MARIETTE AND HIS WORK
The story of the life-work of the man who, more than any other, was
responsible for the creation of a genuine interest in the great
works of ancient Egypt, as distinguished from the aimless or sordid
antiquity-grubbing which has been described in the preceding chapter,
is one of the romances of science. Mariette was one of those men who,
in the words of Cromwell, never go so far as when they do not know
whither they are going, and in his early connection with Egypt he was
like Saul the son of Kish, who went out to look for his father’s asses
and found a kingdom. Born in 1821, at Boulogne, and employed as a
teacher in the college of his native town, he was drawn to the study
of ancient Egypt by the fact that the town museum had acquired a fine
Egyptian sarcophagus from the collection of Denon, one of the savants
who had accompanied Napoleon’s Army of Egypt.
[Illustration: 3. DETAIL OF DECORATION, TOMB OF SETY I.]
In 1849 he was appointed assistant in the Egyptian Department of the
Louvre, and in the following year he was sent out to Egypt for the
purpose of buying Coptic manuscripts. The mission, a comparatively
trifling one in itself, was one of those trifles which often prove
turning-points in a man’s life; and from the moment when he set foot on
Egyptian soil, Mariette’s future career was marked out for him.
The thing which determined his fate was a passage from the old
geographer and historian Strabo. The god of Memphis, the most ancient
capital of Egypt, was Ptah, the artificer-god, who was supposed to
become incarnate in the sacred bull Apis. As each successive Apis
died, it was buried with all the reverence and splendour due to an
incarnation of Divinity, in a special necropolis at Saqqara. Later
in the complicated story of Egyptian religion Apis was identified
with the god of the Underworld, Osiris, and was called Osiris-Apis,
and the Greeks speedily corrupted this into Serapis, and called the
burial-place of the Apis bulls the Serapeum.
Now Strabo, in writing his account of Egypt, inserted the following
passage about this ancient bull-cemetery. “One finds also [at Memphis]
a temple of Serapis in a spot so sandy that the wind causes the sand
to accumulate in heaps, under which we could see many sphinxes, some
of them almost entirely buried, others only partially covered; from
which we may conjecture that the route leading to this temple might be
attended with danger if one were surprised by a sudden gust of wind.”
While Mariette was pursuing his inquiries after Coptic manuscripts, he
noticed in a garden at Alexandria several sphinxes, and shortly after,
when at Cairo, he came across several more of the same type, while
more still were found at Gizeh. It was plain that there was somewhere
not far off some storehouse of sphinxes which was being plundered to
furnish ornaments for the gardens of local officials. The matter lay
in Mariette’s mind until one day when he was at Saqqara he noticed the
head of a similar sphinx sticking up out of the sand. Searching round
about it, he found a libation-tablet, inscribed with a dedication to
Osiris-Apis. At once Strabo’s statement occurred to his mind, and he
realised that he was standing over the avenue of sphinxes which the
ancient writer refers to.
Coptic manuscripts went to the winds. Without apparently asking
permission of anybody, “almost furtively,” as he says himself, Mariette
gathered a handful of workmen, and began the excavation. “The first
attempts were hard indeed,” he says; “but before very long lions and
peacocks, and the Grecian statues of the dromos, together with the
monumental tablets or _stelæ_ of the temple of Nectanebo, were drawn
out of the sand, and I was able to announce my success to the French
Government, informing them, at the same time, that the funds placed
at my disposal for the researches after the manuscripts were entirely
exhausted, and that a further grant was indispensable. Thus was begun
the discovery of the Serapeum.”
The passage is entirely characteristic of Mariette, and the calmness
with which he assumes that the Government which had sent him out to buy
manuscripts will be quite pleased to hear that he has spent all their
money on something quite different, and has committed them to a huge
excavation which was to last four years, instead of to the purchase of
a few parchments, is particularly delightful. One wonders what were
the first thoughts of officialdom at Paris when his letter reached the
Louvre, and his chiefs realised the kind of man and the irrepressible
energy which they had let loose in Egypt to spend money on things which
they had never dreamed of.
His action at the Serapeum was typical of his whole career in Egypt.
When Mariette had once reached the conclusion that a certain object
was desirable, nothing was allowed to stand in the way. He went for
his object, one cannot always say straight, for he had caution as well
as daring, and knew how to use the wisdom of the serpent, but with a
resolute determination which seldom failed in the end to accomplish
its purpose; and if regulations stood in the way, so much the worse
for the regulations. It was this self-reliance and impatience of
restraint which were responsible for a good deal of the wastefulness
which undoubtedly was a marked feature of his Egyptian work; but, on
the other hand, without these same qualities it is difficult to see
how his work could have been accomplished at all, in the face of all
the obstacles which were thrown in his way by Oriental lethargy and
corruption, and by European jealousy and selfishness.
The great Apis-cemetery which was thus discovered by Mariette’s happy
disregard of the limits of his commission is all that remains of
the original Serapeum. When the place was complete, it comprised an
avenue of sphinxes at least 600 feet in length, leading up to the
great temple of Osiris-Apis. No fewer than 141 of the sphinxes were
discovered, together with the pedestals of others. The temple had
entirely disappeared, having, no doubt, been used as a quarry for
other building operations; but an inclined passage led from one of its
chambers downwards into the vast vaults where for centuries the bodies
of the dead Apis-bulls were given burial with splendours which rival
those of the Pharaohs.
The vaults belong to three periods. In the first, which belongs to the
XVIIIth Dynasty, the tombs are separate vaults hewn here and there in
the rock; in the second, which is that of Dynasties XXII to XXV, a
long gallery was excavated, on either side of which mortuary chambers
were excavated as needed; in the third (XXVIth Dynasty) the gallery
plan is followed, but on a much larger scale. The total length of the
galleries of the XXVIth Dynasty is 1150 feet, and the great gallery
alone measures 640 feet in length. In the side chambers are the immense
granite coffins, of superb workmanship, which were provided for the
last resting-place of the Apis. Twenty-four of these were found in the
third gallery. They average 13 feet in length, 11 feet in height, and
7 feet 8 inches in breadth, and weigh not less than 65 tons apiece,
magnificent specimens of the engineering skill of the ancient workers
who transported these vast blocks from Aswan to Memphis, a distance of
almost 600 miles.
The discovery of the Serapeum set the seal on Mariette’s destiny.
Henceforward his life-work was to lie in the excavation and
preservation of the relics of that ancient land to which fate had
brought him; but as yet he occupied no official position in the
country, and was, indeed, looked upon rather as an unauthorised
interloper by the native antiquity-hunters and the foreign officials
who encouraged the constant and shameless pillage which had been going
on for half a century. It was in his struggles with these vampires that
the great explorer acquired the habits of secret and solitary planning
and working which characterised his reign as chief of the Egyptian
Service of Antiquities, and the distrust of all other excavators which
led him to forbid all such work even to the most famous scholars or to
his dearest friends, and to retain the right to excavate exclusively in
his own hands to the day of his death.
“Forced to struggle for more than three years,” says Maspero in his
vivid sketch of his predecessor, “against the jealousy of the dealers
of the time and the sharp practices of the Egyptian officials, he
was not long in learning and putting into practice all the dodges
which the natives employed to track out their rivals or to cheat the
treasury. No one knew better than he how to conceal a quest, to pack
up the product of it in secret, and to dispatch it without arousing
the suspicion of anyone.” Curious qualifications for the head of a
great Government department; yet they served him well in what was
really a lifelong battle against the rivalry of men of science, who,
instead of encouraging him in his efforts to set Egyptology on a firm
foundation in its native land, did their worst to rob him of the fruits
of his labours; and against the apathy and indifference of his master,
who regarded the antiquities which his untiring servant unearthed as
valuable only because he could gratify a globe-trotting potentate by
the gift of some of them, or in the last resort might raise a loan on
the precious treasures of his Museum.
Mariette’s appointment as head of the Service of Antiquities was
due, indeed, to a piece of skilful wire-pulling in which de Lesseps
and Prince Napoleon, afterwards Napoleon III, were concerned; and
Said Pasha gave him the post, not because he cared for his royal
predecessors, but because, as Maspero caustically puts it, “he came to
the conclusion that he would be more acceptable to the Emperor if he
made some show of taking pity on the Pharaohs.”
An appointment due to no higher inspiration than self-interest on the
part of the giver obviously depended largely on how long self-interest
coincided with the interests of the new post; and perhaps the most
arduous part of Mariette’s task consisted in trying to make his
thoroughly Oriental master see that it was his interest to maintain
what he had begun, and in overcoming the whims and caprices, and the
secret intrigues which continually threatened to undermine his position
and destroy the structure which he was so painfully rearing. He never
could get a permanent grant for the work of his department from the
Egyptian Government. When money was needed he had always to ask it
direct from the Khedive, who granted a subsidy or refused it according
to the mood in which he happened to be at the moment. Again and again
Mariette had to close down his excavations because he had unfortunately
approached Said when the Khedive was in a bad temper; but though the
continuance of work under such conditions might have driven the most
phlegmatic of men, let alone a mercurial Frenchman, to despair, he
never for a moment lost sight of his end. Repulsed once, he only waited
a more favourable opportunity to return to the charge, and in the end
he was almost invariably successful.
When his work is criticised, as it has often, and not unjustly, been,
as hasty and wanting in thoroughness, let it be remembered that, with
all its faults, it was done under conditions which would have driven
most men mad, and that thoroughness and minute care are not precisely
the qualities which are encouraged by the knowledge that the exchequer
is empty, and that there is no prospect of being able to pay the
workmen unless one can catch a wayward prince in a favourable mood.
All things considered, the wonder is, not that so much was overlooked
and left undone, but that so much was actually accomplished under such
maddening conditions.
His main object was to form such a Museum in Egypt that it would no
longer be possible for the representatives of the European powers to
excuse their spoliation by the suggestion that Egypt was unable to
safeguard her own treasures of antiquity. With this end in view he was
indefatigable in the work of excavation, doing his utmost to gather
from Memphis, Thebes, Abydos, Tanis, and other famous sites, such a
collection of historical monuments as should render the creation of a
permanent home for them a crying necessity.
Erelong he had so far succeeded that his collection included fine
statues of Ramses II, the well-known Amenartas, the so-called Hyksos
Sphinxes, the Triumphal Stele of Thothmes III, and a great mass of
amulets from the cemeteries of Memphis, Abydos, and Thebes. To house
these treasures he was provided with a set of miserable buildings
which were of no use for any other purpose--a deserted mosque which
was falling into ruin, some filthy sheds, and a dwelling-house alive
with vermin, in which he lived himself. Making the most of this heap
of ruins, he improvised pedestals for the statues and cases for the
amulets, and turned his early training as a drawing-master to account
in the painting of the decorations of his crazy walls.
The incident which finally determined Said to yield to the importunity
of his energetic Director of Antiquities was highly characteristic,
both of the daring and persistence of Mariette, and the waywardness of
the ruler with whom he had to deal. One of the chief hindrances to the
erection of the Museum was the fact that the excavations, though highly
productive of objects of historic interest, had as yet yielded nothing
in the way of gold or jewellery, and Said, a thorough Oriental, cared
but little for researches which only produced inscribed or sculptured
stones. Early in 1859, Mariette’s workmen at Drah-Abou’l-Neggah,
near Thebes, discovered the splendid gilded sarcophagus of the Queen
Aah-hotep. Mariette sent orders for it to be sent to Cairo at once; but
meanwhile the Mudir of Keneh had laid hands on it, opened it in his
harem, and, throwing aside the mummy, took possession of the fine set
of jewellery which the coffin contained, and hurried off by boat to
present it to the Khedive as an offering from himself.
Mariette immediately set out on his steamboat, the _Samanoud_, to
meet the robber. Boarding the Mudir’s boat, he tried to persuade him
to give up his ill-gotten goods, and when persuasion failed he passed
to threats, and from threats to blows. Finally he triumphed, and took
possession of the treasure. Knowing the danger which he ran of having
his action represented to the Khedive as sheer robbery of a treasure
addressed to the Royal Palace, Mariette took care to be the first to
tell the story to his royal master, and did so with such effect that
the Khedive thoroughly enjoyed the joke, and laughed heartily at the
spoiling of the spoiler. He kept a gold chain for one of his wives, and
himself wore for awhile a fine scarab which he afterwards returned;
but the rest of the treasure was reserved, as Mariette wished, for his
darling Museum, and the Khedive, now convinced that the collection was
worth housing, gave orders for the erection of a suitable building at
Boulak.
Thus, by a happy combination of good fortune and daring, the great
explorer succeeded in the attainment of at least a part of his heart’s
desire. The buildings at Boulak, however, were far from satisfactory,
and his heart was always set on a dream-museum, which he did not
live to realise, which indeed has not yet been realised, though the
great Egyptian Museum has known two changes of abode since his time,
and is now preparing for a fresh extension to house the treasures of
Tutankhamen’s tomb. In addition, he had to be continually on his guard
to see that the priceless things which he had gathered with such pains,
and housed at such risk, were not dissipated to gratify his patron’s
passing whims of generosity towards some favourite guests, or sold
_en masse_ to act as security for a loan. Mariette had no intention
of allowing his treasures to be treated as pawnbroker’s pledges;
but it took all his energy and authority to prevent this happening,
for whenever Said was short of money, which happened with unfailing
regularity, his first thought was to raise a loan on the Museum, and it
was only the Director’s personal acceptability with his master which
enabled him to stave off disaster once and again.
The narrowest escape came just on the heels of what had seemed the
greatest triumph of his life. At the Paris Exhibition of 1867, he had
secured the first adequate representation of Egyptian antiquities.
A small Egyptian temple was built, preceded by a short avenue of
sphinxes; and within the temple were housed the finest specimens of art
and craftsmanship which Egypt could produce. For six months all the
world admired and wondered; then came the blow. Mariette had wrought
too well, and made his treasures look too inviting. The Empress
Eugenie had cast covetous eyes upon them, and the Khedive Ismail was
informed that she desired to have the whole collection offered to her
as a gift. Ismail, taken by surprise, and, as usual, short of cash, did
not dare to refuse; but he had the sense to make his consent subject
to one condition. “There is,” he said to the emissary of the Empress,
“someone at Boulak more powerful than I, and you must address yourself
to him.” It must have been the cruellest of blows to Mariette thus to
be wounded in the house of his friends; but his resolution was proof
against both imperial wiles and threats, and the collection returned in
safety to its native home. The explorer had saved the treasures of the
land of his adoption from the greed of his native land; but it was at
a heavy cost that the victory was gained. The favour of France, which
had always been one of his main supports, was immediately withdrawn,
and for the next two or three years Mariette found himself in disgrace
at the palace, and unable to obtain any support for his schemes.
Curiously enough, it was the downfall of France in 1870 which brought
him into favour once more with the Khedive, and for the last ten years
of his life he saw the work to which he had given himself steadily
growing, though on at least one occasion the proposal to raise a loan
on the Museum was revived, and though Ismail’s grandiose plans for the
extension of the buildings remained only dreams, which came through the
ivory gate.
In respect to the excavations which he kept so jealously in his
own hands, Mariette’s energy was amazing, though its results were
never so carefully chronicled as they might have been, and were
sometimes scarcely chronicled at all. The two greatest charges to be
brought against him as an excavator are, first, this lack of adequate
publication of his results, a huge mass of precious material being
gathered without anything to tell the student its actual provenance,
or its historical connection, and, second, the craving for big and
imposing results, which led him often to neglect the smaller but often
more important material which would have been of priceless value
to modern workers, but did not appeal to him, and consequently got
overlooked and lost.
With regard to the latter point, however, we must remember that
the knowledge of the infinite importance of the small game of the
archæologist is a thing of modern growth, and that it is scarcely fair
to blame Mariette for not being a quarter of a century in advance
of his time; and also that the difficulties of his position obliged
him to lay stress on the big and imposing monument, even at the cost
of neglecting what was really of more value to the serious student.
Broken potsherds may mean far more for the reconstruction of history
than intact colossi; but to the men in authority on whom depended the
continuance of the excavator’s work, they were just-broken potsherds.
[Illustration: 4. TEMPLE OF RAMSES III, MEDINET HABU.]
Spite of all the defects of his methods, we owe him an infinite debt,
both for what he accomplished and for what he hindered others from
destroying. The chief fruit of his toil, apart from the work at
the Serapeum and in the necropolis at Saqqara, was the unveiling at
Abydos of the noble temple of Sety I, with its exquisite reliefs, which
will always rank among the very finest work of the artists of the New
Empire. Besides the excavation of the temple, he did an immense amount
of work, very imperfectly recorded, alas, in the great necropolis
of Abydos, where he unearthed over 15,000 monuments of one kind or
another. It ought not to be forgotten either, though it often has been,
and though it has been stated that in his work at Abydos he had no idea
of the existence there of any remains of the early dynasties, that it
was Mariette who prophesied both the discovery of Ist Dynasty tombs and
that of the great subterranean “Pool of Osiris,” which is the latest
fruit of M. Naville’s work there.
Scarcely less important was his work at Thebes, where he for the first
time made some approach to establishing the architectural history of
the great temple of Karnak from its foundation under the Middle Kingdom
down to the close of building under the Ptolemies. To him, also, we owe
the excavation of the great temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu, and
the first beginnings of that huge piece of work which M. Naville and
his assistants at Der el-Bahri only completed, after thirteen years’
hard labour, in 1908.
How many of the visitors to Hatshepsut’s beautiful memorial temple, who
wonder at the patience which unearthed this most exquisite of Egyptian
buildings, remember that it was Mariette who first gave to the world
the most interesting part of the whole building with its reliefs of the
royal expedition to the Land of Punt?
To tell of all his work at the thirty-seven places in which he
excavated would take a volume, and not a chapter. One of his greatest
successes, though it dealt only with a Ptolemaic building, was
the excavation of the very perfect temple of Edfu. He found it so
completely covered with rubbish that an Arab village had established
itself upon the roof of the ancient sanctuary of Horus. Mariette
succeeded in getting these interlopers cleared away, and was at last
able to reveal the whole of a building, which, while comparatively
modern as Egyptian temples go, is yet one of the most complete and
perfect specimens of Egyptian architecture, showing the almost pure
type of temple architecture as it can be seen only in one or two other
instances in the whole land.
The great explorer’s work in Egypt lasted for almost exactly thirty
years. Before his death on January 18, 1881, he had the satisfaction
of knowing that the work of which he had so well laid the foundations
would not be interrupted when he had to lay it down. He never, indeed,
saw the accomplishment of his great life-dream, the completion of a
Museum really worthy of the treasures which he had gathered. Sir Gaston
Maspero, his able successor, has told us how that vision hovered round
his death-bed, and cheered his last hours; but even to-day the great
Museum at Cairo is scarcely worthy of the matchless stores which it
holds, and it is becoming more and more doubtful whether Cairo is the
right place for a collection of such priceless value. But at least
Mariette accomplished one thing which will never be undone; he put a
stop to the worst of the pillage of Egyptian antiquities which had
gone on unchecked for half a century, and he established the fact that
the proper place where the historical monuments of a great nation’s
past should be gathered is on national soil, where they are at home,
and where they have a value which could never be theirs if they were
scattered through a score of alien collections.
A noble statue keeps his memory alive in the Cairo Museum. Maspero
tells us that a great personage who visited the Museum asked whether
this monument was that of a Pharaoh or of a modern individual; and
when he was told that it was the monument of Mariette, the founder of
the Museum, “Mariette,” said he, “I did not know that the founder of
the Museum was a woman!” Such is fame, even in the land where memories
seem to endure longer than in any other spot on earth. But Mariette’s
worth to the world does not depend on monuments, though he had so much
to do with them, nor on great personages, though he suffered so much
at their hands all his life. It lies in this, that he saved the relics
of ancient Egyptian history from the bottomless bog of international
jealousies and greed and insisted that a nation with a great past had
the right and the responsibility to hold the treasures of that past
within its own bounds--in trust for the world.
“Assuredly,” says Maspero, “Mariette is not a model to be blindly
imitated; and the man who should imitate him to-day would run the risk
of committing irreparable blunders; but let anyone who is tempted to
depreciate him replace himself in spirit in the Egypt of sixty years
ago, and let him ask himself how he would have acted in the midst of
the difficulties which would then have assailed him on all sides; I
believe that, if he is an honest man, he will be forced to admit that
though perhaps he would have handled matters differently, he would not
have come better out of the business. Mariette was the man who fitted
the time.”