The Nile

by Toby Wilkinson

  But, in the rural south of the country, the doughty locals—always independent-minded and sceptical of their distant rulers—took matters into their own hands. In the towns and villages between Luxor and Qena, the inhabitants organise rubbish collection, sorting and disposal themselves. As a result, their surroundings are cleaner and greener. It is a metaphor for the divide in Egyptian society, not just between north and south (northern Egyptians think southerners backward; southerners find their northern compatriots rude and selfish) but between the centre and the provinces. The tension between central control and provincial self-assertion is a leitmotif in Egyptian history; nowhere is it more apparent than in this part of Upper Egypt.

  ON THE WEST BANK of the Nile, twelve miles north of the town of New Qurna, lies the small village of Nagada. A poor, undistinguished community of dusty streets, grubby children, hard-pressed adults, scratching chickens and semi-feral dogs, it would merit no mention at all were it not for the ancient burial ground that once lay behind it, at the foot of the western escarpment. The shallow pits that were excavated here at the end of the nineteenth century not only put Nagada on the map, they also changed our very understanding of Egypt’s origins and the genesis of its great civilisation.

  What the archaeologist’s trowel revealed in this rural backwater were the vestiges of a long-lost and hitherto unknown culture, one as sophisticated as it was unexpected. So strange and unfamiliar were its material remains—lustrous, black-rimmed red vases; painted bowls decorated with lively scenes of hippos and hunters; and elegant cosmetic palettes of fine-grained greenish-black stone, carved in a range of curvaceous animal forms—that the excavators thought they had stumbled on a “new race.” Such un-Egyptian objects, they supposed, must have been brought to the Nile Valley by invaders from the East during one of the periods of civil war that interrupted the course of ancient Egyptian civilisation. They could not have been more wrong. Subsequent discoveries at other sites soon showed that the vases, bowls and palettes uncovered in Nagada’s shallow graves were not the work of foreign immigrants, but of indigenous Egyptians from the country’s remote prehistoric past, people whose craftsmanship and creativity had set Egyptian culture on the path to greatness. At Nagada, the very origins of pharaonic civilisation had been dug from the gravelly soil.

  Unbelievable as it seems today, for several heady centuries in the early and middle parts of the fourth millennium BC Nagada was one of the two or three most important places in the whole of Egypt. It was the location of a walled town, an innovation of communal living which betokened greater wealth and a desire to protect one’s assets from jealous neighbours. The same wealth—enjoyed, as in today’s Egypt, by a small, ruling class—is also seen in the nearby cemetery, where richly furnished tombs cluster together in one corner, separating the haves from the have-nots in death as in life. Even more spectacular, even more set apart, was a huge rectangular tomb of mud brick, covering thousands of square feet, its interior chambers packed with costly and exotic objects. This royal burial seems to have been made for an individual of special status, perhaps even the wife of Egypt’s first king. Its location at Nagada suggests that the town had played a pivotal role in the political unification of the country, reflecting its prehistoric prominence.

  But the formation of an Egyptian state spelled the beginning of the end for Nagada’s fortunes. A scene of triumph scratched into the rock face in the desert behind the town suggests warfare between leading power centres of the time. Nagada’s rivals in Upper Egypt, especially Nekhen, gained ground, literally and metaphorically. Nagada fell into obscurity, its leading role in the birth of Egyptian civilisation quickly forgotten. Within a few centuries of its royal tomb being built, Nagada had declined in size and splendour, a process that continued until the trowel of a late nineteenth-century archaeologist rescued it from utter obscurity.

  If the discoveries at Nagada were remarkable, then so was the man responsible for them. William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942), “the father of Egyptian archaeology,” excavated at more sites in the Nile Valley than any other archaeologist, before or since; and, in an age of treasure-hunters, his meticulous methods and careful recording established archaeology as a proper scientific enterprise for the first time. Nagada put him on the map as an archaeologist, and he repaid the compliment handsomely.

  Like many of the great Egyptologists, Petrie was introduced to the land of the pharaohs by a curious combination of circumstances. He was born in 1853 to an electrical engineer, William Petrie, and his wife Anne, who was the daughter of the explorer of Australia, Captain Matthew Flinders. William junior—always known by his third name, Flinders—was too delicate a child to go to school, so was educated at home by his parents. This was his first lucky chance. His father had produced the first electric arc-lamp, ahead of his time, and Flinders showed an equal aptitude for science. His father was also a keen amateur surveyor—a popular pastime in Victorian Britain among the educated middle classes—and by his early twenties Flinders was travelling around southern England with his father, surveying earthworks and ancient monuments. Their measurements of Stonehenge were the most accurate yet made, and were the harbinger of things to come.

  The second stroke of serendipity was William Flinders’ growing fascination with the work of Charles Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal of Scotland and one of the great scientific celebrities of the age. Charles Smyth’s tastes were nothing if not catholic, and he mixed orthodox astronomy with distinctly unorthodox views about ancient Egypt. According to him, “the pyramid was a perfect structure, a product of divine inspiration, which embodied in its measurements a perfect system of weights and measures, among them the sacred cubit of the Israelites, the pyramid inch, and a system of prophecy.”2 Smyth’s objective, through accurate measurement of the Great Pyramid, was to unlock the key to humanity’s past and future. (Today’s “New Age” authors like Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval stand in this long tradition.)

  A fascination with science, an aptitude for surveying and a curiosity about the pyramids: all the pieces were in place, and in 1880 Flinders Petrie set out from Liverpool by ship, bound for Egypt. The resulting expedition spelled the end of Smyth’s theories but the beginning of a lifelong mission for Petrie. At the end of two solitary winters at Giza, living in an abandoned tomb, Petrie’s meticulous measurements thoroughly undermined Smyth’s “pyramid cult”; but the looting and vandalism of ancient monuments that Petrie witnessed all around him made a profound impression. As he put it, “Egypt was like a fire, so rapid was the destruction going on. My duty was that of a salvage man: to get all I could quickly gathered in.”3 Proper excavation and recording of Egypt’s manifold monuments required determination and scientific method, both of which Petrie had in abundance. But they also required funds, and he was a man of modest means. Fortunately, fate intervened once again, in the form of Amelia Edwards, romantic novelist and, ever since her trip up the Nile in 1873–4, lover of all things ancient Egyptian. When Edwards read Petrie’s book on the pyramids, published by the Royal Society in 1883, it was a meeting of minds. With her encouragement and financial support, he embarked on a full-time career as an archaeologist. Over the next sixty years he worked at just about every known site along the Nile Valley, publishing his results in over a thousand books and articles.

  Petrie’s greatest strength—his gift to archaeology—was his insistence that even the smallest fragments, unworthy of display in a museum, were invaluable as historical evidence. His book, Methods and Aims in Archaeology, was seminal. But his meticulous methods went hand-in-hand with an irascible temperament. He quarrelled with his sponsors in the Egypt Exploration Fund and worked on his own for many years with private backers. His attitude to his workers was equally stern: “the people used to loiter over the dinner hour … so one day, when they were worse than usual, I went to meet them as they tardily came up, and dismissed them all for the half day. After that they all came as soon as they had their food.”4 His frugality, born of those first
two winters at Giza, verged on asceticism, and his excavation camps, though providing an unrivalled training, were regarded with dread for their austere conditions: “Of course sheer laziness without a cause means immediate dismissal; but the break of ten minutes in the midst of the morning and afternoon seems desirable all round.”5 He was also utterly impervious to others’ criticism, a trait, perhaps, borne of his home-schooling. Hence, on his digs in Egypt, his dress was individual, to say the least: “For outside work in the hot weather, vest and pants were suitable, and if pink they kept the tourist at bay, as the creature seemed to him too queer for inspection.”6

  In 1892, Petrie’s mentor Amelia Edwards died and bequeathed a sum to University College London to establish the first professorship of Egyptology in Britain. She also let it be known that she wished Petrie to be its first holder. With academic status and some measure of financial security, Petrie was able to devote each winter season to excavation. His dig at Nagada in the winter of 1894 was a model of his trademark meticulousness. In three months, he and his assistant James Quibell cleared two thousand graves. Petrie carefully noted the contents of each burial, especially the pottery, on a slip of card. His scientific intuition suggested to him that by tracking gradual changes in the style of pottery, it would be possible to place the graves in their relative chronological order. So he arranged and rearranged the slips of card until each type of pottery displayed a smooth evolution in its form. The result was Petrie’s famous “sequence dating system,” the very first example of the now standard technique of archaeological seriation. To this day, it remains the best method for dating artefacts and tomb-groups from Egypt’s prehistoric past: pots as a proxy for period.

  The pottery-making prowess of Nagada’s inhabitants has continued through the millennia. It was remarked upon by Arab travellers in the Middle Ages, and the nearby village of Ballas is still a renowned centre for potters. Their distinctive, pale-coloured water-jars, fired with sugar-cane leaves in kilns of ancient design, are sought after throughout the region. Despite the advent of plastic canisters, pots from Ballas can still be seen perched on the heads of local women as they return from the Nile or the village water-pump.

  Nagada owed its prehistoric prosperity to its special location at a point where desert trade routes meet the river and where the Nile, thanks to the bend in its course, swings further east than at any other point in its long journey to the sea. This combination of factors gave the inhabitants of Nagada relatively easy access to the gold mines of the Eastern Desert, and the ability to trade their precious ore the length and breadth of Egypt. Indeed, Nagada was synonymous with gold: its ancient Egyptian name, Nubt, meant, quite simply, “the golden.” If Nagada was a gold emporium, then the centre of operations for mining expeditions was its neighbouring settlement on the opposite bank of the river. This particular town has fared rather better than Nagada over the aeons of Egyptian history. In common with only a few places in Egypt, it has kept its name down the millennia: ancient Gebt, classical Copt(os), modern Qift (pronounced “Kuft”). The longevity of its name also reflects the tenacity of its people.

  Petrie chose Qift for his first excavation as Edwards Professor of Egyptology, in the winter of 1893. (It was while working here that he “eyed the hills on the opposite side of the Nile, and heard of things being found there,”7 leading to his work at Nagada the following year.) He chose Qift, not for its standing monuments (it has none), nor for its historical importance (which was then unknown), but for its geographical proximity to the Red Sea—whence, Petrie then believed, Egypt’s “dynastic people” had arrived to bring civilisation to the Nile Valley. Though his determination kept him going, the conditions at Qift were hardly conducive to archaeology. More irksome to Petrie than the usual flies, rats and dogs, were the local inhabitants: “The Kuftis proved to be the most troublesome people that I have ever worked with,”8 he declared. The problem was partly of his own making. By the late nineteenth century, after a hundred years of Europeans looting Egypt for its ancient treasures, the Egyptians had come to realise that the sudden arrival of white-skinned foreigners with their strange clothes and equipment usually presaged the discovery of valuable antiquities. Qift had the particular misfortune (from Petrie’s perspective) of a public road running right through the archaeological site—making the ancient ruins especially accessible. As a result, Petrie found the town awash with looters and antiquities dealers. Not a man to be thwarted from the important business of archaeology, he set out to teach the Qiftis a lesson. He managed to apprehend one thief, walloping him soundly. Then, Petrie “let him crawl off on hands and knees some way and then, giving shout, ran at him, when he made off like a hare.”9 But the impoverished villagers were not so easily dissuaded from the promise of making a fast buck, and they simply came back each night to steal the antiquities so painstakingly dug up by Petrie the previous day.

  Despite such travails, one group of Qiftis found common cause with Petrie—each admiring the other’s single-minded determination. As the archaeologist explained,

  Among this rather untoward people we found however, as in every place, a small percentage of excellent men; some half-dozen were of the very best type of native, faithful, friendly, and laborious, and from among these workmen we have drawn about forty to sixty for our work … They have formed the backbone of my upper Egyptian staff, and I hope that I may keep these good friends so long as I work anywhere within reach of them.10

  He was as good as his word. “The excavation here was the founding of a tribe of workers who have been sought for by every excavator since; a ‘Qufti’ came to be almost the name for a good digger. There were many substantial old families here, entirely unspoiled by tourist ways, and they formed a fine stock; even their grandsons are still in my work.”11 The men from Qift whom Petrie trained as foremen passed on their skills to their descendants, some of whom are still employed as professional diggers by archaeologists working in Egypt today. “Qifti” is common parlance among Egyptologists for a skilled site foreman.

  THE VILLAGE OF Qift has occupied a distinctive place in Egyptian history: never central to developments, but not insignificant either. It has been aptly described as “economically privileged but historically disadvantaged,”12 because of its proximity to the gold mines of the Eastern Desert and the Red Sea on the one hand, and to Thebes on the other. Its southern neighbour has tended, since pharaonic times, to dominate the politics of Upper Egypt; but the country’s rulers have never been able to neglect Qift, given the importance both of the Eastern Desert’s mineral resources and of Red Sea trade to Egypt’s economy. While provincial in many respects, Qift has been at the heart of Egypt’s story for millennia. Today, the houses and streets of the typically ramshackle modern settlement encircle the ancient remains, marking a continuity of occupation that stretches back more than five thousand years. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the site—like most archaeological ruins in Egypt—was extensively mined for sebakh, the rich fertiliser that is the product of decayed mud-brick buildings. Qift’s ancient structures were reduced to rubble, or grubbed out entirely. Pillaging for antiquities, as encountered by Petrie, wreaked further damage. Today the site shows only “isolated pillars of preserved antiquities surrounded by newly constructed apartment buildings, cut through by modern roads, and inhabited by herds of goats and packs of feral dogs living off the garbage deposited daily.”13 But these unpromising remains hold remarkable clues to Qift’s long history.

  From prehistoric times down to the coming of Christianity, the inhabitants of Qift worshipped a fertility god with a highly distinctive appearance. Known in pharaonic times as Min, his classic depiction was as a tall standing figure, swathed in tight bandages, wearing twin ostrich plumes on his head, with one arm raised behind his head, holding a flail, and the other grasping the base of his huge erect penis which protrudes through his clothing. The twin plumes (denoting divinity in general) seem to have been a later addition; but the other aspects of his appearance, espe
cially the ithyphallic pose, predate recorded history. During Petrie’s excavations at Qift in the winter of 1893–4, he uncovered a remarkable pair of colossal statues of the local fertility god. Each was crudely fashioned from a cylindrical block of stone, and bore strange signs down one side which predate hieroglyphic writing and still defy convincing explanation. The ascetic Victorian archaeologist was clearly rather embarrassed by the statues’ immodesty, and could only bring himself to describe their posture as being “in the usual attitude of Min,”14 without further comment. Usually meticulous in the publication of his finds, Petrie omitted any illustration of the complete colossi, confining himself to just the head of one statue. Nor did he provide any illustration or mention of the detachable stone penis, carefully carved to fit in a socket in one of the statues. Indeed, other than the oblique reference to Min, there is nothing to suggest the most distinctive characteristic of these remarkable survivors from the dawn of religion.

  Later relief carvings of Min from Qift, dating to the reign of Senusret I in the nineteenth century BC, rank among the masterpieces of ancient Egyptian art, but they proved no less embarrassing to Petrie. He felt compelled to publish a photograph of one block, but covered the god’s modesty, quite literally, with a wooden plaque bearing the words “temple scene of Usertsen [Senusret] I dancing before Min.”15 Line drawings of other images of Min omitted the offending member entirely.