[Illustration: 1. PORTRAIT STATUE OF THOTHMES III, CAIRO MUSEUM.]
A
Century of Excavation
in the
Land of the Pharaohs
BY
JAMES BAIKIE, F.R.A.S.
AUTHOR OF “WONDER TALES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD,”
“LANDS AND PEOPLE OF THE BIBLE,” “THE SEA KINGS OF CRETE,”
“THE STORY OF THE PHARAOHS,” ETC.
ILLUSTRATED WITH 32 PLATES
SPECIALLY PREPARED FOR THIS VOLUME
[Illustration]
Fleming H. Revell Company
NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY
WILLIAM CLOWES & SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.
PREFACE
It is somewhat remarkable that, in spite of the considerable, if
spasmodic, interest which is taken in the results of research in Egypt,
no adequate account of the work of excavation has ever been written.
The student who wishes to learn how, when, and where the facts and
objects which interest him were discovered, has himself to excavate
the desired information from the innumerable volumes of reports issued
by the various exploration societies. It is much to be desired that
someone who is master of the subject, and preferably, someone who has
had actual experience of the work of excavation, should tell the story,
not in a manner suited only to the ears of experts, but so that the
educated public on whom in the long run excavation must depend for its
resources, could appreciate and enjoy a narrative which ought to be as
fascinating as any story of search for buried treasure.
This volume makes no pretension to the discharge of such a task. All
that it attempts to do is to outline the story of certain aspects of
the great work which has given us back so many of the wonders of the
ancient civilisation of Egypt. Its omissions are, doubtless, many;
but two will be at once conspicuous to anyone who has the slightest
acquaintance with the subject. Nothing is said of the Search for the
Cities, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century created
so much interest, and resulted in so many identifications of sites; and
nothing is said of the great work of Papyrus-hunting which has added
so much to our knowledge of ancient life. These two matters were left
untouched for reasons which seemed valid. In the case of the Cities,
many of the identifications of the ’nineties are at present being
questioned, and it seemed better to leave the matter till something
like agreement is reached. In the case of the Papyri, the subject has
become so specialised, and has developed so large a literature of its
own as to render impossible any attempt to deal with it, on the scale
which it deserves, in such a volume as the present.
It may be that at some time in the not far distant future, when
controversy has resulted in more or less general agreement as to the
sites, these two aspects of Egyptian excavation may be dealt with in a
volume which may be a sequel and companion to this. My indebtedness to
many authorities is manifest on almost every page of the book; but I
wish specially to acknowledge my debt to Professor Sir W. M. Flinders
Petrie, D.C.L., F.R.S., not only for the kindness which has allowed me
to use the material of several of the plates in the book (7, 9, 10),
but also for the constant inspiration and stimulus which his work has
given to me, as to so many other students of the wonderful civilisation
of Ancient Egypt.
JAMES BAIKIE.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 7
CHAPTER II
MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 18
CHAPTER III
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MODERN PERIOD 35
CHAPTER IV
THE PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 48
CHAPTER V
WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 84
CHAPTER VI
BURIED ROYALTIES 128
CHAPTER VII
TUTANKHAMEN AND HIS SPLENDOURS 177
CHAPTER VIII
LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS IN THE LAND OF THE NILE 213
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE
1. Portrait Statue of Thothmes III, Cairo Museum _Frontispiece_
PAGE
2. Wall of Chamber, Tomb of Sety I, Valley of the Kings 10
3. Detail of Decoration, Tomb of Sety I 18
4. Temple of Ramses III, Medinet Habu 30
5. Temple of Edfu--The Pylon, and View from the Pylon 40
6. Great Pyramid and Sphinx 52
7. Gold Pectorals of Senusert II and III, XIIth Dynasty 72
8. Diadems of Princess Khnumit, Gold work, XIIth Dynasty 80
9. Hatshepsut’s Temple, Der el-Bahri. General view 88
10. North Colonnade, Der el-Bahri; “Proto-Doric” Columns 92
11. Reliefs, Der el-Bahri 96
12. Karnak, Avenue of Sphinxes 104
13. Karnak, Nave of Hypostyle Hall 112
14. Karnak, Columns of the Side-Aisle, Hypostyle Hall 116
15. Karnak, View from the North; Obelisks of Hatshepsut, and
Thothmes I 120
16. Luxor, Forecourt of Amenhotep III 124
17. Luxor, Papyrus-Bud Columns and Colossi of Ramses II 128
18. Colonnade in Temple of Sety I, Abydos 136
19. Bracelets of 1st Dynasty Queen, Chain and Gold Seal, VIth
Dynasty, with XIIth Dynasty Goldsmith’s Work 144
20. Entrance to the Valley of the Kings, Thebes 148
21. Tomb of Ramses IX, Valley of the Kings 152
22. Granite Head of Tutankhamen, Cairo Museum 178
23. Decoration from a Theban Tomb 184
24. Decoration from a Theban Tomb: Sowing, Reaping, the Vintage 192
25. Head of the Hathor-Cow, Der el-Bahri 200
26. Colossus of Ramses II, Luxor 208
27. Portrait-Statue of Mentuemhat, Cairo Museum 216
28. Vth Dynasty Relief-Work, Tomb of Ptah-Hetep 224
29. XIXth Dynasty Relief-Work, Temple of Sety I, Abydos 228
30. XIXth Dynasty Relief-Work, Temple of Ramses II, Luxor 232
31. XXth Dynasty Relief-Work, Temple of Ramses III, Medinet Habu 236
32. Ptolemaic Relief-Work, Kom Ombos 240
A CENTURY OF
EXCAVATION IN
THE LAND OF
THE PHARAOHS
CHAPTER I
THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS
The story of the beginnings of research into the wonders of antiquity
in Egypt is unique in at least one point. In no other land does a
conquering army march at the head of the pioneers of exploration; but
the true beginnings of the century and a quarter of research which has
given to us so many wonders from the Land of the Nile are to be found
with that amazing troop of learned camp-followers who accompanied
Napoleon’s army on the expedition of 1798. The wonders of ancient Egypt
had never altogether been blotted from the memory and the interest of
man, as was the case with some of the other lands of the Classic East.
The pages of Herodotus, never fuller or more vivid than when he is
dealing with Egypt, prevented that oblivion; and therefore Herodotus
has some right to be named at the very beginning of the story of the
exploration of ancient Egypt as the pioneer of pioneers. But the world
was first really awakened to the richness of the Treasury of Egypt by
the colossal production, twelve volumes of plates and twenty-four of
text, which was the result of the untiring labours of Vivant Denon and
his collaborators--the famous _Description de l’Egypte_--a work almost
comparable in scale and grandeur with the monuments which it described.
Few armies have left behind them such a memorial of their passage
across a land--the more credit to the man whose inexhaustibly fertile
brain conceived the idea of making even war subserve the interests of
science.
Unfortunately, however, the tie with international strifes and
jealousies, which had drawn the French savants originally to the Nile
Valley, remained unbroken for many years; and questions of archæology
were continually complicated by questions of national pride and
prestige, so that the early story of Egyptian exploration is not
the story of pure research, conducted for the love of truth and of
antiquity, but very often merely the story of how the representative
of France strove with the representative of Britain or Italy for the
possession of some ancient monument whose capture might bring glory to
his nation, or profit to his own purse. There are few more melancholy
chapters in the story of human frailty than those in which the early
explorers of Egypt (if you can dignify them by such a name) describe
how they wrangled and intrigued, lied and cheated, over relics whose
mutilated antiquity might have taught them enough of the vanity of
human wishes to make them ashamed of their pettiness.
Dr. Macalister has told us in the Cambridge Ancient History that “it
is impossible to give any complete survey of the history of Egyptian
excavation.” This is true for the later period, because the field
is so vast, and the workers are so many; it is not less true for
the beginnings, because it is impossible to write a history of the
scufflings of kites and crows--or rather, one might say, of ghouls. It
must be almost a nightmare to the modern excavator, with his ingrained
appreciation of the importance of even the very smallest object which
may add to the knowledge of ancient lands and peoples, to think of the
priceless material which was destroyed by the undiscriminating zeal of
men like Belzoni, Drovetti, and their fellows, or if not destroyed,
at least deprived of half its value by being torn from its historical
place and connection. These were the lamentable days when interest in
the antiquities of Egypt had advanced but little beyond that displayed
by the gentleman of Addison’s first _Spectator_, whose Egyptian
researches are thus described by himself--“I made a voyage to Grand
Cairo on purpose to take the measure of a pyramid; and as soon as I had
set myself right in that particular, returned to my native country with
great satisfaction,” or by Lord Charlemont, who according to Johnson
had nothing to tell of his travels except a story of a large serpent
which he had seen in one of the pyramids of Egypt.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, and, indeed, till
Mariette in 1858 laid his masterful hand upon the key of the great
treasure-house and allowed no one to spoil it but himself, there was a
perfect orgy of spoliation carried on, not in the interests of science,
but partly out of vanity, and partly out of greed. Every important or
noble traveller had to add a few curios from Egypt to his miscellaneous
collection gathered from half a dozen other lands, and sculptures,
inscriptions, and papyri of the greatest value were thus uselessly
dispersed in paltry private collections, where, when they had gratified
a passing curiosity or ministered to a momentary spirit of emulation,
they were allowed to gather dust through years of neglect, till at last
the futile cabinet of curios was dispersed, and its items were lost
sight of altogether.
Some collections, such as those of Belzoni, Passalacqua, Drovetti, and
a few others, had better fortune, and were finally purchased for one
or other of the great European Museums, which nearly all formed the
nucleus of their Egyptological collections in this fashion; but the
amount of unnecessary loss of what can never now be replaced must have
been deplorable.
[Illustration: 2. WALL OF CHAMBER, TOMB OF SETY I, VALLEY OF THE KINGS.]
This “unbridled pillage,” as Maspero justly calls it, in which the
consuls of the various European powers played an ignoble but doubtless
lucrative part, lasted for more than thirty years, in spite of the
protests of men like Champollion, who could understand the irreparable
loss which was being inflicted on the infant science of Egyptology
by this mutilation and confounding of the documents on which its
future depended. Among its practitioners were one or two men who
were distinguished from the vulgar crowd of papyrus, scarab, and
mummy hunters by a certain dim appreciation of the fact that the
treasures with which they were dealing had a value greater than that
of their price in the curio-market, and who have added at least a few
interesting and remarkable items to the mass of Egyptian treasure
which the nineteenth century accumulated, though our gratitude to them
for this must always be qualified by the fact that we have no certain
knowledge of what they lost and destroyed in the process, but can only
judge from their own admissions that it must have been far more than
they preserved.
Of these men who may be pronounced guilty, but with extenuating
circumstances, the most interesting, and perhaps the least harmful,
was the inimitable Belzoni, to whose unwearying efforts we owe the
opening of the Second Pyramid, the discovery of the tomb of Sety I,
the most perfect example of the rock-hewn tomb of a Pharaoh of the
New Empire, and the magnificent alabaster sarcophagus of Sety which
is one of the treasures of the Soane Museum, London, besides several
of the most important royal statues in the Egyptian Galleries of the
British Museum. No one who wishes to realise what the young science
had to endure at the hands of its first devotees can afford to neglect
the extraordinary farrago of vanity and pomposity, ignorance and
self-seeking, but also of patience and endurance, and a certain inborn
instinct for what was either beautiful or valuable, which Belzoni has
jumbled together under the sounding title--“Narrative of the Operations
and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and
Excavations, in EGYPT AND NUBIA.”
Belzoni’s original object in going to Egypt was simply to get “The
Bashaw” to adopt a hydraulic machine for irrigation work--a project
in which it is almost needless to say that he failed; his knowledge
of the precious material with which he was soon dealing was nothing
at the beginning, and not much more at the end of his “Researches and
Operations”; he had a positive gift for quarrelling with everybody
with whom he came into contact, Egyptian or European, and a mania
for imputing the vilest motives to anyone who coveted any piece of
antiquity on which he had set his own heart; but with it all he had the
_flair_ of the true explorer for a promising site, and could foresee
hidden treasures where his rivals dreamed of nothing, and with all his
petulance he had a patience which was almost inexhaustible. It was
these qualities which have made him the only explorer of those unhappy
days whose name is really remembered, or deserves to be remembered, in
connection with our knowledge of ancient Egypt.
As to his methods, these, of course, were unspeakable, and the mere
mention of them is enough to turn a modern excavator’s hair white. He
finds the entrance of a royal tomb in the Western Valley of the Kings,
and proceeds to open it--with a battering-ram made of two palm-logs!
As to his reverence for the mighty dead of the past one sentence may
suffice: “Every step I took I crushed a mummy in some part or other.”
Again he describes his journey through a tomb-gallery which the modern
excavator would have given his ears to see as Belzoni saw it. “It was
choked with mummies, and I could not pass without putting my face in
contact with that of some decayed Egyptian; but as the passage inclined
downwards my own weight helped me on; however, I could not avoid being
covered with bones, legs, arms, and heads rolling from above.”
The object of these ghoulish journeys was simply to plunder the coffins
of their papyri, which, of course, were marketable, though as yet
no one could read them; and there can be little doubt that far more
was destroyed than was preserved by methods which were only a little
above those of the Ramesside tomb-robbers who stripped the mummies
of King Sebek-em-saf and Queen Nub-khas of their jewels, and then
burned them. Such was Egyptian excavation in the first quarter of the
nineteenth century, and in the hands of one of its most distinguished
practitioners, for Belzoni was an angel of light compared with some of
his rivals, native or foreign.
Fortunately, however, the time for such ignorant and sordid
exploitation of the treasures of the past was not to last for long;
though it lasted far too long for the welfare of Egyptology. By 1822,
Jean François Champollion, working on the material supplied by the
Rosetta Stone and the Philæ Obelisk, and aided to some extent in his
brilliant achievement by the previous labours of Akerblad and Young,
gave to the world the key to the hieroglyphic inscriptions, so that the
Egyptian monuments were no longer dumb. In 1828 came the second great
general survey of the monuments under Rosellini and Champollion.
It was now possible to read some, at least, of the inscriptions, and
therefore to reach some approach to order in the classification of
the monuments dealt with. The work suffered an irreparable loss by
the early death of Champollion; but the results of the expedition,
presented in the ten volumes of the _Monumenti storichi dell’ Egitto
e della Nubia_ constituted a great enlargement of real knowledge as
opposed to the conjectures which had previously held the field.
For a time after the Rosellini Expedition, the field was left to
individual workers, of whom the most notable were two Englishmen, F. E.
Perring and Colonel Howard Vyse, whose careful measurements of the
pyramids, especially the great group of Gizeh, laid the foundation for
all subsequent study of these wonderful structures. The work of Perring
and Vyse was done in 1837, and three years later came the important
Prussian Expedition directed by Karl Richard Lepsius, whose name must
always stand among the foremost on the roll of Egyptology.
Lepsius began with the Pyramid field at Memphis, where his theorising
on the method of erection of the pyramids, though perhaps the part of
his work by which he is most generally known, was of less importance
than his investigation of the Old Kingdom tombs of the nobles in the
necropolis, with its revelation of the life and culture of the Egypt of
3000 B.C. Thence the mission worked southwards, visiting the Fayum, and
carrying out investigations as to the whereabouts of Lake Moeris and
the Labyrinth.
Passing on up the Nile Valley, Lepsius paid special attention to the
tombs of the Middle Kingdom with their valuable pictures of Egyptian
life a millennium later than the pyramid period, and also visited the
site which has since become so famous as Tell el-Amarna. Not content
with carrying his researches to the limit of the Second Cataract, where
Rosellini had stopped, he pressed on through Nubia as far as Napata
and Meroë, the former seats of that Ethiopian extension of Egyptian
civilisation which gave to Egypt its ill-starred XXVth Dynasty,
while on his return journey he visited the Sinai Peninsula, where
he discovered and published the very valuable inscriptions left by
the Egyptian expeditions which for many centuries were sent to work
the copper mines at the Wady Maghareh and Serabit el-Khadem. He thus
revealed to us the first chapter of the wonderful story of Egyptian
exploring and commercial activity, whose subsequent disclosures have
at last almost succeeded in destroying the time-honoured myth which
represented the ancient Egyptians as a cloistered nation, the Chinese
of the Near East.
The _Denkmäler aus Ægypten und Æthiopien_, published from 1849 to 1858
gave to the world the results of the wonderfully fruitful work of
Lepsius, and has scarcely yet been altogether superseded as a source of
illustration of the manners and culture of the ancient Egyptians. “In
the main,” says Dr. Macalister, “the statement may stand, that Lepsius
exhausted the general topographical study of the country.” Subsequent
researches have done no more than to add filling in to the broad
outlines which he drew with such care and certainty.
But now the period of superficial survey of the wealth of material
which Egypt offers to the student was drawing to a close, and was to be
succeeded by the period in which excavation, conducted with constantly
growing skill and attention to the most minute details, was to do, as
it is still doing, what no amount of superficial cataloguing of the
monuments of the land could ever do, and to give us back, not only
pictures of the life of these ancient days, but the tools and weapons
with which the Egyptian worked, fought, and hunted, the vessels which
he used for all the purposes of life, the jewels with which he and his
women-kind adorned themselves, the books which they read, and the songs
which they sang; all the material from which, if we have the vision and
the insight, we may reconstruct the life of those far-off days; and to
crown its gifts by calling up from the tomb the very men themselves who
ruled and warred in the land of the Nile in the great days when Egypt
was the first of all empires, and her Pharaoh a god incarnate, before
whose golden sandals all the lesser kings of the world bowed in the
dust “seven times and seven times.” The pioneer of this work, surely
the most romantic and interesting, as it has proved not the least
fruitful, in the whole realm of scientific research, was the brilliant
Frenchman, Auguste Mariette.