One of the rope artifacts I examined in the British Museum, for example, was a wonderfully preserved large fragment discovered with six others in the limestone quarries at Tura southeast of Cairo in May 1942. The thick diameters of these ropes and their discovery within a source of stone used for, among other things, the Giza pyramids, led to some excitement regarding their possible role in the quarrying of the blocks used to build those massive monuments. Our analysis determined that the specimen, which had a diameter of approximately 7.6 centimeters (3 inches), its structure being Z = s/s/s (that is, three left-twisted strands combined to form a right-twisted rope), was made from Cyperus papyrus. Radiocarbon dating has proved, however, a much younger date than anticipated, about two thousand years old, from the Greco-Roman period in Egypt. Although not Old Kingdom pyramid-building rope, its place of finding and sturdy size, material, and construction suggest that it very well might have been used in stonework, or in the conveyance of quarried blocks used to produce wonderful things in its day.
Another British Museum rope specimen is one of the most interesting Egyptian artifacts I have ever had the pleasure of examining. This rope was originally retrieved by the famous Italian adventurer Giovanni Belzoni in 1817, during his discovery of the tomb of the pharaoh Seti I in the Valley of the Kings. Upon entering the tomb, Belzoni passed through three decorated corridors before being stopped by a deep vertical shaft, the “well” feature found in a number of New Kingdom royal tombs. In Belzoni’s words:
On the opposite side of the pit facing the entrance I perceived a small aperture two feet wide and two feet six inches high, and at the bottom of the well a quantity of rubbish. A rope fastened to a piece of wood, that was laid across the passage against the projections which form a kind of door, appears to have been used by the ancients for descending into the pit; and from the small aperture on the opposite side hung another, which reached the bottom, no doubt for the purpose of ascending.
The first rope and the wood to which it was attached “crumbled to dust on [my] touching them,” noted Belzoni, while the rope on the opposite side of the well “remained pretty strong.” It is this second rope that is housed today at the British Museum; it was originally displayed at an Egyptian exhibition in London put together by Belzoni and eventually was auctioned off with the rest of his collection.
Belzoni’s rope is presently 6.2 meters long (about 20 feet), including two knots, and is in seven sections. With a finished diameter of about 2 centimeters (.75 inch), it has a Z = s/s structure, or two left-twisted strands combined to form a right-twisted rope. It was manufactured from Desmostachya bipinnata, or halfa grass.
The in situ discovery of Belzoni’s rope offers provocative scenarios for its use in antiquity. King Seti’s tomb had been robbed late in the Twentieth Dynasty, and his mummy was later removed and placed along with the bodies of other royalty in a hidden cache. The priests who rescued Seti’s mummy and the others and rewrapped their battered remains left notes indicating that his tomb, according to Egyptologists, had been robbed initially around 1074 B.C. and afterward served as a temporary repository for the mummies of his father and son, Rameses I and Rameses II, which had been recovered from their own plundered tombs. The three were then transferred to the secret cache around 968 B.C. It’s thus easy to wonder whether Belzoni’s rope was employed by the original robbers of Seti I’s tomb to negotiate the obstacle of a great pit or by the necropolis priests who were shifting the royal mummies about.
Fragments of a rope recovered by Giovanni Belzoni from the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings and now residing in the Egyptian collection of the British Museum.
Donald P. Ryan
A radiocarbon dating of Belzoni’s rope conservatively estimated its age at 950 B.C., plus or minus sixty years. Such a date certainly suggests the rope’s involvement in one or more of the various dramatic, ancient events that transpired in the tomb of Seti I, thus possibly tying this “mundane” length of twisted fibers to some real, interesting history.
Dave Hansen and I compiled our data into a report titled “A Study of Ancient Egyptian Cordage in the British Museum,” and we were thrilled when the museum published the little monograph in their Occasional Papers series. I still announce occasionally that it continues to sell vigorously…as a cure for insomnia, but actually we are delighted to see our work put to use and cited in other publications. I also presented the story of Belzoni’s rope in Munich at the International Congress of Egyptologists, and it was published in the conference proceedings.
Dave and I went on and analyzed some other specimens, including some samples of ancient wood, and our collection of modern plants and reference slides is housed in Pacific Lutheran University’s herbarium, where it remains a resource for those with similar interests.
Who cares about old rope? Compared to the Great Pyramid and the tombs of the Valley of the Kings, perhaps cordage is a ridiculous bore, but only in the sense that it is common rather than unique. But common doesn’t mean unnecessary. In fact, it is so necessary that it is common, necessary enough—or should I say crucial?—to be vital in building pyramids, hobbling donkeys, rigging boats, and lowering huge stone sarcophagi down sloping corridors.
In the big picture, the study of ancient Egypt is like a vast jigsaw puzzle with a myriad of pieces both large and small, known and unknown, obvious and subtle. It’s not all golden mummies, stone statues, and hieroglyphs. Though at first glance something as seemingly obscure as cordage appears trivial, a closer examination reveals that such humdrum technologies are essential, if uncelebrated, components of the ancient Egyptian cultural fabric. And many of these bits of string have wonderful tales to tell.
Who cares about old rope? Call me a nerd, but I do.
SIX
FRISKING THE DEAD
SERENDIPITY CAN BE DEFINED AS “the discovery of one thing while in the process of searching for another.” It happens a lot in science, often for the better, and the new findings sometimes take on a priority all their own. For example, while I was conducting my study of ancient Egyptian cordage in the British Museum, one of the specimens caught my attention in a special way. It bore the museum registration number EA 45189, was constructed from three strands of twisted papyrus fibers, and was about half a meter in length. Most interesting was its source—it was noted as having come from the excavations of David Hogarth at a site called Asyut. Even with my interest in the history of Egyptian archaeology, I had heard neither of Hogarth nor of any such excavation. When questioned, Harry James had at least a partial answer. Hogarth was a scholar commissioned in 1906 to conduct excavations on behalf of the British Museum, and since he was neither an Egyptologist nor did he publish the results of his work, his actual efforts were essentially unknown. He did, however, return from Egypt with hundreds of objects that are a valuable addition to the museum’s collections.
Harry led me to a cabinet in the Egyptian department’s archives, where I was shown two old notebooks from Hogarth’s excavation, one containing descriptions of several dozen tombs and the other a hand-drawn catalog of artifacts. The notebooks were certainly intriguing, and I asked if I might examine them in depth. “Why not?” replied the Keeper, and I was provided with copies of both, along with additional related material from the museum’s records. It turned into a major research project. Through a variety of documents, I was able to reconstruct and vicariously relive a “lost” excavation from an earlier time, when archaeology was practiced much differently from the way it is today.
My unearthing of Hogarth’s work involved neither shovels nor trowels nor any physical hardship. Modern London base camps such as the British Museum, the spectacular Reading Room of the British Library, and other sophisticated venues provided a comfortable atmosphere for exploration. The only sweat I experienced was that on the pint glass of Guinness in the Museum Tavern across the street after work each day. Organizing and making sense of Hogarth’s notes was a pleasant challenge, especially when it came to reading his handwriti
ng, which at first glance is nearly illegible. Eventually I learned to read his script, including its shorthand ligatures, with relative ease, which greatly facilitated the pace of my work. For a while at least, my life and Hogarth’s were tied together, ostensibly by an ancient piece of rope. The story revealed was fascinating, with a cast of intriguing characters, a splendid yet unappreciated archaeological site, and a personal glance at Egyptian archaeology at a time when professional standards were still in development.
In 1894, Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge was appointed Keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum. Academically diverse, energetic, and unswervingly loyal to the museum, Budge worked very hard to enhance his department’s collections during the thirty years he occupied that position. And, as a result, he has quite an interesting place in the history of Egyptology. For one thing, he was a prolific academic writer—perhaps too prolific—with over 130 books to his credit. But he also had a notorious reputation for his ability to locate, and often shrewdly acquire, choice items of antiquity for export to Britain from foreign lands. Working through networks of dealers, Budge came home from such places as Egypt and Mesopotamia with amazing artifacts, including Egyptian papyri and clay cuneiform tablets for the museum.
The other strategy for museums to augment their collections at the turn of the twentieth century was through excavation. With a regulatory antiquities bureau in place in Egypt directed by Europeans (the Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte), foreign museums and some individuals could apply for permission to excavate at one site or another. If the application was successful, a concession was granted, essentially a piece of archaeological turf to explore that ideally would be free of competition from other excavators. When the work was completed on these projects, the artifacts recovered were divided between the antiquities authorities and the sponsoring institutions. Therefore there was a good incentive for a museum to sponsor such work—a split of the findings.
In March 1906, Budge journeyed to Egypt with the purpose of meeting with the head of antiquities, a prominent French Egyptologist named Gaston Maspero, to discuss the possibilities of obtaining a concession for excavation. The goal of such a project, explained Budge, was “to obtain objects necessary to fill up the gaps in our collection.” He also noted that the British Museum “could not afford to issue large publications or plans of sites on a large scale,” which explains why the new project would become essentially “lost,” or unknown to scholars for decades. Maspero offered him a cemetery at a place called Khawaled near Asyut, which was said to contain “many tombs of the XVIIIth Dynasty and tombs of a far earlier period, containing wooden statues, etc.” Part of the site had already been conceded to an Italian, Ernesto Schiaparelli, but an adjacent area was available. Budge indicated that the British Museum was willing pay a thousand pounds “for a few years provided the results were satisfactory.”
When Budge returned to England, the museum’s trustees considered his report and directed him to apply for the recommended site, but while his letter of application was in transit, he received word from Maspero that the concession at Khawaled had been granted to another Englishman, the prominent archaeologist W. M. Flinders Petrie. As consolation Maspero offered two other sites: Abydos and Asyut, “the latter containing tombs of the X–XIIth dynasties.” Weighing the merits of each, Budge selected Asyut, and the director of the British Museum telegraphed this intention to Maspero. Budge’s preference for the site was given as follows:
“Of the history of that period [Tenth to Twelfth Dynasties] very little is known and it may reasonably be expected that successful excavations on the site will materially advance the knowledge of the history of that time.”
Asyut is located on the west bank of the Nile, about 250 miles upstream from Cairo and in ancient times was situated between two power centers, Memphis and Thebes. This geographical position made the region of the town a frontier between north and south in times of political disunity. The town sits in a fertile plain beneath the backdrop of a large limestone mountain, running generally west to east, honeycombed with tombs.
Ancient Asyut is known to Egyptologists for several things, including its role in the tumultuous events of a time period referred to as the First Intermediate Period, c. 2160–2055 B.C., which was essentially a civil war. At the end of the Old Kingdom, the central authority of the pharaoh was weakened and the fight for control of Egypt devolved into a three-way power struggle among Memphis, Thebes, and Herakleopolis, a regional capital in Middle Egypt. The reasons for the conflict are still debatable, but when it was resolved, Egypt was again unified, stable, and prosperous during the subsequent Middle Kingdom. Unfortunately, the governors of Asyut backed the wrong side, but the city continued on.
Asyut is also notable as the cult center for a god in the form of a canine named Wepwawet, such that the ancient Greeks renamed the city Lycopolis, “city of wolves.” For those inclined to ancient texts, five inscribed tombs of provincial governors of the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom can still be found there, bearing important historical, biographical, and funerary texts. Likewise the city’s vast necropolis has a reputation as a source from which many wooden funerary figures and decorated coffins have been recovered.
A number of Western antiquarians visited Asyut during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, several copying the texts found in the inscribed tombs. At the same time, local exploitation of the Asyut cemetery for the purpose of obtaining salable antiquities was no doubt extensive. In 1893, for example, a native digger by the name of Faraq “excavated” a large uninscribed tomb of a Middle Kingdom high official named Mesehti. The tomb contained, among other things, Mesehti’s coffins, bearing funerary texts, and, most notably, two amazing groups of wooden model soldiers, each standing over a foot tall and well armed with miniature weapons. The latter are currently displayed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, where they are a unique and popular attraction.
The first official foreign excavation in the ancient cemetery of Asyut was conducted in 1903 by the Frenchmen Émile Chassinat and Charles Palanque. Their excavations uncovered twenty-six small and undecorated tombs, only five of which had been robbed. Of the sixty-one coffins recovered from these tombs, thirty-four were inscribed with texts that provide a wealth of biographical, funerary, and religious data.
The Italian Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli excavated at Asyut beginning in 1905. His concession contained most of the large inscribed tombs and the area extending eastward. He worked at Asyut through 1913, and his labors were apparently productive. Although Schiaparelli published nothing on the subject, objects from his excavation can be found today in the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy. In short, the British Museum would be working at a potentially very exciting and productive site, even though bits of it had already been picked over, legally and illegally.
David Hogarth was recommended to direct the museum’s project as one “whose skill and experience are well known.” I looked up his name in an essential reference book for anyone doing such historical research, Who Was Who in Egyptology, and there was no entry for him at the time. My investigation was now taking a turn toward the biographical, as I hunted for whatever information I could find about the man.
Born in England in 1862, David George Hogarth studied classics at Oxford, with an expertise in the language and culture of ancient Greece. Upon graduation he began a somewhat vague introduction to archaeological exploration by assisting with the copying of inscriptions in Asia Minor and participating in an excavation on Cyprus. Given such a tenuous background, Hogarth would seem to be an odd choice to be sent on a special mission to work in Egypt, but that is exactly what happened.
From 1893 through 1895, Swiss Egyptologist Édouard Naville conducted consecutive seasons of excavations on behalf of the Egypt Exploration Fund at the magnificent mortuary temple of Hatshepsut on the west bank at Luxor. The fund, which was established in 1882 for the exploration and publishing of such sites, was f
ooting the bill. The immense temple was considered an exceedingly worthwhile and an especially demanding project. All, however, were not pleased with the choice of Naville as the temple’s excavator. W. M. Flinders Petrie for one was particularly disturbed to hear of the plan, as Naville seemed to be most interested in finding large artistic objects at the expense of small finds and exercising good archaeological technique.
Attempts to remove Naville from the project failed, but supporters of Petrie finally managed to have the fund send a young archaeologist to join the excavation with the aim of observing, assisting, and improving the work. Thus in 1894 Hogarth ventured to Egypt for the first time. Of this opportunity he wrote, “I ought not to have agreed, but, having so agreed, because the call of the East compelled me, I should have begun humbly at the bottom of the long ladder of Egyptology.” Surprisingly, Hogarth’s report vindicated the Swiss scholar, on the grounds that many of his alleged excesses were justifiable, given the nature of the site.
The next couple of years found Hogarth exploring a few other sites in Egypt, with his distinct preference for Greek remains. During the winter of 1895–96, he participated in the exploration of some Greek town sites in Egypt with the goal of recovering papyrus documents from their ancient garbage heaps. He was joined by two other young Oxonians, Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt, who would achieve fame for their persistent and successful efforts in this activity and their subsequent translation of many of the papyri.
Curiously, after three years working along the Nile, Hogarth developed a distinct disdain for ancient Egypt, which he expressed quite blatantly in his 1896 book A Wandering Scholar in the Levant. Though he admitted a certain appreciation for the Egyptian landscape, he found the art and architecture of the ancient Egyptians unexciting and rigid, in contrast to that of the Greeks:
Beneath the Sands of Egypt Page 11