Beneath the Sands of Egypt

by Donald P. Ryan, PhD

  It’s fair to say that most archaeologists of today would consider the burning of ancient coffin planks to be outrageous, but there was certainly precedent for such behavior in Hogarth’s day. In a letter home written from Kafr Ammar, Egypt, in the year 1912, a young archaeologist named T. E. Lawrence wrote, “Even our very fire-wood comes from 24th dynasty coffins, and our charcoal brazier first performed that office in the days of the fall of Carchemish.” At the time Lawrence was writing from the camp of one of Hogarth’s mentors, none other than Petrie himself.

  Hogarth’s diary certainly verifies the fact that it was often cold and windy, noting both the state of the weather and his own health. And there were dangers, too. The threats of landslides and cave-ins occasionally presented themselves: “Success seemed to flee before us, and to pursue it was dangerous, where rock was rotten and screes of loose chips, thrown out from plundered tombs above, might slip at any moment over the only channel of air and escape, and condemn us to the death of trapped rats in a most unworthy cause and most unpleasant company.”

  One workman was half buried when a threateningly large bank of earth finally slipped while he was excavating Tomb XXXIII. While some large stone blocks in Tomb XXVII were being blasted away, cracks developed along the cliff, and what remained of the original roof collapsed.

  Hogarth dramatically mentioned other unpleasantries, such as “the dim light of smoky candles in the choking dust-laden air of a narrow cell, which reeked of mummy clothes and the foul rags of fellahin,” and further elaborated in a—probably exaggerated—gothic description of his enterprise:

  Crawling on all fours in the dark, one often found the passage barred by a heap of dim swaddled mummies turned out of their coffins by some earlier snatcher of bodies; and over these one had to go, feeling their breast-bones crack under one’s knees and their swathed heads shift horribly this way or that under one’s hands. And having found nothing to loot in a thrice plundered charnel-house, one crawled back by the same grisly path to the sunlight, choked with mummy dust and redolent of more rotten grave-clothes than the balms of Arabia could sweeten.

  Hogarth nonetheless persisted, and by the end of February he had explored the whole of the “Middle Kingdom” cemetery within the British Museum’s concession. The lower part of the concession had been tested and found to contain Ptolemaic and Roman graves carved into poor rock.

  The last field notebook entry, dated February 27, 1907, said the expedition’s final efforts were proving fruitless. The border area and the lower section revealed only more late plundered tombs. Addressing the director of the British Museum, Hogarth wrote, “In my opinion, there is nothing whatsoever to be done further in your present concession, which would be in the least worthwhile….” To Budge, “I would not advise anyone, unless he wants things Ptolemaic and Roman, to put a spade into your part of the site again.”

  “A good representative selection” of the objects was packed, and others, including unpainted coffins, “hundreds of common vases, and other things not worth sending,” were left in the tomb of Khety II. By March 7, Hogarth had packed and sent off thirty-seven crates of objects from the excavation to the museum in Cairo for the expected division of artifacts with Maspero. Nineteen of the thirty-seven cases were left at the Cairo museum, and apparently Norton got a small share, too, which he donated to his school in Rome. Maspero evidently was not interested in examining the contents of all the crates, and Hogarth urged Budge to consider making a claim for additional objects during some future trip to Egypt. The eighteen remaining cases were repacked into twenty-seven and shipped to England.

  The cases reached Britain, where the objects were cataloged in the British Museum beginning on May 11, 1907. Altogether, about seven hundred objects were registered. Several of the wooden figures, models, and some of the coffins have been displayed over the years to an appreciative international audience of millions. However, there are still some gaps in the record. Despite several attempts to locate them, Hogarth’s many excavation photographs have been lost. They would provide a wonderful addition to our information about his important project. Two images, though, survived by being published in his Accidents of an Antiquary’s Life and provide tantalizing glimpses of a tomb’s sealed door and the in situ contents of a burial chamber.

  After Asyut, Hogarth would never again dig in Egypt, and his career as an excavator would continue for only a few more years. In 1908, he engaged in a reconnaissance of the ancient Hittite site of Carchemish in northern Syria, where he would initiate the first season of excavations there under the auspices of the British Museum in 1911. He seems to have had an interesting hidden agenda. The site was strategically located so that observations could be made and data collected in anticipation of a future war involving Britain and Germany with their Turkish allies.

  Hogarth returned to Oxford in 1909, to become the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum. Ironically, though much of his adult life was dedicated to archaeological pursuits, Hogarth is best remembered as a spymaster and as the mentor of T. E. Lawrence, the famed “Lawrence of Arabia.” A student of his at Oxford and his apprentice at Carchemish, Lawrence served under Hogarth during the First World War. With the outbreak of hostilities, Hogarth offered his services to Britain in 1915 and was appointed director of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, the bureau playing a vital role in the gathering of regional intelligence and British diplomacy.

  Then, following the war, he participated in the Versailles Peace Conference as the British commissioner for the Middle East. Upon his return to Oxford, Hogarth’s career continued with distinction, his leadership ability being actively applied to the university until he passed away in 1927.

  Although it is true that Hogarth was not personally enamored with pharaonic Egypt, his sporadic involvement in its study left its own very special mark. And given the unheralded significance of much of his efforts, our appreciation is well overdue. Blowing up stones, engaging in a furious hunt for intact tombs to enhance a museum’s collection, working fast and furiously, and seemingly frisking the dead, Hogarth finds a solid place in the history of Egyptian archaeology as a man of his times. The smug judgment of modern archaeology aside, he wasn’t all that atypical of some of the better practitioners of his day. With Petrie as a teacher, he did a decent job given the standards of his time, an issue we will deal with again when we consider the cases of Giovanni Belzoni and Howard Carter in future chapters. Are Hogarth’s notes an anomaly? Not at all, I would venture to say. There are no doubt many “lost” or unpublished excavations in museums and archives awaiting rediscovery and explication, with the potential of filling in yet more blank spaces in the vast quilt of archaeological inquiry.

  And then there is the phenomenon known as serendipity. In this case a dirty piece of ancient cordage took me to intriguing places I never expected to go, and surprises of this sort are what keep scholarship fun and exciting. An old excavation at Asyut was a wonderful adventure for me. After all is said and done, both David G. Hogarth and the British Museum provided me with an enlightening scholarly journey.

  SEVEN

  THE CURSE OF THE QUEEN

  ARCHAEOLOGY IS A WONDERFUL WAY to learn about past times, whether it’s done by getting dirty out “in the field,” scrutinizing objects in a museum collection, or studying antiquity in libraries and archives. There are numerous ways to approach the subject, and it seems to have something interesting for everyone. I enjoy talking about it, and most people seem to enjoy hearing about it. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many jobs to be had. I certainly didn’t have one initially, but between mountain-climbing instructing and assorted other related employment I remained actively occupied in archaeology. There were, for example, the trips to Egypt, the cordage study, and the petroglyph survey, along with involvement in several excavations and research projects in museums.

  I also taught a few classes and did some tutoring while I myself was being tutored through Sir Alan Gardiner’s mighty Egyptian Grammar. In the latter I was nicely assiste
d by an Egyptologist living in Seattle, Emily Teeter, who was working on her Ph.D. dissertation for the University of Chicago. Emily was absolutely passionate about the subject and agreed to help me work through the intimidating chapters of Gardiner’s masterpiece, which I had begun on my own without checks or supervision. The book quickly displayed its reputation, and in the process of struggling through it I learned about paying attention to obscure details and the importance of reading the fine print. Emily knew the Grammar chapter and verse, literally, and as we worked through the increasingly difficult exercises, the occasional glint in her eye revealed that she, like many before her, had been tricked from time to time by the subtleties in the hieroglyphic text.

  I really enjoyed all this, but at one point I was offered some sage advice. If I wanted to continue seriously in archaeology, I would need to return to school and earn a doctorate, the so-called union card of the professional scholar. The thought was unappealing. I had no interest in repeating anything like the Big University experience, but my counseling was correct: If I had ambitions of teaching and conducting my own excavations, a master’s degree was insufficient. I looked long and hard and eventually found a school with a program that seemed better matched to my personality and that could accommodate my specific interests.

  The “Union,” as it was referred to by its faculty, was a radically different approach to a doctoral program. It had its origins as a 1960s educational experiment within the bounds of a major state university system and eventually took on a life of its own. The school looked at itself as “progressive,” with the aim of improving and restructuring what it considered to be the many inadequacies of traditional Ph.D. programs. The Union was strident in maintaining its approach, refusing to bend its agenda even at the cost of being marginalized. Eventually the school did modify its ways, but just enough to achieve formal accreditation, which is the stamp of legitimacy for any college or university.

  What the Union offered was a flexible model for a doctoral program that retained most of the components of a traditional structure with several innovative changes. The school also had its own additional requirements, including an internship and demonstrations of personal and professional development. The approach was highly interdisciplinary and cleverly demanded the recruiting of two outside scholars not affiliated with the Union to participate in one’s program. As an archaeologist “cross-training” in Egyptology, I found two such committee members: Dr. Mark Papworth, an archaeologist who taught at The Evergreen State College, a radical school not unlike the Union, and Dr. David Lorton, a brilliant but somewhat reclusive Egyptologist. They, with the rest of my committee, were overwhelmingly supportive and encouraging, and although I certainly wouldn’t recommend the Union for everyone, it was well suited for me, and it demanded excellence.

  I eventually accomplished my many requirements, and, with degree in hand, it was time to initiate my own project, the theme of which was described in the first chapter of this book: an exploration of undecorated tombs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Pacific Lutheran University served as my institutional base camp, and I put together a formal proposal for consideration by the Egyptian Antiquities Organization. The paperwork was facilitated in Cairo by the American Research Center in Egypt, an organization that promotes and facilitates scholarship in that country.

  For my first field season in the valley, I put together a small and diverse team. Apart from myself, there was Mark Papworth from my Ph.D. committee and Paul Buck, my buddy from my first fieldwork in the Fayyum. He, too, had recently finished his doctoral program. And then there was Dr. Garth Alford, a scholar of the ancient Near East with a vast knowledge of ancient languages and art, who had been teaching at Pacific Lutheran. It was a small and competent team with a wide range of interests and skills, but it would get even smaller.

  When it was time to leave for the excavation, the team had been reduced to only two: myself and Papworth. Paul had been offered a high-paying summer job surveying petroleum-stained beaches on the Alaskan coast in the aftermath of the famous Exxon Valdez oil spill. Garth? He just couldn’t make it. So it was just me and Papworth, and it actually worked out quite well.

  Papworth had long been something of a renegade. In graduate school at the University of Michigan, he and fellow archaeologist Lewis Binford turned archaeology upside down by instigating a theoretical revolution that became known as the “New Archaeology.” Confronting the long-term inadequacies of American archaeology, their anthropological approach emphasized explaining the past rather than merely describing it, and the discipline has never been the same. It was Binford, however, who published profusely and remains one of the best-known theorists among archaeologists today. In a book entitled An Archaeological Perspective, Binford credits Papworth as the cofounder of this revolution, but Mark was rarely remembered as having even been involved, except by those who recall his role as noted in the book.

  Papworth eventually felt that the New Archaeology had been taken too far, misapplying many concepts in its overembrace of anthropology. The change from the somewhat sterile earlier approaches was certainly refreshing, but the New Archaeology swung like a pendulum, slowly working its way back toward the center as archaeologists begin to critique and reassess. Ultimately Binford became very famous in the archaeological world and made a career of developing the New Archaeology while Papworth drifted into relative obscurity.

  Papworth landed a job at Oberlin College in Ohio and later became one of the early faculty members at The Evergreen State College in Washington State, a freethinking experiment in higher education, where he fit right in and from where he eventually retired after teaching there for well over two decades. Apart from teaching, Papworth was heavily involved in the world of forensic anthropology. With a background that included anatomy, he routinely worked as a deputy coroner on horrific crime cases in which he applied his expertise to the examination of human remains, including the infamous Green River serial murders in the 1980s and ’90s. Mark treated crime scenes as archaeological sites of relatively recent age and occasionally trained investigators with associated skills in order to extract as many clues as possible. He got a lot of satisfaction when his efforts resulted in social justice, but at the same time the disturbing nature of this sideline was cumulative and sometimes wore on him heavily.

  Before we ever met, Papworth was described to me as a colorful, super-smart, fun, eccentric character, all of which proved true. On our first meeting, he struck me as a lunatic-fringe genius, spilling over with advice and enthusiasm and easily dropping quotes from early archaeological explorers and theorists. With a knack for theatrics and good-natured hyperbole, Papworth could be both brilliant and wildly entertaining. He was reluctant to talk about his past, but every so often, during some random moment, he would claim that he’d worked as a young sailor on a barge in the Great Lakes or that he’d served as “a towel boy in Maisey’s House of Delights,” an establishment about whose services one could only guess. Much to my amusement, at a moment’s notice he could transform himself into any number of improvised characters. Once I suggested that he fold his hat up on each side in the manner of a cowboy. He gave it a try and immediately became a satirical version of a North American archaeological professional. “I’m gonna spend the summer up at Mesa Verd’, yup!” he carried on in his best turnip-truck-driver accent, referring to the famous Anasazi ruins in the Southwest. “I’m gonna be a site supervisor—it’s my fifteenth year!” And then immediately, with a straight face, he would express his disdain for the monotony of uncovering yet another Hopi dwelling or ancient fire pit No. 123564. “The ideal archaeologist,” he explained indignantly, “wears size-fifty-four overalls and a size-three hat!”

  Most of Papworth’s fieldwork had taken place in North America, but he was no stranger to Egypt. In the early 1960s, he participated in the great international rescue operation to save the ancient remains of Nubia in the far south of Egypt, doomed to be submerged beneath the waters rising behind the newly built Asw
an Dam. The Egyptians were faced with a difficult choice, providing for the needs of the future with electricity and flood control versus saving the incredible record of the past that would be destroyed in the process. Modernity won out, but salvage operations did their best in recovering what they could, including the dismantling and relocation of several temples and the documentation of a tremendous number of ancient burials and settlements.

  When I mentioned to Papworth that I was interested in working in the Valley of the Kings, he was immediately enthralled and offered his expertise to the project. Grateful for his quarter century of archaeological experience beyond mine and respecting him as a friend, I welcomed Mark aboard. Among other positive traits, he had a special way with the Egyptian workmen, of whom he was very fond. They in turn adored him, bestowing upon him the name “Abu Rumaadi,” meaning “father of the gray,” referring to his white hair. When he was unable to return for our third field season, there were visible tears in the eyes of our workmen.

  Archaeological work can be quite expensive. In the case of Egypt, foreign archaeologists are expected to pay all their own expenses from beginning to end. There are plane tickets to buy, equipment to purchase, workmen to hire, vehicles to rent, plus room and board. I was very fortunate to have private funding from a wonderful couple in Los Angeles who gave generously to several major schools with programs in history and Near Eastern archaeology. A few years before, I had sent them a copy of my master’s project on cordage and thanked them for sponsoring Dr. W’s first work in Egypt, which at least indirectly benefited me. They invited me to meet them and took a kind interest in my research and career, then very generously funded many of my projects, including my first field season in the Valley of the Kings, for which I will always be grateful.