenchmen were the most frequent travellers to the Nile Valley with at least twenty-seven accounts, while the British were in second place with sixteen. Other nationalities making the journey to Egypt and recording their experiences included Germans, Dutch, Italians and Swiss.4 Most of these books were little more than collections of exotic experiences and fanciful interpretations of the surviving monuments, written by adventurers to titillate their readers. But three European travellers to Egypt between 1712 and 1738 showed a keener interest in the country’s antiquities, a genuine desire to understand as well as observe, and their writings made significant contributions to emergent Western understanding of the Egyptian past.
The first of these pioneers and proto-Egyptologists was, like Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit scholar. Claude Sicard travelled as a missionary to the Holy Land – first to Syria and then, from 1712, to Egypt, where he stayed for the rest of his life. His main purpose was to convert the Copts to Roman Catholicism, but he had also been ordered by the Regent of France, Philippe d’Orléans, to survey and record Egypt’s ancient monuments. In pursuance of this task, Sicard made a series of extended tours from his base in Cairo: five to Upper Egypt, one to the Fayum, one to the Sinai peninsula, and one to Middle Egypt and the Delta. He became the best-travelled European in Egypt since Classical times and, after the anonymous Venetian of 1589, the first Westerner since the Romans to visit the temples of Upper Egypt and the first to reach as far south as Aswan. His diary entry for 17 December 1720 noted, ‘we examined and measured at Edfu a famous temple of Apollo which is still almost intact’.5 He went on to describe around eighty more temples.
Sicard did not merely travel and observe, he studied. As a result, he was the first modern tourist correctly to identify the ruins at Luxor as the ‘Hundred-gated Thebes’ of Classical legend, and the Valley of the Kings as a royal cemetery. He sensed that, in the tomb inscriptions of Thebes, ‘we have there the story of the lives, virtues, acts, combats and victories of the princes who are buried there, but it is impossible for us to decipher them for the present’.6 After his first visit to Luxor, in 1718, he decided to embark on a hugely ambitious project: the creation of a comprehensive map of the Nile Valley, accompanied by a description of every location, ancient and modern. The map, published in 1722, was the first accurate chart of the Nile Valley ever produced in the West, with Arabic place names correctly transcribed. Sicard referred to it, presciently, as the Description de l’Egypte. The accompanying gazetteer was never completed, and only a single, partial copy survives. Sicard’s original papers were also lost, and the surviving fragments of the gazetteer were published only in 1982.
Had Sicard been able to publish his work during his lifetime, he would undoubtedly have been regarded today as one of the founding fathers of Egyptology. The first glimmerings of the nascent discipline are ascribed, instead, to two slightly later travellers, an Englishman and a Dane; though nowhere near as curious or studious as Sicard, they were more diligent in printing and promulgating their accounts. Richard Pococke (1704–65) was typical of the small breed of English travellers who ventured as far as Egypt during the eighteenth century. A clergyman by vocation (he later became Bishop of Ossory, then of Meath), he was primarily interested in Egypt for its biblical connections. Although the Nile Valley seemed distant and exotic in the European imagination, it was, in fact, relatively accessible for an adventurous traveller willing to set sail from a Mediterranean port. As Pococke recounted: ‘Having embark’d at Leghorn on the seventh of September, one thousand seven hundred thirty-seven, old style, we arrived at Alexandria on the twenty-ninth of the same month, being only a week in the voyage, from the time we lost sight of Sicily.’7
During his six months in Egypt, Pocoke visited Giza and ‘the famous sphynx,’8 and became the first Briton to travel south of Cairo, exploring tombs in the Valley of the Kings and journeying as far south as Philae and the First Cataract. After his return to England, he joined the newly founded Egyptian Society in 1741, and the following year was elected as its secretary. At the same time, he was moved, ‘by the persuasion of some friends, to give an account of his travels, and of several accidents, that might give an insight into the customs and manners of people so different from our own’.9
His two-volume A Description of the East and some other countries (1743–5) was, in many respects, a typical product of mid-eighteenth-century English scholarship. It was dedicated to Pococke’s patron, the Earl of Chesterfield, while many of the individual plates were dedicated to other notable personages who had contributed towards the cost of publication.10 But, in other respects, Pococke’s work was pioneering. The first volume was arranged in five sections, devoted respectively to the Delta; the Nile Valley; the Sinai peninsula; government, customs and natural history; and ‘Miscellaneous subjects, chiefly relating to the Antiquities and Natural History of Egypt’. The last included detailed and comprehensive descriptions of sites and places which had not yet been touched by tourism. Pococke’s Description was to remain the indispensable guide to the pharaonic monuments for nearly seven decades.
At exactly the same time as Pococke was exploring Egypt, a Danish naval captain named Frederik Norden (1708–42) was also travelling up the Nile. He had been sent by his king, Christian VI, on a mission to obtain a full and accurate account of Egypt, and he stayed in the country for about a year. By the time of his journey, travellers’ accounts of the Egyptian capital were so numerous that Norden glossed over Cairo’s sights. He later wrote: ‘This city is so well known, by such a number of relations and descriptions, as have been published of it, that I flatter myself, the reader will be pleased with my forbearing to enter into circumstantial details.’11
Instead, he was primarily interested in the relics of the pharaonic era: ‘Before I quit Cairo, and its adjacent parts, I cannot forbear speaking of the monuments that are the most worthy of the curiosity of those, who travel into Egypt: I mean the PYRAMIDS.’12
Entering the Great Pyramid was an adventure: ‘After these necessary preliminaries, you must have the precaution to strip yourself entirely, and undress even to your shirt, on account of the excessive heat . . . Afterwards, when you have regained your natural heat, you mount up to the top of the pyramid, in order to have a prospect from thence of the country round about, which is charming to behold.’13
But Norden’s interest in the Giza monuments went much further than mere touristic curiosity. By careful observation, he came to a developed understanding of their purpose and age: ‘They have all been raised with the same intention; that is to say, to serve for sepultures . . . we must absolutely throw back the first epocha of the pyramids into times so remote in antiquity, that vulgar chronology would find a difficulty to fix the era of them.’14
Indeed, noting the absence of hieroglyphic inscriptions, he deduced that the pyramids must have been built before the invention of writing. (He was wrong on this point, but his reasoning was sound.) Norden even dared to critique Greaves’s Pyramidographia, then the last word on the Giza monuments.
On Norden’s journey up the Nile, he visited most of the major sites. Luxor Temple was buried in sand up to the shoulders of the seated colossi of Ramesses II flanking the entrance,15 but Norden could see enough to describe the monument as ‘these superb ruins’.16 At Karnak, like generations of travellers since, he was plagued by crowds asking for bakhshish.17 He was fascinated, not only by the monuments, but by the manners and customs of the ancient Egyptians, making a particular study of mummification ‘in order to render the art of Egyptian embalmings more intelligible’.18
Norden and Pococke may well have passed each other on the river, or in the backstreets of Cairo, but it is not known if they actually met during their sojourn in the land of the pharaohs. They certainly encountered each other afterwards; for, on returning from Egypt, Norden was attached to the British navy and settled in London where he, like Pococke, joined the short-lived Egyptian Society. It had been established, under the presidency of Lord Sandwich, with the aim of ‘promoting and preserving Egyptian and other ancient learning’.19 Another of its members was the antiquarian and pioneer of archaeological surveys, William Stukeley. But it met for less than a year-and-a-half before falling into abeyance when the interest of its aristocratic patrons waned.
Norden, however, was not finished with ancient Egypt. He set to work writing up his Travels in Egypt, which appeared posthumously in 1757, more than a decade after Pococke’s Description. Norden’s book was, if anything, even more influential. Its lively and observant text was illustrated by a fine series of plates. The book was translated at once from Danish into English, French and German, becoming one of the most widely read accounts of Egypt and its monuments. Moreover, it made an implicit claim that would shape Western engagement with Egypt for the next two centuries: in the English edition, the engraved frontispiece shows a standing classical figure, holding a staff topped with the Christian Chi-Rho monogram and pointing towards the image of a chained crocodile, surrounded by pharaonic ruins, while a lion rests at the figure’s feet. The symbolism was clear: by re-discovering Egypt, Western civilization had also mastered it. Norden’s English editor, Peter Templeman, made the claim even more explicitly. In his dedication to the British monarch George II, he reflected: ‘In reading the following account of a country, that was once the model to other nations, but is now sunk through tyranny into the greatest ignorance and brutality, one cannot but reflect with transport on our own happiness in this country, under the reign of a wise, just, and beneficent Prince.’20
No other travellers of the eighteenth century came close to Pococke and Norden in terms of careful observation and accurate description of pharaonic monuments. European visits to Egypt in the second half of the century slowed to a trickle, as disturbances in the south of the country put off all but the most adventurous of tourists. Those who did sail across the Mediterranean and up the Nile either met with misfortune or left little by way of intelligent accounts. For example, a scientific expedition sent to the Middle East in 1761 by King Frederik V of Denmark stayed in Egypt for over a year (while avoiding Upper Egypt); all but one of the members died from disease within months of leaving Alexandria. An eccentric English member of parliament and traveller, Edward Montagu, sailed from Livorno to Egypt (following in Pococke’s footsteps) in April 1763, returning three years later to make a brief study of Pompey’s Pillar. He carried out a series of cursory excavations, the finds from which eventually passed to the nascent British Museum. But, despite making two further trips to Egypt in the 1770s, he added little to contemporary understanding of the country or its history. A British diplomat, Nathaniel Davison, who accompanied Montagu on his first visit, later returned to Giza with a pair of French companions to explore the Great Pyramid. He discovered the lowest set of relieving chambers above the burial chamber, which were duly named after him; to this day, they are known as Davison’s chambers. But, on being posted to Algiers, his interests turned to other matters. Finally, in 1768, the Scottish traveller James Bruce braved danger and discomfort to visit Thebes, and was rewarded for his efforts by discovering the tomb of Ramesses III in the Valley of the Kings (which is still known as ‘Bruce’s Tomb’). But the subsequent account of his discovery ‘inspired disbelief, not interest’.21
By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, advances in the study of ancient Egypt had ground to a halt. The Nile Valley, like the rest of the ‘Orient’, remained, for most Europeans, a remote and inaccessible land of myth. To wake Western scholarship from its torpor and to bring Egypt from semi-obscurity into the light of understanding would require a determined effort: a proper scientific expedition, well planned and well resourced, with the profile to focus Western attention on Egypt as never before.
