From the Renaissance onwards, the East was regarded by Europeans as a source of wisdom – as expressed in the Latin motto ex oriente lux, ‘light from the East’. People looked to the East, and to the ancient East in particular, for new concepts of divinity, and for new answers to humanity’s problems.22 This concept of ‘orientation’ gained particular popularity during the French revolution. Of all the oriental civilizations, ancient Egypt seemed to provide inspiration for a different model of society, be it theistic, pantheistic, cosmotheistic or secular.23 One of the most influential books of the late eighteenth century was a treatise by the French aristocrat, Constantin-François Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney, entitled Les Ruines, ou Méditation sur révolutions des empires (1791). Inspired by Volney’s travels in Syria and Egypt in the mid-1780s,24 Les Ruines blended science, philosophy and theology, attacked orthodox religion, and championed atheistic humanism as the foundation for future human happiness. It helped to shape revolutionary thought, and not just in Volney’s own country. Within a year of publication, Les Ruines was translated into English (as Ruins of Empires), where it chimed with the nascent spirit of Romanticism.
Volney’s view of Egypt, as a source of wisdom, found expression in other artistic creations of the time. Mozart’s operas Zaïde (1779–80) and The Magic Flute (1789–91) are replete with pharaonic symbolism, in the latter case blended with Masonic influences. In a similar vein, Charles Monnet’s painting The Fountain of Youth, which was widely distributed as an engraving from 1793, shows a crowd of people surrounding a fountain in the form of the goddess Isis, with water flowing from her breasts. One of the worshippers raises a goblet to drink from the water of wisdom.25 There was thus a philosophical impetus at the end of the eighteenth century – and especially in revolutionary France – to learn more about ancient Egyptian civilization. For, as a contemporary commentator put it, Egypt stood ‘at the beginning of sacred and profane antiquity’.26
There were also more mundane, political reasons why French revolutionary leaders took a particular interest in the Nile Valley. France had been stung by its loss of influence in India during the Seven Years War. Pushed into second place in the subcontinent by the British, France was not about to suffer the same indignity in the Mediterranean, its own backyard. Moreover, French merchants had well-developed commercial interests along the coast of North Africa, and French scholarship boasted an impressive tradition of oriental studies. In short, France felt that North Africa in general, and Egypt in particular, were its by right. Action to assert this claim was not a spur-of-the-moment decision: Leibnitz had proposed the French annexation of Egypt as far back as 1672.27 Furthermore, the leaders of the French revolution saw their movement in historic, epochal terms: they were not simply forming a new government in France, but ushering in a new era for Europe. Looking to ancient Rome as a model, their objective was to restore the power and purpose of the Roman republic in a new republic, centred on Paris. In a memoir to the Directorate of 13 February 1798, the French foreign minister Talleyrand explained his government’s thinking in the clearest possible terms: ‘Egypt was a province of the Roman Republic; she must become a province of the French Republic. Roman rule saw the decadence of this beautiful country; French rule will bring it prosperity. The Romans wrested Egypt from kings distinguished in arts and science; the French will lift it from the hands of the most appalling tyrants who have ever existed.’28
Whereas the British in India had simply replaced native despotism with its colonial equivalent, French rule in Egypt, Talleyrand asserted, would be a liberation, benefiting both parties.
Persuaded by the force of such arguments – and perhaps goaded into action by the gathering momentum of British exploration – the Directorate, in March 1798, authorized a French expedition to Egypt. Its purpose would be twofold. Military conquest would annex Egypt to the French republic, and have the added benefit of undermining British interests in the Mediterranean and, ultimately, India. At the same time, scientific study would facilitate the intellectual acquisition of Egypt, its people, its monuments, and its illustrious past.29 A successful expedition to Egypt would thus make France both the dominant military power in Europe and its leading cultural force.
While Talleyrand was the spokesperson for the enterprise, its guiding force was the man who had emerged from the chaos of the revolution as France’s new strongman: Napoleon Bonaparte. He certainly understood and espoused the strategic arguments for an expedition to Egypt, but his motivations were as much personal as political. Napoleon saw his leadership in dynastic terms, consciously emulating figures from Europe’s classical past. While the French republic might model itself on its Roman forebear, Bonaparte looked further back for his personal inspiration, to another military leader who had overthrown the established order and reshaped the world: Alexander the Great. At the apogee of his power, Alexander had conquered the land of the pharaohs; twenty centuries later, Napoleon would liberate the Nile Valley from generations of barbarism.30
Napoleon’s expedition was planned in conditions of great secrecy, under the code name ‘the Left Wing of the Army of England’.31 Throughout the late spring of 1798, its members were recruited, and its materials assembled, from across France. Alongside the levying of troops, great pains were taken over the selection of the five hundred or so civilian members of the expedition. Among their number were 151 savants (experts). They were mostly young men (the youngest was just fifteen, and their average age was twenty-five), for whom the prospect of making new discoveries and establishing a new outpost of France represented the adventure, and the opportunity, of a lifetime. They were led by five established scientists, chief among them the thirty-year-old mathematician Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier. A teacher at the Ecole polytechnique, he was charged by Napoleon with recruiting suitable students for the Egyptian expedition. Among those who signed up were two young engineers, Edmé-François Jomard and Jacques-Marie Le Père. Both would go on to make signal contributions to the expedition’s scientific aims, and to the rediscovery of ancient Egypt.
The veritable army of experts assembled by Fourier embraced all the disciplines required to meet the expedition’s scientific and cultural aspirations. The relative numbers of different professions are revealing of Bonaparte’s intentions. Most numerous of all were the printers (twenty-seven of them, together with three of their wives), for Napoleon and his fellow revolutionaries understood the power of the written word: to describe and publish was to master and control. Next came the surveyors and civil engineers (fourteen of each), for a country could only be brought under effective control and made economically productive if it was properly mapped and equipped with an effective infrastructure – roads, bridges and canals. Joining the printers, surveyors and engineers were nine mechanics and three shipbuilders (to keep the new infrastructure running); five mining engineers and three mechanical engineers (to develop Egypt’s economy); four architects, an equal number of mathematicians, seven naturalists and three astronomers (to observe, record and study the natural wonders of Egypt); three gunpowder-makers (to assist the mining engineers as well as the army); eight interpreters and eight artists (to facilitate and record the expedition’s achievements); seven surgeons and three pharmacists (to keep the whole company in good health); and two archaeologists. Although antiquarianism was already a popular pastime in late eighteenth-century Europe, the scientific study of the past was still in its infancy. The inclusion of two archaeologists in the Napoleonic expedition, whilst relatively insignificant compared with the large number of printers and engineers, was thus a pivotal moment in the emergence of the discipline. Indeed, it is ironic that the expedition’s archaeological achievements would far outweigh its other accomplishments. What was launched as primarily a military, political and economic venture would gain a lasting reputation as the crucible of Egyptology.
After two months of feverish activity, everything was ready. The main flotilla set sail from the port of Toulon on 19 May 1798. It comprised thirteen ships of the line; forty-two frigates, brigs and corsairs; and 130 transport vessels. On board were 17,000 soldiers, an equal number of sailors and marines, and 500-odd civilians, including the 151 experts. The armed forces had at their disposal over a thousand artillery pieces and 700 horses, while the experts had measuring instruments, scientific equipment, and a large library comprising just about every book on Egypt then available in France.32 Once at sea, the flotilla was joined by three smaller convoys sailing from Genoa, Ajaccio and Civita Vecchia; they brought the strength of the entire armada to 400 ships and 36,000 men. It was the largest expeditionary force destined for Egypt since the days of ancient Rome.
At the head of his expedition, Napoleon landed at Alexandria on 1 July 1798. One of his first acts on disembarking was formally to establish a commission of science and arts, comprising the 151 savants. His cultural ambitions were matched by his military prowess, and Alexandria fell to the overwhelming French forces on the first morning. Less than three weeks later, after marching his army southwards, Napoleon won the decisive Battle of the Pyramids – against the forces of Egypt’s Mamluk rulers – and on 25 July he entered Cairo as the country’s conqueror. But his victory was short-lived. On 1 August, a British fleet under the command of Horatio Nelson defeated the French navy in the Battle of the Nile at Abukir Bay; Nelson was ennobled (as Lord Nelson of the Nile) and Napoleon found himself stranded in Egypt, with no obvious escape route. However, the British had not landed any forces, so the French still had control of the country, and Napoleon set about pursuing the scientific purposes of the expedition with gusto. By an order of 22 August, he created the Institut d’Egypte, modelled on the Institut de France, and appointed Fourier as its permanent secretary. It met for the first time on 23 August and represented the ideals of the French Enlightenment. Its membership was drawn from the commission and the expedition’s leading military and administrative personnel. The number of members was restricted to just forty-eight, divided evenly between representatives of four branches of science: mathematics, physical sciences, political economy, and arts and letters. A captured Mamluk palace was adapted as the institute’s headquarters, equipped with meeting rooms and laboratories, and furnished with the reference library brought from France.33
While the institute’s members set about their work in Cairo, the study of ancient monuments further upstream fell to Napoleon’s friend and colleague, Dominique Vivant, Baron Denon (1747–1825), who attached himself to a section of the French invasion force, under the command of General Desaix, that left Cairo on 25 August in pursuit of one of the deposed Mamluk rulers, Murad Bey. For the next ten months, Desaix’s army, with Denon firmly embedded in the ranks, marched southwards, stopping only to marvel at the sites they encountered on the way. They were enthralled by what they found. The ruins of ancient Thebes, in particular, made a profound impression. On 26 January 1799, Denon himself recalled: ‘The army came to a stop by itself and spontaneously burst into applause, as if occupying the ruins of this capital had been the goal of our glorious mission and had completed the conquest of Egypt.’34
By contrast, the Egyptians who observed these strangers were probably somewhat perplexed by their obsession with dusty ruins, for Arabic interest in Egypt’s antiquities had long since waned.35 Nor were the European invaders always prepared for the conditions they encountered: when Desaix first reconnoitered the Valley of the Kings in the blistering summer heat of 1799, two of his soldiers died of sunstroke.36
In the late summer of 1798, the physicist (and head of the French ballooning corps) Jean-Marie-Joseph Coutelle and the expedition’s chief civil engineer, Le Père, with a guard of a hundred soldiers, hired 150 local workers to clear the inner chambers and descending passage of the Great Pyramid at Giza. The mission was able to take accurate measurements of the pyramid’s exterior, including the height of each course of masonry, while the architect François-Charles Cécile measured and drew the interior grand gallery. On 24 September 1798, worked paused briefly when Napoleon himself visited Giza. Inside the Great Pyramid, he asked to be left alone for a while in the King’s Chamber – perhaps consciously emulating Alexander the Great at the Siwa oracle. Bonaparte never revealed what he experienced in that moment of solitude,37 but he was certainly struck by the sheer scale of Giza. His architects and engineers calculated that there was enough stone in the three main pyramids to build a wall half a metre thick and three metres high all the way around France; or that, if laid end to end, the stones would reach two-thirds of the way around the earth. The institute’s surveyor and cartographer Pierre Jacotin produced a large-scale map of Giza that remains useful two centuries later. Equally influential, though in a different way, was the conclusion of Jomard, who was so awestruck by the pyramids that he felt they must incorporate a deeper, mystical truth.38 The workmen had begun clearing sand from around the Sphinx when the soldiers accompanying the mission were called away on military duties. The institute’s investigations thus came to a halt, but not before they had carried out the most detailed, comprehensive documentation of Giza yet attempted.
Elsewhere in Egypt members of the commission were busy surveying the country and planning its economic renaissance as a province of the French Republic. One of the most significant pieces of work was the survey of Lake Manzala undertaken by Le Père, part of a programme to explore the possibility of opening a canal from Suez to link the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. That particular project planted a seed very firmly in the French consciousness that would lie dormant, but not forgotten, until brought to fruition under a future Napoleon (Bonaparte’s nephew, Emperor Napoleon III). Bonaparte, however, had realized that his primary dream of annexing Egypt to France was destined to fail. The British Minister of War, Lord Dundas, had warned that: ‘The possession of Egypt by any independent Power would be a fatal circumstance to the interests of this country,’39 signalling that Britain was determined to thwart France’s territorial ambitions. On 25 July 1799, Napoleon won the second Battle of Abukir Bay, buying him enough time to plan his escape. One of his last decisions made on Egyptian soil was to instruct the commission to continue and complete the systematic inventory of Egypt’s antiquities begun by Denon. A decree of 13 August appointed two subcommissions to carry out the task. Nine days later, Napoleon and Denon slipped through the British naval blockade of Alexandria and made their way back to Paris. Bonaparte arrived in the French capital on 16 October and seized power as first consul three weeks later.
The remaining story of the French expedition is the story of the commission members, left to their own devices while their erstwhile leader busied himself with other matters in far-off France. As instructed, they continued their research, gathering material for the official expedition publication. But their days in Egypt were numbered. To guarantee British hegemony, troops under Sir Ralph Abercromby landed in Egypt on 18 March 1801; Cairo surrendered on 18 June and Alexandria on 3 September. The remaining members of the commission made a series of attempts to escape, eventually breaking through the British stranglehold and finding their way back to Paris.40 Theirs was a sorry reckoning: of the 151 savants who had accompanied Napoleon, nearly a quarter were dead within eight years. This included five killed in battle and five who were assassinated; ten who died of plague, five of dysentery, and one from drowning; and five who died back home in Europe from the ill-effects of their time in Egypt.
Militarily, too, the Napoleonic expedition was a disaster. But its long-term repercussions, for Egypt as well as for Egyptology, were profound. The introduction of the printing press, and the ideas that the commission brought with them from France to the Nile Valley, stirred the beginnings of Egypt’s political awakening, for good and for ill. An Egyptian eyewitness of Napoleon’s invasion, Sheikh Abdel Rahman el Djabarty, commented laconically that ‘it was the beginning of a series of great misfortunes’.41
Indeed, the brief French occupation swept away the old order, without putting anything in its place. Into the political vacuum stepped a young officer in the Ottoman army by the name of Mehmet Ali. Born in 1769 in Macedonia (present-day Greece), to an Albanian family, Mehmet Ali had risen to be commanding officer of an Albanian unit loyal to the Ottoman sultan. In spring 1801, following the retreat of Napoleon’s army, Mehmet Ali’s unit was ordered by Constantinople to reoccupy Egypt. It landed at Abukir Bay, site of Nelson’s victory less than three years earlier. Across Egypt, Mehmet Ali found a power struggle raging between the former rulers of Egypt, the Mamluks (who had regrouped after the French withdrawal), and the forces loyal to the Ottoman sultan. Mehmet Ali managed to work with both sides while steadily building up popular support for himself. Eventually, in May 1805 (exactly a year after Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor of France), he was able to engineer the downfall of the Ottoman viceroy and his own elevation to the post. The sultan in Constantinople had little choice but to acquiesce, confirming Mehmet Ali (his name now Egyptianized as Muhammad Ali) as Pasha of Egypt in 1806.
He consolidated his power by defeating a small British invasion the following year, and set the seal on his absolute rule with an act of the greatest barbarity. On 1 March 1811, Muhammad Ali invited the surviving Mamluk leaders to a great celebration in the Citadel of Cairo. As soon as they had entered the fortress, he had them surrounded and killed, before sending his army to round up the remaining Mamluk forces throughout the country. Thus did an Albanian army officer become viceroy of Egypt and founder of a dynasty that would rule the Nile Valley – often with an iron fist – for the next century and a half.
Not only did the Napoleonic expedition – the first major imperialist incursion into the Middle East in modern times – play unwitting midwife to the birth of Muhammad Ali’s dynasty: it also confirmed Egypt as the focus of Anglo-French political rivalry for the next hundred years.42 Moreover, the excitement generated by the expedition and the resulting publication awakened a public interest in ancient Egypt across the Western world that has never abated. Napoleon’s enduring legacy in Egypt was the genesis of a new nation and the birth of a new science. Each would prove a mixed blessing.
The French may have lost the military advantage in Egypt, but thanks to the work of Napoleon’s savants it was France, not Britain, that emerged victorious in the battle for cultural supremacy. By the mid-1810s, the French representative in Egypt exercised a virtual monopoly on the acquisition of antiquities throughout the Nile Valley. Indeed, for Bernardino Drovetti, who participated in the Napoleonic campaign and later served as French consul-general in Cairo between 1810 and 1829, collecting ancient art and artefacts was his primary concern and occupation. A popular saying in early nineteenth-century Cairo was: ‘The riches of Egypt are for the foreigners therein.’43
The head start gained by the French in amassing antiquities for the great national collection at the Louvre did not go unnoticed in London. In 1815, buoyed by Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, the British Foreign Office urged its diplomats around the world to start collecting for the British Museum. Never mind advances in knowledge, national pride was at stake: ‘Whatever the expense of the undertaking, whether successful or otherwise, it would be most cheerfully supported by an enlightened nation, eager to anticipate its Rivals in the prosecution of the best interests of science and literature.’44
Britain’s response to French cultural hegemony in Egypt was to appoint its own consul-general. In 1815, the government announced that its new chief representative in Cairo would be Henry Salt. He arrived in Cairo in April 1816 with his wife and, over the next decade, devoted most of his energies to collecting antiquities – not only for the British Museum, but also to sell at a profit to supplement his meagre diplomatic salary. A posting in Egypt was not merely an opportunity to get one over on the French, it was also a chance to get rich – an irresistible combination.
The rivalry between Drovetti and Salt dominated the exploration – or, more often, the ransacking – of Egypt’s ancient sites throughout the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. As a later observer put it, ‘the archaeological field became a battle plain for two armies of Dragomans and Fellah-navvies. One was headed by the redoubtable Salt; the other owned the command of Drovetti.’45 Salt lost no time in ingratiating himself with Muhammad Ali, believing that good relations with Egypt’s new ruler would greatly facilitate the collection of antiquities. But Muhammad Ali was nothing if not an adept political operator. He used antiquities (or the promise of them) to play the Western powers off against each other.46 At first, Salt was regularly outsmarted and outmanoeuvred by Drovetti, who had built up a network of loyal – and ruthless – agents throughout Egypt. Salt’s response – and his stroke of luck – was to appoint as his own agent a man whose determination and resourcefulness, not to mention physical abilities, were more than a match for any rival.
Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823) emerges from the early annals of Egyptology as a giant in every sense. Born into poverty in the Italian city of Padua, as a teenager he made his way to Rome, intent upon a career in holy orders. But the Napoleonic invasion in 1798 forced Belzoni to leave the city, and he wandered for a time around Europe as a travelling pedlar, before landing up in London in 1802. There, he put his extraordinary physical stature to good use, taking to the stage in a series of show-stopping acts: as a weightlifter dubbed, first, ‘the Patagonian Sampson’, then ‘the French Hercules’; as the eponymous giant in the pantomime Jack the Giant-killer (better known today as Jack and the Beanstalk); and finally, under his own name, as ‘the Great Belzoni’, actor, conjuror and strongman. After marrying an Englishwoman, Sarah, Belzoni sought new adventures and travelled to Malta. There, by good fortune, he met a representative of Muhammad Ali’s, who was scouting Europe for engineers and other experts to assist in the modernization of the Egyptian economy. Belzoni argued that, with a background in theatrical hydraulics, he was just the man to improve Egypt’s irrigation system. Remarkably, the envoy took Belzoni at his word, and invited him to Cairo, to present his ideas to the pasha himself. Muhammad Ali’s thinking was simple: as he is reported to have told a visitor, ‘I know that among fifty men who come from Europe to offer me their services, forty-nine are only to be compared to false stones. Without testing them, I cannot discover the only genuine diamond that may be among them. I begin by buying them all and when I discover the one, he often repays me by a hundred-fold for the loss I have incurred by the others.’47
Belzoni was to be a major beneficiary of this thinking. ‘We sailed from Malta on the 19th of May, 1815,’ he wrote, ‘and arrived at Alexandria on the 9th of June following; Mrs Belzoni, myself, and James Curtain, a lad, whom I brought with me from Ireland, formed our party. The principal cause of my going to Egypt was the project of constructing hydraulic machines, to irrigate the fields, by a system much easier and more economical than what is in use in that country.’48 Even for a man who had seen much of Europe, Egypt was terra incognita, and presented unexpected challenges: ‘On entering the harbour of Alexandria, the pilot informed us, that the plague was in town. To a European, who had never been in that country, this was alarming intelligence.’49
After making his way from Alexandria to Cairo, Belzoni soon got to know other Europeans living in the Egyptian capital. One of his first acquaintances was the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who had studied Arabic at Cambridge, travelled extensively in the Middle East, discovered Petra in 1812, and, later that year, settled in Cairo, living as a Muslim under the name Sheikh Ibrahim ibn Abdullah. Since arriving in the land of the pharaohs, Burckhardt had become fascinated by the country’s antiquities. (He was the first European to see the rock-cut temples at Abu Simbel, in March 1813.) One in particular intrigued him. On the plain of western Thebes, opposite Luxor, there stood a ruined edifice, characterized by towering columns, tumbledown walls, and the remains of colossal statues. Napoleon’s savants had studied the building, and, inspired by the writings of the first-century BC Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, had named it the ‘Tomb of Ozymandias’.50 Other Europeans referred to it as the ‘Palace of Memnon’. By whichever name it was known, its most notable features were a gigantic royal statue that lay prone on the sand and, nearby, two colossal royal heads.51 The larger and more spectacular of the two, a bust measuring 2.7 metres high and 2 metres wide, cut from a single block of granite, was nicknamed the ‘Young Memnon’. It had attracted the attention of the Napoleonic expedition, which had tried, unsuccessfully, to remove it.52 Now Burckhardt decided that it would make a wonderful addition to a European museum – but the British Museum, not the Louvre. According to Belzoni: ‘Mr Burckhardt had for a long time premeditated the removal of the colossal head, or rather bust, known by the name of Young Memnon, to England, and had often endeavoured to persuade the Bashaw [Pasha] to send it as a present to the Prince Regent; but as it must have appeared to a Turk too trifling an article to send to so great a personage, no steps were taken for this purpose.’53
Burckhardt was supported in his scheme by another traveller and antiquarian, William John Bankes, who had come to Egypt in 1815 and had voyaged upstream as far as Wadi Halfa. He was an avid collector of antiquities, and the idea of transporting the Young Memnon to England, to stand as the centrepiece of the British Museum, greatly appealed to him. Together, Burckhardt and Bankes pressed their case with the newly arrived British consul-general, Henry Salt.
By a fortuitous combination of circumstances, Belzoni arrived in Cairo just as Salt was considering the proposal. The Italian giant – doughty, fearless and uncannily experienced in moving heavy objects – presented the perfect solution. On 28 June 1816, Salt wrote in a letter: ‘Mr. Belzoni is requested to prepare the necessary implements, at Boolak, for the purpose of raising the head of the statue of the younger Memnon, and carrying it down the Nile.’54 According to Belzoni, the decision was not quite so straightforward. He claimed that ‘The consul seemed inclined to comply, but was indecisive for some time, saying he would think about it’. Belzoni also categorically denied having been engaged or employed by Salt, claiming instead to have acted in his own capacity for the British Museum.55 Whatever the truth – and the difference in accounts was symptomatic of the tempestuous relations between the two men, which ultimately broke down completely56 – Belzoni accepted the commission and set off for Thebes. On arrival, he recruited eighty local Arab men, and they began work on 27 July 1816.
Brute force proved its worth, and ‘On the 3d [August] we went on extremely well, and advanced nearly four hundred yards’.57 By 12 August, the colossal bust had been dragged all the way to the west bank of the Nile. This remarkable feat must have been the talk of Luxor. News even reached the ears of a professor at al-Azhar, Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, who in a 1817 commentary on European collecting activities made special reference to the Young Memnon; he did not condemn its removal, but he did not entirely understand the Western fascination for Egypt’s ancient relics.58 The Young Memnon’s journey downstream to Cairo took a further twenty-four days, and the torso eventually docked at the port of Bulaq on 15 December 1816. After a break for the Christmas and New Year festivities, the torso embarked on a second river journey, arriving at the port of Rosetta, at the mouth of the Nile, on 10 January 1817.
Mission accomplished, Belzoni turned his attention to some of Egypt’s other ancient sites. According to his own account: ‘I had the good fortune to be the discoverer of many remains of antiquity of that primitive nation. I succeeded in opening one of the two famous Pyramids of Ghizeh, as well as several of the tombs of the Kings at Thebes.’59 Foremost of these was the spectacular tomb of Seti I, father of the Young Memnon’s creator, Ramesses II.60
Meanwhile, the Young Memnon was stuck in quarantine in the port of Rosetta. Only on 17 October 1817 was Salt able to inform the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, that the artefact had finally been embarked on the transport ship Nearchus and was bound for Malta. There, it was transferred to a Royal Navy store ship, HMS Weymouth (laden with antiquities from Leptis Magna), for the final journey to England. Throughout the torso’s long voyage from Luxor to London, news of its progress was eagerly covered by the European press. In January 1818, the Quarterly Review, looking forward to the statue’s impending arrival, described it as ‘without doubt the finest specimen of ancient Egyptian sculpture which has yet been discovered’.61 Eventually, in March that year, the Weymouth anchored in the Thames and the Foreign Office and Admiralty were able, finally, to notify the British Museum that their prize acquisition had arrived. At a stroke, the Museum became ‘the first repository in the world of Egyptian art and antiquity’.62 The scope and ambition of its collections both reflected and proclaimed the scale and reach of the growing British Empire. The torso, now its star attraction, went on permanent display towards the end of 1818. One of its early admirers was the poet John Keats. His great friend and fellow poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley – a man who ‘perused with more than ordinary eagerness the relations of travellers in the East’63 – was inspired to write his sonnet ‘Ozymandias’.64 The poem – the most famous meditation in the English language on the fragility of human power – was published on 11 January 1818, just as the torso was making its way up the English Channel.
In the autumn of that same year, Bankes, Salt and a Prussian naturalist Albert von Sack set sail from Cairo for Upper Egypt. At Luxor, they were joined by the Italian explorer Alessandro Ricci, who had made drawings for Belzoni in the tomb of Seti I, and the Greek merchant Giovanni Anastasi, who had succeeded Belzoni as Salt’s agent in Upper Egypt and who would later serve as consul-general for Norway-Sweden. Proceeding southwards to the island of Philae, the party met up with four more travellers, including Thomas Wyse, leader of Irish Catholic emancipation, and the architect Charles Barry, who would go on to work at Bankes’ country seat, Kingston Lacy in Dorset, design the Houses of Parliament, and remodel Highclere Castle, home of the earls of Carnarvon. Such was the interconnected and multinational nature of European travel in Egypt in the years immediately following Waterloo.65 Ever the eagle-eyed collector, Bankes took a particular fancy to an obelisk among the picturesque ruins of Philae and determined to remove it. The French agent Drovetti tried to stop him, but Salt asserted Britain’s prior claim. Bankes succeeded in having the obelisk shipped to England and erected at Kingston Lacy, where it would play a key role in the decipherment of hieroglyphics.
As for Belzoni, after his falling-out with Salt, he had turned his attention to Giza, where he succeeded in entering the pyramid of Khafra on 2 March 1818.66 The following year he returned to England and published the account of his adventures. In 1821, he opened an exhibition of some of his finds – together with a scale model of the tomb of Seti I – in the appropriate surroundings of the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly. It attracted 1,900 visitors on its first day and ran for a year. (By contrast, when he took it to Paris in 1822, it was not a success: national rivalries were not so easily forgotten.) Eager for new adventures, Belzoni left England again in 1822 on an expedition to locate the source of the River Niger. On his way to Timbuktu, he succumbed to dysentery and died, at Gwato in present-day Benin, in 1823, at the age of just forty-five.
While Salt’s motives for archaeology may have been questionable, he certainly possessed an uncanny ability to spot talent. Another of his employees was Giovanni Battista Caviglia who began his career as a ship’s captain and eventually found his way to Egypt. In 1817, while Belzoni was off digging in the Valley of the Kings, Caviglia was hired by Salt to excavate the Great Sphinx. Caviglia spent over two decades at Giza, clearing the sand from around the Sphinx, thus fully revealing it for the first time since antiquity, and also studying the pyramids, which, he was convinced, concealed mysteries of great religious significance.67 Around the Sphinx, digging down through the encroaching sand dunes, he uncovered a Roman staircase and esplanade, fragments of the statue’s missing beard and the cobra from its forehead, and – between its paws – the Dream Stela, the translation of which would have to await the decipherment of hieroglyphics.68 In the Great Pyramid, he descended by means of ropes, burning sulphur in an attempt to clear the fetid air.69 His pains were rewarded by the discovery of a previously unknown underground chamber directly beneath the centre of the monument. Energetic and enterprising, the two Giovanni Battistas, Belzoni and Caviglia, epitomize the adventure and derring-do of early nineteenth-century Egyptian exploration.
In the wake of the Napoleonic expedition, the acquisition of artefacts became, for the nations of Europe, a measure of success and a matter of pride. Among the myriad antiquities pilfered from the Nile Valley during and after Bonaparte’s Egyptian adventure, two in particular shaped the birth of Egyptology and defined its role in the wider cultural politics of Europe.
In the middle of July 1799, a detachment of Napoleonic troops under the command of General Menou was busy strengthening the defences of Fort Julien (known today as Borg Rashid), the medieval fortress of Rosetta, in preparation for the second Battle of Abukir Bay. As they laboured under the watchful eye of engineer and Commission member Pierre François Xavier Bouchard, they discovered an irregularly shaped slab of granite, weighing three-quarters of a ton, embedded in the walls of the fortress. Bouchard knew at once that this was no ordinary piece of re-used stone, for one face of the slab was covered with a lengthy inscription. The inscription clearly fell into three sections. The uppermost part was written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, the lower part in Greek characters, and the middle part in a strange, cursive script. Like all members of the Commission, even those employed on military and civil engineering tasks, Bouchard was alert and alive to the discovery of Egyptian antiquities. He immediately reported the discovery of the stone slab to General Menou, who arranged for it to be sent to the Institut d’Egypte in Cairo for further study.
There, the savants could scarcely believe their eyes or their luck. What the soldiers had discovered was an amazing survival: the same text, inscribed in three scripts. Any reasonably well-educated scholar could read the lowermost section, written in the ancient Greek language. The uppermost section must therefore record the self-same content, but rendered in the ancient Egyptian language of the pharaohs. Indeed, the last sentence of the inscription, translated from the Greek, confirmed the nature of the monument as a whole: ‘This decree shall be inscribed on a stela of granite, in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek writing.’70 The Courier de l’Egypte, the official journal of the Napoleonic expedition, which was published in Cairo using the imported French printing presses, reported the discovery in its edition of 29 July 1799: ‘This stone offers great interest for the study of hieroglyphic characters; perhaps it will give us the key at last.’71
