by Brian Fagan
Leaving Kalabsha, they arrived at Derr, the capital of Lower Nubia, a village of earthen and stone huts in family groups. Here, Hassan Kachif, one of three brothers who ruled this area of Nubia, greeted Belzoni with great suspicion. It was impossible for the travelers to venture farther, he said, for the people upstream were at war with each other. Fortunately, Belzoni had made inquiries in Cairo about Nubian tastes and found out that they valued looking glasses and glass beads above all other possessions. So, in a moment of inspiration, he had taken a stock of mirrors with him just in case.
A handsome looking glass was solemnly presented to Hassan. The gift produced a letter of safe passage addressed to Hassan’s brother upstream in record time. “The Kachif was never tired of admiring his bear-like face; and all his attendants behind him strove to get a peep at their own chocolate beauty,” exulted Belzoni.14 Two days later the party reached Abu Simbel, which was the real objective of Belzoni’s trip. Ever since he had learned of the huge and beautiful figures that Burckhardt had seen three years before, Belzoni had planned to visit the vast statues and to uncover the great temple that lay behind them.
Having admired the great frieze and the six colossal figures from a distance, Belzoni clambered up the steep, sandy slope to a point where a likeness of the hawk-headed god Horakhty projected out of the sand. This he judged to be above the lintel of the temple doorway. Even Belzoni was daunted by the size of the undertaking. He estimated that the door lay 11 meters (35 feet) below the surface of the soft sand, which poured into his foot imprints as fast as he made them.
After a rapid inspection of the site, the Belzonis landed at the village of Abu Simbel some short distance away, where they found a group of armed men assembled under some trees, among them Daud Kachif, the local headman. Daud was a man of about fifty, clad in a light-blue gown with a white rag on his head as a turban. Somewhat surprised to see a stranger, the villagers greeted Belzoni roughly and inquired as to his business. When he explained that he had come in search of ancient stones and wished to open the buried temple with the help of the villagers, the head- man laughed scornfully. He had heard that story before. Some months previously, another European had passed by and taken away a lot of gold. Did Belzoni want not the stones but to take gold from them? Patiently, the Italian explained that he was interested in the people who had made the stones, not gold. Besides, asked the headman, what use was money to his people, who never used it? Undaunted, Belzoni gave a piastre to a bystander and told him to give it to the carefully briefed boat captain, who would give him a measure of corn in exchange. The people were suitably impressed when the man returned with three days’ ration of grain.
FIGURE 6.2 Abu Simbel, from a watercolor by Giovanni Belzoni. “Could the sand be cleared away, a vast temple would be discovered.”
The headman had met his match in Belzoni, who knew everything there was to know about bargaining. Eventually, the Italian was able to strike a bargain of two piastres a day per man, a bargain that pleased him when he learned that no less a visitor than Bernardino Drovetti had left 300 piastres with the headman as a fee for opening the temple—a fee that was returned, for the people had no use for cash.
Having settled matters at Abu Simbel, Belzoni journeyed on to Askut, a day and a half ’s sailing upstream, to get permission for the work from Hussein Kachif, brother of Hassan Kachif. The Belzonis landed on some islands immediately below the Second Cataract inhabited by simple people whose total worldly possessions were a baking stove and a mat to sleep on. There they obtained two pilots who took them right up to the Cataract. The party narrowly escaped shipwreck when the boat was driven against a rock by a strong current. Soon afterward they landed and climbed a high rock that provided a magnificent view of the rapids. “The blackness of the stones, the green of the trees on the islands, intermixed with the white froth of the water, form a fine picture, which can scarcely be described or delineated,” wrote Belzoni.15
Hussein Kachif, a majestic ruler in his seventies, awaited them at Askut with a fierce bodyguard. He questioned Belzoni minutely, expressed little surprise at his wish to open the temple, a task he clearly considered impossible, and gave permission provided that he received half of all the treasure. Belzoni readily agreed, for he suspected—rightly, as it turned out—that he would find nothing except statuary.
He hastened back to Abu Simbel, only to find that the people had decided they did not want to work. Exasperated, Belzoni pretended to lose interest and leave. The headman saw a useful source of revenue evaporating and called him back. After prolonged arguments, it was agreed that forty men would report for work the next day. No one turned up on the morrow, so Belzoni made the headman send soldiers to round up the men. Eventually, a group of workers began digging in pairs, using long sticks with crosspieces of wood at the ends to drag the sand away from the temple facade. At first the work went quite well, for the men’s thoughts were on the treasure they would find. But the pace soon slacked off. The headman was out to extort every piastre he could from visitors. Belzoni got his way only by bribing the tiresome official’s brother, who arranged for a bonus of grain to satisfy the workmen’s demands.
When the work resumed, Belzoni placed a palisade of palm leaves and saplings upslope of the suspected temple entrance so that new sand did not cascade into the excavation. So many men arrived on the third day of digging that eighty men worked for the wages of forty. At the end of the day the headman’s brother took everyone’s wages. Belzoni sarcastically observed that his magic for obtaining money seemed to be more effective than his own.
There were other incidents, too. Two of the laborers tried to plunder the boat when only Sarah Belzoni and a young girl were on board. “They were rather impertinent to her,” observed Belzoni. “At last she presented a pistol to them, on which they immediately retired, and ran up the hill.” It was impossible to identify the culprits, for “they were all like so many lumps of chocolate seated on the sand at work.”16
By this time the Belzonis’ money was running out. Obviously, the clearing of the temple entrance would have to wait for another visit. They had underestimated the dramatic effect that the introduction of money into the local economy would have on the avarice of the local people. The workmen had now uncovered nearly 8 meters (25 feet) of the facade, and one of the two colossal statues in front of the door. If Belzoni’s calculations were correct, then there were at least 4.5 meters (15 feet) to go. He marked the spot carefully and extracted a promise from the headman that he would let no one touch the place until he returned in a few months. Not that he had much faith in the man’s word, but he gambled on the apparent indolence of the local people.
The Belzonis now made tracks for home and headed downstream. This time they were able to spend more time at Philae and linger among the small but magnificent temples on the island. Again, Giovanni took particular notice of a small obelisk, “which, if brought to England, might serve as a monument in some particular place, or as an embellishment to the Metropolis,” he wrote. This delightful monument, 6.7 meters long and 0.7 meters wide (22 feet long and 2 feet wide) at the base, could readily be transported to Cairo in a large boat when the waters of the First Cataract were high. Belzoni sent for the governor of Aswan and made him agree that he was taking possession of the obelisk in the name of his Britannic Majesty’s consul general in Cairo.17
A small temple at the south end of the island yielded a series of twelve exquisitely carved stone blocks that could be pieced together to show the “god Osiris seated on his chair, with an altar before him, receiving offerings from priests and female figures.”18 The blocks were 76 centimeters (30 inches) thick, far too bulky to be shipped on Belzoni’s boat. So he arranged for them to be sawed down for later shipping and moved his headquarters to Aswan, where he sought another boat.
No boats were to be had, for the governor had hidden them all to delay the travelers in the town. As Belzoni was about to hire camels, the same official rented him one of the hidden boats for an exor
bitant price. This was one of the rare occasions when Belzoni’s tactics did not prevail. He had no option but to press on, for the river was falling rapidly and Young Memnon had to be moved before the flood receded.
There were no boats at Thebes, either, for the pasha had commandeered most river craft. Fortunately, a large boat appeared on October 7 carrying two of Drovetti’s agents on their way to Aswan, and Belzoni was able to engage it for the return journey. The agents moored their boat close to the carefully guarded head of Memnon and were moved to observe in their jealousy that the French invaders did not remove it, because they thought it was not worth taking.
The agents went over to Qurna with Belzoni, had the local people assembled, and told them in his presence that if they sold any antiquities to the English, they, the agents, would arrange for them to be flogged by the headman of Arment. Another member of their gang went so far as to warn Belzoni that if he persisted, his throat would be cut by order of his enemies. Undeterred, Belzoni went on with his arrangements, at the same time setting twenty men to work digging for antiquities at a likely spot near Karnak.
The great temples of Karnak were such powerful political and religious institutions that they were richly endowed with magnificent statues and other works of art by generations of wealthy pharaohs.19 The precincts of the temples were a gold mine for any excavator two centuries ago. We cannot be sure where Belzoni dug, but it was probably somewhere within the precinct of the temple of Mut, the vulture goddess and consort of Amun, well away from where the French had been digging. In the course of a few days he found a cache of black granite statues of the goddess Sekhmet, the lion-headed counterpart of the god Ptah, and other valuable pieces. Only the money at his disposal limited the extent of his finds.
Belzoni’s discoveries caused consternation among Drovetti’s agents, who could do nothing to stop him. They realized that the hard-driving Italian would return for more digging. Their efforts to prevent his recruiting labor were to no avail, for the people of Karnak, unlike those of Qurna, professional tomb robbers all, were anxious for work. Fortunately, also, Calil Bey, the governor of the province and a relative of the pasha, was in Thebes. Belzoni dined with him on a dish of mutton spiced with green peppercorns, onions, and garlic dropped onto the metal serving dish by careless servants with a noise “like a drumhead.” The bey expressed surprise that Europeans would want more stones, when presumably they had plenty of their own. Belzoni gravely assured him that he and his friends had plenty of stones, but thought that Egyptian ones were better. With that more than adequate response, he was given his firman.
While waiting for the boat and more funds from Henry Salt in Cairo, Belzoni crossed the Nile to the west bank, the ancient domain of the dead. He admired the temple of Rameses III (ca. 1194–1163 BC) at Medinet Habu, then made his way to the desolate Valley of the Kings behind Qurna.20 There he examined the open royal tombs, some of which had been visited since Roman times. Belzoni poked into every cranny of the valley with sedulous care. At its western end he came across a heap of stones. Sand and rubbish filled the gaps between the boulders. A stick thrust through the pile met no resistance, so the next day he returned with several laborers. Within two hours, all the stones had been removed and Belzoni was able to enter a palatial tomb, which contained part of a sarcophagus and “several curious and singular painted figures on the walls.” This was the tomb of Ay, a priest who briefly annexed the throne of Egypt on the death of Tutankhamun in the fourteenth century BC. Belzoni ascribed this find to luck rather than deliberate search, but it was enough to whet his appetite for another visit later on, a stay that yielded much more important results.
The boat from Aswan now arrived without the stones from Philae and loaded with a cargo of dates. The owners stopped to return the money and break the agreement. “I had much to say to them, as may be imagined in such a case,” remarked Belzoni with commendable understatement. Drovetti’s agents had succeeded in cowing the captain with stories of shipwreck. Belzoni’s situation was desperate. The Nile was falling rapidly, and the Memnon was still on the bank. At this critical moment, fortune played into his hand. A soldier arrived with a gift of anchovies and olives and an invitation to dinner from his old enemy, the headman of Arment, a most unlikely gesture. The messenger provided enlightenment. The French consul had made the mistake of sending him an insulting present, namely, the olives and anchovies now in Belzoni’s hands, instead of the sizable gifts he had been expecting. “Strange as it may appear, it will be seen that the effects of a few salted little fish contributed the greatest share towards the removal of the colossus,” wrote Belzoni gleefully. Determined to strike while the iron was hot, he hastened to Arment and “set off alertly to my anchovy and olive man.”21 He found the headman in a pliable mood, provided lavish gifts, and the next day obtained a judgment against the boat owners in his favor. They were forced to unload their dates, take on Belzoni’s cargo, and hire a boat of the headman to carry their fruit downstream at such an exorbitant rate that there was almost no profit for them.
Belzoni crossed to Qurna at once, for time was running short. He built a large earthen causeway from the top of the bank to the water’s edge, for the shrinking Nile was now 30.5 meters (100 feet) from the head and 5.5 meters (18 feet) below it. One hundred and thirty men built the ramp in two days, a straightforward task compared with the loading itself, for the great weight of the head had to be placed right in the middle of the boat to prevent it from tipping over.
The Italian was in top form. He ordered the boat maneuvered to the end of the causeway, then constructed a crude bridge of four large poles from the causeway to the center of the craft, so that the weight of the head bore down fairly amidships. He placed a large sack of sand in the middle of the bridge to stop the Memnon if it rolled away during loading. The boat itself was carefully padded to prevent damage to the head. As his men levered the seven tons of granite toward the boat, others manned thick palm-fiber ropes secured to stout posts and around the colossus to check its descent. The operation was entirely successful, much to the surprise of the boat owners, who were in a frenzy of despair and apprehension. It was not for nothing that Belzoni had been a circus strongman.
On November 21, the Belzonis set off downstream from Thebes. Twenty-four days later, they arrived in Cairo with probably the most spectacular load of antiquities ever to be shipped down the Nile, after an arduous journey of five and a half months.
Henry Salt was away in Alexandria when the Belzonis arrived, but he had left instructions that all the antiquities were to be unloaded at the British consulate, except for the Memnon, which Belzoni was to take on to Alexandria. Belzoni obeyed this unexpected instruction without question, although he was under the impression that everything was to go to the British Museum. Early in the new year, 1817, Belzoni took the Memnon to Rosetta, transshipped it to a larger vessel, this time with proper tackle, and soon reached his destination in Alexandria, where the head was deposited in the pasha’s warehouse awaiting a ship to England.
Thus ended a remarkable and exceptionally arduous archaeological expedition. Belzoni had achieved more in a short time than any of his rivals. His unique qualifications derived from circus and theater gave him an advantage in moving large antiquities that even Napoléon’s armies had failed to shift. His determination and ruthlessness were matched by a shrewdness in bargaining and political intrigue that enabled him—most of the time—to get his way and outmaneuver his rivals. And rivals they were. From the moment he excavated at Thebes and entered unexplored Nubia, Belzoni had become a marked man whose life was in danger because he dared challenge a comfortable monopoly on antiquities and excited the greed of others for wealth from the Egyptian soil.
7
“Mummies Were Rather Unpleasant to Swallow”
Then I conveyed King Djeserkare, the justified, when he sailed
south to Kush to enlarge the borders of Egypt. His majesty smote
that Nubian bowman in the midst of his army. They
were carried
off in fetters, none missing, the fleeing destroyed as if they had
never been.
AHMOSE, SON OF ABANA,
on the Nubian campaign of pharaoh Amenhotep I,
quoted in Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature:
A Book of Readings
Henry Salt was delighted with Belzoni’s success and hard work. He paid the Italian fifty pounds in addition to the sum of twenty-five pounds against the Memnon that Burckhardt and he had advanced when the expedition was mooted. These payments were intended to cover Belzoni’s expenses. Whether they were also wages is unclear. Certainly, Belzoni was unhappy about the arrangement, for he received neither public credit nor financial gain from the sale of the antiquities he had labored so hard on his own initiative to obtain at Thebes and Karnak. Nevertheless, he immediately proposed a second journey to finish the work at Abu Simbel.
Salt had other ideas: he was watching with interest the activities of a Genovese sea captain named Giovanni Battista Caviglia (1770–1845) who was digging in the depths of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza and in tombs near the Sphinx. By great determination, Caviglia succeeded in penetrating to the bottom of the so-called Well in the pyramid, and had made other important discoveries. Salt suggested that Belzoni join the mercurial Caviglia, but the Italian declined, knowing full well that he worked better on his own. He was also worried about the activities of Drovetti’s agents at Thebes. Instead, he again pressed for a second journey to Upper Egypt and Nubia, this time to last six months. Salt unwillingly agreed. Belzoni and a small party left Bulaq on February 20, 1817. This time Sarah and the Irish servant, James Curtin, stayed behind. Belzoni was accompanied by a Turkish soldier, a cook, and two employees from the British consulate—Henry William Beechey, Salt’s secretary, and an interpreter named Yanni Athanasi, who was soon to become a bitter enemy.1