Time and again I bore witness to this curiously detached frame of mind. During my stay in Luxor, the French elections, fateful for Europe, took place; the outcome of the American coal miners’ strike hung in the balance; Israeli troops crossed into Lebanon. Erich and I, who privately agreed we were the only sane people in Luxor, were longing for news of these events but not a word of any of this was breathed by our new-found Egyptologist friends. “Doesn’t anybody here ever read a newspaper, or listen to the news on the radio?” I asked. Well, no; but the deepest passions are stirred by politics of the Eighteenth Dynasty, furious arguments rage over assessment of the true role of Tutankhamun, or Akhenaten, or the goddess Mut.
Item: We are in the tomb of Rekhmire, Theban nobleman of the Eighteenth Dynasty, gazing at the magnificent wall paintings of hunting, fishing, banqueting scenes. One wall is devoted to temple workshops showing leatherworkers, carpenters, blacksmiths, brickmakers. Erich Lessing, a Bible expert, tells me that the last are believed to be the Children of Israel in slavery, making bricks without straw as per the account in Exodus. James Manning, eyes blazing, bursts out: “That’s hogwash! Absolute hog-wash!” Lessing, possibly fearing fisticuffs, beats a hasty retreat: “I only said believed to be.”
Item: An Egyptologist who wishes to remain anonymous takes violent issue with the widely held assumption that Akhenaten sought to introduce monotheism into Egypt. “Bullshit!” he shouts angrily. “It was his mother, Queen Tiy, who was the genius behind that movement. Akhenaten was an epileptic idiot, a freak!” Seeing that I am writing this down, he adds hastily “For God’s sake, don’t quote me on that.” Does he half believe, I wonder, that Akhenaten might yet spring from the nether shores into his sturdy funeral barque to bring a defamation-of-character suit in the nearest courthouse?
Item: What of the goddess Mut? A banal cipher, the unimportant, simple wife of the great god Amon? “Not a bit of it!” exclaims one of the Egyptomaniacs (as I have come to think of them). “Mark my words, although she’s been terribly neglected— there’s hardly a mention, not even a monograph, about her in the scholarly literature—she’ll end up being recognized as one of the most complex, diversified deities in the whole Egyptian pantheon! It will be an unveiling!” Given the urgent immediacy with which these remarks were delivered, he could, I thought, be expounding on the posthumous reputation of an Indira Gandhi, a Golda Meir....
TRIP NOTES
There are daily planes to Aswan but we opt for the stately train, the Cairo all-sleeping-car express which disgorges most of its passengers in Luxor and proceeds to Aswan, a three-hour run. Erich, Fattah, and I are ready for the 7 a.m. departure but the train is not; after an hour’s wait, Fattah consults the stationmaster, who explains the driver overslept! At last we are on board, our compartment like one of the shabbier efforts of the British Railways but actually, Erich tells me, built by the Hungarians in the 1960s. The scenery gets lusher and more tropical as we approach Nubia. We head for the Old Cataract Hotel, its magnificent outdoor-indoor terrace with brightly painted basket chairs unchanged since Agatha Christie described it in Death on the Nile. One can even get Pimm’s Cup there. The hotel garden is a spectacular riot of giant hollyhocks, banana plants, and brilliant flower beds; I would gladly have tarried there, but our purpose is to meet Fattah’s colleague Gamal Wahbah, director of the Salvage of Philae Monuments, and to learn something of his work.
Travelers of the last century described Philae, then known as “the Pearl of Egypt,” in rhapsodic terms. Amelia Edwards, who went there in 1873, wrote: “Seen from the level of a small boat, the island, with its palms, its colonnades, its pylons, seems to rise out of the river like a mirage.... As the boat glides nearer between glistening boulders, those sculptured towers rise higher and even higher against the sky. They show no sign of ruin or of age. All looks solid, stately, perfect.”
The feathery palms, the glistening boulders, the sculptured towers have long since been submerged by the waters of the dam—to rise again, however, under the guiding hand of a remarkable twenty-eight-year-old Egyptian scholar, Gamal Wahbah.
We drive to Gamal’s office near Aswan, partake of the regulation hot, sweet black tea, and depart by boat for the island of Agilkia, a granite rock on which we can already see the stunning fruits of Gamal’s labors: vast colonnades and pylons, just as Amelia Edwards saw them, “solid, stately, perfect,” soaring against the glaring blue Egyptian sky. Fattah is amazed; he was here on a visit with Bobby Giella only last year, when there was nothing but a concrete foundation. How is it done?
UNESCO has funded the operation to the tune of some twenty million dollars; an Italian contracting company, Condotti Dotte-mazzi, does some of the rebuilding, but Gamal vehemently stresses time and again that responsibility for the direction of the work is in Egyptian hands: “The foreign expeditions have Egyptians attached to them, but here it’s all Egyptian: the chief engineer, the architect, the workers—all the preparations and experience are furnished by Egyptians.”
From Moustapha Naqui, chief engineer, we learn something of the magnitude and method of the operation, which began in 1972 and will be finished in ’79. His first step was to build a cofferdam round Philae, pump out the water, remove the mud from monuments and pavements. The engineers made a complete plan of the temples, giving the exact position and measurements of each stone dismantled—more than forty-two thousand blocks. These were kept in a storage area while the work of preparing a foundation on Agilkia went forward. There are more dizzying statistics—heights, widths, numbers of pottery fragments found—but I don’t pay much attention because I am seeing it all happen before my eyes; even as Naqui is speaking, two workmen are struggling with bits of a stone king, fitting them together to be put in place in the pylon.
We wander through the work in progress and Gamal points out the cornice, with bas-reliefs of Ptolemy giving offerings to Isis, already reconstructed from scattered blocks and erected in its original position. Along the way, Gamal and his co-workers have come upon some important discoveries: “The second pylon had lost the three upper courses, missing since before Napoleon’s day. We found the scattered stones and for the first time in modern history those courses have been replaced, and the pylon is complete.”
In another major discovery, during the dismantling the excavators found more than two hundred re-used blocks of a small Twenty-sixth Dynasty chapel from which they have reconstituted complete scenes, soon to be rebuilt as originally conceived. Thus Agilkia, the Cultured Pearl of Egypt, so to speak, may end up out-shining its predecessor. The major reconstruction will be completed by April, 1978, after which Agilkia will be opened to tourists; nor is this all, for in another two years the inhospitable granite will be covered with imported soil to nourish plants, palm trees, grass, flower gardens, a reincarnation of Philae as the ancients knew it.
Gamal is currently working on a book about the restoration of Philae, and the new light shed by his team on the history of the island, formerly thought to contain only Ptolemaic relics: “We found work by Ramses II, also artifacts from the Twelfth Dynasty, more than a thousand years before the Ptolemys.”
Again, key to success of the operation are the Kuftis, ten of whom live here in tents the year round except for an occasional visit home to their families in Kuft. “They are very, very intelligent,” says Gamal with measured emphasis. “Their eyes have the experience of the antiquities, they have soft hands to clean the objects. They supervise the other workers and make sure the blocks are put in the right position, and inform us if anything goes wrong.” The chief Kufti, Doctor Sha’had, is now introduced. Is Mr. Sha’had a Ph.D., then? I ask Fattah. “No, his family named him Doctor because they hoped he’d be one!”
We now take a short boat ride to Philae to watch the diving operation in which the stones outside the cofferdam are retrieved from the depths of the Nile under the joint direction of Lieutenant Commander David A. Bartlett of the British Navy and his Egyptian counterpart, Lieutenant Commander Tarik Fifaat
. Twelve English lads and twelve Egyptians work in pairs from derelicts moored near the submerged island. The commanders seem like perfect specimens of their respective nationalities: Bartlett, a handsome, rugged, blue-eyed man; and Fifaat so slender and mobile, his black eyes fringed with the double-thick lashes that have been one of the most attractive features of Egyptians since the days of tomb paintings.
Bartlett shows me a 1902 photograph of Philae as it then was, part of a large collection from the British Museum which they use as a guide to reconstruction of the temples. “There are about three hundred and fifty stones to be recovered from the Temple of Augustus, two hundred and forty have been brought up so far,” he says. An Egyptian and an English frogman are preparing to dive, struggling into their thick black outfits and compressed-air gear. They splash in, and guide the waiting hook and rope dangled from a crane to their quarry. There is a brief flurry when it turns out they brought up the wrong thing, a stone from a pillar, as yet unmarked—they are supposed to go only for the loose ones. “If a stone is taken from a pillar at random, once raised, there’s no way of knowing its right position in the temple,” Bartlett explains. “Once it’s marked, and the mud cleared off it, we can look at the code years from now and see how it fits in the wall.” Bartlett himself dives down to mark the blocks for the use of the archaeologists.
Bartlett may be one of those to whom, as Fattah said, Egyptology is “highly contagious.” Except for occasional brief calls at Egyptian ports, he had never stayed there until this assignment came along two years ago. He immediately started reading up on Philae and became totally absorbed in the island’s history. “I find it absolutely fascinating, specially to be working in the shadow of the new Philae being constructed.” He goes over there about once a week to see how it’s coming along, and is “amazed at it all.” He hopes to come back for the official opening—“that is if I’m invited. It’ll be a grand ceremony, no doubt, with boatloads of dignitaries from all over Egypt.”
Curiously, the Philae reconstruction, now almost completed, has never attracted the attention of the media, Gamal Wahbah tells me. He has seven papers in the works, shortly to be published in scholarly journals; but as far as he knows, there has been no mention of the project in the popular press: “Even when an official delegation from UNESCO arrived to inspect the work, the Egyptian papers gave it only a few lines.” Could Erich and I have chanced upon a journalistic scoop—a hard enough feat at the best of times and the more so when the makings of the scoop are already many centuries old—and all because Fattah was anxious to resume his friendship with a former colleague?
Returning to the Mut Precinct after several days’ absence, I find our diggers have made all sorts of progress: new bits of wall and entranceways have been uncovered, William Peck’s map showing these is coming along apace. “Look, we’ve completely cleared the forecourt, an architectural unit not known before—all previous maps ended at the pylon.” Richard’s mud-brick housing units are beginning to emerge as a coherent plan, now tentatively thought by the excavators to be remains of a Coptic settlement of the sixth century A.D. What’s more, he has found several interesting objects, including a hoard of coins and a pair of dice; first one die was found, a week later its mate. “Fun and games in ancient Egypt!” he exclaims. Best of all, Peck has just received proofs of his forthcoming book, Drawings from Ancient Egypt, which will be lavishly illustrated with photographs taken by his co-author, John G. Ross. Among the hitherto unpublished offerings are “erotica and scurrilities which do not form part of the repertoire of the monumental artists, and give a glimpse of another face of Egypt beneath the veil of Isis,” plus “many comic or satirical drawings—a topsy-turvy world in which cats serve mice, and the fox is the trusted guardian of the geese.” I can hardly wait for the finished book, which is scheduled for publication this autumn in England, Germany, France, and the United States.
TRIP NOTES
My last night in Egypt. I have said goodbye to those dear demented diggers and am packing up my own loot; best buys in the Luxor market are polished Egyptian cotton, priced after the requisite bargaining at about six Egyptian pounds per 6½-yard length; rings of debased but pretty silver set with semiprecious (or more likely semi-demi-precious) stones, said to be nineteenth century, one to two pounds; hand-strung Nubian beads, one pound a strand; saffron, at the astonishingly low price of less than one Egyptian pound per pound of weight, although it does seem to contain a certain amount of chicken feathers and other extraneous matter. Worst buys are the horrid little fake scarabs and statues pressed upon one by vendors everywhere. “But, Madame, it’s an antiquity!” said one. “Or it will be, if you keep it for a hundred years.”
I think back to my first conversation with James Manning. If it is sunrise for the science of Egyptology, he said, it may well be sunset for life in Luxor as experienced by travelers over the past century. The calashes, he fears, will soon be replaced by an efficient motor-bus system; already hideous concrete hotels are sprouting along the banks of the Nile. And shall we see, in place of the ancient mud-brick village that borders the Precinct of Mut, a spanking new Mut-el?
COMMENT
In the summer of 1977 I had a letter from the editor of Geo, a lavishly produced West German text-and-picture magazine, asking if I would do an article about San Francisco. Regretfully (for Geo pays top prices) I declined. I explained to the editor that, having lived in the San Francisco area for several decades, I did not think that I could produce an original and lively piece on the subject; he would do better to find a writer for whom California would be a totally new experience and who would see it all with a fresh eye.
By one of those coincidences that disturb the even flow of life, the day after I met James Manning there came another letter from the editor: Was there anywhere I would like to go for Geo? How about Egypt, I wrote (halfway hoping he would say that was too far afield). Done, he replied. Almost immediately I began to get cold feet—or, rather, to fear hot feet, having heard dread tales of the assaulting heat in those parts—but there had now been an Offer and an Acceptance, as the law of contracts has it, so I felt committed. Why hadn’t I plunged for San Francisco? Too late.
In taking on the Egyptian caper, I realized that I was violating two of my cardinal self-imposed rules about writing: never embark on a project unless you are deeply fascinated by it, and absorb all available information about your subject before approaching the target of the investigation. Obviously, since I knew nothing about Egypt I was not deeply fascinated; equally obviously, here was one case in which it would be folly to try to absorb even a fraction of the “available information.” Hence the elaborate disclaimer on pages 247–48, a useful trick of the trade by which one hopes to disarm the critical reader, although actually I boned up on Egypt a good deal more than I let on.
Despite misgivings, I was looking forward to this adventure. It would be, for me, a complete departure from the abrasive, contentious, dog-eat-dog world of courtrooms, business, and bureaucracy to which I had become accustomed in my capacity of muckraker. What could be more pleasantly relaxing than to explore the quiet realms of Pharaonic life in the company of dedicated, dispassionate scholars who are unharried by worldly preoccupations and immune to the crass self-interest that motivates the rest of us, their only desire in life to contribute in some modest way to the sum total of mankind’s knowledge of the Ancients?
Disillusionment was not long in coming. Muck in the archaeology world, I soon discovered, is knee-deep, there for the raking. Erich Lessing, a connoisseur of Egypt who had photographed in these same precincts twelve years earlier and had visited numerous excavation sites, clued me in: “Scratch the surface and you’ll find the crudest, most vicious jockeying for position amongst these distinguished academics....”
As days went on, I picked up all sorts of hints confirming Erich’s diagnosis of the real malady endemic to the Egyptologist, but this story could not be told then, because it was not what Geo wanted, and cannot be told now—it
would involve, for me, revealing too many half-whispered confidences of people who in some ways resemble the inmates of a lunatic asylum. Like those inmates, they are full of real or imagined fears, beset by notions of betrayal and perfidy, consumed by irrational jealousies. Apparently it was ever thus: in Tutankhamun: The Untold Story, Thomas Hoving, former head of the Metropolitan Museum, gives a devastating picture of the political intrigue, backbiting, unremitting infighting that characterized the Tutankhamun expeditions— not a word of which is breathed by Howard Carter in his account of the discovery, in which all is high-minded devotion to the science of archaeology.
It is hard to conceive of what gives rise to these quirky characteristics; surely not a lust after material wealth, for the chosen life style of the Egyptologist is austere in the extreme. Desire for power? Perhaps, in the constricted sense of power in that field of endeavor. A place in history, or at least a footnote in some archaeological journal? Who knows. Perhaps some go-ahead psychiatric institute should establish a chair for the specific purpose of finding out what makes Egyptologists tick.
Fortunately Erich Lessing, who was commissioned by Geo to supply the photographs for my piece, proved to be a rock of sanity in this queer ambience, and in many ways a kindred soul. Like me, he was unenthralled by mounds of ancient rubble, by the omnipresent “storage areas” filled with fragments of stones and broken bits of statues so beloved by the Egyptomaniacs, by those highly prized shards whose careful cataloguing was a major preoccupation of the diggers. (In my piece for Geo, mindful of the probable desire of its Teutonic readers for solid and scholarly information, I put in many paragraphs about those dismal shards, their historic importance, new developments in coding and dating them, which out of consideration for the English and American reader I have cut from the version given here.)
Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking Page 28