While British travellers before Wilkinson had written any number of books about Egypt, few had published anything that could be reliably used as a guide. Armed only with a copy of Norden’s Travels in Egypt and Nubia, Wilkinson and Wiggett made their way upstream, via Thebes and Aswan, as far south as Semna, at the foot of the Second Nile Cataract. Before turning around to begin the return journey, Wilkinson, like a few other visitors before and many since, carved his name on the rock of Abusir, overlooking the cataract, together with the date, 14 April 1822. A little under three months later, the friends were back in Thebes – where the Nile nearly claimed them both. Wiggett contracted dysentery from contaminated water, and Wilkinson, sailing by night to fetch Salt’s doctor, nearly drowned. Thankfully, Wiggett recovered, but understandably chose to return home to England. Wilkinson, however, had been well and truly ensnared. Giving up all thoughts of an army career, he chose to stay in Egypt and immerse himself in its antiquities. Salt reported back to Gell: ‘The interest he takes in our Egyptian antiquities far exceeds that of ordinary travelers.’14 That letter was written on 16 September 1822. Two days earlier, in Paris, Champollion had declared: ‘Je tiens mon affaire!’ Gell’s intuition had been proved right, on both counts.
Wilkinson decided to take a house in Cairo, but not in the Frankish quarter, frequented by Europeans (who had a reputation for squalor and thieving). Instead, he chose to live in the Turkish districts of the city, first Hasanain, then the more fashionable Ezbekiya. Like his friend Osman Effendi, he wore Turkish clothes, ate in the Turkish style (to the distress of some of his English acquaintances) and, to all intents and purposes, lived like a Turk. This was not merely a romantic gesture on Wilkinson’s part: Egypt was still very much an Ottoman possession, and the Turks were a privileged class of society. So to adopt Turkish manners and customs guaranteed a measure of respect and protection. Moreover, Wilkinson displayed a combination of European prejudice and Ottoman haughtiness when it came to Egypt’s long-suffering peasantry. He wrote: ‘The fellah, born in slavery, is consequently the most degraded of human beings, devoid of gratitude & every kind of virtue, he sees none in those around him; tyranny is to him a mark of superiority, & this alone he respects.’15
Like so many European travellers of the nineteenth century, Wilkinson was enamoured of Egypt’s ancient rulers but felt little sympathy for its modern inhabitants. Impressed by Muhammad Ali’s modernization programme, he expressed the faint hope, if not the expectation, that ‘if the present Pasha continues to govern here the condition of the people may be considerably improved’.16
One of the most remarkable features of Wilkinson’s long sojourn in Cairo was the circle of friends and fellow artists with whom he shared his houses, his interests, and his women. Besides Osman Effendi, there was James Burton, who had first met Wilkinson in Naples, at Gell’s house, in 1821.17 Burton subsequently obtained a position as a mineralogist in the government of Muhammad Ali (one of many European advisers employed by the Pasha) and arrived in Egypt, with his private secretary Charles Humphreys (d.1839), four months after Wilkinson. Unlike Wilkinson, who kept and discarded sexual companions, Burton bought a Greek woman at a slave auction in Cairo and married her. During his career for the Geological Survey of Egypt, he travelled with Wilkinson in the Eastern Desert and located the mines which had supplied ancient Rome with imperial porphyry. Taking up archaeology, he cleared the sand from the temples of Medinet Habu and Karnak, and excavated several tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
Another member of the circle was Robert Hay,18 who had first visited Alexandria in 1818 as a midshipman in the Royal Navy. After inheriting a large estate from his brother, he had been drawn back to Egypt, inspired by Belzoni’s books. He spent two long periods there (1824–8 and 1829–34), during which he, too, married a Greek woman he had ‘rescued’ from a slave market. During the Greek war of independence, Greek Christian women from defeated rebel villages were regarded by many Egyptian troops as part of the spoils of war. Captured and sold into slavery, they commanded high prices in the slave markets of Cairo: a white-skinned Greek could fetch between three and ten times the price of a black-skinned Abyssinian. Wealthy European men living in Cairo often bought Greek women as wives. Hay purchased a number of them in order to educate and resettle them. (He showed no such concern for their non-white counterparts.)
Wilkinson’s friends in Egypt numbered military men like Major Orlando Felix, aristocrats like Lord Prudhoe, and businessmen with useful commercial contacts. Then there was the artist Frederick Catherwood, and the remarkable Edward Lane (1801–76), who, as we shall see, was Wilkinson’s equal in every respect. Last, but not least, there was the sculptor and draughtsman Joseph Bonomi. He worked as Hay’s assistant, but also with Wilkinson, Lane, and even Rosellini. Later in his long career, he accompanied Karl Richard Lepsius’s expedition to Egypt in the 1840s, set up the Egyptian Court at the Crystal Palace in the 1850s, secured Hay’s collection for the British Museum in the 1860s, and corresponded with Amelia Edwards as she prepared her landmark book on Egypt in the 1870s. The first keeper of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum, Samuel Birch (1813–85), who knew all the Egyptologists of the mid-nineteenth century, ascribed to Bonomi ‘greater knowledge and experience of Egypt than anyone else of the period save Wilkinson’.19 Whether or not this praise was justified, Bonomi would provide the unique, personal link between many of the greatest figures in the nineteenth-century story of Egyptology.
Each of these men did their own thing, but they corresponded frequently and met up as they travelled the Nile. Wilkinson, from his first arrival in Egypt, was also guided from afar by his mentor Gell, a steady stream of letters from Naples suggesting sites worthy of exploration and instructing Wilkinson where to dig. As early as July 1822, Gell was suggesting Abydos as a promising location, based solely on its renown in later antiquity: ‘Abydus was so famous a burying place that I have little doubt a great deal might be done by excavating the sands which have filled it up.’20 (His hunch would prove correct: among the antiquities subsequently unearthed at Abydos – the cult centre of Osiris, god of the underworld – were two spectacular temples, built by Seti I and his son Ramesses II, the tombs of Egypt’s earliest kings, later royal cenotaphs, and countless private burials.) Without ever having visited Egypt, Gell’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the relevant literature, both ancient and modern, was unparalleled. Wilkinson, for his part, was diligent and enthusiastic, and had an artist’s eye for detail. The two men made a perfect team. Moreover, unlike the bookish Gell, Wilkinson was always ready for an adventure. In 1823, for example, he undertook an arduous and epic expedition deep into the Red Sea Hills of the Eastern Desert with a caravan of sixty-six camels and twenty dromedaries, to locate two of the most famous quarries of the ancient world, Mons Claudianus and Mons Porphyrites, remote and desolate sites which had supplied the Roman emperors with sandstone and imperial porphyry respectively.
But events back in Europe were soon to turn Wilkinson’s efforts in a different direction. Once again, Gell, with his finger firmly on the pulse of Western scholarship, was the first to spread the news. He had been predicting a breakthrough in decipherment, and when it came, he was certain of Champollion’s achievement, telling Wilkinson: ‘I cannot give you a dissertation on it but the thing is quite settled.’21 Gell even sent some of Champollion’s transcriptions, so that Wilkinson might learn the system for himself. Soon, armed with this new knowledge, Wilkinson began to apply decipherment to the ancient Egyptian monuments in situ, five years before the decipherer himself would have the opportunity to do so. Gentleman scholar he might have been, but nobody else in Egypt in the early 1820s had the knowledge to advance the study of pharaonic civilization as Wilkinson did. Among his many achievements was to date the Giza pyramids correctly to the Fourth Dynasty, years before the discovery of a royal name proved their antiquity.
Muhammad Ali may have improved Egypt’s internal security, but, for Egyptians and Europeans alike, life in the Nile Valley in the early 1820s was still beset with dangers. At that time, crocodiles lived in the river at Thebes; shortly after Hay’s arrival in 1824, a child who had gone down to the river to fetch water was snatched, followed a few days later by a woman. Then there were regular outbreaks of plague – Henry Salt’s wife died during one virulent epidemic in 1824 – and dysentery was rife. The latter disease killed both Salt (in 1827) and Osman Effendi (in 1835). River blindness was another common ailment, one from which Wilkinson suffered at regular intervals. In nineteenth-century Egypt, as in ancient times, villages were ‘full of the bleary-eyed, the one-eyed, and the blind, with inflamed and festering eyelids, of all ages’.22
The worsening diplomatic situation between Egypt and the European powers during the mid-1820s added to the stresses and strains, especially in the capital. When Hay arrived from Europe (carrying the inevitable letter of introduction from Gell), he was only too glad to leave the city after a short stay for the relative quietude (crocodiles excepted) of Thebes. Even Wilkinson seriously considered leaving Egypt for India. But his own relentless curiosity and Gell’s encouragement proved too strong, and Wilkinson soon embarked on further voyages of discovery into Upper Egypt and beyond. He visited the tombs at Beni Hasan, four years before Champollion and Rosellini, and was able to make copies of the reliefs when they were still almost pristine. He was probably the first European to visit the tombs at nearby Amarna, in 1824, but was puzzled by the strange style of the decoration (characteristic of the reign of the ‘heretic pharaoh’ Akhenaten) and thought it might be Persian in origin. Wilkinson certainly knew he had found something important, and swore his travelling companion, Burton, to secrecy in case another antiquarian or treasure-hunter should claim Amarna as his own.
With the means as well as the motivation, Wilkinson’s years in Egypt were immensely productive. He briefly thought of returning home – once, in 1826, when relations between Egypt and Britain reached a nadir following the sinking of the Egyptian fleet at the Battle of Navarino. He even went so far as to send his papers back home, whither he planned to follow. But, ironically, the same conflict prevented him from making the Mediterranean voyage, so he decided to stay. In any case, his heart was in Egypt, and he was tireless in his determination to explore and record it as thoroughly as possible. In a series of expeditions, he covered the length and breadth of the country, visiting far-flung corners where scarcely any European had set foot before, including the oases of the Western Desert and the wadis of the Eastern Desert. His curiosity was insatiable, extending not just to the ancient monuments but also to the landscape and the modern inhabitants. Indeed, the connection between people and culture fascinated him, as it did his friend Edward Lane, and would shape both men’s seminal works.
In the first six years of his stay in Egypt, Wilkinson largely had the country to himself as far as serious antiquarian exploration was concerned. All that changed in 1828 with the arrival of Champollion and Rosellini and their Franco-Tuscan expedition. Despite a shared passion for Egyptian antiquity, and a shared acquaintance with the arch-interlocutor, William Gell, it is remarkable that Wilkinson and Champollion never met. Perhaps there was more than a touch of rivalry between them. Perhaps Wilkinson, like many of his compatriots, was aggrieved at Champollion’s sidelining and disparagement of Thomas Young. Whatever the reason, Wilkinson never even corresponded with Champollion, although he did exchange letters with his brother in Paris. Rather pointedly, for much of the duration of the Franco-Tuscan expedition, Wilkinson ‘withdrew for a lengthy stay in the Eastern Desert’23 and depended on his friends in Cairo, several of whom met Champollion, to give him their impressions. They were by no means flattering. The Frenchman’s boastfulness and his Italian colleagues’ ebullience rankled with British reserve. Orlando Felix, for one (a veteran of Waterloo who could, therefore, have been forgiven for a little Francophobia), reported that ‘the whole party are perfectly disgusting’.24
Two years after Champollion’s departure, Wilkinson was still in Egypt, and had a very different experience with the French expedition sent to remove one of the Luxor obelisks. He struck up cordial relations with the engineer in charge, Jean-Baptiste Apollinaire Lebas, and even made a drawing of the operation. Another visitor to Thebes that same year, 1831, was the young Benjamin Disraeli, at the age of twenty-seven still finding his way in the world. With his sister’s fiancé, William Meredith, he journeyed to Egypt via Europe on a grand tour partly financed by the success of his novel The Young Duke, published the year before. While in Thebes, the pair stayed at Wilkinson’s dig house, built on the hillside above one of the Tombs of the Nobles, and marked by an ancient sycamore tree. Disraeli later wrote in his memoirs: ‘We were a week at Thebes with the advantage of the society of Mr. Wilkinson, an Englishman of vast learning, who has devoted ten years to the study of hieroglyphics and Egyptian antiquity, and who can read you the side of an obelisk, or the front of a pylon, as we would the last number of the Quarterly.’25 (Wilkinson’s house would become a local landmark, a favourite sight for later generations of British tourists, and a convenient base for archaeologists passing through. Lepsius would stay there during his expedition of 1842–5, and scholars stayed there as late as 1909.)
Despite being a fully paid-up member of the establishment, who could count among his friends a future prime minister (Disraeli) and the future Duke of Northumberland (Prudhoe), Wilkinson was not always predictable in his views. His apparent animosity towards Champollion does not seem to have been motivated by prejudice against the French in general, as his friendship with Lebas proves. Moreover, despite the long-standing animosity between the agents of British and French consuls – one of Salt’s employees lived just down the hill from Wilkinson’s house, while an Italian working for Drovetti had a house nearby; the two men argued frequently over the precise boundaries of their adjoining concessions, and distributed generous bribes to local officials to advance their respective cases – Wilkinson remained neutral. He seems not to have been especially bothered by the removal of the Luxor obelisk to Paris. He happily left his workmen unsupervised, allowing them to steal artefacts and sell them to collectors; yet he took great pains in his own investigations not to damage the delicate reliefs inside the tomb of Seti I. (Champollion, by contrast, ‘cut away the sections that pleased him most and carried them away’.26) Wilkinson approved of his friends’ purchase of women from the Cairo slave market, yet intervened to help the local Theban villagers in their disputes with the overbearing government authorities; they, in gratitude, looked after his house while he was away, and long after he had left Egypt. Perhaps most surprising of all, Wilkinson expressed his public backing for Muhammad Ali’s conquest of Syria in 1831, despite a strong, independent Egypt posing a threat to British economic and political interests, and despite fierce opposition from the British government which feared that the premature break-up of the moribund Ottoman empire would be to the advantage of Russia.
A man of inherent contradictions, Wilkinson was nonetheless a dedicated and accomplished surveyor, draughtsman and scholar. Thebes was his special passion, in particular the Tombs of the Nobles with their scenes showing daily life in ancient Egypt. As he later wrote: ‘Here, manners and customs, historical events and religious ceremonies, carry us back, as it were, to the society of those to whom they refer; and we are enabled to study the amusements and occupations of the ancient Egyptians, almost as though we were spectators of the scenes represented.’27
Among his many lasting achievements, he produced the first comprehensive plan of western Thebes, introduced a numbering system (still used today) for the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and copied scenes that have subsequently been damaged or destroyed, providing later generations of scholars with an invaluable record of now lost masterpieces of ancient Egyptian art.
Just a year after Wilkinson played host to Disraeli, the world of Egyptology changed suddenly and unexpectedly. Young had died in 1829 and now, in 1832, Champollion was dead, too. The future of the new discipline looked deeply uncertain. On hearing the bad news from Paris, Wilkinson wrote to Hay: ‘What a loss – there is an end to hieroglyphics – for say what they like no one knew anything about the subject but himself, though wrong – as must necessarily happen in a similar study – in some instances.’28
More alarming still, Wilkinson found himself single-handedly bearing the torch of ancient Egyptian scholarship. Gell wrote to him: ‘We must depend upon you for what is to be learned in the future.’29 Wilkinson was not so sure, replying to Gell: ‘He [Champollion] had great self-confidence & much ingenuity. I do not expect to see another like him for this study.’30 Gell kept sending Wilkinson suggestions for new avenues of enquiry, but the pressure of expectation seems eventually to have become too much for a man who had stumbled on Egyptology quite by accident, and had travelled to Egypt as an extension of his grand tour. Eventually, after nearly twelve years in the country – very probably the longest continuous sojourn of any European since Roman times – he took the momentous decision to return to England, and sailed from Alexandria on 1 June 1833, with a box of mummified heads. (They were duly quarantined on arrival in Livorno.)
Having left Egypt in the throes of Muhammad Ali’s reforms, Wilkinson found the country of his birth in no less a state of transition. Since he had been away, Britain had been transformed economically, physically and socially. The first passenger railway had opened between Stockton and Darlington, and the Menai suspension bridge linking Anglesey with the mainland. The Combination Acts forbidding trades unions had been repealed, and the first Factory Act, improving conditions for child workers, passed. Catholic emancipation had been followed by the Great Reform Act. The Metropolitan Police had been established, and the first government grant made to English schools. Morse had invented the electric telegraph, and the Georgian era had come to an end with the death of ‘Prinny’ and the accession of William IV.
Of more immediate concern to Wilkinson was the change in public attitudes to ancient Egypt. Fashions had moved on, and the manuscript of Wilkinson’s travels – the most important ever undertaken by an Englishman – did not find a publisher. Wilkinson lamented to Gell: ‘No one cares about Egypt.’31 This was not entirely fair. The new Egyptian Sculpture Gallery at the British Museum was completed in 1833, the year Wilkinson returned from Egypt, and opened to great popular acclaim. Also that year, Wilkinson’s friend, the doctor and antiquarian Thomas Pettigrew, who had known Belzoni and had recently purchased Egyptian antiquities from Salt’s collection, conducted a public unwrapping of a mummy in the anatomy theatre at Charing Cross Hospital. According to the Literary Gazette, ‘the room was attended by many men of literature and science, who warmly greeted the able lecturer when he had concluded his interesting work’.32 (Over the next eighteen years, the doctor would preside over dozens of similar events, earning himself the nickname ‘Mummy Pettigrew’.33 In 1834, he published his History of Egyptian Mummies, which has been called ‘the first British scientific contribution to Egyptian archaeology’.34) Although no English publisher would take Wilkinson’s book, he managed through a friend to have it printed by the government press in Malta. His understanding of ancient Egyptian history was the most accurate yet published, and an advance on Champollion’s work.
While the British public’s appetite for books on ancient Egypt and for travellers’ tales may have waned, the upsurge in the number of tourists visiting Egypt itself showed no signs of abating. The enterprising publishers John Murray spotted a gap in the market and commissioned Wilkinson – for there was none better – to write a travel guide to the Nile Valley. (The first modern guidebook had been published in French a few years earlier.35) Now firmly ensconced back in London high society, Wilkinson fitted in his writing around his other social commitments, often working in the early hours of the morning, after returning home from a party. Despite the perils of such an approach, the resulting book, entitled Topography of Thebes (1835), was a triumph. Alongside a guide to the major monuments, it included – a first – a handy English–Arabic vocabulary. Wilkinson gave full rein to his views on pharaonic civilization, for example noting with approval that ‘the stern regulations of Egypt withheld her monarchs from the fatal allurements of effeminate luxury’ and that, ‘though riches and splendor took the place of the early simplicity of the Egyptians, they still continued to reject the enervating habits of the East’.36
Having spent over a decade in Egypt, Wilkinson knew, better than anyone, the trials and tribulations facing a European visitor, so thoughtfully provided his readers with an appendix listing: ‘Things required for travelling in Egypt, and general instructions to those who visit it either from Europe or India.’ Nearly two centuries later, Wilkinson’s list provides an illuminating, often entertaining, snapshot of those early, pioneering days of Egyptian tourism. It began:
I shall merely point out the most necessary: – as a camp-bedstead, bedding, and musquito curtain; a camp stool and drawing table; umbrella, double or lined; drawing paper, pencils, and Indian rubber; and if he intends to follow European customs a plentiful supply of tea, wine,† cognac, aromatic and distilled vinegar, and as many luxuries as he may think proper.
† I believe white to be better in a hot climate than red.37
Falling ill was an ever-present worry for the foreign traveller, and the lack of even the most basic medical facilities in Egypt meant that a European tourist needed to take a full medicine chest. Wilkinson recommended the basic necessities: ‘a lancet, diachylon and blistering plaster, salts, rhubarb, cream of tartar, ipecacuanha, sulphate of bark, James’s powders, calomel, laudanum, sugar of lead, or sulphate of zink, nitre, oil of peppermint, and other common medicines’.38 Alongside medicaments, a decent library was the other prerequisite for the serious traveller, and here Wilkinson displayed both his erudition and his familiarity with sources ancient and modern, recommending Herodotus, Champollion’s Phonetic System of Hieroglyphics, Pococke, Denon, Hamilton’s Ægyptiaca, Modern Traveller, and Colonel Leake’s or his own map of Egypt. Other suggestions included works by Browne, Belzoni, Burckhardt, Ptolemy, Strabo and Pliny.39
Through the interest and encouragement of his mentor, William Gell, Wilkinson had been transformed from a dilettante into a serious scholar; indeed, after the deaths of Young and Champollion he was the foremost living expert on ancient Egypt. But, at root, Egyptology had never been a calling for Wilkinson, only a curiosity (albeit one that absorbed him for a decade and a half). When Gell died in February 1836, just a few months after the publication of Topography of Thebes, the guiding hand was taken away from Wilkinson’s academic pursuits, and he soon found himself without either direction or momentum. His last great Egyptological undertaking, his magnum opus, and in many ways the reflection of his own – rather than Gell’s – interests, was a comprehensive study of daily life in ancient Egypt, inspired and illustrated by the scenes in the Tombs of the Nobles which he had studied and copied so meticulously during those long stays in Thebes.
By the 1830s, the fashion for subjective travelogues had given way to more objective ethnographic studies of foreign cultures; Wilkinson’s genius was to apply this new anthropological approach to the past. His Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (1837) was an instant success. It was the first book to use ancient Egyptian (as opposed to classical or biblical) evidence to illuminate pharaonic civilization, the first to present the ancient Egyptians as real people rather than figures of myth and legend. Above all, it made Egyptology accessible to a general readership, both creating and feeding an appetite for popular history. (Fortunately for Wilkinson, those scholars who might have sneered at his populist approach had all died.) The book was printed in a handy size and sold at an affordable price (unlike the huge and expensive folio volumes of the Description de l’Egypte). Published in the year of Queen Victoria’s accession, it remained the definitive account of ancient Egypt throughout her long reign. In a richly ironic gesture, Wilkinson even travelled to Paris to present a copy to King Louis Philippe – a polite two-fingered salute to the late Jean-François Champollion.
As Wilkinson was writing his Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, one of his friends from his years in Cairo, Edward Lane, was busy with a landmark study of contemporary Egypt entitled Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). Taking the same approach to describing a foreign culture, the two became companion volumes; the plans for Lane’s book were altered before its publication so that it would appear in the same size, format and style as Wilkinson’s. However, while subsequent scholarship has largely rendered Ancient Egyptians obsolete (if still an historical curiosity), Modern Egyptians has stood the test of time and remains a key text for historians of the Arab world. The story of its conception and creation is an important chapter in the Western rediscovery of Egypt, and an illuminating counterpoint to Wilkinson’s adventures.
Little is known about Lane’s early life, before he visited Egypt. Like Wilkinson, he came from an educated and cultured middle-class family: his father was a prebendary of Hereford Cathedral, his mother a niece of the painter Thomas Gainsborough. Edward seems to have inherited his great-uncle’s artistic talents, and was apprenticed to an engraver in London. Here it was that he first developed an interest in Egypt. When Lane arrived in the capital, one of the city’s most famous new landmarks was the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, which had opened in 1812 and hosted Belzoni’s exhibition of Egyptian antiquities in 1821. Lane, like many others of his generation, was fascinated by Egypt and resolved to visit the country for himself. Unlike most of his contemporaries, however, he prepared for the trip with the greatest scholarly dedication, studying Arabic language and culture for three long years. By the time he set sail, he was as well prepared to study modern Egypt as Wilkinson had been to study its ancient civilization, three years earlier. Anchoring off Alexandria on 19 September 1825, Lane wrote:
As I approached the shore, I felt like an Eastern bridegroom, about to lift the veil of his bride . . . I was not visiting Egypt merely as a traveller, to examine its pyramids and temples and grottoes, and, after satisfying my curiosity, to quit it for other scenes and other pleasures: but I was about to throw myself entirely among strangers; to adopt their language, their customs and their dress; and in associating almost exclusively with the natives, to prosecute the study of their literature.40
He stayed first at the house of Henry Salt. The British consul welcomed Lane like an old friend (though the two had never met) and was impressed by his qualities, writing: ‘In Lane’s praise I cannot say too much.’41 On closer inspection, however, Alexandria proved to be a disappointment: ‘A scene of more complete desolation can scarcely be conceived. Mounds of rubbish and drifted sand occupy nearly the whole site of the ancient city.’42 So Lane travelled on to Cairo, where he met up with Wilkinson and his circle of friends. Like all new arrivals, Lane lost no time in heading for the pyramids, but, unlike most visitors, he stayed for two weeks to draw the site. In the cool of the evening, he would sit, smoking his pipe, looking out across the Mokattam Hills, the minarets of Cairo hazy in the distance. He slept in a nearby tomb (as would another great English scholar, Flinders Petrie, sixty-five years later). Lane later wrote, ‘never did I spend a more happy time’.43
In Cairo’s close-knit community of English ex-patriots, Lane and Wilkinson became firm friends. They called each other by Arabic nicknames: Lane was Mansoor, Wilkinson Ismail. Yet the two were, in many ways, very different characters. Wilkinson was gregarious, while Lane preferred to work alone. Wilkinson had adopted the dress and customs of Egypt’s Turkish ruling class, while Lane lived as a native Egyptian. Even with local dress, excellent Arabic and an open mind, travel in Egypt was still a hazardous affair for a European in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, as Lane and Hay discovered when they decided to visit the pyramids and tombs at Saqqara, about thirty miles south of Cairo. They set off one afternoon on donkeys, with a baggage train for their equipment. By sunset, they had only travelled half the distance to Saqqara, and had already been separated from their luggage and servants. They stopped by a Muslim cemetery, but baulked at sleeping among the tombs, so carried on to a nearby village. Unfortunately, the villagers were wary of strangers, having been attacked the previous night by marauding Bedouin, and would not let Lane and Hay enter. They eventually persuaded them of their good intentions by throwing bread over the walls. Continuing onwards the following morning, they were reunited with the rest of their party. Lane wrote, with characteristic sangfroid: ‘our troubles thus ended: our mattresses were spread; and we passed the night very comfortably’.44 On a subsequent trip to the Fayum, Lane and his companions had forgotten to fill their water flasks; seized with violent thirst, in desperation they drank from a stagnant pool and ate cucumbers from the fields. The result was chronic dysentery that would plague Lane for years to come, even after his return to England.
Despite such hazards, Lane began an extended trip up the Nile in March 1826. Over the course of the next two years, he made copious drawings with the aid of a camera lucida (a device for projecting an image onto a drawing surface) and immersed himself in the Egyptian way of life. Indeed, by the time he returned to England in 1828, he had become so thoroughly Egyptianized – he was, for example, addicted to the hookah – that he found it hard to adjust back into polite London society. He tried to have his drawings published, but the cost of the plates made his proposal for a Description of Egypt unaffordable. Lacking funds, he was unable to accompany his friend Hay back to Egypt in 1830. ‘As long as the climate and language of Egypt remain the same,’ lamented Lane, ‘it will always be the country for me.’45 Eventually, his deep knowledge and love of the country persuaded a publisher to commission him to write a book about modern Egypt, and he was able to return in December 1833 to undertake further research. Living an exemplary life according to the Islamic code, he was fully accepted in Cairo as an Arab poet and scholar in his own right. Within two years, he had finished the manuscript of Modern Egyptians, which was published in December 1836 – a few months before Wilkinson’s Ancient Egyptians – with his own woodcut illustrations.
Lane’s book was a seminal publication. It redefined Egypt as part of the Arab world, and reshaped the Western view of Islamic civilization. While Europeans had long admired the relics of the pharaohs, they had also nurtured a deep-seated Islamophobia, a hangover from stories of the Crusades and the fight for Christendom, which had coloured their view of Egypt. Early nineteenth-century travellers to Cairo marvelled at ‘the pyramid and the mosque, the obelisk and the minaret; the sublimest monuments of human industry, amidst the mouldering reliques of Saracenic power’.46 Other commentators expressed their views more virulently, describing Egypt as ‘that nation of sages, and of savages; the source of philosophic illumination, and the sink of barbarous ignorance; the mistress of the mightiest and the tributary of the meanest; earth’s palace of splendour, and her hospital of wretchedness’.47 Lane’s Modern Egyptians, to the surprise of its readers, dispensed with this lazy, ingrained prejudice, instead portraying Arabic society as complex, coherent and subtle. Even more revolutionary was Lane’s insider’s view, which helped to foster the notion that the world of Islam might offer an alternative to, even a refuge from, the Western world.48 Reviewers were astonished to read a book about Egypt that did not focus on the country’s antiquities. One wrote: ‘We verily believe the words obelisk, pyramid, temple, never once occur . . . not a mummy crosses his path.’49 After reading Lane’s book, Thomas Carlyle gave his famous lecture on the underpinnings of Islam, ‘the first strong affirmation in European literature of the sincerity of Mohammed’.50
Following hard on the heels of Modern Egyptians, Lane plunged into another ambitious project, a translation of the Arabian Nights, which appeared in monthly instalments between 1838 and 1840. This was followed by a translation of passages from the Qur’an. But Lane’s chronic illness, contracted in Egypt, began to reassert itself soon after the death of his mother, and his doctors urged him to move to a warmer climate. It was just the excuse he needed. In 1842 he set off once again for Egypt to begin work on his final magnum opus, a comprehensive Arabic–English lexicon. This time, he was supported by a grant of £150 a year from his old friend, Lord Prudhoe. (This was not as generous as it sounds: the funds had to support not just Lane, but also Lane’s wife, sister, two nephews and an Arab translator.) As on his first trip, Lane went fully prepared. He took with him his private library of 130 volumes, housed in bookcases, and a portable writing table.
Lane’s sister, Sophia Poole, stayed with him in Cairo for two years, during which time she carried out her own research, visiting harems to observe at first hand the lives of Egyptian women. Like her brother, she was a dispassionate and objective scholar, not bound by the prejudices of many of her contemporaries. She recorded the everyday cruelties suffered by wives, children and slaves, but also the maternal tenderness she witnessed. Her observations of Egyptian women were nuanced and balanced: ‘In some cases I have been amused by their familiarity, and in many fascinated by the natural grace of their deportment.’51 The resulting book, The Englishwoman in Egypt (1851), is a feminine counterpart to Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, and every bit as remarkable; yet it is little known today.
The lot of Egyptian women may not have improved during the early decades of Muhammad Ali’s rule, but the country at large was undergoing profound changes. ‘Cairo is rapidly becoming more and more unlike what it was,’ observed Lane. ‘An order was lately issued for extensive “improvements”.’52 This latest wave of modernization had begun back in December 1829, shortly after Lane’s first visit, when the Egyptian government had published a sixty-page booklet entitled Programme for Successful Cultivation by the Peasant and the Application of Government Regulations. The outcome of a meeting of 400 provincial, military and central officials called to address the problem of declining government revenues, the booklet set out how Egypt’s fields were to be worked and which crops were to be grown. It also mandated the confinement of peasants to their villages, where they were to be inspected and guarded.53 Any peasant who failed to perform his duties would be punishable with twenty-five lashes; the penalty for a second offence was fifty lashes, and a hundred for a third. Sheikhs would also be punished if they neglected their responsibilities. The booklet was followed swiftly by a government order of January 1830, which required all Egyptians to obtain an official permit and identification papers to travel outside their home district. Even the spies were spied upon by those further up the chain of command, all the way to the Central Bureau of Inspection. The result of this oppressive regime was that tens of thousands of peasants ran away and became outlaws, which simply made matters in the countryside worse, heaping yet more burdens and more misery on those who remained.
Yet English commentators, wilfully blind to the sufferings of Egypt’s ordinary people, generally approved of Muhammad Ali because he had ‘manifested the design, not merely to found a dynasty . . . but at the same time to regenerate and conduct into the track of European civilization a people demoralized and degraded by a thousand years of political servitude’.54 Even more to his perceived credit, he had done so by studying European methods and hiring European experts. In the 1820s, for example, he had sent a group of twenty young Egyptians to study at Joseph Lancaster’s Central School in London, which was organized with military discipline, and a further group of forty-four students from Al-Azhar to Paris to learn modern skills. The latter group travelled with an imam, Rifa’a Rafi el-Tahtawi (1801–73), who, on his return to Egypt, was to become a major figure in the country’s nineteenth-century renaissance.55
