The Rape of the Nile
Page 14
Belzoni happened to show his collections to Major Edward Moore, an army officer with antiquarian interests who was passing through Cairo on his way to England with dispatches from India. Moore was a member of the Society of Antiquaries of London, then, as now, an influential archaeological society in Britain. His journey to Alexandria was delayed by strong winds, so the courier accompanied Belzoni on a visit to Giza. The two antiquarians speculated idly about the interior of the Second Pyramid of Khafre, one of Khufu’s sons, which had never been opened, although there had been talk among French and British residents of trying.
The Moore visit rekindled Belzoni’s interest in Giza. Henry Salt had wanted him to work there before his second journey, but the Italian had refused. A fellow countryman, the volatile sea captain Giovanni Caviglia, was hard at work there and did not fancy working under him. Both Drovetti and Salt were in Upper Egypt, so the field was clear. Belzoni visited Giza a second time with another party of Europeans some days after Moore’s visit. While his companion visited the Great Pyramid of Khufu, Belzoni wandered off by himself and sat down in the shadow of a boulder contemplating “that enormous mass, which for so many ages has baffled the conjectures of ancient and modern writers.”4 He walked around the pyramid, looking for telltale traces of an entrance with an eye honed by months of work in Qurna and the Valley of the Kings. On the north side, he noticed that sand and rubble were piled up at the foot of the pyramid to a greater elevation than the lintel of any door. All his instincts suggested that an inconspicuous doorway lay below the modern ground surface.
The next day, he returned to Cairo without telling anyone of his plans, and with good reason. There had been much talk of starting a public subscription in Europe to open the pyramid, with gunpowder if necessary. Drovetti’s name had been mentioned as a possible leader for the enterprise. Influential people might well have blocked Belzoni’s plans. Fortunately, Belzoni was able to use backdoor contacts to obtain a firman from the pasha’s deputy.
Taking a small tent and some food, Belzoni slipped quietly away from Cairo, ostensibly on an expedition to the Mukattam Hills east of the city. He had but two hundred pounds in his pocket and was afraid that his French rivals would try to stop his excavations, or at any rate ridicule them in public. At Giza, he recruited eighty men without trouble and set them to digging in two spots, one on the north side of the pyramid and the other on the east, where the remains of Khafre’s mortuary temple, which stood in front of the pyramid, could still be seen.
The digging went slowly at first, for hard deposits of stone and mortar bent the workmen’s hoes on the north side. But the temple party was soon digging 12 meters (40 feet) below the surface, where the workers uncovered a stone pavement, which is now known to have run all around the pyramid. After sixteen days of hard digging, uncovering the original surface of the pyramid and removing many large stones, the excavators found a small chink between two boulders. A long palm stick could be inserted into the crack for nearly 2 meters (6 feet) without interference. The next day they removed a loose stone, revealing a small choked-up entrance that led nowhere. After several more fruitless days, Belzoni gave his workers a day off and retreated to brood over the pyramid.
Now Belzoni’s incredible “nose” for the past came into full play. He wandered back to the pyramid of Khufu and suddenly noticed that the entrance was offset from the center to the east side of the base. Hastening back to the unopened pyramid, he measured off the same distance and found a telltale clue—the deposits were apparently less well compacted and there was a slight concavity in the surface of the pyramid where he estimated the entrance might lie. “Hope,” he remarked, “returned to cherish my pyramidical brains.”5 He realized that rubbish piled up against the north face was higher than the entrance on the same face of Khufu’s pyramid and buried it.
FIGURE 8.1 The entrance to the Second Pyramid of Khafre.
Renewed excavations made slow progress, for the ground was very hard. Soon, three huge boulders came to light, two on each side and one on the top. Both sloped toward the center of the pyramid. Then, on March 2, 1818, Belzoni saw the entrance for the first time. The inclined passageway leading into the pyramid proved to be 1.2 meters (4 feet) high and formed of huge blocks of granite. It took two days to unblock the passage, whereupon Belzoni found the now level defile obstructed by a huge granite boulder fitted in grooves in the walls.
Fortunately, there was a small gap at the base between the stone and a groove in the floor, which enabled Belzoni to measure the thickness of the portcullis stone. He found it was 38 centimeters (15 inches) thick. Careful probings with a barley stalk revealed an empty space ready to receive the stone in the ceiling. Slowly and laboriously, the men raised the stone with levers and propped it up with small boulders. A small Arab slipped in with a candle and reported the passage was clear. It was not long before Belzoni had raised the portcullis high enough to admit his large frame.
A month after starting work, Belzoni penetrated the interior of the burial chamber. He found that the floor dropped away to a low passage that ran back and downward under the first one toward the north face. The walls of the passage were salt encrusted and ended in a huge burial chamber with a gabled ceiling, 14 meters long, 4.8 meters across, and 7 meters high (46 feet long, 16 feet wide, and 23 feet high), carved from solid rock. A large red granite sarcophagus was sunk into the floor. The sarcophagus had been broken into and was half full of rubbish. An Arabic inscription translated by a Copt brought out from Cairo confirmed that others had been there before Belzoni.
Belzoni now cleared the lower descending passage leading from the main access passage that sloped back toward the north face. He found another burial chamber as well as a second portcullis, and established that the actual entrance lay outside the base. In the meantime, a visitor rummaging in the rubbish in the sarcophagus had found a bone fragment. Belzoni excitedly dispatched it to the curator of the Hunterian Museum of Anatomy in Glasgow, who pronounced it to be from a bull. The bovine identification seems to have vexed Belzoni and caused quiet chortling in some quarters. Belzoni described the jokers rather pettily as having “little taste in antiquity.”
By this time Henry Salt, who had been digging unsuccessfully for royal burials in the Valley of the Kings, had returned to Cairo. He was closely followed by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Fitzclarence, an aristocratic officer like Edward Moore, carrying dispatches to London from the governor-general of India, Lord Hastings. Fitzclarence had traveled overland to the Nile from the Red Sea and arrived at the consulate, dead tired and after dark, where he was startled by the “extraordinary figures against the walls around me.” He imagined he was in the catacombs, “had I not recollected that I was in the sanctum sanctorum of an inveterate and most successful antiquarian.” Salt was having dinner when the colonel arrived, but their meeting was overshadowed by the appearance of Belzoni, who presented a striking appearance in Turkish costume, “the handsomest man I ever saw.”6
Two days later, Fitzclarence and Salt accompanied the Italian on an excursion to Khafre’s pyramid. Fitzclarence was impressed by Belzoni’s achievements and the man himself. “I have had a long conversation with Belzoni,” he wrote. “He professes that his greatest anxiety is to become known to the various antiquarians of Europe. He said he looked upon it as a fortunate circumstance I had passed through Egypt, and trusted I should be able to speak of him in England, so as to bring his merits before a nation to which he declares himself to be most devotedly attached.” Soon Fitzclarence was promising to publish an account of the entry of the Second Pyramid written in Belzoni’s own hand.
FIGURE 8.2 Giovanni Belzoni in Turkish dress.
Belzoni’s personal relationship with Salt was not so cordial. The consul had immediately offered to pay the full expenses of the pyramid excavations, some 150 pounds. But Belzoni refused and jealously guarded his latest discovery in a fit of deep resentment against the eager antiquarian. By now, the consulate was full of exciting and unique statuary
and hundreds of smaller antiquities, many of them of great rarity. Belzoni’s only reward had been the money for the Memnon and the price of the two statues he had sold to the French. He was mortified to discover that many of his discoveries had been claimed by others “who had no more to do with them than the governor of Siberia, except as far as related to supplying me with money.”7 He felt that he had gained no personal credit for his remarkable discoveries and that the fame he craved so greatly had eluded him. Only word of mouth from returning travelers revealed the true state of affairs.
A series of long and protracted arguments dragged on. Neither Belzoni nor Salt seemed to be able to communicate with the other. Eventually, they drew up an agreement, under which Belzoni was to receive 500 pounds during the next year, half the price of Seti I’s alabaster sarcophagus when it was sold, and assistance in gathering a collection for himself in the Thebes region. For his part, Belzoni undertook to assist the consul to remove some sarcophagi still in Upper Egypt and to help Beechey, now the consul’s agent there, in any way possible. The agreement was signed in Cairo on April 20, 1818, and the two men parted on good terms. With that, Belzoni set off for Thebes on his third and final journey up the Nile.
Only pausing to renew his firman with the governor, who had given him so much trouble on his earlier journey, Belzoni joined Alessandro Ricci in the Valley of the Kings, where the diligent artist had been busy at work in Seti I’s tomb for more than two months. The copying work was well advanced, so Belzoni now began the laborious task of making wax impressions of the major bas-reliefs. Belzoni and Ricci lived in the tomb for most of the summer, a rather cooler base than the searing floor of the valley, but nevertheless a hot and uncomfortable place to copy hieroglyphs and work with soft wax. Wax alone melted too readily and had to be mixed with resin and fine dust to form a workable compound. The hardest task was to make the wax impression without damaging the paint on the walls. Enormous numbers of castings were needed: “The figures as large as life I found to be in all a hundred and eighty two: those of a smaller size, from one to three feet, I did not count, but they cannot be less than eight hundred. The hieroglyphics in this tomb are nearly five hundred.”8 The copying operation was an astonishing feat of patience and skill under very trying conditions.
Seti I’s tomb, now protected with a stout wooden door, preoccupied Belzoni for most of the summer of 1818. He had little time for excavation, although his firman allowed him full access to both banks of the Nile at Qurna. Unfortunately, Drovetti’s agents had staked out both sides of the river. Furthermore, Henry Salt had quietly marked down extensive claims of promising ground before leaving for Cairo. Rather than risk a confrontation, Belzoni had retired to “his tomb,” in the extraordinary position of being at Thebes at his own expense for the first time yet unable to dig for himself. “If I pointed out any spot in any place whatsoever, one of the parties, I mean the agents of Mr. Drovetti or those of Mr. Salt, would consider it was valuable ground, and protest that it was taken by them long before. I verily believe, if I had pointed out one of the sandbanks or the solid rocks, they would have said they just intended to have broken into it the next day.”9
Belzoni’s competitors had taken effective steps to see that the most successful archaeologist among them was frozen out. After some abortive excavation at localities that he had already found unproductive and had not been claimed by the others, Belzoni defied Beechey’s protests on behalf of Salt and worked over a spot behind the two great Colossi on the Nile floodplain marked out by the British consul. Drovetti had already dug there and found only a few broken statues. But Belzoni had his usual luck. On the second day of excavations, he uncovered a magnificent seated black granite statue of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, in almost perfect condition. With admirable restraint, he ceded the rights of ownership to Henry Salt and merely contented himself with carving his initials on the base. This beautiful statue can be seen in the British Museum.
After this chance discovery, Belzoni abandoned excavation and concentrated on his tomb. But he did manage to accumulate what he modestly called “a little collection of my own, in which I can boast of having a few good articles, particularly in manuscript, &c.”10 His friends among the tomb robbers of Qurna were only too glad to sell him some of their choicest discoveries, for he, of all the excavators of the time, seems to have made a real effort to understand their society and way of life—partly, of course, in strict self-interest.
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With Thebes virtually closed to him, Belzoni’s interests were shifting. He knew that his time in Egypt was drawing to a close, that rich opportunities as a showman awaited him back in Europe. It was time to cash in on his growing reputation as a tomb robber, so he focused most of his efforts on copying Seti I’s tomb and its spectacular burial chamber. Meanwhile, he followed with interest the pasha’s sudden interest in the potential of the desert between the Red Sea and the Nile.
Some time before, two Copts had called on the pasha after an arduous desert crossing from the Red Sea to the Nile. They told him that they had seen some old sulfur mines in the mountains near Kosseir, overlooking the ocean. The mildly interested pasha looked around for an experienced European traveler to inspect the mines and, on the recommendation of Consul Drovetti, appointed Frédéric Cailliaud, a young French mineralogist and antiquarian who had arrived in Egypt just before Belzoni and had worked for Drovetti on several occasions, as government mineralogist. Cailliaud had met Drovetti while studying Arabic in Alexandria in 1816. Subsequently, they had traveled widely together, especially in the Western Desert.11
Cailliaud was an extremely perceptive geologist by the standards of the day. He confirmed that the sulfur mines were useless, but also visited Gebel Zabara, the famed site of emerald deposits worked by the Ptolemies, described by classical writers, and uninvestigated since then. The young Frenchman returned two months later with glowing reports of the emerald deposits. He was promptly dispatched once again, this time with a party of Syrian miners. Cailliaud came back in a few months with 4.5 kilograms (10 pounds) of rough emeralds and tantalizing stories of a ruined city with eight hundred houses and several temples lying nearby. Although the ruins were at least 18 kilometers (8 miles) from the sea, the armchair antiquarians of Cairo immediately claimed that they were the remains of the ancient city Berenice, the pharaohs’ main trading port on the Red Sea and a center of vigorous commerce with Arabia, India, and the Persian Gulf, especially under the Ptolemies. Visions of a new Pompeii rose before the eyes of Cairo’s antiquaries, for Cailliaud had written a glowing report of his discoveries.
A few months later, one of the Syrian miners became ill while visiting the Nile to buy provisions. Hearing that a Christian doctor was living in the Valley of the Kings, he called on Belzoni and Ricci and begged for treatment. Belzoni had heard rumors of Cailliaud’s discovery and questioned the man closely. The miner soon offered to guide him to the place. Since the work at Seti I’s tomb was now almost complete and there seemed to be little going on at Thebes, Belzoni leaped at the chance of a new expedition. Within a few days, on September 16, a small expedition was ready to move. The party of eight included the miner; Belzoni; Ricci, whose artistic talents might prove useful; Beechey; and several servants.
The expedition hired a small boat to take them upstream to Edfu, where they were to cut across the desert toward the Red Sea. On the way, they witnessed a tragedy in the making. It was a year of record flood. The Nile had already risen 1 meter (3.5 feet) above the previous year’s flood level, inundating several villages and drowning several hundred people. Every available boat carried precious grain to higher ground. One village they called at was already 1.2 meters (4 feet) below river level. The villagers stood vigil day and night at the surrounding dikes. There were no boats in the village or palm trees to climb if the earthen barriers broke. Farther upstream, the situation was even more critical. Whole villages had washed away. People clustered on patches of higher ground with their grain and stock. There was danger of starv
ation, for the flood would not recede for at least two weeks and there were few watercraft. Some people had fled to safety on the backs of water buffalo or on bundles of reeds. Belzoni was unable to do anything to help, for his small boat would have been swamped by a great press of people. But at Arment, farther upstream, they spent most of a day ferrying people to safety across the river. The fourth and last trip across the flooded stream brought the women to safety, “the last and most insignificant of their property, whose loss would have been less regretted than that of the cattle.”12
FIGURE 8.3 The Nile in flood, Giovanni Belzoni.
At Esna, they called on Ibrahim Bey, the governor, who received Belzoni very civilly and readily granted them a firman, but with strict instructions that they were not to mine for emeralds. As always, the Turks could not understand why anyone would be interested in ruins or stones and suspected some more mercenary motives. The chief miner, Muhammad Aga, who turned up at Edfu just after Belzoni’s arrival, shared the same suspicions. By this time, the local headman had arranged for camels and drivers with Sheik Abeda, the leader of the desert tribe through whose territory the route to the mines passed. Belzoni’s bargaining skills ensured camels at a piastre a day and a small wage for the drivers. But the next day he found the sheik less cooperative. Obviously, the chief miner had aired his suspicions, for he had pressed Belzoni to wait on his journey until his own return. Belzoni countered by insisting that the camels depart the same day, before the sheik had time to delay him further. On the afternoon of September 22, 1818, the caravan of sixteen camels, six of them laden with provisions, set out on a well-trodden desert trackway that had been in use for centuries.
Not much was known about Berenice. The city had first come into prominence in the third century BC, when Ptolemy II built the port in a small, sheltered bay protected from the prevailing strong northerly winds. From the sea captain’s point of view, off-loading at Berenice cut short the passage up the Red Sea against often blustery head winds, although the port itself was more than 400 kilometers (250 miles) from the Nile. The pharaoh also constructed a road from Berenice to Koptos on the Nile. A southern branch route joined the Nile at Edfu. Both assumed ever greater importance as the volume of Red Sea trade in elephants, precious metals, exotic stones, spices, and such luxuries as “singing boys” increased, especially after the monsoon trade of the Indian Ocean linked Alexandria with Arabia and South Asia in the first century BC.13