by Brian Fagan
The journey started slowly, thanks to strong head winds. Progress was so leisurely that they were able to witness Arab dances, the last of which “fully compensated for the extraordinary modesty of the first.” Belzoni called on the “Admiral of the Nile,” Hamet Bey, and presented him with two bottles of rum, a necessary precaution to prevent their boat from being requisitioned by the pasha. Next he visited a Dr. Valsomaky, a druggist and distiller of “aqua vita” (mineral water), who also collected and sold antiquities. Two Copt interpreters in Drovetti’s pay were already at his house, so Belzoni shied off rather than interfere with their business.
The next day the party called on Charles Brine, who had set up a sugar factory for the pasha near Ashmunain. Here they learned that Drovetti’s Copts were now on their way to Karnak posthaste, presumably to stake out a claim on Belzoni’s excavation and to buy up all the antiquities that had been found since the last travelers came through. With characteristic panache, Belzoni sprang into action. Leaving Beechey to come on by river, he hired a horse and a donkey and, accompanied by Athanasi, left in the middle of the night on a forced march of 450 kilometers (280 miles) to Karnak. During the next five and a half days, they had but eleven hours of sleep, stopping at Coptic monasteries or Arab rest houses for only a brief nap or a meal of bread and onions.
The hasty journey was in vain. The governor at Asyut was unsympathetic to Belzoni’s activities, on account of a mistake by Salt’s secretary, who had failed to reply to letters or send a present. In retaliation, the bey had ordered a Piedmontese doctor named Marucchi to dig in the area where Belzoni had found his lion-headed statues. Officially, the governor was forming his own collection of antiquities, but in practice he had transferred his favor to the French and was selling all the finds to Drovetti’s agents. It was some consolation to Belzoni that the excavations yielded only four statues in good condition.
Fortunately, the headman of Arment (he of the anchovies and olives) was still friendly and promised every cooperation. Belzoni immediately set small gangs of workmen to dig on both banks of the Nile and concentrated his efforts on a large seated figure almost 9 meters (30 feet) high, which sat in the forecourt of Amun’s Karnak temple. He found a 2-meter (7-foot) seated statue at the foot of the huge seated figure, conveniently divided in two at the waist. So he removed the bust at once and put it under guard, while the chair in which the seated king was ensconced was left in the ground until a boat could be found to transport it.
Drovetti’s agents were already hard at work. With the connivance of the governor, they promptly engaged nearly all the available labor, leaving Belzoni with only a few men. So he worked near Qurna on the west bank, where the headmen were more friendly.
While awaiting Beechey and more funds, Belzoni found time to wander alone among the ruins of the vast Karnak temples without the noisy accompaniment of the inevitable touts, who plagued every traveler. Although not a particularly romantic man, he was uplifted by the magnificent architecture: “I was lost in contemplation of so many objects; for a time I was unconscious whether I were on terrestrial ground, or in some other planet.” The palimpsest of columns, walls, and friezes transported Belzoni into a state of ecstasy, “as to separate me in imagination from the rest of mortals, exalt me on high over all, and cause me to forget entirely the trifles and follies of life.”2 Belzoni was happy for a whole day, until the gathering darkness caused him to stumble over a stone block and nearly break his nose. The pain brought him abruptly back to earth.
Not that there was much time for reflection. Beechey was so long in arriving that Belzoni took a boat downstream in search of him. A day later, he found his boat at Qena, but it took three days to return to Thebes against the current. Belzoni concentrated his work at Qurna, whose people “were superior to any other Arabs in cunning and deceit, and the most independent of any in Egypt.”3 They boasted of being the last people that the French had been able to subdue, and even then they had forced the invaders to pay for their services. Many hiding places abounded in rocks to the west of Thebes, a place of refuge in times of stress and a rich and apparently inexhaustible source of mummies and papyri, which the villagers sold to consuls, travelers, and antiquities merchants indiscriminately, but always at the highest prices they could extort.
Belzoni seems to have gotten on with these inveterate tomb robbers well enough to embark on a busy search for papyri. He penetrated deep into the tiny burial chambers and caves behind Qurna, where “a vast quantity of dust rises, so fine that it enters into the throat and nostrils, and chokes the nose and mouth to such a degree, that it requires a great power of lungs to resist it and the strong effluvia of the mummies. In some places there is not more than a vacancy of a foot left, which you must contrive to pass through in a creeping posture like a snail, on pointed and keen stones, that cut like glass.”4 One can imagine the problems that the huge Belzoni had in squeezing through such narrow defiles.
After struggling through the passages, some of them up to 275 meters (300 yards) long, the sweating Italian could sometimes find a place to sit down and rest:
But what a place of rest! surrounded by bodies, by heaps of mummies in all directions; the blackness of the wall, the faint light given by the candles or torches for want of air, the different objects that surrounded me, seeming to converse with each other, and the Arabs with the candles or torches in their hands, naked and covered with dust, themselves resembling living mummies, absolutely formed a scene that cannot be described.5
One eventually became inured to the dust and mummies. It helped if, like Belzoni, one had no sense of smell, but even then one “could taste that the mummies were rather unpleasant to swallow.” On one occasion, Belzoni
sought a resting place, found one, and contrived to sit; but when my weight bore on the body of an Egyptian, it crushed like a band-box. I naturally had recourse to my hands to sustain my weight, but they found no better support; so that I sunk altogether among the broken mummies, with a crash of bones, rags, and wooden cases, which raised such a dust as kept me motionless for a quarter of an hour, waiting till it subsided again.
He openly admitted that his purpose “was to rob the Egyptians of their papyri; of which I found a few hidden in their breasts, under their arms, in the space above the knees, or on the legs, and covered by the numerous folds of cloth.”6
The inhabitants of Qurna lived in the mouths of the burial caves they had despoiled. They neglected their agriculture, finding tomb robbing a more profitable venture than farming. “This is the fault of travellers,” wrote Belzoni sententiously, “who are so pleased the moment they are presented with any piece of antiquity, that, without thinking of the injury resulting from the example to their successors, they give a great deal more than the people really expect.”7 The result was high prices, especially for papyri, arising in part from a firm, and probably correct, conviction on the part of the tomb robbers that the antiquities were worth ten times more than they sold them for.
The dwellings of the Qurnese lay in the passages between the tomb entrances, lit by small fat-oil lamps set in niches in the walls. Black soot covered the walls, and the bleating of sheep accompanied the constant murmur of human voices. Belzoni was warmly welcomed. “I was sure of a supper of milk and bread served in a wooden bowl,” he recalled, “but whenever they supposed I should stay all night, they always killed a couple of fowls for me, which were baked in a small oven heated with pieces of mummy cases, and sometimes with the bone and rags of the mummies themselves.”8
At first Belzoni was astonished by the casual way the Qurnese lived among the “hands, feet, or sculls” that littered the floors of their caves. They thought no more of it than if the human remains had been cattle bones. Soon Belzoni himself was indifferent to the constant presence of fragmentary ancient Egyptians. He boasted that he would just as readily sleep in a mummy pit as elsewhere.
The dead were one of Belzoni’s primary targets at Qurna, his objective to obtain as many mummies as he could in the s
hortest possible time. So he paid the village tomb robbers regular wages as well as a bonus for the bodies they found. This made it possible for him to search alongside them. No one was suspicious or out to conceal important discoveries. Finding tombs or burial pits was a matter of luck, for there were few surface indications to go by. Less wealthy people stood stacked in rows in large burial pits, some embedded in a form of cement. Many corpses were wrapped in coarse linen without much ornamentation, their bodies deposited in dense layers right up to the entrance of the burial cave. Such burials were hardly worth the tomb robbers’ time, as few ornaments or papyri were to be found in their wrappings.
The robbers eagerly sought the richly adorned burials, for the heavily bandaged and embalmed body often lay in a richly painted sycamore mummy case. Belzoni described some of the cased mummies he found, the garlands of well-preserved flowers still lying on the breasts of the bodies, the carefully wrapped packages of entrails, and the fine colors and varnish of the decorative casings. Such finds were popular with tourists and museums and had commanded a ready market for at least a century.
The burials of the most important people lay in tombs with several painted chambers bearing fine friezes of funeral processions and everyday life. Belzoni was particularly interested in the smaller objects buried with the wealthy—vases containing embalmed viscera, alabaster vessels, clay ornaments, carvings, gold leaf, and scarabs.
By this time Belzoni had accumulated a larger boatload of antiquities than he had acquired the year before, including a magnificent red granite monument bearing the figures of the cow goddess, Hathor, and other gods from the little temple of the falcon god, Montu, at the northeast corner of Karnak. He moved this fine specimen from the temple, hauling it up a slope from a narrow defile to the accompaniment of much ingenuity and clouds of fine dust, under the very noses of Drovetti’s Copts. Belzoni’s stockpile already contained the fine granite sarcophagus that Drovetti had given Belzoni on his first journey, now safely removed from its apparently impregnable resting place.
Belzoni had been so successful and energetic that his opponents were now seriously concerned. His finds aroused lively jealousy among Bernardino Drovetti’s lethargic agents. So they bribed the governor to issue another order forbidding Belzoni to employ laborers or acquire any antiquities. Their pretext was simply that they were unable to purchase anything because Belzoni had such good relations with the people of Qurna that they sold him everything, which was probably true. As was his normal practice, Belzoni promptly called on the bey, who was visiting a village a few miles from Thebes. The official was evasive. Whenever the Italian steered the conversation toward antiquities, the governor talked of other matters. He greeted Belzoni’s firman from the pasha with indifference, then called for horses and shifted the audience to Qurna, where he summoned the village headman and told him to produce an unopened mummy within an hour as evidence of Belzoni’s influence over the locals. When an unopened burial was produced, he flew into a tantrum of rage and ordered his subordinate beaten on the spot.
Belzoni stood silently by, powerless, realizing that a loss of temper would be fatal, while the soldiers inflicted a savage beating on the unfortunate kachif. Eventually, the headman was carried off, practically insensible. Belzoni now calmly stated he would complain to the pasha. The governor realized he had gone too far. The next day an order arrived authorizing Belzoni to employ twenty men for eight days. After some difficulty, for the local people were now afraid even to talk to foreigners, he succeeded in getting enough men to stockpile all his finds on the quay at Thebes and to build a mud wall around them.
Just as the cache was completed, the bey appeared and inspected the collection, apparently in a more pliable mood. Belzoni pressed his case, complaining that his party was being treated unfairly. All he wanted was a chance to buy antiquities on an equal basis with others. The governor apparently relented, leaving orders that he might buy antiquities, as well as issuing a firman addressed to the kachif of Aswan, for Belzoni still had his sights on Abu Simbel.
Belzoni quietly prepared to resume work at Qurna, seeking to convince the kachif that it was now safe for him to work in the mummy pits without incurring the governor’s displeasure. A public assembly was convened, at which the bey’s order was read aloud. To Belzoni’s horror, the famous order, which, through some strange oversight, he had never had translated, turned out to be instructions forbidding the locals to sell any antiquities to anyone but Drovetti. It was clearly impracticable to continue, so Belzoni placed a guard on his cached antiquities and took a boat upstream for Nubia in disgust.
He stopped at lovely Philae to await dispatches from Henry Salt. The party spent hours wandering through the magnificent ruins and making a wax impression of the portico of the temple of Isis, a difficult task since the thermometer mercury registered more than 51ºC (124ºF) in the shade!
Some days before, two young and adventurous English naval officers on half pay, Captains Charles Irby and James Mangles, joined Belzoni’s small group.9 These enterprising and engaging travelers were in the midst of a leisurely journey through Europe and the Near East in search of adventure and excitement that was taking them as far upstream as the Second Cataract. Irby and Mangles were delighted to be traveling in company with an experienced Nubian hand and added considerable strength to the party of seven.
On June 5 Sarah Belzoni turned up, accompanied by the servant, James Curtin. Belzoni gives no reason for her arrival, but he was obliged to leave her behind encamped on the roof of the temple of Isis in solitary splendor, accompanied by Curtin and a brace of firearms. There was not enough room in his single vessel for everyone.
Eleven days later, the travelers left on a boat whose five-man crew was to be a constant headache in the weeks ahead. The chief villain was a blueshirted gentleman called Hassan, who was promptly nicknamed “the Blue Devil” by the two sea captains. Thirteen days later they arrived at Abu Simbel, only to find that the headman was absent. So they sent complimentary messages and took the opportunity to visit the Second Cataract. At this point the crew decided to mutiny. The local people demanded gifts, and loaded guns were produced. Belzoni remained calm, disinterested, and apparently good-humored. Mangles reasoned with the villagers: admittedly, the foreigners had seen the Cataract without paying, but for their part the locals had seen them, just as novel a sight, without gifts or payment. To their credit, they accepted the argument.
The headman had still not returned to Abu Simbel when the travelers returned on July 5. But two days later a messenger came from Daud Kachif asking if they were the Englishmen to whom Hassan Kachif had made promises. Fortunately, Belzoni had sent turbans from Cairo as gifts, which had not been forgotten. He lavished more presents when the kachif arrived a week later—a gun, a turban, and smaller items.
The digging went slowly at first, for the fifty men spent much of their time singing a Nubian song that proclaimed that they were going to get as much Christian money as they could. A bargain was struck with the kachifs to open the temple for three hundred piastres, a task that Belzoni calculated would take four days. He soon realized that the temple would never be opened by this means. The kachif demanded their money, the men spent a day plundering a caravan, and Ramadan began. Both the headman and the crew bombarded everyone with demands for presents; food was in short supply and could not be purchased.
So Belzoni decided to dig for himself. At three o’clock in the afternoon of July 16 the Europeans quietly slipped up to the temple and stripped to the waist. An hour later some of the crew turned up and were astonished to find the Christians working. They sheepishly joined in. By nightfall the small party had done as much digging as forty locals would have accomplished in an entire day, at the cost of many blisters.
For the next two weeks, the work continued from before dawn until the hot sun became intolerable at nine o’clock. Six hours later, the small group of diggers returned to labor again until sunset. For the most part they made steady progress, sometimes jo
ined by their troublesome boat crew, at others by local people. The headman made repeated efforts to strip them of their firearms and equipment. Two village chiefs from the other side of the Nile came to threaten and offer assistance—for a price. The cook threw a pot of water over a man demanding money, a “truly cook-like mode of assault” that resulted in drawn swords and near bloodshed. Food again ran short, and they were unable to buy more. A foreman tried to cheat them by withholding wage tickets. But persistence was rewarded. On the last day of July, the diggers came on a broken upper corner of a doorway. By dusk they had made a hole large enough to admit a man’s body but decided not to enter the temple until the next morning, for they were uncertain how much sand lay inside and the air was probably foul.
Before daybreak on the following day, Belzoni and his companions hastened to the entrance with a good supply of candles. The crew stayed behind, but soon an uproar broke out led by Hassan, the Blue Devil. Belzoni ignored loud complaints about wages and threats to leave at once, whereupon the crew arrived on the site, armed with long sticks, swords, and rusty pistols. The uproar continued amid a litany of farcical and often-repeated complaints until someone noticed that the interpreter, Giovanni Finati, had quietly slipped into the temple during the argument.10 Immediately, everyone was agog to follow him, and arguments were forgotten.
The diggers quickly built a wall to barricade the door against drifting sand and stones. As the sun rose and shone briefly through the entrance of the temple for the first time in more than a thousand years, Belzoni was able to gaze on one of his most important discoveries. He found himself in a lofty pillared hall where eight huge Osiris-like figures of Rameses II faced one another across a central aisle. The square pillars behind the statues were decorated with brilliantly painted reliefs of the pharaoh in the presence of the gods. A smaller chamber, an antechamber, and a sanctuary opened up beyond the great hall. The rising sun’s rays briefly lit up the seated figures of the gods and the pharaoh in the sanctuary—Amun-Re, Horakhty, Ptah, and Rameses himself.