From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  By the end of the first season Grenfell and Hunt had discovered an entire library of lost classics: a forgotten song by Sappho; fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles; the earliest papyrus of St Matthew's Gospel then known; a leaf of a previously unknown book of New Testament Apocrypha, The Acts of Paul and Thecla. They also unearthed great quantities of historical documents such as the report of an interview between the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and an Alexandrian magistrate, as well as an entire archive of Byzantine correspondence and administrative documents.

  This last discovery was not a great cause of excitement to the Victorian excavators, brought up as they were with Gibbon's magisterial contempt for the late Roman Empire. Nevertheless, a century later, these documents are now usually regarded as the most important of all the finds from the site. For in the administrative flotsam from a provincial Byzantine town on the very edge of the Empire, we come closer to the lives of ordinary Byzantines than from any other surviving contemporary source; it casts a bright beam of light on the private life of the world John Moschos knew as he travelled through the last days of the Eastern Empire.

  Before setting off on this journey, I had spent a week in the London Library poring through some of the 142 volumes of the Oxyrhynchus papyri that have so far been edited, translated and published. Taken together they provide a uniquely detailed picture of a late antique city: reading them is like opening a shutter onto a sunlit Byzantine street and eavesdropping on the gossip, the scandals and the secret affairs of the people milling about below.

  It is the extraordinary randomness of the fragments that forms much of their fascination: we may have lost every one of the seven hundred thousand scrolls of high philosophy and world history stored in the great library of Alexandria, but in obscure Oxyrhynchus we meet the forgotten vendors in the street, the sleepy nightwatchmen on their shift, the disgruntled schoolteachers in their classrooms, even the city's teenage girls creeping back from assignations with their lovers. A shoemaker promises to water the tree that stands outside his house. A husband writes to his wife asking her to come to him and 'bring the old cushion that is in the dining room'. A father writes to his son to complain that he has not kept in touch (‘I have been much surprised, my son, at not receiving hitherto a letter from you to tell me how you are. Please answer me with all speed, for I am quite distressed...'). An indignant son complains to his father that he has been misrepresenting him ('You wrote to me: "You are staying in Alexandria with your paramour." Tell me then, who is my paramour?'). A pained lover in desperation scribbles down a spell or a prayer: 'Make her to be sleepless, to fly through the air, to love me with a most vehement love, hungry, thirsty and without sleep until she comes and melts her body with mine . . .'

  Some of the most interesting Oxyrhynchus fragments read like pages of tabloid journalism. In one fragment a respectable matron writes to her husband in horror at the promiscuity of their children: 'If you want to know about the harlotries of your daughters, ask the priests of the church, not me, how they leaped out saying, "We want men" and how Lucra was found with her lover, making a whore of herself.'

  In another fragment a wife writes to the Oxyrhynchus magistrate to complain about her husband's mistreatment of her and her family: 'Concerning all the insults uttered by him against me. He shut up his own slaves and mine with my foster daughters for seven days in his cellars, having insulted his slaves and my slave Zoe and half killed them with blows. Then he applied fire to my foster daughters, having stripped them quite naked which is contrary to the laws. He also said to the same foster daughters, "Give up all that is hers" ... He persisted in vexing my soul about my slave Anilla, saying "Send away this slave." But I refused to send her away, and he kept saying, "A month hence I will take a mistress." God knows this is true .. .'

  Walking around the midden mounds, I looked over to the green of the cultivation around Behnasa, under whose houses the city

  centre of Oxyrhynchus had once stood. Somewhere over there must have been the stall of Aurelius Nilus, the egg seller. In one of the Oxyrhynchus papyri he makes a solemn declaration that he will only sell his eggs in the forum and cease to operate on the black market. Somewhere by those palm trees may have been the mansion of Aurelia Attiaena. She walks into history in a fragmentary piece of papyrus bitterly complaining about the treatment she received from her husband: '... A certain Paul, coming from the same city, carried me off by force and compulsion and cohabited with me in marriage ... a female child by him ... but when soldiers were billeted in my house he robbed them and fled, and I was left to endure insults and punishments to within an inch of my life . . . Then, once more giving way to recklessness, and having a mistress again installed in his house, he brought with him a crowd of lawless men and carried me off. He then shut me in his house for days. When I became pregnant he again abandoned me, cohabiting with his mistress, and now tells me he will stir up malice against me. Wherefore I appeal to my Lord's staunchness to order him to appear in court that he might be punished for his outrages towards me.'

  It was disgust with such violent sensuality and grasping materialism that led St Antony, a semi-literate Egyptian farmer from the nearby town of Beni Suef, to reject the world and set off into the desert. As I followed his route through the Eastern Desert in Ramazan's stuttering car later that afternoon, I thought of the untold consequences for the history of the Christian world that St Antony's actions would have.

  St Antony first fled to the site of the present monastery in the late third century a.d. in an effort to escape the attentions of a stream of adoring Graeco-Roman intellectuals from Alexandria. Through no apparent fault of his own, the saint had become the darling of Alexandria's fashionable intelligentsia, who revered him for his earthy asceticism and his reputed power over demons. Like modern London literati falling over themselves to become the biographers of Premiership footballers, these Alexandrian sophisticates had turned up in streams at St Antony's cave, causing the baffled hermit - a painfully shy man who had retreated into the sand dunes with the express purpose of avoiding other human beings - to flee from his admirers further and further into the desert.

  When his fan club pursued him to the site of the present monastery, located as it was in the middle of some of the most inhospitable sand-wastes in the entire Middle East, the saint realised that he was never going to shake off his followers. He decided instead to organise them into a loose-knit community of hermits, over which he kept watch from a cave a safe distance further up the mountain.

  So was born Christian monasticism; and with incredible speed the idea spread. By the early fifth century some seven hundred monasteries filled the desert between Jerusalem and the southern border of the Byzantine Empire; they flourished to such an extent that travellers reported that the population of the desert now equalled that of the towns: 'The number of monks is past counting,' wrote Rufinus of Aquileia after his visit to Egypt only twenty-one years after the death of Antony. 'There are so many of them that an earthly Emperor could not assemble so large an army. For there is no town or village in Egypt which is not surrounded by hermitages as if by walls; while other monks live in desert caves or in even more remote places.'

  The story of St Antony's life, which was written within a year of his death by Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, was soon translated into Latin by Evagrius of Antioch for 'the brethren from overseas'; within twenty years it was being read and copied in distant Gaul. Not long afterwards, St Augustine, sitting in Hippo in North Africa, records that he was profoundly moved by a story he heard that two secret policemen from Trier (now part of Germany), having read The Life of St Antony, decided to leave their comfortable posts to become monks in Egypt. A century later monasticism was flourishing all over the West, and had become especially popular in Italy and southern France. By 700 it had reached even the Highlands of Scotland: around that time an image of St Antony under a palm tree was sculpted by Pictish monks on the windswept promontory of Nigg near Inverness, hundreds of miles beyon
d the Roman Empire's northernmost border.

  The Monastery of St Antony - which, unlike most of its medieval Western imitators, is still flourishing - lies in the desert some three hundred miles south-east of Cairo, fifty miles inland from the barren shores of the Red Sea. Even today when the monastery is linked to the outside world by a tarmac road, the drive is a long and dispiriting one, through a desolate wasteland: flat, shimmering with heat during the day, icily cold at night, impossibly inhospitable. Yet until forty years ago St Antony's could only be reached by a three-week journey, and it depended for all its supplies on a monthly camel caravan.

  The monastery is so well camouflaged against its khaki backdrop that it is almost invisible until you drive up directly underneath it. Then, less than half a mile from your destination, the whole complex comes slowly into focus: out of the sand rises a loop of camel-coloured walls pierced by a series of pepperpot mud-brick bastions. Above these stand two enormous towers - the gatehouse and the Byzantine keep - beyond which you can see the tops of dusty palm trees shivering in the desert wind.

  Inside the walls, the monastery looks more like some African oasis village than it does Tintern, Rievaulx, Fountains or any of the great medieval monasteries of Europe. Streets of unglazed mud-brick cottages with creaking wooden balconies lead up to a scattering of churches and chapels; occasionally a small piazza filled with a sway of date palms breaks the spread of cells. Over everything tower the wall turrets and the great castellated mud-brick keep. It is a deeply suggestive spread of buildings - to the European eye like some nineteenth-century Orientalist's fantasy - but to the Byzantines it must have sent out a very different message.

  For the monastery's simple mud-brick buildings were constructed in the fourth century in a manner as crude and earthy as the buildings of Byzantine Alexandria must once have been refined and beautiful. This contrast was not accidental. St Antony and the monks who followed him into the Egyptian desert were consciously rejecting everything that Alexandria stood for: luxury, indulgence, elegance, sophistication. Instead they cultivated a deliberate simplicity - sometimes even a wilful primitiveness -and their way of life is reflected in their art and their architecture.

  In contrast to medieval Western monks, the Egyptian desert fathers also tended to reject the concept of learning, the worship of knowledge for its own sake. St Antony was particularly scathing about books, proclaiming that 'in the person whose mind is sound there is no need for letters', and that the only book he needed was 'the nature of God's creation: it is present whenever I wish to read His words'. Many of St Antony's Coptic followers emulated his example, preferring a life of hard manual labour and long hours of prayer to one of study. A millennium of classical literary culture came to be forgotten as the works of Homer and Thucyd-ides went unread for the first time; in the words of a monastic chant to the Virgin, 'the many tongued rhetors have fallen as silent as fishes.' As late as the mid-nineteenth century, this attitude to the classics seems to have lingered in Coptic monasteries: when the British bibliophile the Hon. Robert Curzon visited the Monastery of Deir el-Suriani in the Wadi Natrun, he discovered manuscripts of lost works of Euclid and Plato serving as stoppers in jars of monastic olive oil.

  Modern Egyptian monks tend to be literate - in fact the majority are university graduates - but their energy is still consciously channelled away from scholarly study and into prayer and agriculture. The monks rise at three in the morning - just as the Cairo nightclubs and casinos are beginning to empty - and spend the next five hours praying together under frescoes of the desert fathers in the ancient early Byzantine abbey church. There then follows a day of gruelling physical activity as the monks attempt, with a certain degree of success, to get the desert around the monastery to flower.

  Indeed they are such enthusiastic students of arid farming techniques that yesterday evening after vespers - the one period of the day when the monks are free to mill around - I saw several groups of fixated novices poring over seed catalogues and the latest issue of some obscure farming magazine - Irrigation Today or Bore Hole Weekly or some such - as excitedly as a gaggle of teenage schoolboys with their first girlie glossy. Because of this agricultural bent, conversation at mealtimes can turn surprisingly technical. Yesterday, when St Antony's Guest Master, Fr. Dios-curos, brought me my supper, he produced a single boiled egg with as much flourish as a Parisian restaurateur might present some incredibly recherche piece of nouvelle cuisine. Then he waited while I tasted it.

  'Very good,' I said, trying to rise to the occasion. 'It must be the most delicious boiled egg I've ever tasted.'

  'That's hardly surprising,' replied Fr. Dioscuros. 'It's an Isa Brown.'

  Isa, the Arabic form of the name Jesus, is a common name among Copts, so I asked if the egg were named after some pioneering Coptic hen-breeder.

  'No, no,' replied the Guest Master, looking at me as if I were some sort of halfwit. 'Not Isa - I.S.A.: Institut de Selection des Animaux near Paris - the most famous poultry centre in the world. Fr. Abbot visited it two years ago. Now all our animals are from the most modern and superior breeds.'

  This obsession with state-of-the-art chicken-farming techniques is one of a number of ways in which the modern world has begun to knock at the gates of St Antony's. The abbey has recently abandoned candles in favour of its own electrical generator, and Fr. Dioscuros turned out to have a portable phone tucked away amid the folds of his habit. More radically, the increase in the number of Coptic pilgrims visiting St Antony's has forced the monks finally to abandon their age-old practice of winching visitors into the abbey by a rope (a practice which began in the sixth century a.d. when Byzantine Egypt first began to be assaulted by Bedouin war bands) in favour of the relatively up-to-date option of a front gate.

  Nevertheless, these concessions apart, the monks remain wonderfully Dark Age in their outlook and conversation. Exorcisms, miraculous healings and ghostly apparitions of long-dead saints are to them what doorstep milk deliveries are to suburban Londoners - unremarkable everyday occurrences that would never warrant a passing mention if foreigners did not always seem to be so inexplicably amazed by them.

  'See up there?' said Abuna Dioscuros as I was finishing my egg. He pointed to the space between the two towers of the abbey church. 'In June 1987 in the middle of the night our father St Antony appeared there hovering on a cloud of shining light.'

  'You saw this?' I asked.

  'No,' said Fr. Dioscuros. 'I'm short-sighted.'

  He took off his spectacles to show me the thickness of the glass. 'I can barely see the Abbot when I sit beside him at supper,' he said. 'But many other fathers saw the apparition. On one side of St Antony stood St Mark the Hermit and on the other was Abuna Yustus.'

  'Abuna Yustus?'

  'He is one of our fathers. He used to be the Sacristan.' 'So what was he doing up there?' 'He had just departed this life.' 'Oh,' I said. 'I see.'

  'Officially he's not a saint yet, but I'm sure he will be soon. His canonisation is up for discussion at the next Coptic synod. His relics have been the cause of many miracles: blind children have been made to see, the lame have got up from their wheelchairs . . .'

  'All the usual sort of stuff.'

  'Exactly. But you won't believe this' - here Fr. Dioscuros lowered his voice to a whisper. 'You won't believe this, but we had some visitors from Europe two years ago - Christians, some sort of Protestants - who said they didn't believe in the power of relics!'

  The monk stroked his beard, wide-eyed with disbelief. 'No,' he continued. 'I'm not joking. I had to take the Protestants aside and explain that we believe that St Antony and all the fathers have not died, that they live with us, continually protecting us and looking after us. When they are needed - when we go to their graves and pray to their relics - they appear and sort out our problems.'

  'Can the monks see them?'

  'Who? Protestants?'

  'No. These deceased fathers.'

  'Abuna Yustus is always appearing,' said Fr. Dioscuros ma
tter-of-factly. 'In fact one of the fathers had a half-hour conversation with him the day before yesterday. And of course St Antony makes fairly regular appearances - although he is very busy these days answering prayers all over the world. But even when we cannot see the departed fathers we can always feel them. And besides, there are many other indications that they are with us.'

  'What do you mean?' I asked. 'What sort of indications?'

  'Well, take last week for instance. The Bedouin from the desert are always bringing their sick to us for healing. Normally it is something quite simple: we let them kiss a relic, give them an aspirin and send them on their way. But last week they brought in a small girl who was possessed by a devil. We took the girl into the church, and as it was the time for vespers one of the fathers went off to ring the bell for prayers. When he saw this the devil inside the girl began to cry: "Don't ring the bell! Please don't ring the bell!" We asked him why not. "Because," replied the devil, "when you ring the bell it's not just the living monks who come into the church: all the holy souls of the fathers join with you too, as well as great multitudes of angels and archangels. How can I remain in the church when that happens? I'm not staying in a place like that." At that moment the bell began to ring, the girl shrieked and the devil left her!' Fr. Dioscuros clicked his fingers: 'Just like that. So you see,' he said. 'That proves it.'