The Nile

by Toby Wilkinson

  In the twenty-first century, plunder has given way once more to wonder; but, in the process, the Valley of the Kings has been transformed from a remote wadi into a major tourist attraction, losing some of its special appeal in the process. A neat arcade of shops keeps the trinket-sellers to one side of the coach park, although every visitor has to run the gauntlet in order to reach the ticket office. A little train now takes tourists from the visitor centre to the valley entrance, which is still marked by no more than a guard’s hut and some iron railings. Inevitably, many of the finest tombs are closed, in an attempt to regulate the flow of visitors and preserve the tombs. The heat and humidity in some of the deeper tombs are almost unbearable. It is a wonder that the wall paintings do not simply peel off in front of one’s very eyes. But the climb up and down into the tomb of Thutmose III merely strengthens one’s respect for the ancient Egyptian workers who built these tombs, labouring for days on end in dusty heat in the humid bowels of the mountain by the light of flickering, sooty tallow candles. All in all, the experience of visiting the Valley of the Kings today is admirably summed up in Vivant Denon’s words, written after a three-hour exploration in the spring of 1799: “A visit to Thebes was like the attack of a fever, it was a kind of crisis which left behind an impression of indescribable impatience, enthusiasm, irritation, and fatigue.”16

  WITH THE EXCEPTION of Tutankhamun’s tomb, all the royal burials in the Valley of the Kings were thoroughly looted in antiquity, leaving only their wall paintings to hint at their former splendour. The tomb robberies started early, and the reason can be found in the community of Deir el-Medina. The workers who built and decorated the royal tombs had an unwritten contract with their employer, the Egyptian state: hard work and tight security in exchange for decent pay and conditions. When the government failed to honour its side of the bargain, the men of Deir el-Medina began to question why they should continue to keep the state’s most carefully guarded secret, the location of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Within little more than a generation of the strikes under Ramesses III, the tomb robberies began. At first, thieves targeted the less well-guarded sepulchres on the hillside behind the Ramesseum. One night in 1114 BC, a stonemason from Deir el-Medina called Amunpanefer set out with a group of accomplices to steal treasure. Entering the tomb of King Sobekemsaf II,

  We opened their coffins and their mummy-wrappings … We brought back the gold we found on the noble mummy of this god, together with his pectorals and other jewellery which were around his neck …17

  Their daring, blasphemous crime netted them a haul of thirty-two pounds of gold: a king’s ransom indeed. The thieves got away with their misdeed for four years, until the robbery came to light and they were sentenced to death. But a line had been crossed. A royal commission set up to investigate the crime discovered that nine out of ten royal tombs had already been looted. It was open season on the royal treasures of ancient Thebes. From the workers’ village, the criminal activity spread to various state and temple officials, some of whom turned a blind eye to thefts carried out under their noses, others of whom were actively involved in robbery. Even the chief guard of Karnak was implicated.

  It was not long before the state itself was in on the act, pilfering the treasures of earlier rulers to fill its own coffers. During the virtual civil war that beset Egypt during the reign of Ramesses XI (1099–1069 BC), the general and head of the Theban military junta sent a letter to the scribe of the necropolis, Butehamun, ordering him to “uncover a tomb amongst the tombs of the ancestors and preserve its seal until I return.”18 It was the beginning of a deliberate policy of state-sponsored tomb robbery. Butehamun was at the centre of it, and, fortunately for historians, he was as enthusiastic a correspondent as he was a thief. The archive of letters between Butehamun and his father Thutmose chronicles the systematic despoliation of the Theban royal tombs during the last century of the second millennium BC. The whole enterprise was organised like a military operation. The workmen who stole to Butehamun’s orders had a map of the Valley of the Kings to assist them. Butehamun’s office had facilities for processing the loot and re-wrapping the royal mummies after they had been stripped of all their precious accoutrements. Without a hint of apparent irony, Butehamun gloried in the titles Opener of the Gates of the Necropolis, Overseer of Works in the House of Eternity and Overseer of the Treasuries of the Kings. All over the royal necropolis, graffiti next to tomb entrances and at other key locations record the names of Butehamun and Thutmose; their fingerprints were literally all over the crime scene.

  With most of the royal tombs thoroughly pillaged, the monuments of ancient Thebes were largely forgotten and left to fall into ruins, as the political and economic axis of Egypt swung northwards in the first millennium BC, towards the cities of the Delta: Tanis and Bubastis, Sais and Pelusium, Alexandria and Cairo. When the next wave of treasure-hunters turned their attention to Thebes in the early nineteenth century AD, in the wake of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, it was the great temples that caught their imagination.

  For a hundred years after Bonaparte left the Nile Valley, Egypt was turned into a battleground, not between armies but between government agents, as Europe’s monarchies vied with each other to acquire the treasures of the pharaohs. From this century of plunder, one towering figure—in every sense of the word—stands out.

  Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823) was born in the city of Padua, the son of a barber. Like many young Italians of the time with limited prospects, on reaching the threshold of adulthood he journeyed to Rome, to prepare for monastic orders. But fate intervened—in the form of Napoleon’s invasion of Rome—and Belzoni left the city to become a vagrant, travelling through France, Germany and the Netherlands peddling religious trinkets. At the age of twenty-four he arrived in England—and caused an immediate stir. He certainly cut an arresting figure, at six foot six inches tall, with dark hair, strong aquiline features and piercing blue eyes. Sir Walter Scott called him “the handsomest man (for a giant) I ever saw.”19 Within a year Belzoni had married the love of his life, Sarah, and embarked on a theatrical career. The London stage certainly welcomed his striking looks and towering figure. On Easter Monday 1803, the playbill at Sadler’s Wells theatre advertised a new act:

  Signor Giovanni Batista Belzoni, the Patagonian Sampson; Will present most extraordinary Specimens of the GYMNASTIC Art, perfectly Foreign to any former exhibitioner (His first Appearance in England).20

  The act involved Belzoni carrying eleven people about the stage on an iron frame which itself weighed over one hundred pounds. It was so popular it ran for three months. After Sadler’s Wells, the Patagonian Sampson transmogrified into “the French Hercules” for a show at Bartholomew’s Fair in the City of London. Belzoni appeared as the giant in “Jack the Giantkiller” (aka “Jack and the Beanstalk”) and was soon billed under his own name as “The Great Belzoni.” For the next nine years, he toured the British Isles as a strongman, actor and conjuror. He also designed dramatic theatrical effects based on hydraulics. Then, in February 1813, he gave his last performance in England, at the Blue Boar Tavern in Oxford. Belzoni, ever eager for new adventures, had tired of the theatre. His old life as a wandering pedlar beckoned, and he set off on travels anew, this time with Sarah at his side.

  En route to Constantinople, they travelled to Malta, where Belzoni met an agent of the Egyptian ruler. Muhammad Ali was recruiting engineers from across Europe to help him realise his ambitious plans for modernising Egypt’s infrastructure. Belzoni, with his experience of theatrical hydraulics, persuaded the agent that he could build a waterwheel driven by oxen that would lift as much as four traditional waterwheels. He was encouraged to come to Egypt to prove his claims. And so, in 1815, he arrived in Cairo, for what would prove a transformational encounter with the land of the pharaohs.

  At first, it must have seemed like a dreadful mistake. On his way to his interview with Muhammad Ali, Belzoni was kicked in the leg by a soldier and incapacitated for severa
l weeks. Then a mutiny in Cairo led to looting, and Belzoni had his passport and all his money stolen. Finally, Belzoni’s waterwheel was rejected, and he found himself in a foreign city, without employment, money or contacts. But, by a stroke of great fortune, he met another government agent, Henry Salt, the British Consul-General. Salt was as ambitious for his own reputation as he was for his employer’s imperial glory, and he wished more than anything to see a colossal bust of Ramesses II (known as “the Young Memnon”) transported from western Thebes to London and presented to the British Museum—with Salt recognised as the donor. Belzoni seemed just the man for the job.

  On 30 June 1816 Giovanni and Sarah left Cairo for Thebes, which he described on first sight as “like entering a city of giants.”21 He was equally moved by the Young Memnon, still in its original setting of the Ramesseum: “I found it near the remains of its body and chair, with its face upwards, and apparently smiling on me, at the thought of being taken to England.”22 The only tools at Belzoni’s disposal were fourteen wooden poles, four palm ropes and four rollers; yet, within a few days, the statue had been successfully manoeuvred to the bank of the Nile. In the space of a week and a half, Belzoni had also discovered four new tombs in the Valley of the Kings (among them the spectacular sepulchre of Seti I, which he duly relieved of its sarcophagus). On 21 November, he set off downstream with the seven-ton Young Memnon aboard. Ten days before Christmas, he arrived in Cairo with his hoard of antiquities. (The Young Memnon duly found its way to the British Museum, but Belzoni received neither credit nor profit for his efforts.) Undaunted, he promptly set off for Nubia, to undertake another gargantuan task, the clearance of Abu Simbel. On his way there, he stopped off at Philae and noticed a rather attractive small obelisk which he fancied might suitably adorn a country estate in England. Brought back to Kingston Lacey in Dorset, it subsequently proved instrumental in the decipherment of hieroglyphics.

  In his career as an acquirer of antiquities, Belzoni had found the perfect outlet for his talents. He was a skilled negotiator, able to outwit his rivals (especially the men hired by the French consul, Drovetti) and persuade suspicious locals to let him relieve them of their patrimony. He was as strong as an ox, and also resilient. A letter he wrote to his brothers from the tomb of Seti I is headed: “The Valley of Biban el-Muluk [the Valley of the Kings] near Thebes. 15 August 1818. Latitude 25°44′31″ North. Longitude 32°36′31″. Shade temperature 124° Fahrenheit.”23 After leaving Egypt for the last time in early 1819, he returned to England to publish his memoirs and exhibit his discoveries. On the first day of the exhibition, held in the appropriate surroundings of the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, nearly two thousand people paid half-a-crown each to see the spectacle. Belzoni finally achieved the fame he deserved. As Charles Dickens put it, “The once starving mountebank became one of the most illustrious men in Europe.”24 But his fortune was to be shortlived. On an ill-fated expedition to locate the source of the Niger, Belzoni caught dysentery and died in December 1823, in Benin, at the age of forty-five. Though castigated by modern archaeologists for his methods, Belzoni nevertheless provided the British Museum with many of its finest Egyptian antiquities, and thus contributed as much, if not more, to the popularity of the subject than most professional Egyptologists.

  A century after Belzoni’s exploits at Thebes, when the mortuary temples had been stripped of all moveable objects, attention turned once more to the Valley of the Kings, where, archaeologists hoped, there remained some royal tombs still undiscovered. This final treasure hunt amidst the Theban Hills is, above all, the story of two protagonists, an American and an Englishman. The American was a wealthy New York lawyer, Theodore M. Davis (1838–1915). With other members of the Gilded Age, he spent his summers in a high society mansion on Ocean Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island; but his winters he spent on his dahabiya, the Bedouin, with his companion Mrs. Emma Andrews. He had already developed a passion for Egyptology when he succeeded, in 1902, in obtaining a permit from the Egyptian government to dig in the Valley of the Kings. Thus began his career as a private sponsor of excavations for the Antiquities Service. The Englishman was the very man who had first got Davis interested in archaeology, and who had himself been inspired by reading Belzoni: the inspector-general for Upper Egypt, Howard Carter (1874–1939). Carter was a talented excavator, but without means. (He started life as a humble Norfolk painter, getting his first experience of Egyptian archaeology as an illustrator.) In Davis, Carter had met the perfect source of funds. In their first seasons in partnership, digging in the Valley of the Kings, they found a private tomb and a box of leather loincloths: interesting, but hardly earth-shattering. When Carter was sacked as inspector-general, his successor persuaded Davis to obtain a fresh permit, with a different archaeologist. Davis continued to bankroll excavations in the valley for another nine years. He discovered or cleared thirty tombs, including the burial of Amenhotep III’s parents-in-law, Yuya and Tjuyu; the tomb of Horemheb; and a discarded embalming cache belonging to a little-known pharaoh called Tutankhamun. But eventually, disillusioned by the lack of spectacular finds, Davis threw in the towel, famously expressing his opinion that “the Valley of the Tombs is now exhausted.”25 A year later, on 23 February 1915, Davis was dead.

  Carter was not so easily put off. He persuaded another wealthy backer, Lord Carnarvon, to obtain the permit; and so began another archaeological partnership which, in November 1922—and just six feet away from where Davis had stopped work, for fear of undercutting nearby tombs—uncovered the greatest treasure of all time, the burial of Tutankhamun. The story of that discovery has been told many times. After five years of fairly fruitless digging in the Valley of the Kings, Carter had persuaded Carnarvon to finance one final season. Just three days into this last campaign, under heaps of spoil from a later royal tomb, workmen uncovered a flight of steps leading downwards into the bedrock. Once the staircase had been fully cleared, an outer blocking wall was revealed, covered with plaster and stamped with seal impressions. It could mean only one thing: beyond lay an intact tomb from the golden age of the pharaohs.

  Most archaeologists would have pressed on. Not Carter. Displaying the stiffest of English upper lips, he ordered the steps to be covered up again, before telegraphing Carnarvon (at home in England) to come out to Egypt immediately. If there was a major discovery to be made, it was only proper that patron and archaeologist should share it together. After what must have been an agonising wait of seventeen days, Carnarvon’s train pulled into the station at Luxor, and on the morning of 26 November work to open the tomb began in earnest. Beyond the outer blocking lay a corridor filled with stone chips, which took a full day’s work to clear. At the end of the corridor, another blocking wall was revealed, also covered in seal impressions. Without further hesitation, Carter took his trowel and made a small hole in the wall, just big enough to peer through. The hot air escaping from the sealed chamber caused the candle to flicker, and it took a few moments for Carter’s eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom. But then, details of the chamber and its contents began to emerge. Carter stood dumbstruck. After some minutes, Carnarvon could bear the suspense no longer. “Can you see anything?” he asked. “Yes, yes,” replied Carter, “wonderful things.”

  What came afterwards, the legacy of Tutankhamun, is more poignant. In the years following his greatest triumph, Carter maintained his home in western Thebes, “Carter House,” but also spent much of his time sitting morosely in the foyer of the Winter Palace in Luxor, lost in his own thoughts. Although decorated by the King of Egypt and the King of the Belgians, and awarded an honorary doctorate from Yale, Carter never shook off the social stigma of his humble origins, and received no honours from his own country. In his last years at Thebes, to his intense irritation, tourists regarded him as a minor celebrity, as much a sight as the treasures he had discovered. Always irascible—one of his favourite expressions was “Tommy rot!”—he did not make friends easily, and was shunned by the Egyptological establishment. No letters of regret were f
orthcoming after his death. But, arguably, no other individual, ancient or modern—neither Intef II, Senenmut or Montuemhat, nor Belzoni or Davis—has done as much to put western Thebes on the map.

  The Kuftis proved to be the most troublesome people that I have ever worked with.1

  —FLINDERS PETRIE

  North of Luxor, as the Nile enters the great, eastward bend in its course, the landscape of age-eroded limestone bluffs and lush green fields is reflected in the river’s gently flowing waters. Yet, by comparison with Thebes, there is a noticeable difference in the state of the banks, canals and verges: they are strikingly free from rubbish, cleaner here than anywhere else in the country. It is a small distinction, but an important one, for it reflects the independent character of the people in this part of Egypt.

  The story of refuse collection is in many ways a parable of life in the contemporary Nile Valley. In the old days, people will tell you, rubbish used to be collected by private contractors, or rather by their armies of small boys who collected the refuse sacks from the roadsides at four o’clock in the morning, just before dawn. At the collecting depot, the organic waste was separated off and sold as fertiliser, earning the contractors a tidy profit. It was a successful system that suited everyone. Everyone, that is, except the authorities, who were jealous of any lucrative sector they did not control themselves. So, the contracts for rubbish collection were taken away from the private operators and given to big companies in exchange for large bribes. Service suffered, the streets and canals started to become choked with rubbish, but there was little that ordinary citizens could do: it was all part of the corruption and sclerosis of Mubarak’s Egypt.