I undressed almost completely, down to my Arab shirt and long linen underpants, and pushed myself flat on my stomach through the small opening in the doorway that, if cleared of sand, would be at least 25 feet in height. I thought I was entering the mouth of a furnace, and, when I had slid entirely into the temple, I found myself in an atmosphere heated to 52 degrees: we went through this astonishing excavation, Rosellini, Ricci, I and one of the Arabs holding a candle in his hand . . . After two and a half hours of admiration, and having seen all the bas-reliefs, the need to breathe a little fresh air made itself felt, and we had to regain the mouth of the furnace.27
During two intense weeks at Abu Simbel, the expedition succeeded in making copies of all the temple reliefs; it was a heroic effort. As Champollion remarked to his brother: ‘Thus has been our memorable Abu Simbel campaign: it is the bitterest and the most glorious we have accomplished during the entire voyage. Frenchmen and Tuscans have been rivals in zeal and devotion.’28
As they prepared to leave, the men took the scaffolding away from the entrance, whereupon the sand collapsed, re-covering the doorway to a depth of two metres above the cornice. Having yielded up its secrets, the temple fell silent again. Champollion knew he would never return.
The mammoth campaign at Abu Simbel exhausted the expedition both physically and materially. By the time Champollion and his companions reached Wadi Halfa, on Egypt’s southern border with Sudan and the furthest point of their journey, they were surviving on dry biscuits brought from Aswan. After replenishing their stores in the town’s souk, they celebrated New Year’s Day 1829, and the beginning of the return journey, with a Nubian dinner washed down with two bottles of Saint-Georges wine. Reaching the Second Nile Cataract without incident and copying the inscriptions at Abu Simbel were not the only causes for celebration. The expedition had also vindicated Champollion’s theory of decipherment and proved the accuracy of his system. He wrote triumphantly to his old friend and mentor, Bon-Joseph Dacier:
I am proud that, having followed the course of the Nile from its mouth to the second cataract, I am able to announce to you that there is nothing to modify in our Lettre sur l’alphabet hiéroglyphes. Our alphabet is good: it can be applied with equal success to Egyptian monuments of Roman and Ptolemaic times and, which is of greater interest, to the inscriptions in all the temples, palaces and tombs of pharaonic date. Everything justifies, therefore, the encouragement that you so kindly gave to my hieroglyphic work at a time when nobody was disposed to favour it.29
Glowing with justification and pride, Champollion allowed personal thoughts to invade his mind for the briefest of moments, asking his brother in a postscript: ‘Send me news of my wife.’30 He also displayed glimpses of humour, writing in his journal, after an unsuccessful hunting trip: ‘Thus deprived, for the twentieth time, of the sweet hope of eating grilled crocodile, we continued downriver.’31 Then he plunged back into his studies.
As he embarked on the return journey and looked ahead to the successful conclusion of the expedition, Champollion began to think about establishing a more permanent connection between Egypt and France. One idea, in particular, started to fix itself in his mind. As the Isis sailed between Aswan and Kom Ombo, he wondered: ‘Will we see, at last, an Egyptian obelisk in one of the squares of Paris? That would be nice!’32 Of all the obelisks still standing in Egypt, the pair in front of the temple at Luxor had attracted particular admiration. Thirty years earlier, during the Napoleonic expedition, Denon had remarked that ‘there is nothing on earth to compare with them’.33 Champollion was rather of the same opinion, musing: ‘Why toy with transporting the one in Alexandria when one could have one of these for the modest expense of 400,000 francs at most? The minister who erected one of these admirable monoliths in one of the squares of Paris would immortalize himself with little effort.’34
While Champollion’s ability to read the ancient texts may have shattered earlier theories about the obelisk inscriptions – ‘far from confirming what people have for so long thought – profound religious mysteries, high philosophical speculations, secrets of occult science, or astronomical observations – they are simply dedications, more or less fatuous, of the buildings in front of which these monuments are erected’35 – the appeal of the monuments themselves remained undimmed. As the date of his departure from Egypt grew ever nearer, Champollion began to agitate to have one of the Luxor obelisks transported to the French capital: ‘If we are to see an obelisk in Paris, let it be one of these at Luxor. Ancient Thebes will have to console itself in keeping the Karnak one, the finest and most beautiful of all . . . Without spending three hundred thousand francs in preliminary preparations, one of the two Luxor obelisks could be transported by river, on a big raft . . . It would be possible. If it was really wished for, it could be done.’36
In the meantime, there was the work of the expedition to finish. Thebes, with its countless monuments, was even more daunting a site than Abu Simbel. In the Valley of the Kings, Champollion worked relentlessly, recording no fewer than sixteen tombs. He insisted on working alone, telling his fellow expedition members: ‘I need absolute silence in order to hear the voice of history.’37 On more than one occasion, they found him lying unconscious from exhaustion, in a chamber deep underground. Whilst his sense of duty and destiny drove him ever onwards, his companions struggled to keep up, and began to wilt. One by one, citing various excuses, they melted away, leaving Champollion to his own devices. By the time the expedition formally departed western Thebes, only half the French members were left. Thanks to the more resilient local labour, and his good relations with the Theban villagers and the Ababda Bedouin, Champollion was able to continue his excavations during the blistering summer months of June, July and August. He complained about the lack of extra funds, convinced that they had been withheld deliberately, but still managed to hack two life-sized reliefs from the walls of the tomb of Seti I: ‘big and beautiful things’ for the expedition’s royal patrons.38 To this day, one is in Paris, the other in Florence.
By the time Champollion left Thebes, he, too, was exhausted, and ready to head home. But his ordeals were not over. In Alexandria, the Tuscan members of the expedition departed on one of their own ships, but Champollion was left stranded for two months while awaiting a French naval vessel. He put the time to good use, writing a brief history of ancient Egypt at Muhammad Ali’s request. In return, the Egyptian ruler gifted the two Luxor obelisks to France. (One of them was finally transported to Paris in 1836, and erected in the Place de la Concorde, where it still stands.) Emboldened by this show of royal generosity, Champollion decided to intervene on behalf of the hard-pressed peasantry and ask Muhammad Ali to improve the education system in Egypt; but the presumptuous request was met with a stony silence. Champollion might have been master of the pharaonic past, but Muhammad Ali was firmly in control of Egypt’s future. Champollion was sanguine. After all, he remarked: ‘There is enough of the old Egypt, without occupying myself with the new.’39
Egypt under Muhammad Ali was determinedly forward-looking, anxious to throw off centuries of economic stagnation and political indifference to chart its own, bold course. From the very beginning of his reign, Muhammad Ali had realized that modernization of the economy would be the key to national prosperity and, ultimately, self-determination. Major improvements to the country’s irrigation and transportation network paved the way for the introduction of cotton production and the development of new international markets. In tandem with this revolution in agriculture, Egypt embarked on an industrial revolution. Europe had shown that the production of raw materials was not the passport to wealth: advanced economies were built on the manufacture and export of processed, higher-value products. Egypt needed to do the same, and reduce its dependence on imported goods (a dependence which merely underlined and reinforced its colonial status). So it was that in the 1820s, and subsequent decades, the Nile Valley reverberated to the sound of construction projects, on a scale not witnessed since the days of the pharaohs. In place of temples and palaces there were engineering projects – dams and bridges, canals and railways – and industrial buildings: cotton mills, sugar mills and rice mills, factories for textiles and munitions.40
As a result of all this activity, the face of Egypt changed more in the first two decades of Muhammad Ali’s rule than in perhaps the previous thousand years. Champollion was the first traveller since Roman times to be able to read the ancient Egyptian monuments, yet also one of the last to see the sites as they had been preserved since antiquity. By the end of his expedition, he was under no illusions that the country’s precious patrimony was at risk of disappearing. He tried to use his scientific renown to persuade Muhammad Ali of the need for preservation, arguing that: ‘all of Europe will take notice [if] . . . His Highness would . . . assure the conservation of temples, palaces, tombs, and all kinds of monuments which still attest to the power and grandeur of ancient Egypt, and which are at the same time the most beautiful ornaments of Modern Egypt.’41
In a nod to this sentiment, Muhammad Ali chose a pyramid as the masthead of his new journal, Al-Ahram (The Pyramids), which remains the official organ of the Egyptian government to this day. But the ruler of Modern Egypt was much more interested in European technology than in lectures about conservation, much more focussed on Egypt’s industrial potential than on the sentimental value of a bunch of old ruins. If Europe was interested in acquiring antiquities, Muhammad Ali was only too happy to supply them in exchange for political favours and technological know-how. Hence, when he presented the Luxor obelisks to France, he declared: ‘I give her the relic of an old civilization; it is in exchange for the new civilization of which she had spread the seeds in the Orient.’42
On 28 November 1829, fifteen months after setting foot in Egypt, Champollion bid farewell to the land of his dreams. His last words written on Egyptian soil, in a letter to his ever-faithful brother, were tinged with sadness, but also with a sense of accomplishment: ‘So goodbye . . . The end of my drama will, I hope, be as happy as the four preceding acts. Goodbye, yours with heart and soul . . . Vive la France!’43
Landing at Toulon on 23 December, his thirty-ninth birthday, he had to endure a month’s quarantine before being allowed to travel back to Paris. On his arrival, on 4 March 1830, he wrote: ‘I have amassed enough work for an entire lifetime.’44
Thomas Young was a brilliant linguist and polymath, Ippolito Rosellini an accomplished scholar and excavator; but Champollion is justly remembered as the founder of Egyptology. Though his adversaries continued to frustrate his advancement and belittle his achievements to the very end (and beyond), he was eventually, if belatedly, recognized with appointment to the world’s first chair in Egyptology (at the Collège de France) and election – the third time around – to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the institution which had launched his career on that mild September day in 1822.
As for his great expedition, the first since Roman times to be able to engage with the monuments on their own terms, its impact was less than it should have been. Two years, to the very hour, after arriving back in Paris, Champollion died from a stroke, aged just forty-one. His untimely death precipitated a breakdown in the relationship between the French and Tuscan teams. As a result, two competing works were published, a ten-volume Italian account, Monumenti dell’Egitto e della Nubia (1832–40), and a four-volume one in French, Monuments de l’Egypte et de la Nubie (1835–45). Without a mentor, Rosellini’s career spluttered and faded. And, even after the posthumous publication of Champollion’s Grammaire égyptienne (1836), detractors continued to decry his whole system of decipherment, calling it ‘a great humbug’.45 Champollion had predicted as much, writing to Rosellini from quarantine in the south of France in January 1830, ‘My Grammar will appear at the end of this year . . . It won’t convert those who oppose my system and deprecate my work, because they don’t want to be converted.’46
Eventually, the weight of Champollion’s scholarship and the abundant proof of his system silenced all opposition. Today, in honour of his achievements, a huge replica of the Rosetta Stone has been installed in the courtyard of his family home in Figeac; one of the roads radiating out from Cairo’s Tahrir Square is named Sharia Champollion (‘Champollion Street’), and the Egyptian Museum itself, standing proudly at the edge of the square, bears Champollion’s engraved name in pride of place. His tomb, in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery, is marked with an Egyptian-style obelisk. Fittingly, for one who dedicated his entire working life to unravelling the mysteries of Egypt’s ancient civilization, his last words are said to have been: ‘And now for the afterlife, on to Egypt, on to Thebes!’47 But perhaps the most appropriate epitaph for this most dedicated and gifted of pioneer scholars is his simple credo: ‘Enthusiasm, that is the only life!’48
THREE
Englishmen abroad
John Gardner Wilkinson, a quintessential Englishman in Turkish dress.
It is so difficult to tear myself away from this place & from Egypt altogether. One seems tied down to it for life.1
JOHN GARDNER WILKINSON, 1832
The birth of Egyptology in the wake of the Napoleonic expedition was felt not just in France, but also in her long-time foe and arch-rival, England. Ever since the publication of Pococke’s and Norden’s travelogues in the mid-eighteenth century, Egypt had exerted an increasingly powerful allure on the English imagination. Napoleon’s exploits and his savants’ scientific accomplishments fully reawakened public interest in pharaonic civilization, both across continental Europe and across the Channel. Throughout the British Isles, the early nineteenth century was the era of historical and antiquarian societies, with groups springing up at local and national levels to cater to the growing fascination with the past. In London, a close-knit circle of gentleman scholars, mostly well-educated men of private means, met and corresponded frequently, assisting each other’s research as they attempted to make sense of the new information coming from excavation and exploration in the Mediterranean lands and further afield.2
At the same time, two ramifications of Bonaparte’s imperial ambitions unexpectedly turned Egypt into one of the most popular destinations for adventurous British travellers. First, the Napoleonic Wars that raged during the first decade and a half of the nineteenth century effectively closed Western Europe to tourists, forcing those in search of adventure to travel further afield, to the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Second, Muhammad Ali’s rise to power as ruler of Egypt, in the wake of the French occupation and subsequent defeat, led to a marked improvement in the security situation throughout the Nile Valley. As a result, Egypt was not just accessible but also safe. Indeed, as one British traveller remarked: ‘I do not know of any European country where one may travel with greater safety than in Egypt.’3 All this meant that, from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, Egypt became a favoured destination for Britons seeking diversion, enlightenment or fortune abroad.
Some, like William Bankes, travelled to collect antiquities for their country houses back home. Others, like Frederick Catherwood, went to Egypt as artists, drawn by the spectacular ruins, the cloudless climes and starry skies.4 A few went to escape their past and forge a new future, like William Thomson who, after being involved in a brawl in Inverness, joined the British army and went to Egypt. Taken prisoner and faced with the choice of death or conversion to Islam as a slave, he chose the latter, and adopted Turkish dress and customs for the rest of his life, changing his name to Osman Effendi. He served in Muhammad Ali’s army in Arabia, where he met the great traveller Johann Burckhardt. At Burckhardt’s prompting, and with the intervention of the British consul-general Henry Salt, Osman was freed from slavery in 1815 and settled in Cairo, where he rendered great service to countless British travellers until his death from dysentery twenty years later.
Some British visitors to Egypt in the early nineteenth century simply wanted to make money by feeding the public appetite for travel-writing. (British authors published over a hundred such accounts of visits to Egypt between 1798 and 1850, more than twice as many as their French counterparts.5) There were also those who travelled to Egypt to experience the picturesque and romantic thrill of a country still associated in the European imagination with the Bible story and the Arabian Nights. Frederick Henniker was typical, writing in his travel account, ‘my delight was rather in nature than in works of art’. Indeed, the monuments of ancient Egypt interested him little: the Great Pyramid he ignored, noting that: ‘The excellent description by Denon of this the largest pyramid in the world, renders further observations almost unnecessary’; the pyramids of Saqqara and Dahshur were ‘uninteresting after those of Ghiseh’; Luxor temple, he remarked, ‘swarms with dogs, Arabs, houses, and other filth’; in Thebes, ‘the city of the hundred gates, the inhabitants on the east bank live in mud hovels, on the west they live underground’; while Elephantine he found ‘part covered with palm trees and corn, partly with ruins’, adding ‘the mud cottages of the natives add to the picturesque’.6
In November 1822, just one month after the publication of Champollion’s Lettre à M. Dacier, a British periodical, the Eclectic Review, noted presciently that ‘in every point of view, Egypt is an object of the highest interest, and is likely to become increasingly such’.7 Eighteen months later, it could assert ‘no-one can now pretend to have seen the world who has not made one of a party of pleasure up the Nile’.8 Indeed, by 1824, travellers’ accounts of Egypt had become so common that the author of yet another, Scenes and Impressions in Egypt and in Italy, felt obliged to concede, ‘the ground over which I would conduct my reader, has been trodden, and described by a hundred travellers, and is . . . as well known, perhaps, as any road or province in our native country’.9 Families travelling overland between Britain and India swelled the numbers of visitors to Egypt; and, by the time Champollion first visited Egypt, in 1828, it was apparently ‘scarcely possible to turn the corner of a street without meeting an Englishman recently arrived, either from the borders of the Red Sea, the cataracts of the Nile, or the ruins of Palmyra’.10
The French sneered at all this tourism, ascribing it to maladie du pays engendered by Britain’s own failings.11 The Egyptians, in whose midst all these strange travellers now appeared, were suspicious, believing that foreigners must be in search of treasure or political advantage (they were correct on both counts). Fortunately, for the history of Egyptology, there were at least some Englishmen (and one or two women) whose interest in the Nile Valley was more benign – who sought neither gold nor power, but knowledge; and whose dedicated scholarship and detailed accounts would secure the study of Egypt as a proper scientific pursuit.
If he had been asked to describe himself, John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875) would have laid claim to the titles of gentleman scholar, traveller and antiquarian, but not, one suspects, of scientist. Yet his position in the pantheon of great Egyptologists rests on secure foundations. He studied virtually every archaeological site of importance, and in his copious writings did more than anyone else, before or since, to make the civilization of the pharaohs accessible to the general public. His work was a far cry from Champollion’s determinedly academic publications, but no less influential.
Wilkinson was born into a comfortable, middle-class, educated family which fully embraced the ideals and opportunities of the Enlightenment. His clergyman father was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a member of the African Exploration Society (later the Royal Geographical Society), and his friends included the traveller James Grey Jackson; Jackson’s stories of travelling through Morocco thrilled the young Wilkinson and left a deep impression, planting in him a seed and a desire to pursue his own foreign adventures.
Meanwhile, Mrs Wilkinson, every bit as erudite as her husband, taught her son French, Latin and Greek while he was still in the nursery. But it was a childhood touched by loss as well as by learning. When Wilkinson was just six his mother died, followed two years later by his father. Their untimely demise left Wilkinson an orphan, but a wealthy one. The combination of means and motivation propelled him to follow his interests, which, in the spirit of the times, centred on ancient history. At the age of sixteen, Wilkinson entered Harrow School to complete his education and prepare for university. It was either a careful or a lucky choice, for the headmaster, George Butcher, was a friend of Thomas Young and had studied hieroglyphics alongside the great polymath. Spotting the young Wilkinson’s interest in the ancient world, Butcher probably introduced his new pupil to the study of pharaonic Egypt. (Wilkinson would remember this early inspiration, bequeathing his collection of Egyptian antiquities to his old school, where it remains to this day.)
After Harrow, three years at Oxford were the norm for a man of Wilkinson’s background, but they did little to advance his scholarship. Like many of his contemporaries, he decided that a grand tour would rectify the situation, and so, on 25 June 1819, just weeks after leaving university, he embarked on a European odyssey, intending to return before the end of the year to take up a commission in the army. However, once entered upon the life of a leisured tourist, all thoughts of the military quickly disappeared. Wilkinson would, in fact, spend the next fourteen years abroad, twelve of them in Egypt. His first destination, however, which he reached via France and Germany, was Geneva, where he spent the winter of 1819–20. From there, he travelled to Rome and Florence, then back to Geneva, before returning to Rome for the following winter. It was during one of his sojourns in the Eternal City that Wilkinson first encountered the man who was to change the course of his life: the classical scholar, bibliophile and avid correspondent, Sir William Gell.
Gell was one of those remarkable, early nineteenth-century figures who not only excelled as a scholar in his own right (he was a fellow both of the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries, and was knighted for his services to archaeology), but also maintained a vigorous correspondence with virtually every other serious scholar in his field, the length and breadth of Europe. He has been memorably described as ‘a sort of Egyptological clearing-house. He gathered ideas from all sides, and communicated everybody’s discoveries to everybody else.’12 He corresponded regularly with Thomas Young and Henry Salt, and with Champollion. He had read every work published to date on Egyptology, ancient as well as modern. He knew the Hermetic and Neoplatonic writings. And he sensed, in 1820, that the study of ancient Egypt was on the brink of a major breakthrough, ‘poised between a rich tradition of antiquarian scholarship and unprecedented opportunities’.13
He must, therefore, have been more than usually interested in the latest traveller to cross his path in Rome. Here was a young man who combined an enquiring mind with a deep interest in the ancient world and was an accomplished artist to boot. Gell duly invited Wilkinson to visit him in his book-filled house in Naples. There, in the summer of 1821, just a few weeks after Napoleon’s death on St Helena, Gell offered to teach Wilkinson everything he knew – which was everything then known – about ancient Egypt. From the transliteration of hieroglyphics being developed by Young to the collections of Egyptian antiquities just beginning to reach the museums of Europe, Gell shared all the latest insights and discoveries with his protégé. By the time Wilkinson left Naples for Egypt – for the land of the pharaohs was, inevitably, to be the next destination on his grand tour – he was better prepared than any previous traveller to the Nile Valley.
Travelling by sea from Malta to Alexandria, Wilkinson caught his first glimpse of the Egyptian coast on 22 November 1821. On coming ashore, as instructed by Gell, he dutifully visited the classical monuments of Alexandria; but what he really wanted to see were the pharaonic ruins further south, in the Nile Valley proper. Within three weeks of arrival, he was on his way to Cairo. In the Egyptian capital, still largely untouched by Muhammad Ali’s accelerating reforms, Wilkinson was granted an audience with the ruler, thanks to an introduction by Salt (and no doubt at Gell’s urging). Osman Effendi, then working as a translator at the British consulate-general, took Wilkinson off to buy Ottoman clothes and showed him how to deport himself as a Turk. By February 1822, everything was ready. Joined by his friend James Samuel Wiggett, Wilkinson set sail from Cairo, bound for Upper Egypt and its manifold splendours.
