In the Valley of the Kings

by Daniel Meyerson

  Which was how Carter saw him the second time the two met: As desert winds covered Petrie with a fine layer of sand, the father of modern archaeology stood in an irrigation canal, naked under an umbrella. He had just finished soaking the salt off some ancient pots, and now he was submerged up to his shoulders in the river, trying to cool off.

  In this pose, he looked “rather like a water buffalo,” as Amelia Edwards, another witness of the nude Petrie, affectionately recalled. As director of the Egyptian Exploration Society, Ms. Edwards had much to do with Petrie; she fell in love with the bearded buffalo-scholar—though it was “as hopeless as loving a young obelisk,” she sighed in a letter to a friend.

  He was as single-minded and chaste as a monk. At least for the first half of his life, he was alone with his scarabs and pots and pyramids. Until he finally met his match in the brilliant and beautiful young Hilda Urlin, the only women he held in his arms were ones he dug up from tombs and burial pits.

  He was indifferent to everything except archaeology. Sleep was a waste of time. Clothing—another unfortunate necessity—must be worn until ragged. As for food: The young hopefuls who worked with him might learn much (Carter, Mace, Weigall, Quibel, Wainwright, Engelbach, and Brunton among them—the list is long). But they would suffer. They would sleep on straw pallets or wooden packing cases, and they would starve.

  “I have known him to knock a hole in a tin of sardines and drink the oil before opening it…. I can’t go on with Petrie I have got so weak and horrid from this beastly food,” Arthur Weigall wrote to his wife, a complaint echoed by a chorus of hungry young archaeologists.

  “Petrie was a man of forty-one with … the agility of a boy,” Charles Breasted remembered. “His clothes confirmed his universal reputation for being not only careless but slovenly and dirty. He was thoroughly unkempt, clad in ragged dirty shirt and trousers, and worn-out sandals…. He served a table so excruciatingly bad that only persons of iron constitution could survive it; even they had been known on occasion stealthily to leave his camp in order to assuage their hunger by sharing the comparatively luxurious beans and unleavened bread of the local fellahin [peasants]…. The fact remains that he not only miraculously survived the consistent practice of what he preached, but established in the end a record of maximum results for minimum expenditure which is not likely to be surpassed….”

  There were no tinned sardines, however, at the Hotel Royale, where Petrie was staying when he first met Carter. Though it was in a good quarter of Cairo, Ezbekia, it was not the exclusive, fashionable Shepherd’s Hotel. However, it had the same chef as Shepherd’s, as the man had saved up and gone into business for himself. Thus, Petrie’s visitors were treated to the last word in culinary refinements when they attended his nightly archaeological salon.

  The many distinguished scholars, the epigraphists and geologists, the linguists and historians and excavators, not to mention Petrie’s half-starved students—everyone—as the talk turned on mummy-bandaging techniques and nummulitic limestone, could gorge himself to his heart’s content under Petrie’s disapproving, fanatic eye.

  Carter remembered those gatherings in his journal. He was awed by the company and afraid of Petrie, “a man,” he noted, “who did not suffer fools.” It was a phrase Amelia Edwards also used about him, adding fondly that that was because “he was born more alive than most men.”

  Be that as it may, at these meetings Carter was silent while Petrie talked. Petrie was in his forties, while Carter was still in his teens, and the older man theorized, pronounced, and advised about everything. Everything! From the subtleties of scarab styles to excavation guards who snore to the name of the pharaoh of the Exodus. How to deal with ancient, fragile textiles, with carbonized papyri, and with fleas.

  Covering many subjects with lightning speed, Petrie held forth like an oracle in a cryptic, staccato style, backing into tables and overturning chairs when he became excited. Even the sound of his voice was oracular: It had a high and eerie quality, the way the Sibyls were said to have sounded in their trances. But though Petrie was, like them, a being possessed, there is a simpler explanation for his quavering, reedy tones—an act of violence he met with at the beginning of his career.

  “Exploring on foot and alone in the Sinai desert,” his colleague Gertrude Caton-Thompson related, “he was approached by three Bedouin in that empty land. He scented danger, and quickly threw his wallet by a backhand movement into a bush unobserved. They fell on him and nearly strangled him while he was searched. Then, empty handed, they went on their way, leaving him temporarily speechless,” his throat injured, his voice permanently changed.

  The young Petrie got up and—not forgetting to retrieve his wallet—continued his explorations in “that empty land.” It is a barren landscape, with red sandstone cliffs and deep gorges and endless sand dunes broken at long intervals by a lone flowering broom tree or sometimes, in the crevice of a boulder, a hardy, sweet-smelling herb.

  He had set out to study what he called the “unconsidered trifles” that would remain important to him throughout his career. Sinai’s turquoise mines yielded as much knowledge to him as a royal tomb (as would the alabaster quarries of Hatnub and the granite mines of the Hammamat).

  As he taught Carter, and as he would write later, after seventy years of digging (the times changed to confirm his ideas, not the other way around): “The observation of the small things had never been attempted…. The science of observation, of registration, of recording, was yet unthought of; nothing had a meaning unless it was a sculpture or a treasure.”

  Nothing escaped his eye in the desert: the ancient graffiti scrawled on cliffs and quarry walls; the wells dug millennia ago; the low stone huts of native slaves (foreign ones were simply worked to death); the signs of the religious life, such as votary steps carved into the mountains, simple altars, or sometimes a complete temple like the one at Serabit el Khadeem.

  Scratched on stone, an inscription read: “I traveled here with one thousand men behind me!” The size of an expedition to this land where nature is so hostile revealed a dynasty’s strength, its wealth, degree of organization, and the like. The ratio of soldiers to workers, even the chiseling technique on a discarded block, had meaning for Petrie: He could deduce much simply from knowing whether the workers were skilled or only peasants drafted during shommu, the season when the Nile inundated the land.

  Crude erotic drawings with holes drilled into the stone told of the soldiers’ desperation in the desert outposts. As did “dream books.” Left behind in the rubble, the ancient manuals interpreted dreams where men couple, almost unimaginably, with baboons, horses, donkeys, wolves, crocodiles, mice, birds, jerboas, serpents, foreigners, and two women together, all to the accompaniment of rattles and pipes and drums, the instruments themselves sometimes merging with the lovers, with harp strings stretched on phalli.

  Here, in the barren land of the quarries, inscriptions on stone recorded jubilant voices raised in self-praise. At a time so remote that Rome was merely a wild forest and Jerusalem an obscure Jebusite threshing floor, they proclaimed: “I hunted gazelles! I hunted lions! I made the name of this mountain famous! Because of me this land had fat bulls and oxen without number!”

  “Never happened the like to a servant of the king….”

  “In the beginning of my life I was excellent, but at the end no one could surpass me.”

  “Great was my praise with him [pharaoh]—more than a son, more than a brother. He allowed me to renew my power.”

  Then there were the rubbish heaps—how Petrie loved them! (Ancient ones, of course.) For they contained the remains of the daily life of the past, pottery especially.

  Petrie became known for his work with pottery. It was a passion with him, though he had made many more sensational discoveries: sandals and finger stalls in electrum (an alloy of silver and gold); a uraeus—the pharaoh’s protective cobra—fashioned in gold and lapis lazuli; a royal diadem, a circlet of flowers and reeds worked in gold a
nd jewels.

  In the western Delta, he had located and “cleared” (of sand and debris) the fortress where the prophet Jeremiah took refuge in Egypt when Jerusalem was destroyed in 587 BC. His find confirmed the biblical text down to a design in its courtyard.

  He had uncovered a stela with the first reference to the Jews (now in the Cairo Museum). It is a thirteenth century BC proclamation by Pharaoh Merenptah whose hieroglyphs read: “Israel is destroyed. Its seed is no more….” (On the other side was an even older text.)

  In the rubble of Sinai’s Serabit el Khadeem he had found a head of Queen Tiye, great royal wife of Amenhotep III and a power in her own right (mentioned in fourteenth century BC foreign correspondence). It was a marvel of its kind, the queen’s strong, pouting features and world-weary expression subtly caught in green stone.

  He had explored the hitherto sealed burial chambers of pyramids, discovered an unknown script (the Proto-Sinaitic), and dug up entire Roman cemeteries in Middle Egypt. All very well and good, but what was his greatest find? “The key to archaeology,” Petrie declared in his trembly, sibylline voice, “is pottery.”

  Its importance cannot be overestimated, he insisted to anyone who would listen—and Carter listened, never dreaming that before the end of the year, he himself would be searching for clues among broken pots and millennia-old dung heaps under Petrie’s guidance.

  Carter had come to Egypt to work as a mere copyist. There was no thought of anything more. But now, at the very beginning of his career, Petrie’s force and intellectual passion had begun to work on him. His conversation imparted a strange glamour to heaps of rotten cloth and beads and pots.

  In this new milieu, these nightly encounters with the excavating crowd, the boy was becoming intoxicated with the intense excitement of archaeology—without realizing where it was leading him, however. “I found him [Petrie] puzzling for me to understand,” he noted in his journal. “But obviously a man with both the confidence and the power to solve problems—in archaeological matters, a Sherlock Holmes…. But what interested me most was his recognition and love for fine art.”

  Fine art, though, was beside the point. Throughout his career, Carter sketched, drew, painted—when he was low on cash, he sold his watercolors; but art was not his calling. More important in his life were Petrie’s lessons in excavation, the accumulated practical experience of years of digging. He was, as Carter called him, a Sherlock Holmes, down to his magnifying glass and his “snooping”—his analytic method of considering the smallest clues.

  Petrie did what nobody else would think of doing with cartonnage, for example (a kind of ancient papier-mâché made from “scrap” papyri; compressed and plastered over, the papyri were then molded into mummy’s masks, full-figure casts, and so on). He soaked the cartonnage, separating the layers one by one. The papyri emerged “none the worse for their pasting and plastering”—ancient moments frozen in time. Just one such “soaked” cast yielded a will disinheriting a drunken son; tax bills; scenes of a lost play by Euripides; and a letter by a terrified royal gooseherd confiding that he didn’t have enough geese for Ptolemy’s upcoming feast.

  Petrie would teach Carter the tricks of the trade—how to treat thousands of beads, complex designs sewn onto a cloth that had rotted away (hot beeswax, applied spoonful by spoonful, preserved the beads in place). Or how to reward workers for finds (pay too little and they might simply steal them; pay too much and they might bring in outside things and plant them on the dig).

  He would lecture Carter on necessary “shortness of nail and toughness of skin” and on the archaeologist’s duty to conserve what he uncovered. He would show him how to move heavy stones; and how to dodge rock slides in unstable tunnels; and the best way of treating corroded silver and bronze. These were the lessons that would be crucial to Carter, not Petrie’s casual remarks about fine art, his after-dinner—or, rather, after-sardine—musings about Raphael or Botticelli.

  But if Carter was in the dark about his future, Petrie also misjudged him. Even after the two had begun to work together, Petrie delivered the verdict (in his journal): “It is no use to me to work him up as an excavator,” adding that Carter’s real interests were natural history and art.

  Which was often the way with beginnings, as anyone can see who watches “the stealthy convergence of human lots,” as the novelist George Eliot so perfectly put it. “A slow preparation of effects from one life on another…. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.”

  Carter’s “cast of characters” so far had been made up of provincial Norfolk farmers and tradesmen (with a few aristocratic “extras” thrown in). But now a new major player must be announced in bold letters: Enter William Flinders Petrie, mentor extraordinaire, arms filled with pots.

  A Petrie excavation found him piecing together thousands of potsherds like a huge puzzle. Various factors came into play: how they were made, whether by hand or by wheel, for example; their colors; the materials of which they were composed—Nile mud, sandy, micaceous clay, and so forth. But most important of all, he studied the pot’s style, which enabled him to give it an accurate date, thus also dating the site or tomb in which it was found.

  Or so he claimed, his critics scoffed, dismissing his theories out of hand and ignoring his evidence, pottery painstakingly collected over the years at remote ancient sites. “Even the British Museum,” Petrie wrote to Ms. Edwards, “has practically rejected [his] collections of perfect examples [of pots], all dated.” His undramatic though crucial finds were stored away in some back room of the museum—just as later (in 1907) the simple clay pots buried near Tut’s then undiscovered tomb were disregarded and stashed away in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. (These pots will be written up archaeologically only in 1941.) If Carter immediately understood their significance, “reading” them correctly, it was in no small measure due to Petrie’s training.

  Foremost among Petrie’s critics was Édouard Naville. Scholar, linguist, and clergyman, Naville was also excavating in Egypt at the turn of the century for the Egypt Exploration Society (later Carter will also work under him). He sighed with patronizing pity over Petrie’s unhappy pottery obsession, his fatal error, a mind led astray, and so on. Pottery styles varied according to geographic region, not time period, Naville insisted. For good measure, Naville added that Petrie’s detailed recording methods were as absurd as “noting all the raisins in a pudding.”

  But could Naville be objective on any subject connected to Petrie? For Petrie had privately called Naville’s excavations lazy, incompetent, expensive, and destructive. Which they certainly were—or rather, to put it more charitably, Naville’s talents lay in scholarship and architectural reconstruction, not excavation. An entire papyri library from the time of the Ptolemies, ca. 300 BC, for example, crumbled into useless fragments in Naville’s clumsy hands. Confidentially, Petrie had requested that the Egyptian Exploration Fund deny Naville permission to work on the more important sites. But nothing remained private or confidential in Egypt.

  After that, only an angel would support Petrie and agree that pottery styles could be chronological—and the genteel, egoistic Naville was no angel.

  In truth, Petrie could sometimes be wrong. He refused to revise his date of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, putting it a whole Sothic cycle1* too early (1,460 years)—and anyone who tried to contradict him had better be prepared to make a run for it.

  He was wrong again about the predynastic Faiyum and Badarian cultures, tracing them incorrectly to the Paleolithic Solutrean. What can you say to such a man? shrugged the offended Naville.

  Petrie was stubborn in his opinions and sometimes equally foolish in his economies. It was a capital crime to discard anything on a Petrie dig. Pity the neophyte who threw away an empty tin can after dining on its contents. (“Petrie is silly beyond human endurance!” exclaimed Reverend Chester, a visiting clergyman-antiquarian who was distressed by Carter’s appearance. Fortunately, another visitor [
a medical man] arrived in time to restore Carter’s health with a “prescription” of wine, preserves, and Valentine meat juice.)

  But though many charges could be leveled against the father of modern archaeology, when it came to pots Petrie was on the money. For Carter, it was a good introduction to “the fight”—or the vendetta, as Petrie called archaeology. That is to say, the tangle of personal and professional motives was as much a part of turn-of-the-century archaeology as mules or magnetometers.

  1* Every 1,460 years, the star Sirius rises at the same time as the sun at the beginning of the Nile inundation (the Nile’s yearly flooding ceased only in modern times with the construction of the Aswan dam). This phenomenon, now confirmed by computer analysis, was observed by the Egyptian priests, who marked the occurrence in their chronicles as a Sothic cycle.

  TEMPERAMENTALLY, CARTER WAS SUITED TO THIS ROUGH AND ready milieu of scholarly jealousy and backbiting. Especially as he was an outsider, he saw early on that he would need self-belief and stamina if he was to make his way in the archaeological world.

  Both of which qualities he possessed in good measure. When attacked, he gave as good as he got—and there were many attacks. Carter was embroiled in quarrels from his very first assignment until he drew his last breath—and afterward as well. Amid much head shaking, Tut’s glass headrest was found among Carter’s possessions, along with gold rings and steatite scarabs from the tomb, gold nails from the funeral shrine, and gold rosettes from the pall—Carter’s due, less than his due, he would have claimed: mere mementos! If he had been alive, he would not have hesitated to go to court and create an international incident to argue his side. The ancient objects were returned to Egypt in the diplomatic pouch, however, and placed in the Cairo Museum by the indignant King Farouk (himself famous for sticky fingers, royal indignation notwithstanding).