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.