The Nile

by Toby Wilkinson

  The reason for Champollion’s high excitement at seeing Dendera for himself had little to do with its design or particular place in Egyptian history, and everything to do with a singular block of relief carving. The block in question had found its way from Dendera to Paris and was, in early nineteenth-century France, the most famous Egyptian artefact of all—more studied and commented upon than the Rosetta Stone. When Napoleon’s savants had visited Dendera in 1798, the ceiling of a small chapel high on the roof of the temple had caught their eye. Here, in a room used perhaps for night-time rituals, the ceiling decoration included a magnificent zodiac, the star signs painted in bright white against a circle of midnight blue, supported on all sides by gods and goddesses. So impressive was this relief that it merited full colour illustration in the great tomes of the Description de l’Egypte. In 1821, captivated by this extraordinary work of art, an enterprising French engineer made his way to Egypt, sawed the zodiac off the ceiling and shipped it back to Paris where it went on public display.

  It caused a sensation. The zodiac was the talk of the city: so much so that it spawned a satirical show called “Le Zodiaque de Paris” in which actors played the different star signs, accompanied by a chorus of wailing mummies. The reason for all this interest and hype was not the design of the ceiling itself, beautiful though it undoubtedly is, but the controversy surrounding its date. Studying the illustration of the zodiac in the Description de l’Egypte, a noted French astronomer and mathematician had calculated that the positions of the constellations indicated a date of 15,000 BC—much older than the known antiquity of Egyptian civilisation, and considerably earlier than the canonical creation of the world (then dated to 4004 BC). Others, egged on by the Church, fervently disagreed and proposed a much younger date of 747 BC. Interpretation of the Dendera zodiac thus pitted atheists against devout Catholics, science against religion. It was Champollion who solved the riddle in the summer of 1822—by philology rather than astronomy. He correctly surmised that the accompanying hieroglyphic inscriptions held the best clue to the zodiac’s date, and when he read the Roman title “autocrator” in one of the cartouches, its true age was confirmed. The revolutionary, anti-establishment Champollion found himself instantly lauded by the Catholic Church as a defender of the Christian faith. A grateful Pope Leo XII even offered to make Champollion a cardinal—an offer he politely declined.

  Today, the original zodiac remains in the Louvre, one of the highlights of the museum’s Egyptian collection. In its place, set in the ceiling of the shrine on the roof of Dendera, is a rather sad copy, uncoloured, unlovely, and largely unremarked. Higher up still is the temple’s roof terrace with its spectacular views out across the desert plain to the Nile. Here, the cult statue of Hathor, goddess of Dendera, would have been brought at dawn on special days, to catch the first rays of the rising sun. On my last visit, however, the terrace was closed. A German tourist had recently fallen to her death—moved by the beauty of the place, overcome by the heat, or pushed, no one could say—and even the Egyptians had felt compelled to respond to health and safety concerns.

  Dendera’s dedication to the mother-goddess Hathor underlines the remarkable longevity and continuity of Egyptian civilisation. At the very foundation of the Egyptian state, in 3000 BC, Hathor had been worshipped as the king’s divine mother, a protector deity in bovine form who suckled and nurtured the land of Egypt and its ruler. Three thousand years later, she was still being worshipped, still appealed to as Egypt’s protector. But not even a grand temple to Hathor at Dendera could save Egypt from the clutches of Rome. Everywhere in the temple are the image and name of Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies. As a woman on the throne of Egypt, she may have felt a particular affinity with Hathor, the mother-goddess. Indeed, the parallels between Hathor nursing her infant son Horus and Cleopatra preparing her young son Caesarion for future kingship were overt and deliberate. On the rear wall of Dendera, Cleopatra and Caesarion are shown at a gigantic scale, offering to the gods in the age-old manner of the pharaohs, triumphantly asserting the dynastic principle that had served Egypt for three millennia.

  But it was not to be. Not even a planned escape across the Eastern Desert to the Red Sea coast and India could save Caesarion from his fate when Octavian’s forces conquered Egypt in 30 BC. Cleopatra took her own life; Caesarion’s was taken for him. The temple of Dendera was completed by Octavian, newly elevated to an imperial throne as Augustus, the first Roman emperor.

  While the Romans safeguarded Egypt’s pagan temples, keen to bask in the reflected glory of so ancient and venerable a civilisation, the Christians who followed them were less respectful of the past. Dendera was particularly badly affected, the faces of the Hathor-headed columns chiselled away by iconoclasts. Yet the air of sanctity, and the presence of the divine mother, somehow survives. As Amelia Edwards remarked, “Without, all was sunshine and splendour; within, all was silence and mystery.”26 Before the cutting of the Suez Canal, when Egypt was under the control of another empire, troops in the Indian Army travelling from Calcutta to Portsmouth would pass by Dendera on their march from the Red Sea to Alexandria. British officers were amazed when their Indian sepoys bowed down and worshipped in the temple, recognising Hathor as one of their own Hindu deities.

  In our twenty-first century, despite the huge investment in cleaning the interior reliefs of the soot and dirt of ages, despite the shiny new visitor facilities and interpretative signs, Dendera is more often than not deserted. It is too far away from the hotels of Luxor for most package tours, beyond the reach of most Nile cruisers, awkward to reach. But therein lies its special appeal. In the vast, empty and darkened interior, the past and present readily intertwine, and one can almost hear the chanting of Ptolemaic priestesses, Champollion’s cries of delight and the prayers of Hindu soldiers in this timeless shrine to mother Egypt.

  For those who love her, Abydos still has a mysterious life.1

  —DOROTHY EADY, AKA UMM SETY

  Beyond the Qena Bend, the valley of the Nile broadens out and quietens down. While the eastern escarpment runs quite close to the river, the western hills are only just visible in the far distance. The resulting wide floodplain affords excellent agriculture, making this one of the most productive regions of Upper Egypt. Here, too, is to be found the Nile Valley terminus of a vital route leading to the oases of the Western Desert, giving the region an importance as a communications hub.

  But the true significance of this stretch of valley is not to be found in its natural bounty nor in its strategic location, but rather in its age-old role as a centre for the mysteries of faith. Since time immemorial, the town of Abydos has been a place of pilgrimage and worship, a focus for the religious yearnings of the Egyptians. There is something about the natural setting—perhaps it is the unaccustomed distance from the river—that gives Abydos and its neighbouring villages an enigmatic, numinous atmosphere.

  The preservation of an air of sanctity is undoubtedly helped by the absence of tourists: the whole region between Luxor and Cairo is tainted by the fear of terrorist attacks; Nile cruises scarcely travel north of Luxor and tourist coaches rarely venture this far from the resort hotels with their ring-fenced security. The arrival of any tour group these days is met not so much by hawkers and guides as by gawping, incredulous locals. But for those visitors who do brave the doom-mongers, unhelpful bureaucrats and reluctant bus drivers, any inconvenience is handsomely repaid. For Abydos is still one of the most magical places in the whole of Egypt.

  ON THE LOW DESERT at Abydos, about a mile to the north of the tourist café and trinket stalls, within sight of the walled Coptic village of Deir Sitt Damiana, stands an immense, looming presence: a great rectangular enclosure built of mud brick, measuring 406 feet long by 213 feet wide, its walls reaching 36 feet high in some places. Inside this vast space there is nothing but sand, banked up in drifts against the walls. Outside, especially on the eastern face, traces of whitewashed plaster still adhere to the bottom of the walls which display an a
lternating pattern of recesses and buttresses, creating a stark interplay of light and shade in the strong Egyptian sun. But there are no inscriptions, no reliefs, nothing to indicate the date or purpose of this mysterious building. Known to the local people as Shunet ez-Zebib, “storehouse of raisins,” it is, in fact, one of the two oldest standing mud-brick structures in the world (the other is its twin enclosure, the “Fort” at Nekhen). Both were built in the reign of a shadowy king of Egypt, Khasekhemwy, who ruled over the Nile Valley around 2700 BC. As far as we can judge, the monuments were designed to celebrate and perpetuate his memory after death. The Shunet ez-Zebib is what archaeologists term a funerary enclosure. And it is an appropriate curtain-raiser to the ancient mysteries of Abydos.

  From prehistoric times, the rulers of this fertile stretch of the Nile Valley chose to be buried at Abydos. The location was not accidental. Here, on the west bank of the river, the low desert plain is backed by towering, majestic cliffs. A cleft in the rocks seems to suggest more beyond, and was believed anciently to be an entrance to the underworld—it points due west, towards the sunset. The desert at Abydos has a stillness, a magic and a mystery that are hard to describe but still palpable. Recent excavations have uncovered a sequence of brick-lined graves spanning the second and third quarters of the fourth millennium BC: the burials of prehistoric rulers, individuals who helped to shape Egyptian civilisation and set the country on its course towards statehood. Among these anonymous kings of remotest antiquity, one stands out. His tomb, larger than any other of its date in Egypt, was designed to resemble a suite of rooms in the royal palace, complete with doorways, a treasury (containing his ivory sceptre) and a wine cellar stocked with the finest imported vintages. His name is not known, although he may have used the symbol of a scorpion to denote his power of life and death over his subjects. Most remarkably, he (or, rather, his officials) was so concerned with recording the income of the royal treasury that he had small ivory and bone labels attached to all the commodities buried in his tomb—not just blank labels, but dockets with hieroglyphic signs denoting provenance, quantity and other details. The inscriptions from this early royal tomb (known prosaically to archaeologists as Abydos tomb U-j) constitute the earliest writing ever found in Egypt. They mark a key staging post in the development of pharaonic civilisation.

  Within a few generations of the scorpion king’s burial at Abydos, the entire Nile Valley, from the First Cataract to the marshlands of the Delta, had been unified into a single country. Following the unification, the First Dynasty of kings chose to maintain the royal necropolis at Abydos—either because they, too, hailed from the region, or because of the site’s ancient and royal associations. But these First Dynasty kings were not content with a single tomb, however lavish. Each of them also commissioned a funerary enclosure—a building facing the town and temple of Abydos, where the majesty of their kingship could be made visible for all to see and where their funerary rites could be celebrated in full view and in suitable splendour. Today, only one of these funerary enclosures remains, the Shunet ez-Zebib. Its predecessors were torn down, perhaps as the final act of each royal funeral. As the last and largest of its kind, the Shunet survived when Abydos was finally abandoned in favour of a more northerly necropolis at the dawn of the Pyramid Age. The Shunet reminds us that Abydos is, above all, a place of dead kings.

  Our beliefs are shaped by our surroundings, and nowhere is this more evident than in Egypt. From the rock-art of the Eastern Desert to the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, from the prehistoric painted linen of Gebelein to the moulid of Abu el-Haggag at Luxor, the Egyptians’ religious rituals have always been dominated by boats. In a land defined by the River Nile, it is only natural that funeral processions, royal progresses, pilgrimages and even the travels of gods should have taken place by boat. Images of deities were housed in barque-shrines—sacred boats—even when carried on land, so dominant was the imagery of river traffic. From earliest times, when considering what lay beyond the grave, the Egyptians conceived of an afterlife journey; and, not unnaturally, they believed that journey would take place by boat. Concrete evidence for this has come to light alongside the Shunet ez-Zebib, in the form of a flotilla of longboats—fourteen have been unearthed so far—buried alongside the enclosure to serve a dead king in his afterlife. Each wooden hull was lovingly buried in a corresponding, boat-shaped pit, and covered with a skin of mud bricks which was then whitewashed to shine in the sun. Finally, each boat burial was provided with a stone anchor. From a distance, they must have looked like a fleet moored on the low desert. Carefully constructed from planks of imported coniferous wood, these boats are remarkable examples of the shipwright’s craft; they are also the oldest boats in existence—dating back the best part of five thousand years.

  While the boat burials and funerary enclosures were intended as public statements, designed to display and emphasise the majesty of monarchy, the kings’ tombs at Abydos belonged to a more hidden realm. Their purpose was to provide the deceased monarch with everything he might need in the hereafter, from wine to women (many of the subsidiary burials which surround the early royal tombs belonged to concubines). The royal necropolis itself occupies one of the most striking locations anywhere in Egypt, on a par with the much later Valley of the Kings at Thebes. It remains exactly as described more than a century ago:

  The situation is wild and silent; close round it the hills rise high on two sites, a ravine running up into the plateau from the corner where the lines meet. Far away, and below us, stretches the long green valley of the Nile, beyond which for dozens of miles the eastern cliffs recede far into the distance.2

  Dramatic cliffs and sand dunes form the backdrop to a stage set on which the rulers of a newly unified Nile Valley intended to play out their power and prestige for all eternity.

  The rediscovery of the early royal tombs was itself a story of pride and passion, dominated by a clash of personalities, nationalities and archaeological cultures. In the late nineteenth century, Abydos attracted interest from antiquarians, not only because of its reputation as an ancient religious centre, but also because a steady stream of good antiquities was starting to emanate from the site. In the scramble to bag the best excavation permits, the concession for the royal necropolis at Abydos was secured by a French orientalist and papyrologist, Emile Amélineau (1850–1915). He may have been the leading expert of the time in Coptic manuscripts and the history of Christianity, but he was wholly unsuited to field archaeology—especially in a place as ravaged by time and tomb-robbers as Abydos. At the height of his scholarly reputation, and in a move which seems inexplicable, Amélineau suspended his teaching and research at the prestigious Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris to direct excavations at Abydos for four years.

  The result was an archaeological disaster:

  no plans were kept (a few incorrect ones were made later), there was no record of where things were found, no useful publication. He [Amélineau] boasted that he had reduced to chips the pieces of stone vases which he did not care to remove, and burnt up the remains of the woodwork of the 1st dynasty in his kitchen. The things taken to Paris were scattered as pretty presents by his partners, and finally the greater part were sold by auction … It was the usual French work, but with total indifference to what became of things.3

  The author of this excoriating report was the man who stepped in and saved the early history of Abydos—none other than Flinders Petrie. Learning about what he called “the great scandal”4 of the “affaire Amélineau,” Petrie rushed to Abydos to take over the excavations of the early royal tombs, despite the fact that the concession still technically belonged to the Frenchman. But Petrie had no regard for the personal feelings of a man whom even the head of the Antiquities Service had called “a stinking beast.”5 His only concern was “to ascertain everything possible about the early royal tombs after they were done with by others, and to search for even fragments of the pottery.”6 Petrie lamented that, “Had I been allowed to work at Abydos when I ask
ed for it in previous years, the whole of the remains would have appeared together, and we should have known much more of the early dynasties.”7 He was undoubtedly correct. Even so, what he achieved in two short seasons more than vindicated his approach. Through the systematic collection and study of the tiniest fragments, including those left on Amélineau’s spoil heaps, Petrie rescued the earliest history of Egypt from utter oblivion.

  It was just as well that Petrie was as determined and ascetic as he was, for not only did he have to deal with the depradations of earlier excavators, he also suffered the same trials and tribulations that had afflicted him at Qift a few years earlier:

  One stormy night a man carried off a statue of over a hundredweight from our courtyard. I tracked him and made drawings of his feet from various impressions, as the toes were peculiar. I got a local man to tell tales which led to identifying the thief. He was arrested; at the police court his feet exactly tallied to my outline …

  Another time a man came in the dark and shot at close range the first person who came out of our mess-hut, which was my wife. Happily she escaped.8

  Hilda Petrie was every bit as doughty as her husband. Together, they toiled long hours in the sand and sun of Abydos, all for the sake of a more scientific approach to uncovering the past. And, after long days at the excavation site, there were few home comforts back at the dig-house. The Petries’ trademark austerity shocked even a visiting clergyman, Canon Rawnsley, who recorded the following pen-portrait of the Petries’ camp: