The Rape of the Nile

by Brian Fagan

  A few days later Mohammed led a small party to the site of the cache. Maspero himself was out of Egypt, so Émile Brugsch (brother of Heinrich) went along as the official representative of the government. Brugsch was understandably nervous as he climbed the steep hillside to the deep shaft where the cache lay, for he feared reprisals from the villagers. Armed to the teeth, he was lowered down the shaft on a long rope with a supply of candles to light the chamber. He had been led to believe that Ahmed’s find was a tomb of wealthy officials, but an extraordinary sight lay before him in the darkness. Maspero quoted from Brugsch’s report:

  FIGURE 13.1 Gaston Maspero, Émile Brugsch (bearded, right), and Mohammed Abd el-Rasul at the mouth of the Deir el-Bahri cleft (picture from Century Magazine, May 1887). “As we ascended from the tomb, I grouped my companions at its mouth, and once again caused the camera to secure a link of history. Professor Maspero reclined on the rocks at the right; Émile Brugsch Bey stood at the palms-log; and Mohammed was posed in front holding the very rope in his hand which had served in hoisting royalty from its long-hidden resting-place.”

  The Arabs had disinterred a whole vault of Pharaohs. And what Pharaohs! Perhaps the most illustrious in the history of Egypt, Thutmose III and Seti I, Ahmose the Liberator and Ramses II the Conqueror. Monsieur Émile Brugsch, coming so suddenly into such an assemblage, thought that he must be the victim of a dream, and like him, I still wonder if I am not dreaming when I see and touch what were the bodies of so many personages of whom we never expected to know more than the names.8

  Bronze libation vessels and canopic jars lay on the floor of the chamber. Coffins of eminent queens lay jumbled in heaps.

  When he had recovered from his astonishment, Brugsch acted with dispatch. He hired three hundred workmen to work on the clearing and transportation of the precious finds from their hiding place, under the careful supervision of the official party. The government steamer el-Menshieh was pressed into service to carry the precious cargo to Cairo. Within forty-eight short hours the first batch of the forty pharaohs and a host of precious antiquities were on board and on their way downstream. As the steamer left Thebes, so Maspero tells us, the women followed the boat wailing and the men fired off their rifles in honor of the ancient monarchs. Other more cynical observers wondered if the locals were bewailing the loss of a highly satisfactory source of income. Later, some of the mummies were unwrapped and archaeologists were able to gaze on the features of the most famous monarchs of ancient Egypt. Seti I was the best preserved, with a “fine kingly head.” “A calm and gentle smile still played over his mouth, and the half-open eye lids allowed a glimpse to be seen from under the lashes of an apparently moist and glistening line, the reflection from the white porcelain eyes let into the orbit at the time of burial.”9 Belzoni would have been both fascinated and pleased that the owner of his most spectacular discovery had survived for posterity.

  ::

  The incident of the pharaohs’ mummies caused Maspero to redouble his vigilance. He employed extra guards and instituted new controls to restrict the activities of dealers and the agents of major European museums who were their principal clients. But this did not deter ambitious European or American museums. They certainly infuriated Sir Evelyn Baring, Maspero, and British as well as French officialdom, an impressive enemy list in the changing intellectual climate of the late nineteenth century. Many of them resorted to underhanded dealing to satisfy their backers.

  Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (1857–1934) was perhaps the most audacious of the breed. He started his long career as assistant keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities in the British Museum. Budge was a constant visitor to Egypt, the Sudan, and Mesopotamia, where he bought antiquities for the museum. He was also a prolific excavator and writer. His collection methods combined bribery, trickery, and sheer audacity, and were outrageous even by contemporary standards. Budge shrugged off this criticism under the guise of loyalty to the British Museum and its great aims.

  FIGURE 13.2 The mummy of pharaoh Seti I, Nineteenth Dynasty. Ken Garrett/National Geographic Image Collection.

  A short, pugnacious man of aggressive and unattractive personality, Budge first visited Egypt on a collecting trip in 1886. He had acquired a working knowledge of Egyptian antiquities and their market value from Samuel Birch, keeper of Oriental antiquities at the British Museum, who had become a famous Egyptologist without ever visiting the Nile.10 Armed with this knowledge and 250 pounds sterling, Budge arrived to a dusty reception from Sir Evelyn Baring, who had been greatly irritated by the recent activities of British archaeologists and dealers.11 Budge was undeterred and determined to work by devious means, through the dealers, if necessary. His deviousness infuriated the authorities.

  Soon Budge had made useful official and unofficial contacts in Cairo and Luxor. His illegal agents cleared tombs, most of them admittedly already half empty. Some of the fine things from them had “somehow disappeared,” but Budge was able to lay his hands on quite a few nice pieces. Senior military officers joined his excursions around Aswan. They mobilized entire companies of royal engineers to help in excavations and to provide tackle for moving large statues. In one instance, Budge collected eight hundred ancient Egyptian skulls for a physical anthropologist at Cambridge and stacked them at one end of his hut to await packing. The local hyenas were so eager to get at the heads that they broke into the hut and stole several dozen of them. The only way Budge could export the skulls was by declaring them to customs as “bone manure.” “When dealing with customs’ officials,” Budge remarked, “I discovered that, after all, there is a good deal in a name.”12

  The field representative of the Bulaq Museum unwittingly enhanced Budge’s reputation by cautioning the locals that the visitor was a wealthy and unscrupulous collector. The dealers promptly offered him all manner of antiquities in the privacy of his hut at night. Such was the reputation of the British Museum that the dealers would even give Budge a valuable piece and tell him to send the money from England later, often funneled through the hands of a cooperative Protestant missionary. Many of his best acquisitions came through the British consul at Thebes, who introduced Budge to the Rasul family. He was regaled with graphic accounts of the tortures used to extract the secret of the Deir el-Bahri cache from them. By the end of the trip he had acquired twenty-four large cases of antiquities that were covertly exported, despite furious objections from Sir Evelyn Baring and the Antiquities Service, simply by placing them under military control. The military, which had little interest in archaeology, was all for excavation and archaeology. Like Budge, it considered the local dealers as reasonable men trying to make a living and the Antiquities Service as a corrupt body whose members sold antiquities for themselves. The trustees of the British Museum passed a special minute in April 1887 commending Budge for his “energy.”

  Most of Budge’s collecting took place in Mesopotamia, but his Egyptian exploits were daring enough. On his next visit to Cairo, the Antiquities Service had him watched by the police, who were instructed to report the names of any dealers who visited him. Budge gaily set off on his buying tour with the police in tow. At Akhmîm, upstream of Asyut, he bought some fine Coptic manuscripts from a French resident, who arranged a large supper for the police while the two collectors transacted their business.

  There were further complications at Luxor. Budge was taken in the depths of night to a tomb on the western bank, where an important find of papyri had been made, including one large roll 23.7 meters (78 feet) long, a complete Book of the Dead, written and painted for “Ani, the royal scribe, the registrar of the offerings of all the gods, overseer of the granaries of the lords of Abydos, and scribe of the offerings of the Lords of Thebes.” Budge recorded the seal on the rolled papyrus, then carefully unrolled a portion of it. “I was amazed at the beauty and freshness of the colors of the human figures and animals, which in the dim light of the candles and the heated air of the tomb, seemed to be alive.”13 Several other important papyri came fr
om the same location. Budge secured the lot, sealed them in tin containers, and hid them in a safe place.

  FIGURE 13.3 From Ani’s Book of the Dead. The soul of Ani leaves the body in the form of a bird with a human head. In its claws is the symbol of eternity. Bettman/Corbis.

  A few hours later, while drinking coffee with the dealer who had taken him to the papyri, Budge found himself under arrest. The Antiquities Service had placed guards on every dealer’s house in Luxor at the order of Eugène Grébaut, Maspero’s successor as director.14 Grébaut’s runner, who brought the news of the arrest, revealed that the director’s boat was stuck on a sandbank in the Nile 19 kilometers (12 miles) away. It so happened that the captain’s daughter was being married that day. Naturally, the boat could not be refloated successfully. Grébaut then tried to ride to Luxor, but no donkeys were available. The villagers had driven them into the fields so that they could not be hired.

  Soon news arrived that the steamer had been refloated, that Grébaut was on his way. The chief of police now sealed off all the dealers’ houses, including a small house abutting the wall of the Luxor Hotel, where Budge’s antiquities lay. At first the dealers tried to get the guards drunk on brandy, but they steadfastly refused to leave their posts. So they commended the guards on their fidelity and resorted to another stratagem. A crew of hefty gardeners entered the hotel garden at sunset, dug a tunnel under the two-foot-thick wall of the hotel that adjoined the house, and entered the basement full of antiquities through a carefully shored-up tunnel. “As I watched the work with the manager it seemed to me that the gardeners were particularly skilled house-breakers, and that they must have had much practice,” remarked Budge proudly.

  The whole operation unfolded in silence, without alerting the guards on the roof of the house. The manager provided a hearty meal for them while the antiquities vanished through the tunnel. “In this way,” boasted Budge, “we saved the papyrus of Ani, and all the rest of my acquisitions from the officials of the Service of Antiquities, and all Luxor rejoiced.”15 One cannot entirely blame Budge for his cynicism. Grébaut’s own staff members were selling the antiquities he had collected on the way upstream to local dealers and spiriting them off the steamer while the director ate dinner. Budge was soon in Cairo, where, with a final touch of irony, he managed to arrange for the police, who were watching him, to carry his precious boxes of papyri and tablets into the city. The very same day the papyri were on their way to England in official military baggage.

  Budge’s activities were perhaps only typical of many European museum officials of the time. He developed a healthy contempt for the Antiquities Service and its servants. Although he got on well with Maspero, and sometimes worked in collaboration with the museum, his relationships with dealers over the years proved far more rewarding. Even the Egyptian Gazette disapproved of Budge, describing him as being well known as a somewhat unscrupulous collector of antiquities for his museum. His tactic was to pay fair prices and to spend plenty of money. With his encouragement, dealers duly ransacked Predynastic cemeteries after scientific digs had been completed. Coptic manuscripts, acquired after “much talking and coffee drinking,” made the British Museum one of the finest repositories of Coptic materials in Europe.

  Despite stricter enforcement of antiquities regulations by an infant service that was now growing into manhood, Budge’s expeditions were models of illegal purchase, excavation, and what can only be described as dubious archaeological tactics. His rationale for wholesale removal and purchase of antiquities was simple: he was attempting to prevent the destruction of ancient Egypt. “The principal robbers of tombs and wreckers of mummies have been the Egyptians themselves,” he wrote. “The outcry against the archaeologist is foolish, and the accusations made against him are absurd. If one archaeologist won’t buy, another will, and if no archaeologist will buy, then the owners of the mummies will break them up and burn them piecemeal.” Then, in a splendidly pompous piece of logic, he went on: “Whatever blame may be attached to individual archaeologists for removing mummies from Egypt, every unprejudiced person who knows anything of the subject must admit that when once a mummy has passed into the care of the Trustees, and is lodged in the British Museum, it has a far better chance of being preserved there than it could possibly have in any tomb, royal or otherwise, in Egypt.”

  After a lengthy description of the dreadful fate that could await a mummy, he continued: “The Egyptian prayed fervently and unceasingly against all these possible, nay probable, evils, as any one can see who takes the trouble to read the charms buried with him. In the British Museum he is placed beyond the reach of all such evils.”16 Furthermore, Budge added, the identity and deeds of the mummy would acquire far more exposure through public but safe display, photographs, guides, and picture postcards. In enlisting the support of the ancient Egyptians themselves, Budge flattered himself that he had moral right on his side and that looting Egyptian sites was entirely legitimate, provided something was left in the Egyptian collections for the local people to gaze upon and study.

  ::

  Auguste Mariette had enforced a virtual monopoly on excavation along the Nile, which effectively stopped foreign excavations. As his ban came into effect, the Germans were revolutionizing excavation methods at Olympia in Greece and elsewhere, working with architects and photographers to record rather than just excavate sites for their spectacular contents. Much of Mariette’s policing efforts fended off local people who continued to sell antiquities and quarry temples for their stone, burned to produce lime. He is on record as telling a villager in 1880 that he could not quarry the pyramids of Giza for building stone.17 At the same time, he was stopping the khedive from giving away obelisks that were much coveted by foreign governments to adorn their capitals. Mariette protested that only five remained in Egypt and prevailed on the cabinet to forbid the export of any more “monuments.”

  Mariette was instrumental in setting up the Bulaq Museum, where he planned to attract not only European visitors but Egyptians as well. Egypt should “love” its monuments. His museum guidebook was translated into Arabic, complete with invocations to the Prophet. By now, there were some books in Arabic on ancient Egypt. Rifaa al-Tahtawi wrote a history, Anwar tawfiq aljalil fi akhmar Misr wa-tawtihiq Bani Ismail (Glorious light on the story of Egypt and the authentication of the sons of Ismael), which appeared in 1868. Egypt, said the author, in the time of the pharaohs had been “the mother of all the nations of the world.”18 The pharaohs occupied only one-fifth of al-Tahtawi’s long work, but there was now a survey of ancient Egypt available for a local audience.

  The khedive Ismail and educational reformer Cli Mubarak wanted to train Egyptians to work in the Antiquities Service and museum.19 Mariette opposed such a move, fearing for his job. But Mubarak offered Heinrich Brugsch a five-year contract to direct the School of Egyptology, which opened in a dilapidated villa near the museum in 1870. The experiment lasted just those five years before the school closed. Mariette derailed the experiment, banning students from copying inscriptions in the museum and hiring a Swiss inspector, who wrote of the school’s deficiencies.

  Ahmad Kamal was one of the school’s students, and took to Egyptology with enthusiasm.20 He was forced to become a teacher and translator, until he won the post of secretary-treasurer at the Bulaq Museum soon after Mariette’s death. Maspero assigned him to run a small school of Egyptology at the museum. Its only graduates became antiquities inspectors. In 1889, Eugène Grébaut reluctantly appointed him assistant curator, purely to make sure that a British Egyptologist did not get the job. Kamal struggled to establish himself as a serious Egyptologist, despite Maspero’s limited support. He was not allowed to excavate, under a policy that forbade non-Egyptologists and those without an official affiliation from digging. Besides, Maspero believed that Egyptians wanted to dig only for treasure and not out of scientific interest. Despite years of hard work, Kamal achieved only limited recognition, retiring in 1914 after lecturing on ancient Egypt at the new Egyp
tian University in 1880–1889. He also taught Egyptology at the Higher Teacher’s School, but the Antiquities Service refused to hire his graduates.

  Kamal was alone. He had no obvious Egyptian successor. His son went to Oxford University in 1912 to study Egyptology, but ended up becoming a physician. The ubiquitous Lord Cromer set the tone, when he remarked, “The Egyptians are as yet [not] civilized enough to care about the preservation of their ancient monuments.”21 His assumption became imperial policy until well after World War I.

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  “A Boating-Trip Interspersed with Ruins”

  Here Osiris and his worshipers lived; here Abraham and Moses

  walked; here Aristotle came; here, later, Mahomet learnt the best of

  his religion and studied Christianity; here, perhaps, our Saviour’s

  Mother brought her little son to open his eyes to the light.

  FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE,

  Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile, 1849–1850

  By the 1870s, Egypt had become a fashionable place for a winter vacation among both the wealthy and the less affluent. Regular steamship service between Italy and Alexandria, with a schedule that was as regular as clockwork, now made it possible to travel in three and one-half days a distance that had taken the fastest Roman galley six days. Thanks to Thomas Cook and others, a trip up the Nile had become a safe, if slightly exotic, experience.