From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  Certainly Alexandria seems to have brought the scholar in Moschos to the fore, and his account of his time in the city depicts him and Sophronius (who was, after all, a Sophist, a teacher of philosophy and rhetoric) engaged in high-minded intellectual pursuits. In one story the pair are attending lectures at the university by Theodore the Philosopher; in another talking to the cal-ligrapher and book illuminator Zoilus the Reader; on yet another occasion, in a charming picture of bookish Byzantine life, they are visiting a bibliophile named Cosmas the Lawyer.

  'This wondrous man greatly benefited us,' wrote Moschos, 'not only by letting us see him and by teaching us, but also because he had more books than anybody else in Alexandria and would willingly supply them to those who wished. Yet he was a man of no possessions. Throughout his house there was nothing to be seen but books, a bed and a table. Any man could go in and ask for what would benefit him - and read it. Each day I would go in to him.'

  The most intriguing story of all, however, concerns a visit to another scholar friend. The tale is set one hot summer afternoon sometime in the late 580s, with Moschos and Sophronius sheltering from the midday heat in the shade of the monumental tetrapylon at the centre of Alexandria. The monks had set out to visit another bibliophile friend, Stephen the Sophist, but Stephen's maid had shouted out of the top window that her master was fast asleep. So while they waited for the Sophist to finish his siesta, the pair amused themselves by eavesdropping on a conversation between three blind men who were also taking advantage of the tetrapylon's shade. They were passing the time by telling each other how they had lost their sight, and the last of the men told a strange and macabre story which Moschos records.

  Before he lost his sight, said the blind man, he had been a grave-robber. One day he saw a richly-decked-out corpse being taken through the streets of Alexandria for burial in the Church of St John, and he had made up his mind to plunder the grave. When the funeral had finished, the man broke into the sepulchre and began to strip the tomb. Suddenly he gave a start: the dead man appeared to sit up before him and stretch out his hands towards the grave-robber's eyes. It was the last thing, said the blind man, that he ever saw.

  Later on, Moschos heard a similar story about another grave-robber who had broken into a rich girl's tomb in the depths of the night. Again the corpse seemed to come to life, only this time the girl grabbed the robber: 'You came in here when you wanted to,' she said, 'but you will not go out of here as you will. This tomb will be shared by the two of us.' The corpse refused to let the robber go until he promised to repent and become a monk. In shock, the man agreed.

  When I first read these stories I had assumed them to be pious superstition, like many of Moschos's other tales. But this afternoon, reading The Spiritual Meadow in the museum garden, I suddenly understood where such tales originated. For from the first century a.d. through to the early Byzantine period, it was the custom in Egypt to bury those who could afford it in mummy cases onto which were bound superb encaustic (hot wax) portraits of the deceased; in some cases - there are two fine examples in the Graeco-Roman Museum - full-length pictures were painted onto the mummy's winding sheet itself.

  These mummy portraits throw a reflected beam of light on the lost world of classical portraiture, vanished now but for a few frescoes at Pompeii, and more importantly form a bridge between the painting of antiquity and the panel-painted icons of Byzantium. It can be no coincidence that the oldest icons in existence are to be found in St Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, and that they are painted in the same encaustic technique as their Alexandrian mummy-portrait predecessors. If, as Otto Demus observed, 'the icon is the root-form of the European picture', then in these Graeco-Egyptian mummy-portraits we see the immediate genesis of the icon.

  But it is as works of art that the mummy portraits are most striking. They are so real that you can almost hear the sitters speak - as Moschos's grave-robbers seem to have discovered. Even today, behind glass in a museum, the portraits are so astonishingly lifelike that they can still make you gasp as you find yourself staring eyeball to eyeball with a soldier who could have fought at Actium, or a society lady who may have known Cleopatra. There is something deeply hypnotic about the silent stare of these sad, uncertain Graeco-Roman faces, most of whom appear to have died in their early thirties. Their fleeting expressions are frozen, startled, as if suddenly surprised by death itself; their huge eyes stare out, as if revealing the nakedness of the departed soul. The viewer peers at them, trying to catch some hint of the upheavals they witnessed and the strange sights they must have seen in late antique Egypt. But the smooth neo-classical faces stare us down.

  Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about these portraits is that they appear so astonishingly familiar: the colours and technique of some of them resemble Frans Hals, others Cezanne, and two thousand years after they were painted the faces still convey with penetrating immediacy the character of the different sitters: the fop and the courtesan, the anxious mother and the tough man of business, the bored army officer and the fat nouveau-riche matron, hung with gold, dripping with make-up. Indeed, so contemporary are the features, so immediately recognisable the emotions that play on the lips, that you have to keep reminding yourself that these sitters are not from our world, that they are masks attached to Graeco-Egyptian mummies, covering the desiccated corpses of people who possibly saw the world through the glass of an initiate in the cult of Isis, who maybe married their brother or sister (as late as the third century Diocletian was still trying to outlaw incest in Egypt) and who perhaps studied in the great Alexandrian library before it was burned to the ground by the howling monks of the Egyptian deserts.

  As Andre Malraux put it, these mummy portraits 'glow with the flame of eternal life'. Certainly it is easy to imagine their effect on John Moschos's nervous grave-robbers breaking into a necropolis at night: no wonder they thought the dead had risen.

  This evening, my final one in the city, following Miss Christina's directions I found my way along the tramlines to the gathering place of the last Greeks in Alexandria.

  The Greek Club consisted of an empty hall, opening onto a trellised courtyard where twenty or thirty elderly Greek couples sat playing backgammon and poker. From the bar, tinned Greek music wafted out into the night. There I found Nicholas Zoulias, the President of the club and an old friend of Miss Christina. Soon a circle had gathered around our table as the old people began to pour out their memories of pre-war Alexandria. They were the same stories I had already heard in the synagogue and the Elite Cafe: how Alexandria had once been the Paris of the East, the diamond of the Mediterranean, how lively the place had been, how prosperous and creative; and also how little remained of what once was. But what I had not heard before, nor expected, was how little these old men thought of Greece. They regarded Alexandria, their own personal city state, as the apogee of civilisation, and looked on modern Greece as some sort of ill-mannered parvenu.

  'Alexandria was always more sophisticated than Athens or Saloniki,' explained Nicholas Zoulias, lighting a cigarette. 'One hundred years ago, when Athens was still a village, Alexandria was a cosmopolitan city.'

  'Everything you wanted was here,' agreed Taki Katsimbris.

  'We don't like the Greeks,' said Michael Stephanopoulos. 'To be honest, I can't live there more than fourteen days.'

  'Athens is just the nightclub of Europe,' said Zoulias, sucking his teeth in contempt. 'Nothing more.'

  'The Greeks in Greece are more rough than we are,' said Michael.

  'They don't know languages as we do,' said Zoulias. 'French, Arabic, English ...'

  'They are as rough as Turks,' said Michael. 'In Greece, if you ask what time it is, they don't answer.'

  'If you ask an address in Greece, they will say they don't know. Here they will show you. They'll take you there.'

  'They don't have a tradition of hospitality.'

  'We are different from them,' said Zoulias. 'We have different food, different speech, different morals...'


  'We are more like the Egyptians,' said Taki. 'We have the same mentality as them.'

  'Many of our grandmothers would wear the veil.'

  'They even used to pray like the Egyptians: with a carpet on the floor.'

  'What's the difference between Christianity and Islam? It's the same God.'

  'But there is nothing like that in Greece. They are very ... narrow-minded over there. They think only they know what is right.'

  'Greece is part of Europe,' said Zoulias, 'and they now have a very . . . automatic way of living. They have speed. They are always running. Here we have an easy way: wahde wahde - step by step.'

  All the other old men nodded in agreement.

  'Here the automobiles are slow,' said Michael. 'The railway is slow...'

  'And slowly we are dying out,' added Taki.

  No one disagreed with what he had said. I asked: 'How long will your community last?'

  'Five, ten years at most,' said Zoulias.

  'There are only five hundred of us left.'

  'All the young are going to Athens. As soon as they finish school.'

  'They say they get bored here. They say there are no jobs for them.'

  'When Nasser nationalised our factories he signed our death warrant.'

  'Many who were rich became beggars. He took everything we had.'

  'But they found it easy to get jobs in Greece. Because of their skills and languages. So everyone went.'

  As Nasser had taken everything, they had no reason to stay.'

  'When I was a boy there used to be two hundred thousand Greeks in Egypt. Two hundred thousand! Even ten years ago there were five thousand. Now there's just us.'

  'We've got ten years. Maximum.'

  'Unless those who left come back.'

  'I don't think they will,' said Michael.

  The old men shook their heads. Taki took a gulp of arak. 'They'll stay in Greece.'

  'Leaving Alexandria without any Greeks.' 'After 2,300 years.' 'They won't come back.' 'No.'

  'But who can say?' said Zoulias, lighting a cigarette. 'Who can say?'

  The Coptic Orthodox Monastery of St Antony the Great, 10 December

  I knew we were in for trouble the minute I saw the taxi.

  It was a sort of prehistoric ancestor of the Peugeot, with a patchwork of repainted bumps and scars that gave it a vaguely scaly appearance, like a large lizard or a small dinosaur. The man who was to drive this beast was even less prepossessing. Ramazan was a Bedu from the Sinai. He wore a faded denim waistcoat over an off-white shift, and around his head he wrapped a red and white keffiyeh; his chin was darkened by a wispy stab at a beard.

  We loaded my rucksack into the boot, and Ramazan turned the ignition. The Peugeot bucked, coughed and staggered like a disgruntled camel. Ramazan tried the ignition a second time, with equally disappointing results. He then got out and did to the car what Bedu tend to do to disgruntled camels who behave in a similar manner. He beat it on its side, kicked its chassis, then whispered some encouraging words into its bonnet. On the third attempt the car hiccupped grudgingly into life and we juddered drunkenly out of the hotel carpark.

  I had arrived in Cairo off the Alexandrian train the day before, and had immediately set about trying to obtain permission to visit Asyut, the province in Upper Egypt where the majority of Egypt's Copts have always lived; it also contains the Great Oasis, modern Kharga, the southernmost point reached by Moschos on his travels.

  The area has been closed to foreigners since its resurgent Islamic movement began widening its scope from taking occasional potshots at the local Copts - whom they have been shooting on and off since the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 - to targeting foreign tourists as well. In the process they came close to destroying Egypt's tourist industry, and as a result foreigners have now been banned from the vicinity of Asyut. But journalists have occasionally been allowed into the area to report on the government's (often heavy-handed) attempts to quell the Islamist uprising. I therefore went straight to the Egyptian Press Centre, presented my credentials and duly made an application, in triplicate. I was told to return in a week. Rather than hang around Cairo, waiting for bureaucrats to shuffle my papers and rearrange their red tape, I decided to take the opportunity to visit two important Byzantine sites that I had always wanted to see.

  The first was St Antony's, the birthplace of Christian monasticism and the greatest monastery in Byzantine Egypt. The second was the lost city of Oxyrhynchus, once one of Byzantine Egypt's most important provincial towns and subsequently the site of the discovery of the greatest treasure trove of Byzantine documents ever uncovered. Its ruins lay on the way to St Antony's, and when I looked at the map it seemed as if it would be easy to take it in on the way. What I did not take into account was Ramazan's driving. For five minutes the taxi juddered along at ever lower speed through the empty early-morning streets of Cairo. Then it finally stalled at a set of traffic lights. 'No problem,' said Ramazan, ducking to avoid the outsized pink velvet love-heart dangling from his mirror. 'No problem at all.'

  As the cars behind hooted angrily, Ramazan disappeared behind the bonnet with a length of metal tubing. There followed the sound of hammering and a strong reek of diesel. Early attempts at reigniting the engine came to nothing, and Ramazan began to look a little worried. But quite suddenly, without anyone apparently turning the ignition key, the car bucked into life and off we set again.

  The incident had taught Ramazan a lesson. Henceforth traffic lights were obstacles we carefully ignored, and we shot through all the others we came to with impressive gusto. At any other time of day Ramazan's tactics would have been suicidal. At 5.30 in the morning they were merely very frightening. Bar a couple of scratches on the boot - souvenirs of a brief clinch with a truck carrying watermelons - we emerged from Cairo remarkably unscathed, and headed off southwards, driving parallel to the Nile through the pretty villages of the fertile valley.

  Here and there, groups of early risers were sitting outside under the vine trellising of the tea houses smoking the first hubble-bubble of the day; a few women were washing clothes by the canals. Through this pastoral scene Ramazan passed like a rugby player in a ballet. He clearly believed that the key to avoiding further stalling lay in keeping the car travelling at some speed. With this in mind he raced along, cutting into the opposite lane, swerving around bends, one minute narrowly avoiding killing two farmers chatting in the middle of the road, the next coming within inches of knocking down a fat sheikh in a blue shift ambling along on a donkey. In this manner we headed down the Nile, the world's most peaceful river transformed before my eyes into the setting for a one-man dragster rally.

  Ramazan's driving may have been terrifying, but it got us to our destination in record time. After two hours' racing down the narrow strip of cultivation that flanks the banks of the Nile we reached Behnasa, the medieval Arab village which grew up on the edge of Oxyrhynchus's ruins. Passing through the village - in the process of which Ramazan came close to overturning an old horse-drawn brougham full of heavily veiled village women - we juddered out of the cultivation into the desert, searching for the ruins marked on my map. We drove into the dunes, then drove back again. The Western Desert stretched all around us, flat, inhospitable and echoingly empty. There were no temples, no pillars, no colonnaded streets, nothing at all except for a single small, mud-brick tomb belonging to a medieval Sufi sheikh.

  It was while walking back from the tomb, baffled by the total absence of any visible remains, that I noticed for the first time what I was standing on. Every time my foot touched the ground, the sand appeared to crunch beneath my weight. Bending down, I looked more closely at the surface. The dunes all around were littered with pot shards: handles of amphorae, small roundels of red Samian-ware dishes, the decorated bases of cups, jugs, mugs and bowls. But it was not just pieces of pottery: fragments of brilliant aquamarine Byzantine glass glinted in the winter sun; beside them lay small lumps of slag and smelting clinker, fragments of jet
, amber and garnet, pieces of bone and the shells of mussels and oysters.

  I walked and walked for the rest of the morning, but the soft crunch underfoot did not stop: the midden extended for many miles. The town of Oxyrhynchus had clearly disappeared, destroyed - presumably - by generations of Nile floods and the robbing of the villagers of Behnasa; but its middens remained: epic drifts of Pharaonic, Graeco-Roman and Byzantine rubbish, left where it had been dropped by the street cleaners nearly two thousand years ago. I was standing on one of the great rubbish dumps of the ancient world.

  Pulling at an amphora handle jutting out of the ground, I broke a Byzantine pot, and its contents, a pile of chaff winnowed, perhaps, while Justinian still ruled the Empire, floated away in the winter breeze.

  The rubbish dumps of Oxyrhynchus first came to the attention of the outside world in 1895 when reports reached the British archaeologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt that the area had begun to yield an extraordinary number of papyrus fragments. What the two men found when they visited the site, however, surpassed their wildest expectations.

  'The papyri were, as a rule, not very far from the surface,' wrote Grenfell in the Journal of the Egypt Exploration Fund the following year. 'In one patch of ground, indeed, merely turning up the soil with one's boot would frequently disclose a layer of papyri ... I proceeded to increase the number of workmen gradually up to 110, and, as we moved northwards over other parts of the site, the flow of papyri soon became a torrent which it was difficult to cope with ...'

  What was written on the papyri was every bit as remarkable as the sheer quantity of texts uncovered. On the second day of the excavations Dr Hunt was examining a crumpled fragment which had just been produced by the workmen. It contained only a few legible lines of text, but one of these contained the very rare Greek word 'karphos, which means 'a mote'. Immediately Hunt made the connection with the verse in St Matthew's Gospel about the mote in your brother's eye and the beam in your own, but with a thrill he realised that the wording on the fragment differed significantly from that of the Gospel. The fragment turned out to be part of a lost collection of The Sayings of Jesus, which predated by hundreds of years any New Testament fragment then extant.