by Brian Fagan
::
Every visitor saw a mummy, readily offered for sale in Cairo’s bazaars. The ancient Egyptian dead had become profitable merchandise. The Egyptians themselves broke up wooden mummy cases for firewood and sold the corpses for medicinal purposes. The word mummy is derived from the Persian word mummia (Arabic: mumija), a term for pitch or bitumen. Pissasphalt from the Near East had long been regarded as a useful cure for cuts and bruises and for the treatment of fractures, nausea, and a host of other ailments. The appearance of pissasphalt closely resembled that of the bituminous materials used by the ancient Egyptians in the mummification process. When supplies of pissasphalt were hard to come by, it became common practice to substitute the materials found inside the bodies of Egyptian mummies for the real thing. From there it was an even shorter step to substitute the dried flesh of the mummy for the hardened bituminous materials found in the body cavities.
“Mummy” had a long and respectable antiquity as a medicinal substance. As early as the tenth century, Arab doctors were describing the properties of a medical specific that had obviously been in use for centuries. The Arab historian and doctor Abdel Latif, whom we have already met admiring the Sphinx’s smile, was evidently familiar with mummy: “The mummy found in the hollows of corpses in Egypt, differs but immaterially from the nature of mineral mummy; and where any difficulty arises in procuring, the latter may be substituted in its stead.” By the sixteenth century, mummy had become a highly prized drug. A flourishing trade in mummified human flesh came into being. The medicinal substance left Egypt in the form of entire mummies or in fragments packaged in Cairo and Alexandria, whence merchants sent the dried substance all over western Europe. Peasant villagers dug up the tombs and transported mummy to Cairo, “where,” recorded Abdel Latif in 1203, “it is sold for a trifle. For half a dirhem I purchased three heads filled with the substance. This mummy is as black as pitch. I observed, when exposed to the strong heat of the sun, that it melts.”9 Another Arab writer recorded in 1424 how
people who had made a large pile of human corpses were discovered in Cairo. They were brought before the provost, who had them tortured until they confessed that they were removing the corpses from tombs and were boiling the dead bodies in water over a very hot fire until the flesh fell off; that they then collected the oil which rose to the surface of the liquid to sell it to the Franks, who paid twenty-five pieces of gold a hundredweight for it.10
Numerous foreign merchants traded in mummy, for the potential profits were enormous. The German traveler Johann Helferich of Leipzig, who visited Egypt in 1565, was so anxious to buy some mummies that he dug the sand out of several tombs in a fruitless search for ancient corpses. But few were as ambitious as John Sanderson, an energetic agent for the Turkey Company who spent a year in Egypt in 1585–1586. Sanderson lived in Alexandria, visited the pyramids and the Sphinx, and studied commercial opportunities in Cairo. But he spent much time at the famous Memphis mummy pits. The enterprising Sanderson was quick to cash in on the ancient Egyptians. He bought more than 270 kilograms (600 pounds) of mummified flesh and a whole body for export to England. Such an enormous shipment of mummy was unusual, but Sanderson simply bribed his way out of Egypt accompanied by his consignment and “divers heads, hands, arms and feet for a sheive.” The market value of mummy in Scotland in 1612 was eight shillings a pound, so Sanderson made quite a profit.11
A French physician, Guy de la Fonteine of Navarre, investigated the mummy trade of Alexandria in 1564 and found clear evidence of fraud and use of modern corpses to satisfy an apparently insatiable demand for mummy. Many of the merchants who exported the substance cared little about the sources of mummy. Indeed, they marveled that Christians, so particular about their diet, could actually eat the bodies of the dead. Mummy was practically a patent medicine. Even King Francis I of France carried a small package of mummy with him as an emergency precaution. But not everyone was happy about mummy. “This wicked kinde of Drugge, doth nothing helpe the diseased it also inferres many troublesome symptomes, as the paire of the heart or stomacke, vomiting, and strike of the mouth,” fumed one writer.12
The Egyptian government sought to restrict the wilder excesses of the mummy trade by levying harsh taxes on traders and forbidding the shipment of corpses out of Egypt. Apparently, the ships that carried mummies met violent storms so frequently that the superstitious crews regarded a cargo of mummy as unacceptably dangerous. But the threat of shipwreck and government regulations did not prevent fraud and the export of mummy; indeed, it persisted in medical use until the early nineteenth century.
The Elizabethan philosopher Sir Thomas Browne was very explicit: “Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsam.” Even in Mark Twain’s day, mummy was remembered, if only in a humorous context. On the Egyptian railroad, he recalled in Innocents Abroad, “the fuel they use for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose, and sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out pettishly, ‘D–n these plebeians, they don’t burn worth a cent—pass out a king.’”13 Even in the early twenty-first century there is said to be a regular, although very insignificant, demand for mummy among those who deal in magic and the occult. It is rumored that genuine powdered Egyptian mummy can be bought at some New York drugstores for considerably more than fifty dollars an ounce.
::
The European Renaissance had emancipated people’s minds from the stultifying fetters of medieval thinking. Culture and learning became fashionable pursuits, the collecting of antiquities a mark of a gentleman. Scholars and librarians dusted off ancient manuscripts, while leisured travelers pursued the Grand Tour to Mediterranean lands and returned home with collections of classical sculpture for their cabinets. The new scholarship triggered a curiosity about human diversity and the history of civilization. Soon, a new generation of dissertations on the state of the world gratified the literary tastes of cultivated gentlemen with speculations on the origins of civilization based on Greek and Roman sources.
The Grand Tour had made Italy a familiar stamping ground for even timid travelers. Some bolder souls journeyed as far as Greece, then a Muslim country under Turkish rule. Far fewer crossed to Alexandria and the Nile. Ancient Egyptian civilization was still virtually unknown to the outside world. With the exception of the obelisks in Rome and Constantinople, few Egyptian antiquities were to be seen in Europe. Mummy was part of popular pharmacopoeia, so many people were aware of the ancient Egyptians’ unusual burial customs. A few casual purchases reached Europe. In 1615 Italian traveler Pietro della Valle brought back the first Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets with their wedge-shaped script from biblical Nineveh on the Tigris River. He also visited Egypt and purchased fine mummies at Saqqara.
Valle’s artifacts caused quite a stir, and a rising interest in the mysteries of cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. They also stirred the acquisitive lusts of European nobility. In 1638, Ambassador du Houssay of France wrote to Cardinal Richelieu from Cairo about the collecting opportunities in the eastern Mediterranean:
Since the most beautiful monuments of antiquity appear to have survived the perils of so many centuries solely to be judged worthy of a place in your Eminence’s libraries and cabinets, may I assure your Eminence that in order to procure for them so glorious a shelter, that I have already written throughout the Levant to impose the necessary orders in all places where there are Consuls of France that they seek with great care all such things as may be worthy of this honour.14
Houssay was merely pandering to the taste of the king and the French nobility for the exotic and curious, for the very finest in antiquities, those worthy of the honor of gracing aristocratic homes.
The serious business of collecting antiquities had begun in the sixteenth century, when some Italian cardinals and the Medici prince Cosimo I (1519–1574) had acquired large collections of antiquities, including a few Egyptian pieces. Travelers on the Grand Tour pu
rchased sculpture and statuary from Greek and Roman temples for their gardens and cabinets. Early collectors were polymathic in their interests, with little sense of quality or geographic specialization. Coins, mummies, Indian scalps, baskets, Polynesian axes, and papyri were all part of a cabinet of curiosities. Large crowds pored over the mélanges of artifacts and exotic statuary on display, the predecessors of today’s museums. Collecting antiquities became a highly acceptable and potentially lucrative activity, both for collectors and for the dealer who supplied them.
“I never saw a place I liked worse,” wrote the Scottish explorer James Bruce of Cairo in 1768. He added that “it afforded less pleasure and instruction than most places” and possessed antiquities that “less answered their description.”15 Other travelers who visited the city after the sixteenth century did not share Bruce’s negative views of Cairo, where one could purchase or experience almost anything. A new breed of visitor now ventured to the Nile in the wake of the merchant and pilgrim—the antiquarian in search of intellectual enlightenment and the antiquities themselves. A flurry of leisured diplomatic activity had accompanied the Turkish annexation of Egypt. Many diplomatic visitors came to Cairo, some of them to settle for long periods of time. Both new diplomats and more transient visitors followed a well-trodden tourist circuit to the pyramids and the mummy pits of Saqqara. They visited the bazaars in Cairo, where they were able to examine completely bandaged corpses and marvel at the blackened limbs and shriveled faces of age-old Egyptians. The curio dealers were only too glad to supply the visitor to Alexandria or Cairo with amulets, scarabs, papyri, or even complete mummies—for a consideration. Even if prices seemed high, one could always sell one’s purchases in Europe at an enormous profit.
The French kings and their noblemen were probably the most avid collectors of antiquities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Special parties of scholars journeyed to Mediterranean lands in search of coins, manuscripts, and all manner of antiquities on their behalf. Their undigested collections provided a catalyst for more detailed inquiry. A more serious objective was part of the specific instructions to Father J. B. Vansleb in 1671, a German in the service of Louis XIV who received orders to seek “the greatest possible number of good manuscripts and ancient coins for His Majesty’s library” in Egypt and Ethiopia. Vansleb was to make a description of the peoples of both countries and “of the different manner of burial of divers peoples.”16
Father Vansleb had an eventful journey, consoled by a “kilderkin of wine” that he guarded jealously from his fellow travelers. He tried to measure the pyramids of Giza with long pieces of string, but was unable to complete the task because of drifting sand. At Saqqara he had himself lowered into the mummy pits, where he acquired some mummified birds in earthenware pots. These he sent back to Paris with some Arab manuscripts, including one that described “the hiding places of all the treasures in Egypt.” Disguising himself in Turkish dress, he traveled upstream from Cairo, only to be forced back because of threats on his life. He may well have been in danger, for the Turks knew he was an emissary of Louis XIV, whom they suspected of having designs on Egypt.
Vansleb now abandoned his intention of going to Ethiopia, and wrote to France complaining of the barbarity of the people and the tyranny of the Turkish authorities. In June 1672 he resumed his travels and nearly lost his life while attempting to visit the Coptic monasteries of Saint Macarious in Lower Egypt. His wine cask was the problem. A zealous Turkish magistrate incited some young people to ask Vansleb for a drink, a demand with which he refused to comply, pointing out that Muslims were forbidden wine. The following day, three young ruffians ambushed him and tried to throw his precious barrel into the Nile. Vansleb snatched his kilderkin; his Nubian servant, a man “of stout heart,” cast one of the thugs into the Nile, and the incident ended with a fine of ten piastres for drinking alcoholic beverages. He appealed to the local kachif (tax collector) for protection and an escort. Instead, the kachif said he would accompany him to the monastery himself, and moved Vansleb to his house. Vansleb was now seriously worried, for the kachif had a reputation for timely assassinations. Fortunately, one of the kachif’s servants, whom Vansleb had tipped well some time before, came secretly and warned him to leave at once. Vansleb “had no further desire for sleep” at this news, stole quickly out of the village, and bribed a boat captain to take him aboard. Moments after they had cast off, the kachif and thirty horsemen came galloping along the bank in frustrated wrath. The perils of the king’s service were too much for Vansleb, who retired to Constantinople to finish a book on the history of the Church in Alexandria before returning to France in 1676. There he was censured for not persevering with his journey to Ethiopia.
The lust for exotic artifacts turned local diplomats into ardent collectors. Diplomatic duties in Cairo or Alexandria were hardly arduous. The collection of antiquities offered a lucrative sideline, especially through local contacts forged in government service. Benoit de Maillet, one of the first of a new breed of diplomatic antiquarians and collectors, was French consul in Egypt from 1692 to 1708. He visited the interior of the Great Pyramid at Giza more than forty times, corresponded with scholars in France, and developed an outline scheme for the exploration of ancient Egypt that acted as a blueprint for Napoléon’s expedition a century later. “We are told,” he reported, “that there are still in Upper Egypt temples of which the blue or gilded vaultings are still as beautiful as if they had just been finished; there are idols of a prodigious size; columns without number.” His diplomatic reports recommended that an accurate map of Egypt be compiled and that “persons wise, curious, and adroit” be encouraged to make a scientific exploration of the Nile Valley at a slow and deliberate pace. Just over a century later, Napoléon Bonaparte’s savants carried out de Maillet’s recommendations. Antiquities continued to interest his successors, including Paul Lucas, a goldsmith’s son who came to Egypt on his own account to buy gems, coins, and curios. He later became an agent for Louis XIV, ordered in 1716 to “endeavour to open some pyramid in order to find out in a detailed manner all that this kind of edifice contains.” But Lucas never opened a pyramid. Instead, he collected mummified birds at Saqqara and took a leisurely voyage upstream through Upper Egypt, where he admired the “vast palaces, magnificent temples, these obelisks, and the prodigious number of thick columns that are still standing,” as he drifted slowly past.17
FIGURE 3.2 The tourist in Egypt. A Victorian tourist climbs a pyramid.
Occasional tourists inspected the pyramids of Giza, and allowed themselves to be pushed and shoved into the burial chambers. Nearly every visitor complained about the heat and stench inside the pyramids. Some fainted away from heat exhaustion; others, too plump for the narrow defiles, became stuck in the passages, to the discomfort of their companions. Local Arabs would help them climb up the outside, assisting them up the huge boulders, a popular excursion for Victorian tourists. To travel farther upstream along the Nile, the tourist struck a bargain with the skipper of a dahabiyya, a large sailing vessel that had plied the waters of the Nile as far upstream as the First Cataract and beyond for centuries. The tourist of two hundred years ago merely plugged into the local transportation system and visited the monuments at Thebes, Aswan, and other localities near the Nile. Until the advent of the railroad, motorcar, and airplane, no other logical means of transportation existed for either tourist or local traveler.
Every traveler paused in the bazaars of Cairo, too. Merchandise from all parts of the Arab world was for sale in the city, to say nothing of European trade goods and the products of tropical Africa. Great caravans arrived and departed from Cairo every day. The bazaars were alive with the bustle and never-ceasing ebb and flow of the world’s commerce. Antiquities had been for sale in the bazaars of Cairo for centuries—curiosities fashioned into jewelry, as well as gold objects and other artifacts stolen from ancient tombs and offered on the open market. The occasional traveler purchased a shipment of mummy, or even a complete body.
Most tourists departed with at least a scarab, statue, or amulet. But the serious collector of antiquities was still a rarity, except for the odd royal emissary or a leisured gentleman making antiquarian inquiries on his own account. A lucrative market in antiquities was already in being, but it was not on the scale that was to develop in later centuries, when the great museums of Europe began to vie with one another in building collections of Egyptian antiquities. But the demand for mummies kept the villagers of Saqqara more than busy with grave robbing. The market for the dead was seemingly insatiable and more profitable than agriculture. Elsewhere, the destruction of temples and pyramids for building stone proceeded apace. Bishop Richard Pococke, a British ecclesiastic who visited Egypt in 1737, was moved to lament: “They are every day destroying these fine morsels of Egyptian Antiquity; and I saw some of the pillars being hewn into millstones.”18
Ancient Egypt was familiar territory to ardent readers of the Scriptures. Its pharaohs had been the hated oppressors of the Israelites, whose escape from bondage under Moses was familiar to every Bible reader. The biblical associations of the Nile fueled a lively market for travelogues. A gullible public devoured the “itineraries” of antiquarians and other travelers, while Egyptian antiquities became prized possessions of considerable social prestige and market value. Even the most miscellaneous collections excited considerable interest. In 1723, for example, one Thomas Serjeant displayed a “parcel of Egyptian Goods lately come from Grand Cairo” to a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries in London. The members were fascinated by “a brass Osiris, a brass Harpocrates, a Terminus, a naked brass figure distorted of better taste, Isis and bambino, a little Egyptian priest, a cat, a stone beetle, a curious beetle with wings and hieroglyphics in a curious paste of blew colour.”19