Beneath the Sands of Egypt

by Donald P. Ryan, PhD

  I know nothing more saddening than to pass from a study of Greek art to a study of art so-called in Egypt. Where is that pursuit of the ideal, that artistic conscience which inspires every work of the Hellene? Look up and down the Nile valley; look at the structures of Upper Egypt, the most part well seeming on the outside, but rubble and rottenness within, continuously jointed and casually patched, able to endure only in a land where frost and rain are not: look at the gesso laid over the walls to cover a multitude of sins: look at the back or any obscurer part of a statue, and you will perceive that the “artist” was influenced as little by any pride in his work for its own sake, as by a belief in the omnivision of his gods. Everywhere one sees temples incomplete, tombs half decorated, reliefs left in outline, inscriptions pirated and served up in hideous half-obliteration. The artists are no better than artizans, modelling and limning unconsciously century after century gods and kings and soldiers and slaves, according to impersonal conventions: twenty generations serve to produce a modification of but a single detail. The personality of the creator is never once obviously instinct in the creation, and there is hardly a statue in Egypt that suggests for a moment individual inspiration.

  Nor was Hogarth overly impressed with Egyptologists. In the same book, he wrote:

  It must be for want of comparison also that Egyptology is spoken of so habitually by its votaries as if there were no other archaeology, and that discoveries in Egypt are qualified by absolute superlatives. In the Nilotic mist Mycenae, Nineveh, and Pompeii are forgotten, and Hawara or Dahshur [two Egyptian pyramid and cemetery sites] extolled as the spots where explorers’ eyes have seen the most wonderful resurrections of a bygone age;…To a greater extent than perhaps any other archaeology the study of ancient Egypt has fallen within the province of the curious amateur or the narrow specialist, little acquainted with any other scholarly study; and only of late has it seemed to be understood that some link with the modern world must be found, or Egypt will remain ever barren, a Memnon, as Hegel so finely put it, ever waiting for the day.

  Though Hogarth decidedly did not acquire a taste for pharaonic art, it was nevertheless in Egypt that he learned some of the higher archaeological standards of his time, developed by Petrie. In a book describing a number of his archaeological adventures, he admitted:

  If, however, I had done little for them [the Egypt Exploration Fund], I had done much for myself. In those three seasons, largely through becoming known to Petrie, and living with men who had served apprenticeship with him, I had learned to dig. When I set foot first in Egypt, I had no method in such search, nor any understanding that the common labourer’s eyes and hand and purpose must be extensions of one’s own….

  Moreover, in handling remains of imperishable antiquity in the Nile land, I learned to observe as an antiquary must. And some of his spirit was breathed into me…. But I was not to be won to Egyptian studies at the eleventh hour.

  It was also in Egypt that he had the opportunity to develop skills with Arabic, which would serve him especially well later on in his career. During the next several years, Hogarth maintained a busy and varied career serving as a war correspondent for the London Times, directing the British School of Archaeology in Athens, and excavating in Greece, Crete, Turkey, and at Naukratis, an ancient Greek town site in the Egyptian delta. With a little background knowledge about Hogarth, I was now ready to review the excavation itself through any sources I could locate, including his notebooks and correspondence with Budge.

  Back to the story of the dig. Now that permission was obtained and an archaeologist recruited, it was time for action. Budge suggested that Hogarth be paid three pounds per day, round-trip fare from England, and other travel expenses. It was anticipated that the season’s work would be completed in three or four months, and a sum for all expenses was suggested at fifteen hundred pounds. The trustees approved.

  Hogarth’s book Accidents of an Antiquary’s Life, source of the passages quoted last above, devotes much of a chapter titled “Digging” to the poetic description of his work at Asyut. In the context of a dinner conversation with a sophisticated young lady, he charmingly describes his trials and travails in a way that might impress, yet at the same time dissuade, his conversational companion:

  I was bidden to search the tombs in part of the hill behind Siut, whose soft calcareous cliffs are honeycombed with graves of every age. This vast cemetery, lying near a large town, has been ransacked over and over again, chiefly for wooden statuettes and models, which seem to have been carved at the Wolf Town more often and more cleverly than anywhere else in old Egypt; and I was warned I must hope for no untouched burial, but content myself with raking over the leavings of hastier robbers.

  Furthermore, his mission was poetically characterized by him as “that body-snatching sort, which science approves and will doubtless justify to the Angel of Resurrection by pleading a statute of limitations. To rob a tomb appears, in fact, to be held dastardly or laudable according as the tenancy of the corpse has been long or short.”

  On Hogarth’s arrival in Egypt, the limits of the concession were clearly defined in the immense tomb-pocketed mountain directly behind the town of Asyut, and a magnetically oriented boundary line was established from the mountain’s base beginning slightly to the east of one of the decorated tombs. The British Museum was free to explore the mountainside to the west and fifteen kilometers north; the eastern side of the line was the domain of Schiaparelli. Unfortunately, Hogarth’s hand-drawn map illustrating both the boundary of the concession and the tombs he was to discover was nowhere to be found among his papers. A letter sent to Budge, though, gave me clues that eventually enabled me to find it, improbably bound up in a book of official museum correspondence.

  Hogarth apparently started his excavation on December 15, 1906, but before work began, French Egyptologist Gustave Lefebvre, the local antiquities inspector, pointed out where robbers in the last year had discovered an inscribed tomb door at the foot of the hill in the courtyard of a large tomb. Hogarth began at this spot and revealed, over the course of the next ten days, a tomb bearing inscriptions on its door lintels and jambs and containing a variety of objects in its fill. The tomb was given the Roman number I, and thus began a tomb-numbering sequence that would end with fifty-seven tombs “cleared with good result” by the end of his nearly three-month project. Tomb I was mapped, and others in the immediate vicinity were investigated as the general boundaries of the concession were explored.

  Many excavations were made in the search for relatively unravaged tombs. In one account Hogarth estimated that “for every profitable tomb, at least twenty profitless had to be opened and, moreover, examined scrupulously….” In a letter by Hogarth from Asyut on January 1, 1907, he wrote, “Meanwhile I began tombs high up the mountain…but, although again and again tombs were found which had not been robbed in modern times, they were never intact. The tombs lie in terraces, and it was not till we had worked systematically down to the third terrace from our starting point that we hit a virgin grave.”

  It was fun to examine the expedition’s surviving salary ledgers, which provided insights and details. The size of the expedition’s labor force increased greatly during the first three weeks. On December 15 there were thirteen employees; by December 18 there were twenty-seven; on December 19, forty; and by December 24 fifty-four locals were on the payroll. Overall there were at least sixty-three Egyptians employed over the duration of the excavation, a few dropping out and some working part-time. The average wage was five piasters per day, though one fellow, Omar Hussein, received six per day (probably as headman), and Gabr Seidan (perhaps a child) received three and a half per day. Achmet Hussein was paid ten piasters per day for his services and those of his donkey.

  Bonuses were occasionally paid, presumably for exemplary service, for hardship, or as baksheesh. (“Baksheesh” means “tip” or, more cynically, “payoff,” and some archaeologists in Egypt would reward their workers by offering a competitive price for obj
ects discovered.) At best the baksheesh system was productive and effective, but it could also promote “salting,” the surreptitious addition of objects found elsewhere. On December 24, for example, twenty-one piasters were paid out for the discovery of the missing fragments of a statue found in Tomb I. Petrie, the role model for archaeologists in his day, was a proponent of the baksheesh system and argued that it encouraged careful digging for the discovery of unbroken objects and for those that were especially small. Weekly bonuses could exceed twenty additional piasters. Faraq Ali Ali and Mussi Hassan were two of the most successful diggers for Hogarth, receiving an additional twenty-three and a half and twenty-four piasters respectively during the week of December 31, 1906, to January 5, 1907, which makes one wonder if perhaps they were involved in the discovery of the intact tomb found on January 1.

  Early on, Hogarth expressed certain doubts of success in his concession. His area appeared to be exceedingly plundered and quarried and lacked the big tombs found in Schiaparelli’s neighboring concession to the west and Petrie’s to the south. In a letter to Budge, Hogarth wrote:

  The facts militate against success here. The Copts in the early centuries of the Christian era evidently used this cemetery as a dwelling place, turned tombs into homes and systematically robbed grave pits, etc; and in very recent times—especially since Faraq’s discovery of the soldiers [in 1893]—there has been most thorough plundering. I often find a dozen tombs communicating by holes and passages made by these robbers who worked constantly underground. But the most serious consideration is the absence of the larger type of tomb in our part of the cemetery—if one may judge by such tombs as have long been opened. The central and southern parts, conceded to MM. Schiaparelli and Petrie respectively, seem to contain the larger graves. I have little doubt that I can find small graves here and there intact and of good period; but about large and well furnished graves I feel much doubt unless M. Schiaparelli’s concession is ceded to me.

  It is clear that Hogarth’s ultimate ambition was to find intact burials in large tombs, not at all an unusual goal in the Egyptian archaeology of his day. This can explain the extraordinary effort and stamina expended in the excavation of two large collapsed tombs, Numbers XXVII and XLII. Tomb XXVII occupied his serious attention from January 14 through February 1, as he dynamited fallen blocks of stone. Teased by what appeared to be a shaft sealed with palm logs, wherein “the dust from the [ancient workmen’s] chisels still clung to the walls and floor,” Hogarth persisted and found the shaft essentially empty and unused.

  Tomb XLII was addressed from January 22 through February 16, producing very little for the effort. Near the end of the season, Hogarth wrote, “What has never been forthcoming during the season has been one fairly large virgin Middle Kingdom tomb, wherein both upper and lower chambers were well furnished. I have found virgin upper chambers and virgin pits, but never the two together…”

  Such comments can be flabbergasting to the modern archaeologist, who would be more than delighted to have investigated Hogarth’s many disappointments. He even comes off as impatient, if not a bit spoiled, but one must not forget that this is archaeology in a different era, with different methods and expectations.

  Schiaparelli’s concession expired on December 31, 1906, and Hogarth wrote to Maspero regarding this, presumably to request that the British Museum be ceded that territory. By the end of the excavation, word had been heard that Schiaparelli would be back, and Hogarth responded as follows: “He [Schiaparelli] would probably not exhaust it [the concession], if the results of his excavations elsewhere afford any guide, but he would, in any case, make it more difficult for anyone else to succeed by disturbing the superficial indications. On the other hand he may only do a little work, sufficient to retain his claim, and once more renew his concession at the end of the year, as he did on the last occasion.”

  Hogarth doubted that Maspero would react against such concession-maintenance games.

  Despite his dismay, by the end of January, Hogarth had achieved a certain level of success in finding several intact tombs and others still containing a variety of objects. The unviolated tombs were often very small, with their doors blocked by tightly wedged stones, and tended to be “hidden away in odd corners of the cemetery, or cut in promontories of rock, which have, by their position, escaped the methodical subterranean progress of the native plunderers.” Other similarly closed doors and chambers were discovered, but when opened they revealed that the tombs had been robbed from above, below, or from the sides, sometimes producing vast networks of communicating chambers.

  Surprisingly, some of the larger plundered tombs contained more and higher-quality objects than did the intact tombs, which had the tendency to be quite small and sparse or common in their artifact content. Bemoaning the paucity of objects in the intact tombs, Hogarth wrote, “One [intact tomb], for example, opened yesterday, contained no less than ten coffins, all plain, but of the Middle Kingdom, apparently, and nothing else but rough pottery. On the other hand, two large tombs plundered in antiquity, and recleared by me in the last two days, have yielded three [model] boats with rowers, etc.; several wooden figures, and other objects of value.”

  Around the second month of excavation, Hogarth transferred the focus of his operations to the vicinity of Schiaparelli’s concession boundary in hopes of making higher-quality discoveries.

  Hogarth was very worried about thieves in the area, and he made note of several objects having been stolen. From Tomb LV, for example: “I hear that, in spite of my ‘bakshish’ system, there was some leakage to the dealers from this tomb. Two wooden statuettes are reported stolen, besides some small objects e.g. scarabs. Lying as this cemetery does just above Assiout it is as favorable a spot for intrigue between dealers and workmen as any in Egypt.”

  In Accidents of an Antiquary’s Life, Hogarth elaborates:

  Had I been an annual digger in Egypt, able to call a trained and trusted crew to Siut, and had the scene not lain so near a large town notorious for its illicit traffic in antiquities, that penance might have been avoided. And even in performing it one was robbed. Dealers waited for my men at sunset below the hill and beset them all the way to town, and one digger, a youth of brighter wit and face than most—he was half a Bedawi—gained so much in the few weeks before I turned him off that he bought him a camel, a donkey and a wife. The order of his purchases was always stated thus.

  Like a variety of other things done by many of the official diggers of his day, the competitive tactics Hogarth employed against thieves cause the modern archaeologist to cringe. Describing Tomb XXXIX, for example, he notes: “got into tomb at 3:30 p.m.—only 1/2 hour to get 8 coffins out.”

  There are several references in Hogarth’s field notes to a certain “R.N.,” especially in regard to the documentation of tombs. For example, in the comments concerning Tomb XXVI, a note reads, “Plan in R.N.’s book.” The sketch plan of that tomb had been cut from elsewhere and added to the adjacent blank page. In all the materials I scrutinized relating to the excavation, I found no clues to the identity of this “R.N.”

  Quite recently, though, with the help of computer search engines such as Google, I was able to finally solve the mystery. “R.N.” was an American named Richard Norton who served as director of the American School of Classical Studies in Rome. How he was recruited by Hogarth is unknown, but he must have played a significant role in the project, despite never being mentioned in the correspondence with Budge.

  Reading through Hogarth’s material regarding this excavation, one feels his growing sense of frustration, the hit-or-miss process of sorting through many hundreds of plundered tombs in hopes of finding something large and unplundered but at best recovering a few relatively intact yet pathetically furnished burials. There were thieves in their midst and a seemingly better yet unexploited concession next door. Hogarth’s sincere desire to provide his employers with quality objects, too, likely contributed to his anxiety.

  On February 3 he wrote:
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  In the course of the month I have opened some twenty virgin tombs, mostly, to judge by the style of the coffins, burial, and pottery of the Middle Kingdom. From these I have taken out nearly fifty coffins, of which about fifteen are painted. As a whole, however, these virgin tombs with doors intact are small and contain little beside coffins (generally plain) and rough pottery. Bows and arrows and in a few cases wooden ushabtis and other statuettes, have been the only companions of the dead…. It is hardly worthwhile to find any more of the small types…. I shall bring home a considerable mass of antiquities from which you will be able to judge whether further search is desirable…. One can go on finding tombs every day and all day. The question for you to decide is whether the ten percent of these tombs which are rich, make it worthwhile to find the ninety percent which are comparatively poor, or have been completely robbed.*

  Living conditions on the Asyut excavation weren’t particularly luxurious, but not uncommon for turn-of-the-century excavators. Hogarth evidently resided in the decorated tomb of an ancient official named Khety, although it lay within the boundaries of Schiaparelli’s concession. As he described, his evenings were spent in this

  huge grotto with storied walls, because the lower Nile Valley is a thoroughfare of furious winds all winter long, and tent life, a constant misery in Egypt, would have been most miserable on the face of the Siut bluff, which stands out into the wind’s track, and is buffeted by all their storms. Not that our wide-mouthed grotto, however, proved much better than a tent. The north wind struck its farther wall, and was sucked around the other two in an unceasing, unsparing draught which dropped dust by the way on everything we ate or drank or kept. Warmth after the day’s toil we never felt December to February, even when sitting closest to the fire which we kindled nightly with unpainted slats of ancient coffins on a hearth of Old Empire bricks. The dead wood, seasoned by four thousand years of drought, threw off an ancient and corpse-like smell, which left its faint savour on the toast which we scorched at the embers; and a clear smokeless light fell fitfully on serried coffins, each hiding a gaunt tenant swathed and bound, to whose quiet presence we grew so little sensitive that we ranged our stores and bottles, our pans and our spare garments on his convenient lid.