The Nile

by Toby Wilkinson

  IN THE FINAL STRETCH of valley before the Theban plain, the Nile broadens out to flow between dramatic cliffs. On the east bank, beyond lush banana plantations, a towering escarpment soon gives way to distant, hazy, age-eroded bluffs, while on the west bank the limestone cliffs come right up to the river’s edge. Here, the most prominent features in the landscape are two hills running parallel to the Nile. Heralding the approach to Thebes and its riches, in ancient times they marked the border between the deep south and the Thebaïd. They gave their name to the local settlement: ancient Inerty and modern Gebelein, both meaning “two hills.”

  The southern hill, closest to the Nile, has a forbidding, jagged outline. Its eastern flank is steep, inaccessible and scarred with ravines. Access to the summit is therefore via a narrow, stony track which winds up the hill’s gentler, western side. The panorama from the top is spectacular: a commanding prospect of the river to the south and north as it rounds a gentle bend, and a clear view of the east bank. Little wonder that Gebelein in ancient times was a site of strategic importance, guarding the southern approaches to Thebes. To sanctify its significance, Egypt’s early kings built a temple to the protector-goddess Hathor on the summit of the southern hill. This small stone shrine, far removed in scale and setting from the grander temples of Upper Egypt, was none the less visited by rulers throughout the dynasties.

  Walking back down the hill, through the modern village of Gebelein, is like stepping back in time. Ragged barefoot children play in the dusty streets, which they share with chickens and stray dogs. Goats graze on scraps of thorny scrub and bundles of fodder dumped casually by the roadside. Donkeys are the main means of transport, supplemented by the odd pickup truck. The people are shy but curious, cheerful despite their poverty, and welcoming to visitors, despite an initial reticence. At the arrival of our tour group, the children soon organise themselves into a gaggle, begging to have their photograph taken, while other villagers simply come out to gaze at the strangers in their midst. Foreigners are a rarity here. Yet at one particular moment in Egyptian history—the civil war at the start of the third millennium BC—Gebelein was home to a remarkable community of immigrants. Their actions not only contributed to the fortunes of their adopted village but shaped the destiny of the whole of Egypt.

  Their stories came to light during excavations at the northern of the two hills that give Gebelein its name. This lies further back from the river, about a mile from its southern counterpart. No temple adorned its summit. Instead, its sides and the adjacent low desert were used as the community’s burial ground, for thousands of years. Hundreds of tomb shafts and graves still pock-mark its surface. Among the objects recovered from them, by Italian archaeologists in the 1930s, were the oldest known scrap of painted linen, decorated with scenes of a rowing boat and a hippopotamus hunt; and a unique stone dish carved with the image of an anteater. Both artefacts give us a sense of life as it has been lived at Gebelein since the earliest times, framed by the river and the desert. Alongside these burials from Egypt’s prehistoric period, another group of graves shed light on an equally fascinating episode: the civil war that ravaged Upper Egypt after the end of the Pyramid Age. The first salvoes in this conflict were fired near Gebelein, when a local leader tried to extend his writ. What started as a minor dispute between rival governors soon escalated into an all-out fight for territory and then into a battle for the throne of Egypt. On all sides of the conflict, society was swiftly militarised: an intact burial from Gebelein includes weapons (bows and arrows) alongside the usual grave goods. And all sides looked to the outside for military support.

  In ancient Egypt, anyone wishing to raise an army quickly naturally turned to Nubia. The Nile Valley beyond the First Cataract was relatively impoverished compared to Egypt, and its men were only too willing to fight in anyone’s army for a price. As it happens, the Nubians were also expert archers: a bow was the very sign used to denote Lower Nubia in ancient Egyptian writing. The combination of poverty and proficiency with the bow made the Nubians the perfect mercenaries. In Egypt’s civil war, Nubians were signed up by all factions.

  One particular cohort was stationed at Gebelein. Gravestones from the cemetery record the names and accomplishments of members of this expatriate community. A soldier called Qedes is typical. He describes himself as “an excellent warrior who acted with his strong arm at the forefront of his troop”11 and claims that, “As a runner I surpassed this whole town, Nubians and Upper Egyptians (alike).”12 Such boasts came naturally to the ancient Egyptians and are commonplace among their funerary inscriptions. To this extent, Qedes had become fully acculturated. But what is remarkable about him and his fellow mercenaries is the way in which they chose to depict themselves on their gravestones: not as Egyptians, but as Nubians, with distinctive clothing, coiffures and facial features. In ancient Egypt, the general rule was that anyone who lived like an Egyptian was regarded as an Egyptian, and accepted as part of the community. This makes the case of the Gebelein mercenaries even more remarkable. Buried in the Egyptian manner, but retaining their Nubian identity, these soldiers from the upper reaches of the Nile Valley must have enjoyed considerable renown among the local inhabitants, so much so that they consciously chose to retain and celebrate aspects of their distinctive cultural identity.

  Today, once again, southern Egypt is home to immigrants from the upper Nile—not seeking their fortune in warfare but fleeing it. Since the start of the Sudanese civil war in the 1990s, some four million illegal immigrants have poured into Egypt. Yet the Egyptian police who are ordered to round them up and deport them on planes back to Khartoum generally turn a blind eye. Egyptians feel a special affinity for the Sudanese—“They are our cousins,” explained my guide—and besides, “they do the dirty jobs.”13

  Beyond Gebelein, the floodplain broadens out on the west bank, and much of the land is given over to the cultivation of sugar cane. This has brought employment to the region but also unexpected hazards. During the Islamist insurgency of the 1990s, extremists used the tall fields of sugar cane as hiding places from which to attack convoys of passing tourists. The Egyptian government therefore ordered that a swathe of land some five to ten yards deep be left uncultivated at the edge of any field bordering a road. Although the insurgency has been largely defeated, the restriction remains in force, accounting for one of the more curious features of the rural landscape in this part of Egypt. The presence of tourists is, of course, the result of proximity to Luxor and the monuments of ancient Thebes. Those world-famous temples and tombs eclipse all other antiquities in the region, and few visitors venture even a few miles south of the main tourist sights.

  However, between Gebelein and Thebes, one site has a worthy place in the annals of Egyptian history. In classical times, Hermonthis (modern Armant) was known principally for its temple to Isis. Here, Cleopatra built a “birth-house” to celebrate the birth of her son by Julius Caesar, Caesarion. The Romans added baths and a town wall. The history of Armant, however, goes back much further. A temple was founded here in the New Kingdom, and gained a special significance from its association with a long line of sacred bulls.

  The ancient Egyptians, especially in the final phases of pharaonic civilisation, were obsessed with animal worship. Everywhere they looked in the natural world they saw divine manifestations. Cats were revered as sacred to the goddess Bastet, ibises as representatives of the god Thoth. Jackals, baboons and even fish were kept in special enclosures to be worshipped, mummified and buried as acts of piety. At Kom Ombo, it was crocodiles for Sobek; at Edfu, falcons for Horus; and at Armant, it was bulls for Ra. Mummifying and burying bulls was a considerable undertaking, and an entire underground catacomb was excavated at Armant to receive the embalmed bodies of these great beasts. The so-called Buchis bulls were buried with full honours, including gravestones describing significant events in their lives (such as delivering oracles, curing eye infections and engaging in bullfights). The bulls’ mothers were buried nearby in a separate vault. This s
trange practice was carried out continuously at Armant for a period of six centuries, from the reign of Egypt’s last native pharaoh until the persecutions of the Roman Emperor Diocletian.

  That we know so much—or anything at all—about the curious history of Armant is due to the dedication and munificence of an unlikely patron of Egyptology. Outside the world of archaeology, the name of Robert Mond (1867–1938) is primarily associated with industrial chemicals. Born in Cheshire in 1867, he followed in the family business, taking over from his German-Jewish immigrant father the factory that had grown from humble beginnings to become the largest producer of soda in the world. (Mond senior and his business partner were the first industrialists in England to reward their workers with one week’s annual holiday with double pay.) Robert expanded the Mond interests, becoming chairman of a nickel company with mines in Ontario, Canada. He was elected Honorary Secretary for life of the Davy–Faraday Laboratory at the Royal Institution, and was a founder and benefactor of various learned societies. So he might have remained—a distinguished chemist and philanthropist—but for a serious illness contracted in 1902, soon after the birth of his second daughter. Like many wealthy Englishmen of his time and situation, he was advised by his doctor to spend the next few winters in Egypt.

  For a man such as Robert Mond, this necessitated finding an outlet for his energies. So began a lifelong interest in Egyptian archaeology. (It is a nice coincidence that the word “chemistry” is derived from “alchemy,” an Arabic formulation from the Greek chemeia, “the Egyptian art.”) From his steam-dahabiya moored off the west bank, Mond excavated at Thebes for many years, during which he discovered several tombs and paid for the restoration and conservation of many more. During this time he amassed a fine collection of Egyptian antiquities which he displayed in his home in Cavendish Square, London, in a huge room decorated to resemble a pharaoh’s palace.

  By the winter of 1925 Mond was growing restless and in search of a new challenge. In the early weeks of 1926, he set out from Thebes with his archaeological assistant to prospect for a new site. They hit upon Armant, just ten miles south, whose ancient history was then almost entirely unknown. In three years of excavation under Mond’s personal direction, and several more under his patronage, the burials of the Buchis bulls and the other ruins of ancient Armant were brought to light. A job on the dig team at Armant was a plum posting: with so generous a benefactor, conditions were more comfortable than on other excavations. At Christmas 1928, for example, Mond had two enormous food hampers sent from Fortnum & Mason in London. At his own expense, he had a paved road constructed along the ten miles from Thebes to Armant so that he could visit the excavations two or three times a week by car, inspect the work and record progress. Mond was just as energetic and progressive when it came to publishing his results. For the five volumes of his seasons at Armant, he enlisted the help of sixty-nine scholars and scientists, a multi-disciplinary team of specialists that set a new standard for Egyptology.

  Thanks to the efforts and largesse of Robert Mond, Armant is better known than many similar sites in the southern Nile Valley. What his excavations showed is that Armant was never a major centre of culture or politics, but despite—or because of—that relative insignificance, it remained in continuous occupation from prehistoric times to the present day, an unbroken record stretching back some five thousand years. It was the site, successively, of a pharaonic temple, Ptolemaic birth-house, Roman shrine and Coptic church, while today an Islamic cemetery covers much of the ruins. Its modern name Armant is merely an Arabisation of Hermonthis, which in turn preserves the name of the ancient Theban war-god Montu. Such are the continuities in this part of Egypt: modest communities that encapsulate the Nile Valley’s long and colourful history.

  It is a place that strikes you into silence.1

  —AMELIA EDWARDS

  For many visitors to Egypt, the Nile is at its most entrancing and evocative as it flows majestically past the city of Luxor, its course unchanged since the days of Tutankhamun, Ramesses the Great and the Ptolemies—all of whom arrived here by river to moor at the quays of ancient Thebes. Now, as then, reflections of the rosy Theban Hills looming in the distance are captured in the Nile’s broad waters. During the day, ferries ply the river, transporting goods, people and animals from shore to shore. The hills of the west bank, in ancient times the realm of the dead, retain an aura of mystery, belying their status as one of the great tourist destinations of the world. While the riverside of the west bank has sprouted an accretion of modern hotels, restaurants and shops to cater for visitors, beyond these, across the floodplain green with sugar-cane fields, the landscape presents a timeless picture of towering hills, dotted with tomb shafts.

  The east bank, by contrast, offers an entirely man-made vista. Multi-decked tourist cruisers and traditional feluccas line the quays, several boats deep, jostling for the best position. Above them, a broad, paved promenade runs along the river’s edge, backed by a busy road jammed with coaches, hooting taxis, belching pick-up trucks and horse-drawn caleches. On the far side of the corniche, hotels, shops and offices create an artificial landscape of concrete and brick. West and east, timelessness and modernity. And linking the two, connecting past and present, the constant Nile, the lifeblood of Thebes and of Egypt. As the sun sets each evening, the river turns a deep, inky blue with ripples of burnt orange, heralding the end of another daily cycle.

  LUXOR IS BEST APPRECIATED from the Nile. As my boat arrives from the south, borne along gently on the river’s current, the city, with its numerous sights, unfolds like a panorama. Arriving at Luxor over a century ago, Amelia Edwards described the scene thus:

  The top of another pylon [gate-tower]; the slender peak of an obelisk; a colonnade of giant pillars half-buried in the soil; the white houses of the English, American, and Prussian Consuls, each with its flagstaff and ensign; a steep slope of sandy shore; a background of mud walls and pigeon-towers; a foreground of native boats and gaily-painted dahabeeyahs lying at anchor—such, as we sweep by, is our first panoramic view of this famous village.2

  Today, the accumulations of centuries have been cleared from around the temple pillars and the houses of the Western consuls have gone, but otherwise the view remains remarkably similar. Certainly, the experience of modern visitors on stepping ashore at the quay of Luxor is unchanged in 130 years: “the children screaming for backshish; the dealers exhibiting strings of imitation scarabs.”3

  Above all, Luxor is a city of ancient monuments, of spectacular temples with their gate-towers and columned halls. To the ancient Greeks, it was “hundred-gated Thebes,” to Egypt’s Arab conquerors “the castles” (al-Uqsur, the origin of the city’s modern name). An anonymous Venetian who reached Luxor in 1589 called its temples the only buildings in Egypt worthy of admiration, eclipsing in his mind even the pyramids. In exploring this city of wonders and its remarkable history, there is no better place to start than the monument which still stands at the heart of things, Luxor Temple itself. History has not been particularly kind to Luxor’s defining edifice. The original “southern sanctuary” (the temple’s ancient name) now stands next to the city’s busiest roundabout, the last vestiges of sanctity drowned out by the din of traffic. From the roadside pavement, as I try desperately to fend off hawkers and caleche-drivers, it is difficult to recapture that sense of awe and wonder, of majesty and mystery, that cloaked the temple in its heyday; difficult to imagine the temple standing proud over the southern city, a monument to the institution of divine kingship. Luxor Temple is far better appreciated from the river. From this vantage point, the temple’s undulating, elongated layout of courts and gate-towers (“pylons” to Egyptologists) is clearly discernible, running parallel to the Nile, with later additions along its northern axis. From the river, it is easier, too, to block out the modern intrusions and focus on the ancient stones.

  Most pharaonic temples were laid out facing the river, both for ease of access—ancient Egyptian kings routinely travelled by boat; w
hen they wished to disembark at a particular place, the royal barque would moor at a dock directly in front of the main temple—and for symbolic reasons, to emphasise their connection with the life-giving force of the Nile. But Luxor Temple was designed from the outset as an annexe (albeit a rather grand one) of the larger Karnak Temple, a mile and a half to the north. So it is that the main entrance of Luxor Temple faces directly towards Karnak, rather than towards the Nile. And what an entrance it is! For the façade of Luxor Temple is everyone’s archetypal Egyptian monument, its massive pylon fronted by colossal royal statues and obelisks. Or, rather, obelisk. For the most jarring feature of the temple’s modern appearance is its lack of symmetry. Where on the east side of the entrance there is an eighty-foot high obelisk, on the west side there is merely an empty pedestal. The story of Luxor’s missing obelisk involves the very beginnings of Egyptology. Its unlikely hero (or villain) was a Frenchman at the court of Louis XV, an artist whose pornographic sketches titillated France’s high society in the dying days of the ancien régime.