The Nile

by Toby Wilkinson

  Dominique Vivant Denon (1747–1825) was born into a family of landed gentry in provincial Chalon-sur-Saône. At the age of seventeen, as all ambitious young men did, he went to Paris. There he studied design, and succeeded in being appointed a Gentilhomme Ordinaire to Louis XV. With the patronage of the king’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, he transformed himself from court artist into diplomat, serving in St. Petersburg, Switzerland and Naples. Diplomatic life may have been somewhat dull after the intrigues of Versailles, but it turned out to be a good career move for Denon, for when the French Revolution broke out in 1789 he found himself safely in Venice. Unlike many of his former circle he escaped with his life, but all his property was confiscated. Having no wish to live the remainder of his days in penury and confident of his own diplomatic skills, Denon decided to return to Paris in 1793 and put himself under the protection of a fellow artist, Jacques-Louis David, the revolutionaries’ painter of choice. It was a brilliant move. Denon made the acquaintance of Napoleon Bonaparte and soon won his confidence. So much so that, when Bonaparte embarked on his great expedition to Egypt on 14 May 1798—with the purpose of wresting control of the country from the British, to undermine their dominance of trade with India—he took Denon with him as one of his closest lieutenants.

  Denon’s account of his travels along the Nile, Voyages dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte, proved an instant hit when it was published on his return to France, catapulting the land of the pharaohs to the forefront of the European imagination. His extensive drawings were no less influential, forming the nucleus of the Napoleonic Déscription de l’Egypte, a massive tome that marked the birth of Egyptology as a discipline. The two books, and the wave of Egyptomania that swept the cities of Europe following their publication, inspired one of Denon’s young countrymen, Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), to decipher the language of the pharaohs. After two decades of painstaking research, he made the breakthrough that correctly explained the hieroglyphic writing system for the first time.

  Yet, for the great empires of nineteenth-century Europe, it was not merely enough to understand ancient Egypt: they wanted a piece of it to add lustre to their imperial capitals. On first seeing Thebes, on 26 January 1799, Denon and his men had been overwhelmed by the city’s ancient monuments. As Denon recalled in his memoirs, “The army came to a stop by itself and spontaneously burst into applause, as if occupying the ruins of this capital had been the goal of our glorious mission and had completed the conquest of Egypt.”4 Among so many architectural wonders, Denon had been particularly impressed by the obelisks in front of Luxor Temple. In his diary he commented, “there is nothing on earth to compare with them.”5 Champollion, on his visit of 1828, was equally smitten. For the French, there could be no symbol more fitting of their new greatness than to have one of the Luxor obelisks erected in the heart of Paris. As one contemporary commentator put it, “The pharaohs, the Ptolemies, the Caesars, the Popes had, in turn, erected these imposing signs of Egyptian civilisation.”6 Now it was France’s turn.

  Negotiations with the Viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, were opened on the orders of Louis XVIII in the 1820s, with the objective of securing an obelisk for France. One of the obelisks of Alexandria, the second Cleopatra’s needle, was gifted to France, but for some reason it never made the journey. It was Champollion who reawakened the idea, in 1829, but with a different monument in mind: “If one must see an Egyptian obelisk in Paris, then let it be one of those from Luxor.”7 The views of so eminent an Egyptologist could not be dismissed, so a plan was duly presented to the new French king, Charles X, with the assurance that, if Paris had one of the Luxor obelisks, “it would no longer have any reason to envy Rome.”8 The king was readily persuaded, and established a royal commission under a Monsieur Taylor to travel to Egypt. Taylor’s twin goals were to negotiate the gift of the Luxor obelisk and to amass additional antiquities to enrich the collections of the Louvre. To lubricate the negotiations, he was given the enormous sum of 100,000 francs, as well as various presents for Muhammad Ali and his son. Taylor arrived at Alexandria on 23 April 1830, and was kept waiting a month before the viceroy deigned to receive him.

  From the outset, the negotiations were tricky. The British had stolen a march on the French and had already put in a demand for the Luxor obelisks. But the viceroy sensed the political importance of keeping the French happy, so “He gave to France the two Luxor obelisks, confirmed the gift that he had made previously of the Alexandria obelisk, and offered in exchange to M. Barker [the British consul] the Karnak obelisk.”9 It was a deal. The Paris revolution of July 1830 threatened to scupper the agreement, but Champollion persisted in his plan and eventually the gift was reconfirmed in a letter that November from Muhammad Ali’s minister: “I am commanded by His Highness to put the three aforementioned monuments at the disposal of His Majesty the King of the French with immediate effect.”10

  On 15 April 1831, an extraordinary boat named the Luxor set sail from Toulon, bound for the Nile. It had been built to endure two long sea voyages to and from France, to navigate the shallow waters of the Nile and the Seine, and to pass under the arches of the Paris bridges. It also had to accommodate a 250-ton obelisk in a wooden and iron cage. Exactly four months after leaving its home port on the Mediterranean coast, the Luxor docked at Luxor, ready to receive its colossal cargo. Unfortunately, things had not been going smoothly at the temple. On arrival at Luxor months earlier, the French engineers had been met with suspicion, their explanation—of dismantling one of the obelisks and transporting it to France—with incredulity. Once they had convinced the locals of their peaceful intentions, they had been forced to embark on lengthy negotiations with the owners of the houses that abutted the Luxor obelisk, houses that would have to be demolished before the monument could be taken down. Two weeks after the Luxor docked, an outbreak of cholera killed fifteen French sailors and threatened the entire project. But the engineers stuck resolutely to their great enterprise: “Nobody left his post, nothing interrupted the work, a single idea motivated us all: to remove from the ancient capital of the civilised world one of its most beautiful ornaments.”11

  Against enormous odds, by 1 September 1831 the Luxor obelisk had been encased in scaffolding. It took another month to lower it safely to the ground, and three more months to drag it to the riverbank and load it on to the waiting ship. It was now mid December, and the river level had dropped. Only when the inundation returned the following August could the Luxor, with its precious cargo, finally weigh anchor and embark on the long journey back to France. The ship arrived in Paris on 23 December 1833, entered dry dock and was dismantled around the obelisk. Another three years’ careful work was needed before the great stone needle was ready to be installed in its new home. “On 25 October [1836], in the morning, more than 200,000 spectators filled the Place de la Concorde, all its exits, the terraces of the Tuileries and the Champs-Elysées, waiting with avid curiosity for the erection of the obelisk.”12 Fortunately the weather was dry, if a little overcast. A time capsule, consisting of a cedar box containing gold and silver coins and medallions of the king, was placed in a cavity cut in the centre of the pedestal before the obelisk was hauled into position. To crown the work, young men scaled the monument and adorned its summit with laurel wreaths and tricolours. The French state struck a commemorative medal to mark the great occasion.

  Sadly, Vivant Denon had died eleven years earlier and was unable to witness the realisation of his dream. The irony would not have been lost on the wily old diplomat: an obelisk from the greatest kingdom of the ancient world now stood at the centre of the Place de la Concorde—the very spot that, three decades earlier, had witnessed the execution of the French ruling class (including many of Denon’s friends and colleagues) by Madame la Guillotine. As for the British, who had coveted the Luxor obelisks for themselves, they could only look on with customary disdain. When, some fifty years later, Amelia Edwards visited Luxor Temple with its now solitary obelisk, she remarked drily that its compani
on was “already scaling away by imperceptible degrees under the skyey influences of an alien climate,”13 and imagined it looking down “with melancholy indifference upon the petty revolutions and counter-revolutions of the Place de la Concorde.”14 France had acquired an appropriately imperial monument, one of the glories of pharaonic architecture. But Egypt had lost one of its architectural wonders. As the pharaohs had known only too well, the Nile could give and the Nile could take away.

  In the early days of Nile tourism, Luxor Temple presented a very different picture from today’s pristine attraction. Back then, the half-buried temple was “a smoky, filthy, intricate labyrinth of lanes and passages. Mud hovels, mud pigeon-towers, mud yards and a mud mosque clustered like wasps’ nests in and about the ruins. Architraves sculptured with royal titles supported the roofs of squalid cabins. Stately capitals peeped out from the midst of sheds in which buffaloes, camels, donkeys, dogs, and human beings were seen herding together in unsavoury fellowship.”15 How different from the description of Luxor Temple composed for its royal builder, pharaoh Amenhotep III, in 1360 BC:

  It is made of fine sandstone, very wide and incredibly beautiful.

  Its walls are of electrum, its furnishings of silver.

  All its gates are decorated on their thresholds.

  Its pylon rises up towards heaven, its flagstaffs are in the stars.

  When the people see it, they will give praise to His Majesty.16

  In an age feted for magnificent monuments, Luxor Temple ranked as one of Egypt’s greatest architectural achievements. Originally conceived in 1539 BC as a monument to monarchy, the southern sanctuary was one of a series of monuments situated at the four corners of the city of Thebes, to demarcate a sacred arena in which the king would play the leading role. Over the course of the following two centuries a modest shrine was transformed into a great temple of courts and columned halls. The current façade was added by Ramesses II, its massive pylon and towering obelisk(s) expressing his uncompromising and overweening megalomania. The two seated colossi that flank the entrance do likewise. On their pedestals, decorated with images of conquered peoples, Ramesses’ names are carved so deeply that they could never be erased. The walls of the massive gate-towers are decorated with scenes from the Battle of Kadesh, Ramesses’ epic encounter with the Hittites. In his quest for perfection, Ramesses was also responsible for the temple’s curious alignment. Having discovered that the original axis failed to line up precisely with Karnak (a mile and a half to the north), Ramesses ordered the error to be corrected in the orientation of his new forecourt. Hence the curious kink in what is otherwise a perfectly symmetrical monument.

  The core of Luxor Temple is the creation of Amenhotep III’s reign. Here, the elegance of form and ambition of scale reflect ancient Egyptian civilisation at the height of its aesthetic powers. There is the immense processional colonnade of fourteen gigantic stone columns, each shaped to resemble a papyrus reed in full flower. Never before in the history of ancient Egypt had such a vast edifice been conceived or constructed. To those walking beneath them, the tops of the columns must indeed have seemed to be “in the stars.” Beyond the colonnade lies the most beautiful part of the whole temple, the so-called “solar court,” each side formed by a double row of twelve elegant columns carved to resemble bundles of papyrus reeds. The purpose of this part of the temple was to associate the king indissolubly with the sun, the supreme creator god. Temple courts had traditionally been roofed, their dimly lit interiors creating a sense of mystery and emphasising the ineffableness of the divine. By contrast, the solar court was deliberately left open to the sky to permit the direct worship of the sun, and to allow the sun’s rays to fall uninterrupted on the king and his officials.

  The solar court was not just the expression of a new theology in which king and sun-god were associated in an ever-closer union. It was also the setting for the king’s transformation into an immortal divine being. This was expressed most startlingly in a life-size statue which Amenhotep III commissioned in anticipation of his jubilee. Carved from a block of dazzling red quartzite (a stone with strong solar connotations) and adorned with gold, the statue showed the king emerging into the solar court at Luxor, visibly younger, radiant as the sun, and undergoing transformation into a celestial falcon. By a miracle of preservation, the statue escaped the ravages of time, buried in a deep pit in the middle of the solar court—where it was unearthed in 1989. Today, it is regarded as one of the masterpieces of ancient Egyptian sculpture, and takes pride of place in the Luxor Museum.

  The solar court of Luxor Temple was both radical in its conception and extraordinary in its execution. Remarkably, it can be attributed to identifiable individuals, because a commemorative stone slab from the time of Amenhotep III names the architects responsible: the twin brothers Suti and Hor. Like their royal master, they were adherents of the sun cult, but it is the details of their lives, rather than their faith, that are most fascinating. For Suti and Hor are the only definitely attested twins in the whole of pharaonic history. Suti was the senior, presumably the elder, but to all intents and purposes the two brothers were treated as a single individual. Their very survival into adulthood—at a time when multiple births usually resulted in infant mortality—may have given them a special status and contributed to their rapid advancement. Appointed joint “Overseers of Works of Amun in the Southern Sanctuary,” they shared the responsibility equally:

  My brother, my likeness, his ways I trust,

  He came forth from the womb with me the same day …

  When I was in charge on the west side,

  He was in charge on the east side.

  We controlled the great monuments in Ipet-sut [Karnak],

  At the forefront of Thebes, the city of Amun.17

  In the midst of modern Luxor’s urban sprawl, thronged by visitors and hawkers, assaulted by the din of city life, Suti and Hor’s remarkable creation still stands serene, as it has for over three thousand years: a remarkable testament to the vision and energy of the ancient Egyptians, and a potent symbol of their continuing legacy.

  IN EVERY AGE, Luxor Temple has been at the centre of Theban and Egyptian religion. Through pharaonic, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic rule, for over a hundred generations, the inhabitants of Thebes have come to pray among the hallowed stones of Luxor. Nowhere else on earth—not even the temple at Jerusalem—has seen such a continuity of worship, stretching back 3,500 years. As its original name, southern sanctuary, suggests, Luxor Temple began life as a holiday home for the Theban god Amun, a small pied-à-terre closely linked to, but some distance from, his main residence at Karnak. According to ancient Egyptian custom, Amun would journey south from Karnak to Luxor once a year for some rest and relaxation from the onerous duties of divinity. (That the ancient Egyptian words for “sanctuary” and “harem” are the same is no coincidence.) But in reality, Luxor Temple had another, more subtle purpose. Right from the start, Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty royal family had embarked on a deliberate programme of architecture and spectacle designed to associate the king with Amun, and to blur the distinction between royal and divine. Luxor Temple played a vital part in the ideology which underpinned the regime.

  The doctrine of divine kingship was the defining myth of the pharaonic state, the ideological glue which held ancient Egypt together. But the notion of a divine monarch was potentially undermined by a fundamental weakness: the all-too-obvious mortality of the king. The solution to this dilemma was one of the most ingenious pieces of theology ever devised by Egyptian priests. According to this myth, the king was rendered divine by means of a god-like essence (ka) that, at his accession, suffused his mortal body. At the king’s death, the royal ka would pass, unaltered, into his heir, thus maintaining the divinely ordained succession. Luxor Temple became the setting of a new religious ritual, the annual Festival of the Sanctuary, which was explicitly designed to recharge the royal ka, so that the monarch might be rejuvenated and reaffirmed in office.

  At the
start of the Festival, the cult images of Amun, his consort (Mut) and their son (Khonsu) were taken from Karnak to Luxor. Originally, the images travelled overland along an avenue of sphinxes, borne aloft on the shoulders of priests, and resting at way-stations along the route. In the later Eighteenth Dynasty, they were towed along the Nile by barge, the focal point of a great river pageant. Once safely inside the precinct of Luxor Temple, the cult images were taken from their barque-shrines and installed in their new quarters. Here, in the innermost chambers of the temple, the Festival reached its culmination. Amidst the ritually charged atmosphere, the pharaoh communed in private with the god; Egypt’s supreme deity and the king’s divine essence co-mingled and drew strength from each other. At the end of the communion, the king would emerge into the open court of the temple, to be acclaimed by the priests and high officials of the realm as “foremost of all the living kas.”18

  The Festival of the Sanctuary was one of the rare occasions when ordinary citizens might share in the otherwise rarefied religious life of the court, glimpsing the sacred barque of Amun when it passed through the streets on its way to the temple. The propaganda value of a popular celebration, especially a river pageant, with the monarch at its heart was not lost on Egypt’s rulers, and the Festival of the Sanctuary shaped the Egyptians’ religious experience for centuries to come.